Kanata (37 page)

O
n the weekend they took a picnic down to the small creek that trickled through her land. It had dried up in '34, she said, disappeared without a trace. The heavy snows had put a little moisture in the ground and it was running now, though barely. They unpacked in the shade of some trees and laid the lunch on the blanket. They ate bread with two trout Michael had caught and drank homemade beer they'd gotten from a Scandinavian neighbour. Afterwards, they made love.

“Do you think God can see us?” she asked when they had finished.

“I hope not. You'd have some explaining to do.”

“My mother used to say that's why there was so much wickedness in cities. It was because people were hidden away in alleys and basements and they could get away with anything. Out here God can see everything and people don't stray as much.”

“I don't know what kind of God can't see into a basement,” Michael said.

“The kind worshipped by farmers, I guess.”

“Maybe farmers are just too tired to sin.”

“Oh, they find the energy somewhere,” Hannah said. “You scratch hard enough you'll find the seven deadlies all across these plains. And worse. Sloth is about the only sin they don't claim. You hear whisperings. Someone heard something about someone. A hundred rumours. Then we all get together at church and look around and wonder how true any of it is. That's human nature. It doesn't give you much hope to lift us out of this mess. And God isn't helping. But He'll get tired of punishing us at some point.”

They lay on the blanket staring up at the unyielding blue sky.

“You know my husband Horace wasn't always the way he is,” Hannah said, after a silence. “You don't start out farming already defeated. That comes later.”

“You think he'll be back?” Michael asked.

“I suspect so. I doubt it's a woman if that's what you're thinking. He's a practical man, Horace, not much for romance. He's probably wearing the same suit of clothes he was wearing when he left, hasn't found but a little work and he's too ashamed to show himself. This farm was my father's, one of the first ones in the area. Horace wasn't feeling too successful before all this and he's feeling less so now. But I think he'll be back. There'll be better times.”

They were still naked and Michael stood up, the breeze unfamiliar on his exposed skin. He pulled Hannah up and they slow danced naked, which felt more sinful than sex. “Do you know why Presbyterians disapprove of sex?” Michael asked, her head nuzzled in his shoulder.

“No.”

“They're afraid it'll lead to dancing.”

She laughed and they danced for a few minutes, made love again, and then fell asleep on the blanket.

Michael woke up to a strange light. The sun was red in the west but storm clouds rolled toward them, an unholy combination. Michael woke Hannah up and she stared at the black sky and the red behind it. “For our sins,” she said. The storm looked like it was still a few miles away but the wind had picked up and it was closing fast. The rain would help the crops and the garden, and anything that kept the soil down, even if only for a few days, was welcome. As they neared the farmhouse, the sky was dark with glints of red. Michael hadn't seen anything like it. Then he felt the first sting on his face. They were still three hundred yards from
the house and he yelled at Hannah to get inside but his voice disappeared in the wind. Hannah turned around and felt the same sting and instantly understood. It wasn't a thunder-storm; it was a thousand tons of topsoil being driven by a ferocious wind. Some of the soil was essentially sand and it picked up the red sunset and reflected it, like a blood mist descending on the land. They ran for the house, the dark grains swirling in small eddies and mixing with dust that was briefly suspended then swept east in a fury. It felt like sandpaper on the back of Michael's neck. By the time they got to the door, the storm was on them and it was hard to breathe. Michael pulled his shirt up to cover his mouth. They ran inside and quickly closed the door, and Michael raced through the house closing the windows; he could feel the grit under his feet on the wooden floors. He sat on the couch and watched the colours shift in the cloud, red and black and grey that billowed up a mile or more, symphonic in their movement, strangely beautiful.

It took a week to get the house clean and repair the damage. Michael thought he could feel Horace getting closer somehow, working up his nerve to come home. He thought Hannah felt it too. What would that house be like in January with eighteen hours of darkness and the thermometer reading forty below, the wind moving through the parlour. When he left, there weren't any tears. Hannah stood in the doorway and waved to him. She was holding one of the homemade dolls she had in her bedroom and she took its hand and waved it too.

M
ichael returned to Calgary, getting a ride from a sullen farmer who drove wordlessly for three hours before letting
him out on Eleventh Avenue. The city's sandstone buildings were solid and ornate and it looked like a desert city conjured from a children's book. On the train tracks a freight sat with a few hundred men lounging on top of the cars. A banner nailed to a boxcar read
ON TO OTTAWA
. Michael asked a man in an ill-fitting pinstriped suit what was going on. He told him they had come from Vancouver, hundreds of them, on railcars, twenty-three hours over the mountains. They were going to ride two thousand miles on the rails to the nation's capital and then march straight up to those Parliament Buildings and say their piece to the prime minister.

“Mr. Richard B-for-Bastard Bennett will listen to us. You wanna believe that. He ain't going to have a choice.”

Michael worked his way through the crowd, mostly refugees from Bennett's work camps, he guessed. They flowed through downtown toward the river, and in Bow River Park they laid out their bedrolls and some of the men walked tentatively into the river to bathe, bracing against its glacier-fed June cold.

Michael sat down beside a man who was eating beans out of a can. He might have been in his late twenties, Michael guessed, though he looked older, a big slope-shouldered man with reddish hair wearing a mismatched suit who introduced himself as Dusty.

“I don't figure the prime minister aims to let this train get all the way to his front porch,” Dusty said.

“You think he'll call in the army?” Michael asked.

“He'll call in something. That's for sure.”

A wooden stage was in the park and Michael could see three negroes setting something up on it. A banner was stretched across two posts at the back of the stage.
KNIGHTS OF HARLEM
, it read.

“What he does, see, if he's smart,” Dusty started. “What he does is, he blows up the train.”

“Blows it up.”

“Damn right. He blows it up when it's on a bridge maybe.

It's rigged to look like an accident. Then Bennett, see, he has a funeral for a thousand dead men and he says how these fine souls were taken by God and maybe he squeezes out a few tears. The papers get a picture of him and he gets two things—one, he's rid of us, and two, he looks good doin' it. Suddenly he's God's own angel weeping for a thousand men who smelled like dead cats headed for his parlour.”

Dusty rolled a cigarette. He was filled with the wisdom of the road, the repeated lore of men who had nothing but stories to occupy themselves.

“You watch,” Dusty said. “Bennett is sitting right now in that government house figuring ways to get rid of us.”

The Knights of Harlem took the stage, a saxophone, banjo, guitar, trumpet, and four men who sang. The instruments lurched into step and the singers began marching in place.

“Black as coal,” Dusty observed. “I hope they can sing some.”

The Knights of Harlem high-stepped into their first song and the singers wagged their fingers in unison and sang through oversized smiles.

It was after midnight when the men began to get into their bedrolls. Michael stared up at Cassiopeia, the vain queen. He could feel himself drawn to this endeavour. It was partly the train, the promise of movement in these stagnant days. He slept with his hand in his pocket, clutching the nine dollars that was there.

I
n the morning the men straggled to the river and washed and drank, kneeling on the stones. Michael put his head underwater and let the river flow around him, then stood up and ran his hands through his hair. He started walking toward the rail yard and Dusty pulled up beside him.

“They ain't going to blow it between here and Regina,” Dusty said. “My guess is somewhere east of Winnipeg, north shore of Superior. I bet Bennett's already got someone working on a statue for the fallen men. So I figure we're safe until Winnipeg.”

“That's a comfort,” Michael said.

“You goddamn right it is. Those men stay on past the Lakehead are done for.” Dusty scrambled a bit to keep up with Michael. “You got a woman?”

Michael didn't say.

“Me, I got woman troubles,” Dusty said, then paused, hoping Michael would want to know all about them. “Two women on the coast both trying to horsecollar me. They got me like TB but I ain't the settlin' kind.” Michael was looking at the York Hotel. A few dandies lingered outside smoking their morning cigars and watching the hordes fill the streets like water, moving south toward the train.

When they got to the boxcar, Michael instinctively went on top. The sun was high, there would be a breeze, and it was harder to talk up there. Inside, they'd be crowded like cattle and a thousand stories would start. Stories of hard luck, remarkable skills, abandoned women who looked like movie stars. The train shunted east, pulling slowly through downtown and the small houses of the east side, then suddenly onto prairie. The farms looked as if a fire had gone through. In three hours they approached Medicine Hat and there was sand blowing in the wind, a taste of grit. He
wondered how Hannah was doing and whether Horace had come back. Lying on his side, he watched the prairie go by, whorls of dead land collapsed under the June sun.

I
n Regina, they camped at the Exhibition Grounds and it was agreed that three hundred men would go to Market Square on Dominion Day and hold a fundraising rally. The rest would stay put. Too big a presence would intimidate the citizens. Their biggest sympathizers were women. An army would frighten them.

Michael walked to Market Square with Dusty and a man named Eberle, short and wiry with a few days of hard bristle on his face. It was dry and the heat had already settled in on everything.

“The worst job I had,” Dusty said, “was hauling coal. In winter it'd freeze the balls off a brass monkey. So cold I had to walk with the horses. Sit on the wagon and you'd freeze up solid. Pick up the coal west of Taber, take half the day just to get it to town. Walking around black as negroes from the coal dust. I hauled ice in the summer and that was a damn sight better. You're loading ice into some woman's icebox. She gives you a glass of lemonade. Maybe she tickles your feather. So hot in August, you don't know if you done it or not.”

“I worked as a navvy in northern Ontario,” Eberle said. “Laying track fourteen hours a day for a dollar. You'd buy your boots from the company, your gloves, food, bed. End of the month be lucky to have ten bucks. Swinging those hammers. Jesus, the blackflies would drive you mad. Taking pieces of you all day you'd wonder what was going to be left but too damn tired to care. The straw boss we had was mean as a
snake. He'd get after you, bend right down in your face, tell you to swing that hammer or go back to the goddamn farm. He was on this one fellow, big Scandahoovian, hardly spoke English. But the boss just had it in for this guy. Be on his case all the live long. One day, it's July, bugs are on us, heat something fierce and this big blond Scandahoovian has got the boss in his face too, leaning right in there yelling some fool thing. The Swede finally blows a gasket. He lets go with that hammer, and you swing that thing all day you can hit a dime nine times out of ten with your eyes closed. Drive a spike into granite with a single shot. He brings up that hammer and drives it right through the boss's forehead. Sinks in like it was a pile of manure. Then he just walks off into the bush. We're all standing there staring, boss is lying on the ties, deader than Christmas in July. What we do is, we all take a break. Get a little water, roll a smoke. Christ we earned it and you don't get many chances like that and not a one of us missed the sound of that man's jaws flapping. We sat in the shade and played cards until dinner while the boss lay there on the track with that hammer sticking in his head, the flies gathering. Never saw a cop. Never saw that Scandahoovian neither.”

“That was the worst,” Dusty agreed.

“It was the worst for that straw boss. But that wasn't the worst job, no sir. Bad as it was.” Eberle took off his hat and wiped his brow and stared up at the sun. His face had a glaze of sweat on it, and looked polished, the colour of teak. “The worst was the killing floor at the Burns slaughterhouse. You're standing in blood all day. Lord help you if you fall. Jesus, it's ugly work. You kill something all day long. It don't matter they're dumb as hell and headed for your plate—it's one living thing after another and none a them are looking to go quietly. They ain't the smartest mammal on the ark
but the whole place smells of death. It's in their nose. They don't need to form the thought. Every animal understands death.”

“But it was a paycheque,” Dusty said.

“It was a paycheque.”

“It kept you and yours.”

“It kept me,” Eberle said. “The wife run off. It hardens you, that work, and I'd come home with blood on me, looking like John Dillinger and smelling like death and not a kind word for anyone on this earth. I guess she was within her rights.”