Kanata (38 page)

“I'd kill for a paycheque now,” Dusty said. “I'd kill a steer anyway.”

“I'd kill just about anything,” Eberle said, then turned to Michael. “How about you?”

“I worked for the King of England,” Michael said.

Dusty laughed. “Well, King of bloody England. Now there's a job I'd like. Someone offers me the job of king it's where do I fucking sign.”

“Pancakes every morning,” Eberle said.

“And beer,” Dusty said.

“Whisky.”

“I'd shoot ducks from the car,” Dusty said. “Pay my wife to drive it.”

“You'd have to pay someone to be your wife first,” Eberle said. “I'd sit in that castle in my long johns and play cards till I was too drunk, then get the butler to take my hand.”

“You'd get all the skirt you want, that job.”

Eberle turned to Michael. “So we're talking to royalty practically.”

“Edward, the king in waiting,” Michael said. “He had a place by Pekisko. I took care of his horses.”

“What kind of king he going to make, you figure?”

“The kind who can't find his ass with both hands and a map,” Michael said.

The men moved in orderly bunches, conversation leaking out, dust bouncing behind them.

“We get to Ottawa, Bennett's going to have to make a stand one way or the other,” Eberle said.

“We ain't getting to Ottawa,” Dusty said, spelling out his theory about blowing up the train.

“I don't think he'll blow it,” Eberle said. “I figure Winnipeg is where he makes his move. No shortage of police there and an army barracks if it comes to it.”

“Or Regina,” Michael said. “He makes his stand here. It's farther away. Not so many newspapers. He uses the RCMP. He rounds us up and sends us all to relief camps on the coast, only they're closer to prison camps this time out.”

“They were close to prison camps last time out,” Eberle said.

T
hey were sweating when they got to Market Square. Maybe a thousand people were there, some of them waiting to hear what they had to say, some of them, Michael sensed, just looking for distraction. There weren't any police, which seemed strange. There had been militant talk from the government, stressing the need for law and order, for soldiers if necessary. A few men stood up and made speeches about equality and fat cats and socialist hope. The air was dry and still. It felt like the city was in suspension. Michael was midway back in the crowd, and the stillness made him nervous. The evening felt poised, waiting to break.

At eight o'clock, a shrill whistle blew and forty or so Royal Canadian Mounted Police spilled out of three large vans. A garage door opened and two dozen Regina police rushed out. From around the corner, RCMP on horseback trotted through the crowd. Some plainclothes police arrested the men who were on the speaker's platform. Michael instinctively looked for cover, edging toward the surrounding streets. In the square, they'd be cut down. The RCMP on horseback had clubs and were swinging them. A few of the police had their revolvers out and some shots were fired above their heads.

People moved in waves of panic, seeking escape in undulating shapes that formed and then dispersed. Michael broke away from the pack down a side street, then darted into an industrial yard filled with rusting, unfamiliar machines. A man was stripping one of the machines, tearing it apart with a wrench. “Tar-maker,” he said. “Grab some of them pieces.” The man worked quickly and within ten minutes he had a pile of metal to be used as weapons, bushings and bolts to throw, longer pieces of steel to wield as swords. Two dozen men were in the yard, fashioning weapons from whatever they could. Others found rakes or hoes in garages near the square. Michael heard shots, the dull pop of the police revolvers. “God, they going to kill us all,” the man said. He spun his wrench in a counter-clockwise motion and tugged at a steel spindle and gave it to Michael. Michael tested its weight against the air, then ran toward the lane. Crouched behind the fence, he could see into the square. A dozen bodies lay there, moving with a slight limbic twitch. Four policemen were carrying a man, one on each limb. A fifth came up, blood streaming down his face. In the lane a man swung a hoe that caught a cop across the
forehead. Another policeman came around the corner and shot the man, who fell down and crawled ten feet.

Michael followed the laneway and came out on Thirteenth Avenue and went east toward Osler. Now hundreds of men were moving through the alleys and streets in packs. Michael saw Eberle standing on Twelfth, taking a stone out of his pocket. Two policemen rushed him and Eberle let go with the stone and hit one of them but the other one was on him, flailing with his billy stick. Michael rushed up and swung his steel spindle and the policeman fell, bleeding from his head. Michael knelt down and saw that Eberle's skull had been caved in near his eye. He was rocking back and forth, his mouth open. The policeman was holding his head, blood leaking. Michael couldn't do anything for either of them.

He spent an hour circling around to Rose Street, where a pitched battle was going on, policemen firing their revolvers at men who were throwing bricks and stones and any piece of metal they could lay hands on. Tear gas carried on the evening breeze. Broken glass littered the sidewalk and Michael saw a dozen typewriters lying broken in the street. He turned south on Halifax and saw two RCMP riding toward him. He ducked into an alley and sprinted, then went into a garage and sat on its dirt floor in the half-light, his breath coming out in sawing gasps. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw a man sitting against the wall near the corner. One side of his face was dark gore. He held a rag over one eye and with the other he looked at Michael.

“They ain't going to stop, you know,” the man said. “They got the blood lust in them now and they don't know how to quit.”

“I imagine you're right,” Michael said. Those RCMP must have been sitting in the vans for an hour or more, he
thought. It would have been stifling in there. They came out hard and almost overwhelmed the crowd in that first rush.

“They ain't no issue now,” the man said. “No law, no order. It's just kill the first thing you get your sights on.”

“We can't stay here,” Michael said.

“We go out there, we'll get cut down sure.”

“If we stay we'll be cornered. Out there we have options.”

“I don't think options is anything I got,” the man said. “This one eye's gone or near enough. I figure I wait until they killed enough, maybe it gets quiet. I go out now, they'll just shoot me.”

“If we can get back to the Exhibition Grounds, we'll be safe. They won't follow us there. They don't have the manpower. They don't want a war.”

The man thought about this. “I don't know how good I can move.”

Michael heard a door slam and a shot fired. He heard yelling no more than twenty yards away, and the sound of wood splintering. They were kicking in doors. Michael put his ear to the wall and heard the whinny of a horse and two shots. There was scuffling and yelling and then silence. Michael waited for another sound, like he and Stanford had on that roof, but there wasn't any and he fell asleep sitting up against a stud.

When he woke up, the other man was gone. He ventured outside. It was early morning and the sun was rising pale and tentative to the east. He walked down the laneways to Market Square, which was littered with debris. A newsie stood beside a stack of newspapers. “Biggest story ever to hit town, mister, yours for a nickel,” the kid said. Michael looked at the front page, which said there were hundreds of injuries and one death. The police claimed thirty-nine
injuries, many of them grievous, they said. A million dollars in damage, though Michael suspected that most of those numbers were either guesses or political calculations. The paper said a dead horse was found in the alley behind Dewdney Street with a slogan painted on its side but didn't say what it was.

AWAY

1936–1939

Before the Regina Riot we sent a man to Ottawa—Slim Evans—to negotiate with the prime minister. Evans was a union man, though he'd stolen union funds and been caught at it. Maybe not the ideal negotiator. Prime Minister Bennett was a wealthy man who spent his evenings answering all the letters people sent him. At first they'd asked him to end the Depression, but faith in government had disappeared and by the time Evans went to see him, people were asking him for a new coat, or three dollars, or ten pounds of flour. Bennett told them to buck up, the worst was over. Bennett feared communism. Most people did, and they were probably right to. Not many of the men in Regina were communists, but revolution comes from hunger and they were hungry. Bennett told Evans they'd bring the law on him and Evans told Bennett he wasn't fit to be head of a Hottentot village. So much for negotiation.

When things go bad, men turn on each other; your own country comes after you with a billy club. I wasn't a communist but I went
to Spain anyway. The whole world seemed adrift and maybe I was looking for purpose. The Spanish Civil War was billed as Good vs. Evil. But they all are, aren't they. It's where Stanford would have gone, though maybe for different reasons.

Part of the reason I went was Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor who went over and wrote about his experience in the newspapers. Spain seemed like something concrete, and Bethune was a hero. But when you get close to anything, it looks much different. From five thousand miles away, communism looked like a brotherhood of man; up close it looked like three drunks fighting over a bottle.

1

N
ORMAN
B
ETHUNE,
M
ADRID,
1936

King or Chaos, that Hobson's choice. King had won, but chaos still ruled, Norman Bethune thought. Politics was a cesspool you threw money and principles into. As for his personal life, well it had always been chaos, hadn't it? The divorce from Frances (not once, but twice), his love for Marian. Married Marian. Perhaps he needed torment. There were men who did, God knows, and Bethune came from a long line of them.

Bethune was a doctor, a brilliant one—though what doctor, no matter how incompetent, was not brilliant in his own mind? A revolutionary in both medicine and politics. With his mobile blood transfusion unit, he would change the
nature of triage. Outside, the Ford station wagon Bethune had bought in London held the gear, the Electrolux refrigerator that ran on kerosene, the autoclave, incubator, vacuum bottles, blood flasks, drip bottles, Froud syringe, microscope haemocytometers. On the side of the car was painted “Service canadien de transfusion sanguine à Madrid.” And what better country for his experiments than Spain, with its ancient blood-mystique.

The fifteen-room flat in Madrid where he was billeted had eight thousand books, gold brocade curtains, and Aubusson carpets. It had formerly been occupied by a German diplomat who had fled to Germany to embrace fascism at its source.

When Bethune arrived in Spain he was detained and questioned by authorities because he had a moustache. War is filled with absurdities. In London he had ordered a halfdozen monogrammed silk shirts, deliciously inappropriate, but he was against all convention, even socialist fashion.