Kanata (43 page)

Perhaps his whole life had been a preparation for China. The Chinese embraced him in a way the Spanish were reluctant to. He hadn't been an easy man to love in Spain. Or anywhere. But he felt loved here.

He was the only trained doctor among thirteen million people. What a practice! Had he stayed in Detroit, he might have had a few hundred.

Outside Ho-Chin he came upon a boy with a bloodstain on his blue army jacket. He was perhaps seventeen and had been shot through the lung a week earlier. The right anterior chest wall suppurating, fluid in the pleural cavity as high as the third rib. Who would have believed this possible? An
untreated gunshot victim walking around for a week. Each war was a medical laboratory, often grotesque, occasionally uplifting.

In Ho-Chin there were live carp in buckets, black pigs, barkless dogs, paper windows, and obsequious priests whose chants reminded him of High Church Anglicans.

Lying on the stained hospital bed, surrounded by wounded Chinese, he contemplated the body, how beautiful it is; how perfect its parts; with what precision it moves; how obedient. How terrible when torn. It goes out like a candle. Quietly and gently. It makes its protest at extinction, then submits.

He remembered walking among the pines near Gravenhurst early in the morning with his father when he was a boy. His father quoted Deuteronomy, a familiar ritual, the Bible delivered as they walked over fallen boughs under a brilliant autumn canopy. As Deuteronomy entered his ears, unwanted and abstract, Bethune scanned for deer tracks and dreamed of escaping his father's righteous temper that built as the day progressed, starting calmly then gathering force.

Bethune had found his highest fulfillment out here among the peasants, without love or comfort. Perhaps, he noted, he was a man of God after all, like his father. How lovely an irony. His head was a fiery pain now, his organs beginning to shut down, like a street of shopkeepers turning out their lights after the day's business was done. He wasn't a lover or an artist or a man of science as he had intended. As he firmly believed. Merely a missionary, and now, he thought, a martyr.

ALLIANCES

1939–1950

They were a curious pair, King and Bethune, the careful politician and the reckless doctor. When I went to Spain I was following Stanford's righteous anger as much as Bethune's, I think. I half expected to see his ghost there.

Thomas Carlyle had a theory that history was the accumulated biographies of great men. Was Bethune a great man? A messy, recognizable type: He was arrogant, drank too much, and embraced the world like a lover. Angry and restless, though I think he found peace in China. The Chinese considered him a national hero. He became one here, too, though that came later. He was too dangerous to embrace when he was alive.

And Mackenzie King? Who knows. He was insecure, a loopy spiritualist who feared women and envied great men. His charms were subtle, to say the least. Yet the country prospered under him. For a time we were defined by him (and perhaps we still are): the spirit of compromise. I wasn't a fan of Willie, but he endured, and you can't ignore that.

Endurance is part of the national theme: that humbling geography, its overwhelming scale, the sheer weight on the collective psyche. Though for most people (Thompson being the greatest exception), all that land is an abstraction. But it's the most obvious one and we cleave to it. We need to cleave to something; that's what sustains a nation.

When David Thompson first set out to explore, he went to Lake Athabasca with two Cree named Kozdaw and Paddy. Coming back on the Black River they hit a set of rapids and the canoe tipped. The two Indians got to shore but Thompson went under and scraped along the rocks. He lost his shoes and most of his clothes. They were able to recover his sextant, which was in a cork-lined box, and their cotton tent. The flesh was torn from the bottom of Thompson's foot, and he ripped the tent into strips to bind it and used the rest for clothing. It was September and already getting cold. They made a fire and Thompson thought about their situation: in a barren land, the canoe lost, without food, almost naked. They wrestled two small eagles from a nest and ate them, and Thompson and Paddy came down with dysentery. For four days they limped through the forest, eating a few berries, the dysentery sending their bodies into spasm. They were so weak that Thompson thought it was useless to go any farther. Better to die where they were. He was a young man and his life's exploration had come only to this: one lake, one river.

Kozdaw didn't get sick but he cried all day. Not for Thompson and Paddy but for himself: He knew he'd be blamed for their deaths when he got back. So using charcoal on a piece of birch bark, Thompson wrote an account of his own death, signed and dated it, and gave it to Kozdaw as protection. Sitting in the wilderness, writing his obituary with a piece of charred wood. I think of this image often. My great-great-grandfather, not much older than you. The mapmaker. It was the second time he had contemplated the
end of his life, a short journey, its unfulfilled purpose, a hundred stories told by a dying Indian, and then a wisp, like an ash that wafts out of the fire, consumed. And yet, he endured.

Y
ou could see World War II approach from a long way off, like a prairie thunderstorm. And then it hit and we were surprised by the awful power of war once more. Wars are bad for people but good for nations; we had another chance to shed our colonial status. In the end, we left the British for the Americans, a devil's bargain, perhaps, though it hasn't been a bad marriage. They're dangerous and entertaining, and God knows marriages have been based on less.

1

M
ACKENZIE
K
ING,
1939

—Am I loved?

A silence from beyond, the discreet spirits.

—They
voted
for me, King said. The crowds when I spoke—I could feel something. I was their choice.

—A woman makes a choice but she doesn't always love her husband. Few politicians are loved.

—And I am not among the lucky, Wilfrid?

—They will love you after you're gone, Mackenzie. It is the way with most men. Resented, then mourned.

—Perhaps if I had a wife.

—The political wife is a rare thing. A woman who understands your world but lives in the other. A medium. Ha. But
even they aren't enough for the politician. He needs the crowd, that roar of approval.

—Will I will feel it again? Will it be enough?

—You will feel it. It won't be enough.

K
ing knew that the people didn't love him. That's why he didn't lead; he knew few would follow. In the West, Bible Bill Aberhart was a demagogue who understood his people at the level of their private fears, staring into the dark centres that contained failure and shame and a moral strength guided by lack of opportunity. And Aberhart worked these truths like the preacher he was.

King understood the people at a level they couldn't comprehend and therefore didn't fully appreciate: balancing the delicate factions of the country like a conductor bringing in the strings, signalling the oboes, keeping peace among the temperamental violins, ensuring the lonely triangle felt wanted, and making all of this move forward, if not in the pleasing strains of his favourite composers (the lulling Brahms—even his name was lulling), then the emphatic lurch of the Russian, Shostakovich. The people weren't consciously aware of this, but at another level, at the level of the spirit lusting for balance, they knew. And they knew King, the rationalist, the appeaser, the delicate crackwalker of Berlin, Ontario, was the one to keep this fragile alliance on course. If he could not overcome the forces of geography and history that tore at the nation (and he couldn't, but then, who could?), then he could at least stay them. His peculiar genius was like the spirit world, impossible to see but powerful nonetheless.

K
ing decided that Hitler was too shrewd to go to war. He would get what he needed simply by preparing for war, assembling all those people (that enviable unity!) and massing that German steel along the borders. The threat would be enough.

The medium said Hitler would die this year—perhaps assassinated. Mussolini too was being called. King asked her to examine his hand, to see if she saw marriage there. She took his hand in both of hers, and King thrilled slightly at her touch, the finger tracing lines along his palm. “You are destined to live alone,” she said. “There is purpose to your life. It is being ordered in this way.” They spoke to Leonardo da Vinci, whose advice was unfortunately Mediterranean (“To truly live, Mackenzie, you must embrace all of life”). Was he counselling hedonism? A genius, an artist.

There was a surprisingly casual chat with Philip the Apostle. A disciple of Jesus, an extraordinary breakthrough. (Could he talk to Jesus himself ? King wondered. What would he dare ask?) Philip, who had been crucified, hung upside down on a cross yet he continued to preach. He was offered release and refused, and died on the cross. What courage, what faith! And now, according to the slightly mousy medium, a woman with grey streaks in her dead brown hair who was channelling Philip's Hebrew musings into a breezy American dialect, the disciple and King had begun a friendship of sorts. His friendships with the great: da Vinci, Philip, Louis Pasteur. They were a comfort, though it occurred to him that he had more friends among the dead than among the living, an imbalance he would need to address.

What of his dead dog Pat? What was God's plan for
terriers? Do dogs have souls? King was unsure what to ask the medium.

“My dog. Pat, I was very close to him,” he said. “I'm wondering … Is it possible to communicate … I don't know the … I'd like to try.”

The medium stared at King.

“Your dog Pat,” she said.

“My dear departed terrier.”

A slight shrug. She sat motionless for three minutes. Would Pat bark at the medium? King wondered. Did he now have the gift of language? A low sound came out, not a growl, a guttural sigh almost. It pitched lower and finally died out.

“Pat is well,” she said quietly. “He misses you.”

In the morning King walked his estate at Kingsmere, gazing on the ruins he had assembled—some of them taken from the Parliament Buildings when they burned in 1916, other pieces scavenged from old houses. He was comforted by antiquity; he welcomed his ghosts. King had asked Laurier if he thought Kingsmere was too large an estate. He had bought the neighbouring properties, and his land was now too vast to comfortably walk. Partly the purchase had been defensive. The Jews had wanted to buy near Kingsmere and they would have ruined it certainly.

In the morning, King reread Matthew. Almost an hour went by before he received the news that Hitler had invaded Poland.

The following evening his departed father told him that Hitler was dead, “shot by a Pole.” His mother confirmed it. “War will be averted,” she told him. This view seemed to be confirmed again by both his grandfather and Laurier, so it was disturbing to find Hitler alive the next day. What could
this mean? That the spirit world was unreliable, or nonexistent, a fraud? It couldn't be. He had
felt
it, felt it with Laurier, with his mother and grandfather. He sought ways to explain this lapse, to keep all he had invested in the spirit realm intact; he couldn't merely be chatting with a blankfaced Detroit housewife who charged him for every session. There were malicious spirits at play, he thought, spirits that were not yet divine, or simply mischievous. Perhaps there were wars in the spirit realm as well, good and evil continuing their joust. He must be cautious with future advice.