The Governor of the Northern Province (14 page)

“Family, friends, Mr. Mayor and Deacon Phil, thank you. On behalf of the children, thank you, thank you, thank you. The kind words, cards and casseroles we've been given since George went on— everything's been beautiful, simply beautiful, and just so generous. Many of you knew my late husband as a leader, and much of what we've heard this evening confirms as much. But what I'm about to say, in these brief remarks, which I promise to keep brief”—bathroom-and coffee-ready gratitude spread through the hall—“may surprise you. I have come here today to praise George Gallagher, dear friends, as a follower.”

The audience gave up confused murmurs and frustrated growls at this proposal, like black bears searching through trash cans in vain. “Yes, a follower. I know we've come to understand that term as a negative in our culture, and rightly so in most instances, but not in the way I mean it today. George Gallagher was indeed a follower, his entire life. He was a courageous follower of one thing, my friends: Canadian values.”

Immediately the crowd released great patriotic drafts of affirmation and exaltation; so many discrete fantasies of what this meant whirled together. Faye looked up, nodding satisfaction at these billows. And then she harnessed the national blow-up doll into her private lodestar.

“Yes, he followed those Canadian values from his time as both altar and paper boy through successful family and legal practices, and then, because he kept following them, a series of terms as this town's most devoted alderman. But, my friends, all of this was merely preparation for what was supposed to have been George's next great search, his plans to run in a federal election.”

The crowd gasped and whispered and went collectively downcast at this news, at this bright-light-snuffed-too-early motif. Then they started wondering what Faye would do. Throw herself on her husband's funeral bier? Take up the torch from failing hands?

She'd been so strong through it all, but now she opened up, her mascara running like a drained starfish as she sniffled and sobbed her closing remarks into a tear-drenched declaration for office. “George … he … he was never able to … to follow through on that dream, dear friends. But I stand before you today to make this promise.” Her voice quavered its last and then firmed with statesman's resolve before flashing with showman's promise. “My husband, the father of my children, the late George Gallagher, he knew best for all of us. And where he led—sorry, where he had
wanted
to lead—I, Faye Gallagher, I shall follow!”

She turned away from the microphone to pick up a paper and signal to the woman at the Clavinova. She looked up, smiling bravely, and opened her lips.

“Song sheets ready? I know this isn't on the program, but I couldn't imagine ending otherwise. So let's together sing ‘Be Not Afraid,' which, I think, is a fitting way for us, as a community, to look to the future, which is to say, together. Because George would have it this way, my fellow Canadians, going before us as he has done, and asking us, as I ask you, my friends, to come, follow me.”

Jennifer hadn't noticed the handouts until just then, her focus divided between parsing Faye's eulogy and marking its effects on the crowd. But then she saw the columns of efficient volunteers moving through the aisles, handing out lyrics to what was at once the concluding hymn of the funeral service and, in its refrain, the unveiling of Faye Gallagher's campaign slogan for the federal seat of Nipissing–Renfrew–Pembroke.

Be not afraid.

I go before you always;

Come, follow me.

Mumbling and mourning with the rest, Jennifer had to grant Faye this masterstroke, this blend of religiosity and righteousness so politically pitch-perfect she wondered if her opponent had also been studying the American ways. But no matter, Jennifer decided. Having seen this, the best her opponent could manage, she was confident of her prospects in the race and the more confirmed in her earlier decision to throw up and off her chances at Middle Canadian nuptial bliss.

Because once the singing was done and the crowd, her parents included, had tired of watching close family and various friends embrace Faye and whisper and voice-box their support and admiration for her just-great and courageous plan to run, Jennifer recalled her counter-strike, which was in process. Even if these good Canadians, these everyday people, had been huffing and puffing with Faye at the funeral and singing her tune, Jennifer predicted they'd be thinking pink on the way home. She grinned a little at this cleverness and decided it would be a good conversation opener with Bokarie when next they met. Perhaps to distract him from what paper cuts and wiper blades he might recently have suffered through for the campaign.

7

STUMP SPEECHES

I.

“Can you all hear me okay? How about at the back?” The speaker didn't get much in the way of response, so he shrugged and leaned over to his cousin to confirm that Bokarie was ready to address the recruits.

The twitchy crowd, which had been gathered across the tee-off strip of the ruined driving range, knew these space-filling sounds. They were usually made before the meal packs and medicine bags came out at the aid centres and AIDS clinics they frequented in the capital as much to break up their days as for the goodies to be had there. So the young men didn't bother responding and kept instead at their afternoon lazing, reclining on each other's shoulders, cadging cigarettes, trading evidence of girlfriends, tattoos, knife wounds. Making predictions of how much this thing they'd agreed to do was going to pay.

Official representatives were moving among them rechecking tribal affiliations before the training session began. This last-minute, extra vetting was a necessity for those leading the General's growing movement, what with the number of informants, false friends, black BBC reporters and other tricky cockroaches clattering around the capital these days.

And so, in response to these very important presences mixing with the crowd, a few strategically earnest types, looking for pay and position bump-ups, blared that they weren't here for the money. They were going Upriver to sink a few of those roundy waists for their family's sunken bellies. Because they were optimistic that an important ear or two might cock at such principled, focused rage. But their voices were laughed at and shouted down by others mimicking toothpaste rhymes and condom jingles, which underscored the pointlessness, the indignity, of such apish pleading. Everyone there knew the
sink a roundy waist for a sunken belly
slogan. In recent weeks it had been a constant on radio stations that broadcast to select bars and slums in the capital. Hotel workers had cleaned pools to it, children jumped rope to it.

Meanwhile, another handful of the recruits styled themselves the cognoscenti among the young and hungry crowd. Showy and knowy, they trafficked in rumours about the fellow who was going to address them. The hard long man who was moving to the centre position in front of them. He was wearing the standard African Big Man sunglasses necessary to ward off the wedged throb of late afternoon sun and conceal bloodshot and leer. But he had something else going on, they sensed, a wide-edged smile and a sharp-cut frame and also a jaunt, even a rhythm in his walk. These were the indicators, weren't they, that this was that new warlord, that Bokarie?

There were always ant lines moving between the northern province and the capital city—refugees and rebels, rustics and random revolutionaries, and with them their assorted wives and goats and children and broken-down elders. Among these travellers, reports had been recently passing back and forth of a dynamo from an outlying village near the Upriver region. Among other things, he was reported to be well spoken and a killer dancer.

He was smiling.

His lips opened.

“Greetings, my new brothers, and on behalf of the General, whose trucks picked you out of your banlieues and boroughs to bring you here today, I offer hearty congratulations on your deciding to join this most worthy mission of ours. Can you guess why we have chosen this place as our training grounds? Look around you. See the flat dead land with the little holes drilled into it everywhere. Once, this was a place thick with huts, trees, animals, fruits. With life! But then someone—and we shall use no names today, in strict obedience to the slander laws that the National Assembly recently appended to the Permanent Emergency Measures—but someone, let us say a certain self-appointed President-for-life who shall go unnamed, had this whole area cut down. Yes, cut down and flattened. And what about those who had lived here? Who had been born and given life and then died on this ground since a time well before even the hungry whites came in their boats and boots? The peoples of this land were swept out like so many husks and feathers, their glories forgotten, my brothers, and for what purpose? For the pinhead Japanese and the loudmouth Mickey Mouses and the blue-haired UNs that the President is always inviting to his palace for his famous trade and aid summits. This was his gift to them. So that, after a long day of getting their feedbags heavy with our treasure, they could drop their little white balls where they pleased.

“This latest pack of outsiders is gone for now. They've been scared off, terrified like our old French masters of trying to hunt anything that can run in two directions. Because they've heard that the men of this nation have found a great light, that they—that we—are taking courage because we have been granted a new leader, a good and brave and ready man. I have met him, my brothers. The General. He has told me himself that he shall right every wrong, every imprisonment, every evacuation, every marble statue that the great soft sow, our beloved and swollen-bellied President, has birthed in the name of what he calls National Progress!

“We say enough with progress. We say it is time for repairs. The General has decided the hour has come, at last, to do something about the sorry state of our beloved Atwenty. Our country is the sickest man in Africa, or so the Western papers are cawing. And do you know what the General says to this? He says, fine, let's get a little sicker, let's hurt a little more. Because he knows, like we all do, my brothers, that you need to bleed a wound before it can heal.”

A voice cried out, raw, blood-lusty and confirming. Almost immediately the rest joined in, their eyes only for a passing moment searching each other's for affirmation that, yes, this was the right response, what was wanted. So they gave back to the man standing before them, their heads swirling with possibilities, their mouths going wider and blacker with want and rage. Like open graves.

It had been a plant, one of Bokarie's brothers, standing in the middle of the now-yawping audience, who had yelled on cue and so brought out of the rest their pledges to the General's National Restitution Campaign. Their howling sounds were taken as positive signs by the men in charge; they also made Bokarie strut some, so he let them rev a little longer. Stalking around, he noticed Charles, the General's chief aide-de-camp, nodding. The man who had discovered Bokarie back in Uncle's beer bar was pleased with himself, with his eye for such talent. He was also impressed at how quick a study the young man, from the outer rim no less, had proven of the rhetoric and premises necessary to get the Upriver mission under way. These had only been shared with him a few days earlier, upon his coming to the capital city in place of the former new warlord of his village, Foday. He must have been blessed this way, Charles thought, a natural at tongue-twisting men to his purposes.

Bokarie was giving this speech as part of his responsibilities to and from the General. Upon reaching the capital city and meeting him, Bokarie had been informed that it would be in the best interests of various parties, the Nation and the People included, were there something along the lines of a sanitation program implemented in the Upriver lands, since that was where the filth-bathing President hailed from. Such an undertaking would limit the President's support in advance of a
coup d'état c'est moi
that the General, ever hedgy, was considering considering, as he explained to Bokarie in the loud confessional mode he preferred. And then, dangling more sweets before the child's open mouth, the General told the young man that were it a successful cleanup, as new President he would need loyal and capable governors for the nation's various provinces, including the crucial one to the north.

Hearing this offer, Bokarie gorged on what it could mean were he to empty out the Upriver lands of their rutting residents. The possibility became his prime mover, and he focused on it with especial hardness after a little heartbreak came his way. The General had invited his girl Elizabeth—his dance partner, whom Bokarie had brought with him to the capital for a view of the greatness coming his way after his disco beat-job on the old warlord Foday—to be his new policy adviser on women's health and welfare issues. And she accepted.

After telling his cousin and brothers this news over swigs, Bokarie observed that he had every right to go after the General. Cradling his courage and peeling away at its label, he mused openly that he might even do it with a little of his famous bottle work, an idea that was well received.

Swelled as usual from his words, Bokarie's brothers and cousin promised to hold down the General's aides while Bokarie had at the big man. They had added incentive: two were themselves recently abandoned by Marigold, the girl they had long shared, whom Bokarie had saved from Foday but then avoided, because that's what a hard man like Bokarie did. She had also accompanied them, only to start working for some foreign big shot known as Ngo, who, from the name, as far as Bokarie's brother and cousin could figure, was either Kenyan or Japanese. The boys knew they would never have lost Marigold to a bigger man had the General left them all to their beer bar fun back home. They had grudges to work from as well.

But to their surprise Bokarie decided against the move. Instead, he vowed never again to let a woman matter for anything except that fur below her fangs, which was a statement he dragged and pushed off his tongue after taking another swallow at his bottle for ache and numb and guts. Then, drawing his blood men close, he explained that having taken over his girl, the General would be forced to grant Bokarie more power, this being the standard recompense for more flesh. Bokarie invoked the great King David as his historical precedent, noting that after he had bedded Bathsheba, David granted her husband Uriah pride of place in battle. At least, in his rummy swirl and heap of self-pity, that was how Bokarie chose to remember the moral of the story. Because beneath his bravura words and despite more throat-bulging swigs, there was something hurt here, from how she had smiled at him from down below the orphanage wall a few years earlier and pulled him out of that life and been warm and firm to sleep beside afterwards. All of which was enough to make Bokarie want to go against him. But then again, the General had mostly gold teeth and they weren't going to be knocked out so easily and there were those other possibilities to consider, to take as consolation.