The Governor of the Northern Province (17 page)

When the reporter reached Bokarie and first let the young men roving around him play for a while in front of a lens-capped camera, he interviewed the dapper-tongued leader in an exclusive. This was during a heat-induced lull in the Restitution drive, and Bokarie whiled away the sun-beat afternoon by fencing with the reporter about rumours of a disco bar bottle drive to an early challenger's neck. Impressed by the demure way the warlord responded to an account of his own legend, while his entourage crowded into the frame to confirm and embroider it, the BBC man decided he'd stick around and see what came of this. As a result, he had occasion to record the only extant footage of Bokarie making his most famous speech.

The reporter had it confiscated during an army checkpoint search when he returned to the capital. Labelling it stock wildlife footage didn't convince them. The video, he learned upon later inquiry through one of his sources in military affairs, would not be going to England as intended. And if its owner tried to figure out which General it mentioned, he wouldn't be either.

There will always be growing pains when a great nation is reborn! If a few sandals fall into the fire, or a little woman blood mixes into the ashes, what great loss is this? My brothers, it is no loss. My own mother, my own woman, my own child – they have fled, have starved, have been killed in the first wars of the new history, after the British and the French and the Germans left us to fight amongst ourselves for the right to tend our own fires. Meanwhile, the tribes Upriver have guns and electric and water and maize. They have as many goats in their fields as we have vultures above our huts. Do you wonder why? They worship the swine that squeals in the capital city, our self-appointed President-for-life, who sells our wives and daughters to Nike Red Cross U.S. of A. Who protects the Upriver villagers and fills their troughs because they are all of that snub-nosed, mongrel tribe.

There is one man who can put an end to this. The General. And he has told me that only the eldest and purest people of our beloved homeland can help him cleanse what has been soiled. This is why he has asked us to reclaim our ancient lands as part of his National Restitution Campaign. This is why we must crush the chirping locusts that sing of the President's greatness and slaughter the dancing baboons that step to his orders. This is why we will at last greet rosy pink morning from the moist earth that your fathers' fathers left to you. Brothers! When they desire mercy, you shall make of them a sacrifice! For our sons, for our General, for our nation!

After a few deliveries, Bokarie found his stump speech banal. He gave it from the flatbeds of derelict aid trucks to cap off pre-raid rallies on the outskirts of various Upriver settlements, before he sent the men off chanting their
catch them kill them
and
sunken belly
songs. The stump speech had become his standard because of the guaranteed response it gave. Though trite by comparison with the oratories he knew he had in him if only given the right ears to trumpet into, it proved to be the easiest way to keep his men pushing towards their final target. Which was officially known, by decree of the President's office, as the World-Famous Village of Our Beloved President's Glorious Birth, with Actual Manger in Which He Was Born Preserved to This Day and Recently Restored to Its Golden Humble Majesty.

While supervising the recomposing of the Upriver lands, Bokarie had no choice but to give up, eventually, on the Bible as an aid to his own great and terrible words, save a snippet from Hosea. It just didn't get a rise out of people anymore. He had tried a few more portions after his Jesse bits had flopped—of Isaiah, then some of the harsher Psalms, even a little Judith when a few women joined up—but to little success. They just wanted the regular lines; the veterans enjoyed mouthing along, the new recruits demanded the speech because they had heard tell of it and wanted to experience it in person. Most of the Bible-fed orphans he'd taken from Father Alvaro's, who at least could have appreciated his scriptural brio, had been cut down in the early going. That was unfortunate. Not even his brothers and cousin were sympathetic to his complaints of soul sap from saying the same thing again and again, only the more distracted as they were by their little conversations with each other. And so that stumpy speech would stay with him afterwards, until he finally found occasion for new listeners and new material.

After a few months, Bokarie was growing impatient for his mission to finish, so that he could be called down in glory to the capital and receive his reward, an address to the National Assembly as the newly appointed governor. Such a reception he would get then! His only happiness in those bloody Upriver days was that the General was cramming him with promises in every satellite chat they had along the route to the President's village. This kept him driving his men towards that destination and reciting the same old same old every time he was introduced and stalked out in front to whip them up for another run. But while enduring this boredom for the coming reward, he became disgusted with his audiences, with their easy chanting and cheering and roiling at his words, at how easily he held them with such vulgar jingles and then sent them off to the General's business, to their hacking and hollering and exterminating. The brutes.

8

EXODUS POLLS

I.

Faye Gallagher held herself above responding to the garish campaign ploy her opponent had unleashed on her beloved's memorial. Muckraking, after all, was for farm girls. Impartial observers, family members and campaign supporters alike marvelled at this restraint over their crullers and multivitamins the morning after the moving Gallagher affair. At not just the restraint but the courage Faye had shown when she left the funeral home to find a hot pink flyer crammed into the windshield of her husband-gifted, now widow-driven SUV. Faye had removed it so gracefully, so unflinchingly, like Jackie O or something, they had thought. Without even unfolding it to confirm its contents, she climbed up and into her lady truck and drove off, followed by a solemn procession of late-model sedans, extended-cab trucks and pine-freshened vans full of Faye's pining children and theirs.

One woman in the half moon of supporters who saw the widow and her family out to their cars had started humming “Be Not Afraid” when Faye had been, momentarily, stopped short by the pink blot on her windshield. This had been in hopes of encouraging her to endure and prevail over this provocation, but Faye had left before the others remembered the melody. This left them in that half-humming, half-mumbling condition they were reduced to elsewhere in their lives, as when grin-hardened wait staff clapped Happy Birthday ditties at nearby tables in family restaurants, or when parts of the national anthem were sung in French.

Only Blaise Maurier, electric with outrage, lingered in the canopied car lane that fronted the funeral home. From there he held forth, buzz-throated, for any and all ear-covering passersby who processed out thereafter.

Not knowing what evil Blaise was inveighing against, the rest of the townspeople were surprised upon reaching their cars to find the same pink sheet caught up in their wiper blades or, occasionally, crumpled around them, a condition owing to Bokarie eventually growing tired and somewhat distasteful of the so-called mission Jennifer had sent him on while the rest of the community attended heart-attacked George Gallagher's memorial. He enjoyed this feeling rightfully offended, since sharing pain with others was one of his strong suits, and he could easily have worked up something from Lamentations and gone in for an elegant embrace of the bombazine bereaved. But Jennifer had refused him, explaining that the campaign needed him in the field for now, that his time to return to the stage was coming. He'd started crushing the papers against the windshields because it kept cutting at him. How familiar Jennifer's promise had sounded.

The flyers were received with mutterings at the sloth and greediness of the tactic, of letter-bombing the town's cars because they were mostly parked in the same area and during a mourning service no less. Everyone, not just the high Anglicans, clucked at the poor taste of it. But they all pocketed and pursed the sheets, adding them to the napkin-smashed croissants and crumbly date bars that had been palmed and scooped from the refreshment table on the way out. The townspeople kept the papers so they would remember to mark their calendars when they got home. As instructed. Remember the Date. For Little Caitlin. Think, etc.

Meanwhile, Faye was driving home alone, against the insistence of others. Being an always-Christmas-and-usually-Easter Catholic, she had chosen this solitude because she felt the need for a little purging and penance about what she'd just done to her husband's memory, done with his funeral. For her practical and creative use of both, she thought she deserved a private reckoning with the fifty-first Psalm. She hadn't been to confession proper in years, of course, and she had no intentions of going now—not merely because of the self-evident impracticalities of a rising small-town politician confessing to sins of pride and un-charity towards her deceased husband en route to electoral glory, but because of the sheer pointlessness the sacrament had become. It was administered at St. Anne's these days by smiling bearded Father Joseph, an Indian-born cleric. He was an import from Babel-proud Toronto, an enthusiastic little man with an advanced degree in systematic theology. He was also, as anyone leaving Mass could confirm, ripe with spices Old and otherwise. The former was familiar, being a standard odour for parishioners because of its yearly emanating from the toes of Christmas stockings. The latter were usually described, for lack of a better term, as,
well, you know, ethnick
.

Father Joseph was less than well received, however, not because of his hues—this community had recently come to terms with a real-time African, after all—or for his smelly exotica, or even for his backward Third World conservatisms about the prescription needs of young women about town, but because he spoke that nerved-up tonguetying high-pitched dizzy English of the displaced subcontinent. Which made it near-impossible for any of his current parishioners— many of whom went to Sunday Mass as religiously as they went out for brunch afterwards—to make bobbling head or shuffling tail of anything he said about interfaith harmony back home in Cochin or the exemplary work of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. Which made it plain silly, Faye had decided, to bother trying him out for a confession. And so she had planned to self-administer purgation and absolution on the ride home from the service.

As the initial examination of conscience, Faye decided that George had been a good husband—prominent and providing, open to two children, no more no less, willing to do Rock, Paper, Scissors to see who'd get their tubing tied, but also prone in later years to golfing, dock painting, the television in the garage, the more elaborate perfume gift packages with every successive birthday. Prone to these and many of the other polite demonstrations of spousal indifference available to twenty-first-century Western man, except of course during re-election campaigns and holiday photo shoots and children's graduations. But then, before she could watch enough daytime television and so muster up enough self-worth to call Blaise and file the necessary papers for divorce, there had come those unexpected gifts: first, her devastating management of George's re-election campaign against young Jennifer Thickson, and second, the gift he gave her in recognition of the tactics she had employed.

Driving in it now, Faye could still remember the words that had framed the purchase as George signed the papers, from the French-Canadian sales manager orgasmic to have someone this prominent buying off his lot instead of from his English rival's one town over.

Faye had been shocked not so much at George's largesse—after all, she'd eliminated his only challenger well before election day, and an all-inclusive week to Cuba with in-room rum dispenser would only have been acceptable were she a younger and thus stupider wife—but at how he had gone about it. He did the doubly unthinkable, first opting to buy from a lot outside town, after it turned out that Hollerwatty couldn't promise that Detroit had anything in champagne (which Faye had requested in honour of the gift's celebratory significance), and second, buying an import. And while the jelly-roll stomach and dimpled thigh diminishments of middle age had reduced their sex life to little more than the touchy affection of preteen second cousins, she'd given up a little gasp and sigh at such evidence of her husband's persistent manhood, at his brawny dismissal of the backbiting and character assassination that they both knew Hollerwatty would be sending his way come the next poll, in vengeance for such a notable lost sale. This was no bother, George had assured her, and then explained that he didn't care anyway, because this was what his wife deserved and he wanted for her.

So, Faye decided, he was all in all pretty good as a husband, taking more than he gave, of course, but leaving her with a paid-off house and a car still under warranty. From trading notes during her morning power walks with fellow prominent town wives—of doctors, the police chief, the Junior A hockey coach—she concluded this was a
very
penitential thing for a wife in her fifties to admit. Having reached this insight, Faye thought she could now leave behind her spiritual exercise for a more exacting estimation of her late husband's political ambitions. Which were smallish. Being many times returned to an alderman's municipal seat was about as ambitious as his requests, in later years, that she buy him only khakis with elasticized waistbands. Now, driving down Albert Avenue, the town's main thoroughfare, Faye gave a passing glance at the bloated Victorian dollhouse where her husband had worked for years. The building was
circa
1900 and the town, like its counterparts across the nation, proudly called it Historic City Hall in its tri-annual tourist brochure. The paint-peeled, nail-pocked walls were updated as necessary with new plaques from the Rotary Club and the Optimists, oak and oil portraits of recently deceased town fathers, and, now and then, federal commendations with airbrushed ribbons for support of handicapped children's bowling leagues, elderly meal services and other such civic sanctifications that tended to count more attendants than attendees in their attendance.