The Governor of the Northern Province (6 page)

An African in the Ottawa Valley! This was a sign taken for the wonders of twenty-first-century living, on the same order as city buses that lowered for elderly riders and the availability of cappuccino at the Tim Hortons. These strange, fancy things, previously seen on hockey tournament trips to Toronto and cable television. There was, of course, some resistance, from a few retirees who took their morning news over black coffee and cigarettes, thank you very much. And none of these new buses better treat them like the G-D Holy of Holies, that's for sure. This rheumatic rabble spoke out against Bokarie to their wives and chiropractors. One or two chose the familiar parable of the road apple in the snow to argue for the danger this new fellow posed to the rest of us.

You find a road apple in December and you curse the cow that crapped it but you don't do anything because hell, what's the harm? It's frozen, right? Just stuck there day in and day out—you know you can keep an eye out for it. So what do you do then? Well, you keep clear, of course, shovelling around it, and on the way to get a Christmas tree from the city park with the grandkids, and you tell them to keep clear too and maybe you even toss a pylon in its general vicinity before one of the February storms. Always you got these plans to get rid of it, but not just now, an old Beachcombers is on. Or maybe your arms are full of kindling. But right when you get around to it, you're gonna turf that patty into the woods. Then next thing you know, spring comes up and out you go to take down the Christmas lights and tarp up the snowmobile and maybe put out the cardboard Easter bunny for the squirts and oh yeah, you really should get rid of that old black turd. Now's the time and it's got to be done. But you can't find it, though you catch something right ripe in the air. And you know what that is? That's the smell of everything gone to shit.

Jennifer heard this at Sunday dinner with her parents, a couple of weeks after she first met Bokarie and directed him to speak at the Little Caitlin Event. This was when she first informed Gus and Barb Thickson of her plan to run as an independent in the next federal election. Undaunted by what had happened back at the end of high school and more recently, embarrassingly, against an alderman, she was confident of her chances this time, she explained, having found a potential global dimension for her local drainage security campaign. Think Pink. In addition to Little Caitlin, she could now have Bokarie's children, lost to floods over in Africa. Her mother crimped her face a little at the wording but didn't say anything just yet, not just yet.

“After all,” as Jennifer knew from her reading and then informed the table, “FDR distinguished himself by combining the domestic accomplishment of that New Deal with the overseas success of World War II, while LBJ had initiated his Great Society and increased America's intervention against the Communists in Vietnam. In both cases,” she had learned, “domestic success wasn't enough to be a beloved leader,” and a three-letter acronym was vital.

Her father put his fork down for added effect and warned Jennifer that bookworms hooked no men and that learning from Americans was like lending to Jews. Then, to sum up his case, he told the parable of the road apple in the snow, which had been proclaimed to him by the man who ran the gas station. Having done his fatherly duty, he picked up his fork and went back to his mashed and wondered why it hadn't been a boy. At least that would have made more sense of the shoulders and ambition.

III.

A Spanish priest ran the white-walled orphanage where Bokarie lived until a better possibility came up. After many beds went empty one night and the younger children said men who smelled like smoke and bottles had come into their rooms, the priest had decided to line the orphanage's walls with row on row of cut red and green glass. Father Alvaro gave a soccer ball to the boy who collected the most bottles per month, tallying on each boy's rosary how many were brought back from their excursions to the surrounding town. These bottles were shattered under the priest's supervision, and the shards were collected into the orphanage's red, white and blue camping coolers by children who had more calluses than cavities. The priest would then choose one of the older boys to sink the jigsaw pieces of glass into the mud-and-dung-filled trench that was grooved across the top of the orphanage's white walls.

Using his gravest Ash Wednesday voice, occasional sprays of holy water and flashes of a Santiago de Compostela medal, the priest was able to hold off evening recruitment visits to the front gate by the frequently drunk and always superstitious representatives of the national army, and by the various local rebel groups, and by the occasional roving militia from one of the neighbouring countries. But that wasn't enough to stop those agile and desperate enough from scaling the orphanage wall in the middle of the night. So the glass-shard wall was maintained, at least up to when the blue helmets came. (At which point a quartet of nervous Bangladeshis was stationed in front of the building with a military Jeep loudly donated by the French, who had salvaged it from what was left of their Algiers tackle. The Bangladeshis displayed bayonets on rifles that dated from 1971. They were considered quaint by local warlords.)

Bokarie liked to imagine that the orphanage was a giant shark, having seen a picture in one of the
National Geographic
s that had come to the orphanage with the coolers. He thought its walls were like open jaws, with all those sharp teeth ready to snap down. He told this to the younger boys at night under the mosquito nets, and the idea was quickly taken up and spread, with attribution coming his way. He liked that. He wanted more. This was before he was chosen to mount the wall and fix the few teeth pulled out and blotted and flattened every five days or so, according to troop cycles and the state of supply lines and recruitment efforts elsewhere.

The
National Geographic
s and the red, white and blue coolers had been donated to the orphanage by an evangelical millionaire from Texas named Bayard Jellyby, who presided over the largest sporting goods and camping equipment chain in the Southwest. He had seen something on one of those television specials they do on empty Sundays after football's done and the spring recruiting camps haven't started up yet, about the modern history of Atwenty, Bokarie's first country.

Jellyby learned from this documentary that the nation's post-independence history was punctured and potholed by corruption and shifts in governance so frequent that the power grids left in place by the exiting English at the end of World War II were long since defunct. As were the basic mannerisms of civil society that the Empire had exported to the dark corners of the Royal Society's maps. Things had turned rather carnal rather quickly.

This wasn't surprising to the nation's last viceroy, a Sir Basil Seal, who was interviewed in his palsied paisley splendour for the documentary. Upon returning to the Home Country after his stint in Africa, he confessed that his time in Africa had killed what merry old Kipling had been in him since boyhood about life in the colonies, and brought him over to that nasty Conrad chap.

One story he especially liked to tell when he was back in London, at sherry receptions and old headmasters' funerals and now for this documentary that Bayard Jellyby was watching, described his last time with the natives. To his always captive audience, Sir Basil explained that before leaving, he had listened to the local bureaucrats, whose colouring and capabilities were modelled after Macaulay's minute fiats for Bombay middle managers, flub those famous lips of theirs to express what a pity it was he and the British were leaving. They were a spot nervous over this exit and what the new power portended for them and their country. This came up during a melancholic farewell reception Sir Basil had held for them in the gingerly upright British barracks, though he knew some of the invitees had bloody well agitated for his going, dancing and clapping alongside the scruffier natives at their passionate, incoherent independence rallies. In response to their doe-sad eyes, he had loudly wished he could just stuff all of them in his steamer trunk and take them home with him, but of course this was right around the time that ugly Enoch Powell and his lot were bloodying up the streets. They were more worrisome, he assured them, than what life under the nation's first homegrown prime minister would be like.

The native mandarins weren't naive; they expected the new Big Man to clean house and bring in assorted cousins-in-law and other village baboons to run the nation, just as the British had done to the French and the French to the Germans and the Germans to the first tribal leaders they had met. The first post-independence leader, a man of the People as they all are, was rather brutish. While he had been educated partially in England as a young man, he had spent more time at Oxford thrusting and grunting as all-school Eight Man and midnight caller for the dons' girlfriends than he had spent studying gunpowder plots and suffrage politics.

Sir Basil knew all of this, as he told the documentary's host, but he also knew that he was only a week's voyage away from trustable clotted cream and the glorious freedom to see a man about a dog without having to check the bowl for a scorpion first. So he did less than his best to buck up the black spirits around him at that goodbye get-together. But he concluded in full Britannic style, of course. On behalf of Her Majesty, he raised a toast to the newly independent nation and to its grand new leadership. To Kong and country! His gin-soaked slip of the tongue was neither copied nor corrected. It was taken as a closing colonial wisecrack and regarded, with false hope, as false prophecy.

As the documentary then recounted, the new man burst through mere expectations of gluttonous vice and implacable incompetence. His inaugural act as prime minister was to neuter the parliamentary system into a self-appointed National Assembly, proclaim a democratic republic, and accept the title of President-for-life. He was the first of many in the decades that followed.

Meanwhile, the majority of the nation's people, including its many orphans, had been in straits since this magnificent independence, rarely provided with light at night or refrigeration for what food they had, both of which compounded already high levels of malnutrition and illiteracy. This juxtaposition, along with a closing photo montage set to an Elton John–Peabo Bryson duet, and a 1-800 number branded on the screen, got Bayard Jellyby to thinking.

“It is just plain un-Christian for these young boys to be without my two favourites way back when I was just a little trigger myself, bedtime reading and ice cream. These things transcend all cultures, all religions and both races, which is why my family and I are sending them along to the African nation of Atwenty. God Bless America, and may theirs bless them.”

Jellyby made this speech to the San Antonio news crew he arranged to profile him and his family as they packed up and sent along his personal collection of
National Geographic
back issues to the orphanage. The magazine's famous yellow borders and exciting, informative pictures were bright enough to be read at night regardless of light bulbs, he reasoned, which was important, since young African minds could be more than terrible wastes. He explained all of this at the swelling close to the local NBC affiliate's Community Hero spot for that week.

The Texan knew that it was no good sending over ice cream, let alone refrigerators. Instead, he cleared his Harlingen warehouses of the previous season's Fourth of July Freedom coolers and hired a cargo plane from a private security firm. He added a monetary donation and listed in the cheque's memo “Rocky Road, Tin Roof, etc.” He also threw in some soccer balls, having been convinced that baseball bats might be misused and pigskin possibly offensive on religious grounds. Practicalities required the priest to modify the Texan's requests, which were detailed in an accompanying letter. Because ice cream, like red meat and disease-free prostitutes, was only to be found on embassy row in the capital city, Father Alvaro bought some chocolate with what money was left over from the Texan's donation. After, that is, the conversion fees and processing charges and national surtaxes were variously assessed. He also sold most of the coolers that were left after customs and port inspections to the beer bars that squatted around the orphanage. He reserved a couple to hold and haul the broken-up bottles—a far safer method than using doubled-up soiled pillowcases—and also for six to eight quality four-by-six photos of the boys smiling and reaching into the coolers. This had been the only particular request from the Texan. The priest did as best he could to oblige, and a Tucson graphic design firm was later commissioned to airbrush ice cream cones into the little black hands. Pamphlets were eventually available beside in-store credit card applications at registers in each of the Texan's stores.

Father Alvaro gave out a soccer ball for best bottle retrieval once a month. He awarded the yellowy
National Geographic
s and mushy chocolates for best elocution and memorization of a Bible reading from the series he offered every morning after their breakfast of rice pap and mashed banana. When he was eighteen, Bokarie won for both speaking and memory on a selection from Hosea, which the priest had read to the boys in hopes of getting them to forswear violence and the other temptations and dangers outside the orphanage. Bokarie would draw on it again.

For this reason have I hewed them by the prophets, I have slain them by the words of my mouth: and thy judgments shall go forth as the light. For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice: and the knowledge of God more than holocausts. But they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant, there have they dealt treacherously against me. Galaad is a city of workers of idols, supplanted with blood. And like the jaws of highway robbers, they conspire with the priests who murder in the way those that pass out of Sichem: for they have wrought wickedness.

Because the boy had already won a soccer ball and now had both elocution prizes and was long known to be a voracious, even gluttonous consumer of any Bible passage that came his way, the priest judged Bokarie ready for further advancement. Also, he was more than old enough to be subject to whatever mandatory conscription law seized him if he was found roaming the town's streets with the younger boys.