Late Nights on Air (14 page)

It was in jail, she said, where she became part of a native healing circle. “And that changed everything. That’s when I gave up my life of blaming. You claim your mistakes,” she said, “you claim your good qualities, and you don’t get stuck. You move around the wheel of life from one level to the next, from the emotional level to the spiritual, making room as you move for something else to enter.”

That night Gwen was in the announce booth when she heard her name being called. She opened the door and Teresa was standing in the hallway. She had something to give her—a rosary she’d found while unpacking boxes in her apartment. Gwen slipped it into her pocket and pulled it out the next afternoon in the Gold Range café. She and Eleanor and
Teresa had gone there together for coffee. It was about three in the afternoon. Outside, the perfect summer weather held, hour after hour. Gwen would remember back to this time and it seemed to her it rained only once; a place where you had no need of an umbrella.

Unaccountably, the rosary had broken inside her pocket, and Teresa hooted. “You’re going to hell. You’ll have to buy a
big
indulgence for that.”

Gwen and Eleanor laughed. Then Gwen, a little alarmed despite herself, laid the rosary flat on the table. She tried to refasten the broken wires, but two of the beads were missing. “Hell twice over,” said Teresa.

As Gwen and Eleanor watched, Teresa went around the rosary showing them how to count off ten Hail Marys and when she came to the missing beads, instead of “Hail Mary,” she said, “Roast in hell, Roast in hell.”

Eleanor, with arms leaning on the table, was smiling at the banter. She confessed she’d been reading the Bible lately. “It’s been coming on me gradually,” she said.

Gwen stared at her soft and tired eyes, and Eleanor went on. “I’m talking about belief. The belief that Christ is a source of perpetual grace.”

With these words Gwen’s antipathy to religion came back. It was like a moth’s antipathy to cedar, it filled her whole being. “I wish Christ didn’t have to come into it,” she groaned. “Why does grace have to be personified in Christ?”

Eleanor stared down at her hands. “Because Christ is a
person,”
she said. She knew it sounded simple-minded. But Christianity wasn’t a system, it was person-to-Person.

Dido and Eddy had come in while they were talking, they were at a table near the front. Teresa spotted them and said, “Nobody works. I love it.”

Between spoonfuls of ice cream, Teresa claimed she had no regrets about her years as a nun. There were concepts like Devotion and Respect that she didn’t know how she would have learned about otherwise. All religions had something to offer. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses. When they knocked on her door, she invited them inside for a cup of coffee. “To be rude is just not part of my diet.”

Teresa had been watching Dido and Eddy out of the corner of her eye. When they stood up to leave, she watched as Eddy put his hand on the back of Dido’s neck and guided her through the door. “Those two are cooking up a train wreck,” she said.

Eleanor and Gwen swung round and saw the pair through the restaurant window. Teresa asked how long they’d been together, and Eleanor told her it had started in June, so a month.

Teresa said, “I’ve seen other couples like that. He won’t let her do things and she likes that. He’ll get her to do other things, and she’ll like that too.”

The same afternoon Ralph Cody dropped into the station. The tobacco-stained bibliophile traded books back and forth with Harry. Today Ralph was returning
The Big Sleep
, hard-boiled reading for a hard-boiled town, and bringing Harry an issue of
Blackwood’s Magazine
of interest for its engrossing article about stammering Frank, the fifth son of Charles Dickens.

“Dickens had seven sons,” recounted Ralph with energy, “every one a disappointment. They all had what the great man called ‘a curse of limpness’ upon them. It must be the worst luck in the world, don’t you think? Having a father who’s a literary genius.”

Harry had reached into a bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a bottle, and now he and Ralph sat back and enjoyed the fruit of Scotland, while Ralph continued the tale of stammering Frank. Dickens tried to cure the boy by making him read Shakespeare out loud, but young Frank grew up tongue-tied and deaf to boot; he got work eventually, with the Bengal police, a job that paved the way to sunstroke, deep depression, full-scale dissipation. Then strings were pulled, Ralph said, and he came out to Canada in 1874, taking a post in the newly formed North-West Mounted Police, where his superiors immediately rated him an officer of “no promise.” Over the years he saw many things, including the decline of buffalo herds and consequent emaciation of the Indians, and some of their more desperate battles, and in the end, concluded Ralph, he acquitted himself rather well. “He said if he himself ever wrote a book, he’d call it
Thirty Years Without Beer.”

Harry laughed and stared into his glass. “‘The curse of limpness.’ That sounds like a manager I could name.”

Then he remembered to tell Ralph something not unrelated. On Saturday morning Abe Lamont would be playing
Death in the Barren Ground
for anybody on staff who was interested, a copy from radio archives in Toronto, and he’d be welcome to join them. It was the narrative drama of Hornby’s last journey written by George Whalley. Harry knew that Ralph had copies of Whalley’s biography of Hornby and of
the diary written by Hornby’s young cousin, Edgar Christian—a diary published in 1937 with a title Harry admired,
Unflinching
—and he was right to think Ralph would be eager to come.

Harry waved his big hand to take in the station. “I should have prepared everybody for Abe. Warned them not to expect flattery. I don’t know how to manage egos. I alienate people.”

“You’ve heard rumblings of discontent?”

He had. He’d even heard himself referred to as the crunchy granola dictator. Bill Thwaite, not bothering to keep his voice down. “It’s too bad I can’t be a bit more charming,” Harry said.

Ralph snorted with laughter. “You’re charming.”

“Who have I charmed?”

“Who do you want to charm?”

Harry rubbed his eyes and readjusted his glasses, then shifted the conversation back to safer ground. “What’s got you reading
Blackwood’s Magazine?”

Ralph smiled and went along. He said it had been a command performance when he was young, his family all read it from cover to cover and his father stored every back issue in the attic in Vancouver. His father was a great character, he added, the one who’d got him interested in languages by introducing him to the Cyrillic alphabet. They’d spent hours together poring over stamps, enchanted especially by anything Russian.

“My old dad was something of a mystic,” he added. “Like the Celts, he believed we’re made up of invisible currents. He used to say there are ‘thin places’ where we’re closer to the unseen world.”

“Name a thin place.”

“The ocean. You stand next to the sea and you’re in touch with all your longings and all your losses.”

“Longings and losses,” repeated Harry. “That does sort of sum it up.”

Ralph took in Harry’s rumpled face. “Dido came to see me the other day.”

“Lucky you,” said Harry.

“She wanted to borrow a book.”

“A book,” said Harry.

“Rules for Radicals
. I sent her home with a year’s worth of reading. Her arms were full, lumbered, aching with books.”

“Saul Alinsky,” Harry said slowly. “A smart man.”

“They’ve started a study group.”

“Who has?”

“Dido and Eddy. You know. ‘Concerned whites who oppose the pipeline and want to support the native cause.’ Solidarity. Brotherhood. Resistance. They asked me to join.”

They hadn’t asked Harry to join.

“She’s a serious woman, Dido. I told her I wasn’t the studying type.”

“I like serious women,” said Harry, and in his mind he saw Dido and Eddy come out of the little blue house in Rainbow Valley, and thought, So she’s into politics. Then came the second thought, and it was bitter. Not politics—love.

“IN THE SPRING OF
1926,
John Hornby’s party, three men and one canoe, left Fort Resolution and travelled to the site of Fort Reliance at the eastern end of Great Slave Lake. Here they were delayed for a time by heavy ice. Then by the classic route of Pike’s Portage, they entered Artillery Lake. After that there was silence. “

So began the hour-long radio drama
Death in the Barren Ground
. A handful of staff had come to listen. In the studio were Harry and Dido, Eleanor, Gwen, and Ralph. Eddy and Abe were in master control.

The narrator, marvellous Bud Knapp, related how two years later, in July of 1928, a party of geologists led by Harry Wilson was travelling by canoe from Great Slave Lake to Hudson Bay. They were aware that Hornby and his two companions had gone into the Barrens the previous summer, intending to overwinter there as Hornby had done once before, and that the three men hadn’t reappeared, and there was some anxiety about them. Thirty-five miles below the junction of the Hanbury and Thelon rivers, Wilson discovered the derelict cabin and two bodies “apparently sewn in blankets” to the right of the cabin door, and inside a third body on a bunk. A note on top of the stove directed them to
the papers and diary laid in the cold ashes inside, papers that would identify the three men as John Hornby, Harold Adlard, and Edgar Christian.

Knapp’s voice then took them forward to the Mounted Police investigation and the conclusion of “death due to starvation not foul play,” and then he took listeners back to the beginning, to the man at the centre of the story, the small, wiry Englishman, the son of a famous cricketer, who came to Canada in 1904 and fell under the spell of the Arctic, soon acquiring a reputation for incredible physical endurance, for surviving against the odds, for considering the Barren Ground “his destined element.” At the age of forty-six, he had determined to make at least one more journey into a part of the world that only a few people had ever travelled through.

Here were Hornby’s own solitary, musing words taken from his writings and spoken by actor Alan King. “I’m jealous, I suppose. Jealous of that country. Jealous of any man who goes in there without me.” To Harry, the man sounded compelling, candid, clear-headed. “The trees end at Artillery Lake. The timber doesn’t straggle off, it just ends in a distinct line that cuts diagonally across the lake. Beyond that, the Barrens … I’ve seen it go down to eighty below. There are no cabins, no trading posts, no human beings. But in the season, and if you’re lucky, there’s plenty of game … The caribou! Wonderful. I’ve seen tens of thousands of them in the open and at the shallow river crossings. At a narrow ford they may take hours to go by, trotting in a solid mass, their eyes glazed, the air shaking with their funny gruntings, their hooves grinding the ice to a fine powder. There’s no sight like it.”

And here were Edgar Christian’s perceptive, accepting young thoughts about his much-admired cousin whom he called Jack. “He doesn’t talk very much and when he does it’s as though he were talking to himself.” Edgar’s voice, as spoken by Douglas Rain, was haunting, milky—
I am as safe as a house with Jack
. The boy was only seventeen.

Harold Adlard, the third member of the party, who’d joined up with them in Edmonton, out of eagerness to see the North, was twenty-seven.

The three men travelled slowly that summer of 1926. It wasn’t until October that Edgar’s diary began in earnest, by which time they were putting the final touches on their cabin on the Thelon River and contemplating a last push to get caribou. But the effort to get meat failed and winter set in. Hornby, quixotic, eccentric, confident he would survive because he always had, was guilty of defying “the immemorial custom of the North; he had not laid in his winter’s meat in September.” Their food ran low, then it ran out, and the three men turned into Hansel without Gretel, starving in a winter cage. Hornby had always planned to write a book and call it
The Land of Feast and Famine
. Now his notes for the never-finished volume took on the colour of tragedy. “My life has been finding out how to eat when there’s nothing to eat, finding game when there isn’t any, crawling on hands and knees to find food when you aren’t strong enough to stand up and when your will to live has shrivelled away … In the Barrens starvation is an intensely active process. You are more likely to die of exhaustion than of starvation. As your strength goes you become more methodical and remorseless. A kind of
creeping obsession entirely focused on the need your body has for food, and you set about finding it with the ingenuity of a deliberate, cold-blooded murderer.”

Time and again, they hunted desperately and unsuccessfully, their days a succession of blizzards, frostbite, enforced idleness, injury, slow starvation, quiet valour. Triumphs of composure offset their bodily sufferings. Young Edgar was devoted to Hornby, Hornby was as selfless as he was reckless, the two were alike in their courage and resolve, which seemed inhuman, sublime. Hornby died first, on April 16. Harold Adlard died next, on May 4. Edgar Christian lasted another month, all by himself, until early June. By then there was still no northward migration of birds or animals, and for several days it had been blowing a snowstorm. His last diary entry was June 1.
9 a.m. Weaker than ever. The sunshine is bright now. Make preparations now. Left things late
. He would write to his father, then to his mother.
Dearest Mother. Feeling weak now. Can only write a little. Sorry I left it so late. Please don’t blame dear Jack
.