The Governor of the Northern Province (20 page)

IV.

Her lips, trembling from the moment of it, opened.

“The waters beside us, my fellow countrypersons, flow out from our little community and they leave us today strong and clear, thanks to your cleanup efforts in this special place. These waters will carry with them many things, including memories of a little girl taken too young, but also hopes that this will never happen again. As for the beloved water spiders that she'd first tried to catch, they'll be back too, next spring, hopping and dancing along the water, which, no doubt, will again be brimming from the thaw. And we should take their return and the high water as reminders about the danger and power of Nature itself, which can never be stopped, only controlled.

“These waters flow southeast, as you all know, and they join up with the Ottawa River, and from there they make their way into the mighty St. Lawrence and from there they go out to the Atlantic Ocean and from there, my friends, from there they reach the rest of the world! And this symbolizes the way that everyday Canadians, people like you and me, can touch people across the planet with our actions.”

The audience nodded, pleased they were somewhat familiar with these ideas, which was owing to the recent proliferation of little booklets tied with gold twine to their purchases explaining how this particular salad dressing or that specific soap bar was helping to combat the sex slave trade in India and the depleted lemur population on Madagascar. Or vice versa. The moral was the same. They listened on.

“I promise that if elected, I will journey down this river to Ottawa and tell them about you, and about Little Caitlin, and about our pink ribbon campaign and about the need for raising awareness about the dangers of rising creeks. And because I'm running as an independent, I won't—be afraid—to speak your mind and I'm not—wedded—to any single party and, most importantly, I won't be—trading in—the gifts this community has given me for anything new they're trying to sell down there.” Having thus dashed the widow Gallagher, Jennifer went in for a clear majority.

“But I'll do more than carry this covenant for you. As we all know these days, the world touches us too, and it has, very recently, with our new addition to this community, I mean Bokarie, who brought with him memories and hopes of his own. Many of you might have noticed that he's not with us today, and you're probably wondering why, you're maybe remembering the eloquent speech he gave back in the spring, so courageously coming forward to embrace our tragedy and share his feelings and his ancient wisdom with us. You know, I was walking with him by this very creek just yesterday, and he was telling me about where he's coming from, about how his people were driven out of their lands, men on horses chucking spears and chasing after them and burning bushes around them until they were forced to cross a river bottom that was dry before the next monsoon and flood came, and that was how they were sent into a bitter banishment far from their home. That's all I heard”—or all she could remember from the last time she'd seen
The Ten Commandments
and from flipping through the African climate section of her encyclopedia set the unsleeping night before—“because he started breathing hard at that point in the conversation and couldn't go on, couldn't come back to be with us today even though he wanted to, because he couldn't wade up and down the creek and face such memories. He didn't want to confront what had happened to his loved ones. But we all have cable these days. We can picture what must have happened.” Nods to this and also quiet gladness that Bokarie wasn't there with them interfering with their respective imaginings of his tragic humanity.

“And so”—here she left behind DeMille and
Britannica
for some lines she had copied down, years earlier, from a speech printed in a biography long overdue from her high school library—“he came here an exile, a stranger, brave but frightened, to find a place where he could be his own man. And how has he been treated since getting here? Well, you know as well as I, we live in a world in terror, where terrific dangers and troubles that we once called foreign now live and catch planes among us. And some, though I shall name no names, but some deal … and trade in … jokes about a road apple rolling into our town.” A few wife jabs to husband ribs, but Thickson's ellipses were enough to let the rest recall Glenn Hollerwatty's awful trafficking in good ethnic jokes and make the necessary ascription. His sales dipped in the months after the election. “Yes, calling him a road apple rolling into our town and bringing dangers and troubles that we once called foreign with him. Is this the Canadian way? I say no!”

Applause they were giving her, Jennifer Ursula Thickson, applause at this, at her. But no time to wallow in it, she thought. Get more.

“I say it's too black and white an attitude for my Canada and yours. Ours is a nation that's proud to be open to new worlds, to blending, to mixing, to bringing things together. And so that's what I've been doing this afternoon and what I'll do for you in Ottawa if I'm fortunate enough to service you from there. You know, if I can get personal for a moment, I lost the very first election race I ran, back in high school. I lost to None of the Above. I found in this my first lesson about what it means to be a leader. People can surprise you, things can happen that you don't expect, and I want you to consider that lesson yourselves when you think about who you are voting for tomorrow, and why. And if you vote for me, that means I'll go down to Ottawa where I'll bring together Little Caitlin's story with Bokarie's, and I know, I have to believe, that you're with me on this. My friends”—here she leaned forward on her lectern, loomed over it, came down at them, and they were transformed into so many back-bending Hubert Humphreys—“I'm telling you, there's no need to be not afraid since I might go before you always, like my opponent suggests. Instead, I'm telling you there's no need to be afraid because we go forward
together
, as a community, as just a really great society. That's how we'll conquer our fears of the unknown!”

The crowd's not knowing what these unknowns were made the message the more convincing.

“We'll do it by being true to the standard we hang above us, the place where our values really fly, our glorious red and white!” She almost added blue, which would have been immediately fatal and perhaps God's retribution upon her for borrowing so much from Johnson's 1965 inaugural, but she was spared, for now.

Jennifer unveiled in a flourish a flag that she'd had Barb Thickson run through the wash that morning a few times to make the colours bleed just right, while they both ignored Gus's grumps about this unpatriotism and also his questions about why all their garbage bags had gone missing the day before. “And so, if I'm your member of Parliament, I pledge to you that we'll keep bringing things together, we'll do what Canadians do best: we'll blend, we'll mix, we'll think pink! We'll blend, we'll mix, we'll think pink! We'll blend— OH!”

Bokarie cut in just then. He had parted the foaming crowd like an ignited oil slick and made his way to the stage. Having hung back behind a tree during her remarks, now he hopped up and took her at her word. He grabbed Jennifer by the hand and started waving and jiving and got up a good rhythm from the people from their chanting the candidate's end phrase. He smiled at her and she forced a smile back and they turned to look again at their listeners, beribboned in pink and each presuming to play Moses to the other's Aaron.

Jennifer had to grant the optics of this even if she hadn't wanted to share the stage with Bokarie again and even though she was wincing at the force with which their hands were locked together. Because he was holding on hard, serving notice that he was going with her. Wherever. Which was fine. She would make good on her promise to bring him with her to Ottawa. He'd play well in the capital, Jennifer thought. They'd be hungrier for his hardship than this place ever was. And then maybe Bokarie could bring her elsewhere in turn. Africa was very hot these days. Third World nations and First World peacekeepers went together like newborns and diapers.

And so she squeezed back harder, matching him, their arms swinging like bullwhips, their hands intent like Vise-Grips, their fingers mashed like slow-mating slugs, their knuckles and notions and nations gloriously popping together in the brusque October air, their Promised Land a poll vault and widow's loss away.

9

QUID PRO QUO

I.

She won. Over an opponent no less. The widow Gallagher responded graciously and swiftly by sending a congratulatory e-mail and then forming a non-profit concern committed to memorializing as much public land as possible in her husband's name. Which Jennifer supported, even if she was still feeling warlike and wanted to tie Faye by the ankle to the back of her father's riding mower and circle the town limits to show off her vanquishing. But she knew that was neither lady- nor sportsman- nor statesmanlike.

The race itself was notable for the higher than normal interest it had generated, the sixty-percent turnout nearly double the national average. The rest of the country had simply continued their low-intensity citizenship, treating another federal election like little more than a rush hour bus; it didn't matter if they missed this one, the next would chug along before they could finish muttering about all the noxious fumes left in the air by the last.

Jennifer hadn't planned a victory party, though her mother did send her father out for an ice-cream cake later that night. But no victory party because, because, well, the very idea of her actually winning an election, any election,
this
election, was, for all of her ready hunger and brute politicking, something she hadn't really thought through. And this meant that she was suddenly faced with the lashing, taunting words that come after every newly elected leader.

What now?

Trying to hold them off for a bit, the new MP, after receiving the news of her victory in her mother's sewing room, which had doubled as her campaign headquarters, excused herself upstairs. Sitting on her bed, her fingers still too sore from Bokarie's to wrap around her braids, she tried to settle what this was she was feeling. It was no longer the ragged raw taste in the mouth as when she lost in high school and then against George Gallagher and always the desire for more. There was a newness here.

Some pride, of course. She'd started her trajectory now, finally, and at an impressive height, no less—victory as an independent against the fresh widow of a beloved town father running for the incumbent party. This was fine and well and to be marvelled at and only the beginning. But that wasn't all. There was also a sense of recognition, more of that than of pride. She could tell that her mother was pleased from the ice-cream-cake order to her father, and she wondered if her father was too. But strangely, the lording, the tribute, the gloating, though all rightly hers, weren't what she was feeling, or even what she wanted in the immediate after-burn of the election. Nor was it dealing with What Now, which, at least provisionally, Little Caitlin's memory and drainage security and her African angle were enough to hold off. If lacking further specifics, she could at least assure people, based on this array of concerns, that she was for a lot of things and against very little. It had worked for LBJ. Finally, if cornered, she could always tether herself to Canadian values and float away to safety. That worked for everyone else.

Jennifer looked out her bedroom window at the sullen cornstalks of her family's fields, at the thicket mush where she had gone as a child to watch and learn from the birds and the slugs, at the line of leafy water that ran near it, and then over to the road that led past the gas station where she liked the smell and the squat high school where she had her first loss and the town proper where she had her second loss before she figured out what to do with its car dealership and convenience store and the chunky blocky fantail of new housing developments that seemed to spread out from it unto eternity. All of which was now, finally, under her name, while beyond, in the southeast violet light of late fall, there was Ottawa, waiting to receive her. Looking out at this, Jennifer felt a crinkle in her nose, as if she would weep. Only she didn't, because she was—and this was what the new feeling came to—content. There seemed to be nothing more to conquer. She didn't want another go at the buffet. At least not yet.

It was enough to have it, finally, the riding, the power, the glory. The problem now was that she hadn't ever really thought much past the getting. She had never had reason to do so. Of course Jennifer didn't need any Bible to know the nature of the beast: getting begat more getting. That was how it worked, and if she stopped, extinction. And she would be ready when the next bell rang, but she thought that taking a moment before going on wouldn't do any harm.

The strange fullness she was feeling became a temptation—to decline the seat. Not for spite, per se, but Jennifer didn't really want to go to Ottawa. She wanted others to want her to go. Sitting in her bedroom and thinking back over years of fever-dreams about becoming a Great Leader, she realized now that what she had always desired more than anything else was the evidence that only their electing her could provide. Admission, affirmation. That she was capable of going further, of doing more, than her teeth, her ankles, her farm, allowed for. That
others
thought she warranted a higher position, a wider prominence than being Gus Thickson's heavy-set unmarried daughter vouchsafed. But something else still. That while the rest were all wrapped up with each other and thought the cosmic drama of it all started and ended with them, she could open her lips and swoop down and swallow them up.

Only she wasn't allowed to be satisfied. She knew this much and also that she had to go get more and keep getting more to hold on to any of it. Because, having proven everyone wrong, now she had to keep up the electorate's publicly stated belief that they had done right in sending her to the Hill.