The Governor of the Northern Province (3 page)

Hanging from a bent twig was a twirling braid of wet mottled fatness. Two yellowy, whitish slugs, pocked with red dots, wrapped around each other. Twisting and turning, taffy-slick and slow-mating in the tumid thick of Ottawa Valley summer. Jennifer watched them for a long while. Then a bird came at them and they dropped onto the leafy, squashy ground with a SMACK! But only for a moment before another swoop down and a scoop up. Following the bird back to its perch, Jennifer wondered if the slugs were still swinging because they hadn't quit doing to each other, or if they were now just dangling from the beak. But then the bird threw back its head and its throat bulged and they were gone.

Slogging home, something pulling at her ankle, she couldn't decide what it was about the slugs and that bird in the woods. But she would look for them again.

II.

At the start of her final year of high school, Jennifer Ursula Thickson declared for Graduating Class President. She ran unopposed. She lost.

“And for Graduating Class President, well, it seems that Jennifer Ursula Thickson has been defeated, has lost to—I'm not sure of how to put this—well, she's lost to ‘None of the Above.'”

Mrs. Bureaux, the civics teacher, had been unsure of what to do. This was without precedent at the high school Jennifer attended, in a conscientiously unremarkable town where not unhappy lives shuffled to hushed ends. Whose Latin motto, invented in a Civic Pride contest during the once and once only, federally funded exuberance of 1967, was provided by a clever favourite son who had gone on (escaped, as he later put it to colleagues) to lecture in Classics at a university in Ottawa.
Status quo
.

A simple majority of an otherwise genetically indifferent graduating class had crossed Jennifer's name off the ballot and written “None of the Above.” They did this with a bland insolence inherited from the blended loins of generations in the Ottawa Valley, those Scots and Irish and French farmers whose tribal hatreds and seeding secrets and uglier ethnic features got all mixed up in cars and fields after a century of harvest dances and Canadian Legion wedding receptions and Knights of Columbus bingo nights and all-church Christmas parties. Who, thus combined, gave to each successive crop dispositions formed to resist someone like Jennifer because she was trying to raise herself higher than her family, her history, her teeth allowed for. This being the mortal sin of every small town. So it was decided by tacit referendum that she should be prevented, the decision passing among her classmates like the silent, purposeful spread of fog on a warmed-up autumn morning in their postage stamp of a township northwest of the capital. There was no other discernible source for the decision, no evidence of a vengeful campaign, no traces of animosity, and no alternatives offered.

Everyone just understood. Jennifer. She wasn't supposed to be Class President. She had heavy ankles. She would have made sense as Correspondence Secretary. She would have been acceptable as Treasurer of the Prom. But anything more than that would have been off, unbalanced, mutually embarrassing—like using the good dishes for dinner with lesser relations, or a wife referring to the front porch as the veranda in front of her in-laws. Jennifer would have to push against this sullen, grain-fed logic in her every effort to be something more than was preordained as her lot by virtue of being born into a large-boned, small-farm family.

In place of a president, the faculty decided on something fancifully known as a Provisional Collective Authority, comprising the smarter students and better athletes and prettier girls. Jennifer was still invited to join. With the embarrassment of receiving unexpected and unwelcome company, they had to acknowledge her shunted desire to participate in school life. To their relief, she declined the offer. She would show them.

She required neither the pity nor the charity. She was not upset by the loss. She had gained a view of the life that she decided had to be hers. She knew this much from the sucking thrill, the ache of expectation, the cold steel taste in her mouth the unsleeping hot night before election day; and from her ragged heartbeat in the moments before and then after the historic results were announced. All of which gave her a stabbing excitement that her prior pursuits—crossing guard's assistant, recess monitor, Friday night handler for the backward child Benjy one farm over—had only pricked at. Waiting for the election outcome, she had been wrapping and then unwrapping her blond plaits around her thick fingers, as was her habit when excited. When she heard, she let go and went limp for a moment. But then something else.

She was supposed to agree, graciously, with the unassailable logic of the late teen electorate, for whom such elaborate and meaningless high school elections were devised and regularly held as natural preparation for their full immersion in the political life of the nation. Jennifer was supposed to recede back into the Canadian Shield whence she seemed to have come. Instead, she got hungry.

She went in search of knowledge to prepare for the next election. It didn't matter what it was for, when it would happen. She sensed already that there is always,
always
another chance to get people to put their finer senses aside and be willingly duped into seeking their betterment in billowy slogans and cold buffet promises. Having watched enough chatty sewing machine salesmen from Cornwall and haughty farm subsidy officers from Ottawa come by the house and have at her parents, Jennifer only had to discover how to master what she sensed was this universally accepted, even necessary trickery. But she needed more to work with. Her family wasn't ever going to make enough money, which was clear enough from their recent crop yield and long-standing policy of reheating leftovers until the plates and pots were finger- and thumb-licked clean. She also knew there was little in the way of ambition in the bloodline; her father was hopeful of someday saving enough to put down a little on a cabin up north, not even thinking about a cottage, mind you, and with river frontage at best. Plus, Jennifer had come to terms with her own slabbish frame and had never been interested in the dress patterns from the
McCall's
books that her mother occasionally showed her and gamely described as slimming options for the coming Christmas dance. She didn't bother with any of that. She was never going to trim down and tit up enough to get pregnant enough to marry well enough, like other ambitious poor girls in town did.

Instead, Jennifer approached the civics teacher, Mrs. Bureaux, for assistance. This was reasonable: she had been the elections monitor, and once the other students had slouched out of the portable after the results were announced, she had pulled Jennifer aside and offered a mess of therapeutic pottage.
If there was anything more she could do
;
When you need to talk
;
It's not you, it's society
; etc.

Mrs. Bureaux was sorting through overheads for a unit on the Red River Rebellion when Jennifer came up beside her. After checking her shock that the girl seemed interested in actually taking up the offers to talk and such, she went worried that Jennifer was going to make a scene. She calibrated her distance from the intercom and tried to remember the code for the school's on-call guidance and emotive care counsellor. A scene being a venal, not mortal, sin in a small town, but still to be avoided along with any near occasion to commit it. The teacher listened, blinking rapidly, to Jennifer's request, followed her jabbing finger as it pointed at the prime minister's portrait hanging beside the smudgy clock. She was immediately relieved by the option that presented itself. A good book or two on politics is better than a boring lecture any day! The bait worked. The girl left.

But like a door-rapping Jehovah or a tent-smacking deer fly, something kept coming at her. That ponytailed bloodsucker, the teacher thought, would have clung on until she had taken enough and then more of whatever it was she wanted.

III.

Hortense Spillway was demonstratively unmarried. Which is to say that at fifty-two, she was gradually blending into the static landscape around her, noticed by others with less and less frequency, like wallpaper patterns in gently rundown homes. She walked as if on padded feet. Her body, only a few pounds heavier and plusher than when she was in her twenties and first took the job in the school library, was, in her early fifties, a slender, barren willow branch. Her wrists and neck were always garlanded with colourful, clinking jewellery, the cut glass resembling bits of bruised fruit. The acceptable flourishes of a respectably aging, single woman. She was companioned by two cats, Charlotte and Emily. She lived for her monthly reading group—the Hoarfrost Romantics, a name she had helped devise. It was composed of a half-dozen town ladies and one single but artistic man. He was a night school drawing instructor and occasional director at the Community Playhouse. Save Christmas visits to a very married sister in Renfrew, the Hoarfrost Romantics was Hortense's only let-up from the litter box of her daily life. Otherwise, it was along the gravel of the town's streets that she went, passing from her first-floor rental to the school library's front door to the greengrocer's to the family pew in the gingerly upright and echoing Anglican church, then back to the first-floor rental, repeated every week since she first took rooms a few months after her parents had passed on. There had been a man, once, but having failed to secure her father's blessing, she was alone, measuring her days in the steeping of teapots and the collecting of Victorian figurines from a mail-away collectibles society based in Brixton.

She was arranging date slips at the front counter when the osprey diorama that hung in the middle of the library was suddenly blotted out. There was a largish girl standing in front of her, staring with massing insistence. A girl at a hulking right angle to Hortense. She sensed that the girl was lonely, being heavy-set and plain, and there arose the dim prospect of fellowship, which was welcome. The reading group adjourned in May, under the collective ruse of crowded summer months. But Hortense was too quick. Before the girl could explain what she had come for, she was directed to paperback copies of
The Stone Angel
and
The Edible Woman
, their mustardy pages stacked together providentially on the nearby returns cart. The overture did not have its intended effect.

The girl wanted to know about politics, about how great men were made, how they came to become what they were.

“Politics, please. That's what I want to know about. Mrs. Bureaux said you'd have books on politics in here. You keep your fairy tales, Miss Spillway. Books on politics. Please.”

This was an aggressiveness that Hortense knew didn't run in Jennifer's diffident clan. She wondered if maybe the girl was trying to impress a boy by reading up on his interests but then remembered hearing about the unfortunate election results some months earlier. Sympathy came, momentarily. The stupid hurtful pointlessness of rejection.

But then she went angry, wasp-stung by this thick-lipped, this thick girl calling her proffer of literary titles, of friendship, fairy tales. For Hortense, recalling her well-received write-up for the March Hoarfrost meeting, these two novels
were corrugated testaments to the tragedy of being born at once Canadian and woman
. And this girl was calling them fairy tales. Fairy tales! But she also felt a dab of heartsink at the now-receding possibility of afternoon teas for two. She was accustomed to the superior indifference of the girls who were sent to work in the library—bored, wan AV monitors rejected for yearbook club and making do; pouting painted circulation assistants on the verge of pregnancy whenever they uncrossed their legs in detention hall. Who were always reassigned to Miss Spillway in the best interests of school hygiene and public morality.

But in this girl she saw something else. A wider emptiness and maybe a little ambition, a hungry hollowness that, she thought, might have been an opening, something to be filled in, fed with sophistication and knowledge and other forms of human fineness. The ability to pronounce German words; subscriptions to leading magazines from Toronto and Boston; a taste for salad as the second course; cheese on a plate unto itself.

Hortense stopped herself. She was no elegant womanly mentor, Europe-returned and man-wise. And this girl was no money-swaddled ingenue in want of tutoring in the ways of civilization. This was no budding Henry James story. Hortense was reminded of the where and the what and the who. She was a lonely coat-rack of a high school librarian, talking to a heavy parka of a high school girl.

And while of course in polite company Hortense was just as troubled and outraged by her nation's guilt by geographic association to its elephantine neighbour, in private she had the sense of living in a nowhere corner of a small-town country. History and culture and capital E events happened below the border and across the sea. Her nation was, at best, a cousin by marriage to all of this. But still. Calling its great books fairy tales? That was unnecessary, uncharitable, un-Canadian. Steeping and steaming, she decided someone still had to come to the defence of what goodness this place managed to produce. She fretted the pleats of her skirt until she had enough pluck.

“They're—these are not fairy tales, young lady. You're simply misinformed. If you would open your mind and, yes, your heart enough to read them, I think you'd find that these writers know more about you and where you are and where you come from and where you're probably headed than you do. But in the meantime,” she continued, a little breathless and overexcited but recalling her asthma and professional responsibilities, “if it's politics you want, must have, I'll see what we have for you.”

Her chip of a chin set at a flinty angle, Hortense glided around her desk and into the stacks. She was satisfied with her performance even if the audience seemed unmoved. Jennifer had listened with the mute patience of a mule at a railway crossing. Her only response was reiteration. “Politics, please.”