A Good Man (2 page)
I felt I knew what she was alluding to, felt Mother was making reference to the sooty cloud of trouble that had hung over my head for nearly a year. Just a month before, Alice had broken our engagement. The statement Alice’s father had forced me to sign, which declared his daughter blameless in our suddenly interrupted march to the altar, laying all fault with me – this was common knowledge in Mother’s circle. My erstwhile fiancée had ensured that by circulating her father’s idiotic document among all her friends, beginning with the bridesmaids. And that document, onto which I had contemptuously scratched an angry signature, had bolstered suppositions about my bad conduct at the Battle of Ridgeway. Mother was certainly aware of such gossip. That I had failed to do my duty was dinner-party talk among all the “better people” of Toronto. Nevertheless, it was only talk; my name had never appeared in the newspapers; I was not subject to the sort of public finger-pointing that pursued Lieutenants Colonel Booker and Dennison and led them to demand military courts of inquiry to examine the accusations of incompetence and cowardice made against them in the press. As could have been predicted, they had been exonerated because key witnesses were not called. But if the big fish had escaped, there were still minnows such as me darting about in the muddy waters of the disgraceful affair, ready to be scooped up in the persistent journalists’ sieves.
Fearing she might touch upon the rumours surrounding me, which she had so far always studiously avoided, I hurried to deflect her. “And have you changed? Are you a different person now than you were when you were fourteen?”
Her brow furrowed. “Changed? On the whole I should think not, but I have always wished to recognize things.”
“Recognize what things?”
“When I was fourteen, I drew up two columns, entitled Greatest Weaknesses, Greatest Strengths. Under Greatest Weaknesses, I wrote, ‘I want too much.’ Under Greatest Strengths, I wrote, ‘I want too much.’ ”
That was unexpected and intriguing. “And what was it you wanted?”
“I didn’t know. I still don’t know. But you, Wesley, don’t even realize that wanting is a possibility.”
Mother gave me this journal when I was nearly twenty-four and all at sea, my ship going down under me. I have carried it with me for ten years and, until tonight, never set down a single word in it. Now I cannot seem to stop scribbling. Why? Is it because I will soon risk the money Mother left me, try to amend my stumbling life, and I dread the prospect of failure? Does some part of me wonder that the urge to defy Father makes me rash? Or am I uneasy that the past is yet to present its bill and demand payment? At any rate, unlike Mother, I seem unable to sum myself up in a few lines, look at myself directly as that fourteen-year-old girl was capable of doing.
Hours after the memory of Mother visited me, I put this journal, Father’s most recent letter, a stub of candle, and a box of lucifers in my pockets and trudged up the knoll to the Métis graveyard. By the derelict wooden crosses that stand askew as if shouldered aside by Death in a hurry, I sank down on a boulder to think. The heat of the day was still stored in the stone. I fondled its pelt of rough lichen while the acrid odour of timber burning far away to the south in Montana Territory stung my nostrils.
I gazed down solemnly at what I will soon say goodbye to, the fort, whitewashed palisades glaring in the twilight. A sprinkling of lights several hundred yards north of it marks the tiny settlement, which sprang up overnight, watered by a generous shower of Mounted Police dollars. The Billiard Emporium, the mercantiles of T.C. Power and I.G. Baker, the laundry shack of the black washerwomen, Molly, Annie, and Jess, who scrub my shirts and unmentionables, Claggett’s bedbug-infested lodging house, the cabins and soddies of Indian traders, Métis carters, wolfers, and hide hunters.
Night sounds all about me, the quavering, desolate howling of coyotes punctuated by a high-pitched yipping and yapping, the persistent ratcheting of a cricket, the furtive scurrying and rustling of mice in the parched grass. Overhead, the moon, a fingernail paring hemmed by stars that smouldered weakly through the haze spread by forest fires hundreds of miles to the south, but which, here and there, by an optical trick of the same smoke-thickened air, pulsed like banked coals, red, glowing.
I took Father’s letter out, lit my candle, and scanned the words that bobbed about on the page in the trembling light, the most spiteful passages which I now take the trouble to reproduce here.
So what have you done, but sit on the cheeks of your bloody arse, your hands pinned beneath them? I tell you that you have squandered yet another opportunity – first the law, come to nothing – playing at journalist, a penny-a-word scribbler! but did I stand in your way, God forbid? and that thrown up too – then, apprenticing yourself to an architect, you, who couldn’t draw a shithouse with a ruler. Finally, for once, you took my advice and agreed to enter the North-West Mounted Police. I thought, an active life, fresh air, etc. might clear you of the doldrums. And what do you do? You refuse to accept a commission. Yo, who had experience of command; who had been a captain of the militia. But no, you preferred to scrape by as an underling, as a mere sub-constable. To wrap yourself in martyrdom like your mother. Do you know what that signals to the world? That you are either an idiot, or so frivolous and irresponsible that you couldn’t escort an old woman across a street without leading her under the wheels of a wagon. You have no idea of the high regard in which the public and press holds the Police here in the East, none whatsoever. And if you had deigned, I say deigned to accept a commission, and kept your snotty nose clean, you would have returned home covered in glory. Nothing clears scandal out of people’s minds like success. And scandal is what you created by virtue of your shameful last act of military service.
And then the Baron struggles for a more conciliatory tone, and becomes simply offensive.
All right, what’s past is past. I have spoken to a few people, and smoothed your way back into civilian life. I have succeeded in buying out the last year of your term of enlistment in the Police. As of July 31st your obligations to the force are legally fulfilled – at considerable cost to me. The question remains as to what is to be done with you. I have spoken to Sir John A. Macdonald about the possibility of finding a safe riding for you. He did not commit – unlike you, he looks before he leaps – but he left the impression your candidacy is not out of the question, which is his way of saying he wants to hear the ring of gold in the bottom of the party bucket. I will oblige him by producing that sound. All signs point to an election within the year so you must get back here to Ottawa, reacquaint yourself with and make yourself pleasant to the men who count. You are university educated, you can turn a phrase, you are more intelligent than your actions testify to, and I shall provide all necessary funds for a campaign. A seat in the House is yours for the asking. If you apply yourself, in a few years you might find your lazy bum on the Front Bench. Let me emphasize, my friends will be your friends if you offer them your hand. Return home and we will begin to sort all this out. I anticipate you at the earliest possible date. There is no time to lose.
Since I could not take him by the shoulders, shake him, shout, “Let me be!” I blew out the candle, consigning Father and his blather to the shadows. It is the place for him; he is a shady man. So why do I take the trouble to copy choice selections of his tirade into this journal? Because at some future date I shall surely wish to relive my triumph over the Baron. He may puff himself up for unlocking my cell door, assume that I will meekly do his bidding, fulfill his defeated ambitions by becoming his parliamentary proxy, but if he thinks that will happen, he has another think coming. In the two months since this letter arrived I have had plenty of time to make my own plans, to prepare to roll the dice and become a rancher. A chancy business, but I have enlisted Joe McMullen to help me bring it to fruition. So to hell with Father. The struggle between his higher organ, which prompted him towards the world of politics, and his lower organ, which urged him towards Solange, was settled long ago. His lower organ won. Let him live with the consequences of it.
Certainly he could not have foreseen the present situation when he decided my future and delivered it to me in this damnable letter. But by now he surely has realized that by springing me from the Police before my term of service has run out, hehas inadvertently rubbed more dirt on the family name. Everyone will assume that this was done to save my topknot from the Sioux. As long as three weeks ago, when a civilian dispatch rider for the U.S. Army brought us the report of Custer’s defeat, I understood that this would be how my early exit from the Police would appear, a coward scampering out of danger.
The courier had few details of exactly what had occurred at the Little Bighorn and what the consequences of it would be, except to say that deliveries of mail and supplies from Fort Benton to Fort Walsh were suspended until the Sioux threat passed. Deliveries have not yet resumed. Which means that no message from Father can reach me. I am certain that out there somewhere, a letter penned by him is held captive in a mailbag, a letter that pleads with me to immediately re-enlist, that reminds me how useful that act would be in future political campaigns. Wesley Case out on the stump, parading himself as the man who rallied around the flag in his country’s hour of need.
When Major Walsh galloped back to the fort on a lathered horse a few days ago, completing the last stage of a mad dash across the continent that carried him from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Ottawa, then on to Fort Benton, he immediately assembled the men to address them. Unfortunately, he did little more than confirm that Custer and the troop he had personally led into battle at Little Bighorn had, in fact, been utterly annihilated. Walsh related this calmly, as if to leave the impression that he gave us the whole truth and nothing but the truth. His quiet authority did a good deal to steady the men. But I found his silence about where the Sioux were, or what steps the Americans had taken to pursue them, a significant omission.
As Father is fond of saying, connections are the harness that pulls your wagon. I did not hesitate to use them to my advantage with Major Walsh. I may be a lowly sub-constable now, but he has not forgotten the time we spent together training at the School of Cavalry in Kingston. The Major believes he owes me some consideration as a former colleague; my request for a few words with him was not refused. When we met, I tried to leave the impression that I had come simply to inquire after his health and to remind him that my term of service expires at the end of the month. But the Major, clearly preoccupied with weightier matters than my departure from the Police, only acknowledged my imminent return to civilian life with a brusque hitch of the shoulders.
Then I went to work to find out what he had avoided saying at the assembly. After all, what happens in Montana has a bearing on my future. If one prods Walsh gently, circumspectly, he opens up. Soon he was giving me the substance of a brief meeting he had had with Major Ilges, commandant of the Fort Benton Army detachment. Ilges confided to him that rumours of what the troops sent to recover the corpses at the Little Bighorn had seen are circulating throughout every Army post in the West. Bodies stripped of every stitch of clothing and left to bloat in the sun. Faces pounded to mush with stone hammers. Corpses quilled with arrows. Private parts lopped off and stuffed in mouths. One of the officers of the 7th Cavalry, who sported a magnificent set of sidewhiskers, had his cheeks cut off to decorate a scalp shirt. Now, Ilges says, every man in the Army with a pair of Burnsides is in a panic to shave them off. He intimated to Walsh that these reports of atrocities have demoralized the rank and file to an extraordinary degree. Nightmare has walked out into the daylight. The shock given to the generals’ systems by the Sioux victory appears to have induced paralysis in the high command. It is all dithering and hand-wringhoothe top. Few steps are being taken to see that the Sioux are swiftly dealt with.
If there is paralysis in the Army, the rest of the country is having a fit of hysterics. That much is evident from the stack of newspapers that Walsh collected hurtling his way to Fort Benton and which he passed on to me before I left his office. What a farrago of lunacy they contain. Glowing approval for schoolboys in Custer’s hometown, who laid their hands on their McGuffey’s Readers and swore a solemn oath to make short work of Sitting Bull if he ever crosses their paths. Praise for the showman Buffalo Bill, who portentously announced that he was abandoning his Wild West Show tour because his country requires his services in the wilds of Montana. Ludicrous claims that Sitting Bull is no Indian at all, but a dark-skinned former West Point cadet expelled from the academy, who, nursing an implacable hatred for the Army, has made common cause with the Sioux and is ready to vengefully employ his knowledge of military science against his former colleagues. There can be no other explanation for Custer’s whipping than that he received it at the hands of a white man. The buck-naked, dirt-worshipping polygamist savages that the newspaper scribes denounce could not have dealt him such a blow.
And if this renegade is not to blame, others are plainly culpable. The Army is crammed with bummers, drunks, the dregs of the slums, foreigners. The Indian Department is a nest of pacifist, mollycoddling Quakers who teach the Indian one thing and one thing only: contempt for the weakness of the white man. Cleanse the Augean stables, the journalists cry, sweep them clean, clear this stink from the public’s nostrils.
Adding to the hysteria is the timing of the defeat. News of the disaster at the Little Bighorn reached the Eastern Seaboard shortly after July 4, and not just any ordinary July 4 but the grand celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. A country feeling its oats, flexing its muscles, vigorous and rich, cocksure and confident, has seen the impossible happen, the unthinkable become fact. Sitting Bull has spoiled their glorious Centennial, pissed on Custer’s golden head, the head of a genuine Civil War hero, the head of someone who has recently been touted as a future President of the United States. Somehow a wedding and a funeral got booked for the same hour in the same church. The joy of the Centennial, the joy of the great Exposition in Philadelphia, is drowned in a wave of gloom.