The Governor of the Northern Province (22 page)

Madame GG, as she was known to Rideau Hall staff and assorted colleagues and admirers, was a birdish and precise woman in both official languages. She was fond of Persian shawls and Madison Avenue saucer hats and First Nations peoples and outfitted herself accordingly. Watching her work the line, Jennifer was impressed. To each new MP she gave a cocked head at the interesting story about the local riding followed by a syncopated eyebrow-raising smile at the personal anecdote and then a gushing nod
yes indeed how very exciting all of this was
to the fumbled admission of nerves and now the clipboarded Ojibwa stepped in
oh too bad it was time to move on but let's talk some more when you're settled into Ottawa
. Leaving them all wriggling and flush in her wake. Effective. Jennifer was ready for some of it and long waiting to give back a little herself.

But when Madame GG finally introduced herself and congratulated each of them, Nova Scotia came out ready and hard and loud. His hand clutching his teacup with antic violence, he right away started in on a peaty story about how he and his brothers “used to take tea and toast at 2 a.m. before loadin' up the smelt and goin' out on the trawlers with our pops and his brothers back oh way back when we were growin' up in God's country as we call it out there you really should come visit us. So this was something”—tears in the wheel wells, a hard swallow and then vigorous, then thoughtful nodding—“this was
some thing
, drinkin' this tea in this grand room so many years later with the grand likes of you, Madame. If only me pops and brothers”—but there had been a bad storm and heart disease in the family and Coast Guard cutbacks—“could see us now,” etc.

With the intelligent vacancy of an experienced public figure, Madame GG went through her prix fixe of responses to George Jr.'s spray before finishing up with “A few 2 a.m. sessions of toast and tea just might keep you up in this coming session of Parliament!” Winking, impish sagacity, vouchsafed by the totemic status of her office. Sensing a clever joke that he was included in, Damariscotta Jr. slapped himself on the knees and reared up, ululating in his briny brogue, his blue eyes bulging, throat pulsing, rum nose reddening.

Madame GG banked over to Jennifer. Jaunty George Jr., squirming and searching in vain for something else to say, had no choice but to stall. He backhanded a slice of quiche into his mouth like a puck of fried cod. Jennifer was waiting, issues and topics loaded, her fork ready with much twisting and turning in her fingers. Leaning in and down to engage the Governor General, Jennifer inhaled the sweet eau of Anglican girls' school and honorary degrees and husband money and ladies' golf and hospital foundations that was variously swabbed and daubed around the golden neck and lobes. Jennifer was ready for this, for all of this. In immediate preparation, she had balanced two buttery fiddleheads on the tips of the tines. When Madame GG looked up into her, how well Jennifer guided the fork and its freight into her mouth! That librarian with her doilies and Shakespeare, that Miss Spill-something would have been pleased. But Jennifer had to stop going back to her beginnings like this. If she was going to get anything more, she had to stay in the moment of this Ottawa reception hall. Her latest getting place. The best so far.

The Governor General was relieved to be nearer again civilization, but just as she started up with Jennifer, she was forced to adjust her hat and shield herself from George Jr.'s volley of crust flakes, broccoli bits, Gruyère shreds and piped-up questions about “An East Coast visit sometime soon for Madame?”

When little came in the way of response, he broke out the top-shelf stuff: his explanation of the native son who'd recently moved to Ottawa for work, the one-time middleweight champion of Eastern Canada don't you know, Antigonish's very own Ricky Rhinehart. Whose nickname, on account of his unfortunate mixed-race background, “was Zebra Muscles, but also this is a political statement about the understudied state of the freshwater fisheries back home, speakin' of which if you'd like to meet him or talk sturgeon I can arrange …”

Madame GG's face gripped at its rouged corners from these rising, trilling decibels, but she remained target on, head cocked and eyebrows set on Jennifer's round and empty and expectant face. She did break away for a moment, to signal to her attendant, who quickly bivouacked before George Jr. and held him back with a good Gananoque glare.

Madame GG refocused on Jennifer, looming above her. She asked the fork-fine young woman about the striking pink sash that she had wrapped over one of her arms and about the fabulously matching pink scarf tied round her hair. Who swallowed decisively and then mobilized her explanation. A little girl, the rising creek, a sudden African. Think Pink.

“Oh wait, wait now, you want to talk 'bout drownin'? Nowhere this side of Labrador got as many men lost in the full fathom deep dark blue than we do! And hey, we got
them
too! From way long back! From slave times come up from down in the States there! I even got my boxing boy Ricky, the one I just was mentioning, I got him a job over at Parks and Rec, if you want to come see him with me!” So Antigonish had tried, one last time, squirting round the attendant. But it was in vain. Jennifer was in control, shaking Madame GG's hand and broadening her shoulders to wedge herself in front of the mint-fresh gill-blown Aqua Velva flop from God's Country. Now forgotten.

Gripping the Governor General's rosehipped fingers, Jennifer said she knew and hoped they would have cause to see each other again. She offered to introduce Her Excellency to the courageous African. Madame GG immediately assured her that, having heard good and interesting things about Jennifer's inaugural speech and visual presentation in the Commons, she would be honoured to meet such a sad, uplifting story.

Feeling large with the idea that she was already gaining a reputation in this town, Jennifer went after and caught another brow cock as the Governor General and her assistants readied to push on to their next pair—a teeth-bearing Albertan bursting around the stitches of his corset-tight Stampede vest with statistics about federal transfers, and a self-medicating, fair-trading Vancouverite who had successfully run on the platform of handing over his own riding to Aboriginal self-governance. Jennifer noted that the African couldn't be with them today because he had gone on a skating excursion along the canal with some schoolchildren from the riding.

“Don't worry, my dear, I know,” Madame GG said, departing. “You promise much. Think Pink.”

“Yes, that's right,” Jennifer answered, greedy to hear such a one as this say her phrase. Which was why she kept going for more and more, calling out as the shawl-clad shoulders turned away, “But do you know that, in Africa, pink means the colour of the dawn? So beautiful and yet so sad given all the problems over there, where a Canadian presence is clearly lacking. So yes, Think Pink, Madam, and think about where that—where we could go with that.”

The Governor General made a note of this young woman from the outer regions and of her intriguing appendage as possible add-ons for her proposed junket to Africa, which was pending prime ministerial approval. The government was in fact very willing to send her to a donors' conference on behalf of the national interest. The Governor General's office was ideal for what was wanted from a Canadian mission to Africa. The thin power of a photogenic figurehead. A pliable young MP with a ductile connection to the homeland would be a nice touch, Madame GG decided, and being nice to an independent never hurt a minority government. She would include all this in her final pitch to the PMO. Plus, Think Pink, with its ancient folkloric fullness thus explained, was grander and a little punchier than the rather cumbersome slogan her staff had worked up for the trade and aid conference she was hoping and planning to lead that winter.
Quid Pro Quo: The Third World Needs More Canada!

10

CROSSOVERS

I.

The blades slung over his shoulder, he ducked into the metal hut. Inside was the man he'd been instructed to seek out. His back was turned to him; he was hunched over a table studying something; perhaps it was a map of the river outside the door. With all the yelling and shrieking and bodies thudding to the ground, the man at the table didn't seem to notice his visitor come in. He didn't turn around at the boot-crunching sound of the approach, the blades swinging down into the hands. But he must have recognized the sound, old steel rasping against old steel. He twisted and looked up and smiled and Bokarie's face went slack, dumbfounded, the colour draining. At who, at what, was standing in front of him in this shed.

“Want to get your skates sharpened? Sorry, buddy, I didn't hear you come in, I was just checking today's ice report, you know, to see how much of the canal is frozen through and through. Looks pretty good, incidentally—feels like January around here already and it's only November! What's wrong there, cat got your tongue? Or is it that you don't speak English? No offence intended, of course. Anyways, it looks like the girl at the rental desk gave you some pretty rusty blades there! Not her fault—it's not often we get adults who show up without their own, so what we have on hand are usually pretty old. Yours look like they're from Original Six days or something though! But that's probably why she sent you in here. Nobody sharpens skates better along the Rideau Canal than yours truly, Ricky Rhinehart, ex–middleweight champion of Eastern Canada. Perhaps you've heard of me by my ring name, Zebra Muscles. I was even the under undercard for a few late night boxing shows on the Sports Channel a while back. You might know that, depending what channels you get.

“But it doesn't seem like you're picking up what I'm putting down, so let's just get to business then. If this is your first time out on the ice, you're not going to get too far on the canal with your steel in that shape. Especially with the school buses coming in today, all the kiddies out there leaving the ice about as smooth as a Québécois girl's legs in February. You didn't get that one neither, huh? Kay-Beck-Kwa. Nothing? Well, that's okay too in point of fact, you know, you're probably lucky that you didn't. Still nothing, eh? All right, be the silent type and just hand 'em over and I'll see what we can do ya for with the old whetting machine.”

This was as long as Bokarie had been quiet before a fellow—well, a fellow what?—since coming to Canada. Too much was getting blended and mashed together and he wasn't in control of it, not just yet at least. First there was the sound of the man's talking: it was that saltwater singsong, the same
so forth
and
so on
that the immigration men had done in that deliciously named Newfoundland, back when they'd first flashed their torches on him extravagantly cowering in the bottom of the tanker with the rest of the asylum seekers. But then there was also the look of this man, which didn't make sense with that sound. And something else about it too. The face didn't look exactly like one of his brothers or his cousin, but close enough, given present standards, just with a little more meat on the bone. Bokarie himself had added a little flub around the waist and some chub in the small of the back and a bit of thrum to his thighs since coming to Canada. But he hadn't really noticed it much, being little bulge by comparison with the jut and girth of the host bodies around him. His own weight gain, however, made it plausible that this could be one of them, even if he knew—
no, he knew
—it couldn't be one of his blood men from back home.

Still, this reaching back there to explain away this man standing here, in front of him, was evidence of how puzzled Bokarie had become. He didn't know how to proceed and couldn't exactly call anyone for fresh coordinates. Because, except for bathroom mirrors and the music and sports channels of the television, he had never seen one in Canada before. And for the first time he could remember, ever, he couldn't find any words to come back with, to subdue, to take over.

“I—I—they—they—” was as much as he could manage as he handed the skates over. He didn't know what to say to another black man, or, better still, how to say to another black man. Over here. He was unclear as to what behaviour was expected, required, what codes were to be followed.

So he made a tactical retreat to the corner of the hut while the man went to work on the skates. He started thinking about how much faster things would have proceeded back in the Upriver region had they had such a machine to keep their blades sharp. Yes, he liked that, it was reassuring to juxtapose, to laugh at two places while hovering between them, lording himself over his nations past and present. But the suspension didn't hold for long. The idea insisted on playing itself out.

Maybe if his men had been more efficient in their machete work during the last stages of the National Restitution Campaign, the General wouldn't have lost his patience and stopped taking his calls. And maybe then the General wouldn't have made that deal with the President to take care of the evildoers to the north butchering innocents of that noble tribe. And maybe then the General and President wouldn't have agreed to the terms the visiting pink-meaty American senator had proposed for reconciliation between the executive and military branches of the government in exchange for freedom and defence contracts. And maybe then the General wouldn't have tried to cover his tracks by buying Bokarie's blood men with Canadian passports so they would come carve at him. And maybe then Bokarie wouldn't have had to do to them what they required of him to do, when the first came into the shed and cut him and the second protested he had nothing to do with it and was unconvincing, and the third helped him across the river without mentioning the men he'd arranged to be waiting on the other side. And maybe then— But stop this! Stop this! What good was there in going on like this? That past was another country. It had to be.

Yes, that's right, Bokarie thought, he wasn't back-bloody scrambling through underbrush to get away from the just-in-case execution squad his cousin had arranged to greet them when they made it over the river into a neighbouring country. His current difficulties were a too-long lineup for hot chocolate and doing something about rusty skate blades, since the children visiting Ottawa from town had insisted on his joining them on the ice, where they would return the favour of his soccer lessons the summer before. All of which meant he didn't need to wield and whip around all those old
maybes
; he wasn't confined to thinking from and about there. He also wasn't confined to keeping it all at bay at all times, either, as he'd realized by the creek that day before Jennifer's successful close to her campaign. That,
this
, was the gift of immigration. The adjustment of memory into identity. Selectively. Because in the weeks since, he'd moved to Ottawa to take up his position as aide-de-camp for MP Thickson and was successfully mixing up and blending this and that together, and liking what and where it was getting him.