by Don Hunter
“Where are the ballots?”
“On their way, apparently.” She nodded toward a fast-approaching Silas Cotswold, who was on a health kick and thus on his bicycle, carrying a shoulder bag.
“Dusting,” Anwen said, and she disappeared inside.
“Had a flat,” Silas said as he dismounted. “Bloody cheap offshore products.”
“Which nevertheless you bought,” Annabelle noted. “As you did your computers and printers. Perhaps you could start a ‘buy-Canadian’ campaign. Make Canada great again.”
“Again?”
Henry and Harvey started humming “O Canada.”
Annabelle said, “Shut up.”
“I’ll get us set up.” Silas parked his bike against the Legion wall. Inside, he dragged a six-foot folding table to the centre of the floor and placed a chair behind it with the cardboard ballot box, courtesy of Gilbert, on top.
“For the scrutineer,” he remarked at the chair.
“Who would be …?”
“Me.” Aila Hanif had misjudged the time on her morning run and was a bit out of breath. “He”—indicating Silas—“thought that we needed an objective overseer.”
Silas placed the ballots in a heap. He had printed the candidates’ names alphabetically and had tried to create a square beside them for the X or check mark. His tech skills still required some refining and the squares had come up less than square. “They’ll do,” he said. “Just tell the voters to try to stay inside the lines.”
Silas had a list of registered voters that MLA Jethro Wallace had obtained for him, which he laid beside the cauliflower box. The list was at least five years old and caused a problem when it was clear that Randolph Champion’s name was missing.
That was because his lot had been in the Inlet only three years, and had never bothered to register. When this was pointed out to Randolph, and the suggestion made that as he was not a voter, it would be difficult for him to be mayor or to vote for himself or anyone else, he ranted and invoked the BC Human Rights Commission and various discriminatory legislative bodies that he could complain to.
He made such a noise about it that Silas simply added his name to the voters list and hoped fervently that Randolph would not become mayor. The fact that being among the four losers meant he would be on council anyway, Silas could deal with later, or someone else could.
While Aila got her breath back and waited with a sentry-at-the-gate demeanour to do her scrutineering and counting duty, Silas got the geeks to check off voters on arrival.
Sheila Martin complained that it was not really a secret ballot because there was no closed booth where voters could mark the thing. Silas, who was beginning to regret ever starting the process, murmured, “Bureaucrat,” and received a wintry look, but smiled and had a geek find another cardboard box, cut open one end, and place it on a side table. “There you go,” he said. “Just stick your head in there.”
When no one was left in line to vote, Aila finished checking and approving the count. She handed the result to Silas, remarking, “Much easier than Kabul.”
“Must be a real bugger there, then.” He waved the paper at the remaining citizens. “And the winner—and our new, I mean first, mayor is …”
“Hold on!”
Anwen Brannigan appeared from the inner door, broom and dustpan in hand, and waving the latter. “Just hold on.”
Silas glared, signalled to her to go away, and returned to his announcement. “The first mayor of Spinner’s Inlet is …”
“I haven’t bloody voted!” Anwen’s broom was now at the present-arms position. Good job it wasn’t a gun, Samson Spinner thought, as he watched things develop.
“Voting is closed.” Silas tapped his wristwatch. “Twelve hours. You’ve had plenty of time to vote, like everyone else. The first mayor of Spinner’s Inlet is …”
“My arse!” Anwen marched to the table, grabbed the sheet of paper from Silas’s hand, folded it, and thrust it into her apron pocket. “The poll opened late, so it should close late. You arrived after I did and I was already late. Through no fault of mine,” she added, although that could have been open to challenge. In fact, one of the geeks, fastidious for detail, was about to indulge himself by doing that, until Anwen shifted her broom position slightly and fixed a look on him.
“My democratic rights are being denied. I didn’t raise seven kids in this community without a sniff of social assistance,” here she pinned Randolph Champion to the spot with a telling glare, “to be told I’m denied a voice in its future. One vote can make a difference.”
She smiled, sort of, at Silas, and commanded, “Give me a ballot—and then count them again.”
He did, and she was right. Her vote tipped the scales and prevented a tie and a vote-off for the position of mayor of Spinner’s Inlet.
With the result, Anwen received a warm hug from Sheila Martin, a thin and insincere smile from Annabelle Bell-Atkinson, and some ineffectual fist-shaking and grunting from the geeks.
Give It Up
The Clements twins climbed up onto the front deck at Samson’s place, where he was taking a break from splitting alder for the living room fireplace. He poured the last drops of McEwan’s Scotch Ale into his glass and finished off the rich, dark brew with a sigh, part contentment, part regret at the empty bottle, then a satisfying burp.
The kids were unusually quiet as they studied him. Something coming.
“Well?”
“What are you giving up, Samson?”
Alun posed the question. He and Jillian waited for Samson’s answer, which was a puzzled, “Giving what up?”
“For Lent,” sighed Jillian, as if to a slow learner. “Amber says we should make a sacrifice for forty days? Like God did?” Then, “What?”
“You’re doing that thing again. That uptalk. Where you’re incapable of speaking in simple declarative sentences. Every sentence ending in a question mark. You talk to people as if they’re idiots. As if you’re asking if they actually understand what you’re saying. I mean, how is anyone to know when you expect an answer?”
Jillian rolled her eyes … this again. She dismissed it with a shrug.
Alun said, “Jesus. It was Jesus. Not his dad. And he didn’t do it for Lent. He was out in the desert being tempted. Way before Easter was invented. People just use the forty days to see if you can last that long without going to the pub or having candy and stuff.”
Alun was born a minute before midnight, Jillian a minute after. Alun took it upon himself to correct the kid whenever the chance arose.
“Moses did it as well, but not at the same time,” added Jillian, who liked to fill in any glaring omissions by her brother. “And then there was all that rain for forty days and forty nights another time. Right, Samson?”
“Christ,” Samson said. Then he deflected the original question. “You said ‘Amber.’ Amber? Don’t you mean the Reverend Rawlings? We would never have called her father ‘Randall.’ Always Reverend. Respect, eh?”
“Randall?” Alun said. “Who would name anybody ‘Randall’? That’s funny.” And he laughed.
“What is Amber giving up?” Samson asked.
“I think she said chocolate chip cookies,” Jillian said.
Samson said, “I was right behind her in Gilbert’s Groceries a week ago when she said she was done with cookies—chocolate or otherwise—because they were going straight to her hips. So, nice try, Amber. Happy Lent.” He continued, “What about your mother—what’s her sacrifice going to be?”
“Mom told our dad that she might give up Sunday morning lie-ins, if he didn’t smarten up, but he said that was way too much to ask of anybody—or to, I think it was, impose on anybody—and she should think of something else.”
Alun said, “And we know what that’s all about, don’t we? I mean the Sunday morning l
ie-ins. Oh, yeah.”
Samson could swear he heard his eyeballs click. He managed a muffled, “Oh?” and hoped for a diversion, like the deck collapsing, or maybe a handy little tsunami.
“Of course,” Jillian observed. “First one to get up from the lie-in has to make breakfast and take it back to bed for the other one. It’s a rule.”
“Ah, right,” Samson murmured.
“Anyway, my mother said for you maybe beer,” Jillian noted, with a nod to the empty bottle. “She figured it would do you good. Or wine. ”
“She said and wine,” Alun added. “Both. Together. At the same time.”
Their mother, Julie, was principal of the elementary school.
“She would,” Samson said.
“So?” Jillian cocked her head and waited.
“Well, first of all it’s none of your mother’s concern what I give up or don’t.”
Jillian’s eyes widened at someone questioning her mother’s word. And then she grinned at the thought. She said, “You should get going on it. It starts after Pancake Tuesday, which was yesterday, when you had all those pancakes at our house. My mom said it seemed like you hadn’t eaten for about forty days, when she had to open another bottle of maple syrup. And that’s when she started about Lent, and wondered if you be giving up anything. Grandma wondered the same thing, but said probably not because you don’t have the self-discipline.”
Grandma was Sheila Martin, retired secondary school teacher, recently elected the first mayor of Spinner’s Inlet. Samson was one of the four by-default council members.
“She would,” Samson said.
“And she said you would get crabby if you tried it.”
“Crabbier,” Alun corrected her. “She said you’re already crabby.”
Jillian added, “Then Mom said Grandma should have said ‘more crabby’ not ‘crabbier’ because it didn’t sound like proper English.”
“She would know,” Samson agreed.
Jillian said, “And to do Lent properly, you have to make sure you wash some of your friends’ feet. Jesus did that for his apprentices. Washed them and dried them. They all wore those open sandals so it was probably easy to get dirt in them. He said they should do it for others, it would make them humble.” She added, “Grandma said you probably don’t know what that means, but you could still give it a try.”
Alun said, “You can get humble as well if you give a lot of money away like the Queen does. We saw her doing that on TV last year. Some pensioners and poor people. I think they said it happens on Laundry Thursday.”
“Maundy,” Samson corrected.
“Whatever,” Alun said. Then, “That’s the day they had the last supper. Mom said you could come and have that at our place, if you like.”
“My last supper?”
“She said you’ll be ready for a drink by then.”
“Tell your mother, and your grandma, that I appreciate their thoughtfulness and I will give the Lent thing serious consideration.” Then, “But what about you two? What are you giving up?”
Alun smiled. “Grandma said we were to tell you that we are just the messengers. The rest is up to you.”
“She would,” Samson said.
Stop Sign
Sheila Martin smacked her gavel on the mayor’s table.
Or, her “hammer thing” as Councillor Finbar O’Toole called it. It was an actual maple gavel that Sheila had found on eBay—placed there by a retired “President of … Local … union,” the details of which had been mostly sanded off—for $9.75, which she had acquired for $7.75, hers being the only bid.
The table quivered on its four folding legs. Mayor Sheila had ordered a proper mayor’s desk from a dealer in Victoria, but they had asked for a credit card number, in the name of the new Spinner’s Inlet council, before they would ship it. After an emotional appeal to council to accept its fiduciary duty had been met with a restless silence, except for Randolph Champion humming tunelessly and Samson Spinner murmuring, “Nice try and good luck,” she had eventually snapped that she would pay for the desk herself.
That may have still been on her mind when she demanded, “Order,” although the only disruption to the current debate was Councillor Annabelle Bell-Atkinson. She was instructing one of her two geek nephews sitting in the public gallery (two picnic-table benches donated by Ali Hanif who had found four of them decomposing in a blackberry thicket, resurrected them, and applied a thick coat of leftover outdoor paint in a startling shade of royal blue) to go get her a coffee from Gilbert’s Groceries across the street. “Double shot with two Splendas, and remind them that it’s only two dollars at Timmies in town,” she had whispered, though clearly not quietly enough to suit Sheila, who glared and pointed a warning finger at them. The geeks sniggered. Sheila frowned; it used to work when she was a secondary school teacher.
The debate concerned the proposed placement of a stop sign and/or a crosswalk near the seniors complex. The provincial government’s highways department had been consulted, but an immediate return email had made it clear that those in Victoria who were familiar with Spinner’s Inlet and its population were reluctant to get involved in anything there that might become controversial and worse—God forbid—require a decision.
“The minister has been advised of your concern and has forwarded the information to your Independent MLA, Jethro Wallace, who, the minister is sure, will give it his earliest attention.”
“Do it ourselves, then,” Samson Spinner had concluded.
And thus the present council gathering, where contributions to the debate had been varied.
“The codgers should have enough sense at their age to be able take care of themselves if they get let out,” said O’Toole, who added, “but if it has to be, I would give a good rate for all the painting and sign-building.”
“Let the record show that he is all heart,” said Samson.
Annabelle Bell-Atkinson noticed that Cameron Girard was busy with his pen. “Duty!” she declaimed, her eyes sweeping the public benches and the one chair with a cardboard label stating “PRESS ONLY” tacked to it, where Cameron sat, apparently paying attention. The public benches held the geeks, Erik Karlsson, the recent arrival to the Inlet, great-great-nephew of the late Swede, who was trying hard to get used to his new surroundings, and a couple from Mississippi.
When they had met the nosey Clements kids at the ferry dock, they had declared where they were from and asked if they needed to show their passports or were they still in America. They had then been treated to a chanted duet of the spelling drill—“Em-i-ess-ess-i-ess-ess-i-pee-pee-i”—of their home state, along with Jillian’s dance version, and had escaped into the council meeting looking for directions as to how to get home.
“Duty to the needy and the old!” Annabelle continued. “Imagine when we have reached their stage in life and need to cross the road in safety. Who will be there for us?”
The coffee-run geek had just re-entered. He waved his free hand. “I will!” he promised, while his twin nodded approval and shot a thumbs-up toward his aunt.
Mayor Sheila slammed her gavel down. “Take your seat—this is not a public debate.”
“Christ,” Samson Spinner said.
Councillor Finbar O’Toole got the nod from Sheila to speak. But then she raised a palm—meaning hold on—crooked a finger at the coffee gofer, and when he approached her, apprehensive, she said, “Get me the same. I’ll pay you later. And a doughnut.” She smiled and the twin fled. “You were saying … ?” she said to Finbar.
Finbar’s brow creased, then, “Yes, I was, but with all this stuff going on … give me a minute, Your Honour,” and he sat down.
“She must be the judge,” the American husband remarked. “I thought they wore wigs.”
His wife asked, “Where’s the perp?”
A few m
inutes earlier the Americans had had the significance of the forty-ninth parallel explained to them by Aila Hanif, who had started studying for her eventual citizenship test and had dropped in to experience the local version of democracy in action.
Finbar rose again. “I wish to make a movement.”
“Not here, you don’t,” the mayor corrected him. “Try a motion.”
“Right, then. I motion that we secede from a government that passes the buck, like the highways department, and join somewhere else that would be more helpful.”
“We could inquire about that, if you like,” the American wife offered. She seemed miffed when Sheila pointed a stern finger at her and made the zip-your-lip motion.
Dr. Timothy, who had just joined the meeting, said, “I tried that with the Turks and Caicos Islands years ago and they were willing—Turks, Caicos, and Spinner’s Inlet, it would have been. We could have had Christmas and everything down there, but Ottawa turned it down and buggered it up. I’ll give them another shout when Megan and I go down there again.”
Mayor Sheila tasted her coffee. She frowned, beckoned the twin back up. “You forgot the Splenda,” and handed him the mug. As he tottered away with it, his brother shook his head sadly and muttered, “You ask him to do one thing.”
Sheila took a deep breath. “All in favour of the motion—Councillor O’Toole’s, that is.”
Both Americans raised their left hand while placing their right on their hearts. No one else moved.
The mayor’s head drooped. “Motion is defeated,” she sighed.
Samson thought she might be finding that running the new council was a different game from commanding a couple generations of students in the secondary school. And this was only the first council meeting. He was feeling relieved that he hadn’t won.
Sheila hammered the table. “Meeting adjourned.”
Cameron was just closing his notebook on a page that contained an especially lifelike image of the mayor, but with smoke issuing from her ears and flames—courtesy of a red Sharpie he carried and usually used to mark his golf balls—from her mouth.
