by André Alexis
felt relief at the young girl’s rescue and I was sure I wasn’t alone.
But then I sensed the crowd’s mood and, for a moment, I was a
stranger amongst my contemporaries. Were they really more
disappointed in the McGregors’ loss than they were happy at
the young girl’s rescue?
As we walked away from Kiiskinen’s Dale, we were met by
the Flynns’ neighbour, the man from Belleville, still in the checked
shirt he’d worn to mow his lawn. He seemed such a polite and
unassuming man, I was shocked when Ms. Flynn called him the
rude word to his face.
– This is my neighbour, she said, the cunt from Belleville.
And then
– Cunty, this is Morgan Bruno and his assistant, Alfred.
– Pleased to meet you, he said. But, you know, many people
call me Alby. The other is only my nickname.
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– How did you get such a strange nickname? asked Professor
Bruno.
– The nickname is strange, he said, but the story behind it is
banal, I’m afraid. I was born in Germany, yeah? My family is
from the nobility. My name is Wilhelm Alberich Baldur Peter,
Graf von Neuenahr Ahrweiler. My parents are proud of our
heritage. So, they used to insist people call me Graf von Neuenahr
Ahrweiler. That’s even when we moved to Belleville. Which is
where my mother went to practise medicine. When I was in
Grade 8, I made the mistake of telling someone that Graf means
Count and that meant I was a Count from Belleville. The rest you
can imagine. I’ve been called the cunt from Belleville so often, it
feels like my real name. And, you know, I don’t think about it
anymore, unless someone asks me where it comes from.
– Don’t you find it inconvenient? asked the professor.
– Not exactly, Alby answered. When I was young, I liked it,
because it made my parents furious. These days I like trying to
guess who’ll use it and who’s horrified. I thought Brigid would
be horrified, but I was wrong. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s
happier to call me cunt.
– But I’m not calling you that! said Ms Flynn. Cunt from
Belleville is an honorific.
– Well, almost, said Alby. But I’m not sure it matters, anyway.
A rose by any other name …
Rather than drive us back to her home, Ms. Flynn insisted
we eat at the Wolf and Pendulum, a place that reminded me of
taverns I’ve been in throughout the province – television behind
the bar, Canadian flag above the shelves of hard liquor, a number
of booths and a number of tables, the place full of people who’d
been to the house burning or seemed to have been, all the audible
talk being about McGregors and Ainsleys.
When we’d got a table, Ms. Flynn ordered food (shepherd’s pie
and tourtière), and a round of Old V (for all but me), plus a Nobleton
Hard Pear Cider (for me). Count Neuenahr Ahrweiler said
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– This makes the second house burning I’ve seen. I think I’m
going to wait a few years before I see another.
– Why’s that? Ms. Flynn asked.
But before the count could answer, a number of people – three
or four, I think, though the number changed whenever I looked up
– moved their chairs to our table and joined the conversation.
– The cunt from Belleville’s right, said someone. The house
burning is too much. People can’t give the poor anything, without
they burn it down, too.
– The fuckers giveth and they taketh away.
– But at least we’re not Coulson’s Hill.
– You look up stupid in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of
the Indigenous Parade.
With that done – everyone having acknowledged the prob-
lems of the house burning while ridiculing Coulson’s Hill – the
conversation turned to what was uppermost on people’s minds:
the treatment of the McGregors. There was general agreement
that an injustice had been done. The McGregors had lost their
home while rescuing a six-year-old child. It wasn’t up to them to
look after the Ainsleys’ children. That was the committee’s duty!
The whole thing amounted to taking from the innocent – the
McGregors – for doing good. Even the Ainsleys thought so.
They’d volunteered to surrender their home to the McGregors.
But the committee wouldn’t hear of it. They refused to take
circumstances into account. It didn’t matter to them why the
McGregors’ home burned down. The fact of it was all that
mattered. And what was their reason?
A short, red-faced man who’d been getting more and more
agitated spoke up.
– There’s no reason! They’re damned unreasonable!
He was shushed by another short, red-faced man. No, no. The
committee did have a reason. Just not a very good one. It seemed,
as far as the committee was concerned, that one had to remember
the whole purpose of the house burning. The purpose was to
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celebrate the past through understanding. In the past, fate made
no exceptions. Fire came. Houses burned. Lives went on, differ-
ently. Had their house burned two hundred years previously, the
McGregors would have been left as they were now. That was the
point. For the legions that had come from Europe and pushed
the Indigenous off the land, calamity was irrevocable.
A third short and red-faced man – a cousin to the others –
said
– But this isn’t the past! It’s 2017! Why shouldn’t we be
humane when we have the luxury?
– Exactly! said his short, red-faced cousin. What Bobby said!
We should be building a home for the McGregors!
Though I didn’t drink anything after the pear cider, I couldn’t
make out the time on the clock behind the bar. But it must have
been late when the serious arguments started. Because although
I appreciated the passion my companions brought to the subject
of the McGregors, I lost the thread of the argument. I was left
with impressions: grey hair recently grooved by a comb, white
T-shirts stretched taut over bulging stomachs, ruddy skin,
yellowed teeth, missing teeth, phrases that struck me (“My chick-
ens were inebriated,’ “You can poach rhubarb, eh”), the smell of
beer, the smell of whisky on someone’s breath, the smell of
french fries and just-microwaved chuckwagons: slices of ham
and slices of bright-orange cheese carelessly tucked into a wrin-
kled hamburger bun.
Beneath these small impressions, there was something deeper.
I could feel the flow of that particularly Canadian thing: passion
brought on by outrage. Outrage seeped into the Wolf and Pendu-
lum and permeated the place: an outrage that turned, at times, to
aggression, an aggression that few of those in the pub would have
permitted themselves unless prompted by their sense of political
imbalance – the fate of the poor, petty rules running roughshod
over good people, distant committees dictating to those who lived
in Nobleton. In the Wolf and Pendulum, I recognized what you
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could call a “Canadian instinct” or, if you were being unkind, a
Canadian addiction: moral reproach.
Now the house burning made a kind of sense to me. In the
past, I’ve often been dismayed by how desperately my compatriots
crave the feeling of moral superiority. No opportunity for finger-
pointing goes untaken, while the finger-pointing itself leads
nowhere but to more finger-pointing. On this night, however,
the cries of “Shame!” or “Fuck the committee!” were reassuring,
because the emotions expressed were so typical of Canadian
life, of my life.
This feeling of familiarity – of reassurance – lasted until I
went to sleep.
The following morning, after a quiet breakfast with Brigid’s
father, we left for Coulson’s Hill.
The first time I saw five flower ( Monotropa cinqueflora), a variation
of the ghost plant, was as we drove along Highway 27, the old
Simcoe County Road between Nobleton and Schomberg.
Professor Bruno was not feeling well. He (and Brigid) had
drunk too much the night before. Just past Schomberg, he asked
me to stop the car a moment so he could let his stomach settle.
While he sat in the front with the windows down, I walked in a
ditch by the side of the road. The sun was somewhere above,
burning through a thin curtain of cloud, the blue sky visible in
scarlike stretches. There was wind – the trees shook and dry
stubble in a field sounded like a rattle.
I thought at first that the five flower was a tall mushroom or
an unusual fungus. It had white flowers and a white stalk, as
Monotropa does, but it was growing out of the rotting trunk of a
fallen elm. Then I saw that it was “four-headed” – four bell-like
flowers growing from one stalk – and recognized it for what it
was. I was surprised – cinqueflora is usually found in old-growth
forests – and pleased. I was also hopeful of finding a fully devel-
oped flower, one with five heads. I examined quite a length of
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ditch and, although I didn’t find one, I came away feeling grateful
that I’d finally seen a flower I’d often heard about, most recently
from Professor Binama, a former teacher of mine.
When Professor Bruno’s stomach had settled – he’d spit up
in the weeds and felt better – we went on to Coulson’s Hill. The
farms we passed smelled of their own greenery – corn, canola,
cilantro – and of the greenery around them: Johnson grass,
Queen Anne’s lace, buttercups, chicory, maple trees, elms, the
occasional clump of evergreens, sticking out as if there by some
mysterious design.
According to Professor Bruno, Coulson’s Hill was named for
George Coulson, a cobbler from Brighton who, in 1840, had a
dream that he was destined to find a fortune somewhere in North
America, that his family was destined for great wealth. A few
years later, he was on his way across Canada, heading to Califor-
nia, when he fell ill near what became Coulson’s Hill. Feverish
and near death, George Coulson dreamed of a seam of gold
directly beneath the grass on which his burning body lay, a great
seam that would make him rich. And when he’d recovered, he
dug up the land beneath him and found pure gold, a brilliant
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vein in a long stretch of quartz. It was enough gold to make him
a wealthy man, but not rich. Faithful to his dream, convinced
he’d find more, Coulson spent his money digging up the land
around the spot where he’d found gold. He dug systematically,
for twenty years, until he’d excavated every bit of ground within
a square mile, save for a kind of hillock, a raised circle whose
diameter was twenty-five feet.
By the time he was fifty-seven, Coulson had spent most of his
gold searching for more of it. Yet, neither age nor lack of funds
put an end to his digging. This did: the hillock, derisively known
as “Coulson’s Hill” by his neighbours, was all that was left to him
of his dream. If he dug it up and found nothing, his twenty-year
search would have to be called a delusion. To have found another
modest seam of gold would have been almost as bad, scarcely
worth the decades he’d devoted to it. He was at an impasse.
George Coulson died in his seventies, having neither exca-
vated the hill nor permitted anyone to do the digging for him.
After his death, no one was interested in his plot of land. No
one believed he’d been much more than a fanatic. So, Coulson’s
Hill, which now serves as the name of a village – a crossroads,
really – became something of a synonym for broken dreams,
hesitation, and futility. Professor Bruno could not think of Coul-
son’s Hill without feeling both pity and scorn.
My own feelings were harder to pin down. I agreed it was a
pity George Coulson had never learned for certain if he was
meant to find more gold. But I also felt – maybe because I’d just
seen my first cinqueflora – that Coulson, by refusing to dig, had
kept alive the possibility of finding something precious. Despite
the professor’s view, the name Coulson’s Hill struck me as hope-
ful, maybe even forever hopeful.
– No, not really, said Professor Bruno. The hill was dug up
long ago. It’s buried under the 27 somewhere. No one ever found
anything there but shale.
I must have looked puzzled because he added
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– The fact you believe in a dream doesn’t make it real, Alfie.
A thought that’s difficult to deny. But it occurred to me, as
Professor Bruno spoke the words, that being awake is no proof
that what you see is real any more than being asleep is proof that
it’s not. The realms – sleeping and waking – are different, but
you have to be attentive in both. Not that my dreams are as
hazardous as reality. They’re strange and sometimes frightening,
but there’s a consistency to them as well. The memorable ones,
the ones that recur, almost always begin with me going on a long
trip – as I did when I was a child, travelling to churches with my
parents. They often end similarly, too, with some variant of us
(me, my mother, my father) driving home along the curve of the
lakeshore, the cn Tower in the distance.
Mr. Henderson, the friend of Skennen’s who’d been recom-
mended by Ms. Flynn, lived just off the 11th Line. He was a tall
man. At a guess, I’d say he was six feet five and looked as if he
weighed at least three hundred pounds. He was intimidating. As
was his voice. It was a loud whisper. He’d got it – the raucous
whisper – when, as a younger man, he’d been hit in the throat by
a bar stool. The stool hadn’t hurt him all that much. It had been
wielded by his younger brother, Henry, when they’d both been
drunk, after winning a number of bets as to where on Mr. Hender-
son’s person hard objects could be broken.
– I don’t do that kind of thing anymore, he said.
There was no bitterness in his voice. If anything, the
re was
nostalgia for the days when he’d had brooms, plates, chairs, and
beer steins broken on his head, shoulder, chin, and elbow. He
spoke affectionately of his brother, Henry, the “icy crook,’ who’d
recently passed away.
– Ah, he said, Henry could steal your shorts while you were
wearing them.
I found the idea of stolen underwear amusing, partly because
I’m finicky about my undershorts and partly because I’ve rarely
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“gone commando,” disliking as I do the flops you get when you
don’t wear briefs. Mostly, though, I was amused because I was
suddenly reminded of Anne, who disliked my farting if I was
naked, because flatulence was somehow worse to her when done
“without a barrier.”
As if the world were of the same mind as me, these thoughts
were accompanied by a terrible odour, like gusts from a summer
outhouse. I’m not certain anyone else noticed. In fact, I wondered
if I were the cause of the smell. Had I farted without knowing?
Or was it Mr. Henderson? The odour didn’t stop the conversation,
but my thoughts and self-consciousness negatively influenced
my first impressions of Mr. Henderson.
To be fair, this mild anxiety about flatulence came from my
parents. Not farting in public is part of the civility they taught me,
a civility they expected from me. But they were inconsistent. My
farting in public was taken as something that tarnished their
reputation. At home, I could fart almost without consequence.
They didn’t like it, but neither of them objected too much if acci-
dents happened. (I don’t believe I ever heard my mother fart. My
father I only heard once and that was while he was delivering a
sermon at St. Andrew’s, poor man.) But my parents considered
it impolite to notice when others were flatulent. And there was
the contradiction: if it was polite for me to ignore the flatulence
of others, why should others not ignore my flatulence? Now that
I’m older, I realize that this is, more or less, how it works. People
fart and you politely ignore them while holding your breath. As
a child, though, I wondered why my parents didn’t simply allow
me to fart and then allow convention – the tacit agreement that
we not acknowledge the public flatulence of others – to take
over. The other thing that puzzled my nine-year-old self was my
first inkling of how tricky society can be. Since farting at home
