by Don Gillmor
In the spring he turned forty-nine. No longer young, and international brotherhood was no longer a youthful passion. He had come to China as he had left Spain: angry, troubled, abusing his colleagues and himself, drinking a bit too much. But he was happy in China, who wasn’t his mistress finally, he supposed, but his last wife. Contentment rather than passion. That was the role of the last wife, was it not? You would read by the fire together, inquire how the garden was going.
He started a medical training school. There were 2,300 people in makeshift hospitals and a few doctors, but there was no money coming in from Canada or America. Perhaps he should have expected as much. For a year he had had no books, no radio, magazines, or letters; no English. The only thing he had read were weeks-old editions of San Francisco newspapers that had been used to wrap cakes and knives. He read about The Wizard of Oz, and its gamine star, Judy Garland, with whom everyone had fallen in love. The movie was in colour, like life itself. He knew the Yankees were on pace to win the pennant, but he didn’t know if Roosevelt was still president. He didn’t know who the prime minister of England was. No news from Canada at all. It would be too much to hope that King had been voted out of office.
He had been deaf in his right ear for three months. His teeth were neglected and he badly needed a Western dentist. His glasses were cracked and his vision compromised at any distance. On the border of northwestern Hopei, he was as isolated as if he were on the moon. Life was in the hospitals and in his head. Marian touching him at that party in Westmount as he left, her husband in the next room, leaving the party feeling loved, and happy in the mourning that had already begun for the loss of that love, walking downhill among the mansions, revelling in that delicious misery. Days went by when he didn’t see a reflection of himself. He dreamed of coffee and rare roast beef, apple pie, music, and women.
In November he was planning to go across Shansi and down to Ya’an on foot, a distance of five hundred miles. He thought it would take six weeks. From there, Chungking, then to Yuman in the south, to Hong Kong, and finally San Francisco. In North America he could raise money and hopefully recruit some volunteers. Had he become an old man? he wondered He wouldn’t know until he was back home. Everyone was old here, a consequence of war.
He had met Mao Tse Tung, a brilliant tactician. There was none of the divisiveness there had been in Spain. Mao would drive the Japanese out, marshalling those sheer numbers, waves of citizens joined by common cause.
A few days before he was planning to leave he cut his finger while operating on a soldier, and the cut became infected. A tiny wound, yet the most significant. We are undone by our greatest successes and smallest failures, he thought. He returned from the front, too weak to operate, and joined the 3rd Regiment east of Yin Fang. His fever was high and he was vomiting violently; it could be septicemia. The poison was spreading and it would attack the tissue and then the organs, which would hold out briefly before failing in their prescribed order: liver (a veteran of many assaults), kidney (an innocent), and finally the heart (scarred, remote, perhaps ready to die). He tried phenacetin, aspirin, woven’s powder, antipyrine, and caffeine; all were equally useless.
He had already died once, in 1927, lying in the Trudeau Sanatorium with tuberculosis. He was thirty-seven, just divorced from Frances (one of the few things that got easier as his life went on), contemplating his own death. He took forty yards of brown wrapping paper and created a mural that he titled The T.B.’s Progress, modelled on Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. Using oil pastels he painted nine panels. In the first, he was in the womb. The second showed him being embraced by a beautiful angel with iridescent wings. He drew his childhood as a dangerous journey through a wood, surrounded by animals that represented diseases (the measles were a tiger, he recalled, and a dragon for diphtheria). These were the real terrors of childhood, those unseen bacteria that ate lives.
He had written poetry for each painting. He was a dreadful poet, something he had known even as he wrote all those poems, yet he kept at it. He was young then, or at least not old, and poetry is a prerogative of the narcissist. At any rate, all he was able to do in the sanatorium was contemplate his unfinished life.
Perhaps his whole life had been a preparation for China. The Chinese embraced him in a way the Spanish were reluctant to. He hadn’t been an easy man to love in Spain. Or anywhere. But he felt loved here.
He was the only trained doctor among thirteen million people. What a practice! Had he stayed in Detroit, he might have had a few hundred.
Outside Ho-Chin he came upon a boy with a bloodstain on his blue army jacket. He was perhaps seventeen and had been shot through the lung a week earlier. The right anterior chest wall suppurating, fluid in the pleural cavity as high as the third rib. Who would have believed this possible? An untreated gunshot victim walking around for a week. Each war was a medical laboratory, often grotesque, occasionally uplifting.
In Ho-Chin there were live carp in buckets, black pigs, barkless dogs, paper windows, and obsequious priests whose chants reminded him of High Church Anglicans.
Lying on the stained hospital bed, surrounded by wounded Chinese, he contemplated the body, how beautiful it is; how perfect its parts; with what precision it moves; how obedient. How terrible when torn. It goes out like a candle. Quietly and gently. It makes its protest at extinction, then submits.
He remembered walking among the pines near Gravenhurst early in the morning with his father when he was a boy. His father quoted Deuteronomy, a familiar ritual, the Bible delivered as they walked over fallen boughs under a brilliant autumn canopy. As Deuteronomy entered his ears, unwanted and abstract, Bethune scanned for deer tracks and dreamed of escaping his father’s righteous temper that built as the day progressed, starting calmly then gathering force.
Bethune had found his highest fulfillment out here among the peasants, without love or comfort. Perhaps, he noted, he was a man of God after all, like his father. How lovely an irony. His head was a fiery pain now, his organs beginning to shut down, like a street of shopkeepers turning out their lights after the day’s business was done. He wasn’t a lover or an artist or a man of science as he had intended. As he firmly believed. Merely a missionary, and now, he thought, a martyr.
ALLIANCES
1939–1950
They were a curious pair, King and Bethune, the careful politician and the reckless doctor. When I went to Spain I was following Stanford’s righteous anger as much as Bethune’s, I think. I half expected to see his ghost there.
Thomas Carlyle had a theory that history was the accumulated biographies of great men. Was Bethune a great man? A messy, recognizable type: He was arrogant, drank too much, and embraced the world like a lover. Angry and restless, though I think he found peace in China. The Chinese considered him a national hero. He became one here, too, though that came later. He was too dangerous to embrace when he was alive.
And Mackenzie King? Who knows. He was insecure, a loopy spiritualist who feared women and envied great men. His charms were subtle, to say the least. Yet the country prospered under him. For a time we were defined by him (and perhaps we still are): the spirit of compromise. I wasn’t a fan of Willie, but he endured, and you can’t ignore that.
Endurance is part of the national theme: that humbling geography, its overwhelming scale, the sheer weight on the collective psyche. Though for most people (Thompson being the greatest exception), all that land is an abstraction. But it’s the most obvious one and we cleave to it. We need to cleave to something; that’s what sustains a nation.
When David Thompson first set out to explore, he went to Lake Athabasca with two Cree named Kozdaw and Paddy. Coming back on the Black River they hit a set of rapids and the canoe tipped. The two Indians got to shore but Thompson went under and scraped along the rocks. He lost his shoes and most of his clothes. They were able to recover his sextant, which was in a cork-lined box, and their cotton tent. The flesh was torn from the bottom of Thompson’s foot, and he ripped the tent into str
ips to bind it and used the rest for clothing. It was September and already getting cold. They made a fire and Thompson thought about their situation: in a barren land, the canoe lost, without food, almost naked. They wrestled two small eagles from a nest and ate them, and Thompson and Paddy came down with dysentery. For four days they limped through the forest, eating a few berries, the dysentery sending their bodies into spasm. They were so weak that Thompson thought it was useless to go any farther. Better to die where they were. He was a young man and his life’s exploration had come only to this: one lake, one river.
Kozdaw didn’t get sick but he cried all day. Not for Thompson and Paddy but for himself: He knew he’d be blamed for their deaths when he got back. So using charcoal on a piece of birch bark, Thompson wrote an account of his own death, signed and dated it, and gave it to Kozdaw as protection. Sitting in the wilderness, writing his obituary with a piece of charred wood. I think of this image often. My great-great-grandfather, not much older than you. The mapmaker. It was the second time he had contemplated the end of his life, a short journey, its unfulfilled purpose, a hundred stories told by a dying Indian, and then a wisp, like an ash that wafts out of the fire, consumed. And yet, he endured.
You could see World War II approach from a long way off, like a prairie thunderstorm. And then it hit and we were surprised by the awful power of war once more. Wars are bad for people but good for nations; we had another chance to shed our colonial status. In the end, we left the British for the Americans, a devil’s bargain, perhaps, though it hasn’t been a bad marriage. They’re dangerous and entertaining, and God knows marriages have been based on less.
1
MACKENZIE KING, 1939
—Am I loved?
A silence from beyond, the discreet spirits.
—They voted for me, King said. The crowds when I spoke—I could feel something. I was their choice.
—A woman makes a choice but she doesn’t always love her husband. Few politicians are loved.
—And I am not among the lucky, Wilfrid?
—They will love you after you’re gone, Mackenzie. It is the way with most men. Resented, then mourned.
—Perhaps if I had a wife.
—The political wife is a rare thing. A woman who understands your world but lives in the other. A medium. Ha. But even they aren’t enough for the politician. He needs the crowd, that roar of approval.
—Will I will feel it again? Will it be enough?
—You will feel it. It won’t be enough.
King knew that the people didn’t love him. That’s why he didn’t lead; he knew few would follow. In the West, Bible Bill Aberhart was a demagogue who understood his people at the level of their private fears, staring into the dark centres that contained failure and shame and a moral strength guided by lack of opportunity. And Aberhart worked these truths like the preacher he was.
King understood the people at a level they couldn’t comprehend and therefore didn’t fully appreciate: balancing the delicate factions of the country like a conductor bringing in the strings, signalling the oboes, keeping peace among the temperamental violins, ensuring the lonely triangle felt wanted, and making all of this move forward, if not in the pleasing strains of his favourite composers (the lulling Brahms—even his name was lulling), then the emphatic lurch of the Russian, Shostakovich. The people weren’t consciously aware of this, but at another level, at the level of the spirit lusting for balance, they knew. And they knew King, the rationalist, the appeaser, the delicate crackwalker of Berlin, Ontario, was the one to keep this fragile alliance on course. If he could not overcome the forces of geography and history that tore at the nation (and he couldn’t, but then, who could?), then he could at least stay them. His peculiar genius was like the spirit world, impossible to see but powerful nonetheless.
King decided that Hitler was too shrewd to go to war. He would get what he needed simply by preparing for war, assembling all those people (that enviable unity!) and massing that German steel along the borders. The threat would be enough.
The medium said Hitler would die this year—perhaps assassinated. Mussolini too was being called. King asked her to examine his hand, to see if she saw marriage there. She took his hand in both of hers, and King thrilled slightly at her touch, the finger tracing lines along his palm. “You are destined to live alone,” she said. “There is purpose to your life. It is being ordered in this way.” They spoke to Leonardo da Vinci, whose advice was unfortunately Mediterranean (“To truly live, Mackenzie, you must embrace all of life”). Was he counselling hedonism? A genius, an artist.
There was a surprisingly casual chat with Philip the Apostle. A disciple of Jesus, an extraordinary breakthrough. (Could he talk to Jesus himself ? King wondered. What would he dare ask?) Philip, who had been crucified, hung upside down on a cross yet he continued to preach. He was offered release and refused, and died on the cross. What courage, what faith! And now, according to the slightly mousy medium, a woman with grey streaks in her dead brown hair who was channelling Philip’s Hebrew musings into a breezy American dialect, the disciple and King had begun a friendship of sorts. His friendships with the great: da Vinci, Philip, Louis Pasteur. They were a comfort, though it occurred to him that he had more friends among the dead than among the living, an imbalance he would need to address.
What of his dead dog Pat? What was God’s plan for terriers? Do dogs have souls? King was unsure what to ask the medium.
“My dog. Pat, I was very close to him,” he said. “I’m wondering … Is it possible to communicate … I don’t know the … I’d like to try.”
The medium stared at King.
“Your dog Pat,” she said.
“My dear departed terrier.”
A slight shrug. She sat motionless for three minutes. Would Pat bark at the medium? King wondered. Did he now have the gift of language? A low sound came out, not a growl, a guttural sigh almost. It pitched lower and finally died out.
“Pat is well,” she said quietly. “He misses you.”
In the morning King walked his estate at Kingsmere, gazing on the ruins he had assembled—some of them taken from the Parliament Buildings when they burned in 1916, other pieces scavenged from old houses. He was comforted by antiquity; he welcomed his ghosts. King had asked Laurier if he thought Kingsmere was too large an estate. He had bought the neighbouring properties, and his land was now too vast to comfortably walk. Partly the purchase had been defensive. The Jews had wanted to buy near Kingsmere and they would have ruined it certainly.
In the morning, King reread Matthew. Almost an hour went by before he received the news that Hitler had invaded Poland.
The following evening his departed father told him that Hitler was dead, “shot by a Pole.” His mother confirmed it. “War will be averted,” she told him. This view seemed to be confirmed again by both his grandfather and Laurier, so it was disturbing to find Hitler alive the next day. What could this mean? That the spirit world was unreliable, or nonexistent, a fraud? It couldn’t be. He had felt it, felt it with Laurier, with his mother and grandfather. He sought ways to explain this lapse, to keep all he had invested in the spirit realm intact; he couldn’t merely be chatting with a blankfaced Detroit housewife who charged him for every session. There were malicious spirits at play, he thought, spirits that were not yet divine, or simply mischievous. Perhaps there were wars in the spirit realm as well, good and evil continuing their joust. He must be cautious with future advice.
Britain immediately declared war. King waited nine days to announce that Canada would join them, a way to telegraph its status as an independent country. The First War had ended Canada’s life as a colony; perhaps this one would complete the transformation to nation. It is odd, he thought, that German aggression played such a large part in Canada’s sense of itself. But such is history, the currents difficult to detect when you’re in its swirling waters, but when you look back, what seemed like coincidence or of little consequence suddenly gathers import.
MACKENZIE KING, OGDENSBURG, NEW YORK, 1940
Roosevelt was eating the largest steak King had ever seen, rare and bloody, a prehistoric slab sitting in a lake of pale red juices. King doubted he could finish a steak an eighth its size. Where did that appetite come from? A right that God gave Americans. The president dabbed at the blood on his lip and examined the napkin. “I have been having a dreadful time with Congress,” he said.
Ogdensburg had been decorated for FDR’s arrival, the streets lined with soldiers and citizens and a thousand flags. King wondered if the president knew that Ogdensburg had been burned to the ground by the British during the War of 1812. This couldn’t be coincidence, King thought. It was part of a divine plan, an illustration of the eternal laws of justice. What was destroyed in anger shall host a meeting of peace, a peace and alliance that will reverberate for all mankind. Roosevelt wanted to assist in the war effort without being seen to do so. His political enemies would accuse him of dragging the country into the war, but the United States needed to defend itself, and if FDR went through Congress it would take months of blustering debate. Better to do it on his own. Canada was the conduit through which all of this could be conducted, once again the go-between.
“Mackenzie, I can give you fifty destroyers. We’ll deliver them to Halifax, fully crewed, then it’s up to you Canadians to get them overseas. There’s the possibility of 250,000 rifles, though little chance of ammunition, I’m afraid.”
