I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (10 page)

A senior corrections officer knocked on the door, opened it. “Ten minutes, Mr. Beauchamp. We need him for the count.”

I rose. “What books shall I bring next time?”

“The histories of our nations, our legends.”

“I suspect there's not much from a Native point of view. Maybe some oral histories.”

“Those they haven't yet obliterated.” He stood, speaking intensely. “This is what I want the judge and jury to hear. I want this entire goddamned country to hear it. How we've been neutered as a people, our culture gutted. First came the smallpox holocaust. Then, after stealing our lives, they stole our land. My God, man, your Parliament passed an Indian Act that made it illegal to raise money for land claims, money to hire lawyers.” Breathing heavily.

“
My
Parliament? Am I to be assigned the role of collaborator?”

“At least the role of wilfully blind. Like Germans in the 1930s, blind to having imbibed, like mother's milk, the myths of the white master race.”

I gave him plaudits for his alliterative eloquence but reminded him that those objectionable laws had long been repealed.

“But we lost a generation to repression because the struggle had to go underground. And after stealing our land, here's the final solution: steal the children, suppress not just their culture but their language. Because with loss of language there is a loss of memory. A people without a history is a people conquered.”

“Intelligenti pauca.”
Few words suffice for he who understands.

“But
do
you understand, Arthur?”

I remember being startled, though I ought to have been aware that Latin had been taught in the Catholic-run schools.

“I mean, God, here's the white man, the colonizer, making damn sure he saves his own precious ancient tongues.”

“Am I also to blame for that?”

“Yeah, Arthur, you.
You
plural. Everyone who was raised with a bourgeois class consciousness – and that's practically all of you. I blame you for forcing your history on us. For inheriting what has been taken from us.”

However one-sided, this vigorous debate reminded me of some of my tos-and-fros with Professor Mulligan, his many challenges. I had an appetite to continue, to defend poor Arthur Beauchamp with his bourgeois class consciousness, but I was being importuned.

“Gotta cut this short right now, Mr. Beauchamp.”

I departed feeling unsatisfied, wounded. I'd been scolded unfairly. I prided myself in being a modern thinker. I had fought against the parental prejudice instilled in me
(their problem is they're all lazy)
and I had conquered it, damn it. Yes, our Native peoples had got a bum deal, but John Diefenbaker would correct all that. (I think I honestly believed that back then, in the days of my naïveté.
Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt
, said Caesar. Men readily believe what they want to believe.)

I drove Ophelia to her home in Burnaby Heights and broke the speed law getting there, hoping to evade her threat,
We really should talk
. She did talk, but not about us. I found it hard to take
her ebullience. She was too busy patting her own back to afford me a chance to congratulate her for her coup at the jail.

The women had returned to their cells after Ophelia persuaded Corrections to send health inspectors into the prison kitchen. She'd had no trouble with the Freedomites. They liked her brashness, her confidence. In the parking lot, while I stood by, she'd dallied with reporters, enjoying her triumph.

In turn I offered a spirited replay of my own session. Res school syndrome. The gutting of Native cultures. “He's brilliant, expresses himself vividly. Angry, troubled, wounded. Mind you, he has every right to be in a fury, though I felt he was trying to tutor me. It felt like a political re-education class.”

The fact is, he'd challenged me, and I didn't have the answers. I vowed to be better prepared next visit. Though I admired Gabriel, was even a little in awe of him, of his depth of conviction, I was daunted by his intensity, fearful of being used, perturbed by his short fuse.

“Tommy Douglas reigns here.” She was referring to the
NDP
lawn signs in her hilly working-class neighbourhood. I was directed to stop outside a pleasant frame house overlooking the Second Narrows. “I'm in the suite below, so I don't get the view. I'd invite you in but it's late.”

“Of course, definitely. Eleven-thirty, must hit the pillows.”

She lit a cigarette. I tensed, fearing what was coming.

She turned to face me. “Intercourse did not occur, Arthur. Normal intercourse, anyway. I thought all bachelor suites came equipped with condoms, but apparently not yours.” Pausing, looking at me quizzically. “Do you remember anything?”

I swallowed. “Not a great deal, I'm afraid. Nothing, in fact.”

“Too bad. The foreplay was awesome. We got tangled in the sheets – it was hilarious. I was going to take you in my mouth but you seemed to prefer my armpit.” She blew me a smoky kiss.
“Sayonara.”

I drove home in a state of unbounded desolation.

T
hough mostly quadruple-laned now, the highway to the Squamish Valley was a narrow, twisting affair back then, cut into precipitous cliffs falling away to the surging tides of Howe Sound. A spectacular drive from sleepy Horseshoe Bay past the clanking copper mines of Britannia Beach, past Shannon Falls and Stawamus Mountain, the towering perpendicular cliff-face known to rock-climbers as the Chief. Adding a tingle to the two-hour drive, especially in the rain, was the perpetual threat of running into a rockslide or a logging truck.

Squamish is at the fingertip of a long, crooked fjord at the mouth of the grand meandering river that shares its name, a river that on the day I arrived was at high-water, fed by the melting snows of the Tantalus and Coast ranges, which enfold the rickety town. I did a brief patrol in my Beetle, avoiding the stucco-walled structure that was the
RCMP
station. I planned to talk to Staff Knepp and his crew only at the end of my stay. Until then they weren't to know I was snooping about.

The black clouds advancing like a fleet of attacking dirigibles informed me I'd forgot to check the forecast. I thought of pulling in to the Kosy Motel but bravely continued a few miles north, to Alice Lake Provincial Park.

My tent up, I repaired to Squamish Valley Road, a gravel stretch that meandered through the Cheakamus Reserve, rimming the wide, rushing river, ultimately to some small holdings north of the reserve. The ancient forest of spruce, hemlock, and cedar had been logged, replaced by big-leaf maple and alder. Nature had lost her battle on the McLeans' one-acre lot, however – it was stripped of all natural cover. Presumably that was Buck in the driveway, about to go off on a job, stacking saws and wedges in his four-by-four International. A growling thick-chested mongrel was chained beside a sturdy log residence. A henhouse, a tool shed.

Across the way, on the river side, was a clear view of the Mulligan house on a rise above the river, an uncouth melding of an older A-frame with a modern picture-windowed afterthought sticking out the back. A Liberal Party election sign was stuck beside the mailbox, near a gated driveway so thick with mud that I dared not attempt it by car. Armed – as a good West Coaster must be – with rain slicker, wellies, and umbrella, I unlatched the gate and slogged past a pasture where two horses grazed near a mini-barn.

Smoke was curling from the chimney, lights were on, muddy boots on the doormat – Irene's relatives, maybe. Dermot had none I knew of, unless there was a distant cousin in his ancestral Ireland.

The door opened to my knock on a burly woman of middle years, a pugnacious set to her round red face. I guessed this was Thelma McLean. Her frown on learning I was Gabriel's counsel deepened into one of confusion when I carried on about how much the Mulligans meant to me. I implied I found my role distasteful but was professionally obliged to take a legal aid case and, regrettably, had to do my best.

“Would you be one of the neighbours? Their good friend Thelma McLean, perhaps?”

Her guard finally lowered, she accepted my hand. “Well, I guess you must've seen me on the
TV
. They had a crew out here. And both the Vancouver papers and
CKNW
and the
Squamish Times.”

“And you came across very well. Do you have a minute?”

“Well, kick off them mud flaps and come in. I have some coffee on.”

Most of the living area was devoted to a substantial library on tiers of shelves below the slanting walls. A wide staircase to the book-lined bedroom left little room for furniture – a few armchairs, but no sofa where a couple might sit. No television, and the fireplace looked long unused, likely because of the dangers posed by sparks in this book-rich environment.

Thelma attended to coffee in the narrow kitchen and sent me off to the addition, a spacious post-and-beam parlour looking out on misty green mountains. A boxy windowed airtight kept it warm.
A console radio and record player. Dermot had brought a wide collection of
LPS
and older thirty-fives, including Bach's complete cantatas – music that fuelled his muse, he'd told me, and made him long for God.

I strolled to the far end, with its view of the growling river. This was Mulligan's study – a wide desk and, beside it, shelves of references: biography, history, philosophy, ancient classics. There was a phone on the desk but no typewriter, no other writing tools, no paper, files, or journals; it was polished clean. I sneaked a peek in a drawer. Only some staples, paperclips, and a couple of decks of cards.

As Thelma came in with a tray I closed the drawer with my knee and strolled over to join her, affecting nonchalance. I took my coffee black, found it too hot, told her it hit the spot. I said I'd talked to Irene only the night before. “She's exhausted with grief.”

“Poor thing, she never had no close relatives, no kids neither, and her parents are gone, she told me. There's nobody excepting me to help her out. I insisted on looking after the house; it was all I could do. I won't wonder if she sells it. She never felt relaxed here. All them books would drive you crazy.”

She added some split alder to the stove. I sat near it, my notebook out.

Mrs. McLean talked easily, clearly relishing her role in this notorious case. “She must've felt like a prisoner whenever she was here. It's not as if the Professor could ever leave his books and take her to town for a meal or bowling or a movie. She didn't have nothing to do except be his secretary and sometimes take a walk in the afternoon, whenever it wasn't pouring. She never answered the door when he was out – can't blame her, with all the thieves around – so you could never go calling. But I'd wander across the road if I saw her and we'd talk about this or that – woman talk, life's burdens. You'd have to say she wasn't real countrified. And she didn't like the horses – they was Dermot's thing. The whole idea was Dermot's thing.”

“Irene stands behind this fellow Swift; I guess you know that.”

“Well, she just won't believe they made an awful mistake hiring that red Indian. That's what we call him – red Indian – because of his politics. Sergeant Knepp calls him a commie shit-disturber.”

That was useful to know, but this was going in the wrong direction. “Okay, we've pretty well covered Irene. What about Dermot? Surely he wasn't always with his books.”

“I didn't mean that impression; he just never spent his free time with her. It was always Gabriel. They'd have a heater going in the barn. I don't know what they did in there – maybe just read their books and talk, maybe something else. Or they'd go riding together out onto the reserve, or fishing, whatever. Hiking. They'd take the trail up the Chief. He could've thrown Dermot off that and nobody'd be the wiser.”

“Okay, how did you and Buck get along with him?”

“We heard about how he took a swing at Roscoe Knepp and figured him for bad news. We got ourselves a good guard dog just in case, and even then my laundry got swiped right off the line one night, which Gabriel thought was a laughing matter. Mostly we kept out of each other's way.”

“I meant Professor Mulligan.”

“Oh, him.” She fiddled with the poker, added another stick of wood. “I didn't want to say nothing like this to the news people, but between me and you, he was snobby. He had this way of looking at you like you was white trash, like even Indians are better. He's a big intellectual – or was – but he'd talk to us like children, speaking slow, with small words, like we couldn't understand anything over two syllables.”

Mulligan
was
rather a snob, with all but his favoured few. A haughty, clipped manner of speaking.