Kanata (2 page)

The sun came in the eastern windows and flooded the room with a warmth that could put a third of the class to sleep in half an hour. Some of them lived on ranches and had been up since five doing chores. Michael taught grade twelve history at John G. Diefenbaker High School. He enjoyed the students, their complacency an amiable challenge. He told them stories. These children who had been lulled by stories, whose first worlds were made of dragons and princes and who had moved through cowboys, detectives, and plucky heroines, and finally heartache.

The class was drawing a map, a historical mural to mark Canada's centennial. Today they were painting the surrounding foothills and mountains. What is a mountain? A question too obvious for any of them to consider. Waves of stone that extended from the Pacific Ocean wrinkled into existence by the methodical war between crustal plates. At the bottom were the Proterozoic layers containing fossilized algae, then up through the Cambrian with its trilobites, past the Devonian and into the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. They
held oil and natural gas created from lost worlds, and vast coal deposits formed by Cretaceous forests.

The Rockies weren't formed, like some mountains, by volcanic activity. They were the result of the meticulous creep of sedimentary shelves sliding inland, the horizontal compression pushing them into soft folds and continuing to push until the folds finally erupted with slow delicacy into jagged peaks. It was a middle-aged range with no history of violence. Its childhood, in short, was normal.

The foothills were the final folds, the geologic energy spent, a last marshalling of Mesozoic strength after the calm of Morley Flats to the west, the arching of the rock less severe, the folds intact as soft hills.

Once formed, however, the Rocky Mountains showed a flair for violence. They took the lives of hundreds of Chinese railway workers. People drowned when the spring runoff suddenly flooded the Bow River, the Elbow, or the Red Deer. They died of hunger or exposure, were gored by elk or mauled by bears, buried by avalanches. They skied into crevasses, were lost on glaciers, drove off embankments, and suffered heart attacks diving into the clear pools of melted snow.

It was Europeans who brought the idea that the mountains were an inconvenience, an obstacle to trade, the barrier between Europe and the mythic wealth of the Orient. The drawing of a mountain, Michael told the blank, blotchy faces in his class, is more than a child's simple geometry, that triangle with a cap of snow indicated by a bisecting squiggly line. It has a history.

M
rs. Grayson had talked to the principal about Michael's class. Her son Hector was a corn-fed giant moving awkwardly
into adulthood, a rancher's son, and like all mothers, she was trying to protect her child. From what? Michael wondered. From change, perhaps. Change in these parts had been measured in small doses for more than a century. But now it was gushing out, and perhaps she saw his history class as part of that. The culture was in upheaval and she was worried that what had been built might fall. But she was safe. These children were immune to the slogans and fashions from the Summer of Love, from the privileged revolution playing out in the cities. They were certainly immune to his history class. Hector will go away to university, Michael thought, drink beer, perhaps try marijuana, and stare with doleful love at the first girl who undresses in his presence. He and his new girl will go everywhere together, to the library, to classes, walking and talking and drinking coffee and staring at the miracle of themselves. Hector's body, which moved as if it was operated by two different owners, will be invested with a new authority and confidence. And what will he do with this confidence? Search for a prettier girl to sleep with. He'll finish two years of university and then drift back to the ranch to become his parents and his grandparents: hard-working, independent, unimaginative, resourceful, capable of delivering a calf at 2
A.M
. on a January night, changing the timing chain on his Ford half-ton, digging wells, repairing pumps, butchering a steer. This was his history, Michael thought, he just hasn't lived it yet.

The pale yellow cinderblock hallway of the school was filled with essays that sang the praises of prime ministers, medical researchers, and suffragettes, all taped to the walls in orderly rows. A red and white banner stretched across the hallway. One hundred years old, an infant among countries. Michael's mother was ninety-seven.

The map project had begun last term, and the idea had metastasized into two hundred and fifty square feet of ragged narrative. Twenty-five feet long and ten feet high, it laid out the country in all of its idiosyncrasies—earnest drawings of founders, explorers, politicians, rebels, local landmarks, distorted aerial views, a few gracefully rendered portraits, crude battle scenes, and a ghastly rendering of Christ bleeding on the cross. It contained all the baroque whimsy of a fifteenth-century map. Initially, Michael had offered some direction, but it had grown into a monumental piece of folk art and he was comfortable with its cheerful chaos. It was his last year of teaching. He was sixty-nine, past retirement age, teaching because of a severe shortage of teachers and because it sustained him. There had been questions about his methods, but they were largely perfunctory. What choice did they have?

Did it matter who taught them history? Most of the students spent their days trying to kill the past. They lived in an age that prized the present and the future. In two weeks there would be a faster car, a new Rolling Stones album, personal jet packs. The present had all the joys of revolution without the blood.

At some point every teacher was talking to himself. You got to a point where the age gap was simply too large, or you became bored with your own stories. Or you lost the student you felt you were talking to, the life you thought you might be affecting. Michael wondered if that student was Billy Whitecloud. Now that Billy was no longer in his class, with his patient, inscrutable face and epic detachment, perhaps Michael was remaking him as someone who had promise. Some of the kids would move to Calgary and disappear into the oil business. Others would simply take over the
ranch or marry a rancher. Billy's future was less clear. That ancient lament—when, in real life, will I ever need art/math/history?—had genuine currency here.

I
n the sixteenth century, Michael told the class, London was like most of you: The British didn't have much interest in exploration; they were content to stare at one another and silently find flaws or love or both. They listened to music, drank beer, pissed in the street. Anyway, why explore? Londoners assumed they were the centre of the world, content with public floggings and the glory of themselves. Meanwhile, the Spanish sailed across the ocean to spread Christianity and disease, returning with gold.

But at some point you have to embrace the world. How else to define yourself ?

So the British take the leap. In 1576, Martin Frobisher leaves to find a passage to China. He's handsome, ambitious, essentially a pirate. One of his backers hires a balladeer to write songs about his bravery before he even leaves. Frobisher has maps that are partly rumours and fantasy, drawn by people who have never left London, who rely on traders and travellers and fabulists for their information. On the maps are drawings of sea monsters, fish, game, grape vines, and spice trees. This is the map we all begin with, filled with faith and doubt and error and fear, and with that imperfect document, we sail away.

Frobisher sails to Baffin Island where there are Inuit in their kayaks bouncing on the waves, and when he gets close and sees those weathered, narrow-eyed faces, he is filled with joy. These must be Chinese people; he is close, though China is colder than he imagined. He sends five of his men to
accompany the leather boats to shore. They land out of sight and then two of Frobisher's men appear on the shore and stand there, not moving. They turn away and disappear. Hours go by. Frobisher sends a search party to look for the men, but there is no sign of them or of the magical Chinese. The two men are never seen again.

On his way back to England, they encounter an Inuit in his kayak on the calm sea near Baffin Island. Frobisher dangles a bell over him and when the man reaches for it, they haul him and his boat on board as if they were fishing. The first thing the Inuit does in captivity is bite his tongue in half. Now he can't tell them anything in any language. Frobisher takes him to Queen Elizabeth, the perennial virgin, who had put up a thousand pounds for the voyage. He wants to show her what her money has bought: an authentic Oriental, living proof. The Inuit goes to Hampton Court and on its exquisitely manicured grounds he demonstrates his skill with a bow by shooting the Queen's swans. He dies a week later of heartbreak.

Frobisher goes back a second time and returns with ore and a family of three Inuit. The ore isn't gold, as it turns out, and the Inuit all die within a month.

He goes back a third time. To raise money, one of his backers sells tickets to see the dead Orientals. There are maps in London that have China on them now, located northeast of Newfoundland. This time Frobisher brings back 1,200 tons of ore. Gold, he says, and he parades some of the dark rock through the streets. It turns out to be iron pyrites: fool's gold. Frobisher returns to his old job of pirating, and London returns to hangings and floggings for entertainment. The maps are once more filled with monsters.

A
t the hospital the nurse stood in front of him, her grey face weary with the daily routine of cigarette breaks and human decay. “Third floor,” she said.

“What do the doctors think?” Michael asked.

“Impossible to tell with these things. He could wake up in ten minutes or ten years.”

Michael walked up the stairs. There were two other beds in the room and all three occupants were unconscious, their IVs dripping methodically. Michael sat on the metal chair and stared at Billy Whitecloud. His face was slightly swollen at the jaw, and a small patch of hair was missing on the side of his head where the stitches were. One arm was in a cast. He looked like a seven-year-old boy, untroubled in sleep. You could still see the child in them, even as they were almost grown, suddenly and regrettably gawky teenagers, resentful and insane, Michael thought, but a small gesture, the way their mouth sat in repose, the light catching their hair, and the perfect seven-year-old emerged. Billy was over six feet tall, stretched out on the bed, his feet pushing against the metal footboard.

His potential as a student was impossible to divine. He wasn't indifferent to history—the most common response in Michael's class—but was somehow unavailable to it, as if he hadn't decided what it was. There were glimpses of ability. There were glimpses of something in most students.

A
ncient maps, he told his class, were seductions, the compiled lies of merchants, the half-truths of fishermen, tales from sailors swimming in ale, a fevered dream drawn on parchment. Most of the mapmakers sat in London or Lisbon
or Genoa and in their foreshortened lives they didn't get any farther than the harbour. The empty spaces on those maps were filled with fear. What waited out there? Perhaps the Antipodeans, a race of devils who lived in flames near the equator. Or sea monsters, or men who had only one foot and hopped after their prey, their shark teeth gnashing. A race of giant women who shat gold, or winged monkeys.

The maps we have now, he told them, the ones you pick up at the gas station, are purely functional, for people travelling through those spaces. But early maps were made by people who had never gone there, for people who would never go. They were filled with larceny and rumour. Mapmakers stole from one another and distorted the truth to suit their interest.

Their mural had few supporters. The principal thought it was a fool's errand and had said as much. Each of the five panels was five by ten feet, and they worked on them in sequence, spreading them on the floor, the shoeless students congregating around the canvases like an overgrown kindergarten. He thought the act of doing, of translating talk into art, might help. The teenage brain, an endless subject in the teacher's lounge, was impervious to logic or reason, but a grateful host for whim and experience and, on occasion, narrative.

I
t was Purvue, a rancher's son, dark haired, twitchy and raw boned, usually attentive only to the unchanging view through the window, who put up his callused adult hand.

“If we wanted to draw a war on the map, Mr. Mountain Horse?”

“How would you paint a war, Purvue?”

“Blood. Dead guys.”

For the exams, they had to memorize dates, and the dates usually corresponded to wars or treaties: Jay, Ghent, Boer, Civil, Holy.

“What war did you have in mind?”

“The Plains of Abraham. It was short. I think maybe an hour.”

“Battles are short and wars are long.”

“You were in a war.”

“Yes.”

“Did you paint it?”

“No, but others did.” Picasso's
Guernica
, with its angled drama and calculated chaos. Paintings were once the only visual images of war. Da Vinci's idealized males with their perfect musculature, wielding swords, holding severed heads, dying nobly of their wounds in languid poses attended by angels. The audience craved nobility, the state demanded it. Artists were complicit for centuries. Frederick Varley's World War I paintings showed the same anguished faces as da Vinci's work, the gods or women or cherubs replaced by waste, decay, and futility in brown acres of mud. Of course, Varley was there. The Plains of Abraham produced several paintings, but one elbowed all others out of contention and became the visual reference for the next two hundred years. Inaccurate, perhaps, but catchy, like a pop song, it was called
The Death of General Wolfe
.

The first thing you have to understand about James Wolfe, Michael told the class, is that he was a tortured man. There isn't much disagreement about that.