Kanata (54 page)

There was a drawing of David Thompson standing on the west coast, staring out to the sea. If the individual elements were irregular in scale, and the artistic sensibility discrepant and crude, there was a naive grandeur, Michael thought. It was huge, for one thing, and who doesn't admire the epic?

M
ichael drove along 1A, the wind listing him toward the median. The sun was obscured by cold clouds blowing swiftly from the west, bunches of slate grey among the offwhite. A flat light, the fields dry and drained of colour. He drove past the motel on the highway with its small bungalows, an illicit meeting place for lovers. Why else would you stay in a motel on the edge of town? He had used it himself years ago, consumed with desire in that shabby room. A woman from town who flirted but when they got to the motel she sat on the bed and talked for an hour and finally asked, “I was wondering, your father, as I understand it, was
white. I'm just, what would be the, if you had to put a percentage …”

He looked at her. “How much of an Indian am I?”

She gave a relieved smile. “Yes, I suppose. How much of an Indian are you?”

For an hour she talked about her obligations, and he suspected that in the course of that hour he became another one.

Past the motel were rolling hills that rose up from the Bow River valley. The western edge of the city was a hive of bulldozers and earthmovers, pirouetting on the scraped land, creating contours for new suburbs. The city grew west toward the mountains as if there was some force in that rock, a magnetism that drew people. There was still pasture land within the city limits, holding a handful of horses that looked stranded. On the fringes, you could see how cities weren't imagined, but evolved like a child's fort, adding pieces as necessity or whim dictated, an ongoing accident.

T
hey had moved Billy to a new room, and Michael assumed there was a reason. Maybe they felt he was going to improve. He was now installed in an east-facing room, the morning sun welcome. Did he sleep, and then wake within the coma, each morning a fresh disappointment? Or was it all some version of sleep? His whiskers were still spare and soft and clustered around his mouth. The two roommates that had been there on the last visit hadn't been replaced, and Michael wondered if Billy missed those wheezing, damaged bodies.

He paced around Billy's bed, and looked out the window to the city laid out in a sprawling grid of lights. What was left to say? History is a series of accidents balanced against
inevitable forces. If Montcalm had just waited three hours, instead of sending his troops out to engage the British in 1759, Louis Antoine de Bougainville would have arrived with three thousand troops and the French might have won. If Billy hadn't gotten into that car.

What are we? Thompson's Great Map, Wolfe's reckless climb, Macdonald's drunken genius, the flaws of our fathers, the corpses of Passchendaele bloating in the mud waiting for the kiss of history. Laurier's genius, Mackenzie King's shrewd indecision, the threat of snow. The path of the wolf fleeing the modern, New France, the smell of mustard gas and wild rose, the dead at Batoche, the dust settling on a million bison. A railway, revolution, a gathering of the dead on a prairie night. Loves that form mysteriously and then vanish, leaving wounds we tend like gardens. A hymn heard in another language, brothers left to their madness, a car travelling a dark country road. The hope that this frozen space could be filled; four hundred years of blood and accidents forming a shape to comfort the world.

A map was the view from above: How high do we have to go before we can place ourselves? The scouring wind roared past the window. Michael adjusted the pyjamas that were misbuttoned and kissed Billy's forehead and turned out the light.

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

Chief among the many challenges of historical fiction is finding a way to condense a huge volume of material into a coherent narrative. I relied on David Thompson's journals but collapsed the events for the purposes of my story. So his several tries at crossing the mountains become a single conflated effort, for example. Where possible I used primary sources (such as the thousands of pages of Mackenzie King's diaries, which make for interesting, occasionally disturbing reading). I used actual quotes but in some cases modified them slightly for the sake of rhythm or brevity. Dozens of books went into the research of
Kanata
, among them Knowlton Nash's
Kennedy and Diefenbaker: Fear and Loathing Across the Undefended Border
(McClelland & Stewart), Jack Nisbet's
Sources of the River
(Sasquatch Books), R. Douglas Francis's
Images of the West
(Prairie Books), and
The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art
(edited by Larry Hannant, University of Toronto Press). I am indebted to
Alan Morantz's fascinating
Where Is Here?: Canada's Maps and the Stories They Tell
(Penguin).

Thanks go to a number of people: Nicole Winstanley for her editorial skills as well as her extraordinary patience and generosity. My agent, Jackie Kaiser, who was so instrumental in the conception of this book. Gail Gallant for her perceptive reading of the manuscript. The Canada Council for their generous support. Special thanks go to Ken Alexander for his heroic efforts with the manuscript—reading, advising, and arguing Canadian history with the energy of a patriot.

And of course, my family, my wife Grazyna, my daughter Justine and son Cormac for their support and indulgence while I worked on the book.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Spanning two centuries and countless kilometres,
Kanata
is a story both epic and personal in scope. Don Gillmor, coauthor of the award-winning
Canada: A People's History
, brings the vast story of our nation into fine focus through the eyes of Michael Mountain Horse, a high school history teacher with a remarkable heritage and an adventurous past. Shifting seamlessly between Michael's story and insightful historical portraits, Gillmor delves deep into the hearts and minds of fascinating characters both real and fictional, inviting the reader to examine not only the nature of history but that of storytelling as well.

As the country celebrates the 1967 Centennial, Michael is ready to retire, but he hasn't given up trying to reach the easily distracted young minds in his classroom. Hoping to involve them in Canada's historical narrative, he assigns his class a new project: a commemorative wall mural that illustrates what the nation's past means to them. Absent from this project, however, is a fellow student named Billy Whitecloud, who is trapped deep in a coma following a tragic car accident.

Michael begins making regular visits to his comatose student, and it is here in Billy's quiet hospital room where the real story of
Kanata
is told. Starting with the life of his great-great-grandfather David Thompson, Michael delivers the lessons Billy has missed, revealing his own past in the process. Gillmor's skills as a historian shine as he furnishes the high school teacher's stories with narrative passages that invigorate hundreds of years of Canadian and world history and bring a vital human touch to men and women lost to the past.

Thompson's story sets the tone for the book and establishes many of its themes. Despite cruel hardships and seemingly insurmountable challenges, Thompson explored the vast uncharted country for the Hudson's Bay Company and made it his life's work to draft the first accurate map of its distant borders. Although his work wasn't recognized in his lifetime and he died penniless, Thompson's perseverance
and pioneering spirit were essential stones in the foundation of the country.

Kanata
's history lessons continue through the years leading up to Confederation, as John A. Macdonald, D'Arcy McGee, George-Étienne Cartier, and George Brown form a decidedly uneasy alliance and an unusual country. Gillmor presents a fascinating look at Macdonald and how this very fallible man took his place in history as our first prime minister. He also explores the inner conflicts of other crucial and controversial Canadian figures, including Métis revolutionary Louis Riel, battlefield surgeon Norman Bethune, and prime ministers Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker.

But it is Michael's remarkable story that truly brings
Kanata
to life. As his private lessons with Billy continue, Michael slowly reveals his nomadic past and the events that made him a man. From his childhood adventures with his older brother Stanford to the bloody killing fields of the Great War and the Spanish Civil War, Michael's spirit remains restless. He tramps the railways across the prairies, learns about love and heartbreak in Hollywood, finds work on ranches and oil derricks, and finally applies his incredible life experience to a career as a history teacher.

Based on painstaking research, Don Gillmor's
Kanata
is an epic exploration of Canada and its greatest natural resource—our history.

AN INTERVIEW WITH DON GILLMOR

It started with
Canada: A People's History
. It was the story of David Thompson that seduced me. I had known a bit about
his life, but after delving into the details I found his story both extraordinary and heartbreaking. At the time I thought it would be perfect for fiction.

Certainly Thompson could have supported his own novel (as could Macdonald and Bethune and others), but once I decided to open up the subject, to continue past Thompson and up to the modern era, I needed a fictional character who would act as a narrative thread. Mountain Horse gave me that latitude. He had the Native background that allowed me to explore a critical part of the country's history, and he was born at a time when he could conceivably be part of many key historical moments.