Kanata Read online

  Praise for Kanata

  “With the bravura of E.L. Doctorow and the elemental force of Cormac McCarthy, Kanata captures the heartbeat of a continent, in a language as visceral and raw as the landscape and lives it chronicles. This is history made flesh, unerring in its portrait of how we make history and are made by it.”

  —Nino Ricci, author of The Origin of Species

  “Don Gillmor may well have written ‘The Great Canadian Novel’ here. In casting the country as the main character, in tracking Canada through the story and bloodlines of explorer David Thompson, he has shown Canadians their country as never before seen or imagined. Brilliantly written, Kanata is a breathtaking achievement—and one that should bury, forever, the ridiculous notion that Canadian history is dull. It is not; under Don Gillmor’s hand, it is a page-turner.”

  —Roy MacGregor, author of Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People

  “Unforgettable [and] stunning … Gillmor has such a firm grip on his factual material and the story he’s created to link those facts together. Kanata should be required reading for immigrants to Canada, but the beauty of the book is that it will also appeal to anyone looking for a good yarn rich with detail.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Gillmor’s descriptive writing sings of colour. He creates vivid portraits of a young land endeavouring to reach maturity, its inhabitants challenged by natural disasters, wars and natural disputes, but constantly struggling not to be defeated … it sure brings Canadian history to life.”

  —Guelph Mercury

  “Don Gillmor dares to write nothing less than the history of the nation in novel form, with a legendary explorer up front … Gillmor[’s] style—direct, wry and dramatically astute—might most reasonably be described as Pierre Berton by way of Don DeLillo and HBO.”

  —Toronto Star

  “An ambitious Canadian novel … Fine and demanding reading.”

  —Randy Boyagoda, National Post

  “[A] snappily written, fast-paced piece of historical fiction.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “You certainly can’t fault Don Gillmor for lack of ambition … [Kanata is a] maple-flavoured match for that Great American Novel, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (And to give Gillmor extra points for audacity, he aims to do in one book what took Dos Passos a trilogy) … A compelling work … Kanata will make you feel a little less lost when you think of your place in Canada.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  PENGUIN CANADA

  KANATA

  DON GILLMOR is the author of Canada: A People’s History and The Desire of Every Living Thing. The winner of nine National Magazine Awards, he is a frequent contributor to The Walrus, Toronto Life, and The Globe and Mail. He lives in Toronto.

  ALSO BY DON GILLMOR

  NON-FICTION

  Canada: A People’s History, Volume I

  Canada: A People’s History, Volume II

  The Desire of Every Living Thing

  I Swear by Apollo

  CHILDREN’S FICTION

  The Boy Who Ate the World

  Sophie and the Sea Monster

  Yuck, A Love Story

  The Christmas Orange

  The Fabulous Song

  When Vegetables Go Bad

  The Trouble with Justin

  KANATA

  ~ A Novel ~

  Don Gillmor

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009

  Published in this edition, 2010

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Don Gillmor, 2009

  First epigraph reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from UNDERWORLD by Don DeLillo. Copyright © 1997 by Don DeLillo. All rights reserved.

  Second epigraph reprinted with the permission of University of Toronto Press Incorporated, from “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26(2), pp. 1–20, 1989, by J.B. Harley.

  www.utpjournals.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This book contains certain accounts of conversations and events involving historical figures. Where necessary, facts and conversations involving such persons may have been altered. Kanata is not intended to provide a historically accurate memorial but is a work of fiction involving historical events and people.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Gillmor, Don

  Kanata : a novel / Don Gillmor.

  ISBN 978-0-14-305442-9

  1. Canada—History—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8563.I59K35 2010 C813’.54 C2010-905723-6

  * * *

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

  FOR GRAZYNA

  KANATA: Iroquoian for village or settlement,

  thought to be the origin of the word Canada.

  “Longing on a large scale is what makes history.”

  Don DeLillo, Underworld

  “Maps are slippery customers.”

  J.B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map”

  MICHAEL MOUNTAIN HORSE

  1967

  ALBERTA, 1967

  The light leaked through red cirrus clouds over the eastern hills as two hawks floated in elliptic descent. To the south a large bowl rose to a narrow ridge defined by the millennial curves of a stream. The Blood had stampeded buffalo off the cliffs into the creek below, their thundering weight suddenly pointless. The Rocky Mountains were visible to the west, and the expansive sky evoked a sense of possibility, the hand of God on the tiller here in the tranquil lee of the oil industry. The wind rushed at the kitchen window where Michael Mountain Horse sat, percussive gusts punching the glass.

  When they were children he and his brother Stanford used to wake early to fish the Jumping Pound Creek. It was a good trout stream but during spring runoff some years catfish ran a
s thick as logjams, their fat, prehistoric bodies filling the creek where it narrowed. One day in May, Michael and Stanford piled rocks to narrow the creek even further then stood and swatted the fish out of the water like bears. They were slimy and firm and each swat had to be timed perfectly or the fish would slide by. Filled with adolescent purpose, they found a rhythm, the simple destructive fact of being able to do it a justification. After an hour dozens of catfish lay on the stones beside the water, a handful still tossing morbidly. The largest was two feet long, its heavy, monstrous face staring up. Neither of them cared to eat the spongy flesh; it was simply malevolent sport.

  The creek was fed from glaciers in the Rockies and their feet were quickly numbed. When they got out of the water, the air stung the wet raw skin. They lay on a large rock that slanted toward the sun warming themselves, and finally slept. When Michael woke, Stanford was sitting up, surveying the fish littered on the stones below, magpies hopping delicately, taking the eyes, the most accessible (and shiniest) part. He remembered Stanford’s face, its look of disappointment.

  He and Stanford shared a bedroom and Michael recalled the door opening one night and their father standing there in a cloud of gin and they instinctively closed their eyes pretending to be asleep. Michael opened his eyes to slits and watched their father hovering over them, breathing heavily through his nose like a horse on a cold day, looking down, his face a puzzled wound, as if he wasn’t sure what he had created and was examining them for clues.

  It was Stanford who found their father, a nine-year-old boy led by his dog finding his bloody, peaceful form in the damp grass. He looked like something that had fallen from the heavens, which was true more or less. The dog licked his ruined face and Stanford just stood there for fifteen minutes, an odd farewell.

  Michael’s Thursday morning class stared at him, each pudding face empty of conviction. Baxter was curling her white blond hair with a pencil. Hector Grayson sat stonily, and August Purvue had his usual air of distraction. Billy Whitecloud’s seat was empty, an absence that filled the room. How did he fly out of that car? Michael considered the stories that had surfaced: unreliable threads, rumours, bold uninformed certitude: “I told you. Guy’s crazy. Didn’t I say it.”

  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.

  Mrs. 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 h
im 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.

  In 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.