challenge him. Canon Campbell said: 'Trudeau is our Kennedy, you know.' I was glad that Canon Campbell didn't say 'Trudeau is our Kennedy' to Owen Meany; I think I know what Owen would have said.
'OH, YOU MEAN TRUDEAU DIDDLED MARILYN MONROE?' Owen Meany would have said. But I didn't come to Canada to be a smart-ass American; and Canon Campbell told me that most smart-ass Canadians tend to
move to the United States. I didn't want to be one of those people who are critical of everything. In the seventies, there were a lot of complaining Americans in Toronto; some of them complained about Canada, too-Canada sold the United States over five hundred million dollars' worth of ammunition and other war supplies, these complainers said.
'Is that Canadian or U.S. dollars?' I would ask. I was very cool; I wasn't going to jump into anything. In short, I was doing my best to be a Canadian; I wasn't ranting my head off about the goddamn U.S. this or the motherfucking U.S. thatl And when I was told that, by , Canada-'per capita'- was earning more money as an international arms exporter than any other nation in the world, I said, 'Really? That's very interesting!'
Someone said to me that most war resisters who returned to the United States couldn't take the Canadian climate; and what did I think of the seriousness of the war resistance if ' 'these people' could be deterred from their commitment by a little cold weather? I said it was colder in New Hampshire. And did I know why not so many black Americans had come to Canada? someone asked me. And the ones who come don't stay, someone else said. It's because the ghetto where they come from treats them nicer, said someone else. I didn't say a word. I was more of an Anglican than I ever was either a Congregationalist or an Episcopalian-or even a nondenomi-national, Kurd's Church whatever-l-wns. I was a participant at Grace Church on-the-Hill in a way that I had never been a participant before; and I was getting to be a good teacher, too. I was still young then; I was only twenty-six. And I didn't have a girlfriend when I started teaching all those BSS girls-and I never once looked at one of them in that way; not once, not even at the ones who had their schoolgirl crushes on me. Oh, there were quite a few years when those girls had their crushes on me-not anymore; not now, of course. But I still remember those pretty girls; some of them even asked me to attend their weddings! In those early years, when Canon Campbell was such a friend and an inspiration to me-when I carried my Book of Common Prayer, and my Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, everywhere I went!-I was a veritable card-carrying Canadian. Whenever I'd run into one of that AMEX crowd-and I didn't run into them often, not in Forest Hill-I wouldn't even talk about the United States, or Vietnam. I must have believed that my anger and my loneliness would simply go away-if I simply let them go. There were rallies; of course, there were protests. But I didn't attend; I didn't even hang out in Yorkville-that's how out of it I was! When 'The Riverboat' was gone, I didn't mourn-or even sing old folk songs to myself. I'd heard enough of Hester singing folk songs. I cut my hair short then; I cut it short today. I've never had a beard. All those hippies, all those days of protest songs and 'sexual freedom'; remember that? Owen Meany had sacrificed much more, he had suffered much more-I was not even remotely interested in other people's sacrifices or in what they imagined was their heroic suffering. They say there's no zeal like the zeal of the convert-and that's the kind of Anglican I was. They say there's no citizen as patriotic as the new immigrant-and there was no one who tried any harder to be 'assimilated' than I tried. They say there's no teacher with such a desire for his subject as the novice possesses-and I taught those BSS girls to read and write their little middies off! In , there were , deserters from the U.S. armed forces; in , there were ,-that year, only , Americans were prosecuted for Selective Service violations. I wonder how many more were burning or had already burned their draft cards. What did I care? Burning your draft card, coming to Canada, getting your nose busted by a cop in Chicago-I never thought these gestures were heroic, not compared to Owen Meany's commitment. And by , more than forty thousand Americans had died in Vietnam; I don't imagine that a single one of them would have thought that draft-card burning or coming to Canada was especially 'heroic'-nor would they have thought that getting arrested for rioting in Chicago was such a big fucking deal. And as for Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young, as for Joni Mitchell and lan and Sylvia-I'd already heard Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and Hester. I'd even heard Hester sing 'Four Strong Winds.' She was always quite good with the guitar, she had her mother's pretty voice-although Aunt Martha's voice was not as pretty as my mother's-which was merely pretty, not strong enough, not developed. Hester could have
stood about five years of lessons from Graham McSwiney, but she didn't believe in being taught to sing. Singing was something 'inside' her, she claimed.
'YOU MAKE IT SOUND LIKE A DISEASE,' Owen told her; but he was her number-one supporter. When she was struggling to write her own songs, I know that Owen gave her some ideas; later she told me that he'd even written some songs for her. And in those days she looked like a folk singer-which is to say any old way she wanted, or like everyone else: a little dirty, a little worldly, a lot knocked-about. She looked hard-traveled, she looked as if she slept on a rug (with lots of men), she looked as if her hair smelled of lobster. I remember her singing 'Four Strong Winds'-I remember this very vividly. I think I'll go out to Alberta, Weather's good there in the fall; I got some friends that I can go to workin' for.
'WHERE'S ALBERTA?' Owen Meany had asked her.
'In Canada, you asshole,' Hester had said.
'THERE'S NO NEED TO BE CRUDE,' Owen had told her. 'IT'S A PRETTY SONG. IT MUST BE SAD TO GO TO CANADA.'
It was . He was about to become a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
