The Englishman’s Boy

“Sure you told me. But do I believe it?”

“He’s an eccentric, Rachel. But so is anyone who tries to do something big. Edison is. Alexander Graham Bell. Nobody can really explain them. Chance happens to believe movies are the art form of the future. He thinks they can capture the American spirit the way Shakespeare captured the spirit of Elizabethan England. Speaking of ambition, it may sound megalomaniac and preposterous, but that’s his aim. I don’t hear anybody else talking that way. Everybody else talks dollars. Not Chance. He talks art.” I wait for this to sink in. “What you say about me is likely true. Maybe I’m nothing more than Chance’s blank-filler. But let me put the question to you, Rachel. What’s better? To be a small part of something big, or a big part of something small?”

She ignores my question and fires back with one of her own. “And what’s the American spirit, Harry?”

The best I can do is one word. “Expansive.”

“Oh, that nails it, Harry. Just expansive?”

“And everything the word implies. Energy, optimism, confidence. A quicksilver quality. Like the movies themselves. Chance says the movies are the only thing that can capture the American spirit because they are like America herself. It makes a kind of sense to me.”

“Quite the theory, Harry. But for myself, if I want a dose of the American spirit I’ll go to Whitman, Twain, or Crane before Rebecca of Sunny brook Farm.”

“You’re missing the point. Chance wants to make films that are the artistic equal of Leaves of Grass. He might fail but he’s got the guts to try. Besides, how many people have read Leaves of Grass in Mencken’s Sahara of the Bozarts? Or anywhere else in this country for that matter? And what about the tenements and the ghettos? Immigrants can’t read English. Whitman is for the elite. But everybody goes to the movies. It’s the movies that have the chance of making everybody – the immigrant, the backwoods Kentuckian, the New York cab driver, maybe even the Ivy League professor – all feel the same thing, feel what it means to be American. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are all very well, but constitutions make states, they don’t make a people.”

“And you’re a Canadian, Harry. So why is a Canadian so concerned about teaching Americans how to be American?”

“Because I chose this place. And I’m not the only one in Hollywood. America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, was born in Toronto; Louis B. Mayer came from Saint John, New Brunswick; Mack Sennett was raised in Quebec. Canada isn’t a country at all, it’s simply geography. There’s no emotion there, not the kind that Chance is talking about. There are no Whitmans, no Twains, no Cranes. Half the English Canadians wish they were really English, and the other half wish they were Americans. If you’re going to be anything, you have to choose. Even Catholics don’t regard Limbo as something permanent. I remember when the ice used to break up on the South Saskatchewan. We’d be woken up in our beds in the middle of the night by a noise like an artillery barrage, you could hear it all over the city, a great crashing and roaring as the ice broke apart and began to move downriver. At first light, everybody would rush out to watch. Hundreds of people gathered on the riverbanks on a cold spring morning, the whole river fracturing, the water smoking up through the cracks, great plates of ice grinding and rubbing against the piles of the bridge with a desperate moan. It always excited me as a kid. I shook with excitement, shook with the ecstasy of movement. We all cheered. What we were cheering nobody knew. But now, here, when I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts we preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators, preferred to live our little moment of excitement and then forget it. Chance doesn’t want Americans to forget to keep moving. I don’t think that’s ignoble.”

It is then my mother says a surprising thing. “Home.” Loudly and distinctly. Both Rachel and I are taken aback.

“What, Ma?”

She points to the window.

“What, Ma?” I ask. “What?”

“Home,” she says one more time before retreating into silence.

19

The wolfers rose at first light, ate a quick meal of pemmican and biscuit, saddled their horses and rode out. The morning air was sharp and bracing after the night’s rain, the sky a clear crystal-blue, cloudless. Hardwick, Evans, and Vogle took the lead, the rest bunched in a squad behind them, surrounding the pack horses and remounts. There was no straggling this morning, no one spoke. In the cool air, the horses moved briskly across the platter-flat prairie, Hardwick setting the pace, a sharp trot alternating with short walks to allow the horses to recoup their wind. The sun swung up in the sky as they headed north; a few mares’ tails began to stripe the blue crystal bowl, brush-marks of white.

In an hour or so, Grace pointed the Englishman’s boy to the Cypress Hills lying athwart the brown horizon, a low bench of hazy blue, darker than the sky. By mid-morning they had reached the foot of these hills miraculously heaped on the prairie, an astonishing blue-green elevation on a sallow plain. Hardwick called a brief halt to admonish his men to look sharp, keep their eyes peeled for the Blackfoot, Saulteaux, Cree, and Assiniboine, for whom the hills were a favourite hunting ground and haunt. As he talked, the men fingered their guns, eyes warily scanning hills darkly shaded with green bands of spruce and lodgepole, interspersed with the paler green of newly leafed poplar and willow. Then they began to climb, steering to open uplands spattered with yellow cinquefoil, avoiding the spreading skirts of timber that might hold raiding parties of Indians ready to pounce. This slow procession winding its way to the Power Trading Company post run by Abe Farwell on Battle Creek moved more cautiously, more watchfully than before, the wolfers flicking their eyes right and left, a few twisting round in their saddles to toss hurried glances back over their shoulders.

At noon, the scout, Philander Vogle, spotted a single rider on a treeless ridge and raised the alarm. Hardwick’s troop bunched in a meadow a hundred yards from the nearest timber. All around him the Englishman’s boy could hear the click of rounds being levered into firing chambers. He did the same as Hardwick studied the horseman on the ridge.

“Make for cover?” Vogle prompted.

“If it’s a war party, it might be a trap,” said Hardwick. “They might be trying to drive us to the trees. If they’ve hid a party in the bush and they open up on us point-blank, from cover, that’d brown our goose but good.” He pondered some moments, his lips rolling a stub of cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “We’ve got an open field of fire here,” he said at last, decisively. “If it’s a small band back of that ridge, they ain’t going to come at us across the flat. If they’re in force and they charge us, we’ll break them with a volley, then high-tail it for the trees.”

They sat their horses, watching the motionless figure silhouetted against the sky, watching them. Nobody moved. The Englishman’s boy could feel the tension stiffening the faces all around him, feel the plumb line of midday heat bobbing up and down on the clustered heads. The figure began to move, the horse switching daintily down the ridge, breaking into an easy lope when it won the level.

“He ain’t an Indian,” observed Hardwick. The man’s blue capote had identified him as a French half-breed. On the rider came, reins draped high in both hands to show he was concealing no weapon. He braked his horse before Hardwick with a cavalier flourish, a slightly built man with a wisp of straggly beard and shocking blue eyes, evidence of a distant Norman ancestor, startling, exotic in the dark face. Cinched at his waist was the red sash of his people; a brilliantly beaded fire bag hung from it.

The two men nodded to each other. “You parlez the Anglais?” demanded Hardwick.

The man smiled, held up forefinger and thumb gapped an inch apart. “Bit much,” he said.

“Devereux, get your Frenchifying ass up here!” Hardwick roared. “Parley this fellow!”

Hardwick set the questions, Devereux translated. The man’s name was Hector Desjarlais and he lived in a Metis settlement close to the trading posts of Moses Solomon and Abe Farwell. He told Hardwick there was a band of Assiniboine led by Chief Little Soldier also camped there on the Battle Creek. The Assiniboine were in an ugly mood, spoiling for trouble. They had warned their half-breed brothers they intended to kill Solomon, burn his fort,