Читать книгу Our Only Shield - Michael J. Goodspeed - Страница 7

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Pemmican Lake, Manitoba, October 1939

THE FAIRCHILD FLOATPLANE skipped and bounced twice as it touched down on the northern lake. The engine roar intensified as the plane slowed, and the cloud of mist thrown up around the exposed cylinder heads bloomed into a circular rainbow. To Chief Superintendent Rory Ferrall, sitting in the passenger seat, the instant rainbow looked as if some clever engineer had designed the aircraft to have its own good-luck charm with each landing. With his one good eye, he stared out at the shoreline of granite, jack pine, and birch, wondering if he would ever be lucky enough to see these north woods again. He shifted restlessly in his seat after the long flight. His life had changed dramatically in the last few days. Just a week ago he had been in charge of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in northern Manitoba. Now he was flying out to say his farewells before being posted overseas. This was his last stop on that parting journey.

Exactly a week ago he had received a brief and cryptic telegram from Ottawa advising him politely that “if he should choose to volunteer,” the RCMP would second him to the War Office in London for “unspecified duties.” Rory had a good idea what those duties would entail. He spoke fluent German and had served on clandestine operations within Germany during the Great War. With another war now declared, some desperate soul in an office had dug up his file and they wanted him back.

As the Fairchild neared the dock, a small crowd of handsome, cheering, copper-faced Indian children ran down the hill. In the isolated northern Manitoba village of Pemmican Lake, the unannounced arrival of a floatplane was still such an infrequent occurrence that it created a stir in the community. The children waved and shouted greetings in Woodland Cree; and while the happy mob applauded their village’s latest arrival, a small boy in a red-chequered flannel shirt triumphantly seized the mooring line.

Rory smiled at the children’s enthusiasm. There was something infectious about the way kids up here laughed and roared when a plane came in. There was a sense of genuine zest in their hilarity, and he loved it. But these days, laughter was something he had to work at. Ever since his wife had died four months ago, he found some days a struggle. On the good days, he thought he was getting over his loss. He had told himself that he was a fatalist, that he understood that life was inherently unfair. That kind of thinking got him through the Great War, and he supposed it helped make him a reasonably efficient policeman; but on the dark days, it wasn’t enough. He looked from the children on the dock down to the aircraft’s floor. He still wasn’t certain how he got himself through those dark times.

As boisterous as this meeting with the native children was, it also left him with an uncomfortable twinge. The kids out there were like all the children who remained back in these isolated settlements: happy and energetic. The others, the majority of Indian children, those who had been sent to the residential schools, seemed perpetually dejected and tired, like transplanted flowers wilting in a neglected garden. Rory wrestled with the handle on the plane’s door. It seemed that all the new ideas after the Great War had proven to be catastrophic failures. Communism and fascism were the two colossal disasters. But even up here in the North, the great social engineering project to integrate native children wasn’t working the way it had been planned. He couldn’t put a finger on it. How else would you run schools for a population so sparsely distributed across tens of thousands of square miles of bush? Maybe it was the schools themselves, or maybe the way they ran the system. He wasn’t close enough to the project to know, but it was a problem begging for a solution. What was strikingly obvious to him was that the kids in this remote village were happy.

Happiness is a strange thing. Rory had always believed you had to cultivate it yourself. He had come back from the war highly decorated, but missing an eye and three fingers on his left hand – and with more ugly memories than he cared to think about. Happily, life had gotten steadily better for him. He joined the Mounted Police, and years later married a wonderful Chinese woman from a small prairie town; and despite the protestations of his father at both of his choices, Rory had found married life and his career in the police force deeply satisfying. It was true, there was something about police work. If you weren’t careful, it had the potential to turn some of the most optimistic men into cynics. Maybe that was true for other professions as well, but as he had seen some wonderful men become embittered, long ago he had deliberately set out to counter that.

By the time Rory’s duffel bag was unloaded, the boy in the red-chequered flannel shirt had established for everyone within earshot that he was to be the one carrying it to the Mountie’s cabin. As the procession got under way, Sergeant John McWilliams and a heavy, grey-bearded black Labrador jogged down the rock-strewn path from the village. Although McWilliams was several years younger than Rory, an extra twenty pounds, thinning hair, and a bushy grey moustache made him look much older. Unlike his commanding officer, McWilliams was dressed in a mixture of Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform and Indian clothing. He wore a Mountie’s peaked forage cap, a buckskin jacket, regulation yellow-striped trousers, and moccasins; and as usual he was smiling broadly.

“Got your radio message last night, sir. Didn’t expect you to come up for another month. Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine, John. It’s a routine visit. I’ve brought some books and newspapers, and I’ve got some spices, books, and magazines for Angela as well.” Rory looked around him, drinking in the scenery with obvious satisfaction. “I’m posted out of the division and they let me do one last set of rounds before I head off. The new divisional commander hasn’t been designated yet. Thought I’d come up and see you folks. I’m going to miss this part of the world.”

“Where are you going, sir? I was sure you’d be with us for at least a couple more years. It’s only been nine months. Is there some kind of problem?”

“No, no problems. It sounds like I’m going to England – something to do with the war. They’ve let me do one last circuit. I get to tidy up some loose ends, and then I go to Ottawa and then off to London. I suppose I’ll find out what’s in store for me later, but from what I can make out, they’re being tight-lipped about what’s going on.”

Surrounded by a cluster of happy chattering children, the two men walked up the path from the dock. The birch trees were still a dying yellow and most of the scrub bushes had already lost their leaves, exposing a floor of pale green lichen-covered granite. There was more than a touch of autumn in the air, and it struck Rory that up here only the maples resisted this turn of the seasons with one last defiant but futile crimson flourish before winter’s iron frost.

At the cabin, McWilliams’s wife, Angela, a sturdy, black-haired woman with a ready smile, was tying a braid in her three-year-old daughter’s hair. Angela stood up and gave a mock curtsey, and then, instantly turning serious, hugged Rory. “Rory, I was so sorry to hear about Ruth. It was all so sudden.”

“Thanks, Angela. Yeah, it was sudden. One week she felt ill and complained of stomach aches, and five weeks later she was gone. To be honest, I still haven’t gotten used to the idea of her being dead.” For a few seconds nobody spoke. It was a tacit moment of remembrance and commiseration. Rory shrugged. He felt choked, and despite these two being among his closest friends, he didn’t want to lose control, not now. He took a deep breath. “Life has to go on, I guess. So tell me, how have you two been since I was up here in the spring? You both look great.”

Angela spoke. “We’re fine. We still love it, just like you did when you were up here with us. That seems like a long time ago now. I suppose some day John and I will have to go back down south, but until then, we’re happy here.”

Anxious to change the subject from married life, Angela gave a small shrug. “Just now, except for the three of us and the village grandmas, we’re the only adults within a hundred miles of here. Everyone else has gone downriver for the autumn goose hunt. They’ll be back in a week or so.”

Later, followed by two shy, giggling girls and a puffing Labrador, Rory and John McWilliams strolled through the village. They were in no hurry and stopped to chat with the elderly women who sat in front of their cabins expecting to see their visitor. Although Rory could only remember a few words of the language, he was gratified to see how fluent his old friend had become in Cree and how he was genuinely accepted by the native elders. That wasn’t always the case with some of the officers up here.

When they returned, Angela had a simple supper laid out in their cabin’s front room. They talked cheerfully for an hour, then Angela excused herself to put their daughter to bed. She followed not long after.

Rory was pleased that the conversation meandered throughout the evening. In truth, there wasn’t a lot of police work to discuss up here. The Mounted Police functioned more as a steadying influence than as enforcers of the law in these truly isolated communities, a practical link to the more intensely settled world rather than the long arm of the outside world’s law. As it was, Rory probably didn’t have to come here. He could have said his official farewells by letter, but Angela and John McWilliams were special friends; and there was something in the North that exerted an irresistible pull on him. No matter what the time of year, he loved the rock, the lakes, and the woods. But it wasn’t just the outdoors. For those with the Northland in their soul, there was a perceptible sense of freedom and simplicity up here. On the Canadian Shield, life was lived to the unhurried rhythm of the seasons rather than the ticking of a clock and the shuffling of paper.

Late in the evening as the two men sat outside around a stone fire pit watching the flames, Rory grew serious. They had exhausted their small talk. For those who had spent many years living amongst the Indian communities, they understood that a trusting silence was a kind of conversation in itself. “Have you heard anything about Tommy Many Dreams?” Rory asked. “I guess I haven’t seen him for over a year now.”

McWilliams stirred the coals with a stick. “He’s gone downriver with his daughter and her husband and his grandchildren. He lives with them in the Eagle Lake band now. I think he’s doing quite well. Someone was telling me about him a month or so ago. His limp hasn’t gotten any worse, and he has no trouble keeping up with the others.” He winced at the heat from the fire. “You know, you Great War veterans keep pretty close tabs on one another. I suppose that’s only fair. Come to think of it, one of the last things Tommy said to me was that I had to say hello to you for him when I saw you next.”

They stared into the fire for a long time. John asked, “Why are you going back, Rory? I can’t imagine you don’t have a say in this. You’ve already done your share. Anybody who knows you, knows you’ve done your bit.”

Rory didn’t answer right away. He poked the fire with a stick, squinting as a draught of wind blew flame toward them. “I suppose I could have said no. In fact, even though I’d prefer to stay here, I think I could have done some useful work if I went to Ottawa at the end of this posting in Manitoba. But this war just isn’t the same as the last one. We can’t lose it. I’ve no doubt: the Nazis are completely different from the Kaiser.”

He stopped and gazed at the fire as if trying to read a pattern in the coals. “If we lose this war, it really will be the end of our civilization as we know it. That’s not me repeating propaganda. I believe it. Not only do I believe it, it scares the hell out of me. So, I think I have to go where I’m needed. Besides,” he said with a wry smile, “unlike you, I don’t have a family to raise. I can afford to be altruistic.”

The log Rory had been poking suddenly collapsed in a crash of sparks and crackling. “The fire’s dying and I suppose it’s time to go to bed; my plane’ll be back first thing tomorrow.”

Rory was up long before the others. He made himself a mug of tea and went outside. The wind was rising and low clouds were driving in from the north. He put his mug on a rock, stretched his arms above his head, and twisted to the left and to the right, slowly stretching the muscles in his back as he looked out over the lake. He was surprised that the socket of his right eye felt so good. Normally, the lingering effects of a short night’s sleep and the smoke from last evening’s fire would have left his eye feeling irritated. His glass eye and the missing fingers on his left hand had been a constant reminder that he was a survivor of the cauldron that was the Western Front. Now, with the passage of time, his disfigurement served more as a reminder to be grateful for each day instead of a stimulus for the intermittent anger he had endured for so many years after the war.

Far off, out in the middle of the lake, whitecaps were forming. Rory walked down to the community’s small dock, made from rough planks and a log-and-rock crib. The wind was cold. As the sky in the east brightened and the waves lapped along the shoreline, he watched a large flock of geese rise and circle and then shake into their V formation before flying low out from the reeds at the end of the bay. There must have been a hundred of them. They were honking and calling out to each other as they winged their way southward. Staying far out from the settlement, they passed the cabins at the lake’s narrows – well beyond shotgun range. They were smart birds, no doubt about it. And their calls, whatever it was they said to each other, made for a lonely song. Nothing epitomized the sound of the north woods in autumn like the distant call of Canada geese on the wing. At the same time, Rory thought, they were an odd sort of bird. They lived in flocks, but it wasn’t unusual for several to join another flock if they couldn’t keep up, or if in their perpetual honking at one another they had some kind of falling out. In flight, they regularly rotated their leaders throughout their journey of thousands of miles in their aerodynamically efficient wedge. And unlike most birds, the big grey, brown, and tan geese mated for life. If one mate was killed on the migration, the other stayed in the vicinity until the days grew so short and the wind so cold that it absolutely had to go. Up here amongst these lakes, Rory had often seen grief-stricken Canada geese lingering around for weeks after their mates had been killed. The survivor would be there, out on the water or strutting up and down a rocky headland, day after day, alone, and always out of shooting distance; and then one day it would be gone. Rory didn’t need the food and had stopped hunting geese a long time ago.

Above the wind and the cries of the geese, Rory thought he could hear the faint drone of a floatplane. It was time to get his things and say his goodbyes.