Arthur wondered if he’d been born with an abhorrence for politics, though likely it had been instilled early by his close-minded, right-wing, iconoclastic parents. He saw politics as a Machiavellian game of clandestine deals and low intrigue. To his dismay, Margaret enjoyed it, enjoyed her underdog role in the Commons, had proved herself agile at it, despite a tart tongue and an impatience with the eco-hypocrisy that pervaded the House.
She’d been isolated by the old boys’ club, orphaned to a rear seat on the Opposition side, but she was the poster girl of the Green set, darling of the liberal press, whom she worked with jokes and sound bites. Two decades younger than Arthur, vigorous, trim, and comely. Sort of a political sex object, her gams boldly displayed in that recent Maclean’s profile. (When had she taken to wearing such short dresses?)
Sauntering from the hall came Robert Stonewell, fresh from beating his bylaw charges. Most of his illegal businesses were auto-related: motor mechanics, a taxi service, and rentals and sales from his sprawling used-car lot, Garibaldi’s infamous Centre Road eyesore. But Stoney ran other illegal trades, including a specialty crop called Purple Passion. By now, in late September, his plants will have budded out.
“He finally gave up.”
Wilkie, he meant, who’d probably developed one of his migraines trying to deal with Stoney’s convolutions. An imminent ferry departure had also played a part: judge, prosecutor, and staff were rushing for their cars, with the local constable, Ernst Pound, escorting them, emergency lights flashing.
“Stoney, I hate to offend you by asking, but when am I going to see my truck again?” Arthur’s venerable Fargo had been sitting for a month in the reprobate’s yard, awaiting a transplant. It was Blunder Bay’s sole vehicle, other than a tractor, Margaret having sold the half-ton diesel. Arthur had been making do by walking or hitching.
“Well, I was gonna surprise you, but you spoiled it by asking. I found a skookum rebuilt trannie in Victoria which I plan to acquire maybe as early as tomorrow. Those babies don’t come cheap no more.”
The traditional bargaining ceremony followed, one that would not have been out of place in a Cairo souk. Finally, Arthur bowed to the inevitable, greased his palm.
The hall was emptying out. Arthur must get back to the farm. Assuming the caretakers weren’t in one of their squabbling modes, he would have a few more days’ repose before flying to Ottawa to serve as loyal consort to the member for Cowichan and the Islands.
“Listen, man,” Stoney said, “it’s that time of year, and a certain individual is in the process of getting his crop off, and this could be a chance to make a advantageous investment. The party I represent needs a little front money.”
Arthur looked quickly to his right and left, toward the hall, saw no one close enough to hear this criminal offer.
“Hundred per cent purple Thai, man.” Stoney lit a joint, as if in demonstration. “Sweet.” The fat rollie gave off an intense aroma.
“Stoney, I do not do drug deals.”
“Heaven forbid that I would sully the name of our respectiful … respectable town tonsil. In case you ain’t aware, Arthur, I am addressing my brother here, my long-time soulmate who has just come into some tall money.”
Arthur looked down to see a horny, muscular hand reaching for the joint. Hamish McCoy, a foot shorter than Arthur and below his radar during his lookabout, was right under his beaklike nose.
McCoy took a drag. “Yiss, yiss,” he said after a moment, “a fine vintage, b’y.”
The two rogues went back to the hall to celebrate and scheme, and Arthur headed off to the trail to Eastshore Way, which led ultimately to Potters Road and home. A two-mile hike, getting his strength up for another snowbound Ottawa winter.
He was limping as he cut across the high pasture — his feet didn’t like these stiff city shoes. Blunder Bay unfurled below, a ridge of arbutus and Douglas fir above a scallop-shaped inlet, a rickety dock with his forty-horse runabout. Greenhouse, barn, deer-fenced garden, goat-milking shed, and two grand old farmhouses. The weary-looking one with the slumping veranda was lived in, and the other was being refurbished: the former home of the neighbour he’d wooed and won.
That was eight years ago, after he’d made a break for freedom, vowing forever to retire from the odious practices of the law. The courtroom had taken a cruel tolclass="underline" the artifice, the duplicity, the games that he’d despised himself for excelling at. The bloodletting, the acrimony. Dragging the innocent through the mud, painting the brutish client as the angel of innocence.
No one had been surprised as much as Arthur by the prowess he’d displayed in court. A classical scholar, a shy and gentle soul plagued by self-doubt, by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy (blame his merciless parenting), he had magically transformed each time he’d put on his robes.
Maybe it was a dissociative disorder, a double personality. Mild-mannered Arthur Beauchamp becomes his opposite, dons the armour of the Greek and Roman heroes glorified by his beloved Homer and Virgil. He’d astonished himself by winning his first twelve murders, tying Hercules’ record of twelve labours, besting the savage Cretan bull that was his own felt impotence.
And then he became a jealous cuckold and a drunk …
He carefully closed the gate, manoeuvred around the thick coils of excreta left by Bess, their Jersey milk cow, and Barney, their old stallion, who was grazing by the fence, blind and deaf, only mouth and anus working. In contrast, Homer, their two-year-old border collie, had everything working — he’d seen, heard, and smelled Arthur’s coming, was bounding so fast toward him that he overshot his target by ten feet.
Arthur treated him to a shoulder rub, then ordered him back to work. Homer bounded off to the lower pasture, where the young goat they’d named Papillon had escaped the pen again, was hiding out amid the sheep, trying to look inconspicuous.
Directing this light entertainment was the vivacious Savannah Buckett, eighteen months out of jail for an act of eco-sabotage against a high-end logging operation. She waved, looking a little helpless and flustered — a city woman, a street-smart radical, unused to the travails of country living. As was her partner and fellow parolee, Zachary Flett, who was out there too, sealing a hole in the goat pen.
Arthur paused to look at his flourishing garden, its fattening pumpkins and cabbage heads and wilting potato tops with their promises of bounty below. He will fork some up as soon as he gets out of this sweaty suit and into a uniform more rustic.
Zack had added more solar panels to the roofs of the house and barn — he was a fair hand with green technology. (“We’re going to take you off the grid, big boy,” Savannah had said, patting his farm-fed belly.) They’d been reviving Margaret’s 1920s frame house as well, and planned eventually to move into it.
He mounted the creaking steps to his veranda, sat down on the rocker, kicked off his shoes, massaged his feet, and watched with approval as, with Homer working right point, his caretakers finally arrested the goat while loudly blaming each other for its bolt to freedom.
At first, Arthur hadn’t minded sharing his house with this pair. It was spacious, three bedrooms, a large parlour off the living room, funky gingerbread details. But they were constantly at each other over the most trivial transgressions — mislaid toothpaste, underwear and socks lying about, compost not taken out.
Savannah, Zachary, and three other activists of what the press dubbed the Quatsino Five had canoed by night into a log-booming grounds below a hotly debated old-growth clearcut, armed with acetylene sets in backpacks. They’d cut through the boom chains, and by morning several hundred logs were afloat on the Pacific Ocean. Gourmet timber, yellow cedar, forty-thousand dollars per raw log in Japan. Much was salvaged, more pirated by scavengers.