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  STORIES

  DON HUNTER

  For June, always,

  and for Susie and Taryn

  Contents

  Swede Down

  Ali’s Friend

  Elections

  Campaigning

  Two New Guys

  Up … and Away

  If Only …

  Ballots

  Give It Up

  Stop Sign

  Barely There

  Randolph on the Job

  Family Ties

  The Grand Opening

  The New Doctor

  A Twosome

  Not in This Stocking

  Con Job?

  Burns Night

  On the Run

  Ravina and Grace

  Post Office Blues

  ER

  Neighbourly Treats

  Gone and Back

  Pressing the Matter

  Find the Artist

  At the Ready

  New York

  Pets and Plants

  Rachel Spinner

  Thelma

  Acknowledgements

  Swede Down

  It was commonly agreed in Spinner’s Inlet that Rachel Spinner should be the main speaker at Svensen’s funeral.

  The Swede, who had sat down on a driftwood log on the beach in Spinner’s Inlet, placed his twenty-four-inch-bar Husqvarna chainsaw carefully by his boots and not risen again, had been sent on his way not exactly with the Viking funeral that he had suggested—being cremated along with his boat out on the strait so that his soul would rise with the smoke and ashes into Valhalla. That particular venue, it was pointed out to him by his elementary school-principal neighbour, Julie Clements, who had studied Norse folk history as part of her Simon Fraser University master’s program, was specifically reserved for Vikings who had died in combat. Svensen’s argument that his involvement, and mostly victories, in various confrontations in logging camps from the Queen Charlottes, now Haida Gwaii, to Boston Bar and Hope made him as much a combatant as any Viking, was dismissed.

  He received a ceremony at the Church in the Vale, accompanied by ABBA playing in the background, because the Reverend Amber Rawlings, overseeing the ceremony, swore that Svensen nightly played a DVD of the group from his homeland. She had chanced to see and hear it more than once through the narrow gap in the centre opening of his drapes, and she also happened to have their whole collection. As a woman of the cloth, and the daughter of the retired-but-still-resident Randall Rawlings, she held considerable clout, so “Dancing Queen” and “I Have a Dream” it was.

  Rachel delivered what passed as a eulogy for Svensen before a standing-room-only audience of much of the Inlet’s population and a few retired loggers, who had drifted in from here and there in the bush to see an old and respected colleague move on. Rachel spoke not with notes, but from the heart. Some found her words at times inelegant, but none could fault her accuracy. She noted that The Tidal Times had reported that the Swede had been taken unexpectedly.

  “He made his own potato vodka, drank like a drain, and was 103. The only thing unexpected was that he was able to stand up and ambulate without help for as long as he did.”

  She was estimating his age—nobody really knew it, and those who had asked him did it only the once. No one objected when Rachel proposed that Svensen be buried with the Santa hat and suit that had for decades been his uniform at the community Christmas gatherings, and wearing under the suit his ripened caulk boots, logger’s pants with suspender buttons, and his perpetually present red suspenders. She dwelt at some length on the running argument that Svensen had had with the late Chief Jimmy Plummer concerning the earliest arrivals on the British Columbia coast.

  Svensen’s case had been seriously compromised when he invoked Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition as proof of Viking arrivals, conceding that while Heyerdahl was Norwegian, that was as close as you could get to being the real thing. Chief Jimmy pointed out that, according to Google—and known to anyone not as dumb as a stump—Heyerdahl’s expedition occurred in 1947, when things here were already quite well settled, and that anyway, his balsa-wood raft had ended up in Polynesia. He had concluded, “And, have you never wondered why it is that we are called First Nations?”

  So now their debate was over.

  Several of those present volunteered to be pallbearers. Two of these were spry widows of Rachel’s vintage (advanced nineties) who stepped from the ferry dressed in faded but perfectly pressed Second World War air force-blue uniforms of skirt, tunic, and cap. Each wore the two thin stripes of a second officer in the British Air Transport Auxiliary and a pilot’s wings. Along with Rachel, they had been ferry pilots in that conflict, delivering, in all kinds of British weather, every make of aircraft from Spitfires to heavy bombers to airfields across the UK. Each of them had, on previous visits, shown an interest in the Swede, which had not been reciprocated. The ageing flyers would have been in the Inlet anyway, for their monthly visit, during which the three of them would remonstrate with the TV over some improbable plot point while binge-watching Rachel’s carefully recorded episodes of Coronation Street and sipping Harveys Bristol Cream sherry.

  Funeral Usher-in-Chief Samson Spinner, Rachel’s nephew and now de facto elder statesman of the Spinner clan, with alarming visions of the two old lady pilots overexerting themselves, adding to the list of dearly departed and gaining new wings, of the heavenly variety, persuaded them to park themselves in a pew by the church door.

  Julie Clements, who was related to the Spinners through her father, Paul Martin, whose grandfather Henry had married Victoria Spinner in 1903—as shown in Rachel’s substantial and verified genealogical collection—advised that traditionally there were six pallbearers.

  The Reverend Amber Rawlings said that while she was against gambling in principle, perhaps a lottery could be held among all those wishing to tote the casket from the church out to the Wilson family pickup, an old blue-and-rust Ford thing. Rachel had dictated it would be the hearse, in the interest of economy, though the bill later presented by Charlie Wilson suggested that he, like his father, Lennie, before him, was imbued with all the generosity one might expect of a Scottish banker after a poor quarter, and he and Samson would have words before reaching a settlement.

  Samson muttered, “Christ!” appointed himself lead bearer and stuck the rest of the names into his golf cap for a draw.

  Annabelle Bell-Atkinson, the much younger sister of a former and now late Miss Bell-Atkinson, who for decades had monitored and corrected the habits and practices of the Inlet population, hinted that the draw was fixed when her name was not pulled. When no one rose to that point, she claimed also that there was a glaring lack of diversity and inclusivity because no Muslims had been selected. When advised politely by Ali Hanif, the head of and spokesperson for the five-member Afghan refugee family who had been sponsored by a combined Lions and Legion group, that none of his Muslims had put their name forward because they felt it would be a bit presumptuous after only six months in the community, she sniffed that that was all very well, but if the family was going to integrate, as was expected of them, then it was time to get on board.

  This brought a murmur from an unidentified source in the gathering that she might be a racist, which produced a contradiction from one of her twin nephews, the geeks Henry and/or Harvey—the two impossible to tell apart—who proposed that it was a momentary clash of cultures that time and generous spirits would heal. They cited statements from the prime minister about diversity as proof.

 
Samson muttered, “Christ!” again, and took charge. Rachel would walk ahead of the coffin followed by an honour guard of the Inlet’s RCMP, Constable Ravina Sidhu in full red serge and her buddy from Depot, Constable Sammy Quan, who had negotiated a day off from the Salt Spring detachment and grabbed a water taxi.

  Samson read out the names that he had picked from his cap, before stuffing them into his pocket. He led the way on the front left handle. To his right was a close-to-retirement Dr. Timothy, recently returned from his annual sojourn to the Turks and Caicos Islands, whose frequent advice to Svensen about his drinking had been unfailingly ignored. “You can’t say I didn’t warn him,” he whispered to Samson.

  On the middle two handles were, on the left, Evelyn Spinner, daughter of the late Chief Jimmy Plummer and wife of Jackson Spinner for these past thirty years. “Dad would have wanted one of us to be a witness,” she said. “They were old friends, sort of, after all.” Across from her strode the Inlet’s vet, Scotty McConville, with Svensen’s German Shepherd, Conrad (the fourth of Svensen’s shepherds so named), on a leash and looking baffled.

  On the left rear was Willie Whittle, who had taken on the job at the BC Ferries booth when his father, Sebastian, had retired. (There was a letter in The Tidal Times wondering about a lurking nepotism at work, but a BC Ferries official assured all that the competition had been fair and square. The accusatory letter, over a name not recognized in the Inlet—nor anywhere else—had actually been placed by the paper’s new owner, Silas Cotswold, who had feared the consequences of stating his apparently unfounded suspicions in a regular editorial.) At the coffin’s right rear, completing the cortege, were Julie Clements’s twelve-year-old twins Alun and Jillian, whom Samson, knowing their penchant for conflict over seniority—Alun was born just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, Jillian one minute after—had allowed each to have a finger on the handle.

  Jillian asked Samson if Svensen had signed an organ donor card and if so, which of his bits would be harvested for reuse.

  “Harvested? Harvested?” Samson sputtered. Anything else he might have said was muffled by the sudden roaring overhead of a low-flying DHC-2 Beaver float plane that dipped, then soared and seemed to disappear in a silence as it passed beyond Spinner’s Mountain, itself quite low. Breaths were bated while images of Mark Clements, husband of school principal Julie, wrestling with the controls of the one plane in his new charter business filled imaginations. But in less than a minute, the four-seater curled around the headland and splashed safely down in the bay.

  Constable Sammy Quan took out a bugle from under his tunic and broke into a moving version of “The Last Post” in B-flat, and kept proudly repeating the final notes until Constable Ravina stepped on his foot and said, “That’s good, Sammy.”

  As the cortege resumed, Alun asked Samson who was correct, Svensen or the late Chief Jimmy, on the matter of first arrivals.

  “Later!” Samson snapped.

  And later, after a communal repast of traditional Swedish dishes that Rachel had taken from a book of Swedish recipes found among Svensen’s sparse belongings (only the fish balls proved a bit slippery and difficult), Samson said that all he knew about arrivals was contained in Rachel’s history of the Spinner family. In 1855, twenty-six-year-old Samson had abandoned the bleak life of a collier in the mines of England’s northwest county of Cumberland (now Cumbria), where the narrow seams ran for miles out under the Solway Firth and men worked the coal face with picks and shovels, on their knees, and often lying on their sides, in fetid water, for wages that barely kept a family fed. He and his nineteen-year-old bride, the former Maud Skillings, had made the arduous journey to what later would become British Columbia, and were among the first non-Indigenous settlers of the Gulf Islands. (Chief Jimmy Plummer would frequently, and patiently, remind the family of the hyphenated qualifier.)

  A small rowboat had been lowered from the merchant ship they had boarded in Victoria, and the young couple had climbed down into it. Their belongings, in two trunks, had been lowered after them. The following day, after a night camped on the twenty acres they had purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company for one pound an acre—money scrimped by two generations of two families of coal miners—they had rowed out again to claim the first of their livestock: one milk cow in calf, two oxen, a crate of chickens, and a yearling bay stallion. Everything except the chickens had been shoved, protesting, off the back of the boat, and encouraged to swim.

  Samson recited from memory the words in Rachel’s family history. “Regrettably, both of the oxen and the stallion at first chose the opposite shore as their destination. Only after considerable and repeated efforts were we able to persuade the beasts that their health and future well-being—to say nothing of our own—would be best served by them adjusting their bearings and making their way to the flat beaches of what soon we would name, Spinner’s Inlet.”

  Young Alun laughed. “Good thing the first Samson turned them around. Who knows where we might be living today!”

  As the gathering broke up, Dr. Timothy asked, “Where’s Conrad?”

  The Clements youngsters found him sitting by the freshly filled grave. Conrad IV seemed to be checking the sky, where fleecy clouds were being ushered along by a soft breeze.

  “What’s he doing?” Alun asked.

  “Duh. Looking for the angels, of course,” Jillian replied.

  Ali’s Friend

  Jack Steele was ready when Ali Hanif arrived.

  Jack was a New Zealander and an exchange teacher at Spinner’s Inlet Secondary School. He had assumed that, being in a sister country of the Commonwealth, he would find cricket to be a popular sport. Not so much, as he discovered. But he was not about to be deterred and had enlisted Ali to help explain the finer points.

  Ali had not been Jack’s first choice. Earlier, he had asked Constable Ravina Sidhu to drop by and “offer some tips to a group.” Ravina turned up, thinking it likely had to do with drugs.

  Instead, “Cricket?” she said. “What the hell do I …”

  “Surely a national game,” Steele said. “I mean, where are you from—Mumbai? Delhi?”

  “Abbotsford,” Ravina replied. “And my national game is hockey. The ice kind. UBC T-Birds for two season, and I was in line for the national team before I decided to be a cop. Cricket is daft. Five hours or more, run around shouting ‘Howzat?’ stop for tea … I think my dad still follows it. Maybe you could call him, though you’d have to pay his ferry fare. And you might have trouble understanding him—he’s from Bradford.”

  So, no Ravina.

  When he arrived, Ali had said he would willingly help but would not have much time this first day. He kept checking his watch as he explained to the assembled and mostly indifferent Grade 9 students that those things were called wickets, not sticks as one voice suggested, that the ball was not thrown at them but bowled, and he was getting on about overs and boundaries and hitting for six, when the many-times-refurbished Gulf Queen announced her arrival in the Inlet.

  Ali left and trotted down the hill to the dock, where the passengers were streaming ashore and the soldier was turning heads. His faded camouflage top carried the marks of service abroad. He seemed distressed, staring around him, grabbing at something, at nothing, opening then closing his fists. His eyes seemed unfocused—until he saw Ali. He pushed through people to reach the Afghan, whom he folded in an embrace as tight as embraces can get.

  “All right, Harry. It’s all right now. You’re safe,” Ali said.

  The soldier said, “Thank you, my friend.” His face was wet.

  “No, it is I who should be saying that!”

  A young man standing nearby studied the scene. He carried a reporter’s notebook. His boss, Silas Cotswold, owner and editor of The Tidal Times, had said, “People, Cameron, that’s where you find the stories. Everybody has a story. Let them tell it.”

  C
ameron Girard decided to heed that advice. As the one intern taken on by the Times, he needed to impress, which meant more than quoting Annabelle Bell-Atkinson after she had hunted him down to deliver “some more significant community news,” mostly with herself up front.

  He had already done a decent job on a welcoming piece about the Hanif family of five—Ali, his wife, Aila, two young girls, Nadia and Balour, and one younger boy, Fabian— although he sensed that there was much unsaid about their story.

  Ali Hanif had been pleased with the story that Cameron had produced: straightforward, quotes exactly as he had spoken, and a suggestion that there was more to the tale than the reporter was able to tell. Now the reporter could have the rest. Ali beckoned the clearly curious Cameron over.

  Cameron asked how the cricket coaching was going. Ali rolled his eyes. Then he tapped the soldier on the chest and said, “Here is your story, Cameron, and it’s time that someone told it.”

  The story appeared in the next day’s edition of The Tidal Times, as told by Ali.

  “I lived in Kabul. I have a degree in engineering from the university there, and I was working what I thought was secretly as an interpreter for the Canadian forces. Harry was my main contact. He was Corporal Dyson. The Taliban learned of my work, and I and my family became targets. Harry became my protector. He was close by one day when an old pickup truck stopped outside my house. A young girl stepped out, and the truck left, quickly. The girl walked toward the house. She looked odd, staring straight ahead, a fixed smile, but her eyes were blank. I suspected that she was drugged. And I knew what she was wearing under her bulky, quilted jacket: a suicide-bomb pack.