The golden boy, p.12
The Golden Boy, page 12
“How’s Aunt Angela?”
“Well, she’s still ailing,” his uncle answered, “ailing since November.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She’s on a new blood thinner. Yesterday it was too thin. Last week it was too thick. I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Well, her other hip went, and then her blood got too settled, her laid up like that, and it’s no wonder. But it wasn’t a big one, thank God. Her mother went the same way. Terrible.”
“Big what?”
“Stroke, Stafford. Angela had a stroke.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“A little bleed in the brain, that’s what the older nurse said. She’s good, that one. Angela likes her. She’s from Guelph. Married a Dutchman who went to school with one of your cousins there. I don’t remember which cousin.”
“Where’s Angela now, Uncle Christy?”
“Kingston General Hospital. Sixth floor. South wing. She’s in the bed by the window since the other lady died. We’ll stop in on our way past and say good night. You’re at a hotel downtown, aren’t you?”
“The Holiday Inn.”
“That’s a nice hotel. Go on and get the car and bring it around. We need to get on the road ahead of the weather.”
Stafford had known there was no point in keeping his arrival secret and he was relieved he had made no attempt to do so. The fate, after all, of the four Shepherd children so tragically orphaned would have been the principal topic of every local conversation for weeks, and Stafford knew that no amount of damage control from a retired network executive could alter the process. Every scrap of information would have been shared and rehashed many times over, and by now there would be few in the extended community who would not know that Stafford Hopkins was on his way home. And somehow, caring neither too much nor too little, Stafford was glad that the long drive from the sprawling chill of Toronto to Kingston would be shared with his father’s youngest and only surviving brother, Christian Hopkins.
It was to his uncle Christy’s farm that Stafford had gone in the months following the death of his father, and had it not been for the trouble between Christy and Emmett over the horse, Stafford might have stayed there. But change-of-life babies like Stafford were invariably caught between the generations of a family and it was no easy task to remain neutral when an older brother was the same age as an uncle’s wife and nobody could agree on anything. It was more complicated than that, though. More complicated than the insecurities of a young wife, the loss of a farm, or even the desire of two men for the same horse. It was more complicated than a mere sequence of events. It would always be more complicated than that.
“The city doesn’t stop anymore, does it?”
“No, it sure doesn’t,” his uncle agreed.
“You came up by bus?”
“I came by train. There’s a bus from the station to the airport.”
“How long did that take you?”
“Oh, I’m retired now.”
“I heard Chris is running things.”
“Chris married a real good girl. Better late than never, I told him. Just like his old dad.”
“That’s great.”
“You’re right about that. And they have a nice family too. The three boys and there’s another one coming.”
“Another boy?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know about that, Stafford. I think they’d like a girl, maybe.”
“And Emmett?” Stafford said, and he cleared his throat. “What news of my brother?”
“Portsmouth,” his uncle said. “He’s in Portsmouth.”
“He’s in jail again,” Stafford said flatly. “Great.”
“Oh no, no, nothing like that anymore,” his uncle said. “That’s all over and done with now. No, he’s not inside the jail, well, not that one anyways. They wouldn’t put a man like your brother in there. He’s just living in the neighborhood is all. He’s in a rooming house. There’s a place in Portsmouth Village that’ll take in some of the older ones if they behave themselves. It’s a house on Grange Street, just up behind the church.”
“What one?”
“The Church of the Good Thief. You know that church. We had a second cousin that went there. On the Callaghan side. Father James. He was there about ten years, maybe. The Callaghans had two that went in. Him and another one. The middle boy, I think. But that one didn’t last. Quit the church and married a schoolteacher. They moved out west, I think.”
“Are you warm enough? I can turn the heat up.”
“Did you get free mileage on this car?”
“The heat’s free.”
“How much would a car like this cost?”
“New?”
“Right off the line.”
“Forty, forty-five.”
“Thousand.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Forty-five thousand dollars.”
“More or less.”
“That’s a new factory over there. Went up all last year. Look at the size of it. They’re making the copper tops on a new kind of battery in there. Harold Miller’s got a grandson working on them.”
“Harold’s still alive?”
“Oh yes, Harold’s alive. But Isabel died. She’s gone. She died right after Maureen.”
“Maureen died?”
“Catherine found her on the stairs. It was a terrible shock for the family. You knew Catherine, didn’t you?”
“We were in the same confirmation class.”
“She married one of the Murray boys, but it didn’t take.”
“Ed?”
“No, not Edward. The other one. Russell.”
And so it went, the meandering conversation and the long drive home, and if it surprised Stafford how easy it was to remember the rhythm of a language he no longer spoke, he didn’t dwell on it. It was late afternoon by the time they left Toronto, and the sky was gray with the weight of another snowfall. But as they passed through Oshawa and then Bowmanville, the road dipped south to the very edge of Lake Ontario, where Stafford could see the great jumble of broken ice and dirt in the fading light and the darkness of open water beyond.
CHAPTER 13
Division
When several villages are united in a single complete community large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence.
—Aristotle, Politics
THE CITY OF KINGSTON is tucked into a natural harbor on the northeastern shores of Lake Ontario at a place where two rivers meet: the Cataraqui, which drains into the lake, and the St. Lawrence, which leaves it. In the winter months, Kingston can be a cold place with its pale limestone buildings and the bleak apathy of snow-covered fields and ice-bound waterways. But in the summer, when the ice melts and the snow is gone, it is a wonderful place, and the green water that emerges from beneath the frozen lakes and rivers is like new grass growing in an open field. Stafford had lived most of his life near the Pacific Ocean, but whenever he thought of water, it was always Kingston that came into his mind. Kingston in the summer, with all its rivers and lakes and hidden islands. A little city of limestone and memory, its watery walls carved out by the glacial aggression of millennia past.
The site of the city had long attracted human interest—and with it, a history of displacement, as newcomers arrived, saw the possibilities, and took what was there for themselves. Much of that was Indigenous history, back even to the Stone Age, but in Stafford’s day, the textbooks he studied in school didn’t dwell on that. History was names and dates you could memorize and be tested on. History came with right and wrong answers. A fluted point with traces of red ocher found on Wolfe Island was interesting, but less important than knowing who built Fort Frontenac; who tore it down; who rebuilt it and changed the name to Kings Town; why it prospered from an influx of British loyalists from the south when the British Empire lost the American Revolution—and how Canada beat the Yanks when an American fleet pursued a British warship into the Kingston harbor on November 12, 1812.
Some called it a second war of independence, an American fight for free trade and human rights. Some called it an extension of the Napoleonic wars. And some called it the Battle of the Carpenters, but they were the Kingston shipwrights pressed into service to build the frigates, schooners, gunboats, sloops, and brigs needed to keep the Americans on their side of the lake. It was the War of 1812, and although Kingston would escape the bloody battles fought elsewhere, the town was strategically valuable—and therefore vulnerable. In anticipation of further attacks, Fort Henry was built on a high point of land overlooking the dockyards and the inner harbor where the waters of the Cataraqui and St. Lawrence Rivers converged. Barricades and command posts were built along the shorelines and Kingston was flooded with volunteers from the farms and the townships, readying themselves for attacks that did not come their way.
Stafford tried to explain the war to Agnes on several occasions, but she found it impossible to believe that the United States of America started the war much less lost it.
“Well, you did,” he said. “James Madison signed the war bill.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Maybe that’s because Americans don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, maybe Canadians like to puff themselves up.”
“We weren’t Canadians then, Agnes,” he said. “We were, technically, Britons—citizens of Great Britain’s far-flung empire. The ones that weren’t Scottish, Irish, Welsh, or English, that is.”
“Then technically, Stafford, you couldn’t have won the war, could you?”
In truth, Agnes was not the only one confused about who won the War of 1812. History would agree on the victims, though, when the people of the Six First Nations, who had fought for allies on both sides of the dispute, were summarily betrayed by all when the treaty was signed and peace returned. There would be little left for them.
The citizens of Kingston fared better. The British loyalists had proven their loyalty. They had aligned themselves with English- and French-speaking settlers against a common foe and, in doing so, had separated themselves from their southern neighbors. It was time to regroup and start building again in preparation for new settlers and more trade along the river, but not without strengthening their defenses against future attacks with military towers of substance and a canal system that linked them to the north. There was an abundance of limestone and good timber available, and as the wealth and security of local citizens grew, so too did the little town. Grand houses and public buildings were built, garrisons and dockyards, a hospital, churches with bell towers, schools and colleges, and a penitentiary called KP to house the wicked. With each new building, the remnants of Fort Frontenac were buried deeper under the red bricks of Ontario Street and beneath those bricks, the footprints of others. And so there was a shifting of opportunity and loss as everyone took their place in the new order, and if it was a hard time for some, nobody felt their pain was too high a price to pay.
By 1841, the well-fortified town was deemed secure enough to host the first meeting of a new parliament and, in doing so, was briefly declared the capital city of a British colony now called the Province of Canada. A country was emerging, slowly but competently, like a middle child unaccustomed to fuss. There would be no great upset between Great Britain and Canada, no catastrophic break or bitter dispute. Rather, there would be a gradual shifting of perception, a shift that moved slowly from loyalty to routine, making a story less about drama than moderation.
Unfortunately, the Americans remained a mere five miles away, and even with Fort Henry, six military towers, a protected naval dockyard, and a few thousand seasoned troops, the St. Lawrence River could be too easily blockaded by the Americans, which would cut off Kingston’s access to the east. Renewed disputes were not yet improbable, and since the Americans wouldn’t be moved and the river couldn’t be moved, the capital city would have to be moved, first to Montreal and then to a place called Bywater. Kingston was too geographically vulnerable for a capital city.
The Americans, however, did not attack a second time. Instead, they settled down, as if they had suddenly lost interest in their dull northern neighbor, and Kingston was left in peace with its beautiful limestone buildings and its waterways and rivers and hidden islands.
And then the Irish came, and with them, Stafford’s people.
Stafford knew that his mother’s people, the Brennans, came to Canada later than the Hopkinses and settled on farms west of the lake near Guelph. He knew that his brother, Emmett, was named after a Brennan boy who had died in a hunting accident. He knew the Brennans had big families and got into fights easily, but he rarely got a chance to see this because it was a long drive from the Hopkins farm to Guelph and there was little time in a dairy farmer’s day between morning and evening milking to drive to Guelph for a cup of coffee and an argument. The occasional Brennan relative stopped in on his way through Napanee, though, and once, Stafford remembered, when he was about five or six, he went with his parents and Emmett to a Brennan family reunion where he ran wild with his cousins, boys who laughed when he said he had never shot a rabbit or jumped naked into a lake. But for the most part, there was little regular contact between the Hopkinses and the Brennans, and that seemed to suit Stafford’s mother more than the rest of them.
“Those Brennans are wild,” his mother had said on the long drive home following the family reunion. “Wild as hawks.”
“You’re a Brennan, Mother,” Emmett had said. “Are you wild?”
“I’m a Hopkins now, Emmett. I’ll never be a Brennan again.”
“But you might have been a Mallory,” Stafford’s father said.
“No, I wouldn’t,” she answered. “Don’t be silly.”
“I might have been a Mallory too,” Stafford said. “Stafford Curran Mallory.”
“You’re Stafford Curran Hopkins,” his mother replied. “The Mallorys don’t matter to us.”
“They came first, so they do matter,” his father said. “We wouldn’t be sitting here in this car if they hadn’t.”
“Well, I’d be here,” his mother said. “Because I’m a Brennan and we were on a different boat.”
“I thought you were a Hopkins now, Mother,” Emmett said.
“Don’t get smart with me, Emmett!”
“Come on, Mary-Jean,” Stafford’s father said. “Emmett’s just having a bit of fun with you is all.”
“But we would have been Mallorys,” Stafford insisted. “If the boy lived and the girl died, we’d be Mallorys because boys keep their names. Girls can’t.”
“You wouldn’t be sitting here worrying about names or anything else, that’s what!” Stafford’s mother snapped. “You wouldn’t be born at all, Stafford, because you wouldn’t come out of—oh, never mind! This kind of talk is no good.”
“But you are born, aren’t you?” Emmett said to Stafford, and he laughed because his brother was too young to understand how things worked. “So never mind what Mother says.”
“You never mind yourself, Emmett Hopkins!”
“All right, all right,” Stafford’s father said. “Let’s just leave it alone. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
The Mallory story would always irk Stafford’s mother because it was a story based on speculation and she disliked speculation. But Stafford loved the story, as did his father and Emmett, because the story was about their people and their name and the starving family who came to Canada on a coffin ship in 1847. A family who couldn’t have known that if their son had lived and their daughter died, the name carried forward by the only family survivor of a famine, a coffin ship, and typhus would not have been Hopkins but Mallory.
The Mallory family left Sligo in July 1847, and on August 9, a bulletin from the Canadian quarantine station at Grosse Île reported that of the 440 original passengers, 108 were dead and 150 were sick with typhus.
There were seven Mallorys on the passenger list, but only four survived the crossing. Curran, a twelve-year-old boy, was one of them, along with his father, his younger sister, Fianna, and a baby not yet two. Curran’s father was well enough when they arrived at Grosse Île, but there he picked up typhus and died cruelly, he raged, within a stone’s toss of land. The baby surprised everyone by surviving both the crossing and the quarantine station, only to die on the overcrowded river barge that brought Curran Mallory and the sister he called Fee up the St. Lawrence River to Kingston.
Over the winter of 1847–48, thousands of Irish arrived at the Kingston wharves, and they were filthy creatures, riddled with lice and sick with typhus. Many had planned to stop only briefly in Kingston before traveling on to other parts of the country where they had a distant cousin or knew the name of a family who might help a fellow countryman get a start. By the time they got to Kingston, however, all plans were put on hold because most of them were too sick to leave.
The people of Kingston had not protected their city from the Americans to hand it over to the Irish. But what were they to do in the face of this invasion of boat people who drifted in on overcrowded barges pushing against the current? They could not turn the shore batteries on them or leave them sitting in open barges to die, their bodies pitched over the side and into the lake. There were too many of them. There was disagreement initially because compassion is an unequal burden, but invariably came a practical, if not collective, recognition that the invaders could not be ignored. Kingston would have to open its gates and let the Irish in, but not without some precautions, because typhus could kill a clean person who belonged just as easily as a dirty one who did not.
Fever sheds were hastily built at the bottom of Emily Street and on the grounds of the hospital near the lake, and hundreds of local citizens came to the aid of the Irish despite the risk to themselves. There was no cure for typhus in 1847, a disease dreaded for its high fevers, agonizing headaches, and the stench of a necrotic rash if the skin bled into itself and began to rot. There was no way of knowing who would survive and who would not, but it seemed children had a better chance if they were carefully nursed through the fever and the long convalescence that followed.
