My father as a leading man in the city was looked to as someone who ought to give guidance. He called a gathering of the heads of families in the meeting house — the same one where I later found the fingers.
So many came that the meeting had to be held outside. It was a rowdy gathering. Tumilty’s son and widow were there. Mrs Tumilty made a passionate speech, naming the murderers and asking for justice. There were plenty that sided with her. But there was another faction who felt the call for punishmp id revenge would alter the spirit of our settlement utterly. At that time we had no police, no courts, no judges, no penal code. There had been deaths before now, but no crimes of violence. This was our Cain and Abel.
Many were waiting for my father to speak. He took his time. When he finally did, he spoke against punishment. Pa was steeped in the Bible and he wanted us to be moved only by love and compassion. He pointed to the feeding of the multitudes as a sign for how we should behave.
Tumilty’s widow shouted from her place in the crowd that we didn’t have six magic loaves that could feed five thousand.
Pa tried to handle her gently, but he pointed out to her that the loaves weren’t magic. The miracle was human nature, behaving in a spirit of good will that multiplied in the act. In simple words, he said, when each of the five thousand saw the fish and bread coming out, they reached into their robes and pulled out the food they’d been keeping for themselves. ‘Fear breeds fear,’ Pa said. ‘We have to offer our guests selfless support and expect nothing in return. We have enough food. The land around us is empty and big enough to absorb all that have come and more. We have to be soft enough to yield to what’s inevitable, but strong enough to hold tight to our doctrine.’
Tumilty’s widow and son took his words very badly. It seemed my father was blaming the dead man for being ungenerous. ‘They are not people like us,’ said Tumilty’s son, Eric. ‘Give them an inch, and they take a yard. They’re laughing up their sleeves at us and think we’re fools for parting with what we’ve sweated for. They’ll pay us back all right. You’ll each get what my father got. Six feet of ground for every one of you.’
Then a man called Michael Callard spoke up.
The Callards, Michael, Freya and their twins Eben and Liesl, were one of the settler families who had left their home further south. The Callards had arrived with almost nothing and had lived with us for a few months before Michael Callard put up a house of their own on the other side of Delamere Street. They were devout and hard-working, and well liked by the other settlers.
Eben and Liesl were eighteen. Liesl was shy and handsome like her mother. Eben farmed with his dad. He was proud of his strong shoulders and lean brown body. Sometimes after a day of work in summer, he would wander downtown and brave the midges with his shirt off. He was a good rider too, and once or twice we had raced ponies on the fields outside the city. A rumour found its way back to me that we were sweet on each other. But he had always struck me as ruthless and quick-tempered, and the truth is I have never liked a man who was too much like me.
Michael Callard spoke of how his farm in the south had been attacked by armed men, how they’d been rounded up at gunpoint and given an hour to leave. He said he, like the rest of us, had come here to live in a new way, free of the threat of violence, as equals. But he was damned if he thought that meant accepting the threat of being hounded out of his own home, or having his food taken, or his wife and children hurt. He called on the able-bodied of us to form and arm a militia to keep the streets safe, and eject or punish anyone who broke the codes of the town.
You could see that many were moved by his words, even those who had persuaded themselves that all forms of violence were wrong.
I watched my father as Michael Callard was speaking and I saw trouble flit across his face. I loved my father, but I was not like him. I never needed to believe the best of people. I took them as they were: two-faced, desperate, kind — perhaps all at once. But to pa, they were all children of god, poor troubled sheep, who only needed love and an even break. He needed the world to back up what his religion told him about people. And when it came down to a choice between reason and faith, he let go of his reason.
They held a vote that time, and my father carried the day, but that was the start of two factions in the town. The one, led by Callard, was warm for the militia and us getting armed to defend ourselves. The other, which looked upon my pa as its head, wanted us to stick to the original spirit of the settlement.
Thinking of my pa just now, I see something childish in his need for things to be perfect. He was a clumsy workman and could labour for days over something that would get tossed out if he marred it. A thing would be worthless if it wasn’t just so. And that childishness fed his intolerance of people. He loved ideas more than men because they were less contradictory. And pa sometimes seemed to be able to forgive a thief or a murderer more easily than he could forgive lateness or backtalk. Murder or theft was less troubling because wholly bad. Variety and contradiction bothered him. He was like the god of the Methodists — one word could put you out of the Elect for ever.
I think in his love for the arctic you see the same hunger for simple truths: sky, snow, mountain, trees. What I found in a city — when I finally saw a real one — was disquieting. Nothing matched. It was a weird assemblage of things, but there was beauty in the oddness of it, and the thought that it was all man’s doing.
But the doctrine my father chose, like our landscape, had a crystal order to it: peace, self-reliance, love, submission to the will of god. The simple shape of it had a power to persuade. People were drawn to him. The force of his conviction made them trust him.
It puts me in mind of a piece of block ice, with its glassy sides shirred from the saw-teeth. When you melt one for water, for the longest time the block stays perfect. It just sighs and shrinks a little. But as soon as the heat finds out a bubble of air in it, it swells and bursts the whole thing into tiny pieces.
That year was one in a cluster of hot summers. The city was splitting at the seams like a fat man in his wedding suit — so many incomers, Quaker people and others, pouring up out of the scorched south, fleeing the famines. There had been squabbles all through July — people filching food from gardens, or squatting empty properties and refusing to go. And as it turned out, what happened to me was the tinder that set the haystack blazing.
Callard and Tumilty put their militia together, with weapons they bought off the incomers themselves in spite of the vote going against them.
The settlers who opposed them, which was the majority, led by my father, dogged them throughout the summer, followed their patrols shouting and ringing bells, and sat down in the streets so their horses couldn’t pass.
Over the coming weeks, the arguments went on, in the meeting houses, in stores, on the sidewalks, and between husbands and wives at dinner tables. Family by family, people were won over to Callard’s side. In our house, I was the cuckoo who spoke up against my own father. I had a simpler notion of right than he did. I think I was relieved when Michael Callard spoke: he gave voice to feelings I had had all my life. I said if someone slapped my face, I slapped back, no matter what the Bible said. My father went thinlipped with disapproval and ordered me up to my room. He felt the mood going against him in the town, and it was too much to have mutiny at his own table.
Those weeks were the worst I ever got on with him. The pressure he was under made him angry and bitter. He raged at Callard. He still had support among the settlers, but day by day it was ebbing away from him, and it didn’t take a wild leap of the imagination to foresee a day when he stood alone. He was losing authority and he was losing the city that he had struggled to build. He warned anyone that would listen what would happen if we followed Callard, but the number who would listen grew smaller and smaller every hour.