Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Last Crossing

T he works I relied on in researching this novel are too many to list, but I would like to note a number of them. George Bird Grinnells Blackfoot Lodge Tales: The Story of a Prairie People (University of Nebraska Press, 1962); Marjorie Wilkins Campbells The Saskatchewan (Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1982); Walter L. Williamss The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Beacon Press, 1992); James M. McPhersons For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1997); Philip S. Longs Jerry Potts: Scout, Frontiersman and Hero (Bonanza Books, 1974); Ronald Pearsalls The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (Penguin Books, 1983); William Gaunts The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (Cardinal, 1975); The Last Great Indian Battle, Occasional Paper no. 30, Lethbridge Historical Society, 1997. As well, I would like to make mention of two articles, Hugh A. Dempseys Jerry Potts: Plainsman in Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Autumn 1967, and Gord Toltons Battle on the Belly River in True West, September 2000.

I also wish to acknowledge the generous, unstinting assistance of Richard Shockely, Doran Degenstein, Malcolm Greenshields, and Gord Tolton of the Fort Whoop-Up Interpretive Society, and, above all, my late brother-in-law, Norman Nagel, who taught me so much about Chesterfield House and showed me so many wonderful historical sites.

I thank my editor, Ellen Seligman, and my agent, Dean Cooke, for their invaluable advice and assistance.

BOOKS BY GUY VANDERHAEGHE

FICTION
Man Descending (1982)
The Trouble With Heroes (1983)
My Present Age (1984)
Homesick (1989)
Things As They Are (1992)
The Englishmans Boy (1996)
The Last Crossing (2002)

PLAYS
I Had a Job I Liked. Once. (1991)
Dancocks Dance (1995)

Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He is the author of four novels, My Present Age (1984), Homesick (1989), co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, The Englishmans Boy (1996), winner of the Governor Generals Award for Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and a finalist for The Giller Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and, most recently, The Last Crossing (2002), a long-time national bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. The Last Crossing was the winner of CBC Radios Canada Reads 2004. He is also the author of three collections of short stories, Man Descending (1982), winner of the Governor Generals Award and the Faber Prize in the U.K., The Trouble With Heroes (1983), and Things As They Are (1992).

Acclaimed for his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written plays. I Had a Job I Liked. Once. was first produced in 1991, and won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His second play, Dancocks Dance, was produced in 1995.

Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.

CHARLES GAUNT I let myself into the house, stand looking up the stairs, turn, go into the study, pour a whisky and soda. Todays mail is waiting, envelopes on a salver. My man, Harding, has laid a fire, but I dont trouble to light it. I leave my ulster on, stand sipping from the tumbler with a gloved hand, staring at the days letters.

I know what they are. Invitations. Invitations for a weekend in the country. Invitations to dine. More invitations than I am accustomed to receiving. Now people court me. Queer old Charlie Gaunt has become a minor, middle-aged bachelor celebrity. Even Richards and Merton, long-time acquaintances with whom I dined tonight in the Athenaeum, did not allow my new eminence to pass unremarked. For years, I was never anyones first choice as a portrait painter, never admitted as a full member of the Royal Academy, only very lately handed the privilege of sporting the initials A.R.A. after my name. Merely an Associate. Tardy laurels finally pressed upon an indifferent brow.

The highest praise ever bestowed by my fellow artists was to say I ought to have been a history painter, my rendering of marble in oil paint was as exquisite as Alma-Tademas. Cosgrave, with a picture dealers disdain for the truth, once described me to a dewlapped matron as a court painter. By that he meant I had doodled up a portrait of a demented claimant to the throne of Spain (of which there are legion), a sallow-complexioned fellow who sat in my studio morosely munching walnuts and strewing the floor with their shells. I cannot recall his name, only that he wore a wig, but never the same wig twice. This led to an indistinct element to the portrayal of His Catholic Majestys coiffure which mightily displeased him.

But now, the mountain comes to Mohammed. Artistic success won in an unexpected quarter. The dry old stick Charlie Gaunt publishes a volume of verse. Love poems, no less. For months, much of London society has been mildly engrossed in tea-time speculation about the identity of the lady of whom I wrote. A small assist to sales. Of course, it didnt hurt that the Times was laudatory and the Edinburgh Review kind in a niggling, parsimonious Scottish way.

Yesterday, I ran into Machar, the Glasgow refugee, outside Piccadilly Station. He was arch, and I was short with him.

We hadnt guessed, Gaunt, he cooed. I mean the book thats a side of you we hadnt suspected.

I challenged him. Youve read it, have you?

Havent had time to read it yet. But I bought it.

He was lying. If he had it at all, it was borrowed from a lending library. Well, I said, brandishing my stick to hail a passing cab, then you dont know what youre talking about, do you, Machar? I showed him my coattails, spun off without another word.

One of the envelopes on the tray attracts my eye, addressed by an unfamiliar hand and bearing a Canadian stamp. Inside, I discover a newspaper clipping already a month old.

The Macleod Gazette July 17, 1896

JERRY POTTS DEAD

AN HISTORICAL LANDMARK GONE

Jerry Potts is dead. Through the whole North West, in many parts of eastern Canada, and in England itself, this announcement will excite sorrow, in many cases sympathy, and in all, interest. Jerry was a type, and a type that is fast disappearing. A half-breed, with all that name implies, he had the proud distinction of being a very potent factor in the discovery (if it might be so called) and settlement of the western part of the North West Territories. When Colonels French and Macleod left their worried, and almost helpless column at Sweet Grass in 74, after a march of 900 miles and a vain search for the much vaunted Whoop-Up it was the veriative accident of fortune that in Benton they found Jerry Potts

My eyes skim the remainder of the obituary, settle on the last paragraph.

Jerry Potts is dead, but his name lives, and will live. His memory will long be green in the hearts of those who knew him best, and faithful and true is the character he leaves behind him the best monument of a valuable life.