The Governor of the Northern Province Read Free Page A

through the sandpaper-and-scrub interior. The second dropped him into a tanker headed to the deliciously named Newfoundland. Wedged between the barrels, he befriended a nervous Liberian and helped him prepare for his asylum hearing. He learned his story. Later, when he crushed the man’s windpipe, the others in the hold shifted positions to absolve themselves of witness. The altruism of survival. In a St. John’s impound yard two weeks after they reached the shore, a German shepherd sniffed out the body. By then, Bokarie was in a warehouse dormitory studying refugee relocation pamphlets.
    IV.
    He stepped off the bus and entered Centennial Park. Everything was thick and wet with spring. Damp in his heavy coat, he dripped and squelched his way into a solemn pink sea. The family was on a stage flanked by monstrous posters. Baby Caitlin, toboggan Caitlin, school Caitlin, birthday Caitlin, soccer Caitlin. A flotsam of cameramen and civic leaders was crushing them.
    As he drew close, Bokarie saw the big and empty-eyed woman from his store, Jennifer, teetering at the edge of the stage, trying to control the roseate flood of frothing sympathizers. An old longing returned. His talents were needed.
    Tilting her sunglasses, Jennifer glimpsed a pink ribbon flailing in a black hand; it was raised up and floating forward. She remembered him, the pitiful and eloquent African engineer stuck behind a lottery-and-cigarettes counter. He was starting to figure this place out, she sensed, noticing the clump of a winter jacket he had just dropped on a chair as he plotted towards her. He had lost a child to flooding as well, she recalled, deciding that there was currency in skimming a sympathetic new Canadian onto the stage. She was planning to run in the next election, her campaign centred on a private member’s bill for drainage security. Think Pink would be the motto. A global dimension could help. She beckoned and he scuttled up. They nodded at each other. She was, for a moment, surprised by what happened next.
    Bokarie broke past her, his thin frame cutting towards the family. He embraced them with an ancient comfort. Though startled to be wrapped up in this unexpected black man’s soaking clinch, they were too polite to writhe. The audience was quietly, curiously watching.
    After a measure, Jennifer intervened, now in control of the stage. She swivelled Bokarie around and guided him forward, her hand pressing against the crest-shaped scar on his back as she whispered instructions. He did not recall the pain. He was smiling. New words started crawling across old sentences. There were photographs. There was applause. There were only possibilities in his new, temperate country. Such a shiny microphone!

2
    NONE OF THE ABOVE
    I.
    When she was nine years old, Jennifer sank ankle deep into the thicket mush behind her family’s cornfield and had a mystical experience. She had been off on her own, as was her habit, her station. The other children endured the vibrating July heat by ranging across town. They searched through floridly named subdivisions and behind barren strip malls for ants and the odd frog to burn with bifocals liberated from their grandparents’ bureaus. They dropped vengeant fistfuls of pennies in the mailboxes of retired teachers, dental hygienists, and other local warlords known to be at their afternoon naps. But Jennifer was bulling through the swollen cornstalks of her family’s few acres. Their green tongues were slapping at her with rain catch dropped down by a sun shower. Which had just stopped.
    Coming out on the other side of the drooping green poles, she wiped the water and sweat from her forehead. Everything was dripping warm. She parted the reeds and came upon something that looked like an upside-down fancy candle, or maybe, she thought with a vault in the chest, an iced cruller. She walked forward. She didn’t mind the ooze sucking around her shoes when she neared the indifferent elm tree,