Some Great Thing Read online

  “I bet,” Louise said.

  “He was!” Ben brought a thick volume to his wife.

  “Alexander who?” his wife said, reading the cover.

  “Pushkin. Alexander Pushkin.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a Negro to me,” Louise said.

  “He wrote poetry. He wrote prose. He wrote The Queen of Spades! He wrote an unfinished novel about his great-grandfather, called The Negro of Peter the Great.”

  “Didn’t finish it, hunh?” Louise said. “Now that sounds like a Negro. So tell me, if he’s Russian, how come he’s black?”

  “His great-grandfather was from Abyssinia,” Ben said.

  “From where?”

  “Ancient Ethiopia.”

  “You’re saying he had one ancestor from Africa?”

  “That’s right,” Ben said.

  “And the rest were Russians? Regular white folk?”

  “Yes. But…”

  Louise turned back to her ironing. “Then he didn’t have much coloured blood left in him, you ask me.”

  Ben lost his temper. Who was she to deny black heritage? One drop of coloured blood made you black, and that was that.

  “Don’t pay him any mind,” Louise told Mahatma. “Twisting and yanking the truth out of shape, he’ll fill up your head with confusion. I say, better to have your head empty and see clear.”

  “Don’t pay her any mind, son,” Ben countered. “If you keep your head empty, you’ll see clear all right. You’ll look clear at mediocrity all your life!”

  Louise had wanted to name her son Paul. Paul James Grafton. Ben would have nothing to do with it. Who ever heard of a world leader named Paul? This was no ordinary baby. He was a Grafton! The baby, the story goes, started to cry. Louise rocked him protectively. That husband of hers was insane. He read too many books. Lately, he’d been reading Greek mythology. Walking all around the house spouting crazy names: Prometheus, Zacharia, Euripides, Homer. She wished he would shut up about all those books of his. He carried on as if he were a scholar, and not just a plain old railway porter.

  “And how do you want to name him?” Louise asked.

  “Euripides Homer Grafton.”

  Louise put the baby in its room, closed the door and went to the kitchen cupboard. She launched a teacup at his head. It missed and exploded against a wall. “You’re not naming my baby after any Greeks,” she said between clenched teeth. “And none of your Negro pride names, either.” With her next missile—a teapot—she nicked one of Ben’s massive ears. Years later, Ben would show the scar to Mahatma. See that? Your mother gave it to me. Cupping his bleeding ear, Ben consented. It was agreed that he would find the name, but that Louise retained veto rights over anything sounding Greek or Negro. There was to be no Euripides Homer Grafton. No Marcus Garvey Grafton, no Booker T. Grafton. Ben accepted his wife’s conditions, because he knew that otherwise she would oppose him at every turn. She would call the boy Paul no matter what Ben called him. Ben needed her cooperation. He didn’t want the boy confused about his name.

  Ben found the name for his son by a devious route. Mahatma Gandhi was a great man. A man of great thoughts and great action. A credit to his race. True, he was an Indian, from India. But he had brown skin. Call him an Indian, call him what you wanted, as far as Ben Grafton was concerned, the man was coloured. Brown-skinned just like Ben’s son. Mahatma it would be. It was a great name. Fitting for a great person. Mahatma had a good sound to it. It was respectable. It had three syllables. Anybody who meant to pronounce that name was going to have to stop and think about it. Mahatma Grafton!

  “Mahatma,” Louise sniffed. “Is that a Negro name?”

  “No,” Ben was able to answer, “it is not.”

  Late one September afternoon, Chuck Maxwell asked Mahatma, “By the way, where are you from, anyway?”

  Mahatma Grafton hadn’t found anything to write about that day. He had been in a dry spell for three weeks and was getting edgy about it. Even the old man had been bugging him about it. “I haven’t seen your name in the paper lately. Aren’t they giving you enough work to do?” And now Chuck was asking a question Mahatma fielded ten times a week. Mahatma mumbled something silly and went home.

  “He says he’s from Equatorial Mali,” Chuck told Helen. “That’s in Africa, right?”

  “There’s no such place,” Helen said. “There’s Mali. And there’s Ecuatorial Guinea. But there’s no Ecuatorial Mali. He’s spoofing you.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Why’d you ask him where he was from?”

  Chuck threw up his arms. “What’s wrong with that? We’re professionals, right? What’s wrong with asking a question?”

  “Forget it, Chuck. I’m sure he still likes you.”

  “How do you think he’s doing on probation?” Chuck said.

  “They won’t hire him unless he puts out more copy,” Helen said. “He hasn’t been on page one for a while.”

  “Come on,” Chuck said. “The kid’s good. Management won’t cut him loose.”

  “How much you want to bet?” Helen said.

  Chuck ignored the challenge. “Imagine getting fired. Imagine having to do something else. That’s what rots my socks. I mean, outside the newspaper business, what else could I do?”

  Helen chuckled. “Chuck Maxwell, Chief of Public Relations, Manitoba Provincial Police.”

  “Very funny,” Chuck said. “My problem is, I hate it here, but what else can I do? You have been to university. But I’ve been working in this joint since I was sixteen. It’s the only job I’ve had. If Mahatma Grafton fails his probation, he’ll just get another job. But what if they axe me? Where do I go?”

  Mahatma Grafton was beginning to agree with Chuck Maxwell that newspaper managers behaved “like neanderthals.” Mahatma had spent almost two months on the job without any indication of how his work was viewed, or why his own initiatives were usually junked, or why he was receiving little from assignment editors. The only feedback he had was in how his stories were placed. In that sense, his worth was measurable in each day’s paper: page one meant good, page forty-nine meant not so good, and stories that never ran meant very bad. Nobody told him anything. Except Chuck, who warned Mahatma that his performance would be assessed by numbers. How many stories did he generate? How many ran on page one? Mahatma tried to produce more. But it was hard to dig up news on his own, and his editors weren’t assigning him much. He remembered something Ben used to ask him every day after school: “What did you do for humanity today?” As a boy, Mahatma grew to hate the question. He learned to shut out the voice of his father exhorting him to do great things for mankind.

  Mahatma was flipping through the paper one day and wondering about the value of his work at The Herald, when his horoscope jumped out at him.

  Don’t be hoodwinked by pedlars of mediocrity. Quality counts. Quantity doesn’t. But forget that for now and hustle to save your job.

  Mahatma walked up to Helen Savoie. “Something tells me you know my birthday.”

  “Late January, I believe. You’re an Aquarius.”

  “Do you doctor those horoscopes?”

  Helen grinned. “Sometimes I get inspired.”

  “What does the management think about that?”

  “Management?” she laughed. “It doesn’t care, dear lad. Management doesn’t read the paper.”

  Don Betts was committed to hard news. Who shot whom, who got charged with electoral fraud, who was advancing the cause of totalitarian communism while working as mayor of Canada’s seventh largest city! This was what readers wanted. It was certainly what Don wanted. No entertainment, no comics. No lifestyle puffery. Horoscopes were the only exception—they were Don’s one weakness. They seemed written by someone who disliked him. He knew this was impossible—The Herald got its horoscopes from a syndicated astrologist in Los Angeles. But it tickled him to imagine some California wacko taking the trouble to insult him every week.

  Around eight-thirty p.m. on September 2
0, Don Betts pushed away from his desk and walked to the men’s can, taking the horoscope page with him. He settled into a stall and began to read the entry for Taurus:

  You will bungle whatever you undertake today. Do the world a favour and call in sick…

  The lights went out. Don swore. He figured there had been a power failure. But someone entered the stall next to his and coughed.

  He asked, “That you, Chuck?”

  “Oh, you in here too, Don?”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Can’t you hear, Don?” Chuck laughed.

  “Why did you turn off the lights?”

  “I find it relaxing.”

  “He finds it relaxing,” Don echoed. “He turns off the fucking lights and finds that relaxing!”

  “If it really bothers you, you can turn ’em back on.”

  “I can’t even find my way out of here. It’s pitch black. Where’s the light switch, you nimwit?”

  “Hold on. I’ll just be a minute. I’ll show you out.”

  For Don Betts, that incident confirmed it. Chuck was around the bend. He wrote useless copy and Don wanted him out. Another person Don hoped to get fired was Mahatma Grafton, whom he despised even more than Maxwell. What infuriated Don was the way Grafton looked up at him blankly, the corners of his lips tugged up in a smirk, whenever Don approached him with a story idea. You could jazz up a quote or be caught drunk on the job, but you could never appear not to give a shit! You could never just stand there and shrug when CBC-TV scooped you. It was unthinkable to say ‘so what?’ when Edward Slade of The Winnipeg Star was the first to catch wind of the sensational murder of a high school cheerleader. Yet this was precisely what Don had heard Grafton say.

  Maybe it was racial. Maybe it was cultural. Maybe it came from too much schooling. Don didn’t know exactly why, but Mahatma Grafton did not fit in a newsroom. Didn’t have the right values. Didn’t have any values. Don had given the guy a chance. Tried to straighten him out. One time, after Grafton had filed a story so balanced and cautious that it made the reader yawn, Don tried to talk to him. “This story lacks zip. It has no punch. Can’t you make the lead stronger?”

  “No,” Grafton said.

  Don tried again. “You have to capture the reader and make him read your story. So pack that story with every punch you have. To do that, you gotta keep one thing in mind. Big or small, local or international, in every story someone is gettin’ screwed and someone’s doing the screwing. Stick to those basics and you’ll never go wrong.” Don gaped at Grafton, who was grinning. “What’s so funny?”

  “So if I understand, our job is to expose fornicators.”

  Don Betts had no use for smartasses.

  Using The Winnipeg Herald’s computer system, an editor could see what any given reporter was writing at any given moment. Late one afternoon, eight weeks after Mahatma joined The Herald, Don found him working on an interesting story:

  American immigration authorities listed John Novak as an “unwelcome alien” from 1952 until he became mayor of Winnipeg ten years later.

  After sweeping the 1962 municipal election, the communist politician immediately “took formal steps” to have his name struck from the foreign visitors’ “Lookout List” kept at border crossings into the United States.

  “I had a life in politics ahead of me and it was entirely unpractical, not to say ludicrous, that the United States should continue to refuse me entry on the basis of my political beliefs,” the mayor said in a recent interview.

  Section 212(a)28 of the 1952 United States McCarran-Walter Immigration and Naturalization Act bars entry to foreigners who are members of the communist party of any foreign state, who advocate communism or who write, publish, distribute or possess for the purpose of circulation any printed material promoting it.

  The same section of the Act, which is still in effect, also states that aliens who are anarchists, mentally retarded, polygamists, illiterate or sexual deviates are unwelcome to visit the superpower.

  Producing a file of letters from U.S. immigration officials, Novak said he finally had been given entry for the purposes of his work, although he was placed under certain restrictions, which remain in effect.

  “They made me undertake never to participate in any public rallies, or to engage in the propagation of communist theory,” Novak said…

  Don stopped reading there. “Hat, can you come up here?” When Mahatma walked up, Don said, “Not bad work. But you’ve got to concentrate on the news aspect of this story.”

  “The news aspect?”

  “That’s right,” Don said. “Who wants to read about what happened to the mayor in the 1950s, Hat, before he was even mayor? This is what you’ve got to write.”

  Punching the keyboard with two middle fingers, Don deleted Grafton’s first paragraphs and entered his own:

  The American government has slapped restrictions on Mayor John Novak’s visiting privileges to the United States because of his communist beliefs.

  Although he denied a Herald report last summer that he was on a U.S. border lookout list barring alien communists, anarchists and other subversives, the mayor admitted yesterday that he had been on the list earlier and that he was still barred from attending public meetings or spreading communism in the United States.

  “That looks better, doesn’t it?” Don rewrote two more paragraphs. “What other quotes did you get? Anything from the immigration people?” Grafton gaped at the computer screen. “What else did those immigration people have to say?” Don repeated. “Got a quote?”

  “Your lead is unacceptable,” Grafton said. “And the second paragraph carries a false tone.”

  “What’s the matter with it?” Don raised his voice. Copy editors watched as they worked on the rim. “Do the Americans have restrictions on the mayor? Yes or no?”

  “That’s not the point,” Grafton said. “The point is one of focus, and of the impression that you leave. You make the reader think the restrictions have been imposed recently.”

  “Did I say that?” Don was growing red in the face.

  “You’re suggesting it. You can’t say that. You should say—”

  Don jumped to his feet. “Don’t tell me what to write. I’m going to fix this story and you’re going to cooperate. Clear enough?” Grafton said nothing. “So just tell me what the immigration people said about—”

  Grafton cut him off. “In the second paragraph, you imply that the mayor has not been telling the truth, whereas, in fact, you screwed up the first story and The Herald had to admit it. I’m not helping you write nonsense like that.” Five copy editors stared at Grafton.

  “I’m going to the can,” Betts said. “And when I come back, you and I are gonna fix that story!” Don stormed off. Grafton sat in the editor’s chair and typed a command that killed all traces of his article in the computer system. Don returned as Grafton was stepping back from the terminal.

  “Where’s the story?”

  “If you want to write about the mayor, you do it. But I’m not helping you.”

  Don grabbed Grafton by the collar. Chuck rushed up. “Take it easy!”

  They pulled Don away. But Don ended Grafton’s shift and sent him home. “Talk to the M.E. tomorrow morning.”

  The door opened and slammed. Ben confronted his son. “You sick?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t quit?”

  “NO!”

  Ben asked, more gently, “Then how come you’re home early?”

  “I had a fight with my editor. He sent me home.”

  “Fired you?”

  “No. Sent home. I have to see the managing editor tomorrow.”

  “Why’d he suspend you? You give him too much lip?”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  Ben looked blankly at his son. “Meaning?”

  “You’d never understand, Dad. Just take my word for it. He tried to ruin something I’ve put a lot of work into. I wouldn’t let him. I killed the story in the
computer system.”

  “You what?” After Mahatma explained what happened, Ben said, “You’ve always been a tad mulish.” Mahatma said nothing. “But you know, son, you have to survive. You have to stay on that job and show them all you’re better than they are. You are going to be a great writer, son. You can write circles around all those people. You have it in your blood. Don’t be a quitter, son, stick it out and show ’em what you’ve got.”

  Mahatma felt a trace of revulsion at the speech. It seemed he’d heard it a million times. Everything you did, someone wanted you to commit your life to it. Mahatma had never felt like committing his life to anything. “Can you imagine,” he had said jokingly to university friends, “having some job and sticking with it for twenty years? Or even ten? Five? The same job for five years? It’d be like being in prison!” And as for social causes, he had the feeling that none was worth pursuing. Ben had so sickened him with black history that Mahatma gladly forgot the whole subject, avoided books about race issues and avoided people who talked about them, or any causes. Sure, he had read about the CIA bringing down Allende in Chile, and everybody knew about acid rain and the arms race, but the issues were so distant that it was hard to care about them. Occasionally, in a university class, a professor would be challenged by an angry student. Mahatma and his friends would turn to stare at the student, not to reflect about the complaint, but to wonder about how anyone could care so much. For years, Mahatma moved among peers who would look up, narrow their eyebrows and stare in curiosity if they heard someone wishing he had “done more for society.” It never occurred to people in his generation to “do” anything for anybody. That seemed naïve.

  Nevertheless, Mahatma had felt a flood of anger earlier that evening, watching Don Betts sabotage a story he had carefully researched and—yes!—begun to care about. The story meant something! It was fascinating that the United States and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service should be brimming with paranoia. The mayor’s case intrigued him. Mahatma had dug out the story by talking to the mayor and to Sandra Paquette and to U.S. government officials. He didn’t dig it out to see it distorted by Betts.