The Governor of the Northern Province by Randy Boyagoda

Author:Randy Boyagoda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)

8

EXODUS POLLS

I.

Faye Gallagher held herself above responding to the garish campaign ploy her opponent had unleashed on her beloved’s memorial. Muckraking, after all, was for farm girls. Impartial observers, family members and campaign supporters alike marvelled at this restraint over their crullers and multivitamins the morning after the moving Gallagher affair. At not just the restraint but the courage Faye had shown when she left the funeral home to find a hot pink flyer crammed into the windshield of her husband-gifted, now widow-driven SUV. Faye had removed it so gracefully, so unflinchingly, like Jackie O or something, they had thought. Without even unfolding it to confirm its contents, she climbed up and into her lady truck and drove off, followed by a solemn procession of late-model sedans, extended-cab trucks and pine-freshened vans full of Faye’s pining children and theirs.

One woman in the half moon of supporters who saw the widow and her family out to their cars had started humming “Be Not Afraid” when Faye had been, momentarily, stopped short by the pink blot on her windshield. This had been in hopes of encouraging her to endure and prevail over this provocation, but Faye had left before the others remembered the melody. This left them in that half-humming, half-mumbling condition they were reduced to elsewhere in their lives, as when grin-hardened wait staff clapped Happy Birthday ditties at nearby tables in family restaurants, or when parts of the national anthem were sung in French.

Only Blaise Maurier, electric with outrage, lingered in the canopied car lane that fronted the funeral home. From there he held forth, buzz-throated, for any and all ear-covering passersby who processed out thereafter.

Not knowing what evil Blaise was inveighing against, the rest of the townspeople were surprised upon reaching their cars to find the same pink sheet caught up in their wiper blades or, occasionally, crumpled around them, a condition owing to Bokarie eventually growing tired and somewhat distasteful of the so-called mission Jennifer had sent him on while the rest of the community attended heart-attacked George Gallagher’s memorial. He enjoyed this feeling rightfully offended, since sharing pain with others was one of his strong suits, and he could easily have worked up something from Lamentations and gone in for an elegant embrace of the bombazine bereaved. But Jennifer had refused him, explaining that the campaign needed him in the field for now, that his time to return to the stage was coming. He’d started crushing the papers against the windshields because it kept cutting at him. How familiar Jennifer’s promise had sounded.

The flyers were received with mutterings at the sloth and greediness of the tactic, of letter-bombing the town’s cars because they were mostly parked in the same area and during a mourning service no less. Everyone, not just the high Anglicans, clucked at the poor taste of it. But they all pocketed and pursed the sheets, adding them to the napkin-smashed croissants and crumbly date bars that had been palmed and scooped from the refreshment table on the way out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.