Last of the Independents Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Seriously?”
    â€œI need the help.”
    â€œYou want me to drop out and do this for the rest of my life? On what kind of wage?”
    â€œYou just got five hundred dollars.”
    â€œIs that likely to happen again?”
    â€œWe can negotiate,” I said. “This isn’t about money, it’s about you fulfilling your calling.”
    She smirked. “Which is what?”
    â€œEvery person has a purpose to serve. This —” I swept my arm majestically around the room, Charlton Heston style “— is yours.”
    â€œAnd what’s your calling, Mike?”
    â€œI’m here to make sure you don’t squander another three years on a bachelor’s degree, and then the rest of your life in government service. Smart as you are, why the fuck would you want to work for the Canadian government?”
    â€œMoney. Security. Benefits.”
    â€œThat’s the language of fear.”
    â€œNo, Mike, that’s the language of adults.”
    I said, “Work here.”
    She said, “I’ll think about it.”

III
    The Blessed Peacemakers
    I n the lobby of the Cambie Street police station, above the plaques commemorating the dead, is stenciled an excerpt of witness testimony from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” Every time I step inside I’m drawn to that wall. I look from the scripture to the plaque beneath the word peacemakers . I stare at the bottom row. I find the photo of the clean-shaven man fourth from the end, and I lock eyes with him.
    It’s a photo my grandmother doesn’t display. He is so eager to do good. His is the expression of a man who has never reckoned with deep uncertainty. His world is one where the law, the Sovereign, and God are perfect and infallible and in no way contradict one another. It’s hard to look at that face and believe he would know anything about living in the world today.
    My grandfather, Jacob Kessler, was born the year of Stagecoach and Gone with the Wind . A rawboned Mennonite from Moosefuck, Manitoba, he rebels, runs away from home, gets drunk, and enlists. After a stint in the navy he moves west, joins the Vancouver Police, meets a thin, sharply beautiful girl with a glint of prairie poverty in her eye. They have a son and a daughter: a nuclear family in the nuclear age. The son eventually hangs himself. The daughter meets the draft-dodging scion of the Drayton & Kling Paper Products empire. They’re together twelve years before they have a kid. The pressure gets to Jacob’s son-in-law and he splits for an ashram in Southern California. His daughter follows as soon as she sheds the pregnancy weight. The kid only knows them as abstracts.
    Around the house, Jacob was a dark presence, a stoop-shouldered, apelike, Victor McLaglen-type who drank lemon juice during the afternoons and Crown Royal in the evenings; who watched hockey scores and Hee Haw and owned three long-playing records, all of them Merle Haggard. Doted on me, took me camping and hunting, always teaching.
    As a cop he never sought advancement and hated the brass. He stayed CFL, Constable For Life. In the seventies, his heyday, he was part of an anti-gang unit charged with taking the neighbourhoods back from the local gangs. Rumours abound about members of the H-Squad descending on the East Vancouver parks, preying on the predators, beating them senseless or worse. He didn’t talk much about those days.
    Six weeks before mandatory retirement, Jacob rousted a drunk who had passed out after rubbing fecal matter on the cenotaph in Victory Square. The drunk stabbed him in the throat with the broken-off handle of a sherry bottle, then hightailed, taking his gun and radio.
    Legend has it Jacob completed the walk to St. Paul’s Hospital, passed out at the door, and never woke up.
    Four years later, the moment I’d met the recommended minimum of