“I don’t know why I said five. Maybe because raccoons have five claws.”
Now it was her turn to be excited. “Society can only grasp the few Customs that it feels ensure its survival and prosperity. Those Customs are instructions for how to be a society. Like Sensibel’s new laws. Everybody knows what they are; most agree that they govern the kind of society they want to live in. But they leave out thousands of situations; some of which haven’t even happened yet. My question is: where are all the other relationships that aren’t felt to belong to society’s immediate self-interest?”
“They are like seeds no one has a use for,” Mindwalker said. “Raccoons who are born different. The unmated. The poor. The sick. The migrant. The weird and frightening. All the unwanted among us. An uncaring society holds them in suspended animation in some dark place like bulbs in a root cellar. A caring society allows the diversity to flourish.”
“Like seeds on this Island,” she said. She thought of a rhyme:
There is a Garden by a Lake
That greener grows for Nature’s sake,
Than any garden ever planned
By squinted eye or maker’s hand.
“This little blessed Isle.”
“Waiting …” she said, prompting.
“Waiting. For the world to change and discover among those hibernating relationships a set of instructions for being a better society.”
“Our City Republic was a dream in hibernation. We woke it up and made it blossom.”
“You need more than a dream: you need changes in circumstance that favour the dream becoming real. The flood of migrants, the shortage of housing, the uncertainty about being able to raise cubs, the incapacity of the Leading Families to address these issues, the arrival of a catalyst like Meatbreath. Makers sensed the changes first. But it wasn’t enough to sense them. They had to make an effort to fit a dream to the circumstances.” Mindwalker took the daisy stem out of his mouth and examined it. He seemed surprised he had chewed the stem to pieces. He placed it carefully in the sunlight. “It’s almost as if the dream of the democratic Commonwealth was already alive within the circumstances.”
She put this next thought to him as a proposition. “The dream was thinking I am becoming a nightmare. It was thinking I can’t breathe deeply. The Customs are too stuffy, they only favour a few, they oversimplify, they feel uncomfortable. Then it becomes time for Makers to dream up a different Custom. A Custom that will open up a tight society.”
“Well, I didn’t realize I was doing that,” Mindwalker said – he was grinning. “I thought I was just hoping to find a place to be comfortable in myself. For the longest time, I felt most comfortable among the excluded people. Among the hopers and dreamers, but also the hopeless and the sufferers that the preferred Custom of being a society shuts out. Where people gather and carry on their silent, sympathetic conversations. But aren’t we thinking too much of the dream on its own? A dream is already awake and aware within the circumstances.”
“It is in the circumstances, then it overflows the circumstances,” she said. “It was thinking openly, like this river. Normally, the river follows its timeless path, which is inscribed on the riverbed as its Custom. Its customary way of being a River. But what if the climate changes and there’s a non-stop downpour? Big crisis! The river backs up on itself, consults its riverbed only to find out there are no instructions for how to be a river in this situation. Its only recourse is to send out a bunch of rivulets to explore a new landscape. Then negotiate with the new landscape about a new riverbed for the river to follow.”
“I liked being a rivulet,” Mindwalker said.
They basked in the silence of wondering. The noise of the city re-entered their senses. The smell of oats and honey coming downwind from the factory. The air vehicle droning overhead. In all these scents and noises, she sensed a greater sound. It was the music of a raccoon city singing in its sleep.
“I’ve got to go and meet Mom in the chimney. Clutch and Bandit are coming home. We’re going to tell the stories of what happened to us on our adventures. She thinks the Idiot who lives behind our wall will still be listening to us. That he’s going to fashion a replica of our stories.”
“Tell him to put me in his Making.”
“I will make a rhyme for him.”
Some night, fishing for the thousandth time,
you will find it.
The dream of the unborn City, the crowds at night singing,
the dancing, the laughter.
Oh, do not betray it. Hold onto it.
Keep it in your heart,
and it will blossom.
AFTERWORD
By Margaret Atwood
In the spring of 2019, Graeme Gibson received a story letter from Sean Kane. It was an account of a family of raccoons nesting in Sean’s chimney: he’d been eavesdropping on them, he said, and was reporting on what had been going on in there. They were making quite a racket, with a lot of chittering, hissing, and screeching; anyone who’s ever had raccoons in their attics or chimneys will agree that this part of the tale, at least, is accurate. They were also saying rude things about human beings in general, and Sean in particular. From the raccoon point of view, it seems we are a stupid, disagreeable, and uncooperative bunch.
This first letter was quickly followed by others. Installments of the saga arrived in brown envelopes. The raccoons were on the move. They were having philosophical discussions, they were arguing, they were scheming, they were indulging in power struggles, they were narrating. The story had taken on a life of its own.
Sean was writing this epic to amuse Graeme, who’d asked him to describe the wildlife he was witnessing in the woodlands and riverbanks beside his home in Peterborough. At that time Graeme was in the seventh year since his diagnosis of dementia in 2012, a diagnosis he himself had sought. He’d suspected there was something wrong with him, and there was.
“What’s the prognosis?” he had asked.
“Either it will go slowly, it will go quickly, it will stay the same, or we don’t know,” they had said. Not a lot of help, but accurate. For a while it stayed the same; then it went slowly. But by the spring of 2019 it was going quickly. Neither our family nor Graeme knew that Graeme would die of a cerebral hemorrhage before the year was over, though both Graeme and the family suspected this might be the case. We did not say as much to Sean, however, because you never know.
Going quickly meant that Graeme was losing the ability to use his computer or to read. He was still keenly interested in the natural world, however. I read the installments of Sean’s story out loud to him because he couldn’t read them himself. After a while, he couldn’t follow the plot line or remember the cast of characters, so I had to stop reading. But Graeme still understood the intention: Sean’s wonder tale about a bunch of fractious but savvy raccoons was a kindly gesture from an old and loving friend.
***
Sean and Graeme had known each other since the mid 1960s, through the Rosedale chapter of the New Democratic Party – they both campaigned for it in 1965. Sean was starting an M.A. in English. He was wondering if it was possible to be a serious academic and a novelist at the same time. Graeme was a failed M.A. who’d spent years struggling to write fiction. Out of desperation, he was teaching at what was then Ryerson College, where he was known as Bones; his course on modern European literature was dubbed, by the students, “Introduction to Despair.” At the same time, he was toiling away at his first novel, Five Legs, which eventually came out in 1969, after a long and difficult gestation. This novel was an unlikely success – it’s not exactly standard fare – and briefly outsold the hit pop writer Jacqueline Susann, at least in the bookstores of Toronto.
Both Sean and Graeme were part of a somewhat rackety group of characters in a pocket of South Rosedale that was not so posh then as it has become now. Decaying gentry, bohemian-minded semi-writers, various academics, several book publishers, a pessimistic early environmental writer, a forensic psychiatrist, a madcap housewife who later became a gardening guru – all this was before my time, but it seems to have been an eclectic and effervescent mix; sort of like the raccoons in the chimney. Touch football got played sporadically on Saturday mornings, I was later told. I get the impression that a certain amount of drinking went on.
Campaigning for the NDP must have seemed a logical outgrowth of the outsider position some of these folks felt they were experiencing. The likelihood of a social welfare party winning a seat in conservative Rosedale was nil, but low odds never stopped Graeme from trying something. Nor was he a socialist: he was more of a 19th century Conservative – a Red Tory, this lot used to be called in Canada before they went extinct – which meant that he couldn’t bring himself to vote either for the Liberals or for the Conservatives as they define themselves today, nor even for the Conservatives as they were then constituted. Sean on the other hand was what might now be called a “progressive,” a term I have caught him using, though Graeme would have repudiated this term for himself, since he was suspicious of things calling themselves “progress” – a word that had been used in his youth as a label from some dubious projects, such as eugenics and urban sprawl. “You can’t stop progress” was the motto of many a rapacious business conglomerate from the thirties to the fifties. It was supposed to be a Final Word. (Just sayin’.)
