The last man: the toppling of John (‘Gassy Jack’) Deighton* "I have done well since I came here." —epitaph —for Richard Bilkszto Tilting and rickety on his barrel plinth, Gassy is all gassed up— playacting the city father for tourists in heritage town, his town, Gastown— while, over his shoulder, eastward across the land, he spies churches . . . they're burning—one, then others, then others— Is he concerned? Not his children, not his mission, he thinks. To him, wine, women, song and gab are the words to imbibe, those good, those his legacy, those the limit of his care. Something, though, he can’t quite name has been tipped, motioned, as if by thumbs of emperors: in the laying low of his betters, far above, far removed from his rum-swilled honky-tonk life: notables mounted on sturdier steeds, stone and brass of truer fathers, tossed without ceremony, without rule, into second graves: crated up, melted down, deep-sixed, never to be exhumed from the archives of opprobrium, of the damned, of a shiny new amnesia. Can’t name it, no, but can taste it, feel it, in the back of his throat: its westward slouch, the sulphuric odour of a constant din: drums, marching, the ever-righteous cackle of torches, droning chants growing louder, as if from a river to a sea. What Gassy cannot ingest, not quite: how all legacy, heritage, rags, robes, of honour, the faux, the true, the small, the great, that to come, too— has been primped, primed, for surrender— surrender to a rough, bile-filled beast that sears without forgiveness, redemption, (with gleeful lassos about the neck, tightly cinched), successive sons of fathers, their still-breathing children and the yet to be born: those long settled, long gone native, their daily selves daily slathered, marinated, in the pitiless crimson sun of the once abused, once lynched— all to be pulled down down to the barrel’s bottom, down to the first cobblestones down to the last man.
*Born in England in 1830, John Deighton chose a life of adventure. In 1858, after nearly a decade at sea and giving up on California gold, he traveled north to New Caledonia (British Columbia). Once again finding no gold, he opened a bar, first in New Westminster, then Granville (Vancouver), finally opening a hotel called Deighton House. Business success and his garrulous personality (thus ‘Gassy’) made him a prominent figure. He was married twice to native women and had one son. In the early 1970s, a statue of his likeness was erected as an historical focal point of interest, part of the renewal of the old Vancouver city centre, now called ‘Gastown’. In February of 2022, demonstrators on an annual march for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls used ropes to pull the statue down and cover it in red paint.
that was fun, I liked "shiny new amnesia". I wonder why they pulled him down, was it because he had native wives?
Transfixed and horrified. Wow.
(So of course how can I not go off to learn more about this.)