Dead Presidents

Courtesy Viking Canada

For all our supposed ignorance of history, we never miss a chance to buy a piece of it. Thus, John F. Kennedy’s golf clubs fetch $770,000 US in a Sotheby’s auction; Marilyn Monroe’s temporary California driver’s licence from 1956 commands $145,500 US through Christie’s; and a decade-old grilled-cheese sandwich with fry marks vaguely resembling the Virgin Mary sells for $28,000 US on eBay.

To novelist Brad Smith, this garish spectacle of consumerism was ripe for satire. To maximize the impact, he felt he had to find an item that actually had historic significance.

“Early on, I tried to cater it to the Canadian scene and I really couldn’t do it,” says Smith, on the phone from his home in Dunnville, Ont., a small burg near Lake Erie. “Nobody cares about John Diefenbaker’s golf clubs. So then I got thinking about Lincoln – I’m a bit of a Civil War buff. Gettysburg is the site of maybe the most famous political speech ever given in America. We’re 142 years past it and it still defines that country.”

Busted Flush, Smith’s third novel, revolves around Dock Bass, a carpenter turned realtor manqué who abandons a life of futility in New York state to answer a mysterious writ from a law firm in Gettysburg, Penn. The news: Dock has inherited a century-and-a-half-old farmhouse from a departed relative he never met. While renovating his new property, Dock discovers a secret trove of Civil War paraphernalia, including photographs of Abraham Lincoln. There’s also a very old plate that may contain aural evidence of the Gettysburg Address – the oft-quoted oratory only ever heard by the people assembled at Soldier’s National Cemetery on Nov. 19, 1863 – along with the device on which it was captured: a phonautograph, an audio-recording device that predated Edison’s phonograph.

News of Dock’s momentous find spreads through Gettysburg – and the national media – like an attack of smallpox, and before long, Dock is fending off a parade of scheming lawyers, unctuous agents and various other grifters and toadies.

Over the course of three novels, Smith has distinguished himself as an author of countrified detective fiction (minus the detective), a sort of cornpone Carl Hiassen. Smith’s first book, One-Eyed Jacks, involved a brain-addled boxer who takes on one last bout to salvage his family farm. His second novel, All Hat, was a modern horse opera about an ex-con who’s forced to pilfer a prize-winning steed. Another ebullient crime caper, Busted Flush is Smith’s bemused look at the commodification of history.

Dock’s biggest adversary – and the victim of his tartest insults – is Stonewall Martin, a spivvish antiques dealer and zealous Civil War re-enacter. Like the folks whose lives he conjures, Stonewall is indifferent to grooming and hygiene. In researching Busted Flush, Smith discovered just how far people go to simulate the 1860s. Some re-enacters – or “historical interpreters,” as one character in the book vehemently calls them – refuse to wear mass-produced socks and even soak their shirt buttons in urine to get just the right look of sanitary neglect. And that’s just a start.

Brad Smith. Photo by Kevin Cavanagh. Courtesy Viking Canada

“Historical re-enacters starve themselves down to 120 pounds, and they walk around like that all year long,” Smith reports. “For the Gettysburg re-enactment, they’ll start at Chambersburg and march to Gettysburg, and if they want to have chicken, they’ll take a live chicken with them, because they can’t take a cooler with them. They won’ t have anything with them that wasn’t in existence in the 1860s. So they’ll take a live chicken and cut its head off the next day and cook it over a fire.”

If pure parody were the extent of Smith’s purview, Busted Flush would be merely amusing. But there’s more to it than that. Like All Hat, Busted Flush explores the clash of rural and urban values. Take Dock: terse, inscrutable and given to flights of aggression, he’s the antithesis of the neurotic metrosexual. “I think [both characters] are a response to the overly sensitive hero in modern fiction,” says Smith. “One of the things they have in common is that they were both willing to do something wrong to make something right.”

The pithiest exchanges in the novel occur between Dock and Amy Morris, an unabashed reporter from media conglomerate TransWorld, who tries to intimidate him with her broadcasting bona fides and cosmopolitanism. She fails woefully. Dock stands as a bastion of old-time honour and rationality in a culture that puts a price on everything. Throughout the novel, he struggles to defend the estate of Willy Burns – the man who built the homestead and likely snapped those pictures of Abe – from the taint of commerce. It’s an idea that resonates in the author’s own life.

“In the area where my parents live, which is 15 to 20 miles from [Dunnville], there was a guy who came out here a couple of years ago and bought a 100-acre farm,” says Smith. “He intended on splitting it up into 100 one-acre lots. And when he found out he couldn’t do that, he was quite amazed. And we were all saying, ‘Don’t you think that some of us dumb country folk would have thought of that if you were able to do it?’ He must have just said, ‘Boy, these people are dumb. They’re ploughing this land when they could be selling those lots for 50 grand apiece.’”

Smith, who owns a five-acre farm himself, was worried that a similar spirit of exploitation might have tainted Gettysburg. What he saw there was rather heartening.

“I was afraid that I would get down there and there would be a McDonald’s in the field where Pickett’s Charge took place,” says Smith, citing a crucial Civil War skirmish won by the North. “And there isn’t. It’s really quite pure. There are plaques, so you know where you are, and it’s virtually unchanged in 140 years, the battlefield itself. It’s pretty commendable that they’ve done that.”

Brad Smith reads from Busted Flush in the following cities: Toronto, Feb. 2, Ottawa, Feb. 7, Montreal, Feb. 8, Calgary, Feb. 9, Edmonton, Feb. 10 and Vancouver, Feb. 11.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.