Agency

In Which Corporate Greed Celebrates Women With Overpriced Beer and Hummus Wraps

Saturday

It is a gorgeous late-May day. There is sun streaming all across southern Ontario and the trees are showing off this season's colour, which is, most definitely, a verdant green. In the comfortably warm air, there is the glimmer of summer ahead. According to gardeners, this is the time for planting — safe finally from surprise frosts, we can be assured that things are only getting better from here.

In Canada, this is the weekend they refer to as the "May two-four" which is a double entendre referring both to Queen Victoria's birthday (May 24th) as well as the large size case of Canadian beer bottles (called a 2-4, or more idiomatically, a "two-fer") that is traditionally carried to outdoor events on this long weekend.

While it is the "May Two-Four" (or two-fer, as you prefer) weekend, the event that Berry, Berenice, Noemi, Lucille and Mister Waffles have bundled into a car and are headed toward is not in celebration of the Great-Great-Grandmother of the Queen you'll see on Canadian money — a Queen who, herself, is now a great-grandmother. Rather, they are going to observe the traditional Haudenosaunee celebration of spring, which this year, will also feature the re-interment and prayers for the remains found in their Cabbagetown yard, putting to bed finally the strange energies that were awoken when the Russians dug that fateful hole.

And that makes it a very big deal.

Berenice is driving, although she would prefer not to. The car — loaned to the Rosses while their insurance company sorts through the precedent of falling geese against other, more commonplace acts of god — is motoring across the Queen Elizabeth Way (a different Queen altogether, but let's not turn this into a genealogical mapping of the English monarchy when it doesn't need to be) at a sober 10kms under the speed limit.

Berry is not driving because he isn't physically able — his neck and arm motion still tightly restricted — nor is he mentally ready to take the wheel. As they move across the highway, Berry's subconscious is gaily delivering up flashes of his accident (geese, whirling horizon, the bone-crushing restraint of the seat belt against his collarbone and the final brain-jarring collision of skull against driver's side door frame). Fortunately, Berry's dialled up brain chemistry is still acting as a shield to negative emotions and he maintains a serene smile as he passively experiences his memories and the passing scenery.

Berenice, who, as we've covered before, is not a practiced driver, is taking things very much at her own speed much to the consternation of the miles of cars behind her. To be on an Ontario highway on the Saturday of a long weekend is an exercise in patience in any case, but finding yourself stuck behind someone who is safely maintaining two car lengths at all times? Maddening. There is a great deal of horn blaring going on behind them, but nobody in the Ross family seems to notice.

Mister Waffles, who is delighted to be in proximity to the food-flavoured little girls again, and to be in a car, and by the increasingly un-city smells to be smelled, and just generally to be a dog and to be alive, has settled contentedly across the back seat with his slobbery face in Lucille's lap and his volatile back end on Noemi's. Noemi has the worse end of the deal, to be sure, but the windows are rolled down to keep the air in the car breathable.

On the instruction of the GPS, after almost two hours of driving, Berenice signals well in advance and turns the car onto a smallish exit off the highway. So does, it feels, everyone else on the road.  Now part of an even slower-moving convoy, Berenice maneuvers the car along increasingly smaller country roads toward their final destination of Ohsweken, the village in the Six Nations of the Grand River.

As they drive along the paved roads toward the Reserve, Berry points to a strange disturbance in the otherwise calm countryside.

"Look," he says.

Jutting up from the horizon is what appears from a distance to be a looming spaceship. Metal glints in the sunlight, in ominous contrast with the idyllic green fields surrounding the Grand River. As they drive toward it, they begin to see signs (oversized, neon orange, surely visible from space further cementing the notion that they're advancing on a landed UFO site) dotting the roadside:

SHE FEST PARKING $30, the signs proclaim.

"What's 'She Fest' supposed to be?" muses Berenice.

Berry shrugs delighted as a child who's just spotted a travelling amusement park erected in a local parking lot overnight.

"A music festival, maybe?" he ventures. There's a flicker in the dark recesses of his cerebellum, but, like a silverfish, it wriggles away before he can capture it.

"Cool!" says Noemi from the backseat, who again, is only six and whose musical interests extend no further than Justin Beiber and Katy Perry. "I want to go there instead."

Berenice shakes her head. "We have other plans."

Noemi groans and tosses her head back dramatically so that her chin is raised to the car's roof. "Argh. I don't WANT to go to that stupid ceremony. It's going to be. so. boring."

Berry turns his body awkwardly in the passenger seat to admonish his daughter before Berenice has to. This is, quite possibly, the first time he's ever eagerly stepped into his role as a parent.

"Gnome. Only boring people find things boring," he says, sounding like his father.

"But look at that!" she responds, pointing past him at the festival grounds which are coming up on their left side now.

The grounds, which are just a large, open field, are cordoned off by bright plastic fencing and lined on one side by vast rows of blue porta-potties. At one end of the field, which is already thronging with event-goers, are food and drink stands advertising cups of beer for $15 each and hummus wraps for $10. At the farthest end, is a massive metal stage, hung with professional looking stage lights and adorned with a full-length awning that reads "Atrabax brings you... She Festival!!!!!"

Towering above the metal stage construction is the flickering digital eye of a Jumbotron.

"Wow," says Berenice. "That's your client, isn't it? Berry, is this your festival?"

Berry's face goes still. He has just remembered everything.

The money. The almost-disaster of being found out. The shameful lunches with Allegra. The client who insisted on sponsoring the small, serious, community ceremony.

Even as the full scope of what he'd forgotten blooms forth into his hippocampus, ready to be sweated over, picked apart and combed through for indications of impending doom, Berry finds himself preternaturally able to push it aside.

"We're not on Reserve grounds yet, right? Looks like Tracy wouldn't change her mind," he muses. "Good for her."

"Tracy? The clan mother?" asks Berenice.

"Mmm," affirms Berry. Then he tells Berenice about how Janus-Klien offered the council all sorts of money to sponsor the ceremony, but the council turned them down, flat. "The last thing Tracy said about it was 'all boats go up in a rising tide.' What do you figure she meant?" he asks his wife.

They have driven past the festival by now. The roads are empty now, most of the traffic having turned off into the festival parking area. They're passing over the river and into Ohsweken.

Berenice smiles uncertainly and pushes her (cheap) sunglasses up onto her head. "I don't know, but I think it means a win-win."

As Berry watches the landscape shift around him, he considers this. He's glad the council told Janus-Klien to piss off.

Still. Think of all the doctors they could've paid with that money.