The Diviners (19 page)

Jules?

She remembers how it was, and the feeling of his skin all over hers. Wants him again, as she often often does. Well, too bad. Nothing can be done about it. No answers. Is he alive, even? No reports. No news. She reads the casualty lists, always.

When she was a young child, she used to believe that everything would be all right once she was grown-up and
nobody could tell her what to do. Now she wishes someone
could
tell her what to do.

Memorybank Movie: The Banner

Lachlan MacLachlan, editor and owner of the
Manawaka Banner
, is not a difficult boss, although sometimes unpredictable. A bulky, thickset man, bald except for a fringe of grey around the back of his skull. Wearing heavy hairy tweed suits even in summer. Suffering often from hangovers, at which times he closes the door into his office and sips Alka-Seltzer or Cokes, answering only to urgent questions, of which there are few. Apart from the three printers, Morag comprises Lachlan’s entire staff. He has until recently done it all himself, but his son’s death has depleted him. At first, Morag was shy and a little frightened, for Lachlan never ever smiles, much less laughs. But now they get on. She fetches the Alka-Seltzer on the bad days, and calls him Lachlan, like everybody else in town does.

Morag has her own desk. A roll-top oak desk with drawers. A typewriter. Just like a real reporter. She has learned typing at High School. Jock MacRae, one of the printers, has taught her how to read proof. If Lachlan doesn’t feel up to doing the layouts, Jock does them and is teaching Morag. Morag writes or rewrites:

Obituaries

Town Council meetings

Courthouse cases (if any)

Rotary Club dinners

IODE
meetings (the Daughters of Empire in fruit-salad-like hats)

School Board meetings

News (e.g. Accidents, Broken Legs, Lightning Striking Barns, etc.)

Local Reports from South Wachakwa, Freehold and so on.

Many of these items are written down by people who were there, and given to her. She then rewrites them in newspaper style, as Lachlan has taught her. She is not permitted to rewrite the Local Reports from South Wachakwa and Freehold.

Mrs. H. Pearl, widow of late Henry respected farmer spend the weekend visiting with her son Simon and wife in Manwaka and a good time had by all at a tea given in her hounor by Mrs. Cates wife of Doct Cates son of late Alvin Cates of South Wachakwa Mrs. Cates had red roses on a silver baskt and four kinds cake served. Glad you had a good visit Mrs. Pearl and welcom back!

Morag thinks this is hilarious.

“Lachlan–can’t I rewrite it? I
mean
.”

It is one of Lachlan’s poorer mornings, but he struggles bravely against headache, nausea, and cramps in various parts of himself.

“They don’t want it rewritten, Morag. They want it as it is. You can clean up the punctuation, grammar and spelling. That is all. As I have said before, if my imperfect memory serves, God help me, I have all the symptoms of a pregnant woman this morning–except I suppose they don’t normally twitch or imagine their eyeballs are falling out.
Mea culpa.
Now stop fussing about those reports, girl.”

“But–”

“But
what
?” Lachlan’s voice is low but slightly menacing.

“They make the
Banner
look like–well, like a small-town paper.”

“They do, eh? Well, that is precisely what it is, Morag. And if you think your prose style is so much better than theirs, girl, remember one thing. Those people know things it will take you the better part of your lifetime to learn, if ever. They are not very verbal people, but if you ever in your life presume to look down on them because you have the knack of words and they do not, then you do so at your eternal risk and peril. Do you understand what I am saying?”

Morag gazes at him, embarrassed and angry and partly comprehending.

“Yeh. I guess so. A lot of people here look down on me. I don’t think of myself as looking down on anybody, Lachlan.”

“No? Well, maybe you better have another think about that one, then, to make quite sure. And for God’s sake quit feeling set upon. You’re not trapped. The doors are open. You couldn’t say the same for some. I know whereof I speak. Go on, get out. Tell Jock he’s to handle the layout for Simlow’s sale handbills. Green newsprint, tell him. Not that puke-coloured yellow.
Green
.”

“Do you want some coffee, Lachlan?”

“Get
out
,” Lachlan says heavily. “And bring me four aspirin and a cold Coca-Cola. Make that two Cokes. Tell Miklos to charge it against what he owes me, the chiseller.”

The Junior League, young women from the city, bring out an exhibition of prints of paintings to Manawaka, for the enlightenment of the local populace, and Morag wanders around the United Church basement where she used to go to Sunday
school, looking. A thirtyish woman in sleek grey skirt and blue twin-sweater set with pearls (real?) at her neck sits smiling graciously at the three people who have thus far turned up. It is all very embarrassing.

And then

The picture is of the head of a girl, features so finely cut, so entirely beautiful that you know all at once this would be how an angel or the Mother of Christ would have looked if ever such had existed. The eyes meet yours, look into yours, without flinching or avoiding. Her hair you could call
tresses
, as it says in very ancient tales and the bardic songs, hair in long twisting tendrils of light brown coppergold filled with the sun and coming from the sun. Like a queen in the old old poems, like Cuchulain’s young queen, the woman beloved by all men.

Morag stands for a long time, looking.

“Lovely, isn’t it, dear?” the twin-set and pearls lady says.

Lovely.
What a word. Like using a marshmallow to picture God. But
beautiful
is nearly as bad. How could you say? How can there be words for that face, for what lies behind those eyes? There have to be words. Maybe there are not. This thought is obscurely frightening. Like knowing that God does not actually see the little sparrow fall.

Morag goes back to the
Banner
office and writes the report four times. Shows it to Lachlan. He reads it carefully. Then looks up.

“It’s a pretty good report,” he says. “But–this picture wasn’t painted recently by someone in Winnipeg, Morag. It’s part of a larger painting.
Venus Rising from the Waves.
It was painted by a man called Botticelli. A long time ago. In Italy. I’ll bring you a book that tells about it.”

Morag takes the sheets of newsprint and crumples them small into her hands.

“You would only have to alter it a little,” Lachlan says, not looking at her.

“No.”

“You learn hard, with that stiff neck of yours,” Lachlan says. “There’s no shame in not knowing something. You’re not alone.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Morag says.

The report is never printed. But when Lachlan brings the book, she spends a long time looking at it.

Memorybank Movie: Down in the Valley, Act III

Winter, and the snow squeaks and scrunches dryly underfoot, even on Main Street where the
Banner
office is. Morag has new fleece-lined leather boots and a grey tweed coat with a real beaver-lamb collar, but there is no way of keeping warm in thirty-below weather.

Lachlan is already at the office. He summons her.

“There’s been a fire down in the valley, at the old Tonnerre shack, Morag. The older girl–what’s her name?–and her two kids were caught in it. You better go down and see what’s happened. Rufus Nolan’s called in the Mounties, but he’ll be there as well–he’ll tell you.”

For an instant Morag fails to understand what
caught in it
means. Then realizes.

“Lachlan–Piquette and her kids–are they–”

“Dead. Yes, I believe so.”

“I can’t go. Lachlan.”

“What do you mean, you can’t go? Of course you can go. Rufus or somebody’ll give you a lift back, likely. It’s not that far.”

“I–don’t want to go, Lachlan.”

“Oh christ. Of
course
you don’t want to go. Who would? But you’re the one who thinks the
Banner
shouldn’t act like such
a small-town paper. Here is a genuine news story. Now go.”

The wind worsens at the rim of the town, knifes at her as she flounders through the snow on the valley road. The bare black branches have been enfolded and cloaked with last night’s snowfall, and would delight her with their radiance under other circumstances.

Morag has met Piquette on the streets occasionally, since Piquette returned to Manawaka. They have not spoken, except to say
Hi
to one another. Piquette, once slender, has gown flabbily fat and walks with the lurch of the habitual drunk. She has been arrested several times, like her father before her, for outrageously shrieking her pain aloud in public places, usually in the form of obscene insults to whoever happens to be handiest. Her husband took off and left her, just as Skinner said he would, and the two children, two small boys with large solemn dark eyes, appear to be about one and two years old. What went wrong? Or did it go wrong so long ago that there is now no single cause or root to be found?

Morag could at least have talked to her. But Piquette wouldn’t have wanted to. How can Morag be sure of that? She is, though.

At the Tonnerre place, there is not a lot of noise going on. Valentine left home after Piquette returned, so the two younger brothers are by themselves, and are now walking towards Jules’ shack, which still stands. No one is crying. There is a stillness in the frozen air.

The Tonnerre place, both the original shack and Lazarus’ later addition, has been burned to the ground and is now only a mass of tangled still-smoking charred timbers and twisted shapeless blackened metal. Rufus Nolan stands bulky and bewildered in his navy blue greatcoat and absurd policeman’s cap. The town fire truck is leaving. There is
nothing for them to do now. The Mounties have evidently been and gone.

“What happened, Mr. Nolan?”

“Them stovepipes must’ve been old as the everlasting hills,” Rufus says. “Lazarus and the boys were away. The girl was probably drunk. The place must’ve gone up like tinder.”

Lazarus stands alone, his face absolutely blank, portraying nothing. He looks at Morag but does not see her.

Dr. Cates stands talking to Niall Cameron, the undertaker. There is no town ambulance. Niall has brought his old black hearse instead.

“Well, there’s no point even examining them,” Dr. Cates is saying. “You can tell even from this distance, all right.”

The smell of smoke hangs thickly in the frosty air. And something else, a sweetish nauseating odour.

“Somebody will have to help me go in there and get them,” Niall Cameron says in a hard low voice.

He stands there, bareheaded and tall, running one woollen-gloved hand nervously over his light brown hair and looking towards the ruins of the shack, the pile of blackened debris where three generations of Tonnerres have lived. Morag looks, too, and then realizes what is still in there. She can see only smokened metal and burnt wood, but there is something else in there as well.

Burnt wood.
Bois-Brûlés.

Lazarus shambles over to the two men.

“I’m going in,” he says. “They’re mine, there, them.”

Dere mine dere, dem.

Niall Cameron’s face twists momentarily as though in some inexpressible pain. Then he shakes his head.

“It will take the two of us,” he says. “Hold that end of
the stretcher, Lazarus, will you? Where’s the goddamn draw-sheet? Oh, here.”

Morag turns away. Vomits terribly into the snow. When she is able to look again, the job is done and the back doors of the hearse are closed. Niall Cameron walks over to her and puts one arm around her shoulders, pulling her upright again, forcing her upright.

“For God’s sake, Morag Gunn, what are you doing here?”

“Lachlan–but he didn’t know it would be–”

“Lachlan’s out of his head,” Niall Cameron says furiously, “and you can tell him so from me. Do you want a lift? No, I guess not–I’m sorry, Morag. That was stupid of me. I’d forgotten the fire truck had gone.”

The only vehicle here now is the hearse. Dr. Cates has come down with Niall Cameron. Rufus Nolan has come down with the now-departed Mounties and is at this moment climbing into the hearse.

“It’s okay, Mr. Cameron. I know you didn’t–well, it’s okay. I can walk back.”

He turns to Paul Cates.

“All right, Paul. Let’s go.”

Dr. Cates looks very white and sick.

“You know, Niall, I’m almost glad Ewen isn’t here. He fixed the girl’s legs, years ago.”

That would be Dr. MacLeod, who died some years back. He was the one who had overcome the
TB
in the bone, who had made it possible for Piquette to walk properly. And dance, briefly. And attract Al Cummings.

“He was probably the only one in town who ever did anything for her, then,” Niall Cameron says in his harsh bitter voice.

“Should I say anything to Lazarus?” Dr. Cates asks, as though asking himself.

“What is there to say?” Niall replies. “There’s nothing can be said now. Get in, Paul.”

The hearse pulls away. Morag begins to walk. Looking back, she sees Lazarus.

He is still standing alone there in the snow.

At the office, Lachlan pours Morag a rye and hands it to her without a word.

“Niall phoned and gave me hell,” he says finally. “I’m sorry, Morag. I didn’t realize–”

“I know.”

“Wasn’t there another girl? A younger one?”

“Val. She went away a while ago. I don’t know where she is.”

“Where’s the older brother?” Lachlan asks. “Do you know?”

“He was at Dieppe,” Morag says. “But I don’t think he got killed.”

She recalls then that Lachlan’s son did.

Without warning, taking herself by surprise, she puts her head down on the desk and cries in a way she does not remember ever having done before, as though pain were the only condition of human life.