The Diviners (43 page)

If only there were someone to talk it over with. Someone to share the pain, I guess. That wouldn’t help Pique much. It would help me, though. Or would it? Look at Angie in Flat Two upstairs. When the baby is sick, she says to Dennis that she’s worried out of her mind, and he says she always worries unnecessarily and she’s inherited it from her neurotic mother and she had better snap out of it. And maybe she is indeed worrying unnecessarily. As probably I am. But you would just like somebody to say–God, love, I
KNOW
and I’m worried too.

Outside, on Hedgerow Walk, the high-pitched laughter of guests arriving at some party or other. Upstairs in Flat Two, Dennis turns the record player up full volume, and Angie yells at him to turn it down or he’ll waken the baby–if one of them
doesn’t waken the baby, the other certainly will. If they waken Pique, Morag will go up and strangle them both, or at least sit down here and curse them. She takes off the black and scarlet Madras cotton bedspread (meant to make her bed look in daytime as though it were not a bed) and crawls between the sheets. Then crawls out again to look once more at Pique, who is sleeping but whose skin is unnaturally hot. Nothing more can be done at the moment.

Finally Morag sleeps.

Pique’s fever continues, up and down, for four days. Then it drops to normal and stays there, but the doctor says she is not to return to school for another week. Morag, on the phone to Mr. Sampson, is assured that she still has a job, but he is beginning to sound irritable. A little more of this, and Morag will not have a job, probably. And she will not really be able to blame Mr. Sampson, who hires an assistant with the reasonable expectation that she will be at work most of the time.

Hell, I’m lucky. I don’t know what difficulty means. At least there are some royalties dribbling in from past books, although not much, and I suppose if I were really broke, I could go to the publishers and ask for a small advance on the next book–no, I couldn’t do that, though, because then the book wouldn’t get written. But Jeremy Sampson is not a mean-minded guy, and I am not a cog in some vast machine, at the bookshop. Suppose I was a waitress in a chain of cheap restaurants? Devil a bit they’d care if my kid was sick and I had to stay home for two weeks. I am lucky. I know it. It’s just that I don’t feel so very lucky right now.

Morag buys a bottle of Cyprus sherry and drinks it in an evening. That evening she feels better. In the morning, worse.
Pique, recuperating, is beginning to enjoy poor health, a good sign. The two of them have had an impromptu Valentine’s day party, Pique opening the valentines from school with varied comments–
Oh gee, I never sent Carla one–hey, it says G. R.; that must be Georgie Rexroth, that twit
–and so on. Pique is getting up now, late mornings, and flitting about in her housecoat. Morag has done no writing for more than a week, and now that Pique is better, chagrin begins to set in.

“Honey, could you leave me be for about a couple of hours, while I try to do a little work?”

“Sure,” Pique says with dignity. “Of course.”

The arrangement lasts for fifteen minutes, after which Pique tiptoes into the livingroom, where Morag is sitting staring at the blank page.

“Mum?”

“What?” Spoken churlishly.

“I was just thinking–tonight could you tell me some of those stories again?”

“Which stories?” Not wanting to know.

“Oh,
you
know. The ones Christie used to tell you, and that. And about my dad, and all that.”

Why this sudden need? Or is it simply that this week the two of them have been together all the time, and Pique has herself been frightened by her sickness, and now is well, and wants this particular closeness to continue for a while longer?

“Okay, honey. After dinner, eh?”

“Sure. Okay.”

But now there is no way that Morag can even try to begin to get inside the novel which is beginning. The novel, whose title is
Jonah
, is the story of an old man, a widower, who is fairly disreputable and who owns a gill-netter in Vancouver. He fishes the mouth of the Fraser River and the Strait of
Georgia when the salmon run is on. It is also about his daughter Coral, who resents his not being a reputable character. Jonah inhabits Morag’s head, and talks in his own voice. In some ways she knows more about Coral, who is so uncertainly freed by Jonah’s ultimate death, but it is Jonah himself who seems more likely to take on his own life in the fiction.

How to get this novel written, in between or as well as everything else?

“Pique–”

“Yeh?”

“C’mon, let’s get the dinner now. I’m not going to do any more work today, I guess. And then we’ll do the stories.”

Whose need is the greater? Morag’s, to tell the story of Jonah, or Pique’s, to hear the stories of Christie and of Lazarus and all of them, back there?

MORAG’S TALE OF CHRISTIE LOGAN

Well, a long time ago, when I was a kid, Christie used to tell me all sorts of stories. Christie Logan, he was a strange man, I guess. Not a big man–rather slight, really, but tough as tree-bark and wiry as barbwire and proud as the devil. He used to wear the same old overalls, always, and that embarrassed me and I used to think he stank of garbage, but now I’m not sure he did and I wonder why I thought it mattered, anyway. When he told me the tales about Piper Gunn, at first I used to believe every word. Then later I didn’t believe a word of them, and thought he’d made them up out of whole cloth.

(What means
Whole cloth
?)

Out of his head–invented them. But later still, I realized they’d been taken from things that happened, and who’s
to know what really happened? So I started believing in them again, in a different way. Now, when Christie told a tale, then, his voice would become different from the ordinary. It would be like the ranting of the pipe music, wild and stormy, until you could actually feel the things happening that he was telling you about. He had very blue eyes, Christie did, in those days, and when he was telling a tale, his eyes would be like the blue lightning and you would forget his small stature, for at those times he would seem a giant of a man. And I’ve told you the tale of Piper Gunn–well, now, when Christie told that first tale, about how Piper led his people onto the ship to take them to the new land, he used to describe Piper, and he’d say that Piper Gunn was a great tall man with a voice like the drums, and the heart of a child, and the gall of a thousand, and the strength of conviction. I always liked that–the strength of conviction, even though at the time I didn’t really know what it meant.

(What
does
it mean?)

It means that Piper Gunn believed the people could make a new life for themselves. He had faith. And you know, Pique, how Christie used to describe Piper’s wife? He used to say
Now Piper Gunn, he had a woman, and she had the courage of a falcon and the beauty of a deer, and the warmth of a home, and the faith of saints.

(I like that. Would he tell me those stories, if we went to see him?)

Well, maybe. But he’s getting pretty old now. He mightn’t remember so well.

(He would still remember those stories. He wouldn’t forget. Not Christie.)

MORAG’S TALE OF LAZARUS TONNERRE

Well, your grandfather, Lazarus Tonnerre, he brought up his children in the Wachakwa valley, there, just below the town of Manawaka, where I grew up. And there was your dad, and the two girls, Piquette and Valentine, and the two younger boys, Paul and Jacques. And their mother, Lazarus’s wife, she–I’m not sure what happened. Maybe she died, or–well, I don’t know.

(Why don’t you know?)

I just don’t. Maybe someday you’ll see your dad again and he can tell you. Anyway, Lazarus used to tell stories, too, to his family when the winter evenings were freezing cold and a blizzard wind would be yowling outside and the snow would be blowing across the door in drifts. Sometimes the kids would be hungry, and Lazarus would tell them these stories, all about
his
father, old Jules Tonnerre, who fought in the battle out west, and he really existed, once, and about Rider Tonnerre, a long long way back, who may have existed and maybe not, but it doesn’t matter–and he was said to be the best rider among all the Métis and the best buffalo hunter for miles around, in those old days.

(Why would the kids be
hungry
?)

They were very poor. It was during the Depression–that means a whole lot of people were poor, and couldn’t get jobs and didn’t have enough to eat.

(Oh.)

Anyhow, Lazarus had a lot of troubles, but his family never starved. Sometimes he used to go trapping away up Galloping Mountain way.

(Galloping Mountain? Is that a real mountain?)

Sure. Away north of Manawaka, where lots of very tall
spruce trees grow, and there’s a lake there, and a lot of your father’s people live thereabouts.

(I’m going there someday.)

Sure, honey. Anyway, Lazarus sometimes went alone on those trips up to the mountain, and sometimes he’d take your dad. Then they’d come back to the shack in the valley.

(And have lots to eat, eh? And tell stories. I wish I’d been there.)

Yeh. Well, there was more to it than that. Lazarus must’ve felt pretty low in his mind, sometimes, looking after all those kids, there. But he kept on somehow.

(
What
more to it?)

Well, I never knew him that well myself, but I remember the last time I ever saw him. It was at the time of the fire.

(I don’t like that part. Don’t tell it again.)

Okay. I won’t, then.

(He was brave, though, wasn’t he?)

Yes. He was that.

A letter arrives from Christie, saying the winter in Manawaka has been colder than all the shithouses in hell, but he is mostly all right, and how are Morag and Pique. He also asks, joking and not joking, when is Morag going to Sutherland, and isn’t she ever going to get to see where her people came from?

When, indeed, is she going to go? The pilgrimage. Does that word dramatize it beyond what it is? Probably not. Why, then, has she for so long hesitated?

She is afraid that she will be disappointed, that there will not, after all, be any relations. She is afraid that she will feel nothing and that nothing will be explained to her. Or else she is afraid that she will feel too much, and that too much will
be explained in those rocks and ruined crofts, or whatever is there, now, these days.

In those days, a darkness fell over all the lands and crofts of Sutherland. And among all of them people there on the rocks, see, was a piper and he was from the Clan Gunn, and it was many of the Gunns who lost their hearths and homes and lived wild on the stormy rocks there.

Morag writes back to Christie and says
Soon
.

Mr. Sampson has not been so much irritated as alarmed by Morag’s absence, it turns out. He has been unable to keep up with the accounts, and is convinced that penury is imminent. Morag agrees to work afternoons as well as mornings for the next fortnight, although grudgingly. She has done no writing at all during Pique’s illness and now will do virtually none for the next couple of weeks. A month away from it, and getting back inside will be torture. She thinks of writers with private means (of which she knows none) and puts a mental hex on them.

Had she not been working afternoons, however, she would not have met McRaith, who paints in the mornings and does his wandering around in the afternoons.

He has been standing at one of the counters with a large book in his hands for going on an hour before Morag approaches. She does not want to interrupt his browsing; she wants to speak to him, simply because his sexuality draws her. Why should this be? He is not particularly handsome. A man in his mid-forties, he appears to be, a large-boned large-framed man with a shaggy reddish beard, shaggy eyebrows, a head of thick shaggy hair to match, although his hairline is slightly receding.

“Can I help you?” Morag says, immediately regretting the shopgirl cliché.

He glances up, smiles with embarrassment and closes the book, which she now sees is an expensive edition of Klee reproductions.

“I wish you could.” His voice is faintly Scots, but with some kind of difference, a low-spoken and almost formal quality which she has not heard before. “But I can’t afford eight quid for a book, and it seems a bit large to steal unobtrusively.”

“Would you, if it weren’t?”

“I might take it, but the guilt would likely force me to return it. It’s in the background.”

“Presbyterian, you mean?”

“The same. In my case, considerably lapsed, but we are never totally lapsed.”

“I know. It’s in my background as well.”

His name is Daniel McRaith, and he comes from Crombruach, a village in the part of Ross-shire known as the Black Isle. Hence his accent, which is Highland.

“Strange,” Morag says, “that I wouldn’t know one Scots accent from another. Most of the Scots families, where I come from, came originally from the Highlands, but they spoke Gaelic when they first arrived, about a hundred and fifty years ago, and they lost that. Even with the ones who came later, though, the Scots accent in English never lasted into the second generation.”

“We have lost the Gaelic, too, or most of us.”

“And yet–and this was true of Christie, my stepfather, too, at times–there’s something in your speech that sounds almost as though it’s being translated from another language. Christie never had a word of Gaelic. But there was some echo left.”

“That is an appealing thought,” Daniel McRaith says, “but possibly not too accurate.”

“You mean–sentimental?”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” Morag says. “And perhaps not.”

McRaith calls himself a painter, not an artist. The word
artist
seems pretentious to him. He makes enough to live on now, although frugally; in the years when he didn’t, he had spells of working as a hod-carrier in Glasgow, every minute of which he hated. It was not the physical labour he minded so much; it was the ugliness of the smoke-blackened city.