The Diviners (51 page)

How unlike me. I would have had to say what I thought about it, analyze the words, probably, yakkity yak. She doesn’t have to, and neither does Jules. They do it in a different way, a way I can see, although it’s not mine.

Jules turns to Morag.

“You remember, in Vancouver, there, I wanted to get a song about Lazarus, only I couldn’t get it just then?”

“Yes. I remember.”

“Well, after a while I did get it. Did you ever tell Pique about Lazarus?”

“Some.”

Jules laughs.

“Yeh. Some. Well, here’s some more.”

And he sings. Pique again lowers her head, her hair spreading out like a veil, a mask, around her face.

Lazarus, he was the king of Nothing

Lazarus, he never had a dime.

He was sometimes on Relief, he was permanent on grief.

And Nowhere was the place he spent his time.

Lazarus, he lived down in the Valley;

Lazarus, he never lived in Town.

Now that damn town, still, see, it sits up on the hill,

But Lazarus, oh he belonged way down.

Lazarus was what they called a halfbreed;

Half a man was what the Town would say.

What made him walk so slow, well, they didn’t care to know–

It was easier by far to look away.

Lazarus was nothing to the Mounties;

They knew he never had a cent for bail.

When his life got more than rough, and he drank more than enough,

They just threw him in the Manawaka jail.

Lazarus was not afraid of fighting;

It was the only way he knew to win.

But when the fight was o’er, he’d be in the clink once more;

Those breeds must learn that anger is a sin.

Lazarus, he went and lost his woman;

She left him when she found he wasn’t king.

Then he had no woman there, nothing left, no kind of prayer,

And Nothing was his always Everything.

Lazarus, he had a bunch of children;

He raised them in the Valley down below.

So that they could eat, he shot rabbits there for meat,

Where his ancestors had shot the buffalo.

Lazarus, he lost some of those children,

Some to fire, some to the City’s heart of stone.

Maybe when they went, was the worst time that was sent.

For then he really knew he was alone.

Lazarus, he never slit his throat, there.

Lazarus, he never met his knife.

If you think that isn’t news, just try walking in his shoes.

Oh Lazarus, he kept his life, for life.

Lazarus, rise up out of the Valley;

Tell them what it really means to try.

Go tell them in the Town, though they always put you down,

Lazarus, oh man, you didn’t die.

Lazarus, oh man, you didn’t die.

Morag has stopped thinking about Pique and what she may be thinking and feeling. It is again the valley, inside her own head, and the last time she ever spoke to Lazarus, after that first time with Jules when Lazarus held the bottle
up and said
This here, it’s my woman now
, and Jules was angry, angry. Lazarus.

Pique raises her head.

“I didn’t know it was like that.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Jules says harshly. “Your mother probably didn’t tell you that when my sister died in that fire, with her kids, she was stoned out of her head with home-brew, on account of she didn’t give a fuck whether she lived or died, and she had her reasons.”

“No. I just heard about the fire. I know about that. Do you have to tell me again? I don’t want to hear it.”

Jules reaches for another beer. To Morag, he looks much older than forty-seven now, and much younger. His purple costume seems to fall away from him, leaving only the bones of his being, and his implacable eyes.

“Yeh, I guess I have to tell you it, again.”

My sister’s eyes

Fire and snow–

What they’d be saying

You couldn’t know.

My sister’s body

Fire and snow–

It wasn’t hers

Since long ago.

My sister’s man

Fire and snow–

He ate her heart

Then he made her go.

My sister’s children

Fire and snow–

She prayed they’d live

But it wasn’t so.

My sister’s death

Fire and snow–

Burned out her sorrow

In the valley below.

My sister’s eyes

Fire and snow–

What they were telling

You’ll never know.

Pique keeps her head down. Morag, too, can say nothing. What thoughts may be going on in Pique’s head, she can only guess. And Pique has no notion of the thoughts in Morag’s head. The fire, and Lazarus standing alone in the snow. Jules, years later, saying
Tell me, just tell me
.

“It’s a good song,” Pique says finally, out of the need for distance, but possibly also out of something else.

“Yeh,” Jules says.

He puts his guitar away in its case.

“I never got around, yet,” he goes on, “to doing songs for any of the other ones. I never managed to do one for myself, neither. Crazy, eh? I guess you didn’t know what happened after that time, Pique. It was after Lazarus died. My brother Paul, he was twenty-five, and he was a guide up north, and they say he drowned. Well, he handled a canoe better than most, so I doubt he drowned. It
could
be, I know; it’s happened. But he was taking a coupla tourists, eh, and they came back, all right, and
reported to the nearest
RCMP
that he’d drowned. They had a lotta guns with them, those guys, I’d guess, and a lotta booze. I don’t think he drowned. Jacques never got to first base with an investigation. After that, my sister Val finally died. She’d been trying hard for years, and she finally made it.”

“How did she die?” Pique’s voice is ageless.

“She was thirty-seven years old,” Jules says viciously. “I used to think she’d likely die in some brawl, but she never. After Paul, she fell apart. She’d looked after him, mostly, as a kid. She died of booze and speed, on the streets of Vancouver. As a whore.”

Pique looks at him, her eyes hurt and bewildered and angry.

“Why did you have to tell me? Why did you have to?”

Jules brings down one clenched fist upon the table.

“Too many have died,” he says. “Too many, before it was time. I don’t aim to be one of them. And I don’t aim for you to be, neither.”

Pique begins crying, then, silently, and he puts an arm lightly around her shoulder.

“My brother, Jacques, he lives away up at Galloping Mountain. I guess you’d like the mountain. If you ever go west, go and see him, eh? He talks better than me.”

Pique lifts her head and smiles at him, and there is such a desolation in Jules’ eyes that Morag longs to put her arms around him. But cannot move or speak.

“I’ll show you something,” Jules says, to lighten the atmosphere. “The only thing I got now that belonged to Lazarus, and it’s not a thing which was even really his. Funny, eh?”

He reaches into his wallet and brings out a silver brooch, now blackened with lack of cleaning.

“Jules–that’s a plaid pin,” Morag says. “How in hell did Lazarus come to have that?”

“Is that what you call it? Well, when my dad was just a kid, he used to horse around, sometimes, with this other kid called John Shipley, and Lazarus traded his knife for this brooch, thinking it’d be worth a lot of money, I guess, but then he was scared to try to sell it–people would’ve thought he’d stolen it, see? When I came back from the war, there, Lazarus gave it to me. I would’ve liked to get that Shipley guy to trade back again, but he’d been killed a few years before the war, Lazarus said, when his truck piled into an oncoming freight train.”

Morag stares in disbelief. These things do not happen. Oh yes, they do, though. Everything is improbable. Nothing is more improbable than anything else.

“Jules–”

“Yeh?” Then, as he sees her face, “What in hell’s the matter, Morag?”

“Even if he hadn’t been killed,” Morag says, her own voice sounding detached from herself, “he wouldn’t have had the knife. He’d sold it for a package of cigarettes. To Christie Logan. Christie never mentioned the guy’s name, but he told me the story. Christie never knew whose the knife had been, or he’d have given it back to Lazarus. He gave the knife to me, years ago. That, and a few books, that’s all I have of Christie’s.”

“You’re crazy,” Jules says. “You’re kidding.”

“She’s not kidding,” Pique said. “Where do you keep it, Ma?” “Top drawer of my dresser.”

Pique goes upstairs and returns. She is about to hand the knife to Jules. Then she hesitates and finally hands it to Morag. Jules hunches in his chair, motionless, eyes concealed.

It is an ordinary hunting knife, dulled and slightly rusty with age and lack of use. On the handle there is a sign:

“I always wondered,” Morag says, “what the sign on the hilt meant. I see now it’s a ‘T.’”

He takes it without a word and turns it over and over in his hands, running his fingers over the blade.

“Jesus!” he says at last. “How about that? It could even be cleaned and sharpened, you know that? It’s still a good knife.”

Pique looks as though she were about to say something, then changes her mind and remains quiet, as though recognizing that all this is only between Morag and Jules.

“Here,” he says, shoving the plaid pin across the table to Morag. “Fair trade.”

She takes it and examines it. Neither of them has thanked the other. No need. A fair trade. Morag goes to her bookshelves and gets out Christie’s
The Clans and Tartans of Scotland
. Leafs through it, trying to find an illustration of this particular plaid pin. Pique watches, curiously, but Jules is still looking at the knife.

“Here it is,” Morag says. “It’s the Clanranald Macdonalds. Where could he have got it from, John Shipley? We’ll never know, of course. The crest, it says here, is
On a castle triple-towered, an arm in armour, embowed, holding a sword, proper.
Their motto was
My Hope Is Constant In Thee
–those are the words on the pin. Their war cry was
Gainsay Who Dare
.”

Clan Gunn, according to this book, as she recalls from years back, did not have a crest or a coat-of-arms. But adoption, as who should know better than Morag, is possible.

My Hope Is Constant In Thee.
It sounds like a voice from the past. Whose voice, though? Does it matter? It does not matter. What matters is that the voice is there, and that she has heard these words which have been given to her. And will not deny what has been given.
Gainsay Who Dare.

PART FIVE

THE DIVINERS

ELEVEN

T
he Canada geese had been gone for a week now, and wind was fringed with cold. The leaves were beginning to fall and the grass was splattered with them, red maple, yellow elm, brown oak.

Pique had quit her job at the supermarket and was having coffee with Morag.

“I never told you, Ma,” Pique said, “about when I went to Manawaka, did I? I guess I should. I thought–I dunno–I guess I thought it might upset you, or something. I went down in the valley to see the Tonnerre shack, the one my dad rebuilt after the fire. There wasn’t much left of it–it had sort of fallen in, and the boards were rotting. I was glad I’d gone, though. It seemed I really knew then that all of them had lived there, once. The grass was thick and high all around, and there were these thin prairie maples and the wolf willow. I liked it there. There wasn’t any sign that there’d ever been a fire, not now. I stayed all night, not sleeping much, just sort of thinking, you know. It was very quiet. I could hear the river–it’s really more a creek, isn’t it? It sounded kind of like voices. In the morning–”

She hesitated.

“Go on,” Morag said.

“Well, in the morning, I went up to the Manawaka cemetery, and looked up Christie and Prin Logan’s grave. Zinnias had been planted, and somebody was there, weeding. It was this plain little middle-aged woman with kind of stringy hair, looking sort of exhausted, you know? But she sounded quite cheerful. I liked her. I told her who my mother and dad were, and she looked surprised, but all she said was
Well, now, think of that; I’m glad Morag did have a child after all.
She said you wouldn’t recall her married name, but you would know her single name. It was–”

“I know,” Morag said. “Eva Winkler.”

“That’s right. How did you know?”

“It couldn’t have been anyone else.”

“Ma–I did upset you, didn’t I? I’m sorry. You’re crying.”

“It’s okay. Honestly. It’s just–well, I guess I can’t explain.”

Too many years. No brief summary possible. Accept it and let it go.

“I’ve decided what I’m going to do, Ma,” Pique said. “I
will
be going west again.”

“Where to, Pique?”

“Just as far as Manitoba. I’m going to my uncle Jacques’ place at Galloping Mountain.”

“You are? Does he know?”

“Sure. I’ve been writing to him.”

“You have? What sort of place is it, Pique? Do you know?”

Would that sound suspicious? Shouldn’t have said it. Still and all, a farm or whatever at Galloping Mountain. Forty Below all winter. Probably an outdoor john.

“I’ve been there,” Pique said. “I went up there after I’d been to Manawaka. My dad said I should go, sometime,
remember? When he was here that time about three years ago, he said that. So I went. He’s got this small farm, Jacques, and he sets traplines in the winter, he and the boys. They’re not well-off, but Jacques is some guy. He doesn’t come on strong–I don’t mean that, not at all. It’s just that he’s sure of what he’s doing, and nobody is going to put him down, if he can help it. He and Mary–that’s his wife–they’ve got four of their own kids, as well as the others.”

“The others?”

“Valentine’s three kids,” Pique said slowly. “Mary and Jacques have been raising them.”

“I see. I didn’t know Val had–”

“Yeh. Well. They’ve been up at the mountain all their lives, just about. Also, there’s Paul’s son–he’d be about fourteen, I guess.”

“Jules never said there was–did Paul’s wife die?”

“No. She’s got
TB
. There’s some younger kids as well.”

“Whose?”

Children of Jules? If so, Pique would not say. What did it matter, anyway?

“Jacques goes to Winnipeg sometimes, for Métis meetings and that. He usually comes back with some kid or other, kids whose parents have died or vanished. You know. They’ve had pretty rough lives, so some of them aren’t that easy to get on with. That’s what I’ll be doing–helping Mary out with the work and with the kids who aren’t at school yet.”

“It sounds–well, like kind of a madhouse.”

“Oh it is,” Pique said, laughing. “You’d hate it, Ma. It’s a messy house, with all those kids. It doesn’t bother me. Yeh, sometimes it does, I guess, but not too much.”

“Where in hell does any money come from? The farm wouldn’t make enough.”

“Well, there isn’t much. Some of them work out–Valentine’s two eldest boys, and Jacques’ daughter, Val, who’s about a year older than I am.”

“What about Dan, Pique?”

Pique looked troubled.

“He wants to stay here, and I want to go. He doesn’t see that it’s necessary for me. Maybe I’ll be back, or else he’ll decide to come out for a while. Or maybe I won’t and he won’t. I haven’t got the gift of second sight.”

In a way, she almost did, though. But whatever Pique felt was likely to happen, she was not about to say.

“Pique, I hope–”

What? That Pique wasn’t taking on more than she could cope with? That she wasn’t making an error of judgement in going at all? Nonsense. Who could ever enter anything with a guarantee? Let her go. This time, it had to be possible and was.

“I hope everything goes well for you, Pique.”

Pique smiled faintly.

“Thanks. It will and it won’t, I guess. I wish I was better at explanations, Ma. I’m not going out there because they need me, particularly. All I can do is contribute my share, if I can. For me, it’s more, really, that I need them, right now. For a while, anyway. I don’t know how long they’ll want me to stay. I don’t know how long I’ll want to stay. But my reasons for going–well, it’s like when I went off before. I couldn’t
say
, exactly, and yet I knew. Could I sing you this song I did? I haven’t sung it yet for Dan and the Smiths, but I’m going to. At least, I hope so. Maybe Dan will see then–I don’t know.”

Morag had wondered why Pique had toted her guitar over here today. She must have had this in mind, not having quite decided whether to sing it or not, hesitating to make herself that
vulnerable. It was easier, in some way, to make yourself vulnerable in front of strangers.

Pique sang. Morag had listened to Pique singing many times before, but never before her own song.

There’s a valley holds my name, now I know

In the tales they used to tell it seemed so low

There’s a valley way down there

I used to dream it like a prayer

And my fathers, they lived there long ago.

There’s a mountain holds my name, close to the sky

And those stories made that mountain seem so high

There’s a mountain way up there

I used to dream I’d breathe its air

And hear the voices that in me would never die.

I came to taste the dust out on a prairie road

My childhood thoughts were heavy on me like a load

But I left behind my fear

When I found those ghosts were near

Leadin’ me back to that home I never knowed.

Ah, my valley and my mountain, they’re the same

My living places, and they never will be tame

When I think how I was born

I can’t help but being torn

But the valley and the mountain hold my name

The valley and the mountain hold my name

Then silence. Pique could not speak until Morag did, and Morag could not speak for a while. The hurts unwittingly inflicted upon Pique by her mother, by circumstances–Morag had agonized over these often enough, almost as though, if she imagined them sufficiently, they would prove to have been unreal after all. But they were not unreal. Yet Pique was not assigning any blame–that was not what it was all about. And Pique’s journey, although at this point it might feel to her unique, was not unique. Morag reached out and took Pique’s hand, holding it lightly.

“Could I have a copy of the words, Pique?”

This was apparently all she could say. Pique’s fingers tightened around Morag’s, then let go.

“Sure. I’ll write them out for you now.”

That evening, when Morag was having dinner alone, the phone rang. Morag, wanting only to be left to herself to think, answered reluctantly.

“Hello.”

“Morag? Billy Joe. I thought I oughta phone you, maybe. Jules, he’s not so good.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, I don’t know that I oughta say, like. He’s sick.”

“What is it? Is he in hospital?”

“No. He won’t go.”

“What
is
it?”

Then Billy Joe’s voice, uncertain, telling her.

“Billy. In his throat?”

“Yeh.”

“Where is he?”

Billy gave the address.

“Do you think he’ll see me, Billy?”

“Yeh. I think so.”

“He didn’t say he wanted to see me?”

“Well, no. But–”

“Never mind. He wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get the seven o’clock bus. I’ll be there about ten. Is he–is there a woman with him?”

“Not now,” Billy Joe said. “Not after he got real sick.”

Royland drove Morag to the bus station in McConnell’s Landing. She told him what had happened.

“Look, Royland, phone over to A-Okay’s, will you, and just tell Pique I decided to go in and spend a few days with Ella and Mort, and I’ll be back before she goes.”

“Okay. But are you sure she shouldn’t know?”

“No, I’m not sure of a damn thing. But I think it’s better to wait and see how he is, and also what he wants me to tell her.”

“Yeh. Okay. You gonna be all right, now, Morag? You seem pretty shaky. Want me to come along with you?”

“No. But thanks anyway.”

The bus crawled along the highway. Morag shut her mind, as she was sometimes able to do in time of need. If she began thinking about Jules now, about his whole life, about the way he looked when he was young, she could not face whatever it was that she would have to face.

The place was on Spadina, a three-storey house which seemed to be slumped in upon itself with the years and lack of repairs. Billy Joe answered the door. He had been waiting for her. Morag had not seen him for–how long? Nearly nineteen years. Was that possible? Indeed. Billy Joe looked shorter than she had remembered. His hair was still black as crows’ feathers,
but his face was seamed and wrinkled, even though he could not be more than in his early fifties. He evaded her eyes.

“I dunno if I done the right thing, Morag, phoning you. I never told him I done it, yet. You can’t do nothing. We got two rooms, top floor. C’mon.”

Outside the door to Jules’ room, Billy Joe stopped. He looked oddly determined, as though Jules might not approve of what he had done, but also as though he knew that this was necessary and what Jules wanted even though in an un-admitted way.

“You go in,” he said.

Then he left her, and went into his own room. Now Morag was afraid. Not afraid, any longer, that Jules might mock her or tell her to get out. Not that, not now. Simply afraid of what she might see, of how he might look. Afraid that she might have to look at something she could not bear to look at. She opened the door. One ceiling light, not more than forty-watt, was burning, and the small room was shadowed. The usual one-room setup. Discoloured linoleum on the floor. A table, a couple of straight chairs, a hotplate, a cupboard. Tatty lace curtains on the window. And in one corner, a double bed with a grey blanket.

Jules was lying outstretched on the bed, his arms bent upwards and his hands clasped behind his head. He was wearing an old pair of blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, the kind you buy at the cut-rate clothing stores for $3.33 or thereabouts. He looked more like himself than the last time she had seen him. His leather belt, though, wasn’t his old one–this was wider, new, with a clasp buckle in brass braid. Then Morag remembered he’d given his old belt to Pique. His hair was now nearly as long and as grey as her own. He was much thinner, but not with the hard leanness of his young manhood–this
was a different thing, the erosion of the flesh. His face looked bonier, but the same, the face of Skinner Tonnerre, and behind and within that face, the face of Lazarus. There were no outward signs of the sickness. What had she expected?

His eyes were open and he was looking fixedly at the dull light on the ceiling. He heard the door open and turned his head.

“Billy–”

Then he saw who it was, and raised himself on one elbow.

“For God’s sake–what’re
you
doing here?”

His speaking voice had always had that gravel quality. Was it increased so much now, or did Morag only imagine it? She closed the door behind her.

“Billy Joe phoned me. Maybe you don’t want me to be here, Skinner. But I’m here. I won’t stay long.”

Jules sank back. And, strangely, laughed. A grating sound which made him cough in spasms. He turned away and spat into a basin beside the bed.

“Do you want some water?” she asked, helpless.

“Rye would be better,” he managed at last. “There’s a bottle in the cupboard. Mind getting it? Bathroom’s on the floor below. Get some water, eh?”

She did, and poured stiff drinks for them both. Jules did not get up from the bed. He propped himself on an elbow, again, and gulped the drink quickly.