The Diviners (6 page)

Morag stares. Blood on Vernon’s
face
. He has a nose-bleed. She looks up at Christie.

Christie is sitting very still. His hands are around his knees. He looks away from Morag. She might have known he wouldn’t do anything. Scaredy-cat Christie.

Gus pushes Vernon back inside the Winklers’ shack. All of a sudden everything on Hill Street seems quiet. Then the ordinary noises begin again, as though nothing has happened. Nothing at all. Christie does not move. Then he speaks, but it doesn’t sound like Christie.

“I didn’t go over. I didn’t go over, did I? Not me. Gus Winkler’s too brawny. May God–”

He stops. Prin makes little clucking-hen noises.

“It wasn’t none of your business, Christie.”

Christie gets up and walks inside the house.

“He’s gonna have one of his spells,” Prin says. “He ain’t had one for a long time.”

When they go into the house, Christie is sitting on the oak bench. His blue blue eyes look like they are
blind
. He is
shaking all over. He keeps on like this a long time. Then he stops shaking but doesn’t move. When Morag goes to bed, he is still sitting there, not moving.

“What
is
it, Prin?”

“Shh,” Prin says. “It’s nothing. It’ll go away by itself. Doc MacLeod says he don’t think nothing can be done for it. It’s the shell shock, like.”

“
What
?”

“In the war,” Prin explains. “He was shook up very bad. In his nerves, like. Sometimes it takes him, even now. He never said, but I always had a hunch that was why he couldn’t get no other job except Scavenger. He never knows when it might take him, see.”

“But–he told me he fancied the job.”

“He would,” Prin says, crossly.

“Why would Gus Winkler do that to Vern?”

Prin shakes her head.

“Only the Lord can tell. He’s got a devil in him, that man.”

Morag lies in bed, thinking. Christie would never beat her. He’s stinky and he looks so dumb. But he’s never beaten her. He wouldn’t do that, anyway. But he didn’t go over to Winklers’. He was scared of Gus.

Christie, sitting there in the kitchen. Christie, shaking all over.

Morag cries.

Memorybank Movie: Christie with Spirits

Morag is nine, and it is winter. The snow is a good four feet thick outside and you have to walk to school on the road, where the snowplough has been. The windows are covered with frost-feathers and frost-ferns, and it doesn’t matter that
you can’t see out because the patterns are so good to look at. In the kitchen, the stove keeps them warm, although Christie has a job scrounging enough wood. Lots of people on Relief are going to the Nuisance Grounds looking for old wooden boxes, not being able to afford cordwood, but Christie has first pick. Christie is not on Relief.
Relief
means you have no job on account of the Depression, and the government feeds you slop. Ugh. The
Depression
means there aren’t any jobs, or hardly any, or like that.

Christie is drinking red biddy he got from somebody across the tracks, and he is explaining about the wood and other things to Morag. Prin is cross about the red biddy, so she has turned her chair away from him.

“I leave some, do you see, then, Morag,” Christie says. “It’s only right. Garbage belongs to all. Communal property, as you might say. One man’s muck is everyman’s muck. The socialism of the junk heap. All the same, though, with every profession do you see, there must be some advantages, some little thing or other that you get which others don’t. And this here is mine. The Nuisance Grounds keeps us warm. Out of the garbage dump and into the fire. Och aye, that was the grand load of boxes I brought back today. Old butter crates from the Creamery.”

He swallows some more red biddy, coughs, then gets into the subject he always talks about when the spirits are in him.

“Let the Connors and the McVities and the Camerons and Simon Pearl and all them in their houses up there–let them look down on the likes of Christie Logan. Let them. I say unto you, Morag, girl, I open my shirt to the cold winds of their voices, yea, and to the ice of their everlasting eyes. They don’t touch me, Morag. For my kin and clan are as good as theirs any day of the week, any week of the month, any
month of the year, any year of the century, and any century of all time.”

Gulp. Swallow. The spirits are really in him. His eyes are shining. His right hand comes up, clenched. He is pretending he is holding a claymore. Morag knows, because once afterwards he said so, laughing. But you aren’t supposed to laugh now.

“Was I not born a Highlander, in Easter Ross, one of the North Logans? An ancient clan, an ancient people. Is our motto not a fine, proud set of words, then?
This Is the Valour of My Ancestors.
The motto of the Logans, Morag, and our war cry is
The Ridge of Tears
. The ridge of tears!
Druim-nan deur
, although I’m not so sure how to pronounce it, not having the Gaelic. A sad cry, it is, for the sadness of my people. A cry heard at Culloden, in the black days of the battle, when the clans stood together for the last time, and the clans were broken by the Sassenach cannons and the damned bloody rifles of the redcoat swine. They mowed the clans down in cold blood, my dear, and it must have been enough to tear the heart and unhinge the mind of the strongest coldest man alive, for our folk were poor bloody crofters, and were not wanting to fight the wars of the chieftains, at all. But they thought their chieftains had the power from heaven, Morag. They believed their chiefs were kings from God. And them who didn’t believe was raised anyway, with fire and with sword, until they went off to fight Charlie’s battle for him, and him a green boy from France who neither knew nor cared for his people but only for the crown gleaming there in the eye of his own mind.”

Christie stumbles to the sideboard and opens a drawer. He brings out the book,
The Clans and Tartans of Scotland
, and looks up Logan.

“See there,” he bellows. “The crest badge of the Logans. And what is the crest, Morag? What is the way, then, you would describe, in the right words, what is there on that badge?”

She knows it off by heart.

“A passion nail piercing a human heart, proper.”

Christie’s fist comes down on the table.

“Right! An ancient family, the North Logans, by the Almighty God.”

Then the spirits start to get gloomy in him.

“Och, what the hell does it matter? It’s here we live, not there, and the glory has passed away, and likely never was in the first place.”

“Christie, tell me about Piper Gunn.”

Christie sighs, and pours another drink. He sits there, thinking. Soon he will begin. Morag knows what it says in the book under the name Gunn. It isn’t fair, but it must be true because it is right there in the book.

The chieftainship of Clan Gunn is undetermined at the present time, and no arms have been matriculated.

When she first looked it up, she showed it to Christie, and he read it and then he laughed and asked her if she had not been told the tales about the most famous Gunn of all, and so he told her. He tells them to her sometimes when the spirit moves him.

Now he rocks back on the straight chair, for he is sitting at the table with the bottle beside him.

“All right, then, listen and I will tell you the first tale of your ancestor.”

CHRISTIE’S FIRST TALE OF PIPER GUNN

It was in the old days, a long time ago, after the clans was broken and scattered at the battle on the moors, and the dead men thrown into the long graves there, and no heather ever grew on those places, never again, for it was dark places they had become and places of mourning. Then, in those days, a darkness fell over all the lands and the crofts of Sutherland. The Bitch-Duchess was living there then, and it was she who cast a darkness over the land, and sowed the darkness and reaped gold, for her heart was dark as the feathers of a raven and her heart was cold as the gold coins, and she loved no creature alive but only the gold. And her tacksmen rode through the countryside, setting fire to the crofts and turning out the people from their homes which they had lived in since the beginning of all time. And it was old men and old women with thin shanks and men in their prime and women with the child inside them and a great scattering of small children like, and all of them was driven away from the lands of their fathers and onto the wild rocks of the shore, then, to fish if they could and pry the shellfish off of the rocks there, for food.

Well, now, the Bitch-Duchess walked her castle, there, walked and walked, and you would think God in His mercy would keep the sleep forever from her eyelids, but she slept sound enough when she had a mind to. She was not the one to feel shame or remorse over the people scrabbling on the rocks there like animals and like the crabs who crawl among the rocks in that place.
All the lands of Sutherland will be raising the sheep
, says the she-devil,
for they’ll pay better than folk.

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. And Piper Gunn, he was a great tall
man, a man with the voice of drums and the heart of a child and the gall of a thousand and the strength of conviction. And when he played the pipes on the shore, there, it was the pibrochs he played, out of mourning for the people lost and the people gone and them with no place for to lay their heads except the rocks of the shore. When Piper Gunn played, the very seagulls echoed the chants of mourning, and the people wept. And Piper Gunn, he played there on the shore, all the pibrochs he knew, “Flowers of the Forest” and all them. And it would wrench the heart of any person whose heart was not dead as stone, to hear him.

Then Piper Gunn spoke to the people.
Dolts and draggards and daft loons and gutless as gutted herring you are
, he calls out in his voice like the voice of the wind from the north isles.
Why do you sit on these rocks, weeping?
says he.
For there is a ship coming
, says he,
on the wings of the morning, and I have heard tell of it, and we must gather our pots and kettles and our shawls and our young ones, and go with it into a new world across the waters.

But the people were afraid, see? They did not dare. Better to die on the known rocks in the land of their ancestors, so some said. Others said the lands across the seas were bad lands, filled with the terrors and the demons and the beasts of the forest and those being the beasts which would devour a man as soon as look at him.
Well
, says Piper Gunn,
God rot your flabby souls then, for my woman and I will go and rear our daughters and our sons in the far land and make it ours, and you can stay here, then, and the Bitch-Duchess can have chessmen carved from your white bones scattered here on the rocks and she shall play her games with you in your death as she has in your life.

Then Piper Gunn changed his music, and he played the battle music there on the rocks. And he played “All the Blue Bonnets Are Over the Border” and he played “Hey Johnnie
Cope” and he played “The March of the Cameron Men” and he played “The Gunns’ Salute” which was the music of his own clan. They say it was like the storm winds out of the north, and like the scree and skirl of all the dead pipers who ever lived, returned then to pipe the clans into battle.

Now Piper Gunn had a woman, and a strapping strong woman she was, with the courage of a falcon and the beauty of a deer and the warmth of a home and the faith of saints, and you may know her name. Her name, it was Morag. That was an old name, and that was the name Piper Gunn’s woman went by, and fine long black hair she had, down to her waist, and she stood there beside her man on the rocky coast, and watched that ship come into the harbour in that place. And when the plank was down and the captain hailing the people there, Piper Gunn began to walk towards that ship and his woman Morag with him, and she with child, and he was still playing “The Gunns’ Salute.”

Then what happened? What happened then, to all of them people there homeless on the rocks? They rose and followed! Yes, they rose, then, and they followed, for Piper Gunn’s music could put the heart into them and they would have followed him all the way to hell or to heaven with the sound of the pipes in their ears.

And that was how all of them came to this country, all that bunch, and they ended up at the Red River, and that is another story.

“Best go to bed, Morag,” Prin says. “
He’ll
be asleep at the table in a coupla minutes.”

Morag goes upstairs. Her room is really hers, her place. It has always been hers. She likes that it is small, just enough room for the brass bed and the green dresser. She sits on the
bed, shivering. The cold is seeping in through the closed window. She does not undress. Prin finds her there, after a while, and scolds.

“Morag, you are a mooner.”

Morag puts on her nightgown then, and climbs into bed. Thinking.

A mooner.
That sounds nice. She knows what it means. It isn’t meant nice. It means somebody who moons around, dawdling and thinking. But to her it means something else. Some creature from another place,
another planet
. Left here accidentally.

She thinks of the scribbler in her top dresser drawer. She will never show it to anyone, never. It is hers, her own business. She will write some in it tomorrow. She tells it in her head.

Morag’s First Tale of Piper Gunn’s Woman

Once long ago there was a beautiful woman name of Morag, and she was Piper Gunn’s wife, and they went to the new land together and Morag was never afraid of anything in this whole wide world. Never. If they came to a forest, would this Morag there be scared? Not on your christly life. She would only laugh and say,
Forests cannot hurt me because I have the power and the second sight and the good eye and the strength of conviction.

What means
The Strength of Conviction?

Morag sleeps.

THREE

T
oday would be better. Today Pique would phone, or there would be a letter from her, saying she had decided against hitching west or else that she and Gord were back together and were going west for a while but all was well.

Morag went downstairs, made coffee and sat at the table, looking out at the morning river. The sky was growing light. Exact use of words, that. The sky actually was
growing
light, as though the sun, still hidden, were some kind of galactic plant putting forth tendrils.

Idiotic to have got up so early. As you grow older, you require less sleep. Could it be that she would become a consistently early riser? Two hours’ work done before breakfast? A likely thought.

The swallows were of course awake and flittering out from the nest under the eaves, just above the window, zinging across the water, swooping and scooping up insects to feed their newly hatched fledglings. For years Morag had hardly noticed birds, being too concerned with various personal events and oddities. In the last few years she had become aware
of creatures other than human, whose sphere this was as well, unfortunate them. Even plants were to be pitied, having to share home with the naked apes.

Across the river came a boat, its small outboard motor chuffing fitfully. A-Okay Smith and Co. Maudie and Thomas. At five, apparently, Tom could read, taught by Maudie, so that in Grade One he had been to some extent ostracized by the other kids. Now at eight he was full of exotic knowledge. The Smiths were enlightened almost to a fault. Morag, while exceedingly fond of them, sometimes felt ignorant in their presence, which caused her to react towards them with a degree of resentment and chagrin. Also, they believed, somewhat touchingly, that their enlightenment would mean that Tom would be spared any sense of alienation towards them later on, in his adolescence. Morag had, once upon a time, held that belief herself. One of the disconcerting aspects of middle age was the realization that most of the crises which happened to other people also ultimately happened to you.

The boat came to a jolting standstill alongside Morag’s dock, and the Clan Smith clambered out and straggled up to the house. Tom, deceptively cherub-faced, was heard to announce that he was going along the road to Royland’s. Praise God. Spared his hideously knowledgeable remarks for perhaps an hour, if lucky.
Those birds are not Blackbirds, Morag–the Rusty Blackbird is like that, only smaller and with shorter talons and tail–those are Grackles, Common Grackles.
Tom could confidently be depended upon to know the nesting, breeding and living habits (many of them disgusting) of the Common Grackle, from conception to death. Probably he wanted to pick Royland’s brains on the habits of the muskie, pickerel, rock bass and other fish inhabiting the waters of southern Ontario.

“Hi, Morag.”

The Smiths entered without knocking, which Morag did not mind. They had, after all, lived here last year until they got the place across the river. A-Okay and Maude were one thing, but a winter enclosed in the farmhouse with the encyclopaedic Thomas was not to be highly recommended. Odd how much she now missed the kid, however, all things considered.

“I brought you some poems,” A-Okay said in his earnestly jokey young voice, attempting nonchalance but totally without success.

“Alf read them to me last night,” Maudie added, a testimonial, “and I thought they were Right On.”

Right On. Dear little Lord Jesus, what did that mean? Like saying Great, Stupendous. No meaning at all.

I’m just as bad. Even if I think the poems are rubbish, I always say Very Interesting, at least before clobbering him with my real opinion. Please God, let them be better than the last couple of bunches. Well, some of those would’ve been a-okay if he’d worked on them more.

A-Okay thrust a wodge of papers into Morag’s hands. He was a tall gangling man in his late twenties, still having something of an adolescent awkwardness about his limbs. He would frequently crash into tables, although sober, unaware of their presence until overtaken, and as an accidental dish-breaker he was without peer. He was, admittedly, shortsighted, and although he owned a pair of specs, he seldom wore them, believing them to indicate a subconscious desire to distance oneself from others. The result was that he was considerably more distanced from others, and from assorted objects, than he need have been. But let it pass. His was a heart of sterling or oak, stalwart. Morag’s unofficial protector,
believing her to be in need of one, which indeed she sometimes was.

“Thanks, A-Okay,” Morag said. “I’ll read them later. As you know, I don’t think well off the top of my head. I’ll be over at your place soon, anyway. I’m going with Royland, when he does your well. All right?”

“A-Okay,” said A-Okay, this being the reason for his nickname. Maudie always called him Alf. He always called her Maude, a name Morag found unsuitable. Come into the garden, Maude. Maudie sounded more appropriate. Maudie herself was slender and small and would probably look young at fifty, a plain scrubbed face, blonde hair worn long or in a plait, her dress nearly always ankle-length, granny-type, in gingham she sewed determinedly herself on a hand-cranker sewing machine. A wonder she didn’t sew by hand with needle, thread and tiny silver thimble. At night. By coal-oil lamp.

“Can I make some coffee, Morag?”

“Sure, Maudie. You know where everything is.”

“Heard from Pique yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well,” Maudie said, her voice clear and musical as a meadowlark’s, “she was right to go. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeh.” Yes. Truthfully. No need to hammer the point home, thanks.

“And she’s right not to communicate, too.” Maudie, like Shakespeare, knew everything. “She will, in time, but she’s got to find herself first.”

“Oh balls, Maudie,” Morag said, ashamed of her annoyance but unable to prevent it. “One postcard wouldn’t destroy her self-discovery, I would’ve thought.”

“Symbolically, it might do just that.”

“Yeh. Maybe.” Morag’s voice lacked conviction.

Maudie with a cool efficiency produced a percolator full of real coffee in less time than Morag would have taken to make Instant.

“I’ve been thinking about that back vegetable garden of yours, Morag,” A-Okay said. “How be if I dig it out for you again? It’s kind of gone to seed, since–well, since we left. Now don’t take offense–you know I don’t mean it that way. I know it’s a little late this spring, but at least you could put in lettuce and stuff.”

“We’ve got ours nearly dug,” Maudie said, eyes bright as goldfinches’ wings. “I put in six packets of seeds yesterday.”

Morag felt trapped. For one glorious summer the Smiths had grown vegetables in Morag’s garden. At present, nothing was there except weeds.

“A-Okay, my dear, there is no way I’m going to slog around in that huge vegetable garden as long as I can bring in supplies from McConnell’s Landing.”

Both the Smiths looked away, embarrassed, troubled for her. Traitoress. Lackey to the System.

“By taxi?” A-Okay murmured.

“By packhorse would be better? The taxis are running anyway. This way, I’m not adding to the effluvia in the air.”

A small moment of triumph. Then the recognition that the reason she shopped by taxi was quite simply that she was afraid of driving and refused to learn.

“True,” A-Okay said. “But I was actually thinking of the cost, right at the moment.”

“Look at it this way,” Morag continued. “If I spent all my time gardening, how in hell could I get any writing done? No great loss, you may say, but it’d be a loss to
me
, and also I need a minimal income, even here. Whatever Susanna Moodie
may have said in
Roughing It in the Bush
, I am not about to make coffee out of roasted dandelion roots.”

“An hour a day in the garden,” A-Okay said patiently, “would do the job. At least enough to have some results.”

True. Undoubtedly true. Morag Gunn, countrywoman, never managing to overcome a quiver of distaste at the sight of an earthworm. Lover of swallows, orioles and red-winged blackbirds. Detester of physical labour. Lover of rivers and tall trees. Hater of axes and shovels. What a farce. You had to give A-Okay full marks for persistence–he never ceased trying to convert her.

“I approve of your efforts, God only knows,” Morag said. “I applaud. I think it is great. I cannot help feeling, however, that like it or not the concrete jungle will not be halted by a couple of farms and a vegetable garden.”

Silence. What a fatuous thing to say. As if they didn’t know. As if they didn’t know it all better than she did. They’d been part of it all their lives, from childhood, in a way she never had. She had lived in cities as though passing through briefly. Even when she’d lived in one city or another for years, they’d never taken hold of her consciousness. Her childhood had taken place in another world, a world A-Okay and Maudie had never known and couldn’t begin to imagine, a world which in some ways Morag could still hardly believe was over and gone forever. These kids had been born and had grown up in Toronto. They weren’t afraid of cities in the way Morag was afraid. They knew how to live there, how to survive. But they hated the city much more than Morag ever could, simply because they knew. A-Okay had once taught computer programming at a technical college. The decision to leave was, for them, an irrevocable one and hadn’t been made lightly. Morag had met them through mutual friends in Toronto at
the precise moment when they had decided to leave the city. She had suggested they give it a try at her place, and they had done that, paying their way both financially and in physical work. However they might feel sometimes, now they were living and had to live as though their faith in their decision was not to be broken.

“I’m sorry,” Morag said, truthfully. “I didn’t mean to say that. I didn’t even mean it.”

“No,” A-Okay said suddenly. “We were talking at you, not with you. Weren’t we? I guess we’ve done a lot of that since we got our own place. We didn’t have any right.”

“Well, now that you mention it, there may be some small degree of the Bible-puncher in you, A-Okay.”

More in Maudie than in him. But she did not say this.

“Your writing is your real work,” A-Okay said, with embarrassing loyalty and evident belief. “It’s there you have to make your statement.”

Or not make it. You can’t write a novel that way, in any event. They’d been real to her, the people in the books. Breathing inside her head.

Phone. Her ring. Morag leapt up and shot over to the telephone on the sideboard. Pique. Cool it, Morag.

“Hello?”

“That you, Morag?”

Oh God. Him. Not him surely? Yes. How long since she’d seen him? Three years, only. Before the Smiths moved in. The Smiths had never seen him, and didn’t even know anything much about him, as Morag only ever talked about him to Pique, sometimes.

“Yes. Speaking.”

A deep gust of hoarse laughter.

“Don’t try to make out you don’t know who this is, eh?”

“Yeh, I know. I’m surprised you’re still alive, is all.”

“Yeh? I plan on living forever–didn’t you know?”

Yes. You told me once you used to believe that, and didn’t now. Are you all right?

“Are you all right? Are you okay?”

“Of course not,” he said. “What do you think? I got busted for peddling. The hard stuff, naturally. I’m phoning from Kingston Pen. Got a private phone in the cell.”

Well, at least he was okay.

“Oh, sorry to cast doubts on your blameless reputation. Why did you phone?”

And do you remember the last time I saw you, and what happened and didn’t happen?

“To ask you, you mad bitch,” he said, “what in hell you think you’re doing with that girl?”

He had two speaking voices, one like gravel in a cement-mixer, the other exceedingly low-pitched, quiet. He used the second when very angry. As now.

“What do I think
I’m
doing?” Morag shouted. “What do you mean by that? Wait–have you seen her, then?”

“Of course I’ve seen her. She turned up here.”

“Where is here?”

“Toronto. Yesterday. Don’t ask me how she found out where I was. Ask her. She’s a smart kid, I’ll give her that much.”

“What–how
is
she?” Morag sat down on the high stool beside the phone.

“She’s okay,” he said. “She’s changed a lot since fifteen, eh?”

“Yeh.”

“What’s with this guy she had this fight with?”

“Gord? He wanted to get married. She doesn’t believe in it.”

“God, what an example you’ve been to her,” he said, but laughing, really in approval. “Well, why in hell did you let her leave home? You know where she can end up, don’t you? You know what can happen to her, don’t you? By Jesus, Morag, if she goes out to Vancouver, I’ll strangle you. Why did you let her go?”

“Let her? Let her?” Morag cried furiously. “What do you suggest I should’ve done, then? Chained her to the stove?”

A second’s silence at the other end of the line.

“Yeh,” he said finally. “Well, I guess she had to go. She comes by it naturally. I guess it isn’t your fault.”

“Well, never mind. It’s not yours, either.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t. But I keep thinking of them, back there. You know.”

“I know. But don’t. Just don’t, eh? Has she gone, now, then?”

“Yeh. West. I don’t know how far, though. She wanted something. Maybe that’s why she looked me up. She wanted the songs.”

“Did you give them to her?”

“What do you think? Naturally I did.”

“Well. Anyway, she was okay as of yesterday?”

“Yeh. Hey, Morag, do you still say my name wrong?”

“I–haven’t tried it recently.”

“No. I guess you wouldn’t.”

When he had rung off, she sat without moving. Afraid she would begin shaking, the way Christie sometimes used to do. The Smiths looked worried, curious, startled.

“My daughter’s father,” Morag said finally. “As I’ve told you, never having had an ever-present father myself, I managed to deny her one, too. Although not wittingly. I wasn’t very witting in those days, I guess.”