The Diviners (17 page)

“Please. Don’t go away.”

Then he realizes, and helps her.

“Hey, that’s fine. You’re gonna come all over me.”

And she does. The pulsing between her legs spreads and suffuses all of her. The throbbing goes on and on, and she does not realize her voice has spoken until it stops, and then she does not know if she has spoken words or only cried out somewhere in someplace beyond language.

Silence. He is very lightly stroking her shoulders, her face, her closed eyelids. She opens her eyes. They smile, then, at each other. Like strangers who have now met. Like conspirators.

“That wasn’t so bad for you, after all,” he says.

“It was–oh Skinner–”

“Hey, could you call me by my real name, eh?”

As though now it were necessary to do this. By right. Does she understand what he means? Is this what he means? What is he really thinking, in there? But you have to take it on faith, she now sees. You can’t ever be sure. She nods.

“Okay. I will. Jules.”

He laughs.

“You say it kind of funny.
Jewels
.”

“How, then?”

“Jules.”

“Jewels.”

“You better learn French, kid.”

“Do you know it?”

“No. Not that much, any more. Not that much, ever. Just a bit, mostly swear words. I guess we used to know a few things when we were kids, but it’s mostly gone now. My old man grew up speaking quite a bit of French-Cree, but he’s lost most of it now. You got nice legs, even if you do say my name wrong.”

This is true. Morag has got nice legs, and has always wondered if anyone else would ever think so.

The fire has died, and the shack is cold. They dress. He does up her dress for her, and she helps him on with his Army jacket. They laugh a lot, now, over nothing, over everything. Nothing bad will ever happen again, not ever again. Nothing can ever touch them. This is their house. They are safe, here.

Then she remembers.

“When’re you going, Jules? How long a leave you got?”

He lies back on the bed, alone, smoking.

“I gotta go back to camp tonight.”

“
Tonight?
”

“Yeh. We’re coming back to town tomorrow. Dress parade. Wait’ll you see me in a kilt, kid. A Tonnerre in a kilt is some sight, I can tell you. In the First War they used to call the Scots regiments the Ladies from Hell. I feel like a twerp in that getup, to tell you the truth. Thank christ we don’t have to put it on that often.”

“Why’re they doing that? Tomorrow?”

“Because the Cameron Highlanders got so many Manawaka boys, is why.”

“I see.”

“C’mon, let’s go over to my old man’s. He’ll have some home-brew or at least some tea.”

The main shack has a bigger stove but with shakier looking stovepipes. Val, Jules’ younger sister, isn’t home. The two younger boys, Paul and Jacques, are hopping around like sparrows, but when they see Morag they grow quiet and watchful, and take up silent positions in corners. There are some bunk beds, a mattress on the floor, cooking pots and pans on wooden boxes, a table containing half a loaf of bread and a quart pail of peanut butter. On one wall there is a calendar from two years back, with a colour picture of spruce trees at Galloping Mountain, black against a setting sun, and on another wall Jesus with a Bleeding Heart, his chest open and displaying a valentine-shaped heart pierced with a spiky thorn and dripping blood in neat little drops.

Lazarus is sitting in the room’s one easy chair which looks like it has been garnered from the Nuisance Grounds, springs protruding at the bottom of the seat. Morag has not seen Lazarus for a long time, and then only on Main Street on a Saturday night. Once he must have been a very large man, taller than Jules, and broader, but now he looks a bit shrunken, his belly fat and loose, but his ribs bending in upon themselves. He has the vestige of a handsome face, bonily handsome in the way Jules’ face is now. The same lanky black hair as Jules.

Now everything is changed. Morag feels uncertain again. Scared. What is she doing here? Do they feel she is intruding? She looks at Jules and sees that things are now changed for him, too.

“Who the hell are you?” Lazarus says.

Morag is unable to say anything. Jules scowls at his father.

“She’s Morag Gunn,” he says. “You know. From over at Christie Logan’s place.”

“Oh. Yeh. I know now.”

Lazarus begins coughing and keeps on until it seems he will retch. There is a glass full of brown sour-smelling liquid, with bits of white floating scum on it, on the floor beside her chair. He reaches for it. Stops coughing at last. Then he rises and stretches. Pulls in his belly. Looks Morag up and down. The same look on his face as on Skinner’s, before. Morag is shocked. Lazarus–an old man. How revolting. Yet she feels his man-energy burning out towards her, all the same, so strongly that for a second it almost draws her in.

Jules knows, too, and puts his arm around her shoulders. Definitely. And, towards Lazarus, menacingly. Lazarus laughs, showing several upper front teeth missing. Refills his glass from a bottle, and holds up the bottle.

“My woman,” he grunts. “This here is my woman, now.”

“I’ll be going now, Dad,” Jules growls.

For an instant Lazarus looks–how? Stricken.

“You gotta go now, Skinner?”

“Yeh. There’s an Army truck waiting at the bus station to pick us all up.”

Lazarus makes as though to move towards his son. Then changes his mind.

“Well, you look out, eh?” he says. “You just look out, there, eh?”

“Yeh. Don’t worry. I will.”

Jules says goodbye to his young brothers, and then he and Morag leave. He does not look back.

Walking up the hill and through the back streets of the town, now nearly dark, they are both silent. Then Jules begins talking.

“How old you think my old man is, Morag?”

“I dunno. How old?”

“Thirty-nine. He looks twice that, eh? I was born when he was the same age I am now. Nineteen. One thing is for sure. I’m never gonna get like him. But he’s not always like today. He don’t like me bringing girls home. He gets wild for a woman sometimes. Then he gets drunk and gets into a brawl. I guess he was pretty tough on my mother. She was Métis, too, from up Galloping Mountain way. She thought Manawaka was gonna be the big city, and I guess she thought she was getting a king, there, when she got him. Some king. King Lazarus. Laugh now. No wonder she took off. But Jesus, he can’t help himself sometimes. I’ve seen him get so mad, not at anybody, just at everything, that he’ll hit his fist against the wall, just hit it, there, until the knuckles bleed.”

“Why? Why?”

“I dunno. Things get him down, I guess. He takes off sometimes and goes up to Galloping Mountain or to the city, and he always comes back. God knows why. This town never done anything for him or any of us. He says it’s the same everywhere, christawful jobs and treated like shit. He only got to Grade Three or like that. The best job he’s ever held was sectionhand on the
CPR
, but that quit in the Depression. Sometimes he’d feed us by snaring or shooting jackrabbits. He taught us all how to shoot for meat, even if it was only rabbit.”

“He’s not done too badly, when you think of it. You never starved.”

“Sometimes damn near. But yeh. He hasn’t done so terrible. But try to tell him that. Jesus, he was some fighter in his day, though. He’s had his nose broken four times. I’ve seen him take a hundred-and-eighty-pound man and lift him and throw him about twenty feet. I guess the time I hit him he could’ve
killed me, even then, if he’d put his mind to it. Now I think back on it, he didn’t do a damn thing. Maybe he was surprised. Or maybe not. When I joined the Army and had a bit of money, I told him I’d pay for him to get the dentist to put in some teeth for him, there, in place of them I knocked out that time. But he said no, he was getting along okay without them.”

“Did he really used to tell you those stories when you were a kid, Jules?”

“Yeh. Sometimes even now, when he’s drunk, but he don’t remember them so hot any more.”

“Tell me them,” Morag says.

“You wanna hear? Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess I like stories, is all.”

“You’re a funny girl, Morag.”

But he puts an arm around her, and they walk the chill mudcarpeted streets beside the empty trees and the quiet half-dark houses, and he tells her. Stories for children. As they walk together with their arms around one another, like children away from home with the night coming on.

Then they are at Logans’ on Hill Street. They kiss, and want one another but cannot because there is no time left and no place to go.

“So long,” Jules says. “I’ll be seeing you.”

And goes.

The next day, Morag stands at the corner where Hill Street touches Main. The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders march through the main street of Manawaka. It is very exciting. People wave and shout. The soldiers grin a little but do not look around. Eyes front. They are in dress uniform, khaki jackets and tartan kilts, the Cameron plaid. The pipers walk ahead, leading. They are playing “The March of the Cameron
Men.” It has a splendour in it. You could follow that music to the ends of the world.

It is in fact to the end of their world that most of these men are following the music.

The news of Dieppe changes the town of Manawaka. It will never be the same again. Not until this moment has the War been a reality here. Now it is a reality. There are many dead who will not be buried in the Manawaka cemetery up on the hill where the tall spruces stand like dark angels. There are a great many families who now have fewer sons, or none.

Morag reads the casualty lists. Column after column, covering page after page, it seems, in the
Winnipeg Free Press
. Among the men from Manawaka, she looks for those she knows.

Chorniuk, S. (That would be Stan Chorniuk, from the
BA
Garage.)

Duncan, G. (That would be Mavis’ cousin George.)

Gunn, F.L. (From Freehold, but no relation to Morag.)

Halpern, C. (Jamie’s brother.)

Kamchuk, N. (Nick, who quit school after Grade Ten.)

Kowalski, J. (Steve’s brother.)

Lobodiak, J. (Mike’s brother John, the handsome one.)

Macalister, P. (The banker’s son.)

Macdonald, G. (Gerald, who used to work in the butcher’s.)

MacLachlan, D. (Lachlan’s son Dave, who would’ve taken over the
Manawaka Banner
.)

MacIntosh, C.M. (Chris, son of the High School janitor.)

McVitie, J.L. (The lawyer’s son, Ross’ brother.)

And on. And on.

She has looked first to see, and there is no Tonnerre listed. Did he get away? It is somehow difficult to believe that anyone could have got away.

The newspapers for days are full of stories of bravery, courage, camaraderie, initiative, heroism, gallantry, and determination in the face of heavy enemy fire. Are any of the stories true? Probably it does not matter. They may console some.

What is a true story? Is there any such thing?

The only truth at the moment seems to be in the long long lists of the dead. The only certainty is that they are dead. Forever and ever and ever.

Morag lies awake, thinking of the last time she saw Jules. Wondering if she ever will see him again. If he will survive.

SKINNER’S TALE OF LAZARUS’ TALE OF RIDER TONNERRE

Well, my old man, he told me this about Rider Tonnerre, away back there, so long ago no one knows when, and Lazarus Tonnerre sure isn’t the man to tell the same story twice, or maybe he just couldn’t remember, because each time he told it, it would be kind of different.

Anyway, there is this guy, away back then, and they call him
Chevalier
–Rider–because he handles a horse so good and because his own horse is a white stallion name of
Roi du Lac
, King of the Lake, and how Rider got that horse is–he got it in a kind of spooky way, because once in a dream he saw it and it spoke to him and told him to spend one whole night beside this certain lake, see, which everybody believed was haunted or like that, and Rider
did
that, even though anybody else would’ve been scared to, see, and just about dawn,
this huge white stallion came up out of the lake and stayed with Rider ever after. Of course it could’ve swum from the other side, or something, but the way Lazarus told it, that horse had special powers. I dunno if it ever talked except that once in a dream, though. And that Rider, there, he could also ride a bull moose, and sometimes he used to do that, just for a joke, and to scare the hell out of guys who bragged how strong and great
they
were.

Another thing is that Rider was also called Prince of the Braves. He wasn’t all Indian, though. He was Métis, only back there, then, our people called themselves
Bois-Brûlés
. Burnt wood. I dunno know why. Maybe the fires they made to smoke the buffalo meat. Maybe their own skins, the way they looked.

Okay, so this Rider, eh, he is so goddamn good on a horse he can outride any man on the prairies. They have races, see, and he always wins, him and King of the Lake. And Rider’s rifle, now, it’s called
La Petite
, and he’s so good that he can be going full gallop on that stallion, and he never misses a buffalo at one thousand yards or like that. He’s about seven-feet-tall, and he wears a big black beard.

Now, one time there was a bunch of Englishmen–goddamn
Anglais
, as they used to be called–and they came in to take away the Métis land and to stop the people from hunting buffalo. And these guys had a bunch of Arkanys with them.

(
Arkanys?
)

That is how my dad called the Scotchmen. Men from Orkney, I guess. So a bunch of the Métis, there, they said
Shit on this idea: they’re not coming here to take over our land and stop us from hunting.
But they sat on their asses all the same and didn’t move. So that Rider Tonnerre, he says
We’re gonna hunt these Anglais and Arkanys like we hunt the buffalo, so c’mon there,
boys.
It was some place around Red River, there, and they see all these Englishmen and their hired guns the Arkanys.