The Diviners (21 page)

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.

 

In her report, Morag mentions that Piquette's grandfather fought with Riel in Saskatchewan in 1885, in the last uprising of the Métis. Lachlan deletes it, saying that many people hereabouts would still consider that Old Jules back then had fought on the wrong side.

Memorybank Movie: Beginning and Ending, or Vice-Versa
The War is over. The boys who survived are being sent home. Morag is leaving Manawaka in the fall, to go to college, having been adding as much as possible to the bank account which Henry Pearl started for her, when her parents died, on the proceeds of Louisa Gunn's piano and anything else he could manage to get out of the Gunn farmhouse before the mortgage company moved in.

Leaving Manawaka. At last. At last. Jubilation. Also, guilt.

Prin scarcely moves at all now, just sits in her chair, growing heavier and more silent all the time, living only inside her head, if anywhere. Morag has quit trying to talk to her. Dr. Cates says it is premature senility and he doesn't know what to do. Prin can still look after herself, or usually, the toilet and that, but needs help going upstairs. Who will get the meals when Morag goes? Christie will have to.

Christie is in none too good shape himself. He drinks very little any more, but his attacks of strangeness have increased all the same. Impatiently, Morag sometimes feels he brings them on purposely. It used to take the bottle. Now he can do it unaided. First stage, the ranting. The music of the pipes is sometimes described as
ranting
, and that describes Christie. Human Bagpipes Logan. Blaring up and down, sometimes pacing the kitchen as he does so, here a pibroch, there a battle march, etcetera. Fraud. Fraud. Who does he think he's kidding?

Christie has grown even scrawnier with time, and his Adam's apple is even more frenetic in his throat than it used to be. He dresses in the same old beat-up overalls, rarely bothering to change them even when they stink of the Nuisance Grounds.

“Mine was a great family, then,” he declares. “The Logans of Easter Ross, by christ, they used to be a great bloody family.
This Is the Valour of My Ancestors.
That is a fine motto.”

“Oh Christie.”

“
The Ridge of Tears
,” Christie roars. “That was the war cry. Oh Jesus. Think of it. The Ridge of Tears. And the crest, then. A passion nail piercing a human heart, proper. I always wondered what the hell
proper
meant, and now I'll never know, for who is there to tell me?”

“What does it matter, Christie? It was all so long ago.”

The Gunns have no crest, no motto, no war cry, at least according to what it says in the old book Christie still hauls out from time to time. Just as well. It's all a load of old manure.

“It matters to me,” Christie rants. “By heaven and all the stars of midnight and by my own right hand and by the holy cross its own self, I say unto you it bloody damn well matters to me, then. What have I done with my life, Morag? Sweet bugger-all. I used to think what was there worth doing? Maybe I was wrong. Oh jesus, I
was
wrong. A disgrace to my ancestors. You get the hell out of here, Morag, you hear, and make something out of yourself. I used to think the only clean job in the world was collecting muck. I chose to be the one who'd collect it. But now I see we're all of us rotting in it all the same, myself as well. It was the pride in me done it. I see it now.”

Pride? In being the Scavenger, Keeper of the Nuisance Grounds? He is really wild tonight.

“May I be forgiven,” Christie mourns at the top of his voice. “May I be forgiven, but I'm damned if I know who to ask for that. There
is
no forgiveness in the bloody world. None.”

“Christie. Sh-sh. It's all right. Sh.”

“Them tales I used to tell you. You never knew why I done it.”

Oh God. Not this again.

“Hush, Christie.”

“I meant well, Morag. That's a christly awful thing to be carved on a man's tombstone.
Here Lies Christie Logan–He Meant Well.
And how can a man even be sure of that?”

Ramble, ramble. And then he would sit in silence, for hours, sometimes shaking all over until the spell passed.

Morag goes out into the soft summer evening. Going into the Regal Café for cigarettes, she meets a man coming out. She stops, does a doubletake. Skinner Tonnerre.

“Jules? Jules!”

He is in civilian clothes, grey flannels, grey sports jacket, snappy grey fedora at an angle on his head. The same angular brown face and slanted eyes. But older. Different. He grins. Neither of them makes any move towards the other. “Yeh, it's me. Got back the other day. How're you doing, Morag? You look different.”

“How do you mean?”

“I dunno. Older. I don't mean it bad. You look great.”

“Are you–are you staying, Jules?”

“Who, me? You gotta be kidding. I just came back to see–well, how things are. I'm getting out as soon as I can.”

“How's–your dad?”

Jules' eyes avoid hers.

“Not so hot. It was a bad thing happened, there.”

“Yes. I–I'm sorry.”

“I heard you went–well, Val sent me the clipping from the
Banner
.”

“Yes.”

“Did you–” he searches her face shrewdly, almost angrily. “Did you see
them?
Lazarus won't talk of it. Did you see her, Morag?”

For a moment Morag contemplates saying
Yes
, telling him Piquette suffocated quickly, wasn't touched by the flames. But cannot. He wouldn't believe her, anyway.

“No. Only Niall Cameron and your dad. They went in, and–you know.”

Jules nods.

“Was it bad–the place?”

“Yes.” It is all she can say.

She gets her cigarettes and walks along Main Street with him. He does not take her arm or touch her.

“I looked in the paper, after Dieppe,” she says. “To see if you–”

“Yeh. Well. It wasn't quite the way the papers told it, I guess. All any guy thinks of is staying alive. Some guys were scared so shitless they couldn't even think of that. Yeh, and I guess some guys do think about what's happening to some real close pal.”

“Not you?”

“I never had any close pal,” Jules says lightly. “Lone wolf, that's me.”

Cliché. But true. It
is
him. He is distant, distant from the town, from Morag, from everything, perhaps even from himself.

“Did it–last long?”

“
Yeh.
One million years. Coupla hours, actually. I can't really say. I don't know. Didn't seem very real at the time. Guess you go kind of crazy, like. You just think
Well well that's John Lobodiak dead.
It doesn't mean much at the time.”

“You saw John?”

“Yeh. He was right next to me when he got it. He was shot in the guts. He kept trying to hold them in–they were spilling out, there. Ever seen a shot gopher?”

Yes yes when cannot remember the blood squirming entrails sheets what was it a dream

“Skinner–please. Don't.”

For the first time, then, he touches her. Puts an arm around her. She wants to hold him close. But makes no move. Cannot. Why not?

“That's how he was. Like a shot gopher. His guts. Not his eyes, though.”

“How–”

“Like a horse's eyes in a barn fire,” Jules says flatly.

Always the horses. For the prairie men, always the horses. The comparison. The god, living, dying.

John Lobodiak, handsomer than his younger brother, kicking them all out of the car that Saturday night, so he could take his girl home.

“Well, skip it,” Jules says. “How about you?”

“Going to Winnipeg this fall. To college. And I'm never coming back.”

“Hey, that's something, eh?” He drops his arm from around her. “Go to college and marry a rich professor, how about that?”

“Yeh, I can see it all now. I
don't
think. What're you going to do?”

Jules shrugs.

“How should I know? I don't much care. Maybe something will turn up. I don't have to
do
anything all that much. I'm not like you.”

True. He isn't. She stiffens.

“You're just like Christie.” Disapproval in her voice? Disappointment?

“I'm not,” Jules says. “I'm just like–never mind. Well, you'll do okay.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You want it so bad I can just about smell it on you. You'll get it, Morag.”

“What's
it
?”

Jules stops walking. They have reached Hill Street. He is not going to walk home with her. He grins, but not in the old way, not conspiratorially. Not quite hostile, but nearly. To him, she is now on the other side of the fence. They inhabit the same world no longer.

“I wouldn't know,” he says. “But I guess you do. Well, so long. See you around, eh?”

And walks away. As before, not looking back.

Morag does not think about him for very long. She will not. Will not. She has to think about getting ready to leave. Soon. Very soon now.

In the night, the train whistle says
Out There Out There Out There
.

 

PART THREE

HALLS OF SION

 

FIVE

M
orag sat at the table in the kitchen, with a notebook in front of her and a ballpoint pen in her hand. Not writing. Looking at the river. Getting started each morning was monstrous, an almost impossible exercise of will, in which finally the will was never enough, and it had to be begun on faith.

Last night, sleepless until three
A.M.
, long and stupendously vivid scenes unfolded. Too tired to get up and write them down, she still couldn't shut the projector off for the night. Got up and jotted down key words, to remind her. Staring at these key words now, she wondered what in heaven's name they had been meant to unlock.

Jerusalem.
Jerusalem? Why? Gone. What had she meant by it?

The postcard from Pique yesterday. No address. Mustn't think of it. Morag didn't want to put the hooks onto Pique, nor to have Pique at this point put the hooks onto her. But a somewhat more newsy letter would be appreciated. Idiotic. How many newsy letters had Morag written to Prin and Christie, after she left Manawaka? That was different. Oh, really?

The long sweep of infrequently mown grass down to the river. The elm outside the window, still alive although for how long who could say? The small cedars, spearing lightly featheringly upwards. The fenced-off patch, where once Sarah Cooper had begun a vegetable garden all those years ago. Now it had gone to wild high seed-headed grasses, what a variety, must be dozens. And purple thistles, regal, giant. And those flowers like pale yellow snapdragons, called Butter-and-Eggs. And in late summer, the goldenrod. And those little pink whatsernames and those bright orange and brown softly bristled flowers called–ha!–Devil's Paintbrush. The birds liked the place, especially the goldfinches–it was their restaurant, all those seeds. Morag regarded it as a garden of amazing splendours, in which God did all the work. Catharine Parr Traill would have profoundly disagreed, likely.

 

The screen door slammed as someone entered. Not C.P.T. reborn.

“You talking to that same lady, Morag?” Royland enquired.

She looked at his bulky hunched greyness. Wearing, of course, his plaid flannel shirt in this Pit-of-Hell weather. His neat greybeard blown very slightly in the humid blast-furnace breeze.

“Yeh. You never fail to catch me at it, do you?”

“You're alone too much, Morag. As I may have mentioned.”

“Even if surrounded by a multitude with banners, Royland, I would still talk to ghosts. I got a postcard from Pique yesterday. Want to see it?”

“Sure. Of course.”

 

Postcard:
View of Vancouver harbour, taken from west side of city. Many boats, ships, varicoloured vessels of one kind and another. Buildings tall in background. Excessively blue water.

On the back, with no address, these words:

 

This city the end. They like to classify people here. Matthew Arnold clash by night right on with this place.
Gord and I do not relate so why fight it? Am okay, so no dramatics. Tell Tom seagulls fabulous.

Love, Pique.

 

“Hope this finds you well as it leaves me,” Morag said. “Sometimes I think I know what she's about, and other times I don't. I know it's inevitable, but it hurts all the same. You know something, Royland? We think there is
one
planet called Earth, but there are thousands, even
millions
, like a snake shedding its skin every so often, but with all the old skins still bunched around it. You live inside the creature for quite a while, so it comes as a shock to find you're living now in one of the husked-off skins, and sometimes you can touch and know about the creature as it is now and sometimes you can't.”

“Pique'll be back soon,” Royland said, “before she goes away for good. It'll be nice to see her again. I'm going into town. You need anything from the store?”

“No–but thanks. And for the reassurance, too. I mean it.”

When Royland had gone, Morag got out yesterday's newspaper and looked it up again.

There was the picture of Brooke. Telling about his new appointment. Not just Head of an English Department, not now. President of a university. Well, well.

My God, what a handsome man he still is.

Another shed skin of another life. And it began happening again, again, as it had been doing for years, and perhaps the film would never end until she did.

 

Memorybank Movie: Farewell and Hallelujah

Morag says goodbye hurriedly to Prin, who, obese and silent and almost motionless now except for the awful
crik-crik-crik
of the rocking chair, hardly seems to know that Morag is leaving once and for all. Like a tub with eyes. The vague eyes, though, are suddenly wet with uncontrolled unwiped tears. What has been going on, all these months and years, in Prin's skull? Morag, and probably Christie also, has tried to assume that nothing was. Now she is not sure. How much has she treated Prin as a dumb beast, these past years?

“I'll write, Prin. Honestly I will.”

The hulk of anonymous oxflesh which was once Prin Logan (christened Princess in another world) now speaks, the hoarse guttural tones of someone who has almost forgotten human speech.

“You be–good girl, now. Dear.”

Dear.
Morag, as a very young child, eating jelly doughnuts with Prin, being protected from Christie's sometimes-stinging tongue, his oddness.

Morag bends and kisses the pasty pouched face, overwhelmed with past love and present repulsion. She straightens and sees the look on Christie's face–stricken.

He drives her to the
CPR
station in the old garbage truck. She thanks God it is night. Prays
prays
no one she knows will be taking this train. She has chosen to go by train because most of the kids going to the city for university will be taking the bus.

“Goodbye, Christie. I'll–write.”

“Yeh. You do that, Morag.” No conviction in his voice. “Well, so long.”

She resolves to prove him wrong by writing back regularly. Once a week. At least. Knowing she won't. She dreads Christie standing on the platform, looking at her until the train actually pulls away. But he doesn't. He doesn't even wave to her once she's inside the coach. Just turns and walks back to the garbage truck.

The train clonks slowly into motion, and soon the wheels are spinning their steelsong
clickety-click-clickety-click
, and the town is receding. There go the rusty-red grain elevators, the tallest structures around here. There goes the cemetery. There go the Nuisance Grounds, forever and ever.

Morag settles herself. Exultant. On her way. She is alone in this coach, the plum plush seats puffing out ancient dust with every clank and sway of the train. No other passengers, it seems, on the night train to Everywhere. Only Morag Gunn, swifting into life.

Then–panic.

Alone in the coach, Morag Gunn, erstwhile of Manawaka, prudently goes into the john before she will allow herself to cry. The conductor might happen along. She can bear anything, she knows, really, but not for the people to see.

 

Memorybank Movie: Higher Learning–The Lowdown

A year older than almost everyone in her class–this does make a difference. There are four men who are even older, returned veterans, but they are all married. Or does the difference reside more in the fact that so many of these kids went to High School together in the city? Or is it Morag's own goddamn fault, being both proud and humiliatingly shy? Thinking she looks gawky, not knowing half the time whether other people are kidding or not.

The others flow in and out of classrooms and cafeteria, and she does, too. Usually by herself. So what? This is what she's wanted, to be here, and now she's here.

The late September dust fills the city streets, and the prairie maples are yellow, leaves blowing against her face as she walks to the streetcar stop. Manawaka has sidewalks, too, but the cement there isn't as hard on your feet there as it is here,
perhaps because there you sometimes walk on the roadsides, through the grass.

She sees the night city rarely, with neon signs of crimson, yellow, blue, shrieking cigarettes or hotels or brands of cars. Lights should be blazing, impressive. Perhaps if you couldn't read these would be. By dark she's usually in her room, in the place where she boards, studying.

Her boardinghouse is away to hell and gone, North Winnipeg, half a mile beyond the end of the Selkirk Avenue streetcar line. No wonder Mrs. Crawley was so delighted when Morag turned up. She'd probably had a hundred others turn down the room. Morag had thought it might not be possible to find another room. Idiotic. The Crawleys rent only the one room. It is a small house and Morag's room is about the size of the one she had at Christie's. The size of a large cupboard. She doesn't care. She's used to it. The room will be freezing in winter, she foresees. It has a bed, a dresser and a chair. She uses the dresser top as a desk.

Mrs. Crawley is a Catholic, although not all that devout. Above Morag's bed, when she moved in, there hung The Bleeding Heart of Jesus. It looked familiar, and then she remembered–the Tonnerres' place. Even without this, the picture would be hard enough to endure, Jesus with a soft, yielding, nothing-type face and a straggling wispy beard, His expression that of a dog who knows it is about to be shot. As usual in these pictures, the Heart Itself is shown in violent purplish red, His chest having apparently been sawn open to reveal It, oozing with neatly symmetrical drops of lifeblood,
drip-drip-drip
. All tear-shaped.

“Why did you take Our Lord down, Morag?” Mrs. Crawley enquires.

Not sternly, just sort of wearily. Mrs. Crawley is still
quite a young woman, in her late twenties, fluffy short beige hair the colour of a camel-hair coat, and meek blue eyes which only rarely spark with the momentary insistence that she, too, may possibly be real. She and Mr. Crawley have four young kids. Mrs. Crawley sighs a lot.

“I'm–I'm sorry.” Morag struggles. “It's hard to explain. I was brought up–”

What a great lie she is about to perpetrate. As if it would make any difference what church had been her spiritual home, so-called, in her tender years. She would still have wanted to throw up every time she looked at the Heart. Mrs. Crawley, however, is sympathetic.

“It's okay, Morag, you never mind, then. I understand you've been raised a Protestant. I'll take it for the girls' room.”

Lucky girls, now two and four. But Mrs. Crawley is no bigot. Rather, she is wistful and sometimes defiant.

“I'd never go against my Faith, Morag,” she declares, “but all the same, I sometimes think–well, you know–if I'd known before I was married what I know now, I'd have had some fun, eh? Not that
we
do anything to prevent God's Will, of course. We're expecting again, did I mention, and soon I'll be bloated up like a stout old lady with the wind. I wasn't a bad-looking girl.”

“You're still good-looking,” Morag cries, torn with the necessity of saying two things at once, “and anyway, you should've seen the snobbishness that went on in the church where I went as a kid. The United, it was.”

Mrs. Crawley nods, but isn't really concerned with Comparative Religion.

“Well, it's nice of you to
say
I'm still not too bad-looking,” she says. “I got such awful stretch marks on my stomach and thighs after Marnie. Still, who sees them but Jim?”