The Diviners (49 page)

Morag does not even take her suitcase upstairs to her old room. She leaves it in the kitchen and goes out again.
Everything is very silent. From up the hill and over on Main Street comes the grind and splutter of a motorbike, the whir of cars. But here, along the deserted sidewalks, there is silence, broken only by occasional voices from behind the drawn blinds of the houses. The smell of the grapebunches of mauve lilacs is overpowering.

At the hospital reception desk, she feels alien, apologetic.

“I've come to see Mr. Logan, my–my stepfather. I know it's not regular visiting hours–”

“Oh yes,” the girl behind the desk says. “You'll be Miss Gunn, then?”

“That's right.”

“I've read your books, Miss Gunn,” the girl says shyly, “and I just want to say we're real glad you're from Manawaka. They've got your books in the library.”

Coals of fire upon my head. Must I beg this child's forgiveness, as well? She wouldn't know what I meant, if I said it.

“Oh. That's good. Well–thanks. May I go in and see Christie–Mr. Logan–now?”

“Sure. I'll just get ahold of Miss Patterson. She'll show you in.”

Christie.

“How is he?” Morag asks the nurse as they patter down the antiseptic-reeking corridors.

“Well, I should warn you, Miss Gunn. He can't speak much at all. And when he does, it's pretty garbled. I'm afraid it makes him angry.”

“My God. My God. No wonder. Can he move?”

“He can move his right arm,” the nurse says. “At least, some.”

Christie lies hunched under the too-white bedlinen. He was never a large man, but now he seems to have shrunk even
more. He appears to be composed of bones mainly, and of dried speckled brown skin, stretched barely over the skeleton. He is ludicrously clean-shaven, none of the remembered greyish stubble on his face–they do that kind of thing for people in hospital. His eyes are closed.

“Christie–it's Morag.”

He can hear, obviously, and he knows what she is saying. It is just that he cannot reply. His eyes open abruptly, and they are, weirdly, the clear blue of years and years ago. He mumbles, but she cannot make human speech of it. For Christie Logan to be unable to speak–what must that be like? Christie, who told the tales, who divined with the garbage, who ranted in his sorrow like the skirling of the pipes in a pibroch.

“I'm–I'm sorry I didn't come back before, Christie.”

He wants to speak desperately, but cannot. His mouth opens, and he strains. No words come. His eyes are filled with such pain and such knowing that Morag can scarcely endure the sight of them. What emerges from his mouth, then, is a squawk, a hoarse unverbal croaking like a bullfrog. He turns away from her, but not before she sees the shame in his eyes, at being thus diminished before her.

Then his right hand, like an eagle claw, reaches out and grasps her hand. They sit there like this for long minutes, both unable to speak, although for different reasons, and Morag can feel the heavy vein pulsing in his wrist.

A tiny blonde nurse scurries in. From her extreme youth and striped blue uniform, she looks to be a student nurse. She carries an object covered with a white linen towel.

“Bedpan time!” she announces ringingly, someone having evidently told her that cheeriness under all circumstances is a nurse's duty.

Christie's one good arm pushes weakly at the girl and the
burden she bears. From his throat comes a sound which Morag has never before heard issuing from a human throat, and hopes never to hear again. A growl–the deep growl of a dog, combined with the wrenched-up sob of a man.

“For God's sake!” Morag cries. “Can't you leave him be, just until I'm gone, then?”

“I was going to draw the curtain around his bed,” the girl says, half offended and half scared.

“Get out,” Morag says fiercely. “Just get out.”

“I'll have to report to the ward nurse–”

“Report, then. Go ahead. Look, I'm sorry. I know it's just part of the routine. But please–not now.”

The nurse scampers away. For a second Morag cannot face Christie. When she looks at him, she is astonished. He has regained himself and is peering at her from his shroud of hospital linen, his eyes mocking and shrewd, his mouth in a soundless laugh. Morag laughs too, although it comes out as the travesty of a laugh, but it is their protection, hers and Christie's, as it always has been.

She wants to stay here with him, to keep watch beside him. She also wants to go, not to have to look at him like this. There is something she must say. She wonders if she can discover the words.

“Christie–I used to fight a lot with you, Christie, but you've been my father to me.”

His responding words are slurred and whispered, but she hears them.

“Well–I'm blessed,” Christie Logan says.

Another way of indicating surprise would have been to say–
Well, I'm damned.
But that is not the phrase he has chosen. She sees from his eyes that the choice has been intentional.

 

Back at the house on Hill Street, Morag climbs the stairs to her old room. It is overgrown with dust like feathers or grey ferns in the corners and festooned from the ceiling, but it is otherwise unchanged. The one grimy dresser and the single bed covered with a patchwork quilt. She cannot bring herself to look for sheets. She puts on her housecoat and lies down on top of the quilt. This is the first time she has ever stayed alone in this house, and she has dreaded it, but now none of the ghosts seem threatening. Prin is here, and Piper Gunn and Clowny Macpherson and another younger Morag, the felt or imagined presences of real and fictional people, the many versions of herself, combining and communing here, in her head, in this room with its time-stained wallpaper. Outside, a faint rain begins falling, and the open window channels in the smell of wet earth and grass and prairie lilac.

 

Waking, Morag is at first disoriented.

“Morag!”

The woman's voice, Morag now perceives, is external and not part of a dream or nightmare. She stumbles downstairs, and it is Mrs. Winkler, hideously frail in appearance, although she must in fact be tough as dandelion roots to have survived this long.

“It's the hospital on the phone, Morag. They want you to go there, right away.”

“Can I get a taxi, Mrs. Winkler?”

“Well, I wouldn't know about that,” Mrs. Winkler says doubtfully. “It ain't but a short walk, there.”

By the time Morag reaches the hospital, however, Christie Logan has gone to his ancestors.

 

\When Prin died (a long time ago, it seems), Morag had to make all the funeral arrangements. Christie didn't do a thing. Still, he was there, and they held their wake for Prin, the two of them, sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey between them. Now there is no one. Morag takes the necessary steps, robot steps, not thinking, not even thinking of mourning yet.

The sweeping black-branched spruce trees are the same, but the big gloomy frame house looks different. It has, Morag observes, been painted an eye-shattering limegreen. The sign no longer reads “Cameron's Funeral Home.” It is now an enormous crimson neon, letters about a million feet high, and it would appear at first glance to apply to some publicity-worshipping evangelical sect.

JAPONICA CHAPEL

Underneath, in more modest lettering, are these words:

Free Parking For Clients

 

Die now and get free parking forever. Almost worth it. Morag has phoned previously, so is expected. A shortish man, built rather on the lines of an energetic barrel, and wearing light brown slacks and a checked yellow and brown sports shirt, bounces out to meet her.

“Mr. Jonas?” she says uncertainly.

“The same,” he carols. “Hector Jonas. At your service, Miss Gunn. Or do you mind if I call you Morag? You being a local girl, and me having read your books, I feel like I know you. We don't stand on ceremony here. At least,
some
do, but I am not of that number, unless, of course, clients prefer
the formal approach, in which case I am happy to oblige.”

“No–of course I don't mind.”

“My name, as I mentioned previously, is Hector. Now come in, come on in.”

The office is small but exceedingly tidy. Cherry and blue linoleum tiles on the floor. An impressive desk which takes up most of the floor space. A swivel chair for Hector, and two slender plastic-upholstered armchairs for clients.

“Now, then,” Hector proceeds, “I was very sorry to hear about Christie, an old-timer like him. Of course, I never knew him all that well, myself–”

“No one knew him all that well, Hector. He lived nearly all his life in this town, and everyone knew him to see him, and they all called him Christie, but nobody knew him, to speak of, or even to speak to, much, if it comes to that.”

Hector stops on his way to the cupboard.

“Why in the world would that be, now, Morag?”

“Oh well, he was the town scavenger in the days when it was still called that, and was looked down on. He was also supposed to be some kind of maverick, as I'm sure you know.”

“Well, like I say, I didn't know that much about him,” Hector hedges. “Only hearsay, like. Could I offer you a little sherry, Morag? Or a rye? Although I know the ladies usually prefer the sherry, it being sweeter, like.”

Morag smiles, unaccountably moved by his flashiness, his public-relations act, and by some kind of genuine solicitude which lurks under the glittery plastic and the veneer of himself.

“Not this lady,” she says. “You can pour me a stiff rye. Thanks. That's very kind of you.”

“Well, it isn't, really,” Hector says, in apparent remorse. “It's really for business. Although I don't usually admit it. But then, most people who come in here are in pretty terrible
shape, of course, bereaved and that, kind of knocked-out, you might say, by their dear one's departure from this vale of tears. So they need a little steadying, those of them who aren't teetotallers, and believe you me, we get plenty of
them
. Maybe you think I'm not sounding too serious, but in my business you either have a laugh to yourself sometimes or you'd be climbing the walls, I'm telling you straight. The departed are hard enough to look in the fisheye, to tell you the truth, but the bereaved are usually just that much harder, because they are either all busted-up or else holding themselves together with chewing gum, like, so brittle and held-in that you think they'll crack like a dropped tumbler if you breathe at them. I shouldn't be talking this way, I guess, but you being a writer, it seems natural to talk, although in my profession you learn it's discretion discretion all the way, and in other words you acquire the ability to keep your trap shut. You just seem better in hand of yourself than some, Morag.”

This guy will learn to keep his trap shut when he's pushing up daisies.
Who buries the undertaker? Whoever will undertake it.
One of C. Logan's old-time jests. Something good about Hector, though.

“I'm not better in hand of myself,” Morag says. “I just show it differently, that's all. Has Niall Cameron been dead long?”

“Some years now,” Hector says. “You knew him?”

“Yes. I knew him, and I went to school with one of his daughters. He was a good man.”

“Yeh, so I gather,” Hector says uneasily, “although he drank himself to death. I mean, like,
sure
he was a good man. But he didn't want to go on living, did he?”

Morag laughs, and the sound is more startling and bitter in these surroundings than she has intended.

“I guess he did and he didn't, both,” she says. “It's a common enough trait, hereabouts.”

To be or not to be–that sure as death is the question. The two-way battle in the mindfield, the minefield of the mind. Niall. Lachlan. Lazarus. Piquette. Prin. Christie. Jules? Morag?

“Mrs. Cameron and Rachel, they moved out to the Coast a few months back,” Hector says. “Mrs. Cameron used to say she'd known you well when you were knee-high to a grasshopper. She never said it when Rachel was around, though, so I kind of wondered. It was after your second book came into the town library.”

Parsons' Bakery–Morag going in for jelly doughnuts for Prin. Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. McVitie. Poor little thing–don't they ever cut her hair wash her hair shorten her dress poor poor little thing. Morag behind the counter at Simlow's–the dressmaker suit so suitable for someone about thirty years younger than Mrs. Cameron and Stacey running running from the store in unhealable embarrassment.

“Yeh. Well, you're right. It wasn't quite the way she said. Hector, I suppose they don't call it the Nuisance Grounds any longer, out there?”

Hector, swivelling gently on the large mobile chair behind the desk, gives her an odd glance.

“You mean–the Municipal Disposal Area?”