The Diviners (7 page)

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?”