The Diviners (11 page)

Boy, whoever wrote that song was sure plenty dumb. Serve Vanessa right, having to sing a dumb song like that.

 

It is a month later. School. Roll call. Vanessa MacLeod? Absent. Morag listens to the recess-time whispers.

“Her dad's died.”

At home, Christie blowing his nose on his fingers, stepping outside to throw the snot on the snow already dirtied with yellow dog-piss, comes back into the kitchen and says it.

“Well, then, Doc MacLeod's gone to his ancestors. Pneumonia. He was quite a man, there. You could of had many a worse.”

Morag sits at the table in the warm stove-crackling kitchen. But has to go upstairs to the freezing bedroom.

She never meant never meant never meant and a long time ago what was it when and Dr. MacLeod was there and

God knows what you are thinking.
He
knows, all right all right. But is mean. Doesn't care. Or understand.

Vanessa returns to school. Morag neither looks at her nor speaks to her. Want to but cannot. Vanessa does not notice. She has never spoken to Morag much, anyway. Vanessa does not talk much to anyone, now, for quite a while. Morag watches. From a long way off.

 

Memorybank Movie: Christie and Red Biddy
and Piper Gunn and Clowny MacPherson

Christie has a jug of red biddy. Prin has waddled off to bed, not approving. Morag is doing her homework. The ceiling bulb isn't very bright and she has to bend close over the geography book to read the print which flickers in front of her eyes. Christie, across the table, brings down one fist–
clump
. Taking care with the other hand to hold onto the grey bottle-jug which once long ago used to hold vinegar.

“Now, then, girl, would you like me to tell you about what happened to Piper Gunn and them, when that ship landed up north there?”

Morag closes the geography. Grinning.

“Sure, Christie.”

“Well, now, then, I read it all in a book somewheres, so help me, and it is all there in the books, but you don't want to believe everything them books say, for the good christ's sake. We believe what we know.”

What's he talking about? But she likes this story. He pours another glassful.

 

CHRISTIE'S TALE OF PIPER GUNN AND THE LONG MARCH

Now that bloody ship, there, who would know what its name was, but with all of them from Sutherland on board, and struck with the sickness and the fever and the devil's plague, well, then, that ship with the children dying of the fever, it crossed the ocean, do you see, and it came to the new land, which was
HERE
, only very far north. But what happened? What almighty catastrophe struck that ship? Well, the first catastrophe was that ship had a bloody idiot as captain, then. And he landed the christly vessel, if you'll believe it, away up north there,
at the wrong place
. The wrong place. Can you feature it? Them people, see, Piper Gunn and his woman Morag and all them, were supposed to be landed at the one place, up there by Hudson Bay (that's the water, the sea, like, not the store). But the silly bugger landed his ship at another place. Oh yes. The bloody captain didn't give a hoot. Get landed and well rid of them–that was his thought. So he landed all of them at the wrong place, now, the name escapes me at this moment, but it was on the Hudson Bay, up there. Cold as all the shithouses of hell.

Well, then, there they were. So Piper Gunn, he takes up his morsels of belongs, his kettle and his plaid and his axe, and he says to his woman Morag,
Here we are and by the holy Jesus here we will remain.
And then didn't his woman strap onto her back the few blankets and suchlike they had, and her thick with their unborn firstborn, and follow. But one thing was missing.

Pipes. The pipes.

If we must live here in this almighty godforsaken land, dreadful with all manner of beasts and ice and the rocks harsher than them we left
, says Gunn's woman,
at least let's be piped onto it.

So Piper Gunn, he got out his bagpipes and he piped the people onto the new land, that terrible bad land, frozen as it
sure as hell was, and they built their mud shacks to the music that man played.

Now they lived there and they suffered and then they suffered more, through the long days and longer nights, and it seemed there was no end to their suffering. But they didn't give in. They hunted for meat, to live.

(What did they hunt, Christie?)

Oh, polar bears that looked like great moving snow-banks with jaws and claws, then, and great wild foxes with burning eyes in them, and

(Did they eat
foxes
, Christie?)

Well, maybe not the foxes. They would use
them
for the fur, see? But they ate all manner of strange things, and it was a time of misery, but they stayed because they had the heart in them. And in the spring they walked. Yes, they
walked
to the place where the supplies would be. It was a long long long way. It could've been maybe a thousand or so miles, then.

(They walked? A
thousand
miles? They couldn't, Christie.)

Well, it might not have been quite the thousand, but it was a christly long way. And through the snow and muck and that. And who led them? I ask you, who led them? Who led the men and women and the children on that march? Piper Gunn. Himself. He led them with his pipes blaring, there. He was a man six feet nine inches tall, a mighty man of God. And he played the pipes like an angel right out of heaven and then like a devil right out of hell, and he kept the courage of the people beating like drums, or like the wings of brave wild birds caught in a blizzard, for he had the faith of the saints and the heart of a child and the gall of a thousand and the strength of conviction.

Well, then, I guess they must've walked through all of them frozen lands, and through the muskeg there and through
the muck and mud of the melting snows, and through the hard snow itself although it was spring. And it was that hard, walking, even Piper Gunn himself began to have his doubts, as who would blame him? And he says to his woman Morag,
What in the fiery hell are we doing in this terrible place?
So Morag says to him, for she had the wisdom and the good eye and the warmth of a home and the determination of quietness, and she says,
We are going into the new country and your child is going along with us, so play on.
And he did that. Yes, he did that.

So then, they got to the place where all the supplies was. And they got boats, big flat-bottomed boats, more like scows or rafts or like that, and they went down all the way to Red River, which is to say they came to this part of the country, not so very far from where we are at this very instant. And there they stayed.

(What happened then, Christie?)

Och aye, it was hard. It was so hard you could barely feature it. Locusts. Hailstorms. Floods. Blizzards. Indians. Halfbreeds. Hot as the pit of hell in the summer, and the mosquitoes as big as sparrows. Winters so cold it would freeze the breath in your throat and turn your blood to red ice. Weather for giants, in them days. Not that it's that much better now, I'd say.

(Did they fight the halfbreeds and Indians, Christie?)

Did they ever. Slew them in their dozens, girl. In their scores.

(Were they bad, the breeds and them?)

What?

 

The story is over. Christie's blue watery eyes look at her, or try to.

“Bad?” He repeats the word as though he is trying to think what it means.

“No,” he says at last. “They weren't bad. They were–just there.”

He motions with one hand, tired, for her to go to her room. And she sees him again the way he really looks, the way she sometimes forgets when he is talking. Why can't he look different? But she doesn't say. He is yawning–
gawp
–and nearly asleep across the table, spraddled out with his head going down on his arms.

Morag, upstairs. Writing in her scribbler. This one is nearly full, and what it is full of is a long story about how Piper Gunn's woman, once the child was born, at the Red River, went out into the forest and built a chariot for them all, for Piper Gunn and herself and their girlchild, so they could easily move around in that country there. She cut down the trees and she carved out the chariot. It was not a wagon. It was much fancier, and it had:

 

four giant wheels

a big high back with a seat

the seat covered in green moss

(she said velvet at first but where would they get it?)

the front shaped like a ship and a bird

birchbark scrolls around the sides

carvings of deer and foxes and bears

carvings of meadowlarks

carvings of tall grasses

carvings of spruce trees and spruce cones

polished stones for jewels, on the sides and axles

a brass hook for Piper Gunn's pipes

 

Morag is working on another story as well. In another scribbler. She does not know where it came from. It comes into your head, and when you write it down, it surprises you, because you never knew what was going to happen until you put it down.

She writes in bed, with the eiderdown around her, up to her neck nearly.

The new story is about a guy who was one of Piper Gunn's men. A little scrawny guy. Actually, though, he was very tough. His name was–no, not Cluny, something like that. Macphersons are nicknamed Cluny a lot of the time–why? His name was Clowny Macpherson, because people always laughed at him on account of he looked silly. But Piper Gunn, he knew one thing about Clowny, for sure, and that was he was a great woodcutter and

More tomorrow.

 

Memorybank Movie: Christie's Presence and Presents

Christie is looking for misplaced longjohns in the kitchen dresser. He and Prin do not have a dresser in their bedroom. For some unknown reason, there is a large phonograph there instead, the kind you wind up, and it has a pile of old records in the cabinet, but is never played.

“Damn things must be lost, stolen or strayed,” Christie mutters. “Where the hell'd you put 'em, woman?”

Prin becomes flustered and cannot remember.

“I seem to mind I put 'em in the top drawer. Or was it–”

“Never mind, never mind!” Christie shouts. “I could find something easier at the Nuisance Grounds than here.
You wouldn't know neatness if it was your middle name.”

“You're a fine one to talk,” Prin whines, her breath coming difficult, in gasps.

Christie stops flinging clothes around and looks at her. His face is strange.

“Ah, Lord, don't I know it. You'd have done better to marry anybody else, Prin. That is the declared truth.”

“What chance did I have?” Prin says, very low, but he can hear.

This is mean, Morag considers. She changes in her head, for the moment, to Christie's side. Christie's face frowns.

“Goddammit, you make your own chances in this world!” he roars. “Or else you don't make them. Like me. You have to work bloody hard at it, believe me, to be such a bloody flop as I stand here before you. In my one suit of underwear.”

His voice drops then.

“Although that's not the truth of it, neither. It's all true and not true. Isn't that a bugger, now?”

“I don't understand you, Christie Logan,” Prin says. “I never have done.”

“You're not the only one. I don't understand myself.
Oh what a piece of work is man.
Who said that? Some brain.”

He goes on riffling through the drawer, humming to himself.

“Oh what a piece of work is man oh what a bloody awful piece of work is man enough to scare the pants off you when you come to think of it the opposite is also true hm hm.”

He stops.

“Here, what's this?” he says suddenly.

A book. He looks through it, then brings it over to Morag. A purple cover, faded to a sickly mauve at the edges, and dim gold letters.

 

The 60th Canadian Field Artillery Battery Book

“It's the regiment book from the War,” Christie says. “It's the regiment I and your dad was in from 1916 until we got back in 1919.”

CONTENTS

 

I. In Canada

II. In England

III. First Experiences in France

IV. Position Warfare

V. Open Warfare–The Battle of Amiens

VI. Open Warfare–Arras to Cambrai

VII. Open Warfare–Cambrai to Valenciennes

VIII. Open Warfare–Valenciennes to Mons

IX. The March to the Rhine

X. The Horses

XI. Casualties

 

 

Vis-en-Artois
(brick buildings all fallen down into a heap)

Battery Entering Valenciennes
(a street, building in pieces, men running)

Protection of Horses
(deep ditch; two men and some horses standing in mud)

The Battery
(lots of rows, men but looking more like High School boys)

 

“Christie! Is my father in that picture?”