The Diviners (29 page)

“I'll tell her. Gord, I'm sorry.”

She was, too. Also for Pique. The infinite capacity of humans to wound one another without meaning or wanting to.

An hour later, when it was nearly dark, Pique returned, carrying an old coffee tin full of aromatic wild strawberries.

“Ma–”

“Mm? Thanks for the strawberries.”

“That's okay. Do you think I'm mean?”

“Not wantonly cruel, no. What's the alternative? To go on with him and feel diminished or destroyed yourself?”

“Well, I wouldn't put it quite that dramatically,” Pique said.

Morag had perhaps been talking not about Pique but about herself. She must not do that. No parallels. Dangerous.

“What do you plan on doing, honey?” she asked. “I don't mean with Gord. I mean–”

“Yeh. You mean with my life. Do. Do. Always that. Do I have to
do
anything? Don't worry. I'll get a job. And I won't stay here forever–I'm not the millstone type. Ma–I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to sound like that.”

“Christie used to say that
sorry
was a christly bloody awful word, and I should never say it. I never quite managed not to, though.”

“Well, he wasn't right about everything, from what you've told me. Sometimes a person feels like saying it. It's when you don't feel like saying it, but say it anyhow, that it seems pointless to me. I wish there was something I wanted to do. I feel there must be, but I haven't discovered it yet. Nothing I value that much. I value the songs–my own as well. But I gotta earn a slight bit of bread as well.”

“Well, think of it when you feel stronger,” Morag said, having often used this advice (unsuccessfully) on herself.

Pique went up to her old room, where the window overlooked the back meadow. Morag remained downstairs for a long time, with the lights out, looking at the river. What she felt, more than anything, was relief that Pique was home. Alive.

The next morning, Royland came over with a pickerel.

“This here's for Pique's breakfast,” Royland said. “Saw her arrive yesterday, but thought I'd wait to come over. She okay?”

“Yeh. More or less. Thanks a lot, Royland. Stay awhile. She'll be up soon.”

“I'm divining this afternoon–farm just the other side of the Landing. Think she'd like to come along?”

“I'm sure she would. Remember how she used to go along with you when she was a kid? It's always fascinated her.”

“Not half as much as it's fascinated you,” he said.

True. The mystery which still drew her. What had drawn him to divining? How had he come to try his hand?

“Royland–remember that time you said you'd been–well, a maverick? What did–not that it's any of my business. Don't answer if you–”

Don't indeed, practically twisting his arm.

“I don't mind,” he said. “I wasn't a drunk or a brawler, if that's what you thought. More than one way of being a maverick. I was a preacher.”

“What? You? And what's so–”

“Hold your horses. Let me finish. A preacher. Not the college kind. One of your real ripsnortin' Bible-punchers.”

“It doesn't sound like you.”

“I thought,” Royland continued, “that I had the Revealed Word. God was talking to me, sure as hell, and probably to no one else. At meetings I used to give 'em real fire-and-brimstone. Strong men wept. I'm not kidding. Must've been a godawful sight, eh? I never saw it. I mean, I never saw it that way. Well, I was married, then. You never knew I'd been married, did you? I'd married young, just before the Call came upon me. Well, for all them years I was death on every such thing as drink, tobacco, dances, cards, lace curtains, any dress that looked like anything
but a gunny sack, and so on and so forth. My wife led a life which was filled with nothing pleasant in any way at all. I even quit making love with her. I burned, yeh, but virtuously. I thought it was wasting my powers if I–well, you know. She hated it all, but she never stood up to me. If she tried, I brought her down like a shot sparrow, with my speech and also with the back of my hand. Yep. I thought it was a blow for the Lord.”

“I can't credit it. I can't believe it.”

“True, though. What happened was, she finally took off and left. I couldn't believe she would. Thought she'd come back. She never, though. Finally I went after her. She had a cousin in Toronto, and I finally traced her through him. Saw her. She was living in a terrible little dirty room, alone. Worked as waitress in a café. I saw, soon as I laid eyes on her, what I'd done. I begged her to come back home, and I'd quit being a circuit rider–that's what us Bible-punchers was known as, then. Said I'd go to work on a farm, or like that. I wasn't sure I meant that part, though. I thought maybe it would be enough just not to yell at her, or not so much, anyway.”

“Did she go back?”

“She said,” Royland went on slowly, “that she wanted to go and see her cousin and his wife, first, and she promised she'd be right back to pack. Didn't see her again until I set eyes on her in the morgue. Drowned herself. I guess she couldn't put her hand to any easier way, that moment. She was scared of me. Scared to come back. Scared not to come back. Didn't believe I'd change any. And maybe I wouldn't have.”

“Royland–oh my God, Royland, I'm sorry I asked.”

“It's no matter. I don't generally speak of it. But I've known you a long time now. Well, after that I went north by myself. Stayed about five years in all. Did odd jobs, lumber camps and that. Began to see–not all at once, mind you, but
gradually–that I'd been crazy as a coot, before. Reasons for that, but too many to explain now. I was brought up by an aunt who–well, it wasn't really her fault, either. You don't know how it is for other people, or how far back it all goes. Anyway, I found I could divine wells, so I came back and settled here. Seemed better to find water than to–”

“Raise fire.”

“That's it. Don't believe in hell now, and haven't for some years. But maybe that's just a way of saying that if I did believe in it, I know one man who'd be bound there for sure.”

“I imagine you've had yours.”

“Oh yes,” Royland said calmly. “There's no getting away from that.”

Pique clattered down the stairs. Rushed over to Royland and hugged him.

“The Old Man of the River! Hi, Royland!”

“Good to have you home, Pique. Here's a pickerel for your breakfast.”

“You're great, Royland. Really great. Hey, you know something? You made a big mistake in not getting married. You should've had grandchildren. You'd make a fine granddad. You know that?”

Please. Pique–
no
. How many times had Morag, over the years, made similar jocular remarks?

But Royland could take it. He merely smiled. Maybe you did reach a point in life, after all, when such chance references no longer could break you into pieces. Roll on, that day.

“Well, Pique,” Royland said, “I always thought I was kind of like that to you.”

“You are,” Pique said.

 

Late that afternoon, Morag looked out the window and observed that the first of the swallow children had taken off and was now perched or rather huddled in feather-ruffled and uncertain fashion on a low branch of the elm. She kept on looking. Innumerable swallows (parents, aunts and uncles, cousins) veered in towards the nest and veered off again, squeeping in high-pitched voices, obviously saying
This is how you fly, kids! It's easy! Try it–you'll never be immobile again!
The other four, one by one, were lured out, finally, shakily, and landed beside their courageous sibling on the elm bough. All five sat there, looking dejected.
Hey, Mabel, what happens now?
Tomorrow they would all be flitting back and forth across the river, skilled already.

I look at the world anthropomorphically. Well, so what? And even if I didn't, they do learn quickly. Every year, to see them take off is a marvel.

“Hey, Morag, can we come in?” Tom said.

Three of them–no, there were four people at the door.

“Why ask?” Morag said. “Since when couldn't you come in here when you liked?”

Tom was getting taller. He was up a bit beyond A-Okay's waist. A-Okay opened the door, and Maudie, long clean white-blonde hair loose around her shoulders, glided Thomas in.

A-Okay bumped into the edge of the oak table. He had been looking elsewhere, at Tom, and at the other person, a young man with dark straight hair to the shoulders. He was lean (thin? these kids were all thin these days; it was their diet, or maybe their outlook) and was moustached hugely but not unpleasantly, a rather hesitant look in wary grey eyes.

A-Okay decided he had better don his specs, as always when he'd inadvertently rammed a piece of the furniture.
A-Okay was somewhat like Dan McRaith, whose general clumsiness always had a kind of strange gracefulness about it.

“This is Dan,” A-Okay said. “Dan Scranton. He's from Calgary, or thereabouts. He's gonna stay with us awhile.”

Dan.
Morag felt the blade turning inside the heart. Of course, millions of men in this world must be named Daniel. Still, she did not want this kid's name to be that.

“Hello,” she said. “Sit down, won't you? Maudie, Pique's off with Royland–he's doing John Fraser's new well. They should be back soon. Stay for dinner?”

When Pique and Royland returned, Pique greeted the Clan Smith as though they were her own, which they were. After dinner Dan Scranton got out his guitar and sang some of his songs. They were for individuals, people with names, places of belonging. And they were, just as much, for the Alberta hills and plains, which he had left some years ago and to which he was determined not to return, but loved them now with his painful words.

Pique sat very quietly. Then, as though now was the right time, she got out her guitar.

“I've got maybe one or two of my own,” she said, “but I don't think I can sing them now. This isn't one of my dad's songs, either. It's the one Louis Riel wrote in prison, before he was hanged.”

She sang in a low clear voice, the words in French, then in English. The five verses, and then the last verse.

 

Mourir, s'il faut mourir,

Chacun meurt à son tour;

J'aim' mieux mourir en brave,

Faut tous mourir un jour.

Dying, for it is necessary to die,

Everyone dies in his turn.

I long to die bravely

For all must die one day.

 

“Where did you learn it?” Morag asked. “From a book,” Pique said coldly. “I learned it from a book. Somebody I know taught me to say the French. I only know how to make the sounds. I don't know what they mean.”

Dan Scranton went over and sat on the floor beside her, and took her hand.

 

When the others had gone, and Pique had gone up to bed, Morag went to the record player and put on a song, turning the sound very low. It was in Gaelic and the name of it was “Morag of Dunvegin.” She could not understand the words, nor even distinguish between them, make any kind of pattern of them. Just a lot of garbled sounds to her. Yet she played the record often, as though if she listened to it enough, she would finally pierce the barrier of that ancient speech and have its meaning revealed to her. Dan McRaith had laughed at her that time, when she had said, naïvely, that she wished she knew Gaelic. He didn't have a word of the Gaelic himself, or perhaps a few words here and there, but nothing to speak of, nothing to speak with. Why not take lessons, then, he had said. She hadn't, of course. Too lazy. She would have liked to gain the speech by magical means, no doubt. Yet it seemed a bad thing to have lost a language. Talking to one or two old fishermen in Crombruach, those years ago, she'd realized that. They spoke a mellifluous English, carefully, as though translating into it in their heads, and some of their remarks were obscure to her, but they would never explain, or could not.

Christie, telling the old tales in his only speech, English, with hardly any trace of a Scots accent, and yet with echoes in his voice that went back and back. Christie, summoning up the ghosts of those who had never been and yet would always be.

The lost languages, forever lurking somewhere inside the ventricles of the hearts of those who had lost them. Jules, with two languages lost, retaining only broken fragments of both French and Cree, and yet speaking English as though forever it must be a foreign tongue to him.

Brooke had spoken Hindi, as a child, but had forgotten most of it. That must be different. It was not the language of his ancestors. He regretted its loss for other reasons.

 

Memorybank Movie: Frictions

“Have you been a good girl, love?” Brooke asks.

It has become his game, his jest, before going into her, and indeed before permitting his arousal or hers. If she protests the sentence, he will withdraw all of himself except his unspoken anger. She has to play, or be prepared to face that coldness. Either way she feels afraid. Yet he cannot help it, and she knows this. There can be no talk of it, for it is, after all, only a joke.

She smiles, hoping this will be sufficient, without having to use words in this service. And it provides enough. Brooke, poised above her, lowers his long body upon hers. Then she is angry and wants to shove him away, wants no part of him. But her flesh responds to him, and she rises to him, rises to his bait, and then everything is all right.

And yet, afterwards, when Brooke is asleep beside her, she cannot sleep, the body's spasm no longer being enough to shut off the alarm-clock head more than momentarily.

Dr. and Mrs. B. Skelton now have a new and somewhat jazzy apartment, in keeping with Brooke's appointment as Head of Department. It is large, on the top floor of a downtown block, and is furnished with Danish Modern, long teak coffee tables, svelte things to sit on (you could not call them
sofas
or
chesterfields
, both words having unseemly old-fashioned connotations). On the cream-coloured walls hang several fairly expensive contemporary paintings, which Brooke says are good, even excellent.