The Diviners

  “It’s crazy,” she said, “but I just can’t take this, Morag. I mean, how’ll Royland feel if it doesn’t, you know?”

  “I know. Me, too. Let’s go in and make coffee.”

  The drill hit water at forty feet.

  “Lucky there isn’t so much rock on your place, A-Okay,” Royland said, sucking at his coffee. “Knew one place they had to go down damn near a hundred feet through sheer rock. Had to blast. Cost them enough, I can tell you. Well, you got enough water for a good-size town, here.”

  “I just don’t see, though,” A-Okay said, grateful but confused, “how it’s done.”

  “I don’t know no more than you,” Royland said. “All I know is, it happens.”

  The river had quieted when Royland and Morag went back across. Royland in his old blue-and-grey plaid windbreaker sat hunched over the motor, his eyes half closed.

  “You tired, Royland?”

  “Not exactly. I just sometimes get kind of keyed-up. You know? And you get this feeling, sometimes, I guess.”

  “What kind of feeling?”

  “That this time it might not work,” Royland said.

  Yeh. That.

  “What would you have been like, as a young man, Royland?”

  “Maverick,” Royland said. “Maybe I’ll tell you sometime. Or maybe not. Look–carp jumping, see it?”

  A golden and fanged crescent, breaking the river’s surface. Then gone.

  Maverick?

  Night. A piercing noise.

  Morag shot from her chair and answered the phone.

  “Collect call from Winnipeg.” Operator’s voice. “Will you accept the charges?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Go ahead, please,” said the antiseptic voice.

  “Hello. Ma?”

  “Pique. Are you okay? I mean, how are you?”

  “I’m fine.” Voice sounding strong and maybe okay. “You weren’t worried?”

  “No. I knew I’d hear from you.”

  “Liar.”

  They both laughed. Morag, with relief.

  “So how are you?” Pique asked. “Are you working?”

  “I’ve begun, yes,” Morag said, hands shaking as she lit a cigarette, holding the telephone receiver between her chin and shoulder. “I’m okay. I went over to the Smiths’ today. Royland divined their well. Incidentally, Pique, Gord didn’t phone.”

  “It’s all right. He’s here now. Not with me this minute. I mean, but here.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Oh Mother. For Christ’s sake. All is now fine because I’ve got a big strong husky dog to fend for me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Pique. You know I don’t mean that.”

  “You do, though.”

  True, as Morag realized upon a moment’s reflection.

  “Well, it’s just that you alone, honey–look, I’m sorry. I’ll get used to it. I’m learning, but I’m not learning fast enough. The usual human condition, if I may say so.”

  “Philosophical to the last ditch, that’s you,” Pique said cheerily. “Well, Gord’s okay. I mean, he’s a real good person and that. I’m just not all that convinced he’s my actual destiny. We may as well travel together for a while. I don’t guess he knows, really, what I’m looking for.”

  Gord, however, was six-feet-two, gentle as a lamb flock except when roused to the protection of Pique. This much, in the opinion of some, was decidedly in his favour.

  “I won’t demean myself by asking if you’re eating properly. But are you, Pique?”

  “Oh sure. No sweat on that scene.” Impatience in her voice, then suppressed excitement. “Say, I went out to your old hometown.”

  “You did?”

  Manawaka. Pique sauntering along Main Street in her jeans, her guitar on her back, a stranger in a place strange to her. What had she seen or found? Who?

  “Yeh.” A laugh, not very amused. “I looked it over. I stayed a coupla days. I’ll tell you about it sometime. It was a real gas.”

  “I’ll bet. Was there–did you go–”

  “I said, I’ll tell you sometime. It wasn’t quite what I expected.”

  “I have no trouble in believing that.”

  “Yeh, but you don’t know what I expected, and you don’t know what I found, do you?”

  “Okay, you’ve got me there. What else?”

  “I nearly had the guitar hurt,” Pique said. “Luckily, that turned out okay. It was the day I nearly got busted.”

  “You did? What for? I mean, what did they say it was for?”

  Morag had to remind herself once again that her instinctive image of the police was one from the distant past–old Rufus Nolan puffing beer-bellied up Main Street. Mooseheaded but harmless. The local constable. When anything serious occurred in town, the mounties zinged in, summoned from somewhere, taut and sinister in breeks with the bright yellow stripe like a stinging wasp, and jackboots, but not living locally so only a sometime and not-quite-real threat, even to Hill Street.

  A silence.

  “Pique, what happened? Nobody hurt you? Did anyone–”

  And if they had, what could Morag do?

  “Cool it, eh?” Pique’s uncool voice. “It was outside of some little nothing-type town just inside Manitoba. I can’t even remember the name. Maybe I blotted it out. Or maybe it actually didn’t have a name, you know? I’m walking along hoping for a lift but not actually trying that hard because it’s a nice evening, see, just after dusk and I’m wondering when I’m gonna start hearing those fabulous prairie meadowlarks you always used to tell me about, remember? Listen, this call is costing you a fortune, Ma.”

  “Never mind. What happened?”

  “Well, a car went by, and it was this bunch of, like, you know, kind of middle-aged guys, pretty jowly and obviously the local businessmen or something. So they see me, yes? I take one look and think uh-uh. So you know what they do then?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  She could, though, and none of it was human.

  “Well, they start pelting empty beer bottles at me. Outa the windows. They’re drunk, I need not add. Some charity supper or something they’ve been to, no doubt. One of the bottles hits the guitar, and the case is only a plastic one as you know, but luckily no real damage, although there’s a mark. The car was creeping along slow, there, and I wasn’t feeling too happy just about then. Well, one of the guys took this bottle and cracked it hard on the door frame of the car. The bottle broke, of course, and then he heaved it at me, meantime yelling all kinds of shit. Well, the glass got me on the arm, and I guess the blood kind of scared them. They took off.”

  My world in those days was a residual bad dream, with some goodness and some chance of climbing out. Hers is an accomplished nightmare, with nowhere to go, and the only peace is in the eye of the hurricane. My God. My God.

  “Pique–is your arm okay now? What happened then?”

  Her arm. What about the other dimension?

  “Yeh, it’s okay. Oh, I walked into town. I dunno–just thinking of those guys kind of bugged me. Maybe what they really would’ve liked was to lay me and then slit my throat. I had that feeling. Anyway, I stopped at a house and asked if I could please wash, as I’d had a slight accident, and they called the cops.”

  She tries to speak my idiom, to me. She never says Pigs, cognizant of my rural background.

  “What for? To report on the men?”

  “You’ve got to be joking, Ma. No. To report on me. They took me to the police station. I was let off with a warning.”

  “You were let off with a warning? What about the–”

  “I guess it was just I was walking through their town, by myself, like, and how I got the bleeding arm would’ve been too uncomfortable for them to know, probably. I tried to tell them, naturally, not because I thought it’d do that much good, but I mean, for God’s sake, if you’re a doormat somebody will be bound to walk all over you, right? But they didn’t want to know. So I kept on moving.”

 
If you want to make yourself into a doormat, Morag girl, I declare unto you that there’s a christly host of them that’ll be only too willing to tread all over you.–Proverbs of C. Logan, circa 1936.

  “Pique–honey–”

  “Oh shit. Now I’ve gone and told it like a hardluck story. Appealing to your sympathy. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “It didn’t come across like that.”

  “It did, though. Anyway, I’m going on to the coast. I’ll write you. Listen, I’m sorry, this call really is costing you the earth–”

  I’m not quite broke yet. It’s only money. Don’t ring off. Not quite yet.

  “Yeh, it is,” Morag said. “Well–write when you can, eh? And take care.”

  “I will. You too.” SILENCE.

  The silence boomed resoundingly from wall to wall, The house was filled with it. Only after half an hour did Morag realize that Pique had not mentioned seeing her father, and Morag had not mentioned that he had phoned.

  The night river was dark and shining, and the moon traced a wavering path across it. Morag sat cross-legged on the dock, listening to the hoarse prehistoric voices of the bullfrogs. Somewhere far-off, thunder.

  Incredibly, unreasonably, a lightening of the heart.

  Memorybank Movie: Whose Side Is God On? Morag stands beside Prin, the back row of the church, hating her own embarrassment but hugging it around her. She is much taller than Prin now, and even though she has finally got Prin a new coat, grey with silverish buttons, at Simlow’s spring sale, Prin still looks like a barrel of lard with legs. She has tried to do Prin’s long grey hair up in a bun (which is in classy circles called a chignon, she now knows), but the hairpins are falling out, and Prin doesn’t even realize or try to poke them back in again, so a funny-looking twist of hair is now halfway down her neck. Prin’s hat never stays on at the right angle–it sits there all cockeyed, the navy straw brim drooping over Prin’s forehead, the pink velvet geranium looking as though it may come unhitched at any moment. It is, as well, a hat which Christie found at the Nuisance Grounds and Morag is in agony, wondering if it once belonged to Mrs. Cameron or Mrs. Simon Pearl or somebody who’s here today and will recognize it and laugh and tell everybody. Prin sings loudly, a deep contralto, but is quite frequently off-key, and when she hits a sour note Morag squirms.

  She loves Prin, but can no longer bear to be seen with her in public. Prin maybe knows this, and is grateful when Morag goes to church with her, which makes Morag feel bad, that is, feel badly.

  Morag is dressed nicely. Nobody could deny it. She spends on clothes everything she earns Saturdays working at Simlow’s Ladies’ Wear. Her hair is done in very neat braids, twisted around her head, and her hat is that very pale natural straw, with just a band of turquoise ribbon around it, in good taste. Her coat, also turquoise, matches the ribbon exactly and is princess-style, fitted, and flaring at the bottom. It shows off her figure, which is a goddamn good one–that is, a very nice one. But all this makes no difference. When church is over, and they’re all filing out, chattering, the Camerons and MacLeods and Duncans and Cateses and McVities and Halperns and them, no one will say Good Morning to Morag and Prin. Not on your life. Might soil their precious mouths. Maybe they’re just embarrassed, like, and don’t know what to say? Not a chance. They’re a bunch of–well, a bunch of so-and-so’s. Morag does not swear. If you swear at fourteen it only makes you look cheap, and she is not cheap, goddamn it. Gol-darn it.

  In Christ there is no East or West,

  In Him no North or South–

  Oh yeh? Like fun there isn’t.

  “Let us pray,” Reverend McKee says.

  And prays for all the Manawaka boys who have gone to the WAR.

  Morag, head bent, tries to imagine the War. You imagine lots of things about it, but is that the way it really is? Is it like that poem they took this year in English?

  The sand of the desert is sodden red.

  Red with the wreck of a square that broke.

  The gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,

  And the regiment blind with dust and smoke–

  The rest of the poem is crap, but those lines are really something. Sodden red. Blind with dust and smoke. Is it like that? They don’t use gatlings now, though. Much worse stuff. Also, bombing places like London (and in that giant city, no lights on at night, how creepy and awful) and even little kids lying there, dead. What does God care? What would it be like, actually to feel a bullet going into you, let’s say into your stomach or your lungs, and knowing there was no way out, no hospital or cure? Knowing you have to die, right now, this minute. Was it like Christie described that other war? Gunner Gunn. Age eighteen. Only four years older than she is now. God couldn’t have cared less, whoever died there. If the War lasts until she is eighteen, she won’t join the Women’s Army. They’ll have to come and drag her away, if they want her. It would be a way of getting out of town, though.

  “Amen,” Reverend McKee says.

  At home, Morag faces Prin, now rocking comfortably in the rocker that was part of Christie’s recent loot from the Nuisance Grounds.

  “Prin–”

  “Yeh?”

  “I’m not going to church anymore. I don’t like it. It’s–it’s–”

  Christie is watching her. Half-smiling.

  “I don’t want to go, that’s all,” she says. “I don’t like it anymore.”

  “Well, you suit yourself,” Prin says. Resigned.

  Not in judgement. Just–you suit yourself.

  “Christie–”

  He gathers the phlegm in his throat. Goes to the front door, opens it, and spits outside into the weeds.

  “You heard her, Morag. It’s like she says. You suit yourself.”

  It would have been better, almost, if they’d argued with her. Now she feels she’s done something awful. But will not change her mind.

  Memorybank Movie: Saturday Night in the Old Hometown Simlow’s Ladies’ Wear is a lovely place. There are carpets, even, sort of wine-coloured with black circle patterns, and there are long counters and you stand behind one and say, Can I help you? It’s nice to work here on Saturdays, and you get paid for it as well.

  The racks of dresses are at the back. Morag has looked through them when the store isn’t busy. Right now they have:

  printed silk two-piece dresses for the fuller figure

  a whole load of cotton housedresses blue green yellow etcetera

  silk or rayon afternoon dresses some with velvet bow at the shoulder

  little girls’ party dresses very cute with full skirts and embroidery

  dirndl skirts with bright orange and blue flowers printed blouses with lace ruffles at the neck

  AND

  oh

  the most adorable red dressmaker suit size 14

  Morag cannot afford the suit but is saving for it. Will it be bought first by somebody else? She keeps her fingers crossed. When anyone looks at it, she fixes them with the evil eye. When anyone tries it on, she holds her breath.

  Morag isn’t allowed to work in Dresses, not yet. That is Millie Christopherson’s territory. She needs a helper, and maybe soon it will be Morag. Millie is old (well, older, anyway, as you might say) and she is tiny and light like a dandelion seed, very skinny legs (silk stockings, always, never lisle). She also looks kind of like a dandelion in full bloom, on account of her hair which is puffy and permed and a dandelion-yellow. She dyes it; imagine having the nerve. But it is a gorgeous colour, and does not make Millie look cheap at all. Millie has very Good Taste.

  “Good Taste is learnt,” she says to Morag. “No soul in this here world is born with it, Morag. It is learnt, honey, and I am going to learn a teeny bit of it to you.”

  Morag is proud to have been chosen, and listens carefully. “It is the colour harmony which is all-important, honey,” Millie says, the store being unbusy as yet in the early evening. “Pink and purple, now, would you put the two of them together?”

  “No, I guess not.
”

  “Don’t you guess, honey. You better know. Pink and purple, now, they clash. Also blue and green. Clash. Clash. Ugh.”

  What about sky and grass, Morag wants to know, but doesn’t ask.

  “Accessories, too,” Millie goes on, darting over to the glove counter. “They are also all-important. Take this little dress now–a teal-blue, wouldn’t you say? Lightened with the beige flower pattern. Now, would you wear these black kid gloves with it, or these others here?”

  “The–beige ones?”

  “Right, honey! Very good. The beige carries out the tone of the flowers, doesn’t it? You catch on quick, dear. It’s a pleasure to tell you things.”

  Morag has never felt such a warmth before. She loves Millie with all her heart and soul.

  Morag is in Lingerie. At first it seemed funny, that people would go to all that expense and bother to wear really nifty underwear when who would see it, unless you were married, but now it seems as though it would be lovely if you could afford it. Mostly the demand is for rayon pants and cotton brassieres, the cheaper lines, but sometimes people will buy one of the beauty garments. Morag sorts and folds them, constantly rearranging. They are nice to touch, cool, slippery. Especially:

  the blue satin nightie with a deep band of lace at the neck

  the pale peach slip with tiny appliquéd flowers at the neck

  the pastel pink panties very short not at all like bloomers

  Business is warming up. Between eight and when the store closes, at ten, is the best time. Lots of people just look, of course. Morag stands up straight, behind the slips and nighties, feeling like she owns them, in a way. She knows them, is why. And can show them off to anyone interested. She knows the prices of every item by heart. Millie says a good salesgirl always knows the prices without looking, but if you forget, try to sneak a glance at the tag without the customer noticing. It makes a good impression, Millie says.

  Quite a few people now. Mrs. McVitie in a new hat, dark purple straw just dripping with mauve and yellow velvet violets, what awful Taste. Young Mrs. Pearl the lawyer’s wife, not really young at all but this is so’s she won’t get confused with her mother-in-law, old Henry’s widow, who is hardly ever in town anyhow. A lot of farm women whom Morag doesn’t know except by sight, the same ones who flock into Simlow’s every Saturday night just to look and finger the stuff, because no money.