The Diviners

Now, those spruce trees, there, they were really and actually as tall as angels, dark angels perhaps, their boughs and sharp hard needles nearly black except in the spring when the new needles sprouted soft and mid-green. The grass, there, didn’t grow right underneath the trees, but Morag used to go to the edge of the road and pull up couchgrass as high as herself, carrying it back in armloads and spreading it, already drying in the heat, under the spruces. The walls of her dwelling, her playhouse, were single lines of stones she had found on the dusty rutted road. The fallen spruce cones and the dandelions and wild honeysuckle and purple vetch and pink wild asters were the furnishings–chairs, tables, dishes. All for the invisible creatures who inhabited the place with her. Peony. Rosa Picardy. Cowboy Joke. Blue-Sky Mother. Barnstable Father. Old Forty-Nine. Some of the names came from songs she must have heard, “Cowboy Jack” and “The Wreck of the Old Forty-Nine.” The latter was especially fine, inaccurate as the words might have become in her head throughout the years.

  T’was a cold winter’s night,

  Not a soul was in sight,

  And the north wind came howling down the line;

  Stood a brave engineer,

  With his sweetheart so dear,

  He had orders to take the Forty-Nine.

  She kissed him goodbye

  With a tear in her eye,

  Saying, “Come back quite soon, oh sweetheart mine.”

  But it would have made her cry

  If she’d known that he would die

  In the wreck of the Old Forty-Nine.

  And so on. I recall that song from later on, but it must’ve been sung to me young. Who would have? Maybe we had a radio. Where the other names came from, I wouldn’t guess. I played alone, mostly, as it was too far to go to seek out other kids. I don’t think I minded. I preferred my spruce-house family, all of whom I knew as totally individuated persons (as the pretentious phrase has it, when describing okay fiction). Strange and marvellous things used to happen to them. Once Cowboy Joke’s pinto threw him over a ravine, as in “Little Joe the Wrangler He Will Never Wrangle More,” and he would’ve been a goner except that Rosa Picardy and myself, with great intuition, had happened to build a couch of moss in that precise place.

  Another time, Peony and I, although warned not to by Blue-Sky Mother, went into a deserted grain elevator, hundreds of miles high and lived in only by bats, dragons and polar bears, on different levels, bats highest, and succeeded after many perils in discovering a buried treasure of diamonds and rubies (known to be red, although I had never seen one) and emeralds (which I thought must be the same brave pale mauve as the prairie crocuses we found in spring even before the last snow went).

  I remember those imaginary characters better than I do my parents. What kind of a character am I? Old Forty-Nine smoked a pipe and sometimes spat a giant globule into the local spittoon (a word I loved, although I’d never seen one, and visualized as resembling a chamber pot, only more dignified and decorated). Peony, not unnaturally, had curly blonde hair, the opposite of mine, and sweet little rosebud lips like those on the unreachable dolls in Eaton’s catalogue. Rosa Picardy, my alter ego, I suppose, was somewhat sturdier. She did brave deeds, slew dragons and/or polar bears, and was Cowboy Joke’s mate. Unlike the lady in the song, Rosa Picardy could never have expired gently while sighing–

  Your sweetheart waits for you, Jack,

  Your sweetheart waits for you,

  Out on the lonely prairie,

  Where skies are always blue.

  No. Rosa Picardy had her head fastened on right. Not for her the martyr’s death, the grave where only the coyote’s (pronounced kiy-oot’s) wailing voice paid sad tribute. Rosa was right in there, pitching.

  Does that say anything about my parents, or only that I was born bloody-minded? I WAS born bloody-minded. It’s cost me. I’ve paid through the nose. As they say. Also, one might add, through the head, heart and cunt.

  The spruce-house family must have appeared around the time my mother took sick. The whole thing was so quiet. No outer drama. That was the way, there. But I remember it, everything. Somewhat ironically, it is the first memory of actual people that I can trust, although I can’t trust it completely, either, partly because I recognize anomalies in it, ways of expressing the remembering, ways which aren’t those of a five-year-old, as though I were older in that memory (and the words bigger) than in some subsequent ones when I was six or seven, and partly because it was only what was happening to Me. What was happening to everyone else? What really happened in the upstairs bedroom? No–the two bedrooms. He was moved into the spare room. People couldn’t be that sick together in the same bed, I guess.

  Memorybank Movie: Once Upon a Time There Was

  Mrs. Pearl from the next farm has come to Morag’s house. She is an old woman, really old old, short and with puckered-up skin on her face, but not stooped a bit. Her face is tanned, though, which makes her look clean. She makes dinner and swishes around the kitchen. The stove is great big black and giant–oh, but good and warm. Summer now, though, and it is too hot. Morag has to wash her hands. The pump brings the water to the sink, but you have to chonk-chonk-chonk it, and she is not big enough to get it going. Mrs. Pearl chonks the pump, and the water splurts out. Morag takes the sliver of Fels-Naptha and washes her hands. For dinner. That is what you have to do.

  “How come you’re here, Mrs. Pearl?”

  “Your mum and now your dad is kinda sick, honey,” Mrs. Pearl says matter-of-factly, “and I just come to help out. You and me’s going to have our supper in a minute, so you run along and play now, and I’ll call you when it’s ready. I’ll bet a purty you’re hungry, eh?”

  Morag does not reply. She tries to reach the pump handle so she can rinse her hands, but although five years old is big, it is not big enough. Mrs. Pearl obliges.

  “I think,” Morag says, “I’ll just go upstairs for a minute and see my mother and father.”

  Something is happening. Morag senses it but cannot figure it out. Mrs. Pearl is trying to be kind. Morag is scared, and her stomach aches. If she eats anything, she will throw up.

  “No, honey,” Mrs. Pearl says. “You’re not to go upstairs. There’s a good girl. Doctor MacLeod will be along in a little while, and he wouldn’t want you to go bothering your folks when they’re feeling kind of poorly, now, would he?”

  “I want to see my mother,” Morag says. “I am going up to see her right now. I won’t stay long, Mrs. Pearl. I promise.”

  But the Big Person grabs Morag’s wrist before Morag can slither away. Mrs. Pearl’s hands are very strong, a trap like for mice or gophers or that, crunching down.

  “No, you don’t,” Mrs. Pearl says sharply. “They’re too sick to see you, just now, Morag. They don’t want to see you.”

  “How do you know?” Morag cries. “You don’t know anything about it! They do so! Let go of me!”

  Mrs. Pearl does not let go. Then Dr. MacLeod’s car comes whamming into the yard. He is a tall man with brown hair and a smile. Morag now does not trust anyone who smiles.

  “Hello, Morag.”

  She will not speak to him, or smile. She is not letting on that anything is happening.

  “It’s all right,” the doctor says. “It’s going to be okay. Don’t you worry, now.”

  When he comes downstairs, he and Mrs. Pearl go into the livingroom (where no one ever lives; it is for Best), and close the door. Morag hears their voices but not their words. Then Dr. MacLeod leaves. Nothing else happens that day or night.

  The days snail along, and Mrs. Pearl is still there. Every morning and evening she sprays Morag’s throat with a sticky yellow stuff, saying it is good medicine which Dr. MacLeod has given. Morag sleeps in the kitchen now, while Mrs. Pearl takes Morag’s upstairs room.

  Mrs. Pearl’s husband Henry comes over every evening and eats with Mrs. Pearl and Morag. He is old. He milks the cows. Once he asks if Morag would like to go with him to the barn, to see him milking the cows.

  “No,”
she says.

  Not No Thanks. And feels bad for having been rude. But she hates Mr. and Mrs. Pearl, for being here.

  During the nights, there have been no sounds from upstairs, at least none that Morag has been able to hear, for the stairs go up from the livingroom, and the kitchen door is closed and locked at night so that Morag will not wander upstairs. Then one night Mrs. Pearl forgets to lock this door.

  Dr. MacLeod had been that evening, and Morag had been sent out to play long after supper, when it was nearly dark. Mrs. Pearl’s face looked scary when she put Morag to bed, but she said not a word.

  Morag is alone in the dark. The stove hisses a little, and sighs, as the fire dies down. Morag gets up and tries the door and it opens into the livingroom. She stands barefoot, the linoleum cool on her skin, and listens.

  From upstairs, there is a sound. Crying. Crying? Yes, crying. Not like people, though. Like something else. She does not know what. Kiy-oots. She knows only that it is her father’s voice. There is no sound of her mother’s voice, no sound at all.

  Morag, terrified, scuttles back to the kitchen like a cockroach–she is a cockroach; she feels like one, running, scuttling.

  Next morning, Mrs. Pearl does not have a talk with Morag. Not that day. Or the next. But finally. When?

  “Morag, honey, they have passed on,” Mrs. Pearl says, blushing, as though caught in a lie, “to a happier land, we know.”

  Morag does not imagine that they have gone to some real good place. She knows they are dead. She knows what dead means. She has seen dead gophers, run over by cars or shot, their guts redly squashed out on the road.

  “I want to see them! I have to!”

  “Better not,” Mrs. Pearl says firmly. “There, there, honey. You just cry.”

  And so of course Morag does not know how much of their guts lie coiled like scarlet snakes across the sheets. She does not cry, not then. Mrs. Pearl’s leather arms and flat breast stifle and sicken her, and she pushes the well-meaningness away. She stares unblinking, like fledgling birds when they fall out of their nests and just stare.

  “You are the brave girl,” Mrs. Pearl says. “Yes, that you surely are.”

  There is silence all around, and then Mrs. Pearl says something else.

  “It was the infantile, dear. The infantile paralysis.”

  Morag has never heard either word before. She asks, and Mrs. Pearl tells her that it is a sickness which usually happens to children.

  The lowest and largest boughs of the spruce reach down and touch the earth, making a cave, a small shelter into which no one can see. She is not doing anything. Cowboy Joke and Rosa Picardy and the others are not here now. They have gone away. For good. Once and for all.

  Morag is talking in her head. To God. Telling Him it was all His fault and this is why she is so mad at Him. Because He is no good, is why.

  If it was the infantile, though, why them and not her? She is the kid around here.

  Next day, Morag goes upstairs and looks in all the bedrooms, carefully, but everybody has gone. Vanished. She has not seen them being taken away.

  “Honey, come here a second,” Mrs. Pearl says.

  Morag comes to her, reluctantly.

  “Listen, Morag,” Mrs. Pearl says, clicking her false teeth and then putting a hand over her mouth, “you’re gonna be living with Mr. and Mrs. Logan, dear, in Manawaka. Christie Logan, that is. He was in the Army with your dad, honey, and he and Prin have offered to take you, seeing as there ain’t none of your own relatives hereabouts. They’re not what you’d call a well-off couple, but they’re kind, and they got no children of their own. I’m sure you’ll get on dandy with them, once you’re used to it. It was real kind of them to offer.”

  Morag says nothing. She has learned you can’t argue when you are a kid. You can only wait not to be a kid any more.

  Mr. and Mrs. Pearl have a broken-down old car, black and rattling, like a hearse for clowns.

  They drive off, and Mr. Pearl stops the car on the road just outside the fence and goes back.

  “Won’t be but a minute.”

  Morag does not look back, but she hears the metallic clank of the farm gate being shut. Closed.

  Now I am crying, for God’s sake, and I don’t even know how much of that memory really happened and how much of it I embroidered later on. I seem to remember it just like that, and yet, each time I think of it, are there new or different details? I recall it with embellishments which don’t seem likely for a five-year-old.

  Infantile paralysis–that was what they called polio, then.

  The land, house and furniture had to be sold to pay the mortgage, Christie told me years later, but Henry Pearl managed to winkle the piano and a few other things out and over to his place, and quietly sold them when he could, and no one who knew about it in South Wachakwa or Manawaka ever told on him. He put the money into a bank account for me to have at age eighteen. He died of pneumonia about five years later. So I never had the chance to say anything to him about it, when I was old enough.

  That’s all there was to them, my parents. Christie toted me along once to see their gravestone in the Manawaka cemetery when I was about eight or ten. I didn’t want to go, and hardly looked at the stone, and wouldn’t place on its grey granite the bunch of peach-coloured gladioli (naturally, half-wilted, one of Christie’s salvage operations). Christie scowled but didn’t say a word. I was raging because he’d made me go. And now I no longer know whether I was furious at Christie, or at them for having gone away, or whether I was only afraid and didn’t know that I was. Now I would like to see that grave, only once, although I know quite well it couldn’t tell me anything.

  Were they angry at me often, or only sometimes? Did my father feel he’d done well with his life, or that he was a total loss, or did he feel anything? Did my mother feel pleased when she saw him come in from the barn, or did she think to herself–or aloud–that she’d married beneath her? Did she welcome him in bed, or did she make a habit of turning away and muttering she had a headache? Did he think she was the best lay he’d ever had, or did he grind his teeth in hardly suppressed resentment at her coldness? No way of knowing. Why should it matter now, anyway?

  They remain shadows. Two sepia shadows on an old snapshot, two barely moving shadows in my head, shadows whose few remaining words and acts I have invented. Perhaps I only want their forgiveness for having forgotten them.

  I remember their deaths, but not their lives. Yet they’re inside me, flowing unknown in my blood and moving unrecognized in my skull.

  PART TWO

  THE NUISANCE GROUNDS

  TWO

  Seven-thirty A.M. and the phone rang. Morag, never an early or easy wakener, surfaced groggily from the submerged caves in which she had been happily floating for some nine hours.

  Two rings. Her call. She wondered sourly how many people on her party line would be up and about to listen in. Who on earth could be calling at such an hour?

  Pique. Of course. Naturally. It could only be her. Mother, I’m coming home, okay? I’ve made it up with Gord and he’s gonna meet me at McConnell’s Landing.

  Or no. Not Pique. A welfare officer in Toronto. You the girl’s mother? She’s unconscious at the moment, under heavy sedation. A bad trip. Naturally, LSD–what did you think I meant, CPR? She was found wandering–

  Morag shot down the stairs, tripping on the piece of loose stair carpet which she always forgot to tack down, losing her balance, grabbing simultaneously for her glasses and the stair railing. She had instinctively clapped on her glasses, she realized, not so much because she needed them to find her way downstairs as because she felt totally inept without them. Probably she thought she needed them in order to hear.

  “Hello?” Her voice anxious, tense.

  “Hello? Is that Mrs.–um–Miss Gunn?”

  A woman’s voice. Drawling a little. The welfare officer.

  “Yes. Speaking.”

  “Oh, well then. You wouldn’t remember me Miss–er–Missu
s Gunn, but I was in Dragett’s Bookshop that day last October when you were there autographing your books, you know, and actually I bought Stick of Innocence.”

  “Spear of Innocence,” Morag interjected irritably. What a rotten title. How had she ever dreamed that one up? But let’s at least get it right, lady. Stick, ye gods. Freudian error. Same could be said of Spear, probably.

  “Yes, that’s the one,” the voice went on. “Well, I do a lot of writing myself, Miss–uh–Miss Gunn, so I just thought I’ll phone you up, like, and I’d be grateful if you would just tell me how you got started. I mean, I know once you’re accepted, you don’t need to worry. Anything you write now, I mean, will automatically get published–”

  Oh, sure. Just bash out any old crap and rake in the millions. I get my plots from the telephone directory.

  “But, well, I mean, like,” the voice persisted, “did you know some person in the publishing field? How could I get to know someone?”

  “I didn’t know a soul,” Morag said heavily, trying to force politeness and consideration into her voice. “I just kept sending stories out, that’s all. When I wrote a novel, I submitted it. The second publisher took it. I was lucky.”

  “Yes. But how did you actually get a start? What did you do?”

  “I worked like hell, if you really want to know. I’ve told you. There’s no secret. Look, it’s awfully early. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I really can’t help you.”

  “Oh, is it early to you? I always rise at six, so as to work at my writing before I prepare the breakfast for my husband, but I guess a successful writer like you wouldn’t have to worry about domestic chores–”

  Certainly not. I have a butler, a cook and a houseparlour-maid. Black. From Jamaica. Underpaid. Loyal slaves.

  “Look, I’m awfully sorry, but–”

  “Oh well, in that case, I shouldn’t have troubled you, I’m sure.” Voice filled with rancour.

  Slam!

  Morag held the receiver in her hand for a moment, looking at it. Then replaced it. Had she been too abrupt? The woman only wanted to find out. Desperate, likely. Wanting the golden key from someone who had had five books published and who frequently wondered how to keep the mini-fortress here going and what would happen to her when she could no longer write. Golden key indeed.