The Diviners

  Red-winged blackbird. You would not guess their concealed splendour, seeing them on a branch with their wings folded. Only when they took off, the outfanning of those scarlet feathers hidden among the black.

  A groundhog fatly scuttled from the path. Morag liked them–they seemed portly and innocuous, vine-gobblers, meaning well. But Royland said the groundhogs’ holes made the cattle trip and break legs. Idiotic groundhogs, uncarnivorous, scuttlebustling about on their own tiny business, not one of your great antagonistic creatures, no dinosaurs or jaguars they, yet busting the legbone of some dumbly innocent cow all the same.

  Morag always carried a stick when she walked these roads. So as to fend off the following: mad dogs frothing with hydrophobia; killer foxes; coyotes or some few ancient wolves which might have survived here since pioneer times, unknown to anyone, but possibly lurking in the underbrush, panting to pounce; and poisonous snakes, of which the snake book said this area had none.

  Morag returned to the house. The swallows were positively dangerous, as always at this time of year, dive-bombing anyone who came within eyeshot of the nest, which was above the kitchen window–a goblet-shaped structure of mud and straw, with its patio on either side. The fledglings were nearly ready to fly, and took up all the space in the nest, so the parent swallows slept on the mud-and-straw patio these nights. Admirable parents. Intelligent. Joyous.

  “It’s okay,” she told them now, as they flew to within an inch of her head. “I’m no threat to your young.”

  Imagine dying from a fractured skull delivered by a hysterical parent swallow. A novel death. In a novel, who’d believe it? Novel. Odd word. Swallows never actually hit, though. They possessed fine radar.

  The kitchen door was open. Morag had closed it when she went out.

  “Hi,” Pique said.

  “Pique!”

  Morag hugged the girl, and Pique did not seem to mind. Seemed even glad to be here. Looking just the same–tall, slender, almost skinny, long straight black hair loose around her shoulders, dressed in blue jeans and what appeared to be a man’s shirt of ancient vintage with sleeves cut off short and unhemmed, wide leather belt with old brass buckle which she hadn’t had before but which had an oddly familiar look.

  “How are you, honey?” Morag asked, holding the girl at arms length as though searching for signs of malnutrition, ill-treatment by world, or sadness of any variety. Shadows under Pique’s eyes. Sleepless nights? Worry? Over what?

  “You look a bit tired,” Morag said.

  Pique laughed.

  “I’m okay, Ma. I hitched from Toronto, and didn’t have such good luck. I am a bit tired. That’s why I was kind of delayed, the luck. I’m starving. Got any peanut butter? I’ve just arrived this second. Has Gord phoned? I sure as hell hope not. What hassles. He won’t go away. I don’t want to damage the guy, but what can I do? Where’s your bread–in the fridge? Yeh. You shouldn’t eat white bread, Ma, it’s very bad for you. How are you?”

  “Fine. Fine.” Morag lit a cigarette, hands unsteady. “It’s good to see you. Are you okay, really?”

  Pique grinned, dark brown slightly slanted eyes filled with faint golden lights, sparks.

  “Relax, Ma. Shall I make us some coffee? Where’s the percolator? You shouldn’t drink that instant slop. It’s plastic. Sure, I’m all right. Really. Can’t you see? I had a pretty good time. Some times weren’t so good. They hate kids hitching, some places. They’d really like you to be dead. Really dead, for real. It’s the anger that scares me.”

  “Yeh. Me, too.”

  “Because they don’t know it’s there inside them,” Pique said. “They think they’re sweet reasonableness, and it’s you that’s in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life. It’s the anger you can feel, even if they don’t lay a hand on you. It’s, like–well, visible. You can see and taste and smell it. You know?”

  “I can guess. I’ve seen it, under other circumstances, when I was a kid.”

  “I wondered about that,” Pique said, in between mouthfuls of sandwich, “when I went to Manawaka. I guess it’s changed a lot, on the surface. Underneath–well, I dunno.”

  “Did you see–”

  “I don’t think I can talk about it, just yet,” Pique said carefully. “I’ll tell you about it later on, maybe, sometime. I don’t think Christie’s old house is there any more. Lotta new little tacky houses on Hill Street.”

  “I couldn’t bear to see it. Although it could hardly look worse than it did then.”

  “Prosperous town, I’d say.”

  “Yes. I suppose so. Did you go down in the valley?”

  “I’ll tell you later, I said.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Got any oranges or bananas?”

  “On the sideboard. Where’d you get the jazzy belt?”

  “From my dad. He gave it to me. He had to shorten it a lot. It was his.”

  “Of course. I knew I’d seen it before.”

  “I saw him in Toronto, Ma.”

  “I know. He phoned me.”

  “He did? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Morag said, feeling slightly annoyed. “To say he’d seen you, and what did I mean, letting you go off like that. He has his reasons for saying that, though.”

  “That’s funny,” Pique said. “He didn’t take that line with me. He said he knew why I had to go out west and that. He did, too.”

  “Yeh. Well, maybe he only said that to me because he thought it was what I’d expect to hear. I think he really phoned to tell me he’d seen you and you were okay. He always thought I was kind of–”

  “What?”

  “Bourgeois. Square.”

  “Square. I love your idiom, Ma. It’s like an old dance tune from the forties.”

  “Brat. You wait. Yours will be passé, too.”

  “Well, were you, like, square?”

  “It all depends where you stand,” Morag said. “To him, I suppose I was, at least in some ways. He thought I wanted things that he didn’t care about. I did, too, but then, later, I didn’t.”

  “What things?”

  “Oh–respectability, wall-to-wall carpets and that.”

  “Did you really? Poor Ma.”

  “Indeed. But it wasn’t all that bad. It wasn’t like that at all, really. I can’t explain.”

  “My dad gave me some songs,” Pique said. “That was the best thing he gave me.”

  “He told me. That’s good. That’s fine.”

  Hypocritical Morag. Jealous of the fact that he had that to give. Like A-Okay’s poems. Could you hand over a stack of books to someone? Only to someone who wanted to read, presumably. Maybe Pique would read Morag’s out of curiosity when Morag was pushing up daisies. But songs. And he had been singing them so long ago, long before everyone in sight began going around singing their own songs. Lucky bugger. God knows he’d had a rocky road, withal, though.

  “I never thought he’d actually teach them to me,” Pique said. “He’d sung them that one time before, you remember? No, twice–didn’t he, when I was a little kid, somewhere, as well?”

  “Yes. Yes, he did. Some of them.”

  “Gord couldn’t see how important it was to me. He thought it would be just the same if you listened to a record and picked up anybody else’s song that way. I couldn’t explain. It was kind of strange to see him again, my dad. Did you love him?”

  Morag sat with her hands around the coffee mug. Thinking. How to reply and get across that much complexity in a single well-chosen phrase? Impossible.

  “I guess you could say love. I find words more difficult to define than I used to. I guess I felt–feel–that he was related to me in some way. I’d known him an awfully long time, you know. I mean, at the time when you were born, I’d known him an awfully long time then, even. I’m not sure know is the right word, there.”

  “Who cares about the right word?” Pique cried. Then, suddenly, the hurt cry which
must have been there for years, “Why did you have me?”

  “I wanted you,” Morag said, stunned.

  “For your own satisfaction, yes. You never thought of him, or of me.”

  And to that accusation there was no answer. None. Because it was partly true. To have someone of her own blood. But only partly. She had not conned a kid out of him, after all. Or not quite, anyway. How did he look at it? She didn’t know. But he’d given the songs to Pique.

  Silence. The afternoon sun pouring through the window as though the daylight would be forever. The young swallows fidgeting and flittering in the nest, wanting to fly.

  “Pique–”

  Pique, sitting at the end of the long table, put out her hand and touched Morag’s hand.

  “Yeh. I know. Never mind. It’s okay. You know something, Ma?”

  “What?”

  Pique was about to cry, but refused to do so, was forced to reject tears as an indignity against what she was about to say.

  “His voice isn’t very good any more,” Pique said steadily. “The jobs are getting harder to find. Lots of competition around now, and he’s only got one thing to cash in on now, in lots of places.”

  “Which is?” But she knew.

  “You know, he’s still kind of an oddity,” Pique said, in that same unnervingly calm distant voice. “That’s a bad scene, for him. And he’s not so young any more.”

  “Nor am I,” Morag said. “Nor can I go on forever, either. Sometimes I’d like to see him.”

  “Why don’t you, then? He’s there.”

  “I don’t know if he would like to see me. Probably not.”

  Pique’s voice was not calm and distant any longer.

  “You make me sick. You make me bloody sick. You’re so goddamn proud and so scared of being rejected. You’re so stupid in that way, you really are.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Morag said.

  But maybe it was. No, it wasn’t. Indecision all around. If she went unannounced to see him, he would laugh bitterly in her face. Or would he? She felt extremely tired.

  “How would some dinner grab you?”

  “Okay,” Pique said, without enthusiasm. “Shall I cook, or will you?”

  “Me, I guess. You can tomorrow.”

  Unfortunately, at that moment the door was decisively knocked upon. Morag prayed. Let it be Royland. Or A-Okay and Maudie. But of course, no.

  Gord. Who else? His straw hair tangled, his boy’s face still not quite set into the firmer outlines it would have in a few years, but showing strength of the bones under the skin. A determined tenacious face, but the blue eyes were bewildered.

  “Now, listen, Pique,” he began. “Just listen for one minute, will you?”

  “I asked you not to come here,” Pique said, voice low and helpless. Then, flaring up, “I’m going out. And don’t follow me, either, see?”

  Like a kid. But only because she didn’t know what to do.

  “If you’re going out,” Morag said, “why don’t you take a pan and pick some of the wild strawberries up the meadow?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Pique ran, and the screendoor slammed.

  Tactful Morag. It had seemed practical, that’s all.

  “Want some coffee?” she asked Gord, hoping he would say No and leave immediately.

  He nodded and sat down.

  “Why does she do it, Morag?” he asked, begging for revelations. “I mean, what’ve I ever done to make her be like that? She was okay for a while, there, on the way out west, once I caught up with her. Which wasn’t easy, believe me. Finding her. Then she just sort of went away. What’s she want me to do?”

  She wants you to get lost, you poor mug. No, that’s too flippant.

  “Look, Gord,” Morag said, “she cares about you. That is, she cares about you as a person. But I just think she feels she has to be on her own awhile, and find out what she’s meant to do. You will just have to let go of her.”

  Would it be kinder simply to tell him that Pique couldn’t get on with him any more, through no fault of his or hers, that she was on some kind of search on her own behalf, that she couldn’t care about him as once she had and couldn’t pretend to feel what she didn’t feel? No, not kinder, probably.

  Am I only interpreting her through my own experience? Maybe she doesn’t feel that at all. Why all that talk, suddenly, about her dad?

  “Yeh, I guess I know.” He glared for an instant at Morag.

  All Morag’s fault, he probably thought. Brought up the girl strangely. What could you expect? Bad scene. Morag could feel Gord’s hostility like lye thrown in her face.

  “Couldn’t you suggest anything?” Gord then said, pleadingly. “I feel it must be my fault, but I don’t know how.”

  Morag perceived that what she had taken to be hostility had been in fact self-reproach on his part.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything.”

  Gord rose.

  “Yeh. Well. I thought probably not. Thanks anyway, for the coffee. I’ll be going now. Tell Pique if she wants to see me, phone. My aunt’ll take the message if I’m not there.”

  No doubt, at least for the time in which it took him to find another woman, he would rise up at 4:00 A.M. if necessary, summoned from his aunt’s farm, and come rocketing out. Through the swamp and fog (or flame and fire, or ice and snow; can’t remember) I gotta go where you are. “Chloe.” Done by Spike Jones, a sendup, clanging with tubas and cowbells, aeons ago. Morag was becoming an antique. Also, mind-wanderer. Mooner, Prin had said.

  “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 alo
ng 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.”