Morag started to kindle a fire in the woodstove, then changed her mind. The day would warm up quickly enough. Mid-June, and, although it was cool at daybreak, by noon it would be hot. Strange to think she had once cooked on that woodstove, when she first moved in here, not then being able to afford an electric stove. She was fond of the old stove now, black and huge as it was, but in the first days it had been a disaster, smoking like a train and the food either raw or scorched.
The river was the colour of liquid bronze this morning, the sun catching it. Could that be right? No. Who had ever seen liquid bronze? Not Morag, certainly. Probably no one could catch the river’s colour even with paints, much less words. A daft profession. Wordsmith. Liar, more likely. Weaving fabrications. Yet, with typical ambiguity, convinced that fiction was more true than fact. Or that fact was in fact fiction.
Royland came to the door, looking old as Jehovah. Wearing his plaid wool bush jacket and heavy denims–a wonder he didn’t melt. Greybeard loon. Royland had a beard for the only sensible reason for having one, because he couldn’t be bothered shaving. Large and bulky as a polar bear, he filled the doorway.
“Morning, Morag.”
“Hi. Come on in. Want some coffee?”
“I don’t mind if I do. I brought you a pickerel. Went out earlier this morning. It’s straight from the river.”
Ancient myopic eyes mocking her, albeit gently. He knew she had not yet been able to bring herself to clean a fish. He was working on her, though.
“Oh, thanks, Royland. That’s–wonderful.”
Her face, no doubt, looked gloomy as purgatory. He laughed and produced the fish. Cleaned and filleted.
“Heavens, Royland,” Morag said, ashamed, “you shouldn’t have given into my squeamishness.”
“Well, the last time I tried you with the whole fish, you threw it back into the river.”
“How did you know?”
“The Smiths’ kid told me. Young Tom, he seen you. It just slipped out, kind of. He never meant to tell on you…. Oh, I was about to mention–I’m divining this week.”
“Where?”
“A-Okay Smith’s. Want to come over?”
“Yes. Please.”
“Fine. It’ll be Friday. I’ll pick you up in the boat. Seven. Morning, that is.”
“I’ll be ready.”
Royland’s faded amber eyes grew clearer and sharper, examining her face.
“Why’re you so interested in divining, Morag?”
She hesitated.
“I don’t know. I wonder why, myself. I guess with one part of my mind I find it hard to believe in, but with another part I believe in it totally.”
“It works,” Royland said.
“I know. That’s the only proof needed. I always think, though, what if one day it doesn’t work? And why does it work?”
“I don’t reckon I really need to understand it,” Royland said. “I just gotta do it.”
Oh Lord. Of course. Which she had known all along, but still perpetually questioned. Why not take it on faith, for herself, as he did? Sometimes she could. But not always.
“You’re alone too much,” Royland said, unexpectedly.
“What about you?”
“Oh sure. But I’m getting on in age. And I don’t sit around knocking my brains out, like you do.”
“I’m a professional worrier, that’s all,” Morag said. “Did you know Pique’s gone again?”
“You worry too damn much about that girl, Morag. She’s a grown woman.”
“Hell, don’t I know it. That’s why I worry about her.”
“You used to be her age, once. You made out.”
“In a manner of speaking. Anyway, when I was her age, beer was thought to be a major danger. Beer! Because it might lead to getting pregnant. Good God, Royland. Babes in the woods. Innocents. The tartiest tarts in Manawaka were as Easter lilies. The world seems full of more hazards now. Doom all around. In various shapes and forms. I used to be very liberated in my attitude towards drugs, incidentally, until Pique got to be about fourteen. Okay, pot. That I can accept. Although nervously. But all the other stuff. I worry. I worry, but can do absolutely sweet bugger-all.”
“You brought her up. You should have more faith.”
“Yeh,” Morag said, lighting her tenth cigarette of the day. “Great example I am.”
“Why don’t you quit, then?”
“Too late. For her. Anyway, I began when the disastrous effects of the weed were not yet known, and am now addicted.”
Excuses, excuses.
“Also,” Morag added, “another thing about myself when young was that I got married when only one year older than Pique is now, and Brooke kept me on the straight and narrow for a long time.”
“That must’ve been fun,” Royland said dryly.
Dirty old man. Shut up. Shut up.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Morag replied stiffly.
“Oh-oh. Sorry, lady.”
“Think nothing of it.”
They both laughed, not uncomfortably.
When Royland had gone, Morag wrapped the fish in aluminum foil (good God, why not fresh leaves or something?) and put it in the refrigerator (natural living–it should be an earth cellar or roothouse). Then, willing herself not to do so, she got out the snapshots again, and began looking at the ones taken after she had gone to the Logans’, right up through the years.
She put the pictures away, finally, and walked over to the oval walnut-framed mirror which hung precariously from a nail above the sideboard.
A tall woman, although not bizarrely so. Heavier than once, but not what you would call fat. Tanned, slightly leathery face. Admittedly strong and rather sharp features. Eyebrows which met in the middle and which she had ceased to pluck, thinking what the hell. Dark brown eyes, somewhat concealed (good) by heavy-framed glasses. Long, dead-straight hair, once black as tar, now quite evenly grey.
The films were beginning again. Sneakily unfolding inside her head. She could not even be sure of their veracity, nor guess how many times they had been refilmed, a scene deleted here, another added there. But they were on again, a new season of the old films.
I can smell the goddamn prairie dust on Hill Street, outside Christie’s palatial mansion.
Hill Street, so named because it was on one part of the town hill which led down into the valley where the Wachakwa River ran, glossy brown, shallow, narrow, more a creek than a river. They said “crick,” there. Down in the valley the scrub oak and spindly pale-leafed poplars grew, alongside the clumps of chokecherry bushes and wolf willow. The grass there was high and thick, undulating greenly like wheat, and interspersed with sweet yellow clover. But on Hill Street there were only one or two sickly Manitoba maples and practically no grass at all. Hill Street was the Scots-English equivalent of The Other Side of the Tracks, the shacks and shanties at the north end of Manawaka, where the Ukrainian section-hands on the CPR lived. Hill Street was below the town; it was inhabited by those who had not and never would make good. Remittance men and their draggled families. Drunks. People perpetually on relief. Occasional labourers, men whose tired women supported the family by going out to clean the big brick houses on top of the hill on the streets shaded by sturdy maples, elms, lombardy poplars. Hill Street–dedicated to flops, washouts and general nogoods, at least in the view of the town’s better-off.
Christie Logan’s house was halfway up the hill, and looked much the same as the other dwellings there. A square two-storey wooden box, once painted brown but when I knew it, no distinguishable colour, the paint having yielded long ago to the weather, blistering summers and bone-chilling blizzard-howling winters. Front porch floored with splintered unsteady boards. The yard a junk heap, where a few carrots and petunias fought a losing battle against chickweed, lamb’s quarters, creeping charlie, dandelions, couchgrass, old car axles, a decrepit black buggy with one wheel missing, pieces of iron and battered saucepans which might come in useful someday but never did, a broken babycarriage
and two ruined armchairs with the springs hanging out and the upholstery torn and mildewed.
I didn’t see it in that detail at first. I guess I must have seen it as a blur. How did it feel?
Memorybank Movie: What Means “In Town”?
Smelly. The house is smelly. It smells like pee or something, but not like a barn. Worse. Morag sits still on the kitchen chair. The two people are looking at her. Let them look. She will not let on. She will not say anything.
“You’ll like living In Town, once you’re used to it,” the Big Fat Woman says.
In Town? This does not seem like Town. Town is where the stores are, and you go in for ice cream sometimes, like with Mr. and Mrs. Pearl yesterday or when.
The Big Fat Woman sighs. She is so fat–can she be a person? Can people look like that? The Skinny Man looks funny, too. Sort of crooked in his arms or legs, or like that. He has a funny lump in his throat and it wobbles up and down when he talks.
“You’ll call me Christie, Morag girl,” he says. “And this here is Prin. You hungry, lass?”
Morag does not let on.
“She’ll be all right, Christie,” the Big Fat Woman says. “She gotta get used to us. Leave her be, now.”
“I was only trying, for God’s sake, woman.” Sounding mad. “You want to see your room, Morag?” the woman says.
She nods. They mount the stairs, the woman going very slow because fat. The room is hers, this one? A thin bed, a green dresser, a window with a (oh–ripped, shame on them) lace curtain. A little room. You might be safe in a place like that, if it was really yours. If they meant it.
“I want to go to sleep,” Morag says.
And does that. They let her.
And after that, for one entire year, my memories do not exist at all. A blank. Nothing of what happened then remains accessible. Not until I was six.
Memorybank Movie: The Law Means School
The long long long long street, and Morag walking, slowly. Her hand, sweaty, in Christie’s hand. His hand is like when you feel the bark of a tree, rough rough. Not far now. She wishes it was about another million miles.
All kids have to go to school when they are six. It is LAW. What means Law?
Big brick building, with a high wire fence around the big yard, and the yard all gravel. If you fell on that gravel you would skin your knees, all right. Must never trip. What if they push you, though?
So many kids, there. All yelling. Some very big kids. Some about Morag’s size. Morag knows for sure only Eva Winkler, who lives next door on Hill Street.
“Do I have to, Christie?”
“Aye. Just give them hell, Morag, and you’ll be fine. Just don’t you take any smart-aleck stuff from any of that lot, there. They’re only muck the same as any of us. Skin and bone and the odd bit of guts.”
“Yeh.” But not knowing what he means.
She and Christie walk up the cement steps. Forty miles. LAUGHTER? Why? She turns. Many laughers. All around. On the steps and on the gravel. Large and small kids. Some looking away. Some going ho ho har har.
“Lookut her dress–it’s down to her ankles!”
“Oh, it isn’t, Helen! It’s sure away below her knees, though.”
Her dress? What’s wrong? Prin sewed it. Out of a wraparound which Prin is now too stout to wear.
Girls here. Some bigger, some smaller than Morag. Skipping with skipping ropes. Singing.
Jamie Halpern, so they say,
Goes a’ courting night and day,
Sword an’ pistol by his side,
Takes Junie Foster for his bride.
And oh
Their dresses are very short, away above their knees. Some very bright blue yellow green and new cloth, new right out of the store. You can see the pattern very clear, polka dots flowers and that.
Well oh
Eva Winkler’s dress same as Morag’s.
“Hello, Eva. Hello there, Eva!” Morag’s voice loud.
But Eva is bawling her eyes out. By herself.
In the front hall, dark dark floor stinking of oil bad-smelling oil. Boys’ voices. Mean.
“Hey, you know who that is?”
“Sure, old man Logan. He’s the–”
“Sh! Al Cates, you shut your face.” Girlvoice.
“Oh shut up, Mavis. He’s the–SCAVENGER!”
What means Scavenger? Morag cannot ask. Christie’s face is stone.
“Phew! Can’t you smell him from here?”
“Gabby little turds,” Christie mutters.
The room. Grade One. Christie gone. Morag alone with all the other kids. Having taken a seat at one of the desks in the back row. Holding hard onto her wooden pencil-case. Never mind. They are only gabby turds, these kids. And when she goes home today she will know how to read.
The teacher is a lady. Tall, giant, like a big tree walking and waving its arms. A tree wearing spectacles. Morag giggles, but inside.
Then the worst thought. What if she has to pee or shit? Is there a backhouse in this place?
The teacher says a whole lot of stuff welcome boys and girls I know we’re going to get along just beautifully and I know you’re going to work hard and not make any trouble and I may as well say right now that troublemakers will find themselves in trouble and it is the ruler across the hands for them and the really bad behavers get the strap from the Principal.
What means Principal? What is Strap?
“Stand up and say your names, please. You, the girl at the back in this row, you begin.”
Who? Her. Morag. She knows she won’t be able to say. Or will wet her pants. She struggles up, stooping a bit so as to hide her tallness. She is taller than any of the other girls, what a disgrace.
Mumble.
“Speak up, dear, we can’t hear you.”
“Morag Gunn.”
“Thank you, Morag. You may sit down. Next, now.”
All the names. Stacey Cameron. Mavis Duncan. Julie Kazlik. Ross McVitie. Mike Lobodiak. Al Cates. Steve Kowalski. Vanessa MacLeod. Jamie Halpern. Eva Winkler. And so on and so on.
Teacher’s name–Miss Crawford.
“Miss Crawfish,” Jamie Halpern whispers.
Eva Winkler’s tears go drip-drip-drip-splot onto her scribbler. Morag wants to cry, too. But doesn’t. Miss Crawfish is gabbing again. All sorts of stuff now boys and girls if you want to leave the room you must hold up your hand for permission either one finger or two you take my meaning of course.
What means Leave the Room? Morag does not think it really means you can go home if you want to. One finger? Two fingers? What for?
“Number One and Number Two,” somebody whispers. “If you gotta do Number Two, she lets you go out right away. My brother told me.”
Morag now sees that she cannot see what is written on the blackboard. Her ears, though, are of the best. Maybe this will make up for not having a brother who tells you things.
Eva Winkler’s brothers are all younger. None yet at school.
A horrible smell everywhere. Who? Eva Winkler bawls out loud now. All eyes on her. Morag clenches her own stomach, holding on. She mustn’t. She can’t hold up her hand. Not in front of everybody. Especially now.
“Eva–have you had an accident?” Miss Crawfish asks.
Eva cries and cries. Some kids laugh.
“That’s enough, class. Eva, why didn’t you ask permission? To leave the room.”
“I never knew–”
“But I told you, Eva. Stand up beside your desk.”
“I can’t. It’ll go on the floor, the poop will.”
“Please. Never use such an expression in this room again. Very well, you had better go to the washroom, Eva, and then go home. You can come back this afternoon when you’ve got cleaned up. Now, don’t worry. It’s all right. Just don’t let it happen again.”
Eva scuffs out. Plop-plop-plop behind her as she begins to run, and the floor has stuff on it yellow-brownish and smelly.
“Jamie Halpern,” Teacher says. “Go and find the
janitor. In the basement.”
A man comes into the room after a while. Hairy and dark, grinning at the kids. Friendly? Mr. Doherty. Winks once or twice when Teacher not looking. Carries a bag, a broom, a dustpan. Empties bag, with greenish powder, onto Eva’s shame shame. Morag knows what the powder is. Paris Green. What a music name for that poison stuff. He sweeps up everything and goes.
Recess. Recess means you go out onto the gravel. Morag listens, hanging around the edges of bunches of kids who are friends. No talk about Scavenger now. All about Eva. Eva Weakguts, pale pale face and pale yellow hair. Kids are saying lots of things scared to ask permission doing it on the floor wow wait’ll we see her face this afternoon bet you she’ll be blushing like a rose yeh but not smelling like one oh Ross think you’re so smart dontcha well aren’t I and what about you stuckup Stacey and lots of other things.
Morag’s head is thinking thinking figuring out.
At four o’clock they can go home. She still does not know how to read. Some school this turned out to be. But has learned one thing for sure.
Hang onto your shit and never let them know you are ascared.
Memorybank Movie: Morag, Much Older
Seven is much older than six. A person knows a hell of a sight more. And can read. Some kids still can’t read yet. But they are dumb, dumb-bells, dumb bunnies. Morag can read like sixty. Sometimes she doesn’t let on in school, though. Just depends on how she feels. So there.
Prin is sitting in the kitchen when Morag gets home from school. Prin is getting fatter all the time, and she looks like a great big huge pear. She buys jelly doughnuts at Parsons’ Bakery and sometimes she gives one to Morag. Mostly the bagful has gone by the time Morag gets home. Prin doesn’t mean to be mean. She sits all the afternoon in the squashy leather-seated easy chair in the kitchen, chewing, and then she looks and lo and behold no doughnuts are left.