“Sure,” Jules says, looking at her carefully, but not approaching too closely. “Of course. Hi.”
He walks in and sits down at the table.
“God, I’m beat. Got a drink, Morag?”
“A little rye. Some beer.”
“Let’s try the rye first, eh?”
He is not ignoring Pique, but neither is he forcing her to recognize him, or to talk.
“I got a picture of you,” he says finally to Pique.
“Of me? How come? Where is it? Can I see it?”
“Sure. It’s right here.”
He pulls out his wallet and shows her the snapshot of herself, aged two months.
“Hey, I know that one,” Pique says. “It’s in our book.”
“It’s got your name on it,” Jules says, grinning.
He turns it over. On the back he has written Piquette Gunn Tonnerre. In that order.
“Are you really–you know?” Pique asks.
“Yeh. Want me to say it for you? Your dad. Yeh, I am.”
Pique is silent for a while, but remains beside him.
“How long will you be in Vancouver?” Morag asks.
“Hard to say. Coupla months, maybe.”
“Want to stay here?”
“Sure.” Then he laughs. “You got room for me?”
“Yes. I’ve got room for you.”
Pique says very little more that evening. This new presence is obviously going to take some getting used to. And what, then, when he goes away, as he will? Time enough to think of that then. When Pique goes to bed, she says goodnight to Jules, but from a distance. She does not call him by any name.
“Why’re you here, Jules?” Morag asks.
Jules opens another beer. He does not look at her.
“My sister Val. She’s sick.”
“I never knew she was living here. What’s the matter with her?”
“She’s–how the hell should I know what’s the matter with her? She’s just sick.”
“Is she in hospital?”
“Not yet. I’m trying to get her to go.”
“Why won’t she?”
“Because she’s a crazy woman, is why. She don’t want no charity, that’s what she says. Charity, my asshole. She’s crazy. Let’s talk about something else, eh?”
“Is there–I mean, could I help in any way?”
Jules puts his hand under her chin and looks at her, only his mouth smiling, his eyes hard.
“No, lady, you could not help in any way.”
“You never let me forget it, do you?”
“No. I never let you forget it.”
“Where’s the rest of your family, now?”
“Jacques moved up to Galloping Mountain awhile back. He’s some guy. He’s not like me. Nor like Lazarus, neither.”
“There were two younger boys.”
“Yeh. My youngest brother, Paul, he was drowned. He was working up north as a guide. His canoe overturned at some rapids. At least, that was the story. He just disappeared. Body never found. The tourists, coupla American guys, they got back all right after a few days in the bush, and reported it to the Mounties. Jacques tried to get an enquiry, but he never got to first base with it. They took the tourists’ word for it. Paul was the best hand with a canoe I ever saw. They said he’d been out alone in it one evening. We won’t ever know.”
“What–what do you think happened?”
“I don’t know,” Jules says slowly. “But I’m pretty damn sure it wasn’t what they said happened. So there’s only me and Jacques, now. Not many, eh?”
“And Valentine.”
“Oh yeh. Her. Sure. For the time being.”
“She’s really that sick, then?”
“No. Not yet. Let’s just say she’s not gonna find out how it feels to be an old woman. You know something, Morag? After I wasn’t killed there, at Dieppe, I had this crazy idea, see? I thought nothing could kill me. I could do any damn thing, and nothing could kill me. I didn’t think I’d live forever, or like that. Just–nothing could kill me before my time.”
“It’s a nice thought. Maybe it’s even true.”
“It’s a nice thought. But no, it isn’t true. I’m not even sure it’s that nice a thought. Anyway, about Jacques. He’s got a small farm–the land’s no hell, but he seems to like it up there. It wouldn’t suit me, but it suits him. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s not too late for him and his. He doesn’t waste his time in brawls, like Lazarus used to, and I’ve had my share of that, too, I guess. He never went berserk when Paul got drowned, or whatever happened to him. I never did, neither, although I guess I did, some. Val went nuts. She was the one who looked after Paul the most, when he was a little kid.”
“When did it happen, Jules?”
“Two months ago. Know how old Paul was? He was twenty-five.”
What to say? There is nothing that can be said. Is this one reason Jules has wanted to see Pique? Morag cannot touch him right now, or say anything that might reach him.
“What do you hear from Christie, Morag?” he asks finally.
“He’s–he’s seventy now. He still lives in the old house.”
“You oughta go back,” Jules says offhandedly. “You oughta go back and housekeep for him, there. It’s a hell of a town, but this city’s no place for the kid, once she’s older. It’s a killer, and I mean it.”
Morag’s anger is directed against–whom?
“Listen, Jules, just don’t tell me what to do, eh? It’s the one thing I can’t stand. I can’t go back. I cannot go back.”
Jules takes her hand.
“Yeh, I guess you can’t. Okay. C’mon, Morag. We’ve finished the beer. Let’s go to bed.”
We’ve finished the beer, so we may as well go to bed, seeing as there’s nothing better to do–is that what he means? But when they are in bed, his sex rises quickly and the tiredness falls away from him. They make love urgently, both equal to each other’s body in this urgent meeting and grappling, this brief death of consciousness, this conscious defiance of death. Only at the final moment does Morag cry out, and he stops her cry with his mouth. They are left drenched with sweat in the summer night, their bodies slippery as spawning fish together.
“Let’s sleep now,” Jules says, “and after a while we’ll wake up and fuck some more, eh?”
In an hour or so, Morag wakens, and puts her head between his legs, sweeping her hair across his thighs. She takes his limp cock very gently in her mouth and caresses it with her tongue, and it lengthens and grows hard before he is even awake. Then he wakens and says deeper. After a while, she disentangles and he raises her until she is looking into his face in the grey-light of the room.
“Ride my stallion, Morag.”
So she mounts him. He holds her shoulders and her long hair, penetrating up into her until she knows he has reached whatever core of being she has. This time it is he who cries out. Afterwards, they do not speak, but they go to sleep this time in each other’s arms and remain so until the morning comes.
Jules goes out most days and stays away until dinnertime. Morag does not ask him where he has been, and he does not say. He tells her one day that Val is in hospital. Two weeks later, he says Val has left hospital. Cured? Discharged herself without cure? He doesn’t say. Perhaps he would even in some ways like to talk to Morag about it, if he felt there was a way he could do so without betraying Val, but he clearly does not. Occasionally he comes back shambling drunk, but always very late at night when Pique is asleep, and the next day he sleeps late and is irritable. Usually, however, when the depressions hit him, he merely retreats into silence. Sometimes he sits for an entire evening with Morag, after Pique has gone to bed, and does not speak at all. Sometimes he turns to her in his half-sleep, and holds onto her, shaking in every nerve. But the next morning he does not remember.
He is not morose with Pique, nor does he ever get angry at her, even though (once she grows accustomed to him, which takes a surprisingly short time, at least on the surface) she often pester
s him with questions or with her witty converse, hoping to impress him. He permits himself to be impressed, then makes fun of her, but gently, so that she laughs.
“So you’re not gonna call me Dad, eh?” he says to her one evening.
“Do you want me to?” she asks.
“Naw–I don’t give a shit, really.”
“Then I won’t.”
“What if I’m kidding you, there? What if I want you to?”
“Then I will.”
“Okay, so I do, then.”
“Okay, I will, then. I guess.”
But the word does not come easily to her. After a while she finds she can actually speak it, and then it is easy. So easy and needed that she peppers her talk with it.
“We’ve got a film in our camera, Dad. Hey, Dad, can you take a picture of me, Dad?”
So he does. A picture of Morag and Pique. He will not let Morag take his picture, not even with Pique.
“Skinner–why not?”
Jules hands the camera back to her, and hitches his belt up around his hips. He tosses back the mane of hair from his forehead and eyes, and laughs a little, warning her.
“Search me. Maybe I’m superstitious. Or maybe it’s the same as I can’t make up songs about myself. Maybe I don’t want to see what I look like. I’m going on okay this way. Let’s not get fancy about it.”
That evening, Jules gets out his guitar.
“Are you still working with Billy Joe?” Morag asks.
“Yeh. We had a country and western group going for a while, there, but then we split up. So it’s just me and Billy again, now. We travel some. More coffee-houses than used to be, but a lotta kids coming up now, singing, too, which is great for them but a bit more difficult for guys like me and Billy Joe. Anyhow, this is the one I did for Old Jules, my grandad. You remember, I told you once?”
“I remember.”
Pique sits quietly beside Morag, not asking any questions, waiting. And Skinner sings.
The Métis they met from the whole prairie
To keep their lands, to keep them free,
They gathered there in the valley Qu’Appelle
Alongside their leader, Louis Riel.
They took their rifles into their hands
They fought to keep their fathers’ lands,
And one of them who gathered there
Was a Métis boy called Jules Tonnerre.
He is not more than eighteen years;
He will not listen to his fears.
His heart is true, his heart is strong;
He knows the land where his people belong.
Macdonald, he sits in Ottawa,
Drinking down his whiskey raw,
Sends out west ten thousand men,
Swears the Métis will not rise again.
The young Anglais from Ontario,
Out to the west they swiftly go;
They don’t know what they’re fighting for,
But they’ve got the cannon, so it must be war.
It was near Batoche, in Saskatchewan,
The Métis bullets were nearly gone;
“If I was a wolf, I’d seek my lair,
But a man must try,” said Jules Tonnerre.
Riel, he walks with the Cross held high,
To bless his men so they may not die;
“God bless Riel,” says Jules Tonnerre,
“But the cannon Anglais won’t listen to prayer.”
Dumont, he rides out to ambush the foe,
To hunt as he’s hunted the buffalo;
He’s the bravest heart on the whole prairie,
But he cannot save his hunted Métis.
Jules Tonnerre and his brothers, then,
They fought like animals, fought like men.
“Before the earth will take our bones,
We’ll load our muskets with nails and stones.”
They loaded their muskets with nails and stones,
They fought together and they fought alone;
And Jules, he fell with steel in his thigh,
And he prayed his God that he might not die.
He woke and found no soul around,
The deadmen hanging onto the ground;
The birds sang in the prairie air.
“Now, it’s over, then,” said Jules Tonnerre.
Riel, he was hanged in Regina one day;
Dumont, he crossed the U.S.A.
“Of sorrow’s bread I’ve eaten my share,
But I won’t choke yet,” said Jules Tonnerre.
He took his Cross and he took his gun,
Went back to the place where he’d begun.
He lived on drink and he lived on prayer,
But the heart was gone from Jules Tonnerre.
Still, he lived his years and he raised his son,
Shouldered his life till it was done;
His voice is one the wind will tell
In the prairie valley that’s called Qu’Appelle.
They say the dead don’t always die;
They say the truth outlives the lie–
The night wind calls their voices there,
The Métis men, like Jules Tonnerre.
They are silent for a while. Morag wonders whether he has not, after all, sung it for her as much as for Pique. Pique likes the tune, and the strong simple rhythm, but otherwise it is lost on her. It is not lost on Morag. The echoes, and all the things he could never bring himself to say in ordinary speech, have found their way into the song.
“Hey, you’re crying, kind of,” Pique says, looking at Morag in curiosity and perhaps embarrassment. “Didn’t you like that song? I did.”
“I liked it fine,” Morag says.
She glances at Jules, who is re-tuning his guitar.
“Yeh. Well. It’s good you like it,” he says. “It’s too long for a lotta people, and they can’t listen right through. The older ones, that is. Older, hell–about my age. Or they don’t wanna know about it, and start yellin’ why don’t I sing ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’ or like that. Jesus.”
He turns to Pique.
“Hey, that song’s about your great-grandad. How about that?”
But the concept of great-grandfather is too distant for her, even when he explains. She looks bewildered. But wants to please him.
“Sing it again,” she says.
“No, I’ll sing you some others now. I’ll sing you that one again someday.”
Someday. He doesn’t mean tomorrow or next week. When will someday be? Maybe never. For now, he sings some of the songs he made up for Billy Joe’s kids, songs with some quality of laughter in them, some of them based on Ojibway tales and some of them speaking of the kids for whom he wrote them, naming names. Joking. Pique is excited by these songs.
“I want a song for me, Dad. Hey, would you?”
“Maybe someday,” Jules says. “Or maybe you’ll make up a song for me. How about that, eh?”
“I don’t know how,” Pique says defensively, sulkily.
“Hell, neither do I,” Jules says, “but I do it all the same.”
After this, he sings for them often. He says he is working on a song about Lazarus, but he does not sing that one.
“Well, I gotta move,” Jules says, one evening. “It’s time.”
He says this to Morag, not to Pique. He does not say goodbye to Pique. The last night he is there, he and Morag lie together, their arms lightly around one another, their hands sometimes stroking the other’s skin, but not speaking and not making love. Morag does not think she will sleep, but she does. In the morning, when she wakens, he is not there. He has stayed two months.
Pique says nothing when Morag tells her that Jules has gone. She does not question why he came here nor why he went away. What may come of this, later on, Morag cannot know.
“I have lost my job,” Fan says. “I have been given the axe.”
“Oh God, Fan. What’re you going to do?”
“I will go back to the Okanagan,” Fan says, steadily, her face broke
n. “My sister’s still got the place there, sweetheart. I will go back and I will cook the jesus meals or feed the chickens or whatever else they ask me to do. And I’ll live there until I die, which may not be that long, but probably will be. Fan Brady at age seventy-five or eighty–how does that grab you? Well, I can do it if I put my mind to it. I grew up there.”
“Fan–”
“Oh hell, Morag–”
They hold onto one another for a second.
“What’ll you do, Morag?”
“I’ll go to England. And Scotland, sometime.”
“England? Scotland? Why?”
“I’ve known for a long time I had to go there, Fan. I can’t explain it, exactly. I guess I’ve been waiting for the right moment.”
“Hey, did you want to go before, Morag? I mean, you haven’t stayed here on account of me?”
“Hell, no, Fan. I just needed something like this to get me up off my ass.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
Is this true? It’s true in the only way that matters, probably. Fan accepts it.
“We’ll keep in touch, eh? We will keep in touch, Morag?”
“Of course.”
They both know they won’t. But will never forget, either.
NINE
The screen door slammed, and Pique stood there, wearing the usual old shirt and her jeans with Jules’ brass-buckled belt. Looking great. How could any woman’s belly be that flat and breasts upstanding and un-sagging? Morag’s once were.
“Hi, Ma. You working?”
Morag was sitting at the oak table, momentarily staring out at the river, the willows and maples on the opposite bank stirring faintly in the merciful breeze, the August heat parching the grass but turning human flesh sweat-dank.
“I’m not sure,” Morag said, untruthfully, because she had been.
This had been the pattern of life for how long? Morag at this table, working, and people arriving and saying, in effect, Please don’t let me interrupt you. But they did interrupt her, damn it. The only thing that could be said for it was that if no one ever entered that door, the situation would be infinitely worse.