Pique drew up a chair and peered at Morag’s notebook.
“Well, you seem to be putting down words, anyway.”
“Yes.”
“You sound discouraged,” Pique said.
This was a question between Morag and the work. She didn’t want to talk about it.
“Oh, kind of, I guess. I don’t know if I’ll want it published when it’s finished. You look different, Pique. It’s your hair. Why braids?”
Pique drew one of the long black elastic-held braids over her shoulder and stroked it lightly.
“Cooler. Keeps it away from my face in this weather. Also, I’m part-Indian–it’s suitable, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think I’m hearing you very accurately. What’re you trying to say?”
“I don’t know,” Pique said. “I don’t want to be split. I want to be together. But I’m not. I don’t know where I belong.”
“Does it have to be either/or?”
Pique’s eyes became angry.
“I don’t guess you would know how it feels. Yes, maybe it does have to be either/or. But I was brought up by you. I never got much of the other side.”
Once again, the reproach. Not to Jules; to Morag. When Pique wielded that particular knife, it always found its mark, as she very well knew.
“I told you what I could.”
“Sure,” Pique said. “But it wasn’t much, was it? I never knew what really happened. There was only that one time, when my dad was here–when I was fifteen, eh? And he said a lot of things. And the songs–I’ve got those. And he said some more, when I saw him in Toronto, this time. But some of those stories you used to tell me when I was a kid–I never knew if they happened like that or not.”
“Some did and some didn’t, I guess. It doesn’t matter a damn. Don’t you see?”
“No,” Pique said, “I don’t see. I want to know what really happened.”
Morag laughed. Unkindly, perhaps.
“You do, eh? Well, so do I. But there’s no one version. There just isn’t.”
“Maybe not,” Pique said, dispiritedly. “I’m sorry, Ma, going on like this. It’s part of things which are worrying me.”
“Such as?”
“Dan and A-Okay are going to raise horses. Dan knows about horses–he was raised on a ranch in Alberta. They bred palominos–worth a lot. A-Okay knows nothing about it. But you know him. He’s so serious. He’ll learn. They’re gonna put the land to feed crops. A-Okay will pay for the first coupla nags from the bread he makes out of those articles. Dan’s got a few hundred bucks put by, as well. Dan says he can give riding lessons. He learned to ride western as a young kid, but then his dad got these classy ideas and had him taught English style–wanted Dan to be a gent, what a laugh. When they’ve got all this beautiful bloodstock or whatever you call it, they’ll sell selected ones.”
“You don’t sound exactly ecstatic,” Morag said.
“I’m not,” Pique said. “Where am I in this whole deal? Listen, Dan and I–we’ve got on pretty well at A-Okay’s and Maudie’s place. But Maudie and I, you know, we’re kind of different people, and sometimes her–well, I feel awful saying it–her real goodness and gentleness, sometimes they bug me. That is awful, isn’t it?”
“Not so very,” Morag said. “It bugs me sometimes, too. She’s too good to be true. Like Catharine Parr Traill. But she isn’t, really, Pique. I mean, it’s partly whistling in the dark.”
“Oh sure. I know. Well, we do get on, generally, despite her earth-mother bit. But when she says she feels her vegetables out in the garden calling to her so she has to go out and chat them up a little–well, sure it’s funny, Ma, but sometimes I feel like saying Oh come on, Maudie, don’t give me that bullshit. Anyway, this whole deal. Dan’s quitting his job in McConnell’s Landing, right? A-Okay is bringing in some bread but not enough. Maudie obviously can’t. She’s got Tom, and she’s doing all the cooking and looking after her vegetables and chickens and that. But we need a little something coming in, obviously. So guess who’s appointed? And working as a cashier in a supermarket doesn’t really grab me that much.”
“Have you told Dan?”
“Sure. He says it won’t last all that long, and when the horses are bringing in some cash, I can help on the farm. Well, that’s okay, if it was outside work. I mean, with Maudie, who could really help with the meals? And would I want to, anyway? I’m not much on cooking. But I’m not sure I want to stay here. Only, Dan doesn’t want to move.”
“Where do you want to go, Pique?”
“West, I guess. Maybe not this minute. But soon. I guess, like, I have to.”
“Wouldn’t Dan go as well, for a while?”
“I can’t ask him to, unless he really wants to. And he doesn’t. He doesn’t ever want to go west again, he says. He says he’s had it up to here. Trouble is, I really care about him.”
“I know.”
Silence.
“I gotta get back,” Pique said, finally. “Sunday, day of rest, what a laugh, eh?”
“It’ll be all right, Pique. It’ll work out.”
“Yeh. Probably.”
Dan came over late that afternoon, by himself, docking the boat a little clumsily, still not totally accustomed to boats, banging it broadside against Morag’s dock instead of nosing it in gently as Pique did.
“Can I come in, Morag?”
“Certainly. Of course.”
How to write a novel without hardly trying. Morag folded up her notebook, cursing silently:
Lord, I am concerned about them all. But my God, when am I going to get any work done? And yet if they didn’t want to talk, I’d be sorry.
Dan Scranton stood awkwardly in the doorway, and finally sat down and accepted a cup of coffee. The ritual–come in, have a cup of coffee. He did not speak for several minutes, but when he did, he came right to the point.
“I get this feeling you don’t like me that much, Morag.”
Oh jesus. They were so easily offended, so analytical despite their proclaimed lack of faith in words. What was it this time?
“Sure, I like you,” Morag said, genuinely surprised. “What would give you the idea I didn’t?”
“You hardly ever call me by my name,” Dan said contemplatively.
“That hasn’t anything to do with you,” Morag said reluctantly. “I once knew a man whose name was Dan–I still know him, for that matter, but he lives in another country, and anyway–”
The reaction was instantaneous.
“It’s okay,” Dan Scranton said quickly, as though picking up the needed message right away but not wanting to know more than the basic relevance to himself. “You don’t have to say any more. I’m sorry, Morag.”
“I’ll try to call you by your name.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dan said, “now that I know. I’m probably too anxious to have people like me, so then I imagine they don’t.”
“Pique told me about the horse idea.”
“Yeh,” Dan said. “And there is a good chance it may work. Only thing, why would Pique want to take off again, just now? I mean, at this point. Or at all.”
“Don’t ask me. To look for her family, I suppose.”
“Has she got any? Back there?”
“Only one uncle, as far as I know,” Morag said. “But of course a lot of cousins by now, I expect. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s that–I mean, those specific individuals.”
“I sort of know,” Dan said, “and yet I don’t. I won’t try to persuade her not to go. If she has to, well, that’s that. But I can’t go. Not yet, anyway. Maybe never. Maybe I’m afraid to go back, even if it’s not to the exact same place. I really hated the prairies when I lit out.”
“I know. So did I. I felt that way about the town where I grew up. Then I found the whole town was inside my head, for as long as I live.”
“That’s terrible,” Dan said.
“No. No, it isn’t terrible at all.”
“For me, it would be. I can’t stand th
e thought. The land, yes–my God, who could help caring about land like that? It’s the people I can’t stand, some of them, anyway. One in particular, I guess. When I was a kid, you know, I thought my dad was a real hero–I guess it would’ve been better if I’d never got along with him. But I did. I thought he was great. And maybe in some ways he even is great. He comes on very strong. Most people admire him. He still runs the place. He’s a very wealthy guy now, although once he wasn’t. He belongs to all the right clubs. He even took up golf. He’s got this movie image of himself–gentleman-cowboy. Jesus. That’s what he wanted me to be, only more so. Just before I lit out, I used to get so I thought either I’d start to yell, really berserk, you know, or else hit him. I guess it might’ve been better if I had. Hit him, that is.”
Dan bent forward, his face hidden, the palms of his hands outstretched onto the table, suddenly clenched into himself.
“You know, Morag,” he said, “the trouble isn’t that I don’t care about them. The trouble is that I do. They don’t know. They think I don’t give a shit about anything. They think I’m some kind of traitor–to them, to everything. But I’m not going back to take over the place from him, not even when he’s dead. I don’t want his kind of place. Not in any way.”
“Yet you’re planning to raise horses,” Morag ventured.
Morag Gunn, fleeing Manawaka, finally settling near McConnell’s Landing, an equally small town with many of the same characteristics.
“That’s different,” Dan said defensively. “I have to make my own kind of place. I’m not talking about the difference in outside scenery, either.”
“I know. Your own place will be different, but it’ll be the same, too, in some ways.”
“Not if I can help it,” Dan said angrily.
“I’m not sure you can help it. You can change a whole lot. But you can’t throw him away entirely. He and a lot of others are there. Here.”
Morag reached out and touched the vein on Dan’s wrist.
“Oh jesus,” Dan said, anguished, “maybe it’s true. I can’t take this.”
Tactful Morag. What a thing to say. Maybe even untrue. No, not untrue. The remark wouldn’t matter in the long run, though, because he wouldn’t believe her. Not yet.
“Forget it, Dan. It was a stupid thing for me to say.”
“When I met Pique, I thought This is it. I’m home. And now–well, I know she’s got to go away, Morag. But I’ve got to stay. I wanted you to know.”
“Thanks, Dan. It’ll be all right. At least, I hope so.”
“Yeh. Well. Maybe.”
Across the river, in A-Okay and Maudie’s house, was Pique Tonnerre Gunn, or Pique Gunn Tonnerre, who must walk her own roads, wherever those might be. And nothing seemed to be getting much simpler as time went by.
That evening, Morag went out with Royland in his boat, taking the outboard so that he could fish. The river was a thousand percent cooler than the land. The sweat which had been running down Morag’s forehead all day, steaming up her glasses, began to evaporate. She might just possibly survive the heat of summer after all. Then, after the marvels and cool warmth of autumn, the battle to survive the godawful winter would begin. What a country, and how strange she cared about it so much.
The willows bowed down on either side of the river, low and globe-shaped trees, their flickering silvergreen leaves now beginning to turn yellow. Behind them, the gigantic maples, an occasional massive oak and the dying elms. They passed areas of cleared land, where the fields came down nearly to the river. The massed clumps of goldenrod proclaimed the fields’ extent and ending, the wildflowers as always encroaching, taking over wherever the fields gave an inch. The hay had long since been taken in, and the winter wheat was harvested. The spring crops were ripening now.
“I meant to swim today,” Morag said, above the idling motor, “but of course I didn’t. I hardly ever do.”
“Lotta weed this year,” Royland said, having just disentangled his line from a clump of it.
“Yeh. I go out every morning and think–swimming is the best exercise there is, and what is the point in living on a river if you don’t swim? Then I see all that benighted weed and I change my mind. If I do go swimming and run into a patch of it, I flail around in a panic, thinking it must be a river-monster, probably prehistoric, which has been hibernating down there in the mud for ten million years and has just wakened. Or Grendel, as in Beowulf, and me without courage or a sword.”
Royland laughed.
“Well, you shouldn’t swim alone, anyhow.”
“I used to be a fair swimmer, believe it or not. A miracle, considering I learned to swim in the Wachakwa River. There were bloodsuckers. You had to make them let go by applying lighted cigarettes.”
Morag, terrified of cities, coming out here, making this her place, her island, and still not going swimming because of the monsterweed. But at least she could somehow cope. City friends often asked her if she was not afraid to stay in the house alone, away out here. No, she wasn’t. She was not lonely and not afraid, when alone here. She did not think that the loghouse was about to be descended upon by deranged marauders. In New York, Morag’s agent and his wife had three locks upon their door.
Maybe I should’ve brought Pique up entirely in cities, where she’d have known how bad things are all over, where she’d have learned young about survival, about the survival tactics in a world now largely dedicated to Death, Slavery and the Pursuit of Unhappiness. Instead, I’ve made an island. Are islands real? A-Okay and Maudie, and now Dan, are doing the same. But if they do raise horses, they’ll have to sell them to the very people they despise. And, Morag Gunn, who rails against the continuing lies of the media, does not, it will be noticed, establish her own hand-set press. Islands are unreal. No place is far enough away. Islands exist only in the head. And yet I stay. All this, the river and the willows and the gronk-gronk-gronk of the mini-dinosaur bullfrogs, it may be a fantasy. But I can bear to live here, until I die, and I couldn’t elsewhere.
“Turn the motor off, quick,” Royland said suddenly.
At first, Morag thought he had caught his line in some weed. Then she saw the huge bird. It stood close to shore, its tall legs looking fragile although in fact they were very strong, its long neck and long sharp beak bent towards the water, searching for fish, its feathers a darkbright blue. A Great Blue Heron. Once populous in this part of the country. Now rarely seen.
Then it spotted the boat, and took to flight. A slow unhurried takeoff, the vast wings spreading, the slender elon-gated legs gracefully folding up under the creature’s body. Like a pterodactyl, like an angel, like something out of the world’s dawn. The soaring and measured certainty of its flight. Ancient-seeming, unaware of the planet’s rocketing changes. The sweeping serene wings of the thing, unknowing that it was speeding not only towards individual death but probably towards the death of its kind. The mastery of the heron’s wings could be heard, a rush of wind, the wind of its wings, before it mounted high and disappeared into the trees above a bywater of the river.
Royland reeled in his line, and by an unspoken agreement they took the boat home in silence, in awe.
That evening, Morag began to see that here and now was not, after all, an island. Her quest for islands had ended some time ago, and her need to make pilgrimages had led her back here.
Memorybank Movie: Sceptr’d Isle
Morag firmly crashes the door shut on the garden flat. Garden flat–a joke. When she and Pique first came to England, the advertisement in the Hampstead & Highgate Express, saying “Garden flat–Hedgerow Walk,” sounded reassuringly rustic. In fact it turned out to mean a basement flat, which Morag rented because it was not too costly and was self-contained. Hedgerow Walk does indeed contain hedges, although hardly the tangle of briar roses and blackberries which Morag’s imagination suggested. These are closely clipped green-yellow privet hedges which define each narrow yard. The small front gardens have mostly been covered with crazy-pavement, which, as its name
implies, is a demented combination of cement and vari-coloured tiles of an unsurpassed ugliness. But easy to look after. The Victorian redbrick houses are tall and semidetached. Also identical, except for the fact that householders have all painted their doors a different colour–lilac vies with lemon yellow and deep rose. The individual spirit proclaims itself in paint.
The Yale lock on the door of Morag’s flat clicks protectively. No unlocked doors here. And yet, incredibly, London frightens Morag less than any other city she has ever known. She goes out by herself, to friends’ houses, at night, and returns alone on the Underground, with less panic than she would have believed possible. Perhaps she still, even after three years, maintains in her mind the myth that the English are an orderly and law-abiding people.
Morag slithers out onto the rain-greased pavement and slops up the hill to Hampstead High Street. At least, praise God, no fog today. This has been the worst winter in living memory here, or so she has been informed by numerous people. She has come to believe that nearly every winter here is the worst in living memory because the season invariably comes as a surprise, no one taking seriously the notion that winter ever comes to England at all, until each year it does so. Although Pique has walked to school alone for several years, this winter in the thick sulphurous fogs Morag accompanied her and went to pick her up in the late afternoons, terrified that the child would get lost if she were on her own. It was all Morag could do, then, to find her way, snailing along block by block, clinging close to the buildings, examining every street name set into the brick walls, to check her position, feeling as though there were no pavement ahead and one might possibly drop off the edge of the world.
It was during the worst of the fog that the greengrocer said to Morag–Well, what do you think of this royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle, NOW? Perhaps such a literate greengrocer was an exception, but she had replied It’s fine, and meant it, because of him.
Pique loved the fog, despite the acrid taste that came through the woollen scarf–a primitive gasmask–around her mouth and nose. Pique always feeds on crises because they are exciting.