“It’s not big enough,” he says, “but it’s my place. You might not think anyone could work here. How is it I can’t work anywhere else? Maybe you’ll begin to see, Morag Dhu. When I look out there, I see the firth. It’s the place that’s important to me. The surrounding circumstances–well, they have happened and they are here.”
“You mean your family and all that?”
“Yes, I guess so. But of course it’s not quite like that, too.”
“I begin to see that it’s not.”
He puts an arm around her shoulder, gently and in a sense distantly.
“Morag Dhu. I’m sorry.”
“Bridie must’ve been about seventeen when she married you.”
“Yes. Exactly that. We were both born in this village. I can’t leave, and how could I ever ask her to leave? It’s her place, too. If only she could find something else, someone else to draw her away. But she won’t. I don’t believe she’s ever had another man. I wish to God she would.”
Morag looks at him, loving and resenting him. He really believes he means it.
“If she went down to London with you, sometime,” Morag says, “and went to bed with Andrew, how would you feel about it?”
McRaith considers.
“Andrew wouldn’t attract her,” he says finally. “He’s not her type of person.”
Morag laughs, and he looks at her for a moment, bewildered, and then laughs, too. But does he really see what she is laughing at? And is she laughing, or what?
They are eight for dinner that evening. Bridie once again refuses Morag’s help. Pique has come in with Ian and Jamie, with a huge number of shells collected on the shore.
“Hey, Mum, you should see–you just walk along the beach and there are all these millions of shells–can I take all mine back with me?”
“Sure, honey,” Morag says.
She sees McRaith looking at her, seeing her in a different way, the mother of Pique, the child who has been as unreal to him as Bridie and his kids have been to Morag. He smiles, and Morag has difficulty in straightening her spine and talking calmly.
After dinner, the young depart for a time, taking Pique with them. How much has Pique missed being a member of a tribe, a large family? She is taking to this circumstance in a way which makes Morag mourn for all the days Pique has come home alone, after school, to the flat with only the two of them there.
McRaith is battering around the kitchen, looking for something.
“Have you hidden my whiskey, then?” he says at last, to Bridie.
She does not flinch. She is sitting beside the small black coalstove, and for a wonder she is not actually doing anything except stroking the collie’s ears.
“You know I have not, Dan.”
“Then where the hell is it?” He looks ashamed as he speaks.
“On the lower right-hand shelf of the sideboard, where you left it.”
McRaith looks, and of course it is there.
“Sorry, my queen,” he says. “I have maligned you once again.”
Bridie says nothing. Well, what could you say? These famous silences of hers, Morag now thinks, are caused because he hands her lines to which she cannot respond either angrily or wittily. Her response is silence, possibly because she has not ever figured out any other response. She was seventeen. He has moved on, into other areas. Bridie has not, and knows it well. She runs his house for him; she tends their children and makes the meals. And she has discovered, over the years, maybe with surprise, that her silences are more effective in reproaching him than any words of hers could possibly be. Does it give her any satisfaction to reproach him? Or is she at such times too enclosed in her own pain really to realize his at all?
And yet McRaith does not, at the deepest level, want a woman who will stand up to him. For some of the time, he may indeed want this. But not for most of the time.
McRaith stays, Morag now begins to see, because of the kind of woman that Bridie is. McRaith is not held to Crombruach just because of the place. He is held here by Bridie, whom he has known all his life as she has known him. That is the way it is.
In the afternoons, Morag and McRaith walk, there being little else to do in Crombruach, accompanied always by children. In the hillside fields, the new lambs are everywhere, bravely born into the cold spring. The hillsides are rocky, moss-covered, but in the valleys the earth is black and good. Along the shore, the stones are the colour of jade, rose, amber, seabright at the water’s edge, and long shiny strands of yellowbrown kelp float and straggle. At dusk, the tide coming in over the mudflats, the flotillas of wild swans move along the grey waters of the firth, the young cygnets trailing behind, the great cob swans in the lead, their powerful white wings furled.
McRaith points across the firth, to the north.
“Away over there is Sutherland, Morag Dhu, where your people came from. When do you want to drive there?”
Morag considers.
“I thought I would have to go. But I guess I don’t, after all.”
“Why would that be?”
“I don’t know that I can explain. It has to do with Christie. The myths are my reality. Something like that. And also, I don’t need to go there because I know now what it was I had to learn here.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a deep land here, all right,” Morag says. “But it’s not mine, except a long long way back. I always thought it was the land of my ancestors, but it is not.”
“What is, then?”
“Christie’s real country. Where I was born.”
McRaith holds her hand inside his greatcoat pocket. Around them the children sprint and whirl.
After five days, Morag and Pique leave Crombruach to return to London. McRaith drives them to Inverness station. Pique rushes about, buying sweets. Morag and Dan, conscious of the child, and conscious of an ending which neither of them guessed before, put their arms very lightly around one another.
“Take care, love.”
They both say the words, simultaneously.
In Hedgerow Walk, Morag considers going back, taking Pique to see Christie. Moving seems complicated; she makes plans but does not do anything yet. She cannot go back to Manawaka, to stay. She cannot. But must go, even for a time, soon. Christie will be–how? Does she want Pique to see him as he may be now? She is afraid to go back, there.
It is two months after they get back from Crombruach that the cable arrives for Morag, from the doctor she remembers in Manawaka. CHRISTIE LOGAN VERY ILL STOP CAN YOU COME QUESTION PAUL CATES.
“Pique, we’re going back home.”
“Home?” (What means home?)
“Yes. Home.”
Memorybank Movie: The Ridge of Tears
The bus spurts along the highway, and Morag looks out at the green wheat, the summer’s beginning, and at the tall couchgrass beside the road, the light yellow sweet clover, the dark yellow sowthistle and the purple wild asters. Bluffs of poplar and scrub oak slip past, the popular leaves as always catching the faintest wind, forever-moving leaves.
Pique has remained in Winnipeg with Ella’s mother. It is now too late for Christie to see her. Morag has left it too long. He would not want the child to see him as he looks now. How does he look now?
The Manawaka bus station. No jazzier than of yore. New Coca-Cola posters, that’s about all. But of course the young faces of the girls behind the lunch counter are unfamiliar. Perhaps they are the daughters of some of the people Morag once knew. She scans the faces, looking for a meaning which is not there. She phones Dr. Cates.
“I’ve just got here. How’s Christie?”
“Not good, Morag,” Paul Cates says, sounding weary and much older than the man she remembers. “He’s seventy-six after all. He’s not going to live forever.”
Isn’t he? And does this, obscurely and absurdly, come as a surprise?
“What is it with him, Dr. Cates?”
Dr. Cates coughs, and then, very dimly heard at the other end of the line, sighs.
br /> “His heart’s been tricky for some years now, Morag. He doesn’t take much care of himself. But this time it’s a stroke. He’s only partially paralyzed. He might get over it. But–”
“But what?”
“I’m not sure he wants to. Maybe that’s nonsense. Hard to tell. But with a heart like his, he could go out any time.”
“When can I see him, Dr. Cates?”
“You can go up to the hospital now, if you like, Morag. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”
“I’ll just leave my suitcase at the house. Wait–will the house be open, though?”
Dr. Cates’ paper-thin laughter.
“You’ve been away a long time, girl. You won’t find many doors locked around here, still. Anyway, what’s Christie got that’s worth stealing?”
Morag takes her suitcase and walks. Why not get a taxi? Anywhere else in the world, she would have done, but not here. A penance, more than likely, or a leftover from the days when she couldn’t have afforded a taxi. The house on Hill Street is different from her last visit only in that it is now frankly and indescribably dirty, stinking and chaotic. No one has cleaned for years. Wrong–someone has evidently made some efforts, just recently, to wallow through the accumulation of grime on the kitchen linoleum and the stacks of old newspapers and spidery floating grey-gauze of dust in every corner. Someone has swabbed discouragedly at the floor. The garbage pail under the sink is empty. Not Christie, surely. Maybe Eva Winkler, coming in from the farm on a Saturday night to visit her mother, looking in at Christie’s place.
If I’d stayed or if I’d come back, I’d be dead dead dead. Would I? Who has led a better life, Eva or myself? No doubt I think she has. No doubt she thinks I have.
Morag does not even take her suitcase upstairs to her old room. She leaves it in the kitchen and goes out again. Everything is very silent. From up the hill and over on Main Street comes the grind and splutter of a motorbike, the whir of cars. But here, along the deserted sidewalks, there is silence, broken only by occasional voices from behind the drawn blinds of the houses. The smell of the grapebunches of mauve lilacs is overpowering.
At the hospital reception desk, she feels alien, apologetic.
“I’ve come to see Mr. Logan, my–my stepfather. I know it’s not regular visiting hours–”
“Oh yes,” the girl behind the desk says. “You’ll be Miss Gunn, then?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve read your books, Miss Gunn,” the girl says shyly, “and I just want to say we’re real glad you’re from Manawaka. They’ve got your books in the library.”
Coals of fire upon my head. Must I beg this child’s forgiveness, as well? She wouldn’t know what I meant, if I said it.
“Oh. That’s good. Well–thanks. May I go in and see Christie–Mr. Logan–now?”
“Sure. I’ll just get ahold of Miss Patterson. She’ll show you in.”
Christie.
“How is he?” Morag asks the nurse as they patter down the antiseptic-reeking corridors.
“Well, I should warn you, Miss Gunn. He can’t speak much at all. And when he does, it’s pretty garbled. I’m afraid it makes him angry.”
“My God. My God. No wonder. Can he move?”
“He can move his right arm,” the nurse says. “At least, some.”
Christie lies hunched under the too-white bedlinen. He was never a large man, but now he seems to have shrunk even more. He appears to be composed of bones mainly, and of dried speckled brown skin, stretched barely over the skeleton. He is ludicrously clean-shaven, none of the remembered greyish stubble on his face–they do that kind of thing for people in hospital. His eyes are closed.
“Christie–it’s Morag.”
He can hear, obviously, and he knows what she is saying. It is just that he cannot reply. His eyes open abruptly, and they are, weirdly, the clear blue of years and years ago. He mumbles, but she cannot make human speech of it. For Christie Logan to be unable to speak–what must that be like? Christie, who told the tales, who divined with the garbage, who ranted in his sorrow like the skirling of the pipes in a pibroch.
“I’m–I’m sorry I didn’t come back before, Christie.”
He wants to speak desperately, but cannot. His mouth opens, and he strains. No words come. His eyes are filled with such pain and such knowing that Morag can scarcely endure the sight of them. What emerges from his mouth, then, is a squawk, a hoarse unverbal croaking like a bullfrog. He turns away from her, but not before she sees the shame in his eyes, at being thus diminished before her.
Then his right hand, like an eagle claw, reaches out and grasps her hand. They sit there like this for long minutes, both unable to speak, although for different reasons, and Morag can feel the heavy vein pulsing in his wrist.
A tiny blonde nurse scurries in. From her extreme youth and striped blue uniform, she looks to be a student nurse. She carries an object covered with a white linen towel.
“Bedpan time!” she announces ringingly, someone having evidently told her that cheeriness under all circumstances is a nurse’s duty.
Christie’s one good arm pushes weakly at the girl and the burden she bears. From his throat comes a sound which Morag has never before heard issuing from a human throat, and hopes never to hear again. A growl–the deep growl of a dog, combined with the wrenched-up sob of a man.
“For God’s sake!” Morag cries. “Can’t you leave him be, just until I’m gone, then?”
“I was going to draw the curtain around his bed,” the girl says, half offended and half scared.
“Get out,” Morag says fiercely. “Just get out.”
“I’ll have to report to the ward nurse–”
“Report, then. Go ahead. Look, I’m sorry. I know it’s just part of the routine. But please–not now.”
The nurse scampers away. For a second Morag cannot face Christie. When she looks at him, she is astonished. He has regained himself and is peering at her from his shroud of hospital linen, his eyes mocking and shrewd, his mouth in a soundless laugh. Morag laughs too, although it comes out as the travesty of a laugh, but it is their protection, hers and Christie’s, as it always has been.
She wants to stay here with him, to keep watch beside him. She also wants to go, not to have to look at him like this. There is something she must say. She wonders if she can discover the words.
“Christie–I used to fight a lot with you, Christie, but you’ve been my father to me.”
His responding words are slurred and whispered, but she hears them.
“Well–I’m blessed,” Christie Logan says.
Another way of indicating surprise would have been to say–Well, I’m damned. But that is not the phrase he has chosen. She sees from his eyes that the choice has been intentional.
Back at the house on Hill Street, Morag climbs the stairs to her old room. It is overgrown with dust like feathers or grey ferns in the corners and festooned from the ceiling, but it is otherwise unchanged. The one grimy dresser and the single bed covered with a patchwork quilt. She cannot bring herself to look for sheets. She puts on her housecoat and lies down on top of the quilt. This is the first time she has ever stayed alone in this house, and she has dreaded it, but now none of the ghosts seem threatening. Prin is here, and Piper Gunn and Clowny Macpherson and another younger Morag, the felt or imagined presences of real and fictional people, the many versions of herself, combining and communing here, in her head, in this room with its time-stained wallpaper. Outside, a faint rain begins falling, and the open window channels in the smell of wet earth and grass and prairie lilac.
Waking, Morag is at first disoriented.
“Morag!”
The woman’s voice, Morag now perceives, is external and not part of a dream or nightmare. She stumbles downstairs, and it is Mrs. Winkler, hideously frail in appearance, although she must in fact be tough as dandelion roots to have survived this long.
“It’s the hospital on the phone, Morag. They want you to go ther
e, right away.”
“Can I get a taxi, Mrs. Winkler?”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” Mrs. Winkler says doubtfully. “It ain’t but a short walk, there.”
By the time Morag reaches the hospital, however, Christie Logan has gone to his ancestors.
When Prin died (a long time ago, it seems), Morag had to make all the funeral arrangements. Christie didn’t do a thing. Still, he was there, and they held their wake for Prin, the two of them, sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey between them. Now there is no one. Morag takes the necessary steps, robot steps, not thinking, not even thinking of mourning yet.
The sweeping black-branched spruce trees are the same, but the big gloomy frame house looks different. It has, Morag observes, been painted an eye-shattering limegreen. The sign no longer reads “Cameron’s Funeral Home.” It is now an enormous crimson neon, letters about a million feet high, and it would appear at first glance to apply to some publicity-worshipping evangelical sect.
JAPONICA CHAPEL
Underneath, in more modest lettering, are these words:
Free Parking For Clients
Die now and get free parking forever. Almost worth it. Morag has phoned previously, so is expected. A shortish man, built rather on the lines of an energetic barrel, and wearing light brown slacks and a checked yellow and brown sports shirt, bounces out to meet her.
“Mr. Jonas?” she says uncertainly.
“The same,” he carols. “Hector Jonas. At your service, Miss Gunn. Or do you mind if I call you Morag? You being a local girl, and me having read your books, I feel like I know you. We don’t stand on ceremony here. At least, some do, but I am not of that number, unless, of course, clients prefer the formal approach, in which case I am happy to oblige.”
“No–of course I don’t mind.”