“What? What, Prin?”
“I never used to look this way,” Prin says. “Yeh, well, I know I let myself go. I know. Oh, I know that all right. I don’t know. Just didn’t seem that much use, bothering. We never seemed to get anywheres, anyhow. He’s smarter than what I am, and I only got the Grade Five. I was lucky he married me. I never could fathom why he did. But I never could fathom him, neither. He never cared about getting anywheres. It ain’t his fault, I guess. But now–I don’t kind of know how to be any different, like. That’s why I don’t, you know, look after you better, sort of. I’m that sorry, Morag.”
Morag is crying. Holding onto Prin’s awful fat belly wrapped around in the brown wraparound, Prin’s good good good.
“Prin–I never meant! I never!”
Prin wipes Morag’s eyes with fat warm hands.
“The Lord knows I care about you. I lost my only one.”
“What? What?”
“Strangled on the cord. A boy. Dead when born.”
What? What cord? What means Cord? Dead when born? Oh. How could you be born and dead at the same time? Oh–
“I shouldn’t have said,” Prin says. “Never you mind.”
Morag doesn’t say. Doesn’t say. Doesn’t say. Doesn’t say.
Evening, and the three are sitting on the front porch. Christie and Prin are on straight chairs from the kitchen. Morag is on the top step. All along Hill Street, summer noises. Gangs of kids playing Kick the Can and Run Sheep Run and Andy Andy Eye Over. Dogs fucking in ditches, or fighting, yelping when somebody kicks them apart. Lots of women leaning on their fences and yakking.
Next door, at the Winklers’, old Gus starts to shout. Trouble. Vernon runs outside and onto the road. Vernon is younger than Morag. He is a drip. Also, his nose drips drips drips all the time. He is skinny, and his hair (pale pale like Eva’s) looks funny because his mother cuts it by putting a bowl on his head and snipping all around. But he is just a little kid, and it isn’t his fault he’s a drip. What is Vernon’s dad going to do?
Gus Winkler has caught Vernon by the arm. Gus has a stick in his hand and he is hitting Vernon with it. On the legs, on the bum, oh on the face. Vern screams and screams. Like a dog when somebody has hurt it real bad.
Morag stares. Blood on Vernon’s face. He has a nose-bleed. She looks up at Christie.
Christie is sitting very still. His hands are around his knees. He looks away from Morag. She might have known he wouldn’t do anything. Scaredy-cat Christie.
Gus pushes Vernon back inside the Winklers’ shack. All of a sudden everything on Hill Street seems quiet. Then the ordinary noises begin again, as though nothing has happened. Nothing at all. Christie does not move. Then he speaks, but it doesn’t sound like Christie.
“I didn’t go over. I didn’t go over, did I? Not me. Gus Winkler’s too brawny. May God–”
He stops. Prin makes little clucking-hen noises.
“It wasn’t none of your business, Christie.”
Christie gets up and walks inside the house.
“He’s gonna have one of his spells,” Prin says. “He ain’t had one for a long time.”
When they go into the house, Christie is sitting on the oak bench. His blue blue eyes look like they are blind. He is shaking all over. He keeps on like this a long time. Then he stops shaking but doesn’t move. When Morag goes to bed, he is still sitting there, not moving.
“What is it, Prin?”
“Shh,” Prin says. “It’s nothing. It’ll go away by itself. Doc MacLeod says he don’t think nothing can be done for it. It’s the shell shock, like.”
“What?”
“In the war,” Prin explains. “He was shook up very bad. In his nerves, like. Sometimes it takes him, even now. He never said, but I always had a hunch that was why he couldn’t get no other job except Scavenger. He never knows when it might take him, see.”
“But–he told me he fancied the job.”
“He would,” Prin says, crossly.
“Why would Gus Winkler do that to Vern?”
Prin shakes her head.
“Only the Lord can tell. He’s got a devil in him, that man.”
Morag lies in bed, thinking. Christie would never beat her. He’s stinky and he looks so dumb. But he’s never beaten her. He wouldn’t do that, anyway. But he didn’t go over to Winklers’. He was scared of Gus.
Christie, sitting there in the kitchen. Christie, shaking all over.
Morag cries.
Memorybank Movie: Christie with Spirits
Morag is nine, and it is winter. The snow is a good four feet thick outside and you have to walk to school on the road, where the snowplough has been. The windows are covered with frost-feathers and frost-ferns, and it doesn’t matter that you can’t see out because the patterns are so good to look at. In the kitchen, the stove keeps them warm, although Christie has a job scrounging enough wood. Lots of people on Relief are going to the Nuisance Grounds looking for old wooden boxes, not being able to afford cordwood, but Christie has first pick. Christie is not on Relief. Relief means you have no job on account of the Depression, and the government feeds you slop. Ugh. The Depression means there aren’t any jobs, or hardly any, or like that.
Christie is drinking red biddy he got from somebody across the tracks, and he is explaining about the wood and other things to Morag. Prin is cross about the red biddy, so she has turned her chair away from him.
“I leave some, do you see, then, Morag,” Christie says. “It’s only right. Garbage belongs to all. Communal property, as you might say. One man’s muck is everyman’s muck. The socialism of the junk heap. All the same, though, with every profession do you see, there must be some advantages, some little thing or other that you get which others don’t. And this here is mine. The Nuisance Grounds keeps us warm. Out of the garbage dump and into the fire. Och aye, that was the grand load of boxes I brought back today. Old butter crates from the Creamery.”
He swallows some more red biddy, coughs, then gets into the subject he always talks about when the spirits are in him.
“Let the Connors and the McVities and the Camerons and Simon Pearl and all them in their houses up there–let them look down on the likes of Christie Logan. Let them. I say unto you, Morag, girl, I open my shirt to the cold winds of their voices, yea, and to the ice of their everlasting eyes. They don’t touch me, Morag. For my kin and clan are as good as theirs any day of the week, any week of the month, any month of the year, any year of the century, and any century of all time.”
Gulp. Swallow. The spirits are really in him. His eyes are shining. His right hand comes up, clenched. He is pretending he is holding a claymore. Morag knows, because once afterwards he said so, laughing. But you aren’t supposed to laugh now.
“Was I not born a Highlander, in Easter Ross, one of the North Logans? An ancient clan, an ancient people. Is our motto not a fine, proud set of words, then? This Is the Valour of My Ancestors. The motto of the Logans, Morag, and our war cry is The Ridge of Tears. The ridge of tears! Druim-nan deur, although I’m not so sure how to pronounce it, not having the Gaelic. A sad cry, it is, for the sadness of my people. A cry heard at Culloden, in the black days of the battle, when the clans stood together for the last time, and the clans were broken by the Sassenach cannons and the damned bloody rifles of the redcoat swine. They mowed the clans down in cold blood, my dear, and it must have been enough to tear the heart and unhinge the mind of the strongest coldest man alive, for our folk were poor bloody crofters, and were not wanting to fight the wars of the chieftains, at all. But they thought their chieftains had the power from heaven, Morag. They believed their chiefs were kings from God. And them who didn’t believe was raised anyway, with fire and with sword, until they went off to fight Charlie’s battle for him, and him a green boy from France who neither knew nor cared for his people but only for the crown gleaming there in the eye of his own mind.”
Christie stumbles to the sideboard and opens a drawer. He brings out the book
, The Clans and Tartans of Scotland, and looks up Logan.
“See there,” he bellows. “The crest badge of the Logans. And what is the crest, Morag? What is the way, then, you would describe, in the right words, what is there on that badge?”
She knows it off by heart.
“A passion nail piercing a human heart, proper.”
Christie’s fist comes down on the table.
“Right! An ancient family, the North Logans, by the Almighty God.”
Then the spirits start to get gloomy in him.
“Och, what the hell does it matter? It’s here we live, not there, and the glory has passed away, and likely never was in the first place.”
“Christie, tell me about Piper Gunn.”
Christie sighs, and pours another drink. He sits there, thinking. Soon he will begin. Morag knows what it says in the book under the name Gunn. It isn’t fair, but it must be true because it is right there in the book.
The chieftainship of Clan Gunn is undetermined at the present time, and no arms have been matriculated.
When she first looked it up, she showed it to Christie, and he read it and then he laughed and asked her if she had not been told the tales about the most famous Gunn of all, and so he told her. He tells them to her sometimes when the spirit moves him.
Now he rocks back on the straight chair, for he is sitting at the table with the bottle beside him.
“All right, then, listen and I will tell you the first tale of your ancestor.”
CHRISTIE’S FIRST TALE OF PIPER GUNN
It was in the old days, a long time ago, after the clans was broken and scattered at the battle on the moors, and the dead men thrown into the long graves there, and no heather ever grew on those places, never again, for it was dark places they had become and places of mourning. Then, in those days, a darkness fell over all the lands and the crofts of Sutherland. The Bitch-Duchess was living there then, and it was she who cast a darkness over the land, and sowed the darkness and reaped gold, for her heart was dark as the feathers of a raven and her heart was cold as the gold coins, and she loved no creature alive but only the gold. And her tacksmen rode through the countryside, setting fire to the crofts and turning out the people from their homes which they had lived in since the beginning of all time. And it was old men and old women with thin shanks and men in their prime and women with the child inside them and a great scattering of small children like, and all of them was driven away from the lands of their fathers and onto the wild rocks of the shore, then, to fish if they could and pry the shellfish off of the rocks there, for food.
Well, now, the Bitch-Duchess walked her castle, there, walked and walked, and you would think God in His mercy would keep the sleep forever from her eyelids, but she slept sound enough when she had a mind to. She was not the one to feel shame or remorse over the people scrabbling on the rocks there like animals and like the crabs who crawl among the rocks in that place. All the lands of Sutherland will be raising the sheep, says the she-devil, for they’ll pay better than folk.
Among all of them people there on the rocks, see, was a piper, and he was from the Clan Gunn, and it was many of the Gunns who lost their hearths and homes and lived wild on the stormy rocks there. And Piper Gunn, he was a great tall man, a man with the voice of drums and the heart of a child and the gall of a thousand and the strength of conviction. And when he played the pipes on the shore, there, it was the pibrochs he played, out of mourning for the people lost and the people gone and them with no place for to lay their heads except the rocks of the shore. When Piper Gunn played, the very seagulls echoed the chants of mourning, and the people wept. And Piper Gunn, he played there on the shore, all the pibrochs he knew, “Flowers of the Forest” and all them. And it would wrench the heart of any person whose heart was not dead as stone, to hear him.
Then Piper Gunn spoke to the people. Dolts and draggards and daft loons and gutless as gutted herring you are, he calls out in his voice like the voice of the wind from the north isles. Why do you sit on these rocks, weeping? says he. For there is a ship coming, says he, on the wings of the morning, and I have heard tell of it, and we must gather our pots and kettles and our shawls and our young ones, and go with it into a new world across the waters.
But the people were afraid, see? They did not dare. Better to die on the known rocks in the land of their ancestors, so some said. Others said the lands across the seas were bad lands, filled with the terrors and the demons and the beasts of the forest and those being the beasts which would devour a man as soon as look at him. Well, says Piper Gunn, God rot your flabby souls then, for my woman and I will go and rear our daughters and our sons in the far land and make it ours, and you can stay here, then, and the Bitch-Duchess can have chessmen carved from your white bones scattered here on the rocks and she shall play her games with you in your death as she has in your life.
Then Piper Gunn changed his music, and he played the battle music there on the rocks. And he played “All the Blue Bonnets Are Over the Border” and he played “Hey Johnnie Cope” and he played “The March of the Cameron Men” and he played “The Gunns’ Salute” which was the music of his own clan. They say it was like the storm winds out of the north, and like the scree and skirl of all the dead pipers who ever lived, returned then to pipe the clans into battle.
Now Piper Gunn had a woman, and a strapping strong woman she was, with the courage of a falcon and the beauty of a deer and the warmth of a home and the faith of saints, and you may know her name. Her name, it was Morag. That was an old name, and that was the name Piper Gunn’s woman went by, and fine long black hair she had, down to her waist, and she stood there beside her man on the rocky coast, and watched that ship come into the harbour in that place. And when the plank was down and the captain hailing the people there, Piper Gunn began to walk towards that ship and his woman Morag with him, and she with child, and he was still playing “The Gunns’ Salute.”
Then what happened? What happened then, to all of them people there homeless on the rocks? They rose and followed! Yes, they rose, then, and they followed, for Piper Gunn’s music could put the heart into them and they would have followed him all the way to hell or to heaven with the sound of the pipes in their ears.
And that was how all of them came to this country, all that bunch, and they ended up at the Red River, and that is another story.
“Best go to bed, Morag,” Prin says. “He’ll be asleep at the table in a coupla minutes.”
Morag goes upstairs. Her room is really hers, her place. It has always been hers. She likes that it is small, just enough room for the brass bed and the green dresser. She sits on the bed, shivering. The cold is seeping in through the closed window. She does not undress. Prin finds her there, after a while, and scolds.
“Morag, you are a mooner.”
Morag puts on her nightgown then, and climbs into bed. Thinking.
A mooner. That sounds nice. She knows what it means. It isn’t meant nice. It means somebody who moons around, dawdling and thinking. But to her it means something else. Some creature from another place, another planet. Left here accidentally.
She thinks of the scribbler in her top dresser drawer. She will never show it to anyone, never. It is hers, her own business. She will write some in it tomorrow. She tells it in her head.
Morag’s First Tale of Piper Gunn’s Woman
Once long ago there was a beautiful woman name of Morag, and she was Piper Gunn’s wife, and they went to the new land together and Morag was never afraid of anything in this whole wide world. Never. If they came to a forest, would this Morag there be scared? Not on your christly life. She would only laugh and say, Forests cannot hurt me because I have the power and the second sight and the good eye and the strength of conviction.
What means The Strength of Conviction?
Morag sleeps.
THREE
Today would be better. Today Pique would phone, or there would be a letter from her, saying she had decided against hitching
west or else that she and Gord were back together and were going west for a while but all was well.
Morag went downstairs, made coffee and sat at the table, looking out at the morning river. The sky was growing light. Exact use of words, that. The sky actually was growing light, as though the sun, still hidden, were some kind of galactic plant putting forth tendrils.
Idiotic to have got up so early. As you grow older, you require less sleep. Could it be that she would become a consistently early riser? Two hours’ work done before breakfast? A likely thought.
The swallows were of course awake and flittering out from the nest under the eaves, just above the window, zinging across the water, swooping and scooping up insects to feed their newly hatched fledglings. For years Morag had hardly noticed birds, being too concerned with various personal events and oddities. In the last few years she had become aware of creatures other than human, whose sphere this was as well, unfortunate them. Even plants were to be pitied, having to share home with the naked apes.
Across the river came a boat, its small outboard motor chuffing fitfully. A-Okay Smith and Co. Maudie and Thomas. At five, apparently, Tom could read, taught by Maudie, so that in Grade One he had been to some extent ostracized by the other kids. Now at eight he was full of exotic knowledge. The Smiths were enlightened almost to a fault. Morag, while exceedingly fond of them, sometimes felt ignorant in their presence, which caused her to react towards them with a degree of resentment and chagrin. Also, they believed, somewhat touchingly, that their enlightenment would mean that Tom would be spared any sense of alienation towards them later on, in his adolescence. Morag had, once upon a time, held that belief herself. One of the disconcerting aspects of middle age was the realization that most of the crises which happened to other people also ultimately happened to you.
The boat came to a jolting standstill alongside Morag’s dock, and the Clan Smith clambered out and straggled up to the house. Tom, deceptively cherub-faced, was heard to announce that he was going along the road to Royland’s. Praise God. Spared his hideously knowledgeable remarks for perhaps an hour, if lucky. Those birds are not Blackbirds, Morag–the Rusty Blackbird is like that, only smaller and with shorter talons and tail–those are Grackles, Common Grackles. Tom could confidently be depended upon to know the nesting, breeding and living habits (many of them disgusting) of the Common Grackle, from conception to death. Probably he wanted to pick Royland’s brains on the habits of the muskie, pickerel, rock bass and other fish inhabiting the waters of southern Ontario.