A chariot! the great chariot of war,
Moving over the plain with death!
The shapely swift car of Cuchullin,
True son of Semo of hardy deeds.
Behind it curves downward like a wave,
Or mist enfolding a sharp-peaked hill;
The light of precious stones about it,
Like the sea in wake of boat at night.
Of shining yew is its pole,
Of well-smoothed bone the seat:
It is the dwelling-place of spears,
Of shields, of swords, and heroes.
On the right of the great chariot
Is seen a horse high-mettled, snorting,
High-crested, broad-chested, dark,
High-bounding, strong-bodied son of the Ben,
Springy and sounding his foot;
The spread of his forelock on high
Is like mist on the dwelling of deer.
Shining his coat, and speedy
His pace–Si-fodda his name.
On the other side of the car
Is an arch-necked snorting horse,
Thin-maned, free-striding, deep-hoofed,
Swift-footed, wide nostrilled son of the mountains–
Du-sron-gel the name of the gallant steed.
Full thousand slender thongs
Fasten the chariot on high;
The hard bright bit of the bridle,
In their jaws foam-covered, white,
Shining stones of power
Save aloft with the horses’ manes–
Horses, like mist of mountain-side,
Which onward bear the chief to his fame.
Keener their temper than the deer,
Strong as the eagle their strength.
Their noise is like winter fierce
On Gormal smothered in snow.
In the chariot is seen the chief.
True-brave son of the keen brands,
Cuchullin of blue-spotted shields,
Son of Semo, renowned in song.
Ossian. Christie says Aw-shun. And shows her the Gaelic words, but cannot say them.
“It must sound like something in the old language, Morag. My father knew a few words of it, and I remember a little bit of it from when I was knee-high to a grasshopper and that must’ve been in Easter Ross before my old man kicked off and my mother came to this country with me, and hired herself out as help in houses in Nova Scotia, there, and kicked the bucket when I was around fifteen or so, and with all of that. I never learned the Gaelic, and it’s a regret to me.”
Together they look at the strange words, unknown now, lost, as it seems, to all men, the words that once told of the great chariot of Cuchullin.
Carbad! carbad garbh a’ chómhraig,
’Gluasas thar cómhnaird le bás;
Carbad suimir, luath Chuchullin,
Sár-mhac Sheuma nan cruaidh chás.
“Gee. Think of that, Christie. Think of that, eh? Read some more in our words, eh?”
But Prin waddles over to the table and lays it for supper, and they eat boiled cabbage and boiled spuds and baloney. Christie chews with his mouth open so you can see the mushy slop of pink meat and greeny mush cabbage and gummy potatoes in there. Morag wants to hit him so hard his mouth will pour with blood. She stares at him, but he does not notice. Or if he does, he doesn’t let on.
The Grade Six room is full of maple desks, each with a metal inkwell. Initials of other kids in other years are carved into the desks, with jackknives or by going over and over with a pencil until the lead eats into the wood. This is the easiest to do, and Morag has put M.G. on hers this way. You always have to look up at the blackboard at the front. Should be called the greyboard, always smudged with chalk. Morag can never see the board properly, and never has been able to, but doesn’t let on. If she let on, they’d move her to the front row and she likes the back row better. No one is behind you there, looking at you.
On the walls at the side and back, great big framed pictures. No colours, just very dark brown or black, shadowy. One is of two people, a man and a woman, dressed in olden days poor clothes, kneeling down. The Angelus. Which means a bell is tolling, telling them it is time to pray. The other picture is worse–a whole lot of soldiers looking terrible, and a drooping Union Jack, and in the middle a man falling or fainting (dying, actually) with his eyeballs rolling upwards. The Death of General Wolfe.
“Good morning, Grade Six.”
“Good morning, Miss McMurtrie.”
“We will now sing ‘O, Canada.’”
Grade Six shuffles to its feet.
O Ca-na-DA
Our home an’ native lan’
Troo patriot LUV
In all thy sons’ comman’….
They are also learning it in French. The school board was a mite dubious at first, Miss McMurtrie says, tee hee, but she won them over.
O Ca-na-DA
Teara da nose ah yoo….
The second line always makes the kids titter. They know it means land of our forefathers, but that isn’t what it seems to mean. Morag sings loudly. She loves singing and has a good and carrying voice. She doesn’t mind standing up any more, at least not when all the other kids are also standing beside their desks. Her dresses aren’t away below her knees now, hell no, because she lops them off with the kitchen scissors herself and sometimes even does a hem, which is boring but doesn’t take so long if you take good big stitches. Now her dresses are shorter than anyone else’s, because she is going to show them, is why. Prin still makes Morag’s dresses out of old stuff, though. Who has the money for new stuff these days, Prin says. (Some have.) Prin isn’t so hot at sleeves, so usually leaves them out, and in the cold weather Morag wears a sweater underneath the dress. She wears running shoes in warm weather and galoshes in winter, with only socks inside, not shoes, so has to keep them on all day, and how could anyone not have stinky feet if they had to do that? Who gives a christly damn anyway? She’s not the worst dressed. Eva is worse–her dresses are still halfway to her ankles, as she is too ascared of what her dad will say if she cuts them off. Also, one of the Tonnerre girls, halfbreed from the valley, is worse dressed; she’s away a lot because of TB in one leg but when she is at school she looks the worst because her dresses are long-gawky and dirty, and she has a limpwalk.
They are seated again, and it is Spelling.
“Morag!”
Startled, she looks up. The teacher has been talking to her and she hasn’t heard.
“That’s quite enough, class,” Miss McMurtrie says, because of the giggling all around. “Stand up, Morag.”
Draggingly, she stands. Whatever is going to happen, it can only be awful. She straightens her shoulders and holds herself so her tits stick out under her dress.
“Now, Morag, you weren’t listening, were you?”
Silence. She cannot speak. Her throat is full of phlegm or something. She stares boldly at Miss McMurtrie, so the teacher will think she is being silent on purpose.
“Are you tongue-tied, Morag?”
Morag is not here. She is in the Wachakwa valley, and the couchgrass is high around her. There is a clump of scrub oak trees, easy to climb, and all around are thick chokecherry bushes. It is warm and shady in the hideout, and you can hear the bees singing their crazy buzzsongs as they tumble among the pink wild asters and cowslip bells colour of oranges or suns. Cowslips are the best. For bees. More honey in them.
“I said,” Miss McMurtrie’s butcherknife voice, “I said are you tongue-tied, Morag?”
Morag’s anger. Like shame, burning in her throat.
“You know I’m not.” Loud.
Miss McMurtrie’s face gone reddish, splotched.
“Very well, then, if you’re not tongue-tied, would you be so kind as to answer the question I asked you about ten minutes ago? You’re wasting the class’s time, Morag. I suppose I will have to repeat the question. Obviously you were away off in Cloud Cuckoo Land. How do you spell Egypt?”
&nbs
p; Egypt. Cleopatra, evil and beautiful, dying of a snake bite. Having put the snake right on herself. Ugh. Miss Plowright, last year, reading them Tales from Shakespeare. Was Shakespeare there? Did he see the snake being put on the bare skin? Cleopatra, drifting down the Nile River in a boat shaped like a giant bird (coloured picture in the book) while her slaves fanned her with fans made out of pink green blue feathers. Plumes. Think of that. Classy.
“Well, Morag?”
If she could’ve written it down she could’ve got it. Always the same. But no writing-down allowed.
“E-y–”
“Wrong. Try again.”
“E-y-g-t–”
Miss McMurtrie shakes her starched-looking grey head. More in sorrow than anger, as she is always saying.
“You may sit down, Morag. All right, class, who can spell Egypt? Ross?”
“E-g-y-p-t.”
Show-off. Smart-aleck McVitie. Who cares? Morag, sitting down, will not look around. Neither to left nor to right. Finally, she takes a quick glance around to see if anybody is still looking at her. They better not be. She catches the eye of Skinner Tonnerre, who also sits in the back row out of choice.
He grins at her. Well, think of that. The grin means Screw all of them, eh? Astounded, Morag grins back.
Boys are generally mean. Those girls who have a hope of pleasing them, try. Those who haven’t a hope, either stay out of their way or else act very tough and try to make fun of them first. Skinner is just the same as all the boys, in that way. He is mean. He knows a lot of swear words and isn’t afraid to use them to make girls feel silly or cheap. Hey, Vanessa, want me to fuck your ass? It’s better that way. He has never shouted like this at Morag, because he probably knows she wouldn’t take it all meek. Or else doesn’t think she’s pretty enough to be worth embarrassing. The other boys in the class, even Mike Lobodiak, who is really big, never tangle with Skinner. They’re scared of him. Also, they think they’re better than he is. Skinner is taller than any of the other boys, and has better muscles. He is about three years older than any of the rest of the class, which is why he and his sister Piquette are in the same class. Both having missed a lot of school. Sometimes Skinner goes off with his dad, old Lazarus Tonnerre, and disappears for weeks, setting traplines way up at Galloping Mountain, some say. The Tonnerres (there are an awful lot of them) are called those breeds, meaning halfbreeds. They are part Indian, part French, from away back. They are mysterious. People in Manawaka talk about them but don’t talk to them. Lazarus makes home-brew down there in the shack in the Wachakwa valley, and is often arrested on Saturday nights. Morag knows. She has heard. They are dirty and unmentionable.
Skinner is thin and he has dark dark slanted eyes. He is always scowling. He wears worn unpatched jeans held up by a leather belt with a big brass buckle. Morag has always reckoned that he hated the other kids so much he never even noticed what they said about him and his gimpylegged sister and all of them (and about their Ma, who took off and went to cook for some crazy old man living alone on a farm oh shame). Maybe Skinner does notice the passed remarks? Maybe he just doesn’t let on. Like her.
He is not like her. She does not glance in his direction again all day.
At ten minutes to four, Miss McMurtrie leads the class in “The Maple Leaf Forever”
In days of yore
From Britain’s shore
Wolfe the donkless hero CAME
And planted firm
(titters; but what means Donkless?)
Britannia’s flag
On Ca-na-da’s fair do-MAIN.
Here may it wave
Our boas’ our pride
And join in LUV together
The THISTLE SHAMROCK ROSE entwine
The MAPLE LEAF FOREVER!
Morag loves this song and sings with all her guts. She also knows what the emblems mean. Thistle is Scots, like her and Christie (others, of course, too, including some stuck-up kids, but her, definitely, and they better not forget it). Shamrock is Irish like the Connors and Reillys and them. Rose is English, like Prin, once of good family. Suddenly she looks over to see if Skinner Tonnerre is singing. He has the best voice in the class, and he knows lots of cowboy songs, and dirty songs, and he sometimes sings them after school, walking down the street.
He is not singing now.
He comes from nowhere. He isn’t anybody. She stops singing, not knowing why. Then she feels silly about stopping, so sings again.
Memorybank Movie: Christie’s Gift of the Garbage-telling Morag goes alone to the Nuisance Grounds. Not with Christie. Not with anyone. Eva wants to come along but Morag says No. Just for once she has to see what the place looks like. By herself.
She knows exactly where the spot is. Everybody knows that. A little above the town, the second hill, the same hill as the Manawaka cemetery. All the dead stuff together there on the same hill. Except that the cemetery is decent and respectable, with big spruce trees, and grass which is kept cut, and lots of the plots have flowers which people plant and tend. Gunn is just a small stone with grass around it, no flowers. Morag has only been there the once and doesn’t want to go again.
The Nuisance Grounds are on a large flat sort of plain, up there, and no trees grow, although the place is surrounded on all sides by poplars and clumps of chokecherry and pincherry bushes, screening it from sight. Morag approaches it quietly, cannily, looking around. Okay. Nobody here. She can feel the sun hot and dusty on her bare arms and legs, and her hair feels snarled and too long and hot for summer. She is sweating in this hot closed-in place. It isn’t really that much closed-in. It just feels so. Should she maybe not have come here?
Oh. The Nuisance Grounds contain a billion trillion heaps of old muck. Such as:
a rusty car with no tires and one door off
mountains of empty tin cans, some with labels still on
Best Pie Pumpkin
moth-eaten sweaters and ragged coats
a whole bunch of bedsprings
green mould like fur on things
rotten fruits oranges bananas gone bad soft black
FLIES on thema
car axle but no car
maple syrup tins with holes in them
saucepans and kettles also with holes
a sewing machine with no wheel or handle
broken bottles (beer milk rye and baby)
more rotten stuff cabbages phew
a cracked toilet bowl
wornout shoes some bulging where bunions have been
boxes of not-used rubber frenchies she knows what they’re
for Eva told her (why thrown out? holes in the rubber is
why; that’d fool somebody ha ha)
a pile of clothes and old newspapers, BURNING
and stench sour sicklysweet rotten many smells STINKS
and a ZILLION crawling flies
A shadow. Somebody here. Morag whirls. He laughs (meanly?) showing teeth. He is close enough so she can smell the sweat and woodsmoke on him. The only good smells here. But she is scared. In his hands, an iron crowbar, bent, and a pair of pliers. Skinner Tonnerre.
“Hey, whatsamatter, kid?” he says. “You think I’m gonna–”
“Shut up,” Morag says. “What’re you doing here?”
“Whatcha doin’ here yerself?”
“None of your business.”
“Seein’ the place where yer ol’ man works, eh?”
He says da instead of the. He talks funny, kind of. He always has. Why? Then Morag feels really mad, thinking of what he has just said.
“Christie’s not my old man! My dad is dead.”
“Sure, I know. So he’s yer ol’ man now, ain’t he? What the diff?”
“Plenty. Plenty difference. So there.”
Skinner laughs. Hoarse. Like a crow’s voice.
“Okay, okay. Tabernac! What’s eatin’ you?”
“My family is named Gunn, see? And you better not forget it.”
Skinner’s eyes grow narrow. Cruel. Mean.
r /> “That so? You t’ink that means yer somebody? You’re a little half-cunt, dry one at that I betcha.”
“Listen here,” Morag spits, “my family’s been around here for longer than anybody in this whole goddamn town, see?”
“Not longer than mine,” Skinner says, grinning.
“Oh yeh? Well, I’m related to Piper Gunn, so there.”
“Who in hell’s he?”
“He–” She is afraid to speak it, now, in case Christie has got it wrong after all, but she can’t quit. “He came from Scotland, and he led his people onto the ships when they were living on the rocks there in the Old Country and poor because they didn’t have their farms because the Bitch-Duchess took them, and all, and they were scared, leaving there, but then Piper Gunn played the pipes and put the heart back into them.”
Skinner gapes at her. Then grins again.
“Where’d you get that crap, eh?”
“It’s true. It’s true!”
He looks at her. Then he sits down on an empty tar barrel, not worrying about getting tar on his jeans. He stretches out his long legs and gets out a packet of cigarettes.
“Want one?”
She shakes her head and he laughs. She would like to snatch the cigarette now and light it, but is too proud.
“You ever seen my place, Morag?”
“Yeh. Sometimes. Passing by.”
The Tonnerre place, right beside the Wachakwa River down there, is a square cabin made out of poplar poles chinked with mud. Also some other shanties, sheds and lean-tos, tacked onto the cabin and made out of old boards and pieces of flattened tin cans and tarpaper. Lots of old car parts and chicken wire and wornout car tires lying around, stuff like that.
Morag guesses that is why Skinner is here. Looking. Collecting.
“My grandad,” Skinner says, “he built the first of our place, and that was one hell of a long time ago, I’m tellin’ you. He come back from The Troubles.”
“What’s that?”
“Out west, there. You wouldn’t know. You don’ know nothin’. My grandad was lucky he never got killed, there. Lucky they never shot his balls off, my dad says. But they couldn’t, because he was a better shot than them soldiers. I can shoot pretty good, too. I got his name, see? That means I got–”