The Diviners Read online

  Morag gave up the battle to block her ears against the birds, and got up. The kitchen was cool and would remain so. The thick walls kept out the heat. She put her head outside the door. The river was still. No breeze. The trees across the river were reflected in the water so sharply you could imagine it was another world there, a treeworld in the water, willows and oak and maples, all growing there, climbed upon by river-children, and slithered finnily through by muskie and yellow perch. The day, she predicted, was going to be a scorcher.

  Royland would be here in about an hour. Today was the day.

  You wondered about people like the Cooper family, all those years ago. Trekking in here to take up their homestead. No roads. Bush. Hacking their way. Wagons and horses? Probably coming much of the way by river. Barges teetering and overloaded. Then the people clearing the first growth of timber. Shifting the rocks from fields, making stone walls to outline the land to be cultivated. The sheer unthinkable back-and-heart-breaking slog. Women working like horses. Also, probably pregnant most of the time. Baking bread in brick ovens, with a loaf in their own ovens. Looking after broods of chickens and kids. Terrible. Appalling.

  Healthy life, though. No one died of lung cancer. Strong and fit, they were, tanned and competent. Pioneers oh pioneers.

  But what about a burst appendix? Desperately ill kids? Fever? Women having breech births or other disorders of childbearing? The tiny cemetery on the hill contained, among other stones, the one to Simon Cooper’s first wife.

  In Memory of Sarah Cooper

  Who Died in Childbirth

  June 20, 1880, Age 24.

  She Rests In The Lord.

  Probably glad to rest anywhere, poor lady, even In The Lord. How many women went mad? Loneliness, isolation, strain, despair, overwork, fear. Out there, the bush. In here, a silent worried work-sodden man, squalling brats, an open fireplace, and would the shack catch fire this week or next? In winter, snow up to your thighs. Outdoor privy. People flopping through drifts to the barn to milk the cow. What fun. Healthy life indeed. A wonder they weren’t all raving lunatics. Probably many were. It’s the full of the moon, George–Mrs. Cooper always howls like this at such a time–nothing to worry about–she’ll be right as rain come the morning–c’mon there, Sarah, quit crouching in the corner and stop baring your fangs like that–George and me’s hungry and would appreciate a spot of grub. Onward, Christian Soldiers. Thy Way Not Mine O Lord However Dark It Be.

  The fact remained that they had hacked out a living here. They had survived. Like so-called Piper Gunn and the Sutherlanders further west. Was it better or worse now? Both. Both. At least their children did not wander to God knows where. Unknown destinies, far and probably lethal places. If any did, though, there were no telephones and the mail services could hardly have been very snappy. Well, then, they did not have to wrench up their guts and hearts etcetera and set these carefully down on paper, in order to live. Clever of them, one might say. Anyway, some of them did. Including women. Catharine Parr Trail, mid-1800s, botanist, drawing and naming wildflowers, writing a guide for settlers with one hand, whilst rearing a brace of young and working like a galley slave with the other.

  From the Birch, A Thousand Useful Utensils Can Be Made. A Few Hints On Gardening (including how to start an orchard, how to start it!)

  How To Make:

  Cheap Family Cake

  Hot Tea-Cakes

  Indian-Meal Yorkshire Pudding

  Maple Vinegar

  Potted Fish

  Potash Soap

  Rag Carpets

  Candles

  A Good Household Cheese

  Cures For Ague and Dysentery

  And so on. It did not bear thinking about. Morag, running her log house with admirable efficiency and a little help from the electric fridge, kettle, toaster, stove, iron, baseboard heaters, furnace, lights, not to mention the local supermarket and Ron Jewitt’s friendly neighbourhood taxi. Great God Almighty.

  The song sparrow was tuning up in the small elm outside the window. Its song was unambiguous.

  Pres-pres-pres-pres-Presbyterian!

  Mrs. Eula McCann from several miles away had dropped in with welcome raisin buns when Morag and Pique originally moved in, and had asked Morag if she had heard the bird which said that word. Morag, until that moment, had only heard it as a pleasant trill. Since that day, however, its message came across loud and clear.

  Catharine Parr Traill, one could be quite certain, would not have been found of an early morning sitting over a fourth cup of coffee, mulling, approaching the day in gingerly fashion, trying to size it up. No. No such sloth for Catharine P.T.

  Scene at the Traill Homestead, Circa 1840

  C.P.T. out of bed, fully awake, bare feet on the sliver-hazardous floorboards–no, take that one again. Feet on the homemade hooked rug. Breakfast cooked for the multitude. Out to feed the chickens, stopping briefly on the way back to pull fourteen armloads of weeds out of the vegetable garden and perhaps prune the odd apple tree in passing. The children’s education hour, the umpteen little mites lisping enthusiastically over this enlightenment. Cleaning the house, baking two hundred loaves of delicious bread, preserving half a ton of plums, pears, cherries, etcetera. All before lunch.

  Catharine Parr Trail, where are you now that we need you? Speak, oh lady of blessed memory.

  Where the hell was Pique and why didn’t she phone or write? If Pique were not carrying any form of identification (as was likely), how would anyone know who she was and be able to get in touch with Morag if anything happened? Should Morag try to trace her? Pique had been okay not too long ago. The phone message from Pique’s father had established that. But where was she now and why didn’t she simply say? Was this over-concern on Morag’s part? No doubt. But still. How could you stop yourself from worrying? The kid was eighteen. Only. What had Catharine said, somewhere, about emergencies?

  Morag loped over to the bookshelves which lined two walls of the seldom-used livingroom. Found the pertinent text.

  In cases of emergency, it is folly to fold one’s hands and sit down to bewail in abject terror. It is better to be up and doing.

  (The Canadian Settlers’ Guide, 1855)

  Morag:

  Thank you, Mrs. Traill.

  Catharine Parr Traill:

  That, my dear, was when we were at one time surrounded by forest fires which threatened the crops, fences, stock, stable, cabin, furniture and, of course, children. Your situation, if I may say so, can scarcely be termed comparable.

  Morag:

  Well uh no, I guess not. Hold on, though. You try having your only child disappear you know where, Mrs. Traill. Also, with no strong or even feeble shoulder upon which to lean, on occasion. Okay, don’t say it, lady. You’d go out and plant turnips, so at least you wouldn’t starve during the winter. You’d pick blueberries or something. Start a jam factory. Make pemmican out of the swayback which dropped dead of exhaustion on the Back Forty. Don’t tell me. I know.

  The knocking (only now noticed by Morag) at the kitchen door had ceased and Royland had stepped inside. She knew from his step, slow but not heavy, that it was him.

  “First sign of going off your rocker, Morag, so they say.”

  Embarrassed, she returned the book to its place and went back to the kitchen.

  “Don’t you ever talk out loud to yourself, Royland?”

  “Oh sure. It’s when I start answering myself I get worried.”

  Ha ha. The ancient joke.

  “I was not answering myself,” Morag said. “I was holding a polite if somewhat controversial conversation with a lady of my acquaintance, who happens not to inhabit this vale of tears any more.”

  “You and Joan of Arc, the pair of you,” Royland said, cough-laughing into the grey shagginess of his chin foliage.

  “The lady of her acquaintance held–um–a slightly more distinguished position than this lady of mine. Want some coffee?”

  “Don’t mind if I do. You working yet, Morag?” />
  He got the word right now. Once he used to ask her if she was doing any writing these days. Until he learned that the only meaning the word work had for her was writing, which was peculiar, considering that it was more of a free gift than work, when it was going well, and the only kind of work she enjoyed doing.

  “I don’t know. I mean, about the thing I seem to want to do, or have to. It seems like an awfully dubious idea, in a lot of ways, but I guess I’ll have to go on with it. Maybe it’s begun. I don’t know very much about it yet.”

  “Heard from Pique?”

  “No.” Turning away so the old man would not see her request for reassurance.

  “I thought not. You have got to quit fretting over that girl. As I keep saying.”

  Morag turned suddenly and faced him.

  “Don’t mistake me, Royland. I don’t want her living here any more. She can’t. She mustn’t. She’s got to be on her own. Anything else is no good for her and no good for me. It’s just that I’d like to hear from time to time that she’s okay, is all.”

  “You think she isn’t?”

  “Remember that time a year ago, when she left school and took off?”

  “Yeh. She came back, though. And is now a whole year older.”

  “She was in a mental hospital in Toronto for a month. A bad trip, as they somewhat euphemistically say. She hasn’t had a very easy life, Royland. I clobbered her with a hell of a situation to live in, although I never meant to. Okay, maybe everything else clobbered her, too, and I’m not God and I’m not responsible for everything. But I chose to have her, in the first place, and maybe I should’ve seen it would be too difficult for her. You don’t think of that, at the time, or I didn’t, anyway.”

  Pique, her long black hair spread over the hospital pillow, her face turned away from Morag, her voice low and fierce. Can’t you see I despise you? Can’t you see I want you to go away? You aren’t my mother. I haven’t got a mother. The nurse, candy-voiced, telling Morag it would be best for her to leave and in a week or so we would see, Morag, walking on streets, not knowing where, stumbling into people, seeing only small hard-bright replayed movies inside. Pique at five saying Tell me the story about the robin in our own dogwood tree please Mum. Pique on the first plane flight saying Is it safe Mum? and Morag saying Yes, hoping this was true. Pique in England saying We’re going home? and not knowing where that place could be. Pique saying Are we really going to live on a farm and can I have a dog? Pique, when her father visited both those times, ten years apart, and then when he had to go away again, Pique saying nothing. Nothing. Pique’s face turned away, her hair spread across the white freeze-drift of hospital linen, saying I despise you.

  “You know something, Royland?” Morag said. “I guess I feel that sometimes she despises me. And there are moments when I can see her point, there.”

  “I knew about Pique in Toronto,” Royland said. “She told me.”

  “She did?”

  “Sure. She said she couldn’t be certain she wouldn’t do it again, but she hoped she wouldn’t, on account of she wanted to get her head together–that was how she put it–by herself. Also, she doesn’t despise you. She has mixed feelings, is all. Haven’t you ever had?”

  Christie. Prin. Brooke. Pique’s father. Dan McRaith. Pique.

  “Yes. Of course. Naturally.”

  “You should try to rest your soul,” Royland said. “You ready to go now, Morag?”

  A strong south wind had risen, and the river was darker now, the water undulating under the boat.

  “What if it rains?” Morag asked.

  “Makes no difference. Water’s still there underground.”

  At the Smiths’ dock, grey weathered timbers and driftwood logs, built by A-Okay, Royland drew the boat in, tied it, and they walked up the slope to the house.

  The Smiths’ house was brick, dark red, with a gabled roof on which A-Okay had already restored the wooden lace, now painted white by Maudie, suffering vertigo on the ladder but never once saying Die or even Down. They had rented the farm, with an option to buy, always supposing A-Okay could whomp up the necessary money from the pop science articles he wrote. The rent was small, because the land was neglected and overgrown and the house, while pleasing on the outside, had been virtually only a shell. The floors were sound, but that was about all you could say for it. The rest was a shambles. But being restored.

  “Hi,” A-Okay said at the door. “Maudie’s got the coffee on. We’ll do it right after, if that’s a-okay with you. Any special time of day for this, Royland?”

  “Nope. I don’t usually do it at night, is all.”

  “Why not? I mean, is there a–”

  A-Okay, ex-science man, groping, wondering about all this procedure.

  “Might trip over a tree root,” Royland said.

  A-Okay laughed, but self-consciously. Royland’s cracker-barrel humour embarrassed him. He thought it had been pinched from B-grade movies, as perhaps it had. Royland sometimes took pleasure in his Old Man of the River persona, but was no hick in fact. He had begun life on a homestead–that was all Morag really knew. He knew cities; he knew lots of areas. Probably. But never talked of his past. Morag Gunn, inveterate winkler-out of people’s life stories, had never winkled out Royland’s. He knew a hell of a lot more about her than she did about him. He, obviously, preferred it this way. Perhaps she did, too.

  “Did you read Alf’s poems, Morag?” Maudie asked, coming out of the kitchen looking like a very fragile wood nymph, her long pale hair all around her, a wood nymph in dirty beige corduroy jeans and tomato-stained blouse, today. Maudie could not weigh more than a hundred pounds, at most, Morag estimated. That such apparent frailty could conceal such muscularity, physical and spiritual, was a marvel.

  The poems.

  “I read them, yes.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “Let her get in the door, first, eh, Maudie?” A-Okay said with suppressed irritation, blushing.

  “I thought the river ones were good,” Morag said truthfully, “but I thought the land ones were kind of abstract. I thought maybe they might need more work, more specific detail. I know what you were aiming at–at least, I think I do, but they seemed too exclusively philosophical. A little more flesh and blood detail might get them across better. You didn’t seem–well, to know enough about the land. Not that I know. I don’t know all that much about poetry, either. I really don’t like saying.”

  “Yeh. Well. Thanks.” A-Okay’s tall frame seemed sunken in despondency, and he blinked slightly, short-sightedly connecting with a footstool and knocking it over. “I guess I might do some more work on them.”

  Maudie looked dubious. His one-woman cheering section. Well, good for her. But all the same.

  “As I’ve said before, Morag,” Maudie said, “if Alf messes them around too much, where does that leave the spontaneity? Maybe they’re more for real if he leaves them just as they are.”

  “Yeh. Maybe.”

  They went outside. Royland had a Y-shaped piece of willow, one hand on each branch of the fork. He held his hands clenched, palms upwards, clutching the greenwood tightly. The tail of the Y was held well up. They watched.

  At the back of the house, Royland began walking slowly. Up and down the yard. Like the slow pace of a piper playing a pibroch. Only this was for a reverse purpose. Not the walk over the dead. The opposite.

  Nothing happened.

  “Does it ever–well, you know–not work, Royland?” A-Okay asked.

  “Alf, sh!” Maudie hissed the sounds, as though A-Okay had interrupted during a symphony or a seance.

  “Doesn’t fail if the water’s there, or at least not so far,” Royland said. “You don’t have to sh-sh. I don’t need quiet.”

  But all the same, none of them talked after that. Tom stood with his hand in his father’s hand. The whiz kid, now subdued.

  Morag had once tried divining with the willow wand. Nothing at all had happened. Royland had said she didn’t ha
ve the gift. She wasn’t surprised. Her area was elsewhere. He was divining for water. What in hell was she divining for? You couldn’t doubt the value of water.

  “Hey–look!” Thomas.

  The tip of the willow wand was moving. In Royland’s bony grip, the wood was turning, moving downwards very slowly, very surely. Towards the earth.

  Magic, four yards north of the Smiths’ clothesline.

  “How about that?” A-Okay said. “Well, I guess we’ll see when the driller comes in, eh?”

  Wanting faith, taking it on faith, but not yet convinced. Would the driller strike water?

  Tom, encyclopaedic mind suddenly pierced by mysteries, could only stare.

  “Will they find water there, Dad?”

  A-Okay, naturally, unnaturally, could neither say Yes or No. He grinned, in embarrassment, hoping.

  “Morag–” Maudie.

  “Yes?”

  “What if the driller doesn’t–?”

  Maudie, feeling intimations and premonitions of mortality. Morag wanted to put her arms around Tom’s mother. But could not.

  “I know.”

  Royland marked the spot by sticking the willow bough into it. The driller’s truck clanked into the yard.

  “’Lo, Bob.” Royland. Casual.

  “’Lo, Royland. This it?”

  “Yep. Should be.”

  The drilling rig was set up and began chewing the ground. Clay and earth spat out in a steady stream. Maudie shivered and rose from the front steps.