The Diviners Page 4

Prin’s family was English. She has told Morag about it. Prin’s father was a remittance man. That meant his family in The Old Country didn’t like him so good, and were pretty mean and all, even though he was a gentleman, a real one, and so they made him come to this country where he didn’t want to come to, and for a while, there, they sent him some money, but then they didn’t. He wasn’t much of a farmer, but he meant well, Prin said. She was the only child and wasn’t none too bright (you were supposed to say wasn’t any too bright but Prin didn’t know that) and couldn’t be too much help, but then her dad died anyway. Her mother had died Before. When would that be? Long ago in olden times. Prin married Christie when he came back from the Great War. The town said good job too; a pity to spoil two families. Which was mean. But funny, too.

  Prin’s real Christian name is Princess. Morag thinks this is the funniest thing she has ever heard. But once when she said so to Christie, he told her to shut her trap.

  “Hi,” Morag says. “Can I have something to eat?”

  “Sure. You want some bread and sugar?”

  Morag nods and goes to fetch it. Soft brown sugar spread on white storeboughten bread. Her favourite. Prin used to make her own bread, but gave it up. Too hot to bake in summer and too hard in winter to find a place neither too warm nor too cold for the dough to rise proper. Morag is glad. The soft fluffy bread from Parsons’ is better. More delicate. Morag is very delicate-minded. She prides herself on it, although she never lets on, of course. Vanessa and Mavis and like them have storeboughten bread in their houses all the time. Or so she guesses, never having been into their houses. Never so much as a bite of anything else, heaven forbid. Storeboughten cookies are another thing. She is sure their mothers make cookies because when the class had a valentine’s party, they and some others brought heart-shaped cookies with pink icing. Storeboughten cookies are looked down on.

  The hell with them. Screw them all. They are stupid buggers.

  Morag loves to swear, but doesn’t do it at school because you get the strap or else have to stand out in the hall by yourself where the coats are hung.

  “Christie has to go out with the wagon again, now. I’m sure I don’t know why. I’ll bet a nickel to a doughnut hole they won’t pay him extra.”

  Prin’s voice is kind of small and high, like a little kid’s. Prin really likes Christie. But she is a born whiner.

  Christie comes in from the stable at the back where Ginger and the wagon are kept. He wipes some sweat from around his eyes and grins at Morag.

  “Hello, lass. Did they learn you much today, then?”

  He knows better. He says it like that on purpose. A joke. Prin would say it not on purpose.

  “No.” Morag turns away from him.

  Christie is short, skinny, but actually quite strong. He looks peculiar. His head sort of comes forward when he walks, like he is in a hurry, but he isn’t ever in a hurry. His hair, what’s left of it, is sandy. Blue eyes, but all cloudy and with little red lines on the white part. Wires (hair, actually) grow out of his chin–he doesn’t shave every day. The lump in his throat is called his Adam’s apple, what a name. His teeth are bad and one is missing at the front but he never tries to hide it by putting his hand over or smiling with his mouth closed, oh no, not him. He always wears a blue heavy shirt, and overalls too big so they fall around him and make him look silly.

  That is the worst. How silly he looks. No. The worst is that he smells. He does wash. But he never gets rid of the smell. How much do other people notice? Plenty. You bet. Horseshit and garbage, putrid stuff, vegetables and that, rotten eggs and mouldy old clothes.

  “Gotta pick up a load of scrap from the blacksmith’s,” Christie says. “Want to come along, Morag?”

  Morag hesitates. She has never gone with Christie in the wagon. Just for once she would like to go, to see the Nuisance Grounds. She nods.

  “C’mon, then,” he says. “Haven’t got all night.”

  Ginger is a rusty colour. A gelding. Morag knows what that means, too, ha ha. Ginger is thin, and his hipbones stick out under the leather skin. Morag climbs up onto the wagon beside Christie.

  Why is Christie called Scavenger? Morag does not yet know this and will not ask. She knows what he does, collecting the town garbage and taking it to dump in the Nuisance Grounds. But what, really, means Scavenger? She is afraid to ask. And why Nuisance Grounds? Because all that awful old stuff and rotten stuff is a nuisance and nice people don’t want to have anything to do with it?

  Clank-clonk. The wooden cart crawls up Hill Street, turning north on the main drag. All the stores are up the other end of Main. Here there is only the Granite Works, which makes gravestones in two colours, red or black, speckled stone, some plain and some fancy with flowers and scrolls and that. Then Christie turns in at a sign above a dark dark brick cave. W. Saunders, Blacksmith. Morag isn’t going to go down there. She stays on the wagon, looking into the blackness. At the very end of the gloomy dark there is a fire, glowing red but not seeming to light up the place at all. Smells: heat, horses, sweat. An old man is sitting on an overturned nail barrel outside, and inside a younger man suddenly swings a big hammer onto the iron slab and for a second the whole place is full of stars. Christie loads the wagon with scrap iron, old horseshoes, crooked pieces of rusty oily metal, and they are off again. Morag thinks of the sparks, the stars, and sees them again inside her head. Stars! Fire-stars! How does it happen? She wants to ask, but won’t. Christie would think she was dumb. She isn’t the dumb one. Christie is.

  Now they are going along the streets where some of the big houses are, big yellow brick houses or wooden houses painted really nice. Lawns all neat and cut, and sprinklers sprinkling, swirling around and making water rainbows. Flower gardens with pink and purple petunias, and red snapdragons like velvet, really rich velvet, and orange lilies with freckles on the throats. The blinds are pulled down over the front windows of the houses, to keep out the heat. Cream-coloured blinds, all fringed with lace and tassels. The windows are the eyes, closed, and the blinds are the eyelids, all creamy, fringed with lacy lashes. Blinds make the houses to be blind. Ha ha.

  Morag is enjoying this ride more than she thought she would. Then it happens. A gang of kids. Some from her class in school. Voices. Yelling. Whistling.

  “Hey–there goes Old Man Logan on his chariot!”

  “Giddup! Hey, giddup there, ya old swayback!”

  “Hey, get a load of who’s with him, eh? Got a little helper, Mr. Logan? Hey, Christie, got a new hand, there?”

  Mostly it is the boys who are yelling. Ross McVitie. Al Cates. Jamie Halpern. The girls are looking away, pretending not to notice. But snickering a bit. Trying to get in good with the boys. Mavis Duncan. Vanessa MacLeod. Stacey Cameron.

  “Hey, listen–how about this, eh?”

  Then, like a song, like a verse, but mean.

  Christie Logan’s the Scavenger Man–

  Gets his food from the garbage can!

  Laugh laugh laugh. Har har ho ho. One of the girls, though (which one?), says for them to cut it out. But no. They don’t.

  “I got a better one. Hey, wait, listen! Listen, Ross!”

  Mo-rag! Mo-rag!

  Gets her clothes from an ol’ flour bag!

  Morag is not breathing. She can’t feel herself breathing. She isn’t hearing, either. She won’t hear. She sits still, not looking at Christie. Then she realizes he has stopped the wagon and she glances at him.

  Oh. Christie is grinning. He is twisting his face, like different crazy masks. His tongue droops out like a dog’s tongue. He crosses his eyes, and his mouth is dribbling with spit. Then he laughs. Oh. He laughs in a kind of cackle, like a loony.

  Silence. The kids aren’t saying anything. Now Christie’s face goes back to its own self.

  “Seen enough, then?” he says. “Next time I’ll pass the hat.”

  Then he reaches, very slowly, for the whip which he never uses on Ginger. He lifts it high in his hand.

  Give i
t to them, Christie! Hurt them. But she isn’t saying the words out loud.

  The kids run, scattering all over the place. Christie puts the whip back, and laughs. Laughs like himself. Morag is crying, but with her head down, so as not to be seen. Christie puts a hand on her shoulder, but she shoves it away.

  “Why did you have to act so silly, Christie? Why did you have to?”

  Christie hawks and spits into the road.

  “Och aye. Only showing them what they thought they would be expecting to see, then, do you see?”

  She does not see.

  “Look at it this way,” Christie says. “All these houses along here, Morag. I don’t say this is so of all of them, now, but with the most of them, you can see from what their kids say, what they’re saying. Some of them, because I take off their muck for them, they think I’m muck. Well, I am muck, but so are they. Not a father’s son, not a man born of woman who is not muck in some part of his immortal soul, girl. That’s what they don’t know, the poor sods. When I carry away their refuse, I’m carrying off part of them, do you see?”

  No. She does not see. She sees one thing, though. Christie is working himself into a spiel. He usually gets into a spiel when the whiskey is in him. Prin says so. And Morag has seen it. But there is no whiskey in him now.

  Christie’s face looks funny, sort of squashed-in. His skin is all sunburnt, and now it’s covered with dusty sweat, all that red skin face. Christie is a redskin. Ha ha. But she isn’t laughing. She hates the kids for talking like they did, to her but also to Christie. Now she hates Christie for talking the way he is, crazy.

  “By their garbage shall ye know them,” Christie yells, like a preacher, a downy preacher. “I swear, by the ridge of tears and by the valour of my ancestors, I say unto you, Morag Gunn, lass, that by their bloody goddamn fucking garbage shall ye christly well know them. The ones who eat only out of tins. The ones who have to wrap the rye bottles in old newspapers to try to hide the fact that there are so goddamn many of them. The ones who have fourteen thousand pill bottles the week, now. The ones who will be chucking out the family albums the moment the grandmother goes to her ancestors. The ones who’re afraid to flush the safes down the john, them with flush johns, in case it plugs the plumbing and Melrose Maclaren has to come and get it unstuck and might see, as if Mel would give the hundredth part of a damn. I tell you, girl, they’re close as clams and twice as brainless. I see what they throw out, and I don’t care a shit, but they think I do, so that’s why they cannot look at me. They think muck’s dirty. It’s no more dirty than what’s in their heads. Or mine. It’s christly clean compared to some things. All right. I’ll please them. I’ll wade in it up to my ass. I could wade in shit, if I had to, without it hurting me. I’d like to tell the buggers that.”

  Christie wipes his face with the back of his hand.

  “Now then, Morag,” he says in his real voice, “what a bloody fool, talking to you like that. I want my head looking at, that’s God’s truth. But I took this job, you know, because I fancied it. I could’ve worked for the CPR. Nothing elevated, I not having had the full High School for various reasons. It was after I came back from the war. Lot of muck lying about there, in France, I can tell you, most of it being–”

  He stops speaking. Morag’s hair is hot around her neck, and the sweat is trickling down between her shoulder blades.

  Christie took the job because he fancied it.

  “Christie, I think I’ll get off and go on home now.”

  “Are you not all right, then, Morag?”

  “It’s so hot,” she says. “I feel kinda sick to my stomach.”

  “Suit yourself, then.”

  So Morag does not see the Nuisance Grounds this day, either. Christie goes on his own way alone.

  Memorybank Movie: Parsons’ Bakery

  is the Worst Place in Town

  August. No school for another month yet. The heat is awful. Prin minds the heat, but Morag doesn’t. In the house, the flies are in their millions, but slow and stupid with the heat. They get in through the rip in the screen door. Christie always forgets to fix this hole. The flies are bluebottles–how come they got this nice name given to them? They’re ugly. Some of them are all swollen with eggs inside of them, and they go crawling over the peanut butter pail on the table, or just burrow and nuzzle their way inside the loaf of bread. Morag sits with her elbows on the kitchen table, watching the flies.

  When she peers close, she can see that their wings are shining, both blue and green. Can they be beautiful and filthy? Should she shoo them away? More would only come.

  The oilcloth on the table is dirty. Sometimes Morag wipes it off, but more often she leaves it. It will only get dirty again. Neither Christie nor Prin ever notice, or, if they do, they don’t let on. Prin is not really dirty. She just doesn’t notice so much any more. She sits and sits in her chair, Prin does. Is she dreaming, with her eyes wide open? You can do this. It’s easy. Morag knows. Maybe Prin is dreaming of being young and pretty. And rich. Prin rich! Pretty! She can’t be dreaming that.

  Morag likes the kitchen best. The oak bench, with the coat racks on each side of it, looks like a big moose with antlers, like in the school Reader. Christie’s winter jacket, and all the scarves and mitts are still there, full of moths. The bench part is piled with old newspapers and also Morag’s lunch pail for school. Christie’s chair is the same as Prin’s, armchair, old leather with horsehair (horsehair? Christie says so) inside. The seats of the chairs go scree-ee–squ-uff when someone sits down, and Morag loves this sound because it’s funny. The kitchen smells, but some of the smells are okay: melted butter; heat; dust; Fels-Naptha soap. Sour milk and feet do not smell okay.

  Morag likes the sittingroom, too, but nobody ever sits in it. It is not too good for everyday, like some people’s, but it is full of stuff Christie has brought home from the Nuisance Grounds. Such as:

  a black old stove, quite small and round and fat

  a blue chesterfield but you can’t see the pattern anymore too torn

  a lamp with no shade, but it is bronze and has a bronze lady with a bronze lily

  a real carved wooden chess set, but no bishops (what are bishops?)

  a family album, covered in red velvet (mouldy) and no name attached, no family name, but the pictures have things written in white ink on the black pages–Agnes as Fairy Queen in School Play; Mother & Marigold 1901

  a blue plush (pl-uush–rich-sounding, but it is really like velvet only cheaper and not so smoo-ooth on the fingers) cushion, with a painted-on picture of King Edward the Seventh

  a very good china saucer, very good because thin and you can nearly see through it (Prin’s father had the very same kind; maybe it was his?); tiny mauve violets on it, but no cup

  books, old old old books, and one has real leather for the cover, and the letters are in real gold or used to be but now you can hardly see them, and you can’t read the book because it is in another language, but Christie says it is the Holy Bible in Gaelic. Throwing out a Holy Bible! Oh. But would God mind so much, seeing as it was in Gaelic? (What means Gaelic?)

  Christie keeps bringing stuff home. He never does anything with it. But it is there. He calls it good rubbish. He says Bad Riddance to Good Rubbish. But you’re supposed to say it the other way around. Morag knows.

  Prin is puffing and wheezing. Her shoes are off.

  “Golly, it’s hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, ain’t it, Morag?”

  Morag does not reply. She is watching two flies fucking, buzzing while they do it.

  “Morag, would you run to the store for me, like a good girl?” “Do I have to?”

  “Well, I’d go myself,” Prin says, sighing, “but it’s these gosh-darned veins of mine. I hope and pray you never know what it feels like to have varicose veins, Morag. Sometimes they just burn and sting like I got a whole nest of wasps right there in the veins themselves. Standing on my feet these hot days is murder.”

  So Morag goes. Up the hill a
nd onto Main. To Parsons’ Bakery.

  The bread is kept on open shelves, but not the cakes and pastries. They are kept in a glass case. Morag looks at the iced fancies, little tiny cakes covered with pink or green or white icing, and with an almond or a cherry on top.

  “Four jelly doughnuts, please.”

  “Right away,” Mr. Parsons says.

  At the other side of the store are Mrs. McVitie and Mrs. Cameron. Morag spotted them when she first came in. Sometimes she has to look hard to be sure who people are, because the faces don’t come clear until they’re really close up, but she always tries to see who is around. You have to. In case. Ross’s mother and Stacey’s mother are looking at the walnut slices and the shortbread. Nope. Now they are looking at her. Maybe they don’t know she can hear what they’re saying?

  “It’s a wonder some people can afford jelly doughnuts.” Mrs. McVitie.

  “Haven’t you ever noticed, though, that it’s those who spend their money as though it was water?” Mrs. Cameron.

  “Poor child, don’t they ever have her hair cut?” Mrs. McVitie.

  “And those gangling dresses, always away below the knee.” Mrs. Cameron.

  Morag takes the bag, pays, and turns. Her hair feels dirty. But it isn’t dirty–Prin washed it only a day ago. The two ladies are wearing flowery chiffon dresses. Hats, with real artificial flowers.

  Morag sticks out her tongue at the both of them. And runs. Home.

  “I’m not going there again, Prin. I hate that dumb place.”

  Why doesn’t Prin go and get her own goddamn blistering bloody shitty jelly doughnuts?

  Prin gets up out of her chair. Holding on to the chair-arm to heft up.

  “Honey, what’s the matter, now? Tell me, eh?”

  Okay. If she wants to be told, Morag will tell her, all right all right. Morag has got a good memory. She repeats every word the two of them said, there.

  Prin looks funny. Her face goes crinkled.

  “You think it’s my legs, honey?” Prin says. “It’s that, but I could drag them up the hill. I just don’t want to be seen, like this. But better they’d said it to me than you.”