The Diviners Read online

  “Now, then, girl, would you like me to tell you about what happened to Piper Gunn and them, when that ship landed up north there?”

  Morag closes the geography. Grinning.

  “Sure, Christie.”

  “Well, now, then, I read it all in a book somewheres, so help me, and it is all there in the books, but you don’t want to believe everything them books say, for the good christ’s sake. We believe what we know.”

  What’s he talking about? But she likes this story. He pours another glassful.

  CHRISTIE’S TALE OF PIPER GUNN AND THE LONG MARCH

  Now that bloody ship, there, who would know what its name was, but with all of them from Sutherland on board, and struck with the sickness and the fever and the devil’s plague, well, then, that ship with the children dying of the fever, it crossed the ocean, do you see, and it came to the new land, which was HERE, only very far north. But what happened? What almighty catastrophe struck that ship? Well, the first catastrophe was that ship had a bloody idiot as captain, then. And he landed the christly vessel, if you’ll believe it, away up north there, at the wrong place. The wrong place. Can you feature it? Them people, see, Piper Gunn and his woman Morag and all them, were supposed to be landed at the one place, up there by Hudson Bay (that’s the water, the sea, like, not the store). But the silly bugger landed his ship at another place. Oh yes. The bloody captain didn’t give a hoot. Get landed and well rid of them–that was his thought. So he landed all of them at the wrong place, now, the name escapes me at this moment, but it was on the Hudson Bay, up there. Cold as all the shithouses of hell.

  Well, then, there they were. So Piper Gunn, he takes up his morsels of belongs, his kettle and his plaid and his axe, and he says to his woman Morag, Here we are and by the holy Jesus here we will remain. And then didn’t his woman strap onto her back the few blankets and suchlike they had, and her thick with their unborn firstborn, and follow. But one thing was missing.

  Pipes. The pipes.

  If we must live here in this almighty godforsaken land, dreadful with all manner of beasts and ice and the rocks harsher than them we left, says Gunn’s woman, at least let’s be piped onto it.

  So Piper Gunn, he got out his bagpipes and he piped the people onto the new land, that terrible bad land, frozen as it sure as hell was, and they built their mud shacks to the music that man played.

  Now they lived there and they suffered and then they suffered more, through the long days and longer nights, and it seemed there was no end to their suffering. But they didn’t give in. They hunted for meat, to live.

  (What did they hunt, Christie?)

  Oh, polar bears that looked like great moving snow-banks with jaws and claws, then, and great wild foxes with burning eyes in them, and

  (Did they eat foxes, Christie?)

  Well, maybe not the foxes. They would use them for the fur, see? But they ate all manner of strange things, and it was a time of misery, but they stayed because they had the heart in them. And in the spring they walked. Yes, they walked to the place where the supplies would be. It was a long long long way. It could’ve been maybe a thousand or so miles, then.

  (They walked? A thousand miles? They couldn’t, Christie.)

  Well, it might not have been quite the thousand, but it was a christly long way. And through the snow and muck and that. And who led them? I ask you, who led them? Who led the men and women and the children on that march? Piper Gunn. Himself. He led them with his pipes blaring, there. He was a man six feet nine inches tall, a mighty man of God. And he played the pipes like an angel right out of heaven and then like a devil right out of hell, and he kept the courage of the people beating like drums, or like the wings of brave wild birds caught in a blizzard, for he had the faith of the saints and the heart of a child and the gall of a thousand and the strength of conviction.

  Well, then, I guess they must’ve walked through all of them frozen lands, and through the muskeg there and through the muck and mud of the melting snows, and through the hard snow itself although it was spring. And it was that hard, walking, even Piper Gunn himself began to have his doubts, as who would blame him? And he says to his woman Morag, What in the fiery hell are we doing in this terrible place? So Morag says to him, for she had the wisdom and the good eye and the warmth of a home and the determination of quietness, and she says, We are going into the new country and your child is going along with us, so play on. And he did that. Yes, he did that.

  So then, they got to the place where all the supplies was. And they got boats, big flat-bottomed boats, more like scows or rafts or like that, and they went down all the way to Red River, which is to say they came to this part of the country, not so very far from where we are at this very instant. And there they stayed.

  (What happened then, Christie?)

  Och aye, it was hard. It was so hard you could barely feature it. Locusts. Hailstorms. Floods. Blizzards. Indians. Halfbreeds. Hot as the pit of hell in the summer, and the mosquitoes as big as sparrows. Winters so cold it would freeze the breath in your throat and turn your blood to red ice. Weather for giants, in them days. Not that it’s that much better now, I’d say.

  (Did they fight the halfbreeds and Indians, Christie?)

  Did they ever. Slew them in their dozens, girl. In their scores.

  (Were they bad, the breeds and them?)

  What?

  The story is over. Christie’s blue watery eyes look at her, or try to.

  “Bad?” He repeats the word as though he is trying to think what it means.

  “No,” he says at last. “They weren’t bad. They were–just there.”

  He motions with one hand, tired, for her to go to her room. And she sees him again the way he really looks, the way she sometimes forgets when he is talking. Why can’t he look different? But she doesn’t say. He is yawning–gawp–and nearly asleep across the table, spraddled out with his head going down on his arms.

  Morag, upstairs. Writing in her scribbler. This one is nearly full, and what it is full of is a long story about how Piper Gunn’s woman, once the child was born, at the Red River, went out into the forest and built a chariot for them all, for Piper Gunn and herself and their girlchild, so they could easily move around in that country there. She cut down the trees and she carved out the chariot. It was not a wagon. It was much fancier, and it had:

  four giant wheels

  a big high back with a seat

  the seat covered in green moss

  (she said velvet at first but where would they get it?)

  the front shaped like a ship and a bird

  birchbark scrolls around the sides

  carvings of deer and foxes and bears

  carvings of meadowlarks

  carvings of tall grasses

  carvings of spruce trees and spruce cones

  polished stones for jewels, on the sides and axles

  a brass hook for Piper Gunn’s pipes

  Morag is working on another story as well. In another scribbler. She does not know where it came from. It comes into your head, and when you write it down, it surprises you, because you never knew what was going to happen until you put it down.

  She writes in bed, with the eiderdown around her, up to her neck nearly.

  The new story is about a guy who was one of Piper Gunn’s men. A little scrawny guy. Actually, though, he was very tough. His name was–no, not Cluny, something like that. Macphersons are nicknamed Cluny a lot of the time–why? His name was Clowny Macpherson, because people always laughed at him on account of he looked silly. But Piper Gunn, he knew one thing about Clowny, for sure, and that was he was a great woodcutter and

  More tomorrow.

  Memorybank Movie: Christie’s Presence and Presents

  Christie is looking for misplaced longjohns in the kitchen dresser. He and Prin do not have a dresser in their bedroom. For some unknown reason, there is a large phonograph there instead, the kind you wind up, and it has a pile of old records in the cabinet, but is never played.


  “Damn things must be lost, stolen or strayed,” Christie mutters. “Where the hell’d you put ’em, woman?”

  Prin becomes flustered and cannot remember.

  “I seem to mind I put ’em in the top drawer. Or was it–”

  “Never mind, never mind!” Christie shouts. “I could find something easier at the Nuisance Grounds than here. You wouldn’t know neatness if it was your middle name.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk,” Prin whines, her breath coming difficult, in gasps.

  Christie stops flinging clothes around and looks at her. His face is strange.

  “Ah, Lord, don’t I know it. You’d have done better to marry anybody else, Prin. That is the declared truth.”

  “What chance did I have?” Prin says, very low, but he can hear.

  This is mean, Morag considers. She changes in her head, for the moment, to Christie’s side. Christie’s face frowns.

  “Goddammit, you make your own chances in this world!” he roars. “Or else you don’t make them. Like me. You have to work bloody hard at it, believe me, to be such a bloody flop as I stand here before you. In my one suit of underwear.”

  His voice drops then.

  “Although that’s not the truth of it, neither. It’s all true and not true. Isn’t that a bugger, now?”

  “I don’t understand you, Christie Logan,” Prin says. “I never have done.”

  “You’re not the only one. I don’t understand myself. Oh what a piece of work is man. Who said that? Some brain.”

  He goes on riffling through the drawer, humming to himself.

  “Oh what a piece of work is man oh what a bloody awful piece of work is man enough to scare the pants off you when you come to think of it the opposite is also true hm hm.”

  He stops.

  “Here, what’s this?” he says suddenly.

  A book. He looks through it, then brings it over to Morag. A purple cover, faded to a sickly mauve at the edges, and dim gold letters.

  The 60th Canadian Field Artillery Battery Book

  “It’s the regiment book from the War,” Christie says. “It’s the regiment I and your dad was in from 1916 until we got back in 1919.”

  CONTENTS

  I. In Canada

  II. In England

  III. First Experiences in France

  IV. Position Warfare

  V. Open Warfare–The Battle of Amiens

  VI. Open Warfare–Arras to Cambrai

  VII. Open Warfare–Cambrai to Valenciennes

  VIII. Open Warfare–Valenciennes to Mons

  IX. The March to the Rhine

  X. The Horses

  XI. Casualties

  Vis-en-Artois (brick buildings all fallen down into a heap)

  Battery Entering Valenciennes (a street, building in pieces, men running)

  Protection of Horses (deep ditch; two men and some horses standing in mud)

  The Battery (lots of rows, men but looking more like High School boys)

  “Christie! Is my father in that picture?”

  “Yep. We’re all there.”

  “Which one is he? Which one?”

  Christie and Morag both peer at the picture. Row after row, faraway faces. They are very very small in the photo. And they all look the same, because no face is clear.

  “Lemme see,” Christie says. “This one? No. Maybe not. Maybe this one? Which is myself? Lord, Morag, I can’t even find my own self.”

  Morag looks at the long-ago picture. One of these men is Colin Gunn, her father. But it could be any one of them. She says nothing.

  “Your dad saved my life that one time, then,” Christie says. “He did? When? How?” “Bourlon Wood.”

  He looks up. They read what the book says.

  On the night of September 26th the guns were moved into position. Zero hour was 5 A.M. on the 27th September, and, promptly to the second, the guns opened fire, continuing in action until 12:10 P.M.

  Notwithstanding the secrecy with which the operations had been performed by the Battery, their position must have been spotted, for no sooner had the barrage started than the enemy shelled the guns with whiz-bangs; if it had not been for the fact that the guns were below the level of the ground, the casualties might have been heavy. As it was, the men escaped by a very narrow margin. Time and again a perfect ring of ground bursts encircled the guns, within a very few yards radius, and as the smoke slowly rose and thinned out, it was with a hopeless sort of hope that their comrades glanced around to assure themselves of the safety of the various crews. This phase of the attack included the capture of Bourlon Wood.

  “Oh Jesus,” Christie says, “don’t they make it sound like a Sunday school picnic?”

  “What happened, Christie?”

  Christie sits down and rolls a cigarette.

  CHRISTIE’S TALE OF THE BATTLE OF BOURLON WOOD

  Well, d’you see, it was like the book says, but it wasn’t like that, also. That is the strangeness.

  Holy God, with all of them guns pounding away that morning, the sky was like fire, Like fire, did I say? It was fire. We was firing from the trenches. Them trenches, now. You never heard of “trench foot”? The feet would rot. They’d rot, I tell you, because they’d be wet with the mud and slime and shit and horsepiss all the time. You’d be trying to line up them devils of guns, the eighteen-pounders, and you’d be up to your bloody navel in muck, nearly.

  It was terrible for the horses. I’ve seen horses sinking in mud, where there was a crater, do you see, a shell crater and it would be filled with that damned mire. Once I seen a horse going under, and its mouth foaming with the fear, and its eyes wild as a lunatic’s eyes, and its voice screaming. Not neighing or like that. Screaming. Drowning in mud. Jesus, it’s the mud you recall more than anything, nearly.

  (What happened that day, Christie? Go on.)

  Your dad and me was both gunners. He was my mate, do you see. We worked the big gun together.

  (Gunner Gunn. That’s funny, eh?)

  Not so funny you’d hardly have noticed it at the time. I was older than Colin, and not so quick, I would say. There we are, getting ready to fire old Brimstone, and a shell explodes so christly close to me I think I’m a goner. The noise. Jesus. And then the air all around me is filled with

  (With what, Christie? Why are you stopping?)

  Well, then, with bleeding bits of a man. Blown to smithereens. A leg. A hand. Guts, which was that red and wet you would not credit it at all.

  (Oh.)

  I thought–God, it’s Colin. Then the noise or some damn thing got me. I started to shake and I couldn’t move my feet from the spot I was standing on. Then–I don’t remember. I must’ve passed out. When I came to, it was away past midnight and it was that quiet you could hear the heart beating in you. The stars was out, and I recall they scared me at first. I thought they’d be more shells, you see. But they didn’t move or come closer. Then your dad gave me some water. He must’ve dragged me into the dugouts where we bunked, out of the fire. The water spilled. A goddamn waste. I couldn’t drink it. I was still shaking like a fool.

  (What then, Christie?)

  But the story is over. Christie gets up. He is, Morag sees, shaking.

  “I wish I had not found that christly book at all,” he says.

  And goes to bed.

  “Can I have the book, Prin?” Morag says. “If he doesn’t want it, then can I have it?”

  “Sh,” Prin whispers. “I don’t think he would want to part with it. Don’t ask him, will you, now?”

  Christie has heard, though. He doesn’t come back into the kitchen that night, but the next morning he opens his hands to Morag.

  “Not the book,” he says. “And I don’t have anything that was your father’s. But you can have this if you want it.”

  It is a knife. About eight inches long including the handle, which is dark-brown and leathery. The blade is wide and comes to a very sharp point at the end. A hunting knife. Morag takes it. Examines it. On the
handle, burned into it, it seems is a sign:

  “What’s that sign, Christie?”

  “I dunno. A knife’s not much of a thing to give a girl, I guess. I found it in the same drawer as the book. Haven’t seen it for years. Some young twerp of a kid offered to trade me it for a package of cigarettes, so I done it. It’s never been any good to me, though. He talked me into it. Great talker, he was, as a boy, though not as a man. Killed a year or so ago, when his truck smacked into an oncoming freight, reckless young devil, poor sod, drunk at the time no doubt. Well, I guess it’s not much of a Christmas present.”

  “If you hadn’t had that bottle of hooch, you could of bought candies,” Prin says.

  “Jesus, woman, don’t you think I know it?”

  “I like this,” Morag says. “I like it fine, Christie. Honest.”

  Christie has never given her a present before, except sometimes candies. But never a lasting present. Ashamed of this one, and of herself, she shoves it away to the back of her dresser drawer.

  FOUR

  The starlings and grackles began their dawn performance, a chorus of iron-throated squawks accompanied by a heavy-footed ballet on the roof. Morag sighed. Birds should be light in the step. These sounded like carthorses, tramp tramp tramp. Birds transformed into tiny moose for an hour at sunup. Never any swallows walking on the roof, you could be certain. They would no doubt at least have pranced prettily, but sensibly preferred to fly.

  If the farmhouse had had upstairs ceilings, the birdfeet would not be quite so thundering. But there was only the rafters. Morag liked it this way because it showed the way the house had been built, nearly a hundred years ago by a homesteader called Cooper. Whose sons and grandsons had farmed the beautifully treed but rocky land until finally giving up, selling out and moving to some town or other. The house was log, still as sound as the year it was built. The door frames and window sills were handhewn timber, although the floorboards and doors had come from a sawmill. The rooms were small. Morag had obtained the furniture–old-fashioned straight-backed chair, pine dressers, the long table in the kitchen–at secondhand furniture stores in McConnell’s Landing. The oldness of the farmhouse, the roughness, were qualities Morag would have loathed as a kid. Now she valued them.