An Audience of Chairs

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An Audience of Chairs Page 27

by Joan Clark


  I want you to know our daughters are thriving and enjoy a stable life. This news will please you I am sure. I cannot tell you how much I regret your illness and the fact that it didn’t work out between us.

  I wish you good health. Sophie sends her regards.

  Duncan

  There was no forwarding address and he had carefully omitted any details about the new job or where in Britain he and the children would be. Obviously he didn’t want a reply and was gambling on the assumption she wouldn’t follow him across the Atlantic and hunt him down. Years later, Moranna did consider travelling to Britain to look for her children but was never able to earn enough money to pay for the expedition or to sustain the energy to follow it through. When Moranna read, “Sophie sends her regards,” she barked out a bitter laugh. The least Duncan could have done was to have credited her with arranging the match. Wasn’t it she who insisted Sophie look after their daughters?

  After reading Duncan’s letter, Moranna searched the house for her engagement and wedding rings and finally found them inside an earthenware pot in the pantry where she had dumped them after Duncan filed for divorce. Bundling the rings in paper and cardboard, she sent them by registered mail to the director of the Red Cross, asking that the rings be sold and the money donated to the Gullison Eye Clinic in India—she’d heard on the radio that the clinic was desperate for funds.

  The donation did little to assuage her fury at the false sincerity of Duncan’s letter, and enraged, she stomped around the house, too angry to play the piano board or to carve. For days on end she didn’t eat or sleep and eventually collapsed, her mind fogged with rage at Duncan’s letter, until one morning she struggled out of bed and, with her penchant for the dramatic, rigged up a dummy in mourning clothes, a black dress and veil she found in the trunk, and hanged Moranna Fraser on the porch. She also rigged up a gallows with a noose and a seesaw on which she imagined herself standing, balanced between life and death. She never tried the device and eventually split the seesaw into kindling and used the rope to straighten an oak sapling bent by winter snow.

  Moranna now knows she courted death with the fair certainty that the marriage would never be consummated. She knows she rejected water and rope because on her good days she had a greedy appetite for life. She also knew anger helped keep her alive, anger at Duncan mainly, for cutting her adrift with a scalpel called a pen. Anger may have prevented a second breakdown and after she’d rigged up the dummy and the gallows, she returned to work with a vengeance and carved her first Granny Ross, at the same time reviewing the story Hettie had told her. According to her great-aunt, Granny Ross began her life as Marie Henriette Lejeune.

  “Then she wasn’t a Scot,”

  “Unfortunately not,” Hettie said, “but she was as stouthearted as the MacKenzies, in spite of being Roman Catholic. She was born in France in 1762 and at age thirteen married a French officer from Miquelon. He drowned and she remarried and moved to Cape Breton and in a few years she was widowed again.”

  “How old was she then?”

  “Thirty or thereabouts. She married again, this time to James Ross, and moved to the Margaree Valley, where she became known as Granny Ross because of her good works.”

  “What good works?”

  “Nursing and midwifing. She built a little infirmary in the woods and inoculated people against smallpox, which wasn’t widely done in those days. She inoculated everyone: Scots, French, Indians. She travelled on horseback and snowshoes to deliver babies, carrying a musket in case she met a bear.”

  “Did she meet one?”

  “She did and she killed it too.”

  After selling Granny Ross to a tourist, Moranna carved her again and sold her too, along with Henrietta baking bannock and Big Ian planting potatoes. At the end of that summer she had made six hundred dollars. The following summer, her father extended the veranda along one side of the house to allow space for the wooden people, an area Moranna referred to as a gallery. He supplied her with carving wood by arranging for pine to be delivered from Middle River, and ordered cedar he delivered himself. He had cards printed—Wooden People for Sale—and put them in shops and businesses in Baddeck. When Murdoch chided him for encouraging another of his sister’s flaky ideas, Ian told him he thought Moranna was on to something. With the tourist business picking up every year, she might build herself a modest but successful enterprise. It was important for Ian to believe this. An optimist, he liked to look on the bright side, if there was one, and at seventy-one and suffering from angina, wanted to reassure himself that his daughter would be able to manage her life when he was no longer around to help. Now was the time to deed the farmhouse property to her, set up a trust fund to cover basic expenses and make Murdoch the executor of the estate. Because of her illness, Ian was resigned to the likelihood that his daughter would always live alone. Ten years before Moranna met Bun, he died holding that conviction.

  A few months before his death, Ian finally told Moranna that five years earlier Duncan had come to see her with their daughters, shortly before he’d moved them to Britain. “He came to see me in Sydney Mines,” Ian said, “but refused to come inside the house. I hardly saw my granddaughters.”

  “That must have been after he passed me on the road,” Moranna said. She was going by Duncan’s letter because she had no memory of him passing her. The fact was that when she took those long walks, she was often passed by drivers who slowed down and gawked. To discourage them, her habit was to stick out her tongue and wave them on. If a driver was persistent, she spat at him or gave him the finger, but that hadn’t happened in years.

  On November 29, 1977, Ian and Edwina drove around the Trail as they had done for thirty-one years on their wedding anniversary, stopping at the wooded clearing overlooking Aspy Bay on the Dingwall Road where Ian had proposed marriage, to eat the sandwiches and brownies Edwina had prepared. For all his talkativeness and speechmaking, Ian was inarticulate when it came to matters of the heart and was far more romantic and sentimental than either of his children would have guessed. He had never admitted to either of them that these anniversary assignations took place and all Murdoch knew was that a month before Christmas every year, Ian and Edwina drove around the Trail when, as his father put it, the cabins and motels were shut up for the winter and they wouldn’t get stuck driving up Cape Smoky behind a Winnebago.

  After their picnic, they continued around the Trail. It had rained, not much, but enough to coat the roads with black ice by late afternoon. Even so, they managed to descend Mount MacKenzie and French Mountain, the steepest part of the Trail, and were nearly at the bottom when the Plymouth swerved around a pile of sand left on the road and went over the guardrail at Grande Falaise, killing both Ian and Edwina as it rolled down the rocky embankment toward the sea.

  When Murdoch drove to Baddeck to bring his sister to Sydney Mines for the funeral, he was relieved to see she wasn’t decked out in weird clothes but was wearing a simple black suit and hat he correctly guessed Lottie MacKay had had a hand in choosing. Like himself, Moranna was dry-eyed and silent throughout the funeral at Carman United where she sat on one side of Murdoch, Davina on the other.

  During the eulogy to their father, the president of the Rotary referred to Ian MacKenzie as a faithful steward, a man who tended his vineyards diligently yet always gave unstintingly to others. When the Second World War broke out, Ian MacKenzie sold more victory bonds than anyone in town, and worked tirelessly on the salvage drive—this was news to Moranna, who was born two years before the war ended. Later, when the mine closed, Ian provided sustenance to unemployed miners, without thought of remuneration for himself. There was no better man than Ian MacKenzie, who possessed the finest qualities of the Scots. Hard-working and clean living, he was generous, enterprising, stalwart and loyal.

  Reverend John MacDonald, who gave the eulogy for Edwina, called her the salt of the earth, the kind of gentle, steadfast, thoughtful person who, like her husband, was always ready to help the less fortun
ate and asked little for herself. Badly bruised by the loss of her father, Moranna didn’t mourn Edwina at the funeral, but much later, and in a way that would have pleased her stepmother.

  After the funeral Moranna struck out on a two-hundred-mile walk around the Trail, a trek Hettie once made in search of the pioneer MacKenzie graves in the woods behind the church in Cape North. No costume this time but a warm jacket, snow pants, beaver hat and stout boots against the snowy roads. It took her ten days to walk the Trail because darkness came early and by late afternoon she was already at someone’s door asking for a place to spend the night. She was seldom turned away and the kind hospitality of people blunted the anger she carried everywhere. When asked why she was walking the Trail in winter, she replied that her father had recently died and that it was her responsibility to establish continuity with his forebears by visiting their graves. Even in clannish Cape Breton, the lofty pretentiousness of her reply was met with baffled stares and, in one house, a knee-slapping guffaw.

  Moranna tramped on in the belief that with her father’s death, it was entirely up to her to guard the MacKenzie ancestral line since Murdoch showed no interest in it at all. But where did the line begin and how far back did it go? She began seeing ancient faces in the tree stumps here and there, sombre, elongated faces with heavy eyebrows and high foreheads. The matted hair and beards, the long noses and melancholy eyes convinced her these were the faces of those who had lived in the ancient Kingdom of Dalriada at a time when women lived apart from men, and Celtic kings and Norse jarls huddled around smoky fires inside windy hill forts telling stories of how a dragon had been routed from its misty lair and selkies saved a hunter from a sea monster’s jaws. Aedh of the Ague, Ragnhild of the Frosty Throne, Niall of the Squalls, Morag of the Mating Circle, these were the MacKenzie progenitors who were thrown into bogs and buried near stone circles, the people who understood the world to be a vast wheel of turning stone. Back when Moranna saw the ancient faces along the Trail, she had only been carving a few years and hadn’t included them among her wooden people. She was still working in a hit-and-miss way and hadn’t reached the point of carving people in groups.

  Because Ian had been supplying her with wood, it wasn’t until after he had gone that Moranna began using timber cut from her own land. Unlike the MacKay farmland, her six acres were thickly wooded with maple, oak, pine, cedar, spruce and birch. Having come from generations of poor crofters for whom the forest was the hunting domain of the laird, when the Scots pioneered Cape Breton, clearing forests to make way for farmland, they also planted acres of mixed timber. Knowing this, Moranna thought it entirely appropriate that she carve her forebears using the planted trees. Before meeting Bun, she paid a local man to fell and mill four trees. Murdoch was upset when he found out the trees had been taken down, but Moranna rightly claimed that after thinning her forest, the remaining trees were healthier. The stumps were, of course, left in place to weather and age—they would be easier to pull out after the roots had rotted through.

  Bun doesn’t laugh when Moranna tells him she’s seen a face in a crumbling cedar stump. It’s April and although snow hugs the crotches of trees, most of it has been rained away. Without snow, the woods have taken on the drabness of a landscape that’s not winter yet not quite spring, and is waiting for the flush of green and flash of bird wing to proclaim the season.

  Moranna and Bun are outdoors, bringing down the pine behind the barn, when she points to the face in the cedar stump.

  “It looks like an old king,” Bun says, although he doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s the scraggly beard.

  “He’s Niall of the Squalls,” Moranna says, “or he will be when I finish carving him.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “One of my ancient forebears.”

  “Meaning one of your stories.”

  The rain has stopped but the trees continue dripping water onto the swollen ground. It’s been raining steadily for two weeks and the rain and meltwater have released the tannic odour of sodden leaves Moranna savours, along with the musky smell of wet bark. It also accentuates every knot and whorl in the trees, every hollow and crease in the stump. Moranna suggests hauling the stump close to the veranda so she can work on it there. Extracting a stump requires the use of Bun’s truck and chains, and she wants the job done before he leaves for Newfoundland next month. “Better wait a couple of weeks,” Bun says, “when the frost is out of the ground.”

  It begins raining again but lightly, and dressed in slickers and boots, they stay outside. Both have cabin fever from being cooped up during the heavy rains and are determined to bring down the pine today. Bun has been bringing down trees since he was a boy helping Abel log wood around Fox Harbour, hauling it home in the half-ton truck, then standing the poles in cones until the wood was dry enough to cut into junks. Moranna helps Bun tie ropes around the pine and secure the ends to two birch trees so that the pine will fall between. Then she stands admiring Bun as he swings the axe high over his right shoulder. Swinging the axe, he is the epitome of perfect motion, hips balanced and knees slightly bent, long arms gracefully arced, shoulders braced for the swing. At such moments, no one would guess he had been injured as a child.

  Moranna knows her brother will be apoplectic when he finds out another tree has been taken down. He’s bound to notice the next time he’s here because the pine was right behind the barn and he can’t fail to see it’s not there any more. But if he says anything, he won’t have a leg to stand on since not long ago he was trying to persuade her to sell to the Dutch developer who would have cut down most of the trees to make way for condos.

  Murdoch was right when he told Moranna that if she turned down the Dutchman’s offer, he would go after the MacKay’s farm—Moranna still thinks of it as a farm although no sign remains that it ever was. Lottie herself telephoned Moranna with the news she’d accepted the Dutch developer’s offer of three hundred thousand dollars. She said with the likelihood of Lyle ending up in Alderwood Nursing Home, they were in no position to refuse the offer. It was time to sell. She was keeping the half-acre at the north end of the property and would build a small bungalow there, close to the road. Having studied the developer’s plans, Lottie concluded that the resort wouldn’t spoil the area. There would be twenty condominiums set back from the Bay Road with a mini-golf course and tennis courts behind. The condos would be small, intended for holiday use so she didn’t expect their owners would be here much except in summer when they would become part of the tourist trade that had grown by leaps and bounds ever since Baddeck was put on the bus-tour circuit. Lottie said the resort might be good for Moranna’s business, a thought that had occurred to her while her neighbour was speaking.

  After she finished talking about the sale, Lottie announced that Luke would be singing in church on Rainbow Sunday—she was enormously proud of her great-grandson, a soloist with a boy’s choir in Manchester, who would be visiting Lottie for two weeks at Easter. According to Lottie, Rainbow Sunday was another of Andy Scott’s efforts to lead his parishioners into the twenty-first century by making the church more contemporary and upbeat. Besides the Amnesty service, Andy’s efforts included having “Jesus Christ Superstar” played over the loudspeaker before services, encouraging children to role-play Bible stories, and holding evening discussions on the great religions of the world. Lottie was part of a congregational committee organizing the rainbow service and asked Moranna if she’d like to attend. Moranna said she would. She wanted to hear Lottie’s great-grandson sing and she hadn’t seen Andy since Christmas Eve. He rarely dropped by when Bun was here, knowing the newspapers would be picked up at the manse. Lottie said her son Bruce, who usually sat with his father when she was in church, would be away on Rainbow Sunday and she’d appreciate it if Bun would sit with Lyle while she attended the service. “The playoffs will be on by then,” she said, “and they can watch TV.”

  On Rainbow Sunday, Bun went next door to watch hockey with Lyle and Lottie picked up Moranna in the truc
k. As usual she sat at the back of the church while Lottie sat at the front. The service began with a procession, the choir filing into the sanctuary wearing rainbow-coloured dresses instead of their usual gowns. After the first hymn, the children gathered around Lottie for the morning lesson. Holding up a cardboard rainbow, she explained that like the rainbow, God’s children were different colours: brown, black, tan and white and were the promise of tomorrow. Later, as the children were making their way to Sunday school, Lottie asked the congregation to wave their rainbow-coloured programs while they sang “We Are a Rainbow.” Moranna thought waving programs was silly and refused to wave hers, even for Lottie. So far the service was as bland and tasteless as white bread and she didn’t think it would ever reach the point where Luke would sing. But after more silliness, he finally stood by himself in a white surplice—no rainbow colour for him—and sang one of her favourite solos from the Messiah, “He Shall Feed His Flock,” to perfection.

  After the solo, the service went rapidly downhill with a scripture reading: Exodus 14, verses 26 to 31, an odd choice for the occasion. The reader, a man Moranna didn’t know, read with exultant fervour, clearly enjoying the spectre of Moses holding out his hand while the Egyptians drowned pursuing the Jews. Andy followed with a sermon in which he talked about how much the world had changed since the time when the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea. New technologies, he said, had transformed the globe into a rainbow world where dialogue and talking things through could be used to divert war and achieve peace. At this, Moranna nodded her head, remembering her idea to move the United Nations to Antarctica, where the only distractions were penguins and icebergs. Andy ended the sermon with a prayer evoking the love of Christ who died on the cross to save our sins. The prayer made Moranna uncomfortable. The thought of anyone suffering a hideous and brutal death to redeem her mistakes depressed her. Mercifully, Luke lifted her gloom by singing “The Lord’s Prayer,” again to perfection. Moranna didn’t stay for the coffee and rainbow cupcakes but slipped away after the benediction, walking home past the Bras d’Or, head down, hardly noticing the lake water had been released from the ice. By the time she reached the farmhouse, she had decided to write her own sermon, and after stoking the fire, she took out the typewriter and set to work.

 

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