The Diviners

by Margaret Laurence

  “Did she go back?”

  “She said,” Royland went on slowly, “that she wanted to go and see her cousin and his wife, first, and she promised she’d be right back to pack. Didn’t see her again until I set eyes on her in the morgue. Drowned herself. I guess she couldn’t put her hand to any easier way, that moment. She was scared of me. Scared to come back. Scared not to come back. Didn’t believe I’d change any. And maybe I wouldn’t have.”

  “Royland–oh my God, Royland, I’m sorry I asked.”

  “It’s no matter. I don’t generally speak of it. But I’ve known you a long time now. Well, after that I went north by myself. Stayed about five years in all. Did odd jobs, lumber camps and that. Began to see–not all at once, mind you, but gradually–that I’d been crazy as a coot, before. Reasons for that, but too many to explain now. I was brought up by an aunt who–well, it wasn’t really her fault, either. You don’t know how it is for other people, or how far back it all goes. Anyway, I found I could divine wells, so I came back and settled here. Seemed better to find water than to–”

  “Raise fire.”

  “That’s it. Don’t believe in hell now, and haven’t for some years. But maybe that’s just a way of saying that if I did believe in it, I know one man who’d be bound there for sure.”

  “I imagine you’ve had yours.”

  “Oh yes,” Royland said calmly. “There’s no getting away from that.”

  Pique clattered down the stairs. Rushed over to Royland and hugged him.

  “The Old Man of the River! Hi, Royland!”

  “Good to have you home, Pique. Here’s a pickerel for your breakfast.”

  “You’re great, Royland. Really great. Hey, you know something? You made a big mistake in not getting married. You should’ve had grandchildren. You’d make a fine granddad. You know that?”

  Please. Pique–no. How many times had Morag, over the years, made similar jocular remarks?

  But Royland could take it. He merely smiled. Maybe you did reach a point in life, after all, when such chance references no longer could break you into pieces. Roll on, that day.

  “Well, Pique,” Royland said, “I always thought I was kind of like that to you.”

  “You are,” Pique said.

  Late that afternoon, Morag looked out the window and observed that the first of the swallow children had taken off and was now perched or rather huddled in feather-ruffled and uncertain fashion on a low branch of the elm. She kept on looking. Innumerable swallows (parents, aunts and uncles, cousins) veered in towards the nest and veered off again, squeeping in high-pitched voices, obviously saying This is how you fly, kids! It’s easy! Try it–you’ll never be immobile again! The other four, one by one, were lured out, finally, shakily, and landed beside their courageous sibling on the elm bough. All five sat there, looking dejected. Hey, Mabel, what happens now? Tomorrow they would all be flitting back and forth across the river, skilled already.

  I look at the world anthropomorphically. Well, so what? And even if I didn’t, they do learn quickly. Every year, to see them take off is a marvel.

  “Hey, Morag, can we come in?” Tom said.

  Three of them–no, there were four people at the door.

  “Why ask?” Morag said. “Since when couldn’t you come in here when you liked?”

  Tom was getting taller. He was up a bit beyond A-Okay’s waist. A-Okay opened the door, and Maudie, long clean white-blonde hair loose around her shoulders, glided Thomas in.

  A-Okay bumped into the edge of the oak table. He had been looking elsewhere, at Tom, and at the other person, a young man with dark straight hair to the shoulders. He was lean (thin? these kids were all thin these days; it was their diet, or maybe their outlook) and was moustached hugely but not unpleasantly, a rather hesitant look in wary grey eyes.

  A-Okay decided he had better don his specs, as always when he’d inadvertently rammed a piece of the furniture. A-Okay was somewhat like Dan McRaith, whose general clumsiness always had a kind of strange gracefulness about it.

  “This is Dan,” A-Okay said. “Dan Scranton. He’s from Calgary, or thereabouts. He’s gonna stay with us awhile.”

  Dan. Morag felt the blade turning inside the heart. Of course, millions of men in this world must be named Daniel. Still, she did not want this kid’s name to be that.

  “Hello,” she said. “Sit down, won’t you? Maudie, Pique’s off with Royland–he’s doing John Fraser’s new well. They should be back soon. Stay for dinner?”

  When Pique and Royland returned, Pique greeted the Clan Smith as though they were her own, which they were. After dinner Dan Scranton got out his guitar and sang some of his songs. They were for individuals, people with names, places of belonging. And they were, just as much, for the Alberta hills and plains, which he had left some years ago and to which he was determined not to return, but loved them now with his painful words.

  Pique sat very quietly. Then, as though now was the right time, she got out her guitar.

  “I’ve got maybe one or two of my own,” she said, “but I don’t think I can sing them now. This isn’t one of my dad’s songs, either. It’s the one Louis Riel wrote in prison, before he was hanged.”

  She sang in a low clear voice, the words in French, then in English. The five verses, and then the last verse.

  Mourir, s’il faut mourir,

  Chacun meurt à son tour;

  J’aim’ mieux mourir en brave,

  Faut tous mourir un jour.

  Dying, for it is necessary to die,

  Everyone dies in his turn.

  I long to die bravely

  For all must die one day.

  “Where did you learn it?” Morag asked. “From a book,” Pique said coldly. “I learned it from a book. Somebody I know taught me to say the French. I only know how to make the sounds. I don’t know what they mean.”

  Dan Scranton went over and sat on the floor beside her, and took her hand.

  When the others had gone, and Pique had gone up to bed, Morag went to the record player and put on a song, turning the sound very low. It was in Gaelic and the name of it was “Morag of Dunvegin.” She could not understand the words, nor even distinguish between them, make any kind of pattern of them. Just a lot of garbled sounds to her. Yet she played the record often, as though if she listened to it enough, she would finally pierce the barrier of that ancient speech and have its meaning revealed to her. Dan McRaith had laughed at her that time, when she had said, naïvely, that she wished she knew Gaelic. He didn’t have a word of the Gaelic himself, or perhaps a few words here and there, but nothing to speak of, nothing to speak with. Why not take lessons, then, he had said. She hadn’t, of course. Too lazy. She would have liked to gain the speech by magical means, no doubt. Yet it seemed a bad thing to have lost a language. Talking to one or two old fishermen in Crombruach, those years ago, she’d realized that. They spoke a mellifluous English, carefully, as though translating into it in their heads, and some of their remarks were obscure to her, but they would never explain, or could not.

  Christie, telling the old tales in his only speech, English, with hardly any trace of a Scots accent, and yet with echoes in his voice that went back and back. Christie, summoning up the ghosts of those who had never been and yet would always be.

  The lost languages, forever lurking somewhere inside the ventricles of the hearts of those who had lost them. Jules, with two languages lost, retaining only broken fragments of both French and Cree, and yet speaking English as though forever it must be a foreign tongue to him.

  Brooke had spoken Hindi, as a child, but had forgotten most of it. That must be different. It was not the language of his ancestors. He regretted its loss for other reasons.

  Memorybank Movie: Frictions

  “Have you been a good girl, love?” Brooke asks.

  It has become his game, his jest, before going into her, and indeed before permitting his arousal or hers. If she protests the sentence, he will withdraw all of himself ex
cept his unspoken anger. She has to play, or be prepared to face that coldness. Either way she feels afraid. Yet he cannot help it, and she knows this. There can be no talk of it, for it is, after all, only a joke.

  She smiles, hoping this will be sufficient, without having to use words in this service. And it provides enough. Brooke, poised above her, lowers his long body upon hers. Then she is angry and wants to shove him away, wants no part of him. But her flesh responds to him, and she rises to him, rises to his bait, and then everything is all right.

  And yet, afterwards, when Brooke is asleep beside her, she cannot sleep, the body’s spasm no longer being enough to shut off the alarm-clock head more than momentarily.

  Dr. and Mrs. B. Skelton now have a new and somewhat jazzy apartment, in keeping with Brooke’s appointment as Head of Department. It is large, on the top floor of a downtown block, and is furnished with Danish Modern, long teak coffee tables, svelte things to sit on (you could not call them sofas or chesterfields, both words having unseemly old-fashioned connotations). On the cream-coloured walls hang several fairly expensive contemporary paintings, which Brooke says are good, even excellent.

  Days, Morag writes. Then comes the day when, astonishingly, the novel is completed. It has taken over three years, and much rewriting. She feels emptied, deprived of Lilac’s company.

  “Show it to me, why don’t you?” Brooke says. “I might be able to make one or two helpful suggestions.”

  “I will, Brooke. But there’s something I want to discuss with you first. Brooke, we’re not broke any more. We’ve been married eight years. I’m nearly twenty-eight.”

  “Oh. That again?”

  She perceives at once her mistake. He cannot ever say to her, finally, once and for all, that he cannot bear for her to bear a child. He will never say that. But he cannot agree to a child, either. She is, she now sees, forcing him into a corner and has been doing so for some years. A corner out of which the exit will be violence, not physical, but violence all the same, to her and to himself.

  Brooke rises and pours the last of the martini from the silver jug.

  “Does it seem like the kind of world, to you,” he says, “to bring children into?”

  To that, there is no answer. None. No, it does not seem like the kind of world, etcetera. But she wants children all the same. Why? Something too primitive to be analyzed? Something which needs to proclaim itself, against all odds? Or only the selfishness of wanting someone born of your flesh, someone related to you?

  “I shouldn’t have brought up the subject,” Morag says. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Look, love, let’s just see how things are in a year or so, shall we?”

  “Yes.”

  She knows she will not mention the subject again.

  Finally she shows Spear of Innocence to Brooke. Reluctantly. He stays up until nearly midnight, reading it.

  “Well,” he says at last, carefully, “it seems to me that the novel suffers from having a protagonist who is nonverbal, that is, she talks a lot, but she can’t communicate very well.”

  “I know that. I know. That was part of the problem.”

  “I also wonder,” Brooke says, flicking pages, “if the main character–Lilac–expresses anything which we haven’t known before?”

  No. She doesn’t. But she says it. That is what is different.

  “I see what you mean,” Morag says. “I’ll think about it.”

  The next day she parcels up the mass of paper and sends it, submits it, to a publisher. She does not tell Brooke.

  Memorybank Movie: Prin

  Christie’s telegram reads: Prin very bad could you come yours Christie.

  Morag has always known, of course, that this would happen one day, but the time seemed faroff. Now it is time present.

  “Brooke–I don’t want to go. That’s the awful thing. But I must.”

  “Hush, little one,” he says, holding her tightly. “You’ll soon be back.”

  All the way on the train to Winnipeg, and then on the bus to Manawaka, Morag tries to focus on the novel, but it is finished and away from her, and there is no longer any reason for Lilac Stonehouse to talk inside Morag’s head. She does not want to think of Prin, but can think of nothing else.

  Christie meets her at the bus station, and they walk back to the house on Hill Street, in the dusk, the streetlights not yet turned on. Early summer, and the air smells of dust and the sweetly overpowering perfume of the lilacs that grow in mauve and purple grapelike bunches on the bushes with their heart-shaped leaves, in the front yards even of the small poor houses this side of town.

  “Christie–how is she?”

  “Not long for this world, Morag,” Christie says abruptly, and the euphemism sounds odd, coming from him.

  “Is she at home?” Morag is praying she is not.

  “She’s been in the hospital this past month,” Christie says. “She’s been pretty low for some time now. Even before she went in.”

  Christie, coping with her alone. Has Eva continued coming in on Saturdays? How would Morag know, who writes to Christie perhaps once in three months?

  Had it been wrong to want to get away? No, not wrong to want to get away, to make her getaway. It was the other thing that was wrong, the turning away, turning her back on the both of them. The both of them. As soon as she got back to Manawaka, she even began thinking in the old phraseology. Extraneous the, yet somehow giving more existence, more recognition to them than correct speech could have. Escapist. Wordsmith, forging screens.

  “You’re looking smart, Morag,” Christie says.

  She is dressed in a fairly pricey cotton dress and light blue summer coat, her hair short and swept back and upwards. At this moment she hates it all, this external self who is at such variance with whatever or whoever remains inside the glossy painted shell. If anything remains. Her remains.

  Christie is looking terrible. He is, she realizes, sixty-four. He has looked old for as long as she can remember. Now he looks as ancient as a fossil or the dried and shrunken skin of some desert lizard. His once-blue eyes seem to have retreated rheumily into their sockets, and the skin of his face is brown-brittle, clinging close to his bones as though no flesh came between, mummified as a pharaoh.

  “Well, here we are,” Christie says.

  The house stinks. No other word for it. It has not been cleaned in some time, obviously. The odours seem to be: human sweat, urine from unemptied chamber pots, clinging smell of boiled cabbage, breadmould, and dirt. How could it be otherwise? Christie has done what he could. The house seems smaller than she has remembered it.

  “When can I see her, Christie?”

  “In the morning.”

  Morag goes up to her old room. Cannot sleep. The tiny room is huge with ghosts. Ghosts of people and of tales. Morag, a child, a girl, a young woman. Christie ranting the old ironic battle cry. Clowny Macpherson. Piper Gunn who led his people to bravery. Gunner Gunn, who once, unbelievably, had life as Colin Gunn, her father. Rider Tonnerre, the talesman, the talisman. They are all here tonight. Who has been real and who imagined? All have been both, it seems.

  Prin. Prin, long ago combing and plaiting Morag’s hair. Prin, sitting at the back of the church, going in just before service began, not to be noticed, once she’d grown so gross.

  “Christie–they can’t do anything for her, there?” Morag asks next morning.

  “No. Not a christly thing.”

  “Would she rather be home then? Now that I’m here.”

  “She’d rather it,” Christie says in a low voice. “She couldn’t say so. But I know. It’s not right for you, though, Morag. It’s not a pretty sight.”

  “Oh Christie–I’ve enough to answer for. Let’s just let her come home, then.”

  The doctor, however, is adamant.

  “I can’t prevent you from discharging her against my advice, Mrs. Skelton,” he says. “But she’d never stand the move.”

  “She’s going to die anyway.”


  The doctor frowns massively. It is not Dr. Cates. It is a younger man, a stranger, a newcomer. Probably been here for ten years. Newcomer. Good Lord.

  “We needn’t hasten it,” he says ethically.

  Why not? Why not? But faced with this medical sanctity, Morag finds she cannot argue. And Christie’s fighting days are over.

  Morag goes alone to see Prin. A public ward, naturally, but the white cubicle-curtains are drawn around Prin’s bed. At the first sight of Prin, Morag feels only relief that the doctor has had his way. Impossible, impossible to have Prin home. And then the reverse reaction. Who wouldn’t prefer to die at home?

  Prin lies in the hospital bed which is really too narrow. The white bedclothing rises over her, over her flaccid hugeness, her quietness. Her body is mercifully hidden by the pre-shroud around her. Her hair is thinner even than Christie’s now, wisps and straggling feathers of the almost-bald headskin, reminiscent (unbearably) of the dead half-bald baby birds fallen from nests in the spring of the year. Prin’s face is as blank as a sheet of white paper upon which nothing will ever now be written. Her eyes are open and unseeing.

  “Prin–”

  Morag touches the untouchable face, the hands. No response.

  “I don’t think Mrs. Logan knows you, dear,” the entering nurse busily says.

  Morag says nothing. She sits for a while, her hand upon Prin’s white unmoving lard-carved hand. Then she goes away.

  In her sleep, as the saying goes, Prin dies two days later. She has been in her sleep for years now, but whether there were dreams or nightmares in there, no one can know. Now at least there will be darkness. She has died a month before her fifty-ninth birthday.