The Diviners

by Margaret Laurence

  “I suppose your boyfriend isn’t reliable enough to provide a living?”

  “He is not my–as you repulsively put it–boyfriend.”

  “No? What then?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Brooke–I don’t know what to say, except that it was fine with us for quite a while. I owe you a lot, and I know it. And–”

  And nothing. Quit talking. Babble babble. He wants to quit talking, too. He looks at her from his solitary confinement, but says nothing. Then he turns away. Sits down at his desk and begins marking essays.

  Morag packs one suitcase and goes.

  Jules is reclining on the bed with a bottle of beer.

  “Hi,” he says. “Was it bad?”

  “Yes. Pretty bad.”

  “Want a beer? It’s all we have. Nothing stronger, I’m sorry to say.”

  She takes the bottle he offers her, and sits on the bed beside him, shivering.

  “Don’t think about it,” Jules says. “Look, I didn’t say before, but you don’t want to get pregnant, do you? Because–”

  “Would you mind very much if I didn’t do anything to try not to?”

  Jules looks at her, then laughs.

  “Jesus. You’re a crazy woman. Do you have to ask permission? I don’t mind, no. Only–”

  “It’s all right. I wouldn’t claim support or anything.”

  “Well, you probably wouldn’t stand much of a chance of getting it, from me,” Jules says. “It’s all I can do to keep myself going, right now. You still plan on going to Vancouver?”

  “Yes. If I can just get myself pulled together first–”

  “Stay as long as you need to. But not too long, or it’ll turn out bad. As I ought to know. Funny thing, Morag. I was gonna sing some of the songs to you. But I got a feeling I won’t, not now. Maybe sometime. But this doesn’t feel like the time.”

  “Why not?” she asks.

  “I don’t guess you’d hear them, really,” Jules says.

  Morag stays with him for just over three weeks. They speak little, and make love not at nights when he comes home late, but in the mornings, late mornings, when he wakens. He comes home bleak, usually. He hates most of the places where he sings. Only in one, a small coffeebar which pays hardly anything, does the young audience actually listen. The others are all of the cheap nightclub or roadhouse variety, middle-aged middle-class men out with hired women, painting, as they imagine, the town red, and deaf-drunk. He hates giving his songs there, but it is better than not singing at all. Days, when he and Billy Joe practise and work out new arrangements, they do so in Billy’s room, one floor down. Morag hears the faint twanging of the two guitars and Jules’ rough-true voice but she cannot make out the words. Sometimes she wants to go down and listen, but she senses that Jules is right. This isn’t the time. She wouldn’t really hear. She is overtaken by profound lethargy, some days, and sleeps as much as fourteen hours. Other days, she rushes around the city, making her preparations for departure.

  Billy Joe brings Jules home one night, Jules unable to walk, Billy dragging him. Billy Joe is short and gentle-featured, but must be tough-muscled to haul along Jules, who is about twice his size and weight.

  “What went wrong?” Morag asks.

  “He was singin’, there,” Billy Joe says, “that one song about his grandfather, old Jules. At first they just didn’t listen. Then they laughed, some. Then they started yellin’ that they wanted him to sing stuff like ‘Roll out the barrel.’ So he gets mad and leaves and goes drinkin’. I had to leave the guitars there. Knew he’d end up smashing ’em. I guess maybe I better stay up here tonight, Morag. When he wakes up, he’s gonna be crazy. He won’t really be awake and he’ll still be drunk.”

  When Jules seemingly wakes, after a few hours of restless imitation sleep, he is a man fighting everything he has ever found necessary to fight. A sleepwalker, a sleep-fighter. He is in the valley again, and Lazarus is there, fighting and not fighting. And the fire. And the long long beaches where the fireshot forever kills the same men, over and over. And the satin shirts of now.

  “Take off this shit shirt, willya? Look, lemme tear it off, yeh? Like this this this. Know how she died? She was roasted like beef. She smelled like the roast beef they got there, on the Sundays–Jesus Jesus Jesus–”

  “What do we do with him?” Morag says, scared, to Billy Joe, who is at this moment wrestling with Jules, wrestling with steadiness and apparently no fear. Doesn’t Billy Joe feel fear? Maybe. Maybe he knows something beyond fear.

  “Shut up and stay outa the way,” Billy Joe says.

  And finally Jules subsides into unconsciousness again.

  In the morning, Jules is unspeaking, hungover. Finally, after potions of tea, he clears his throat. Billy has gone back downstairs.

  “Hey. Morag. Was I bad?”

  “Yeh. Not so good. Billy stayed. He was good with you.”

  “He’s my friend. He should be good with me. He oughta know how, after this time.”

  “Your friends should have to wrestle with you?”

  “Sometimes. You don’t think I’ve ever wrestled with him?”

  “I guess so. I’m off today, Jules. Not because of last night. Just because I’m ready to go, now.”

  “Yeh? God, I feel awful. Want me to come with you to the station?”

  “Oh for christ’s sake, in the shape you’re in? Go back to bed. I can manage. I’m travelling light. I’ll write to you.”

  “Well, I probably won’t to you.”

  “No, you were never much of a letter writer. Jules–thanks.”

  “For nothing.”

  “So long, then.”

  “So long, Morag. Look after yourself.”

  She has five hundred dollars and a one-way ticket to Vancouver.

  Clunk-a-clunk-clunk. Clunk-a-clunk-clunk. The train wheels. Once again, going into the Everywhere, where anything may happen. She no longer believes in the Everything out there. But part of her still believes.

  Morag goes into the train john. Vomits. Cleans up tidily after herself. When upset or too tense, her digestion is the first thing to go. Her stomach, obviously, not her heart, is the dwellingplace of her emotions. How humiliating. Unless, of course, she is pregnant, which is hardly likely after a couple of weeks. What if she is, though? How could she have been so unbalanced as actually to try to be? How would she earn a living? She hadn’t thought of that at the time, but does so, now. Fear. Panic. Where is Brooke?

  Brooke’s pain. His damage towards her. Hers towards him. Their voices a million miles apart. Their first coming together, and how good it had been.

  The train clonks on and on. Through the prairies. She looks out at the flat lands, which from the train window could not ever tell you anything about what they are. The grain elevators, like stark strange towers. The small bluffs of scrub oak and poplar. In Ontario, bluff means something else–a ravine, a small precipice? She’s never really understood that other meaning; her own is so clear. A gathering of trees, not the great hardwoods of Down East, or forests of the North, but thin tough-fibred trees that could survive on open grassland, that could live against the wind and the winter here. That was a kind of tree worth having; that was a determined kind of tree, all right.

  The crocuses used to grow out of the snow. You would find them in pastures, the black-pitted dying snow still there, and the crocuses already growing, their greengrey feather-stems, and the petals a pale greymauve. People who’d never lived hereabouts always imagined it was dull, bleak, hundreds of miles of nothing. They didn’t know. They didn’t know the renewal that came out of the dead cold.

  She could have stopped off to see Christie. But has not done so.

  There are many other passengers on this train, and Morag sees none of them. This in itself frightens her, but she cannot lessen it or take any lesson from it right now. What will she do when she gets where she’s going?

  The train moves west.

  PART FOUR

  RITES OF PASSAGE


  EIGHT

  Morag walked through the yellowing August grass and down the river. On the opposite bank, upriver a little from A-Okay’s place, the light-leafed willows and tall solid maples were like ancestors, carrying within themselves the land’s past. The wind skimmed northward along the water, and the deep currents drew the river south. This was what Morag looked at every day, the river flowing both ways, and yet it never lost its ancient power for her, and it never ceased to be new.

  Pique and Dan were not up yet. These kids reversed the order of life, staying up all night and sleeping most of the day. Order. For heaven’s sake. It flowed in Morag’s veins, despise it though she might. What possible differences did it make if the kids wanted to turn the days around? They had both worked for a month in McConnell’s Landing, at nothing-jobs, while Dan was still at A-Okay and Maudie’s place. Was it Morag’s concern if they decided they had enough financial reserves between them to quit work for a while, until the bread ran out, as they put it, because it was more important to get to know one another? They paid for their board; they shared the work of the house with her–in fact, they did more than their share. Nary a dish had Morag washed since Pique and Dan took up residence in the large front bedroom.

  So why complain? They’re pulling their weight. You said they could move in here together. They didn’t take the place by siege.

  It was, of course, perfectly obvious what the problem really was. Not the kids’ late rising, as Morag fairly often (and ignominiously) pretended to herself, thus justifying her early morning slamming of doors, loud stomping about in the kitchen, full-blast radio (preferably some loudmouth trumpeting the news), and general clashing of saucepans like clutches of cymbals. Clichés of symbols.

  Royland came shuffling and crunching through the sundried grass. Old Man River. The Shaman. Diviner. Morag, always glad to see him, felt doubly glad now. He would, of course, not tell her what to do. Not Royland’s way. But after a while she would find she knew. Royland sat down beside her on the dock.

  “Morning, Morag.”

  “Morning, Royland.”

  For a few minutes they both looked at the river and listened to the slapping of the small waves against the wooden posts of the dock.

  “Well, what is it this time?” Royland said finally.

  Morag laughed.

  “How come you always know? Celtic second sight?”

  “You’re the Celt, not me, Morag. Well, a person wouldn’t have to be very smart to see that you’re looking grim as granite. Is it Pique and her man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, look here now, Morag. There isn’t a reason in the world why the two of them gotta stay at your place, is there? You have got to consider your own work, and that. If they are interrupting it–”

  “Royland, it’s not that. Well, it is that, too, but the reason for it isn’t their fault. It’s mine.”

  “Here we go with the guilt again,” Royland said cheerily. “I thought you’d got a bit better about that. What terrible thing have you done now, eh?”

  Can you tell him, Morag? I’ve got to tell someone, and it is inconceivable that I should tell the Smiths, who would be sorry for me.

  “I,” Morag said flatly, “have been reacting badly. Mostly it’s been okay. But then the tension mounts in me, and I flip my lid over something trivial, like they’re not up by noon or they’re not home for dinner at the dot of six. I don’t talk with them about this. Not me. I go around slamming doors. Dishes get smashed. Yesterday, my only Limoges cup and saucer bit the dust, not that I give a damn about that. However, Royland, all this mishmash is only an evasion.”

  “You don’t say,” Royland said mildly.

  “You mean you knew? It’s that obvious? Look, it isn’t that I don’t want them to live together. I do want them to. It seems right. And God knows it isn’t that I care one way or another if they’re legally hitched. But the plain fact is that I am forty-seven years old, and it seems fairly likely that I will be alone for the rest of my life, and in most ways this is really okay with me, and yet I am sometimes so goddamn jealous of their youth and happiness and sex that I can’t see straight. Horrible, eh?”

  “Not so very,” Royland said. “In fact, hardly at all, except you feel bad about it, and also I guess they wonder what’s going on, all those doors and cups and that.”

  “Oh damn,” Morag said, rising. “I’ll have to explain. I hate presenting myself in such an unflattering light. The pride is wounded, and a good thing too, no doubt. But difficult.”

  She looked up the long slope to the house and saw Pique stretching in the sun, on the doorstep, her long hair loose around her shoulders. Royland said nothing. Morag walked back to the house as slowly as possible, stopping to pick a dandelion seedclock and to blow the seeds into the wind. Nine. And it was actually noon. Inaccurate dandelion. Catharine Parr Traill would not have wasted her time puffing dandelion seed-clocks. Nor would she have tried to explain the subtleties of her feelings to one of her daughters, either, probably. Maybe never had this problem, and never felt any such thing. Too busy preserving fruit and sketching flowers and weeding the garden. Too tired. Benefits of physical labour. Cold baths, too, like as not.

  When she entered the kitchen, Pique and Dan were having coffee and cereal.

  “You should have some crunchy granola, Ma,” Pique said.

  “No,” Morag said, suddenly impatient. “I know it is very healthy. But I gag on it. Leave me my depravities, eh?”

  “Oh sorry,” Pique said, grinning. “Well at least you don’t eat Sugar Puffs. Want we should clear out now? Want to work?”

  “Not yet awhile. I have to talk to you first. I’m sorry I slammed the door this morning. I hope it didn’t waken you up.”

  “Well,” Pique said, allowing her annoyance to surface, “we could’ve done without it.”

  “No doubt. I have, however, my reasons.”

  When Morag had finished saying approximately what she had said to Royland, she looked gloomily into her coffee mug, wishing it were possible to teleport herself out of the situation, literally, in the flesh. The ascension of the far-from-virgin. Mars or heaven her destination. Greetings and salutations to ancestors or bug-eyed monsters.

  Silence. Then astonishment. Pique had taken one of her hands and Dan the other.

  “We thought that was what it was,” Pique said, “but we couldn’t say it unless you said it. And, like, we’re aware you’re alone, Ma. But in other ways you aren’t. You know?”

  True. Truer than Morag even yet knew? Perhaps.

  “I think it’ll be okay, now,” Morag said, when able to speak, “for you to stay here. I don’t really know why. But I feel it will.”

  “No, listen,” Dan said. “Pique and I have talked this over a lot. We’ve gotta get jobs of some sort pretty soon, and it would really be better for us to live at the Smiths’, as it’s on the right side of the river for McConnell’s Landing.”

  “We’ll be back and forth a lot,” Pique said. “I mean–you’ll see enough of us. Too much, probably, even.”

  “No, it won’t be too much,” Morag said.

  She held onto their hands for another moment. Then Pique and Dan went outside.

  Morag got out her typewriter.

  LETTER TO D. MCRAITH, CROMBRUACH,

  ROSS-SHIRE SCOTLAND

  Dear McRaith–

  As to why I have begun calling you McRaith, Pique’s new man is named Dan, and I cannot bear confusion. Outer confusion, that is. The inner is quite enough to be getting on with. I once read a novel in which the protagonist, a young man, falls in love with two women (not simultaneously) both named–I can’t remember–let’s say Flora. Both kept flitting in and out of the pages, and were sometimes given the distinguishing marks of Flora One and Flora Two. Sometimes the reader just had to guess. I was enraged. How come this guy (the writer) doesn’t have more imagination, I wondered. Plenty of good names in the telephone directory. Maybe it was his character’s fault…the poor twit had
a fixation on women called Flora. I don’t know why names seem so important to me. Yes, I guess I do know. My own name, and feeling I’d come from nowhere. If I could call Pique’s Dan by any other name, I would, but that would take some explaining. I think this with Pique may work out better this time, although who knows. Whatever she feels is right for her is okay with me, but no doubt I will continue sometimes to get annoyed over trivialities, and so will she. Hers, actually, are less trivial than mine, not because of any intrinsic difference in degree of our various dilemmas, but only because I’ve worked out my major dilemmas as much as I’m likely to do in this life. Now that I read that over, I wonder if it’s true. The calm plateau still seems pretty faroff to me. I’m still fighting the same bloody battles as always, inside the skull. Maybe all there is on that calm plateau is a tombstone. No, this isn’t Celtic gloom–in fact, I’m feeling good at the moment, which is partly why I’m writing to you now. If this is gaiety, you may well observe, what can depression possibly be like? But not so. Do you remember you once told me–we were walking along the shore at Crombruach, and it was freezing and Easter–that a Presbyterian is someone who always looks cheerful, because whatever happens, they’ve expected something much worse?

  Sorry the work isn’t going too well for you at the moment. I will light mental candles for it to begin again. Mine has been pretty much nothing for a month, but I think it’ll start again now. If God is good and if I’m lucky and if I damn well pick up the pen and begin. Which I aim to do now.

  Love,

  Morag

  She put the typewriter away and got out the notebook and pen. Sat looking for a while at the pale blue empty lines like shelves on the page, waiting to be stuffed with what?

  Would Pique’s life be better or worse than Morag’s?

  Mine hasn’t been so bad. Been? Time running out. Is that what is really going on, with me, now, with her? Pique, harbinger of my death, continuer of life.