Dear Ella–
Just now finished the final touches on Shadow of Eden. I haven’t wanted to talk about it until now, but now I do. Maybe you and Mort could come up for a weekend? Bring the kids–Pique thinks they’re great, and would prevent their falling in the river. Let me know, eh? Any time.
Odd–the tales Christie used to tell of Piper Gunn and the Sutherlanders, and now this book deals with the same period. The novel follows them on the sea journey to Hudson Bay, through that winter at Churchill and then on the long walk to York Factory in the spring. Christie always said they walked about a thousand miles–it was about a hundred and fifty, in fact, but you know, he was right; it must’ve felt like a thousand. The man who led them on that march, and on the trip by water to Red River, was young Archie Macdonald, but in my mind the piper who played them on will always be that giant of a man, Piper Gunn, who probably never lived in so-called real life but who lives forever. Christie knew things about inner truths that I am only just beginning to understand.
I kept thinking about the tales Jules once told me, a long long time ago, about Rider Tonnerre. Which brings to mind a curious thing–something that must’ve come from Old Jules. Rider was called Prince of the Braves, Skinner said, and his rifle was named La Petite. In factuality (if that isn’t a word, it should be), those names pertained to Gabriel Dumont, Riel’s lieutenant in Saskatchewan, much later on. That’s okay–Skinner’s grandad had a right to borrow them. I like the thought of history and fiction interweaving. The tale of how Rider got his horse, Roi du Lac, I’ve recently discovered, comes from a Cree legend–probably Old Jules didn’t know that. You wonder how long that story had been passed on.
Enough of this. I feel I’ve neglected Pique, to some extent, recently, trying to get this thing finished. And I mustn’t. Especially right now, because she’s feeling badly. My God, I meant to tell you this first, and didn’t, and now feel heartless even though I’m just as upset as Pique, or thought I was. Our beloved Flame (the Irish setter we got shortly after you and Mort were up here last, about a year ago) was run over last week. Royland, good neighbour that he is, buried the dog. I don’t think I could have. Pique won’t even consider another dog, and I guess I don’t really want one, either. Pique’s first real encounter with death, because Flame was a member of the family. Christie’s death didn’t really affect her, because she’d known him only through stories, and in that way, he’s never died in her mind.
Please try to come up for a weekend. The land looks splendid, and the crops are beginning to ripen–not, however, on my land. Here at the Gunn ranch we have a lovely crop of unmown grass, which I am hoping to lend to a local farmer as pasturing for his cows in exchange for cream, a ploy which I consider to be fairly brilliant.
Love to you all,
Morag
Memorybank Movie: Gainsay Who Dare
“Hi, Ma,” Pique says, slamming the screendoor.
“Hi, honey.”
This Ma bit is new. It is as though Pique, at fifteen, has now decided that Mum sounds too childish and Mother, possibly, too formal. The word in some way is a proclamation of independence, a statement of the fact that the distance between them, in terms of equality, is diminishing, and the relationship must soon become that of two adults. On balance, Morag is glad. But it will take some inner adjustment.
Pique is tall now, nearly as tall as Morag, and has a fine slender figure and what Morag’s generation would call good breasts. Melon breasts no longer being in fashion, however, Pique is constantly moaning that hers are too ample.
Pique and Morag have been at McConnell’s Landing four years now. Vast changes. Pique nearly grown-up. The log house renovated in various ways as finances have permitted. A large window now enables Morag to look out at the river while writing at the long oak table in the kitchen. An electric stove. New furnace. The old linoleum removed, and the original pine floors sanded and restored.
Morag’s land is now only a few acres, meadow and woods. She has sold the rest, partly because she needed the money and partly because she did not like to see the land unused and it took her a very short time to realize that she herself wasn’t going to work it.
Pique, crunching into an apple, casually flicks through the pile of reviews on the table, Shadow of Eden having come out at last.
“These come today, Ma?”
“Yeh. Quite a few favourable ones, thank God. Some snarling ones.”
“Do those ones bother you? Doesn’t it make you mad when people say terrible things about you?”
“Well, they don’t exactly make me feel like a million dollars. On the other hand, they don’t knock me out, either, the way they once did.”
The thing that will take some getting used to, in the reviews of Shadow of Eden, is that so many of them refer to Morag Gunn as an established and older writer. At forty-four–an older writer? She has thought of herself as a beginning writer for so long that it has come as a shock to realize she no longer fits into this category. There are now a large number of writers young enough to be her children, and some of them are very good indeed. Morag reads their work out of fascination, not duty, and in the past few years has got to know quite a few of them as friends. Yes, older writer is the right phrase. Takes some mental adjustment, though, Meditation. Assimilation.
Pique has laid aside the clippings and is looking out the window. She turns and Morag sees from her eyes that she is troubled.
“What is it, honey?”
“What’s the legal age a person can quit high school?”
“What?”
“Do you know? I’m just asking you. If you don’t want to tell me, I can find out easily enough.”
“I don’t know for sure what it is, Pique. But why?”
“Because I’m getting out of that school the moment I can do it without some truant officer hassling me about it, that’s why.”
Pique’s comment on the reviews. Doesn’t it make you mad when people say terrible things about you?
“What happened, Pique?”
The girl sits down and lowers her head, spreading her long black hair like a veil or a mask around her face.
“I just can’t see much use in what they’re teaching, that’s all.”
“I don’t think that’s all. Is it?”
Pique is silent for a moment. When her voice bursts out, it is tense with pain.
“What do you know of it? You’ve never been called a dirty halfbreed. You’ve never had somebody tell you your mother was crazy because she lived out here alone and wrote dirty books and had kooky people coming out from the city to visit. Have you? Have you?”
The old patterns, the ones from both Morag’s and Jules’ childhoods, the old patterns even in Pique’s own life. The school in England, Morag sees in retrospect, was a more fortunate thing than she had recognized at the time–the primary school in Hampstead was full of Pakistani and African and West Indian kids, and also full of kids whose parents were writers; amongst that lot, Pique was normal and accepted, nothing unusual. McConnell’s Landing was a different matter. When Pique first started school here, she’d been given a bad time. Gradually, as she stuck it out (with how much anguish Morag will never know) the taunts tapered off, only to rise again in adolescence.
“No, I never had exactly that, Pique. Your dad had a lot of comments passed about him and his family, when he was a kid, I remember, but at least he could beat up on nearly any boy who gave him that kind of talk. With me, it was comments about Christie being the Scavenger, the town garbage collector, and about me wearing–at least in grade school–long droopy dresses like floursacks. I always thought I was going to spare my child that kind of pain. I haven’t, though. It’s different, with you, but it’s the same. What happened today?”
“Yeh. Well. It was just that this guy, a real smartass, came up and started making these passes at me, see? And when I more or less told him to get lost, he said Aw come on, don’t give me that shit–you know halfbreed girls can’t wait to get fucked
by any guy who comes along.”
Oh jesus.
“Goddamn,” Morag says furiously. “Who was he? I am going to go and see the principal.”
“No, Ma, don’t. The guy’s dad is on the School Board. It wouldn’t do any good to see the principal. He’d be sorry and all that, but he couldn’t do anything. Yeh, maybe a person’s got to put up a fight. But not that way.”
“What way, then?”
“I don’t know,” Pique says. “At least, not yet.”
How to spare one’s children at least some kinds of pain? No way. Where in the Bible does it speak of a new heaven and a new earth? That’s what we need all right, Lord, but it looks to be a long time in coming.
“Okay. I’ll do whatever you want me to do about it, then, Pique.”
“I guess I don’t want you actually to do anything, right now, Ma.”
Pique’s voice, this moment, is very far away from being young.
They eat dinner in silence, but a related silence, not a distant one. About nine, Pique is watching TV in the small and seldom-used livingroom (the big kitchen, in the age-old manner of farmhouses, having developed into the natural meetingplace). Morag is writing letters. The truck draws up noisily at the back of the house. Morag looks out the back window, but in the darkness cannot recognize the figure who climbs out. She goes to the door, opens it and waits. Odd–in a city she would never open a door before she knew who the unexpected visitor was. Out here it never occurs to her that it might be a threatening presence.
The man comes around the corner of the house up to the front door. Runs his hand through his greying hair in a gesture of awkwardness or embarrassment.
“Hi, Morag,” Jules says. “Can I come in?”
At first it seems likely that for no apparent reason she is hallucinating. But no. Jules steps inside and she smells the good sweat smell of him, as always. She cannot say anything. She puts her arms out to him, and he holds her.
“These damn glasses of yours,” he says. “They always did get in the way.”
He takes them off and sets them carefully on the table. Then kisses her. She responds at first as swiftly as always, and then relaxes a little, realizing that it is different now from ten years before. The sheer force and urgency of it are diminished. They are kissing each other like two people who have known one another for a long long time and have not seen one another for a long time.
“Skinner–”
The old nickname comes out without Morag’s having intended it. Jules laughs.
“The only other damn person who ever uses that name for me now is my brother Jacques. Even Billy Joe never has.”
“Are you still singing with Billy Joe, then?”
“Yeh. We split up the team for a few years, and Billy went north to his people, there, but we got together again a year or so ago.”
“How did you know I was here, Jules?”
“It’s not so hard to find you. I phoned your publishers. They gave me your address.”
He wouldn’t have done that, years ago.
“How did you find the place, then? Rural Route One isn’t very helpful.”
Jules hugs her briefly, as though amused.
“Hell, nearly everybody in McConnell’s Landing knows you, Morag. They think you’re crazy as a bedbug.”
He looks, of course, older. He is older. He must be forty-seven now. He looks more like Lazarus than he did ten years ago, and he was looking a lot like Lazarus then. His hair is longer and the grey in it is extensive. His old brass-buckled belt is now slung under an increased belly, and his eyes are the tough tired eyes of a man who still has to battle but no longer finds much joy in doing so. He is wearing purple corduroys and a wide-sleeved Russian-style mauve shirt, and this form of dress somehow seems less confident than the plain coarse Levi’s and blue workshirt of a decade ago. In Toronto fifteen years ago, he had worn sequinned satin shirts, but only for his performances, and he had been scornful about that fancy-dress outfit. Fifteen years? That long? Pique is fifteen now, so in fact it was nearly sixteen years ago.
Morag becomes aware of the fact that it is not only herself who is doing the scrutinizing. What is Jules thinking? Ten years have changed this woman.
“We’re both older,” Jules says in the quiet voice which has always denoted either anger or hurt or both.
“Why did you come here, now?”
“Do I have to have a reason, Morag?”
“No.”
“Maybe I wanted to see you. Maybe I thought it was time I saw her–Pique–again.”
“Will you be staying awhile, then?”
Is she enquiring or pleading? It doesn’t matter.
“No,” Jules says. “I gotta drive back tomorrow.”
And he will be sleeping tonight, she senses, alone in the spare bedroom, by his own wish. And yet, oddly, she realizes she is not taking this as a personal affront to herself. It is he who reaches out his hand first, now. Their hands tighten together. No explanations; merely a consolation against time.
“What do you hear of Christie, Morag?”
“He died a few years back.”
“I’m sorry. He was okay, Christie.”
“Yes. He was.”
Morag realizes now that the TV voices from the livingroom have abruptly ceased. Pique stands in the kitchen doorway. Tall, strong, lovely, and incredibly vulnerable. Her dark eyes sizing things up.
“I know you,” she says to Jules.
Just that. In a neutral voice, neither accusing nor demanding. Jules, who had been able to play it so cool when Pique was five, is now uncertain. There is nothing Morag can say or dare say.
“You’ve sure changed, Pique,” he says finally. “Funny thing–I want to call you by your real name, but like your mother, I can’t.”
“Because of your sister,” Pique says.
“Yeh. Would you have a beer handy, Morag?”
Morag goes to get it for him. There is no way he is ever going to apologize to Pique for his absence, and to defend himself would be to knock Morag, as it was her wish originally to have Pique. Still, Pique is his, and he will never in his life deny her. Does she see all these things? Why should she?
“Are you still singing?” Pique asks.
“Yeh. I’m still singing. That’s how I live. I should’ve been born later. Lotsa new places now, and they don’t think you’re some kind of nut if you sing your own songs sometimes, but most of those places, they’re for the kids, and they want young singers. Me, I’m gettin’ older.”
“You’re not getting old.” The young voice, crying out against time, against the evidence of her eyes.
Jules laughs. Then goes briefly out to the truck, returning with his guitar.
“You want to hear, Pique?”
She nods, silently. Morag suspects that Pique would like to tell him she is trying to learn guitar, that she sings as well, that she plays the records of Baez and Dylan and Cohen and Joni Mitchell and Buffy Sainte-Marie and James Taylor and Bruce Cockburn and a dozen others whose names Morag frequently misplaces, over and over and over, trying to learn from them. Pique listens to groups, too, but it is the solitary singers, singing their own songs, who really absorb her. Pique cannot tell Jules any of this now. Maybe later. If only he would stay longer. But probably he can’t.
“You don’t remember, I guess,” Jules says, “when you were a little kid, there, in Vancouver, and I sang the song to you about my grandfather Jules Tonnerre, your great-grandfather? He fought with Riel, there, at Batoche, the last flight, in 1885. You remember the song?”
Pique frowns. It was a long time ago. There is no resemblance between five and fifteen.
“I kind of remember,” she says, “but not that much.”
“Well, here it is,” Jules says.
He tunes his guitar, and sings.
The Métis, they met from the whole prairie
To keep their lands, to keep them free,
They gathered there in the valley Qu’Appelle
&n
bsp; Alongside their leader, Louis Riel.
They took their rifles into their hands,
They fought to keep their fathers’ lands,
And one of them who gathered there
Was a Métis boy called Jules Tonnerre….
He goes through the fifteen verses, but the song does not seem long. His voice is rougher than it was ten years ago, but it is still strong. One foot beats time. Pique, sitting on the floor beside the woodstove, keeps her head lowered. Her eyes cannot be seen. Jules finishes and reaches for another beer which Morag has placed beside him. Then he and Pique look at one another. Pique again nods silently. Apparently nothing needs to be spoken. The tension in Jules’ shoulders eases visibly. It is all right, then.
How unlike me. I would have had to say what I thought about it, analyze the words, probably, yakkity yak. She doesn’t have to, and neither does Jules. They do it in a different way, a way I can see, although it’s not mine.
Jules turns to Morag.
“You remember, in Vancouver, there, I wanted to get a song about Lazarus, only I couldn’t get it just then?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Well, after a while I did get it. Did you ever tell Pique about Lazarus?”
“Some.”
Jules laughs.
“Yeh. Some. Well, here’s some more.”
And he sings. Pique again lowers her head, her hair spreading out like a veil, a mask, around her face.
Lazarus, he was the king of Nothing
Lazarus, he never had a dime.
He was sometimes on Relief, he was permanent on grief.
And Nowhere was the place he spent his time.
Lazarus, he lived down in the Valley;
Lazarus, he never lived in Town.
Now that damn town, still, see, it sits up on the hill,
The Diviners Page 43