The Diviners

by Margaret Laurence

  “Royland–anybody can have a temporary setback, for heaven’s sake.”

  “No,” Royland said clearly. “I had it for a long while, and now I don’t have it. It’s as simple as that.”

  The Old Man of the River, his powers gone. What happened to an ex-shaman? Was he honoured as an elder of the tribe, or was he driven forth? In Royland’s case, the former. But would that help how he himself felt about it?

  “Royland–I’m so damn sorry.”

  “Well, not that much need to be, really, I guess. I’m not actually going to starve. I’ve got a little put by, and I own my place, so with the old-age pension I can manage. It’s not that, though.”

  “I know.”

  Royland sat down and accepted a cup of coffee, but didn’t drink it.

  “It’s not so easy to take,” he said. “But you know, Morag, there’s something I never told you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s something I don’t understand, the divining,” Royland said slowly, “and it’s not something that everybody can do, but the thing I don’t usually let on about is that quite a few people can learn to do it. You don’t have to have the mark of God between your eyebrows. Or if you do, quite a few people have it. You didn’t know that, did you?”

  “No. No, I didn’t.”

  Royland laughed.

  “A-Okay tried,” he said. “He was that nervous and suspicious. But he could learn, if he has a mind to. That was plain. I think he was kind of upset by it. But he could learn.”

  “Really? Will he?”

  “If he can just get over wanting to explain it,” Royland said, “maybe he will. That’s up to him.”

  The inheritors. Was this, finally and at last, what Morag had always sensed she had to learn from the old man? She had known it all along, but not really known. The gift, or portion of grace, or whatever it was, was finally withdrawn, to be given to someone else.

  “This that’s happened to me–” Royland said, “it’s not a matter for mourning.”

  “I see that now,” Morag said.

  When Royland had gone, Morag sat in her armchair looking out the wide window. Contemplating. Could this be termed an activity? It was to be hoped so. She certainly spent enough time doing it.

  At least Royland knew he had been a true diviner. There were the wells, proof positive. Water. Real wet water. There to be felt and tasted. Morag’s magic tricks were of a different order. She would never know whether they actually worked or not, or to what extent. That wasn’t given to her to know. In a sense, it did not matter. The necessary doing of the thing–that mattered.

  Morag walked out across the grass and looked at the river. The sun, now low, was catching the waves, sending out once more the flotilla of little lights skimming along the green-bronze surface. The waters flowed from north to south, and the current was visible, but now a south wind was blowing, ruffling the water in the opposite direction, so that the river, as so often here, seemed to be flowing both ways.

  Look ahead into the past, and back into the future, until the silence.

  How far could anyone see into the river? Not far. Near shore, in the shallows, the water was clear, and there were the clean and broken clamshells of creatures now dead, and the wavering of the underwater weed-forests, and the flicker of small live fishes, and the undulating lines of gold as the sand ripples received the sun. Only slightly farther out, the water deepened and kept its life from sight.

  Morag returned to the house, to write the remaining private and fictional words, and to set down her title.

  ALBUM

  THE BALLAD OF JULES TONNERRE

  THE BALLAD OF JULES TONNERRE

  (Written by Jules “Skinner” Tonnerre, for his grandfather who fought with Riel in 1885)

  The Métis they met from the whole prairie

  To keep their lands, to keep them free,

  They gathered there in the valley Qu’Appelle

  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 is not more than eighteen years;

  He will not listen to his fears.

  His heart is true, his heart is strong;

  He knows the land where his people belong.

  Macdonald, he sits in Ottawa,

  Drinking down his whiskey raw,

  Sends out west ten thousand men,

  Swears the Métis will not rise again.

  The young Anglais from Ontario,

  Out to the west they swiftly go;

  They don’t know what they’re fighting for,

  But they’ve got the cannon, so it must be war.

  It was near Batoche, in Saskatchewan,

  The Métis bullets were nearly gone;

  “If I was a wolf, I’d seek my lair,

  But a man must try,” said Jules Tonnerre.

  Riel, he walks with the Cross held high,

  To bless his men so they may not die;

  “God bless Riel,” says Tonnerre,

  “But the cannon Anglais won’t listen to prayer.”

  Dumont, he rides out to ambush the foe,

  To hunt as he’s hunted the buffalo;

  He’s the bravest heart on the whole prairie,

  But he cannot save his hunted Métis.

  Jules Tonnerre and his brothers, then,

  They fought like animals, fought like men.

  “Before the earth will take our bones,

  We’ll load our muskets with nails and stones.”

  They loaded their muskets with nails and stones;

  They fought together and they fought alone;

  And Jules, he fell with steel in his thigh,

  And he prayed his God that he might not die.

  He woke and found no soul around,

  The deadmen hanging onto the ground;

  The birds sang in the prairie air.

  “Now, it’s over, then,” said Jules Tonnerre.

  Riel, he was hanged in Regina one day;

  Dumont, he crossed to the U.S.A.

  “Of sorrow’s bread I’ve eaten my share,

  But I won’t choke yet,” said Jules Tonnerre.

  He took his Cross and he took his gun,

  Went back to the place where he’d begun.

  He lived on drink and he lived on prayer,

  But the heart was gone from Jules Tonnerre.

  Still, he lived his years and he raised his son,

  Shouldered his life till it was done;

  His voice is one the wind will tell

  In the prairie valley that’s called Qu’Appelle.

  They say the dead don’t always die;

  They say the truth outlives the lie–

  The night wind calls their voices there,

  The Métis men, like Jules Tonnerre.

  LAZARUS

  LAZARUS

  (Written by Skinner Tonnerre, for his father, Lazarus Tonnerre)

  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,

  Oh but Lazarus, oh he belonged way down.

  Lazarus was what they called a halfbreed;

  Half a man was what the Town would say.

  What made him walk so slow, well, they didn’t care to know–

  It was easier by far to look away.

  Lazarus was nothing to the Mounties;

  They knew he never had a cent for bail.

  When his life got more than rough, and he drank more than enough,

  They just threw him in the Manawaka jail.

  Lazarus was n
ot afraid of fighting;

  It was the only way he knew to win.

  But when the fight was o’er, he’d be in the clink once more;

  Those breeds must learn that anger is a sin.

  Lazarus, he went and lost his woman;

  She left him when she found he wasn’t king.

  Then he had no woman there, nothing left, no kind of prayer,

  And Nothing was his always Everything.

  Lazarus, he had a bunch of children;

  He raised them in the Valley down below.

  So that they could eat, he shot rabbits there for meat,

  Where his ancestors had shot the buffalo.

  Lazarus, he lost some of those children,

  Some to fire, some to the City’s heart of stone.

  Maybe when they went, was the worst time that was sent,

  For then he really knew he was alone.

  Lazarus, he never slit his throat, there.

  Lazarus, he never met his knife.

  If you think that isn’t news, just try walking in his shoes.

  Oh Lazarus, he kept his life, for life.

  Lazarus, rise up out of the Valley;

  Tell them what it really means to try.

  Go tell them in the Town, though they always put you down,

  Lazarus, oh man, you didn’t die.

  Lazarus, oh man, you didn’t die.

  PIQUETTE’S SONG

  PIQUETTE’S SONG

  (Written by Skinner Tonnerre, for his sister)

  My sister’s eyes

  Fire and snow–

  What they’d be saying

  You couldn’t know.

  My sister’s body

  Fire and snow–

  It wasn’t hers

  Since long ago.

  My sister’s man

  Fire and snow–

  He ate her heart

  Then he made her go.

  My sister’s children

  Fire and snow–

  She prayed they’d live

  But it wasn’t so.

  My sister’s death

  Fire and snow–

  Burned out her sorrow

  In the valley below.

  My sister’s eyes

  Fire and snow–

  What they were telling

  You’ll never know.

  PIQUE’S SONG

  PIQUE’S SONG

  (Written by Pique Gunn Tonnerre)

  There’s a valley holds my name, now I know

  In the tales they used to tell it seemed so low

  There’s a valley way down there

  I used to dream it like a prayer

  And my fathers, they lived there long ago.

  There’s a mountain holds my name, close to the sky

  And those stories made that mountain seem so high

  There’s a mountain way up there

  I used to dream I’d breathe its air

  And hear the voices that in me would never die.

  I came to taste the dust out on a prairie road

  My childhood thoughts were heavy on me like a load

  But I left behind my fear

  When I found those ghosts were near

  Leadin’ me back to that home I never knowed.

  Ah, my valley and my mountain, they’re the same

  My living places, and they never will be tame

  When I think how I was born

  I can’t help but being torn

  But the valley and the mountain hold my name.

  The valley and the mountain hold my name.

  AFTERWORD

  BY TIMOTHY FINDLEY

  Maybe it would be best not to read this until The Diviners has had a chance to sigh and to settle; until you, yourself, have had a chance to sigh and to settle.

  My friend and I have a rule when we go to plays and movies: neither of us is allowed to talk when the play or the movie is over if we perceive the other has been upset or moved by what we’ve just seen. Surely there’s nothing worse than somebody breaking in on your own reflections with: “Wow! What a piece of garbage!” Or even with: “Wasn’t that terrific!” It doesn’t really matter whether the voice breaking in agrees with you or disagrees. The point is, the only voice that matters when an experience is over is the voice of the experience itself.

  A psychologist once remarked that what we experience in dreams can be just as affecting–whether for ill or for good–as what we experience in what we call “reality.” Books can hit us hard–or leave us cold. We can set the book aside and say: “I forget.” Or we can close the covers and know we will always remember what is between them. Books, like dreams, are essentially private realms. Nothing should be allowed to detract from each person’s right to read a book privately and to interpret it freely in the light of what each person has experienced and knows of life. This is why what we receive from critics can be so dangerous. Not that critics are inevitably wrong; only that critics forget, too often, to remind us they speak only for themselves.

  The Diviners, since its publication in 1974, has suffered from a plethora of critics–many of them negative, some of them positive–all of them loud. It has been the eye of a storm that has raged off and on from the moment Margaret Laurence wrote its final sentences up to the moment of her death in 1987 and beyond. To be brief: it has been plagued by the dread fear of honesty.

  The sources of this fear have been as influential–and crazy–as school boards and pulpits. “Crazy” because it would seem to be self-evident that school boards and pulpits should have a vested interest in honesty. And yet, they have mounted attacks against The Diviners, charging both it and its author with everything from malicious propaganda against the sanctity of the family to undermining the morals of the young; from pornography to blasphemy. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. At its worst, the campaign against The Diviners took on the colours of riotous comedy, as when its author was accused of being “personally responsible for the current increase in teenage pregnancies.”

  As a consequence of the attacks against The Diviners, few of its readers since 1974 have been able to retire into a quiet place to read it alone. Now, it is achieving the status of a classic and, while there is an obvious rightness in this, it would be a pity if its classification as “literature” were to prove to be intimidating. Nothing we can read should be less daunting than this book. Yes, it is difficult–but only difficult because it pulls no punches. Difficult isn’t daunting, anyway. Difficult is exhilarating.

  The only kind of book that daunts–if such a word exists–is a book that lies: a book that clouds or obscures the truth with sentimental claptrap or mind-easing platitudes. Earth and air and fire and water and all that these imply of reality abound in The Diviners. The flesh, too–and all it implies of being alive. The people here are whole and imperfect–rampant, afraid, and terrifying–and they ask of life and one another nothing more and nothing less than we would ask if we were written on these pages. Such things cannot be said of every book. In fact, they can rarely be said of any book. We know such books when we find them in our hands because they breathe. Books as seemingly different as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Madame Bovary, as Lady with a Lapdog and The Moons of Jupiter all speak of one condition: of being alive, and of the subtle horror we all experience of being trapped in human flesh when what we want–and long for–is something only the spirit can attain. I know this–and you know this. We all know this, at heart. But it takes a Marquez, a Flaubert, a Chekhov, a Munro, a Laurence to articulate it. Why?

  Don’t ask.

  Be glad.

  Late one summer afternoon–in August of 1973, to be exact–Margaret Laurence walked out onto the lawn behind her cottage on the banks of the Otonabee River in Ontario. She wore an oversized cotton mumu and a pair of untied running shoes, and she carried a pack of cigarettes and a glass of wine. Under her arm there were a few loose pages of her inimitable typing–criss-crossed with penciled notes and amendments.

  Insi
de the cottage, a pot of chili was simmering and a large wooden salad bowl stood ready on the kitchen table. The smell of the food was tantalizing and comforting. One of Margaret Laurence’s guests came up out of the water, flopped onto the dock, and grabbed a towel.

  “It may look warm,” he said, referring to the river, “but it’s really cold. And I wasn’t alone in there…”

  Margaret Laurence laughed.

  “That’s the snapping turtles,” she said. “You better count your toes, kid!”

  The sun began its long descent beyond the trees on the opposite bank and the swimmer put on his sweater.

  Three other guests were sitting down on steps and on the grass.

  Two people passed in a rowboat, drifting on the current–one of them fishing, both of them absolutely silent.

  Margaret Laurence slipped her pages into her lap and adjusted her glasses. One of the guests lay back and watched the swallows swooping overhead.

  Someone lighted a cigarette.

  The swimmer poured himself a glass of wine.

  Margaret Laurence began to read. It was just as if they had all been having a conversation–and now it was Margaret Laurence’s turn to speak.

  “Morag,” she said, “is nine, and it is winter. The snow is a good four feet thick outside and you have to walk to school on the roads, where the snowplough has been…”

  She read for some time.

  She ended with the piece about Christie’s First Tale of Piper Gunn and the bit about Morag’s First Tale of Piper Gunn’s Woman.

  This is how books are made. By trial and error; speaking entirely from the heart–letting the mind cope later with the writing of the words.