Moral Disorder

by Margaret Atwood

  “A channel?” said Nell.

  “Sort of like a tunnel. A link,” said Susan patiently. “They come into our world and then they go out of it, right here.”

  “This is the place where somebody died,” said Nell.

  “In that case, they came here on purpose because they wanted to make a quick transition,” said Susan.

  Nell thought about that. “Are the entities good or bad?” she said.

  “They could be either,” said Susan. “There are all kinds.”

  “If you had bad ones in the house, what would you do?”

  “Put light around them,” said Susan.

  Nell didn’t ask how a person might go about that. “Do you think the entities would mind if we closed up the channel or moved it somewhere else?” she said. This was a lot like a children’s game featuring an imaginary friend. Whatever works, she told herself.

  “I’ll ask them,” said Susan. She stood silently, listening. “They say it’s all right, but they want the channel moved out into the yard. They don’t want it moved too far away. They like the neighbourhood.”

  “It’s a deal,” said Nell. Even the entities had real-estate preferences, it seemed. “What do we do next?”

  What they did next was a kind of circular dance, complete with some bell jingling; Susan had the bells in her purse. “There,” she said. “The channel’s closed. But just to make sure …” She took out some bundles of sage and laid them in the kitchen drawers. “That should hold them at bay for a while,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Nell.

  It’s all right now,” Nell told Lillie.

  “You are so kind,” said Lillie.

  But it wasn’t all right. Lillie was still afraid of the house. There was something in it that wasn’t Oona. There was something older, something darker, something more terrible. There was something that had been stirred up; it had awakened, it had come to the surface. There was blood.

  Later, Nell would tell people that this must have been the first stages of Alzheimer’s, or whatever it was that shortly took Lillie away from them, out of this world as she had known it. She went to a better place, however; a place devoid of the past, or of some parts of the past. In this place, several of the people she’d known long ago were still alive. Her husband was still alive. He was waiting for her to get home, she said. He didn’t like her to be out by herself, he liked her to be there in the living room, with the familiar china ornaments, especially after dark.

  Lillie’s grown-up children made arrangements. They got a care-giver so Lillie could stay in her own house. That would be more comforting to her, they thought. She took up painting with water-colours, a thing she had never done before. The pictures she painted were bright and cheerful, filled with sunlight; they were mostly pictures of flowers. When Nell went to see her, she would smile happily. “I made some cookies, special for you,” she’d say. But she hadn’t made any.

  Oona’s house has been bought by two gay men – two artistic gay men, friends of Nell’s and, as it turned out, former clients of Lillie’s – who love the light that comes in on the second floor at the back. They’ve made a studio there. They’ve pulled out some walls, and added on, and put in a skylight, and redecorated. They have an unusual arrangement for their cat – a cat box that slides in and out of the wall when the cat activates it with a sensor. The cat behaves strangely in the glassed-in breakfast nook, they tell Nell: it sits and stares out the window as if it’s watching something.

  “It’s watching the entities,” says Nell, who is over having tea and admiring the renovations. “We moved them out into the yard. That’s where they wanted their channel.”

  “What?” say the gay men. “The aunties? Don’t tell me we’re overrun by aunties!” They laugh.

  “No, the entities,” says Nell.

  Then Nell tells them the story of Oona, and Tig, and herself, and Susan the crystal lady – they love the part about Nell dancing in a circle with the jingle bells – and also the story of Lillie. She changes the story a bit, of course. She makes it funnier than it seemed at the time. Also, everyone in it is nicer than they really were. Except Lillie; there’s no need to improve Lillie.

  The gay men like the story: it’s bizarre, and they like bizarre. Also it’s a story about them, since it’s a story about their house. It adds character to a dwelling, to have a story attached. “We’ve got entities!” they say. “Who knew? If we ever sell the house we’ll put it in the ad. Charming studio. Built-in cat box. Entities.”

  But what else could I do with all that? thinks Nell, wending her way back to her own house. All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we’ll all become stories. Or else we’ll become entities. Maybe it’s the same.

  The Labrador Fiasco

  It’s October; but which October? One of those Octobers, with their quick intensities of light, their diminuendos, their red and orange leaves. My father is sitting in his armchair by the fire. He has on his black-and-white checked dressing gown, over his other clothes, and his old leather slippers, with his feet propped up on a hassock. Therefore it must be evening.

  My mother is reading to him. She fiddles with her glasses, and hunches over the page; or it looks like hunching. In reality that is just the shape she is now.

  My father is grinning, so this must be a part he enjoys. His grin is higher on the left side than on the right: six years ago he had a stroke, which we all pretend he’s recovered from; and he has, mostly.

  “What’s happening now?” I say, taking off my coat. I already know the story, having heard it before.

  “They’ve just set out,” says my mother.

  My father says, “They took the wrong supplies.” This pleases him: he himself would not have taken the wrong supplies. In fact he would never have gone on this ill-advised journey in the first place, or – although he was once more reckless, more impetuous, more sure of his ability to confront fate and transcend danger – this is his opinion now. “Darn fools,” he says, grinning away.

  But what supplies could they have taken, other than the wrong ones? White sugar, white flour, rice; that was what you took then. Peameal, sulphured apples, hardtack, bacon, lard. Heavy things. There was no freeze-drying then, no handy packaged soups; there were no nylon vests, no pocket-sized sleeping bags, no lightweight tarpaulins. Their tent was made of balloon silk, oiled to waterproof it. Their blankets were of wool. The packsacks were canvas, with leather straps and tumplines that went across the forehead to cut the strain on the back. These would have smelled of tar. In addition there were two rifles, two pistols, twelve hundred rounds of ammunition, a camera, and a sextant; and then the cooking utensils and the clothing. Every pound of it had to be carried over each and every portage, or hauled upriver in the canoe, which was eighteen feet long, wood-framed, and canvas-covered.

  None of this would have daunted the adventurers, however, or not at first. There were two of them, two young Americans; they’d been on camping expeditions before, although at warmer latitudes, with fragrant evening pipes smoked before cheerful blazes and a fresh-caught trout sizzling in the pan while the sunsets paled in the west. Each would have been able to turn a neat, Kiplingesque paragraph or two on the lure of wild places, the challenge of the unknown. This was in 1903, when exploration was still in vogue as a test of manliness, and when manliness itself was still in vogue, and was thought to couple naturally with the word clean. Manliness, cleanliness, the wilderness, where you could feel free. With gun and fishing rod, of course. You could live off the land.

  The leader of the expedition, whose name was Hubbard, worked for a magazine dedicated to the outdoors. His idea was that he and his chum and cousin – whose name was Wallace – would penetrate the last unmapped Labrador wilds, and he would write a series of articles about their adventures, and thus make his name. (These were his very words: “I will make my name.”) Specifically, they would ascend the
Nascaupee River, said to flow out of Lake Michikamau, a fabled inland lake teeming with fish; from there they could make it to the George River, where the Indians congregated every summer for the caribou hunt, and from there to a Hudson’s Bay post, and out to the coast again. While among the Indians, Hubbard planned to do a little amateur anthropology, which he would also write up, with photographs – a shaggy-haired hunter with an old-fashioned rifle, his foot on a carcass; a cut-off head, with spreading antlers. Women with bead necklaces and gleaming eyes chewing the hide, or sewing it, or whatever they did. The Last Wild People. Something like that. There was a great interest in such subjects. He would describe the menus too.

  (But those Indians came from the north. No one ever took the river route from the west and south.)

  In stories like this, there is always – there is supposed to be – an old Indian who appears to the white men as they are planning to set out. He comes to warn them, because he is kind at heart and they are ignorant. “Do not go there,” he says. “That is a place we never go.” Indians in these tales have a formal manner of speaking.

  “Why not?” the white men say.

  “Bad spirits live there,” says the old Indian. The white men smile and thank him, and disregard his advice. Native superstition, they think. So they go where they’ve been warned not to, and then, after many hardships, they die. The old Indian shakes his head when he hears of it. Foolish white men, but what can you tell them? They have no respect.

  There’s no old Indian in this book – he somehow got left out – so my father takes the part upon himself. “They shouldn’t have gone there,” he says. “The Indians never went that way.” He doesn’t say bad spirits, however. He says, “Nothing to eat.” For the Indians it would have been the same thing, because where does food come from if not from the spirits? It isn’t just there, it is given; or else withheld.

  Hubbard and Wallace tried to hire several Indians, to come with them, at least on the first stages of the journey, and to help with the packs. None would go; they said they were “too busy.” Really they knew too much. What they knew was that you couldn’t possibly carry with you, in there, everything you would need to eat. And if you couldn’t carry it, you would have to kill it. But most of the time there was nothing to kill. “Too busy” meant too busy to die. It also meant too polite to point out the obvious.

  The two explorers did do one thing right. They hired a guide. His name was George, and he was a Cree Indian, or partly; what they called then a “breed.” He was from James Bay, too far away from the Labrador to know the full and evil truth about it. George travelled south to meet his employers, all the way to New York City, where he had never been before. He had never been to the United States before, or even to a city. He kept calm, he looked about him; he demonstrated his resourcefulness by figuring out what a taxicab was, and how to hire one. His ability to reason things through was to come in very handy later on.

  “That George was quite a boy,” says my father. George is his favourite person in the whole story.

  Somewhere around the house there’s a picture of my father himself – at the back of a photo album, perhaps, with the snapshots that haven’t yet been stuck in. It shows him thirty years younger, on some canoe trip or another – if you don’t write these things down on the backs of the pictures, they get forgotten. He’s evidently crossing a portage. He hasn’t shaved, he’s got a bandana tied around his head because of the blackflies and mosquitoes, and he’s carrying a heavy pack, with the broad tumpline across his forehead. His hair is dark, his glistening face is deeply tanned and not what you’d call clean. He looks slightly villainous; like a pirate, or indeed like a northwoods guide, the kind that might suddenly vanish in the middle of the night, along with your best rifle, just before the wolves arrive on the scene. But like someone who knows what he’s doing.

  “That George knew what he was doing,” says my father now.

  Once he got out of New York, that is; while there, George wasn’t much help, because he didn’t know where to shop. It was in New York that the two men bought all the necessary supplies, except a gill net, which they thought they could find up north. They also failed to purchase extra moccasins. This may have been their worst mistake.

  Then they set out, by train and then by boat and then by smaller boat. The details are tedious. The weather was bad, the meals were foul, none of the transportation was ever on time. They spent a lot of hours and even days waiting around on docks and wondering when their luggage would turn up.

  “That’s enough for tonight,” says my mother.

  “I think he’s asleep,” I say.

  “He never used to go to sleep,” says my mother. “Not with this story. Usually he’s busy making up his list.”

  “His list?”

  “His list of what he would take.”

  While my father sleeps, I skip ahead in the story. The three men have finally made it inland from the bleak northeastern shore of Labrador, and have left their last jumping-off place, and are voyaging in earnest. It’s the middle of July, but the short summer will soon be over, and they have five hundred miles to go.

  Their task is to navigate Grand Lake, which is long and thin; at its extreme end, or so they’ve been told, the Nascaupee flows into it. The only map they’ve seen, crudely drawn by an earlier white traveller some fifty years before, shows Grand Lake with only one river emptying into it. One is all the Indians have ever mentioned: the one that goes somewhere. Why talk about the others, because why would anyone want to know about them? There are many plants that have no names because they cannot be eaten or used.

  But in fact there are four other rivers.

  During this first morning they are exhilarated, or so Wallace records. Their hopes are high, adventure calls. The sky is deep blue, the air is crisp, the sun is bright, the treetops seem to beckon them on. They do not know enough to beware of beckoning treetops. For lunch they have flapjacks and syrup, and are filled with a sense of well-being. They know they’re going into danger, but they also know they are immortal. Such moods do occur, in the north. They take pictures with their camera: of their canoe, of their packsacks, of one another: moustached, be-sweatered, with puttee-shaped wrappings on their legs and things on their heads that look like bowler hats, leaning blithely on their paddles. Heartbreaking, but only when you know the end. As it is they’re having the time of their lives.

  There’s another photo of my father, perhaps from the same trip as the one with the portage; or he’s wearing the same bandana. This time he’s grinning into the camera lens, pretending to shave himself with his axe. Two tall-tale points are being made: that his axe is as sharp as a razor, and that his bristles are so tough that only an axe could cut them. It’s highjinks, a canoe-trip joke. Although secretly of course he once believed both of these things.

  On the second day the three men pass the mouth of the Nascaupee, which is hidden behind an island and looks like shoreline. They don’t even suspect it is there. They continue on to the end of the lake, and enter the river they find there. They’ve taken the wrong turn.

  I don’t get back to Labrador for more than a week. When I return, it’s a Sunday night. The fire is blazing away and my father is sitting in front of it, waiting to see what will happen next. My mother is rustling up the baking-powder biscuits and the decaffeinated tea. I forage for cookies.

  “How is everything?” I say.

  “Fine,” she says. “But he doesn’t get enough exercise.” Everything means my father, as far as she is concerned.

  “You should make him go for a walk,” I say.

  “Make him,” she says.

  “Well, suggest.”

  “He doesn’t see the point of walking just to walk,” she says. “If you’re not going anywhere.”

  “You could send him on errands,” I say. To this she does not bother even to reply.

  “He says his feet hurt,” she says. I think of the array of almost-new boots and shoes in the closet; boots and shoe
s that have proliferated lately. He keeps buying other ones. If only he can find the right pair, he must think, whatever it is that’s causing his feet to hurt will go away.

  I carry in the teacups, dole out the plates. “So, how are Hubbard and Wallace coming along?” I say. “Have you got to the place where they eat the owl?”

  “Slim pickings,” he says. “They took the wrong river. Even if they’d found the right one, it was too late to start.”

  Hubbard and Wallace and George toil upstream. The heat at midday is oppressive. Flies torment them, little flies like pinpricks, giant ones as big as your thumb. The river is barely navigable: they have to haul their laden canoe over gravel shallows, or portage around rapids, through forest that is harsh and unmarked and jumbled. In front of them the river unrolls; behind them it closes up like a maze. The banks of the river grow steeper; hill after hill, gentle in outline, hard at the core. It’s a sparse landscape: ragged spruce, birch, aspen, all spindly, in some places burned over, the way forward blocked by charred and fallen tree trunks.

  How long is it before they realize they’ve gone up the wrong river? Far too long. They cache some of their food so they won’t have to carry it; they throw some of it away. They manage to shoot a caribou, which they eat, leaving the hooves and head behind. Their feet hurt; their moccasins are wearing out.

  At last Hubbard climbs a high hill, and from its top he sees Lake Michikamau; but the river they have been following does not go there. The lake is too far away: they can’t possibly haul their canoe that far through the forest. They will have to turn back.

  In the evenings their talk is no longer of discovery and exploration. Instead they discuss what they will eat. What they’ll eat tomorrow, and what they’ll eat when they get back. They compose bills of fare, feasts, grand blowouts. George is able to shoot or catch this and that. A duck here, a grouse there. A whiskeyjack. They catch sixty trout, painstakingly one by one, using a hook and line because they have no gill net. The trout are clear and fresh as ice-water, but only six inches long. Nothing is nearly enough. The work of travelling uses up more energy than they can take in; they are slowly dissolving, wasting away.