The Double Hook

by Sheila Watson

  THE AUTHOR

  SHEILA WATSON was born in New Westminster, British Columbia, in 1909. She took her B.A. (1931) and M.A. (1933) from the University of British Columbia, and then taught in elementary and high schools on the B.C. mainland and on Vancouver Island before beginning further graduate studies in English literature at the University of Toronto after the Second World War.

  In the early 1950s, Watson lived in Calgary, where she wrote much of her novel The Double Hook. In the same decade, she continued her graduate studies, working on Wyndham Lewis under the supervision of Marshall McLuhan.

  In 1961 Watson joined the Department of English at the University of Alberta. With colleagues there, she was a founder and editor of White Pelican, an avant-garde journal of literature and the visual arts. She retired from teaching in 1975, and moved to Nanaimo, British Columbia.

  In 1992 she published Deep Hollow Creek, a novel she had written in the late 1930s.

  Sheila Watson died in Nanaimo, British Columbia, in 1998.

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  ADVISORY BOARD

  Alice Munro

  W.H. New

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Copyright © 1959 Sheila Watson

  Copyright © 1966 by McClelland & Stewart

  Afterword copyright © 1989 by F.T. Flahiff

  First New Canadian Library edition 1989.

  This New Canadian Library edition 2008.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Watson, Sheila, 1909–1998.

  The double hook / Sheila Watson ; with an afterword by F.T. Flahiff.

  (New Canadian library)

  Originally publ.: 1959.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-244-0

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8545.A88D6 2008 C813′.54 C2008-900781-6

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/NCL

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Series Information

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  He doesn’t know

  you can’t catch

  the glory on a hook

  and hold on to it.

  That when you

  fish for the glory

  you catch the

  darkness too.

  That if you hook

  twice the glory

  you hook

  twice the fear.

  ONE

  1

  In the folds of the hills

  under Coyote’s eye

  lived

  the old lady, mother of William

  of James and of Greta

  lived James and Greta

  lived William and Ara his wife

  lived the Widow Wagner

  the Widow’s girl Lenchen

  the Widow’s boy

  lived Felix Prosper and Angel

  lived Theophil

  and Kip

  until one morning in July

  Greta was at the stove. Turning hotcakes. Reaching for the coffee beans. Grinding away James’s voice.

  James was at the top of the stairs. His hand halfraised. His voice in the rafters.

  James walking away. The old lady falling. There under the jaw of the roof. In the vault of the bed loft. Into the shadow of death. Pushed by James’s will. By James’s hand. By James’s words: This is my day. You’ll not fish today.

  2

  Still the old lady fished. If the reeds had dried up and the banks folded and crumbled down she would have fished still. If God had come into the valley, come holding out the long finger of salvation, moaning in the darkness, thundering down the gap at the lake head, skimming across the water, drying up the blue signature like blotting-paper, asking where, asking why, defying an answer, she would have thrown her line against the rebuke; she would have caught a piece of mud and looked it over; she would have drawn a line with the barb when the fire of righteousness baked the bottom.

  3

  Ara saw her fishing along the creek. Fishing shamelessly with bait. Fishing without a glance towards her daughter-in-law, who was hanging washing on the bushes near the rail fence.

  I might as well be dead for all of her, Ara said. Passing her own son’s house and never offering a fry even today when he’s off and gone with the post.

  The old lady fished on with a concentrated ferocity as if she were fishing for something she’d never found.

  Ara hung William’s drawers on a rail. She had covered the bushes with towels.

  Then she looked out from under her shag of bangs at the old lady’s back.

  It’s not for fish she fishes, Ara thought. There’s only three of them. They can’t eat all the fish she’d catch.

  William would try to explain, but he couldn’t. He only felt, but he always felt he knew. He could give half a dozen reasons for anything. When a woman on his route flagged him down with a coat and asked him to bring back a spool of thread from the town below, he’d explain that thread has a hundred uses. When it comes down to it, he’d say, there’s no telling what thread is for. I knew a woman once, he’d say, who used it to sew up her man after he was throwed on a barbed-wire fence.

  Ara could hear the cow mumbling dry grass by the bushes. There was no other sound.

  The old lady was rounding the bend of the creek. She was throwing her line into a rock pool. She was fishing upstream to the source. That way she’d come to the bones of the hills and the flats between where the herd cows ranged. They’d turn their tails to her and stretch their hides tight. They’d turn their living flesh from her as she’d turned hers from others.

  The water was running low in the creek. Except in the pools, it would be hardly up to the ankle. Yet as she watched the old lady, Ara felt death leaking through from the centre of the earth. Death rising to the knee. Death rising to the loin.

  She raised her chin to unseat the thought. No such thing could happen. The water was drying away. It lay only in the deep pools.

  Ara wasn’t sure where water started.

  William wouldn’t hesitate: It comes gurgling up from inside the hill over beyond the lake. There’s water over and it falls down. There’s water under and it rushes up. The trouble with water is it never rushes at the right time. The creeks dry up and the grass with them. There are men, he’d say, have seen their whole place fade like a cheap shirt. And there’s no way a man can fold it up and bring it in out of the sun. You can save a cabbage plant or a tomato plant with tents of paper if you’ve got the paper, but there’s no human being living can tent a field and pasture.

  I’ve seen cows, he’d say, with lard running off them into the ground. The m
ost unaccountable thing, he’d say, is the way the sun falls. I’ve seen a great cow, he’d say, throw no more shadow for its calf than a lean rabbit.

  Ara looked over the fence. There was no one on the road. It lay white across the burnt grass.

  Coyote made the land his pastime. He stretched out his paw. He breathed on the grass. His spittle eyed it with prickly pear.

  Ara went into the house. She filled the basin at the pump in the kitchen and cooled her feet in the water.

  We’ve never had a pump in our house all the years we’ve lived here, she’d heard Greta say. Someday, she’d say, you’ll lift the handle and stand waiting till eternity. James brings water in barrels from the spring. The thing about a barrel is you take it where you take it. There’s something fixed about a pump, fixed and uncertain.

  Ara went to the door. She threw the water from the basin into the dust. She watched the water roll in balls on the ground. Roll and divide and spin.

  The old lady had disappeared.

  Ara put on a straw hat. She tied it with a bootlace under the chin. She wiped the top of the table with her apron which she threw behind a pile of papers in the corner. She went to the fence and leaned against the rails.

  If a man lost the road in the land round William Potter’s, he couldn’t find his way by keeping to the creek bottom for the creek flowed this way and that at the land’s whim. The earth fell away in hills and clefts as if it had been dropped carelessly wrinkled on the bare floor of the world.

  Even God’s eye could not spy out the men lost here already, Ara thought. He had looked mercifully on the people of Nineveh though they did not know their right hand and their left. But there were not enough people here to attract his attention. The cattle were scrub cattle. The men lay like sift in the cracks of the earth.

  Standing against the rails of the fence, she looked out over the yellow grass. The empty road leading from James’s gate went on from William’s past the streaked hills, past the Wagners’, down over the culvert, past Felix Prosper’s.

  4

  Felix saw the old lady. She was fishing in his pool where the water lay brown on the black rocks, where the fish lay still under the fallen log. Fishing far from her own place. Throwing her line into his best pool.

  He thought: I’ll chase her out.

  But he sat, tipped back in his rocking-chair, his belly bulging his bibbed overalls, while the old lady fished, while the thistles thrust his potato plants aside and the potatoes baked in the shallow soil.

  When at last he went down to the creek the old lady had gone. And he thought: Someday I’ll put a catcher on the fence and catch her for once and all.

  Then he fished himself, letting his line fall from an old spool, his hook catch in the leaves. Fished with his chin rolled over the bib of his overalls, while his fiddle lay against his rocker and the potatoes baked in the vertical glory of the July sun.

  Fished and came from the creek. Pulled the fish out of his pocket. Slit them from tail to chin. Sloshed them in the hand basin. Dropped them into bacon fat until the edges browned. Cooked them to a curl while the dogs sniffed. Cooked them in peace alone with his dogs.

  Angel had gone. She had walked across the yard like a mink trailing her young behind her. She had climbed the high seat of Theophil’s wagon. Now she lived with Theophil at the bend of the road near the old quarry.

  He lifted the brown edge of the fish and took out the bones. The terrier sat under the shadow of his belly. The hounds stood, dewlaps trembling, their paws shoved over the sill. Felix fed the terrier where it sat. The hounds waited, their lips wet, their eyes quick with longing.

  When Felix had finished, he rolled out of his chair and gathered up a pan of scraps from the trestle on which the buckets rest. The hounds backed away from the door, jostling shoulder to shoulder, tail bisecting tail. He gave them the scraps.

  If they walked out of his gate like Angel, he would not ask if they had hay to lie on. His own barn was often empty.

  He went back to the table and gathered up the bones that lay around his plate. He stood with a fish spine in his hand. Flesh mountainous contemplating. Saint Felix with a death’s head meditating.

  At last he threw the bones into the stove. The heat from the stove, the heat crept in from the day outside, anointed his face. Blest, he sat down again in the rocker, and the boards creaked and groaned as he fiddled.

  The old lady did not come back to disturb his peace. But somewhere below the house a coyote barked, and the hounds raised their heads, gathered their limbs and sprang into the brush. The terrier sat in Felix’s shadow, its ear turned to the voice of Felix’s fiddle.

  But the hounds heard Coyote’s song fretting the gap between the red boulders:

  In my mouth is the east wind.

  Those who cling to the rocks I will

  bring down

  I will set my paw on the eagle’s nest.

  The hounds came back, yellow forms in the yellow sunlight. Creeping round the barn. Flattening themselves to rest.

  Felix put down his fiddle and slept.

  5

  The Widow’s boy saw the old lady.

  The old lady from above is fishing down in our pool, he said, coming into the Widow’s kitchen. I’m going down to scare her out.

  The Widow’s eyes closed.

  Dear God, she said, what does she want? So old, so wicked, fishing the fish of others. Slipping her line under our fence before my boy can get the fish on his hook.

  The Widow’s daughter Lenchen sat behind the table. Her yellow hair pulled straight above her eyes like a ragged cap. Her hands in the pockets of her denim jeans. Her heavy heeled boots beating impatience into the boards of the floor.

  At the far end of the table the Widow was straining milk into shallow pans. The boy sat down and rested his elbows on the other end of the table.

  Where’s she fishing? the girl asked.

  Down at the grass pool, the boy said.

  It’s enough to turn a person mad, the girl said, to have an old woman sneaking up and down the creek day in and day out. I can’t stand it any longer. It’s just what I was telling Ma. I’ve got to get away, right away from here. It’s time I learned something else, anyway. I’ve learned all there is to learn here. I know everything there is to know. I know even as much as you and James Potter.

  How do you know what James Potter knows? the boy asked.

  The Widow went on with her work.

  All you’d learn in town, she said, is men. And you’d be lucky if they didn’t learn you first. The things they know would be the death of me for you to know. They’d teach you things it isn’t easy to forget.

  She put the milk-pail down on the floor beside her, but she kept her eyelids folded over her eyes.

  It’s easier to remember than to forget, she said.

  There are things too real for a person to forget, the boy thought. There are things so real that a person has to see them. A person can’t keep her eyes glazed over like a dead bird’s forever. What will Ma do, the boy thought.

  You’ve got to take me, the girl said to the boy.

  Why don’t you just go? he said.

  You’ve been out with the men on the beef drive, she said. You know what it’s like down there. I’ve had enough of round this place, but I don’t know where to go.

  Place is the word, said the boy. I only know a place where men drink beer, he said. A bunch of men and an old parrot.

  He got up and went to the window.

  I’m going down to put a fence right across the creek, he said, so James Potter’s mother can’t go up and down here any more.

  6

  He went out of the kitchen into the sun. Outside the world floated like a mote in a straight shaft of glory. A horse coming round the corner of the barn shone copper against the hewn logs, Kip riding black on its reflected brightness.

  The boy raised his hand.

  Kip rode his horse forward to a stop. He rested his hands on the pommel of his saddle and shook
his feet free of the wooden stirrups to ease his legs.

  There’s nothing doing round here, said the boy, unless you’ve come to trade that bag of bones you’re riding for another.

  Some day, Kip said. Some day.

  Where are you going? the boy asked.

  On the road, Kip said. Riding. Just riding. Just coming and going. Where’s the girl?

  I don’t know, said the boy.

  I got a message for her, Kip said.

  She’s in the house, the boy said. Give her the message yourself. I’m not having anything to do with that sort of thing, one way or another.

  He went over to the barn and picked up a roll of wire. Then he put it down and looked at Kip.

  Kip’s face was turned towards the house.

  What in hell are you doing? said the boy.

  Looking, said Kip.

  Get out of here, the boy said. Wherever you are there’s trouble. If a man is breaking a horse when you come round it hangs itself on the halter, or throws itself, or gets out and back on the range. Take your message back where it came from.

  A’right, said Kip. A’right.

  He shoved his feet into his stirrups and gathered up his lines.

  The girl don’t need no telling, he said.

  He bent down over the saddle. His face hung close to the boy’s.

  When a stallion’s broke down your fence, he said, there’s nothing you can do except put the fence back up again.

  He swung his horse around away from the boy, but he kept his face turned over his shoulder.

  Wipe off that look, the boy said.

  Then he called after Kip: James Potter’s mother is fishing in our creek. It’s her I’m going to fence out.

  7

  As Kip moved off, the boy noticed the light again. Caught in the hide of the beast which picked its way along, its eyes on the dust of the road.

  He stood thinking of the light he’d known. Of pitch fires lit on the hills. Of leaning out of the black wind into the light of a small flame. Stood thinking how a horse can stand in sunlight and know nothing but the saddle and the sting of sweat on hide and the salt line forming under the saddle’s edge. Stood thinking of sweat and heat and the pain of living, the pain of fire in the middle of a haystack. Stood thinking of light burning free on the hills and flashing like the glory against the hides of things.