macCLOUD FALLS, page 26
He hesitated, peered over his glasses at her. ‘That’s quite funny. But the townsfolk? Really? You make it sound like we’re in some Gothic novel.’
They both laughed. ‘Yup. I think we could be,’ she said. ‘Hope they don’t come after us with a wooden stake. And here’s something else for you – they think you’re a scriptwriter and that I’m Sigourney Weaver. They think we’re going to make a film about Jimmy Lyle or something.’
‘Who?’
She was puzzled. ‘Who what?’
‘I mean, who is Sigourney Weaver?’
She stood open-mouthed. ‘You don’t know?’
‘I may have heard the name. Why? Should I know?’
‘Don’t you watch movies?’
‘Not really. At least not since I was young. Then it was Westerns mainly.’
‘You’ve never heard of Alien? Gorillas in the Mist? Ghostbusters?’
‘Heard of them, maybe… seen them, no.’
‘You are an antique, Gil. It’s amazing you even have a laptop.’
‘Had to get one. Online sales in the book-trade took off and I wouldn’t have been able to compete otherwise. Don’t use it for much else. Not until now, at any rate. Suddenly I’m writing. At least, if you’d stop talking and let me get on with it…’ he winked at her.
‘Sorry I’m sure! Anyway, glad to see you’re feeling better.’ She turned to go, then stopped on the threshold, her dog at her knee. ‘But when you’re done and feel you can talk, I’d like to hear what happened yesterday. You were babbling on last night about finding some cabin with initials carved on it?’
‘That’s what I’m writing right now.’
‘Ah, okay. Sorry.’ Again she made to leave, but he turned to her with a theatrical sigh.
‘Hey, it’s alright, I’ll tell you now. I suppose I owe you after you saved my life.’ He winked again. ‘May help if I rehearse the story before I try to write it anyway. Come in, sit down.’
‘Okay.’ She sat on the end of the bed. The heat-fatigued dog lay down at her feet, tongue lolling.
‘It was, well, strange. I didn’t really know where I was going. None of the band want to talk about the cabin, it’s their secret.’
‘I read that. Last night while you were sleeping. Tell me what you found. Where you went.’
‘Okay. You see, there’s this creek that flows into the river just south of the town. It comes out of the side of the mountain as a waterfall, it’s really amazing.’
‘I saw that this morning, yes.’
‘Huh,’ he said. ‘You’ve been busy. Anyway, that water has supplied this little community since the first settlers arrived. It’s cool clear water that could be easily diverted, not like the stuff in the river outside here, where the current is far too strong. It’s all silty – and of course back then they didn’t have fancy pumps and filters like today. But the falls was like a gift of gravity. All they had to do was channel it.’
‘Yes,’ she said, rather impatiently, ‘I read all about that too. Get to what happened – you know, after the end of your journal.’
‘All right. So anyway, I learned from the elder I spoke to that the cabin where Jimmy Lyle had lived with his first wife was somewhere in the hidden valley this creek flows out of.’
‘I know that too.’
He put down his glasses and looked at her. ‘You really are interested?’
She held out her palms to him and shook her head a little, as if to say isn’t that obvious? ‘Tell me what happened after you spoke with Deeanna down at the river. Assuming that actually happened?’
‘You read all that?’ he said, ‘Huh.’ He got up from his desk and went to window to look out. ‘Okay, well,’ he began, ‘After I came back here to the inn, I studied a local map I’d found in the library, and worked out where the cabin most likely was. Actually there were two places it could have been, where there seemed to be a homestead. So the next morning I set out to look for it. I walked up the trail past the waterfall…’
‘Like Kyle told you…’
‘Yes, though his name isn’t really Kyle, so I came to a fork in the track just at the shoulder of the ridge. I could still just see the southern edge of the town, the new bridge and the inn in the distance. And just as I was wondering which way to go, I saw this figure in the distance up ahead. It looked like a child, an Indian child…’
‘First Nations,’ she corrected.
‘Yes, sorry, slip of the tongue. But the thing was, she or maybe it was a he, they were wearing what looked like buckskin and had their hair in a braid. It was like they were dressed as an Indian as they used to be, you know in all the old Westerns.’
‘They were never Indians, not even back then.’
‘I know that. I’m not explaining myself properly. What I mean is that it looked like the Hollywood cliché of what the aboriginal inhabitants of North America looked like. Does that make sense?’
‘Not really. Why would anybody be dressing like that now in 2011?’
He laughed. ‘Maybe they wanted to be in a film that doesn’t really exist?’
‘But wasn’t this before I got here and all the Ms Weaver movie stuff started? By the way, remember to call me Martina here.’
He looked puzzed. ‘I’m incognito,’ she said after a moment.
‘Anyway, I don’t know why I saw what I saw, but I did. And this figure, young woman or maybe a young man, seemed to be signalling me to follow. So I did. By the time I got up to where they’d been standing, they had moved up higher still.’
‘So this was like a trail?’
‘It wasn’t much more than a track. There were no tyre marks, no trucks had been up it, it was just hoof prints, bighorn sheep, I thought, goats or deer or whatever else is out there. And the further up I went the narrower it got.’
‘And?’
‘Well, when I got up to the top, I could just about see what lay on the other side. The waterfall came out of a hidden creek, on a much higher level than the valley here. You could see how the water was eating away at the rock that divided the two, the canyon below and this tributary, and that at some future point in time the divide would give way. It was a landslide waiting to happen, and there was nothing to stop it. And somehow I just knew that this was the sacred valley I’d heard about, hidden away above the town, the source of its water supply.’
‘And?’
‘Then I saw something moving in the sagebrush, quite a distance off so I could hardly see it clearly in bright sunlight, but I just knew it was the same figure who had helped me find the right path up the mountain side. Again they seemed to be waiting for me to follow, so I did. No sooner was I on the move, winding my way through the scrub, the scrawny bushes and the rocks, than they disappeared again. This place was like a pass between two glens…’
‘Glens?’
‘Scottish for steep valleys. When I reached the place where my elusive guide had last been standing, suddenly I could see the panorama of the secret valley. A perfect mountain loch in a kind of corrie…’
‘Translation?’
‘Em, like a small lake in a gulley in the mountainside…’
‘Okay…’
‘The sun was catching the rock face behind it, dazzling bright yellow with these blue or purple fissures cut into it in such a regular pattern, it almost looked man-made.’
She nodded. ‘I noticed that too, how the canyon looks like someone carved it to a pattern. Driving up from Vancouver took my breath away. All the way from Hope we were climbing, climbing, and it just got more and more dramatic, didn’t it, Hero?’ Hero didn’t argue.
‘Yes, but this wasn’t part of the canyon, it was a small side valley at a much higher elevation, like I said. You can’t see it from the road at all. You’d never know it was there except for where the waterfall bursts through. And up there behind the waterfall is this amazing place, protected from the full heat of the sun because of where it is. It’s so green and lush around the loch, it seemed like another country altogether. And the scale was smaller. Like Scotland.’
‘So what happened?’
‘That’s the strange thing. I’m not sure. Not now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, as I was standing there, taking in the sight, about a hundred yards ahead, the same figure I had seen before, guiding me up to the pass, appeared again, on a small rocky outcrop above the path. And with them – she or he – was another figure in buckskin.’
‘And?’
‘I felt sure it was him - Jimmy Lyle. Because I thought I could see he was blond, not dark, under his Stetson, and he wore a fringed jacket like one he was wearing in a photo I have. In fact, I thought he looked exactly like he did in that photo.’
‘But that’s impossible.’
‘That’s what I’m saying... now it seems ridiculous, but at that moment I believed it really was him. And it didn’t seem at all strange to me then. And I seemed to know that the young guide was his N’laka’pamux wife. That she had brought me up the mountain so I could see him there…’
Not-Sigourney sat quietly, Hero by her feet, her brown eyes seeking meaning from his, but her face otherwise expressionless. After a while she said, ‘You were probably suffering sunstroke or something.’
Gilbert shook his head, his pink nose beginning to peel a little. ‘Maybe. But it seemed very real. Or about as real as a vision might be. I’m not explaining this very well. Maybe you should just read what I’ve written?’
‘Okay…’
‘I’ll scroll back to the beginning. Mind, it’s not finished yet…’
‘Sure.’ He got up from the desk so she could sit down.
She read.
The trail turned back upon itself, and I found I was above the waterfall, a steep crevasse between where I stood and the place where it sprang from the canyon wall. A larch stood on one side, almost impossibly rooted between rocks, its trunk twisted in an attempt to defy gravity. Two old birches faced it, their trunks gnarled, leaves few, and yet they stretched towards the place where the sun might reach them, beyond the canyon shadows. From that viewpoint I could see the waterfall began not as a single stream but as two, joining as they fell, invisible from below, as the water vapour rising masked their merging. The mountain John MacLeod had called ‘Arthur’s Seat’, because it reminded him of Edinburgh, from here looked quite different, though no less kingly. The sun was almost behind it, so that the slope of ‘Arthur’s Seat’ was shaded darkly, but further on, where the canyon turned westward into the sun’s rays, the rocky steep shone golden. Below, the narrow strip of green where the settlement was established lay shaded from the summer heat, a vague haze of verdure between mountain and river. Those were orchards once, watered by the flumes that John MacLeod had built, a matter of three miles or so, sloping gently down to the little plain formed who-knows-when by the landslips whose origins could be seen quite clearly in hollows in the shadowed steeps. MacLeod Falls – I thought of how his history had been obliterated, how the syllable that commemorated his effort, the great labour of engineering to irrigate the land below, that simple ‘Mac’, had been forgotten. Now these were simply the ‘Cloud Falls’, a far more poetic name, like an Anglicization of a native observation, those clouds of water vapour that billowed constantly from the crevasse below. I followed the narrow path a little further until I could see beyond the ridge, to the far side of the hill. In the shadows a fleck of red caught my eye and I made out a figure sitting on a boulder overlooking the waterfall. I stood watching as a second figure appeared, clambered up to the very edge of the precipice above the falls, where they stopped on a protruding rock that stuck out over the drop, like a giant nose breathing in the vapour. The figure seemed almost to float above the water in the clouds that rose from below. The noise from the falls was deafening, but I fancied I could hear a voice, chanting, in the midst of it. I was transfixed. It was a moment of sublime enlightenment, and I felt somehow that these figures were the man I was seeking and his wife. But how could they have been? They’d been dead for a century. They were spectres at best, conjured by the heat and the mist, the sunrays’ splintering. And at that moment, it struck me that ‘Cloud Falls’ was exactly the right name for this place. Even if everyone had forgotten John MacLeod, even if the name was now a corrupted misnomer, it described the natural phenomenon, a truth.
She looked up from the screen. He was sitting on the end of the bed, lobster-red, and she couldn’t help smiling. He looked quizzical.
‘Is it funny?’
‘No, it isn’t that. I just thought of something else. Actually, it’s quite poetic. So what happened then?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s all pretty hazy after that,’ he said. ‘But I seem to remember following them down the far side of the pass to their cabin by the lakeside, and him pointing out my father’s initials carved in the timber,’ he said, then frowned uncertainly. ‘Or did I show him them?’
‘Maybe we could go back there and see? I mean, not right now obviously.’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure I could find the path. Maybe I imagined it all? Even if the initials were there, I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I just carved them myself? While I was sun-struck and delirious?’
‘Do you think you did?’
‘All I really remember is coming-to when George and his sons found me. From the young woman guiding me to the secret valley until the lights of the truck shone in my face, it’s hard to say what happened. I felt sure I’d found the cabin at first, but now I’m not certain. It seems so bizarre, it must have been some kind of dream. But some of it did happen. If Lyle and Antko were illusions, what about the cabin? And the carving?’
She didn’t say anything for a while, but got up and walked to the window, from where she could see the mountain. She didn’t know anything about this ‘Arthur’s Seat’ back in Scotland, but she pictured Gil walking up that great slope in the hot sun, here in Canadian canyon and thought again how foolhardy he had been. ‘I think you’re still a little delirious. You should rest,’ she said.
He stretched his arms above his head and yawned. ‘Maybe you’re right. But I feel I have to get this down while it’s fresh.’ He sat for a moment, in thought. ‘You know, thinking about it now, maybe it wasn’t a vision. I think it may have been the painter I saw at the top of the waterfall.’
‘The one who painted the portrait of Lyle’s wife in your journal?’
‘It could have been her, yes. With someone else.’ He seemed confused, trying to work out what had happened to him.
‘Okay, I’ll leave you. But don’t overdo things. Remember you’re not a well man.’ She turned and walked to the door. Hero got up and followed her. ‘Oh, I forgot, there’s something else – then I’ll go, I promise. We’ve been invited out tonight to Colette’s Country and Western night - no, not Colette, Dolette. You know, the Apple Store woman. Whatever it’s called.’
‘Her what?’
‘You know, music, Country and Western.’
‘Really?’
‘I know you’re not well enough, but…’
‘Who says I’m not? I love Country music.’
‘Gil…’
He laughed. ‘And I want to see who’s there… it’s research.’
He did seem to be okay, she thought. ‘And she says her brother-in-law who owns High Ridge where Lyle lived will be there, and that he’d show us around the house if we asked.’
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You’re a fast worker.’
‘It’s easy when you have wheels, Mr Walking Scotsman. You’re very lucky I turned up.’
‘I suppose I am.’
‘You suppose?’
‘Okay, I am.’
She was about to leave him to his writing when a thought stopped her. ‘One more thing. That healer in your story, the one who said you would find the road to the cabin – Paulette mentioned her.’
‘Yeah?’ But he wasn’t paying proper attention, he had returned to his laptop, and was peering through his glasses at the screen. ‘What about her?’
‘What did you feel? Assuming it actually happened?’
He stopped and turned to face her. ‘Hah, yes that happened. Strangest thing.’
‘And you really felt different afterwards?’
‘You know, I’d almost forgotten about that, what with the cabin and all. But yes, I really did, at least at first.’
‘As if she’d healed you or something?’
‘Ach, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t really believe in any of that. Away you go,’ he said, ‘We’ll talk about it later.’ And he went back to his writing.
‘You sure you’re okay?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
‘You still look like a lobster,’ she said as she closed the door. She went downstairs with Hero, thinking she’d like to see this healer herself. She felt like calling back to him, that even if he doesn’t believe, maybe she does. But she wasn’t sure if she did. What harm could it do, though?
It was hot again and Hero was feeling it under all that fur. She filled his bowl of water on the terrace and sat down in the shade. Her mind was confused by the twisted truth she had read and the real town she found herself in. Her life had suddenly lurched sideways, revealing a secret territory she had not expected could exist, and she was now standing on the threshold of travelling deeper into the country that had adopted her than she had ever been before. The history that Gil was uncovering held a strange wonder for her, and it was leading her into a past that was also very much present. It was a world beyond, a life beyond cancer, beyond her imagined death. Something they had both shared, and something that now bound them together. Where they were to go, what lay ahead, was impossible to predict, but she felt sure that she must travel this road as far as it went, this road she had not believed possible until a few days ago. Something in her had been freed and her worst fear quelled. It was like some part of her had died – a part of her that wasn’t her but yet, at the same time, it was, which was in her but shouldn’t be. She and Hero were travelling now, driving away from home and away from all of the past. And they had a passenger, a hitchhiker on the highway north, a pink man who bathed in porridge.
