macCLOUD FALLS, page 3
So this really was British Columbia. He vaguely remembered landing, the airport with its native carvings, the long queue at passport control, coming through, drunk on whisky miniatures, feeling jet-lagged, weakly dragging his suitcase, wondering if the woman he’d met on the plane would be there at the other side of Customs as she’d said she would be. And then her waiting with her small red case, smiling at him, the taxi through the suburbs to the door outside, where she’d left him.
As the morning brightened, he went out to look around. The suite he had rented was a largish room with small kitchen on the ground floor of a wooden heritage house, painted fashionable grey. The neighbourhood was one of similarly smart suburban houses, some like Swiss cottages, others more Arts and Crafts. In one direction, the road dipped out of sight and in the distance he could see white-capped mountains across the bay. After breakfast, he’d walk there.
MacDonald Street was quite busy, a bus route to downtown, and it intersected with the much busier 4th Avenue a couple of blocks away. Commuters were already moving to wherever they were headed. He was waiting to cross at the lights, amused by the novelty of the Canadian signals, when he got a text.
hope u slept. j-lagged? if not, can i show u something? Martina
So she was real. He found a café on the corner of 4th and Bayswater, where he ate a muffin and drank coffee while he texted back: OK what? Where?
Jericho - native daughters.
OK
An hour later, she picked him up outside his suite in a green VW. As he opened the passenger door, hesitating briefly to check it was the correct side, she glanced at him curiously, as if she had doubted he’d existed too, and wanted to see him again just to prove that he did.
‘Hey,’ she said, as he got in. ‘You sleep?’
‘Yeah. But I woke too early, thanks to a flock of crows – or maybe they were ravens?
‘You sure you feel like doing this? Not too jet-lagged?’
‘Haha, I wouldn’t even know what that feels like,’ he said. ‘But when I woke, I thought it was night. I put on the tv and it was breakfast news, the anchorman was a Campbell and he was interviewing a MacAllister. There’s Scots everywhere. Very strange. So where are we going?’
‘I just thought you might like to see the oldest building in Vancouver. Thought it might get you on the road with your historical research.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ he said. In fact, he felt surprisingly good, good to be with her, good to be alive. The car came to a four way stop where a skateboarder was crossing.
A huge laminate photo image of a couple, embedded in the wall of an elaborate timber house on the corner, caught his eye. They were dressed in what seemed like smart 1950s fashions to him, posed almost nose to nose, though she was standing a step above her sweetheart. He read the picture title out loud: ‘John and Dimitra. Together Forever. So who were John and Dimitra?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, pulling away. ‘Some dearly departed Greek couple. I think one of their kids keeps the place as a kind of shrine to them now. Check out the gardens. The white picket fence is plastic, by the way.’
‘Happy in the ever after,’ she added. ‘There’s a big Greek community here. It’s not all Scottish.’
‘But a lot of it is,’ he suggested. He examined the image again. John stood a step below, looking up into Dimitra’s adoring face. She was displaying a large ring on her wedding finger. ‘They’re the perfect married couple, whoever they are.’
As she pulled away from the stop, she smiled. ‘Maybe. One photo doesn’t prove anything.’
At the bottom of the hill as she turned left, he caught a glimpse of skyscrapers glinting in the sun in the other direction. Downtown, obviously.
‘Beautiful,’ he said, not thinking.
‘Isn’t it? she answered. Then neither spoke for a while. She drove quickly and confidently along a main road skirting the shore. The view across the bay skipped in and out of sight between large mansion houses on the cliff edge, towards tall peaks across the sea. He could tell it was very beautiful and wanted to go down there, to be able gaze out across that Pacific water at the mountains and the skyscrapers, to think about all the distance he had travelled.
‘You know, that would be one of things on my bucket list,’ she said, thoughtfully.
‘What is?’
‘You’ll laugh, I know. It’s to get married.’
‘Married? Who to?’
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter so much. I just want to be a bride. If I was dying, it wouldn’t matter who it was, any one of my single friends would do.’
He studied her face as she drove, saw the golden glint of mischief he’d sighted the day before. It was hard to tell if she was serious. ‘But there wouldn’t be any together forever,’ he said.
‘That’s the point, clever. Just a big party where I could be the bride. Never having been one. Yet.’ The automatic gear change clicked and the engine eased into top, as they sped away from town.
‘I don’t really understand,’ he said, after a while.
‘Maybe it’s a girl thing. My girlfriends all understood.’
‘No, I mean marriage. The need. The urge. At all. Think I’ve lived alone too long. To be with someone in that domestic way.’
‘That’s not what I wanted. And maybe that’s why I never got married. No, it’s just the life event. I want to experience it. Every little girl thinks about it, or at least they did where I come from. Her wedding day.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘It’s a little town in Czech Republic. You wouldn’t know it.’
‘And any groom would do in this bucket list wedding, would they?’
‘Well, they’d have to look good in the photos. And play the role well on the day. You know, speeches, that sort of thing. And then leave me alone whenever I said so, once it’s all over. And divorce me if I lived.’
She put down the journal on the bed, a puzzled look on her face. Hero stared at her with his mind-reader’s eyes and she stroked his head. ‘Weird, Hero,’ she said under her breath. ‘We did say these things, or something like it.’ He’d captured something. Her eye fell on the next word and she read on.
‘So pretty straight forward then?’
‘Sure - interested?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not available. Dying men don’t make good husbands to be. You don’t know if they’re going to make it to the altar. Anyway, a beautiful woman like you has no shortage of men to choose from, I’d guess,’ he teased.
‘Not only men,’ she said. ‘This is Vancouver, after all,’
She turned off the main road, and down towards the shore, where a marina arced out into the bay. Behind a sandy cove stretched, the tide far out. They approached a small dilapidated wooden building, peeling a strange shade of dusty pink paint.
‘Jericho Beach,’ she offered.
‘So someone blew trumpets?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Bible story. When Jeremiah brought the walls of the city of Jericho down just by blowing trumpets.’
‘Now he’s making things up, Hero. Taking liberties. He didn’t say any of that clever stuff about the Bible.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know bible stories. I grew up in Soviet times.’
Hah!
‘Of course. It’s not important.’
She stopped and faced out across the wide bay, to the mountainous steeps on the far side, where streets of houses stretched up from the city below. ‘I think the name is a corruption. I read somewhere that an early settler had a lumber mill here and the beach was known as Jerry’s Cove, which got shortened to Jericho. Though there was a Squamish settlement here before that.’
‘And I never said that either.’
‘I sometimes try to imagine what it must have looked like, before Europeans arrived. There were three Squamish villages along the south coast here alone. And this is Hastings Museum, or the old Hastings Mill Store, as it was called. The home of the Native Daughters. It was the heart of the first lumber mill here, where downtown is now, then they towed it up here.’
‘So I suppose when the gold ran out, it was all about timber here, in the early days?’
‘In the early days of the white settlement, yes. That and salmon.’
‘I guess it was a hunter’s paradise, forests everywhere. Wild animals. Bears, wolves, beavers.’
‘But you know, they discovered a garbage pit downtown a while back while they were building, and the remains were at least 2,500 years old. You know, shells and bones and stuff. Some expert said it could be as old as 9,000 years.’
‘A midden?’
‘Yes. That’s it. A midden.’
‘Good Scots word,’ he said as he got out and wandered over to the front door, where an old iron bell swung from a new support. She hung back by the VW, sat on the bonnet and smiled, as he pulled out his Nikon and began snapping the front of the store, its shuttered windows and signs.
‘Like it?’ she asked.
He turned and looked at her sitting there watching. ‘As you say over here, sure.’ And he turned the lens towards her, focused. She crossed her legs, lifted her chin, posed, and he pressed the shutter. Gazing into the camera at the recorded image, he said ‘You don’t look very Czech,’ with a grin.
‘How should I look?’
‘Well, I always thought Czech women were tall and blonde. You know, like the tennis player.’
‘But I refuse your stereotyping. You don’t have ginger hair and a kilt.’
He clicked the shutter again, checked the picture. Again, he had the feeling she reminded him of someone. ‘True. I’m a poor specimen of my race.’
‘You are indeed. So very thin and... what’s the word?’
‘Thrawn?’ he offered, but she didn’t respond.
Instead she stood up. ‘If you say so. Anyway, I’m going in now.’
‘Let’s...’
She laid the journal down as Hero’s ears pricked up, and they both listened as a distant rumble grew. But it passed, just a truck on the highway. Turning back to the story in front of her, she said ‘It all seems a bit stagey, buddy. I’m not sure what to make of it. What is this Scotchman of ours up to?’ But she carried on.
He pushed the old wooden door of the museum open for her, and she went to squeeze past, into the gloom. For a moment they were nose to nose, eye to eye, and he realised she was exactly as tall as he was. Her scent filled his nostrils like a potent smoking drug, then she had passed him by.
Inside was a porch, with various signs and pennants pinned to a v-lined wall. A second door led to the dark interior, like a large schoolroom, or indeed a store. The air inside felt heavy with dust, laced through with the aroma of slowly aging decay, barely masked by furniture polish. It reminded him firstly of a church and then, with an aftertaste of bibliochor, his bookshop in Edinburgh, and for a moment he was back in familiar territory.
In the gloom, behind a long heavy wooden shop counter acting as a desk, a woman sat crocheting. She glanced up as they entered, as if she wasn’t expecting anyone, as if they may be the first and only visitors of the day. She put her crochet down and sat up.
‘Well, hi,’ she said. ‘Come on in. Welcome to the oldest memorial to Vancouver’s pioneer past.’ He gazed around the room at the mass of assembled artefacts. All seemed faded, sepia-coloured, a multi-paned window on an earlier era. Not a smart modern museum full of interactive gizmos, the past sealed behind plexiglass casing, here the building itself was an exhibit.
‘It dates from 1865?’ Martina asked.
‘That’s correct. Though at that time it wasn’t out here at Jericho. You have to imagine the whole of the city as virgin forest,’ the woman at the desk went on. ‘Ancient old growth trees, more than 300 feet tall. Then in 1865 an Englishman by the name of Stamp began to build a lumber mill down by the shore there, at the foot of Dunlevy. They took a flume from Trout Lake to provide steam power, and built this store to service the camp. It sold everything you could think of back then, a true emporium.’
Listening, he wandered through the exhibits, arrayed as if in a country schoolroom or a very plain Protestant chapel, yet the most fabulous of obscure objects to him lay within reach. Old mangles, pots and pans, various tools, many of them carved from wood. As he nosed around, peering at the old photos and artefacts, it occurred to him that Vancouver was almost exactly the same age as Lyle. The idea of the lumber mill would have been gestating in Stamp’s mind just as Jimmy was entering the world, five thousand miles away in Shetland, in the spring of 1864.
‘Are you from round here?’ the woman asked, curiously.
‘I live nearby,’ Martina said, ‘But I’ve never been in here before, although I have driven past many times. My friend is from Scotland and very interested in the history of the province.
‘Well, there’s plenty of history in here. And one of the early mill owners was a Scot, you know, after Stamp gave the mill up. He was a Campbell.’
‘Did you hear that?’ Martina called over to him, then turned back to the figure at the desk. ‘He thinks everything here is from Scotland. He points to street names as we drive past and tells me they’re all Scottish.’
Gil smiled over at the two women as they talked by the desk. The curator laughed. ‘Well, you know, lots of Scots came here at first, my dear. He’s right about that. And it’s from them we take much of our inspiration, them and others like them.’
‘Exactly, just as I told you.’ he said. ‘Is it all right to take a few photos?’
‘For a small donation,’ the woman replied, nodding towards a large wooden collection box on a table by the door.
‘So when did the store move up here?’ Martina asked her.
‘1930. They were going to demolish it, and so a group of ladies came together and insisted that it should be preserved. They towed it up here from Burrard Inlet, through the Narrows across English Bay, and lifted it up here on rollers. There’s a film of it you can watch if you like, just by the entrance to the Hansom Cab over in that corner there.’
The two visitors peered into the gloom in the direction she indicated.
‘It’s quite wonderful,’ she went on. ‘There’s footage of the Native Daughters aboard the Harbour Board yacht, serving a special tea. It was quite an event, you see, the mill store had a very special place in people’s hearts, because it had survived the great fire of 1866. And it had been the first post office, the first schoolroom, the first drugstore anywhere round here.’
‘There was a fire in 1866?’ he asked. He was calculating in Lyle time, that Jimmy would have been in Cloud Falls for two years by then.
‘Yes,’ Martina said. ‘Almost the whole of the town was destroyed, wasn’t it?’
The curator grimaced. ‘Sure, it was terrible. Not that there was so much to destroy back then, but it was all made of timber and went up like a rocket. They were clearing land because Vancouver had been selected as the terminus for the CPR railway, and a squall swept up a brush fire that the workers had started. The sparks fell on the town and it just exploded, and kept on burning till it was just about on top of the store. Then, like it was the hand of Providence at work, the wind changed and the store was spared. The millstore here became an emblem. It still is, to those who know the story.’
Gil was snapping photos as he listened, thinking about the news of the great fire making its way up country to the young Lyle on his uncle’s ranch in Cloud Falls. With no railway at that time, the news would have travelled by stagecoach or horseback, probably – no doubt fiercely discussed and debated, the fire and its causes, the miracle of the wind change. The story would have grown with each telling. Jimmy Lyle would have known this building and its story well.
The curator went on with her tale. ‘After the fire, the store was at the heart of the recovery operation, doling out food and emergency supplies, even acting as a morgue for the dead.’
He wandered about after that, looking at the exhibits, the thought of death vivid, as if the memory was somehow encoded in the timbers of the store. His eyes picked out a massive wooden plough, old sledges, a wooden washing machine. Cannons from 1867 when the settlement still had need of them, the Hansom cab, the old Hastings Mill safe. Some period dresses. A vast collection of woven baskets like the kind he knew Lyle had collected for the museums back east.
Then they watched the grainy film of the Native Daughters serving tea on the day in 1930 that the millstore was brought to Jericho by barge.
Afterwards Martina asked the curator, ‘So just who are the Native Daughters of BC?’
‘We are an organisation of women born here in the province. Pioneers.’
‘So I couldn’t join because I was born in Czechoslovakia?’
‘No, dear. Not if you aren’t born here.’
‘So this has nothing to do with First Nations natives?’ he added.
‘Not much,’ she answered, not elaborating, then to Martina she said, ‘You are, my dear, lovely as you are, what back in the old days, they used to call a ‘cheechako’. Someone who migrates here, in the Chinook parlance.’
‘Yes, I am a cheechako,’ Martina said, and looked to him, suddenly, with a vague glare of annoyance. She seemed somehow upset at the idea.
‘There’s a book of Robert Service’s poems, Ballads of a Cheechako,’ he volunteered, inadvertently making a no-man’s land between the curator and the cheechako.
‘Ah, Robert Service,’ the woman said. ‘Now he was a poet. We Canadians are very proud of him.’
‘But in Scotland, where he came from, he’s hardly mentioned these days.’
For a second the woman looked puzzled. ‘Scotland? Are you sure?’
‘He grew up in the shire of Robert Burns, and was schooled in Glasgow. He came out here as a banker. He ended up as the biggest-selling poet of the twentieth century, living the life of Riley in Paris.’
