macCLOUD FALLS, page 32
The diner coffee wasn’t as good as they’d hoped, but the pancakes and orange juice were better. Good enough to set them up for the trail to the old graveyard above the town Gil had found on googleearth, now that he had wifi again. They could have driven around there through the suburban lots, but Gil wanted to follow the pathway people would have used in Lyle’s day, the route of procession along the river from the church to the place of burial. It was much shorter than the road, which ran around the foothills to get there, he said.
At first the walk was pleasant, the sun quite hot but not unbearable. They had hats and sunblock, water bottles, shorts and t-shirts. For the most part they walked in silence, occasionally observing something along the way. But as the trail left the riverbank and turned sharply uphill, out of the shade of the occasional tree, the sweat broke. Hero began to pant. They stopped halfway up for water and for breath, and to take in the view over the town.
The two rivers that met, here at the place they used to call ‘the Forks’, the Coldwater and the Nicola, were gentle flowing, compared with the canyon torrents. The bronze cupola of the Coldwater Hotel shone in the sun. They could see the expensive new houses around the golf course, the sprinklers dotted over its undulations trying to keep it an island of green in the midsummer sun. Big trucks cruised the streets. Somewhere in the middle was the little square with its stage and the C&W stream.
The old path emerged onto a tarmac road near to a fenced enclosure on the edge of the rise, an outcrop looking over the town to the valley beyond. ‘I bet that’s the place,’ he said.
But it wasn’t. It was a burial ground but far older and more exclusive, just a few settler families, laid together. Original ranchers, maybe, before the town grew, who’d brought their dead in from their spreads to The Forks and the chapel they shared. But then she spotted something in the distance, and when they walked a bit they saw it was a contemporary graveyard, laid out like the town below, whose dead it received, on a grid pattern, and covering a great acreage of the hillside. By no means were all the plots taken. Those that were seemed to cluster like family groups.
‘A lot of these names are Scottish,’ he observed. ‘And Welsh too.’
‘Welsh?’
‘They brought out miners from Wales and Scotland when they began digging coal here. And the railways came.’
It was only after they had visited all the taken sites and eliminated them one after another from the quest that they noticed the stones in the far corner that were laid flat, facing the sky. And there they found him, or least his remains, James Alexander Lyle. And Lotte Marie Lyle, his wife.
They stood a while, hats off, and gazed down at the twin stones. It struck them both as odd that the shared resting place was here above the town of Merritt when their lives were so closely linked with the Falls in the canyon, and that the children should have chosen to have their burial up at High Ridge, not here with their parents.
‘And he lies here with her, and not with Antko,’ Veronika said, as they walked downhill again, keen to get into the shade and have a drink.
‘If he died first, it was Lotte’s call, as you guys say here.’
The Coldwater River seemed a very good thing to her on the trail back. Cold clear water was exactly what this town needed, and indeed had, from these surrounding hills and their streams. That was its first commodity, before cattle or coal or Country music, he said.
They found a beer garden in the square by the stage, where a youthful band were warming up, presumably the first and least known of the day’s fringe performers, and ordered two cold beers. Hero had a bowl of water in the shade. He looked a little happier there. The band came to life through the speaker above their head. The girl singer sang the first line of ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ and a muted cheer went up from the few people listening.
Gil smiled. ‘Girl’s givin em what they want,’ he said.
‘Are you going to go on developing this fake Canadian hillbilly act?’ she asked him, sipping her beer.
He considered a moment. ‘No, ma’am, this is as good as it gets.’
She glanced up at the speaker. ‘Come on, it’s too loud.’
There was one place left he really wanted to go and they had decided over the beer to do that, and then head off north. A second night in the motel wasn’t a good idea, so they went and settled up, packed the car and drove to where he thought the museum was. It turned out to be covered in large murals like much of the town, though these weren’t of country singers but images of the valley’s past. They circled its corrugated exterior walls, looking for narrative among the faces. Here, above the main entrance, the classic male ‘Indian’ pose from pre-contact times gazed down. Further round, hunters, cowboys and miners, schoolchildren and mothers. The first train. A vintage motor car.
Inside, they found the museum was actually part of the library and not the whole building. In fact, it was quite a small wing of the whole. They wandered in different directions through the exhibits. Then she heard him call her name, in a loud whisper. ‘Veronika!’ he repeated. She found him standing with a broad smile on his face, gazing at the glass cabinet in front of him.
‘His things,’ he said. ‘Look. His buckskin suit from the photo I showed you.’
She looked closely at the collection of items while Gil took photos surreptitiously, with suppressed flash, so as not to attract the attendant’s eye. The little typewritten card in the cabinet said they had been donated to the museum by Lyle’s son, and that Lyle had been an early Canadian ethnographer and photographer who collected many songs and dances of the native peoples of the Nicola Valley.
The buckskin suit certainly was something. It struck her that she hadn’t realised before how much it looked like something made by a First Nations hand. She wondered if it had been Antko who had cut and sewn it? Did the hand behind the hand that wrote also make him this suit of skin?
Then there were the scales and gold pan of his uncle ‘John MacCloud’, spelled wrongly, who had claimed the falls for his own and who had also tried to imitate the old Dutchman’s irrigation. They looked hardly used, perhaps coming north too late for the gold rush. There too was Lyle’s camera. His rifle and its embroidered buckskin case. His hunting knife – used for skinning animals, the card said. She shivered. It suddenly sounded gruesome and bloody.
Then her eye was drawn to the far end of the cabinet where some of the children’s things were gathered. A girl’s buckskin embroidered dress. Their little beaded moccasins!
‘Look at this. We saw their graves yesterday. These are their shoes.’ She nearly cried, they were so very sweet.
‘The incongruity of the juxtaposition of the old and the young,’ he said.
She looked at him. ‘Wow. Write that one down.’
‘Probably a quotation anyway,’ he said. ‘I’ve just forgotten where I heard it. But, yes, wow!’ He seemed genuinely blown away by it all, stood for ages staring, until finally she wandered over to the lady at the front desk, and started chatting. She said Gil was related to Lyle and a second lady appeared, who said she knew the children when she was young. ‘Especially the daughter.’
‘You knew his daughter?’ Gil asked, having been attracted from the glass cases.
‘I knew her, yes. She was a bit older than me. She couldn’t wait to get away from Merritt to the big city, but she always came back to visit in the summers. Now which of the children are you related through?’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s another branch of the family. From back in Scotland.’
‘Scotland?’
‘Aye…’
‘Well, Marie, you see, she became a teacher in Vancouver, never married. She didn’t have a good time growing up here. She was a target, you see, because of her father and the Indians back then. You know, times were different.’
‘A target?’
‘Oh you know. The clothes they wore when they first arrived in town. Name-calling, that sort of thing.’ She said it innocently enough, but a sense of shame was vaguely evident in her eyes.
Suddenly Gil asked, ‘I wonder if you ever heard of my father? He was here for a while between the two wars. He was a half-brother of Marie and her brothers.’
She listened blankly. ‘No sorry, I have never heard of that story. And I wasn’t around back then to remember him.’
Veronika was frowning, only half-listening. Those were the clothes the little girl wore that the others made fun of, she thought. And now they are here, in the museum tended by the kind of people who made fun of her. ‘If their father was Scottish and their mother was Dutch, why do you think the kids wore native dress?’ she asked.
Gil looked at the lady and the lady looked at him. ‘Good question,’ the lady responded, but she didn’t attempt an answer at first. ‘I guess Mr Lyle thought it was a good thing to do,’ she said after a second or two.
Gil said, ‘Maybe he saw it as a kind of mission. Something he had to do.’ From the glance that passed between them, it seemed neither the woman nor Veronika quite understood what he meant.
They passed the reservation on their way out of town. It was big but looked weary, squeezed between the expanding town and the river. No room to go, or grow into. It had been strange, they agreed as she drove, to find this anomalous shrine to a man who loved Indians here in the very heart of this Cowboy festival world. But beautiful too, somehow, that these things had survived, from those days when frontiers between cultures were first crossed.
The reality of the current situation could be seen there in Merritt clearly, the First Nations presence still strong among the townsfolk on the street, a solid cornerstone to it. The road passed on under the banner proclaiming ‘The Country and Western Capital of Canada’ and then they were free of the gravity that had pulled them in.
‘So remind me, why are going to see this friend of yours you’ve never met?’ she asked, the road dead straight ahead across the flat plain.
‘He has a book to show me.’
‘A book? You’re travelling all this way to see a book?’
‘Aye.’
* * *
Fourth Dance
‘The Road to
Happy Ever After’
(Quadrille)
* * *
THEY GOT ON to the old road north to Kamloops through the Nicola Valley outside of Merritt and, once they were clear of traffic, she tried again to persuade him to take the wheel for a bit. She pulled in. He protested that he’d never driven a left hand drive, nor on the right side of the road, nor an automatic, but she just said now was the time. The highway was quiet, straight and broad. So they switched seats and he got himself set. She explained the drive and park gears. He was feeling around for a clutch pedal and it was odd not to find one. Once she’d gone over things twice, he tentatively put them into action.
The VW pulled out onto the empty highway. ‘It works!’ he said. ‘Now to remember to stay on the right side.’ But they hadn’t gone far before he decided to test the brakes, and nearly frightened the life from her, so sensitive was the pedal and so sudden the effect. Hero slid off the back seat and into the foot space. She gave him a questioning look, and he said he was sorry.
From then on, he proceeded carefully. He felt the automatic gear changes and thought at first that it would fail to catch if he didn’t do something, but no, it went on like clockwork, which he supposed it was in a way, the clocking of miles.
‘This is great,’ he said after a few minutes. ‘What fun.’
The road followed the valley’s gentle undulations. It looked almost Scottish to his eye, a less grand sight than the canyon, but fertile and beautiful. When they came to the end of the lake, the valley floor widened out further.
As they passed a holiday ranch on the waterfront, she turned in her seat and read the name out loud. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘We must be quite near Kamloops by now.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘A friend of mine mentioned that place. Said it was near Kamloops.’
‘Want me to stop?’ Although he was now enjoying the drive, he would have welcomed a brief hesitation, a stop and start just to make sure it was really happening.
‘Not here. I want to get down to the lake somewhere. Cool off a while. Can we?’ He drove on a distance along the side of it, but but nowhere seemed a good place to stop, until at last they came to track which went off to the waterside, a feeder road to some big new homes that were being built. One of the lots was empty so they walked down that gravel track to the lake, past thistles and thorns. Around the water’s edge here, a bed of reeds grew, and it sheltered a small beach of yellow sand. The water sparkled.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘No wind here.’ And it was true. He could see where the lake bent in a dogleg, and where the wind that had blown in the south of its shores didn’t reach. Up here it was glass-like, a perfect mirror to the clouds that hung in tiny clusters high over the valley. He stopped, took out his camera and tried to capture the panorama, as she and the dog walked on, until Veronika and Hero were in the right bottom corner of the frame by the water. Through the viewfinder, he saw her take her clothes off, down to her underwear, wade into the water, and then plunge under. He looked up, heard her whoop and then a great splash arose, and she was off, swimming freestyle like a marine-born creature.
‘It’s a thing we do, lake swimming,’ she said, as she surfaced. ‘Try it.’
‘Hmm. Maybe I’ll just wade,’ he said. Hero was already in the water, cooling his paws. Because the water was still, he saw no reason to bark at it. ‘Me and him are alike.’
The water was warm and tempting, so Gil did venture in a distance. And then he baptised himself in the N’laka waters, as it was called before ‘Nicola’. It was gloriously fresh clean water and his skin, now healed after the worst of the sunburn, pricked and began to glow afterwards as the sun dried him off. He lay in the sun while she kept on swimming for a while longer. Hero waded further in too, far enough to cool his fur, so that when he came out he looked half himself, his lower body thin and his legs spindly.
When she came out she lay down next to him. ‘It’s nice to be cool again.’ She pulled her bra up. ‘Don’t look at my scar,’ she said.
‘I wasn’t,’ he said.
‘You were.’
He wandered off a bit. Then Veronika called him over, and revealed she had brought a picnic with her. She produced two sandwiches,
peaches, nut bars and two small bottles of wine.
‘When did you do that?’
‘This morning, first thing.’
‘Genius.’
‘Picnic of the Year, I’d say.’
They stretched out on the sand in the sun. He noticed she seemed to be frowning at him, for some reason.
‘What are you thinking?’
She studied him a while longer, sandwich in hand, chewing. Then she said, ‘Who are you really, Gil?’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, it just occurred to me that I read your writing while you were ill and I formed an idea of who you were from that, but I don’t really know if that was you or just something you wrote?’
‘Now you’re forgetting the Calgary woman who’s writing us all.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Oh I’m the one thing I don’t have to invent. That part’s simple, as I am.’
She chewed a moment. ‘I’m not so sure. My mother always says that everybody’s got a twist to them, like on a candy paper. It’s what keeps the sweet stuff in, she says.’
‘Your mother’s profound,’ he said.
‘But you seem all sweet stuff. Where’s your twist?’ She placed two fingertips in front of her eyes, and gave him the ‘I’m watching you’ gangster sign. ‘I bet it’s books, isn’t it? That’s what gets you twisted. Otherwise, why are you going to see this guy?’
He coughed. ‘People are complicated. Isn’t that what you said?’
‘Families. I said families are complex.’
They drove on north through the valley, which just became more and more stunning as it narrowed again beyond the lake. It was relatively unspoiled too, the houses set back from the road. At last they came to a hill, beyond which lay Kamloops, and switched drivers so he wouldn’t have to deal with busy intersections in the city. Later, he was glad of that when they got lost coming into Kamloops. The light was failing fast, slipping into a strangely luminous gloom that seemed to come on far too soon to be night, while the sun still shone through the murk. She pulled in at a gas bar to get directions and fill up. When she opened the car door the strong aroma of wood smoke snuck inside. Somewhere above the city, a wildfire burned.
At an intersection a white Volvo pulled up next to them. She glanced at it and for a second she thought the text message had come true and that he’d flown to Kamloops in pursuit of her. She quickly realised that, although the car was the same model, he wouldn’t have been driving it if he’d flown. It made her nervous, though – maybe her phone had given away her location. Could GPS do that?
They found a liquor store and bought a malt for their hosts, then picked up a few snacks for the drive. She looked at the dashboard dials. They should make it before dark if they kept going.
However, once they were out of the city, visibility narrowed quickly, and they found it hard to see beyond the car in front for a while. A few miles further on, behind the line of pine trees on the high ridge’s edge, they could see vapour rising like steam from a volcanic pool, twisting itself between black limbs and branches. But it was smoke - trees were burning, a halo of fire around them like St Elmo’s Fire on a mast-head. A blue light flashed on a fire truck while, on an airstrip by the highway’s edge, a helicopter sucked in water from a tanker through a hose.
The line was nine cars long. A pall of smoke rose high into the darkening sky, before swinging south toward the city. They both got out to watch the action. A few other drivers had done the same. The heat was pretty overwhelming, though, and before long they were back in the cool of the A/C. She put on a CD while they waited and he found he knew the song but not the version, and asked her who it was. She told him, KD Lang again, explained that this was an album of her favourite Canadian songs she’d made a while ago. They sang along, at least the lines they knew, and occasionally dueted, at least for the chorus ‘Helpless, helpless ...’
