macCLOUD FALLS, page 33
Ages later, the helicopter took off, over the highway and up towards the burning hillside. Once it was gone, they were flagged through. The line was nineteen cars long by then, and it snaked slowly up the hill past the burning forest. At the road edge, the nearest tree was in flame. Not ablaze, but burning steadily. Alive. The smell was acrid and shocking, even though all the windows were up. Choking, indeed. Silently they rolled past, on up the hill, the image imprinted in both their minds as surely as if on film, of quietly flickering intensity strong enough to burn sappy wood.
Above the road, they saw dead trees not burning and wooden poles supporting a triangle of wires – once it was simple, he said, communication, the telegraph, now who knew what they transmitted?
‘So tell me about this book?’ she said, once they were back on the open highway.
‘You’ve read all there is so far…’
‘No, not what you’re writing. I mean the book this friend of yours in Little Forks has got. The one you’re traveling so far to see.’
‘Ah, that book. Well, you’ve heard of Robert Burns?’
‘Sure. Your national poet. The statue in Stanley Park.’
‘Well, George Gordon Fergusson, to give him his full name, believes he has a copy of the Kilmarnock Edition.’
‘Which is?’
‘The very first printing of Burns’ poems. 1786. 612 of them were made, and most are lost now. There’s quite a few in libraries of course, and some in private collections.’
‘But not so many on the market?’
‘No. Precisely.’
KD had covered a Joni Mitchell they both knew. It seemed incredible that they should both have loved this so song much, so many thousands of miles apart, but at the same time. But then, thousands, maybe millions, did. And they would still be on their feet. Their voices sounded quite good together. Not that either were great singers, but both could hold a melodic line, if not a whole tune. Each remembered different lines, and sang loudest when these came along. Together they could almost sing the whole lyric, loudly and fairly badly. When it ended, they both laughed.
‘So this Burns book is valuable?’
‘In a way it is priceless. At least to a Scot.’
And so he told her the story of Robert Burns, his early struggles, his life as a rhymer and a carouser, Jean Armour and her father, the ill-fated Highland Mary, and the ride to Edinburgh on a borrowed pony to meet the literary elite when the book was first published. Nancy McLehose and ‘Ae Fond Kiss’.
The darkness deepened. Now it was not just smoke blotting out the sun, but night, as it began to leech the light away. Soon they were in the night’s void with only their twin headlamps to seek the way out. The road rising all the while, to the left or right, round the bend, out of sight. The names of places suddenly on the roadside – Henckey Creek, McClure’s Ferry. Another Scot, no doubt. Then they were crossing the river in the dark and approaching Barriere.
‘There was a big fire round here,’ she said, ‘a while back. I remember it being on the news. People were evacuated, houses burned.’
But there was nothing to see right then, just black night all around. The highway wound on ahead and they followed it hopefully. After a while she asked if he’d mind driving again. She didn’t much like driving at night, so they switched again. He pulled out without mishap and, once they were back to speed, she stretched out and relaxed.
‘So we’re going to this place so you can look at this book of his? Or are you planning to buy it?’
‘I’ve seen copies before,’ he said, staring into the night, at the beams out in front and the stream of the river that occasionally glistened, briefly, as the road bent around it. ‘The last one made £40,000 at auction in Edinburgh.’
She whistled through her teeth. He smiled. ‘Not a fortune, compared, say, with a First Folio Shakespeare which would set you back a few million. But quite a lot. I’m not sure if he wants to sell it, though. More to be sure of what it is. There was a facsimile edition made in Toronto in the nineteenth century. It could be a Canadian copy.’
‘But you would know?’
‘I think so. He says his great-grandfather brought it out with him to Alberta from Scotland a century ago. I’ll know if it’s real. I have good bookstinct.’
She smiled. ‘I bet you do.’
‘Though of course it would have to be verified by the auctioneers before it could be sold.’
‘And you could arrange all that for him?’
‘I could. It’s what I do. Or did, before I fell ill. Now I’m not so sure what it is I do. Or who I am.’
‘You’re writing now,’ she said, and he grinned. That was true, he really was, at last.
Another long stretch without light or sign. Nothing passed, not even in the opposite direction. They were lonely travellers, companions in blindness bar all but the little beams that went in front of car. An age elapsed, just them, silent in the dark. The CD had ended and neither had moved to change it.
‘I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve missed the intersection,’ she said.
Then suddenly, as if summoned, the name they sought flashed up in front, passed before they had time to comment, as did the settlement. It was barely five streetlamps long. She realised they should have turned off, so he swung around, forgetting for a moment the direction of the loop on Canadian roads, travelling clockwise. But there was no traffic around, no people to confuse.
Little Forks was just a junction, a crossroads store, a diner and a gas bar. Everything was shut. They retraced tracks, took the turn off, and were back in utter darkness. The highway began to climb sharply once again. They had been going uphill since they left Cloud Falls, and yet they went up again, looking for the third turning on the right. A good few kilometres passed without even one, and only when Little Forks was far behind, did they see the first. Then another few kilometres, and a second, the darkness silent between them, as each sought the shape of an opening in the thick trees that lined the road, now hair-pinning up the valleyside.
As they drove past what looked like a turn, they called out at exactly
the same time. Another 180 turn and they were running down a dirt road. Darker and darker. She said, ‘Are you sure this is alright? I mean, how do you know he isn’t an axe murderer waiting for us?’
He laughed and said he didn’t. Then, at the side of the track, they saw a tall standing stone, carved in an elaborate Celtic Revival style. That looks promising, he said. So she pulled up. The text ran top to bottom: F-E-R-G-U-S-S-O-N, it confirmed.
They turned off onto another still smaller rutted track, with green sward down the middle. He steered the car warily up the hill, afraid of hitting the bottom. Out of the darkness, dead ahead, a log cabin came into view in the headlamps. It appeared ancient, windowless, and above the gable end door hung a pair of gigantic antlers, and above them again, a skeleton moose head.
‘Oh my giddy aunt!’ he said, peering up at it, and she laughed at the expression. The road went on, until at last another rather more modern structure materialised in the clearing behind. It was straight out of the back of the backwoods, though, and stood lonely in the darkest forest night. Then the figure of a man appeared, with a great white dog at his side. It was impossible to see him properly, but at least she could tell he wasn’t carrying an axe. Gil pulled up and they got out.
‘Saw your lights,’ the man said. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you’d find us.’
Gil explained they’d stopped in Kamloops, then run into a forest fire and that they were sorry to come so late. The man, still shadowed, said that when he got their message from Merritt to say they were on their way, he’d wondered if they’d make it. Hero seemed a little reluctant to get out of the VW, with the great white beast there, but finally he hopped out and the two dogs began their ritual of rounding and sniffing. Veronika checked her phone – no service.
Aye, George Gordon Fergusson it was, and they embraced like blood brothers separated, met with again, generations later. He showed them inside the warm cabin where soon the whisky flowed.
Tales came fast in breathless conversation from the first large glass on, while supper bubbled on the elegant old stove. It was still somehow Scotch, their host’s accent, well preserved across three Canadian generations first fathered by the tough young Scot who’d emigrated in 1886, who’d settled in Calgary before the First World War, fought in Flanders, a prize boxer, as hard as nails until the day he keeled over. This Canadian Scotch voice spoke of the world of cattle his ancestor knew as a lad in Aberdeenshire and in Calgary as a man, of his great buffalo coat worn on the long prairie rides, impervious to everything.
Gordon, as he was known, was talkative. He said he had chosen BC over Alberta, New Caledonia where the Scottish heritage he’d grown up revering seemed even more present; where he and his wife bought a piece of land first cleared around a century before, with an old cabin unchanged since the 1930s, from an old German settler. He told how they had set about building a home, one slow plank at a time, he and the wife who would join them soon – she couldn’t for supper as she had an ageing mother nearby, and she shared care with her brother.
Later, over bowls of venison stew, wine made by one of Gordon’s friends and vegetables from the garden, the two Scotsmen explained to Veronika how one book order had led to others, and letters led to emails, that led to a virtual friendship. They compared notes on the amazement of virtually being in the other person’s world, 5000 miles away, and now being here together.
She listened as they talked so warmly, both new friends met and old reunited, and tried not to feel too left out of this global Scottish family. She knew how it was to meet someone from your childhood, from the world you had grown up in, to use the words and phrases known only to your most local tribe – to feel at home even if you meet abroad and the common place is far distant.
And then the lady of the house, Sara, arrived as they were talking, a blonde woman with a shy intelligence and an aura of strength. Veronika was glad to join her in the kitchen while she had supper, and Sara explained how they’d moved here as runaways from their respective families when they’d only just turned twenty. They had nothing when they started, just the land she’d bought with a small inheritance she got from her aunt. The original cabin had been home to an old Cariboo prospector who stayed on after the gold rush, panning about enough to keep him going, though it was a hard slog at times just to get a grubstake. To compensate for his unsuccessful mining, he cleared the land and improved it by keeping livestock – chicken, goats and a few cattle. So they’d inherited some well broken ground and the makings of a homestead. But with bears and wolves and other predators about, they were always wary – which accounted for Benji, the white bear dog, who lay outside the kitchen door jealously peering in through the glass to the warm stove where Hero lay curled up, as if wondering what other rare privileges might be afforded this visitor.
She and Sara washed up as they talked, then joined the men by the open fireplace in the large lounge, where logs crackled. George Gordon was explaining how the creek nearby was a blessing twice over. They’d been talking about the wildfires, and Gordon explained that only the previous year they’d had one that burned its way almost to their property. They’d had to seal everything valuable in plastic and put it in the creek just in case. And besides, it was pretty rudimentary up here back when they moved in, no power, but they’d built themselves a hydro plant successful enough to keep their various gadgets going, as well as tools. They’d get a tour tomorrow and he’s show them all that. Veronika wanted to know more about the fire, but it seemed they didn’t want to talk about it. Gordon changed the subject, saying he was eager to hear all about Gil’s time in Cloud Falls.
So Gil told the tale, with Veronika’s help, of the days they’d spent there, of Gil’s ‘adventure’ in search of the hidden cabin, the Country and Western night and all the characters they’d met. They told them about the mistaken identity, the whole film farce, and they all laughed heartily at that.
‘You do look a bit like her, though,’ Sara said finally, after studying her.
Veronika told Gordon that Gil had said he knew about Lyle, and after a moment when she had to explain that she called Gilbert ‘Gil’ rather than ‘Bert’, Gordon replied he had made a study of Lyle’s life for his own satisfaction, years ago, and knew quite a lot about Cloud Falls. It was one of things that had cemented their friendship when he first began to buy books from Bookseller Bert, as he called him. He was about to explain his theories when Sara, teasingly, asked the bookseller who this woman was he’d brought with him. She’d thought him a confirmed bachelor.
Ah, now! Who was she? He said maybe she should answer that herself.
She laughed, said she had asked herself that very question just the night before, had found no answer. Gordon asked if she was Canadian and she said yes, she was a Canadian citizen, though she still identified with the culture of her parents’ country. But she had grown up in Canada and identified with it more, particularly with the multicultural mix of Vancouver. A person has a lot of different levels of belonging, she said, and sure enough ethnicity is a part of that, but she felt a citizen of the world on one hand and a silent self that had no name on another. And in between, yes she was a Vancouverite, a Canadian, a citizen of the New World, yes, all of those. She couldn’t just be one thing, her life had been too complicated, too dislocated by emigration, revolution, by the change in the political system that had entailed.
And Sara had a story too, which was similar in a way, although it had all taken place in Canada. She had been born into a Mennonite family in Manitoba and found herself rebelling against those values. Growing up was not a simple thing, not for her the unthinking adoption of a tradition. It was always complicated by the present moment, by the new ideas shared by different generations, the challenge those embodied to accepted beliefs. Everything was a revolution, in that sense.
True, George Gordon said. Even he, by moving across the Rockies and leaving behind the ranching, the Calgary stampede and all that, had rebelled. Though no one but he really saw it like that. By making their shared attempt at living like pioneers, self-sufficient and truly independent, both he and Sara had rebelled against their families.
Only Gil was without a story to tell. His life had always been one of taking the line of least resistance, doing the easy thing, staying safe – until the cancer had erupted, the danger within, the malfunction of the bodily self.
The whisky bottle slowly emptied, as their glasses remained permanently half-full. It was a tradition Sara didn’t know, with her religious upbringing, but the drinking of spirits was one the others shared, whether whisky, vodka or plum brandy. When George Gordon turned the empty bottle on its head and carefully balanced it upside down, they all knew the ritual was over with. It was well after midnight, and they were all merrily drunk.
‘Come on,’ Sara said to Veronika, ‘I’ll show you your room.’
She explained how the log cabin they had begun to build as youngsters had grown, extension by extension, over their lifetime together. Doors led through one room to another. Each was full of craftwork and art, paintings and embroidery. They climbed a narrow handmade staircase, and when Sara opened the door which turned out to be the last, she opened it onto the vision of a fine hand-crafted quilt, in the classic Canadian style.
‘This is really beautiful,’ Veronika said, laying a hand on it. She put her bag down and sat on the bed. It was a high-mattressed double with a tubular brass frame. ‘So comfy too.’
‘I made it a few years back. Something I learned when I was a girl. The quilt that is, not the bed. Gordon made that.’
‘Really? It looks shop-bought.’
‘Sure. He can make almost anything. Show him a picture, tell him how it works, he’ll figure it out.’ Sara sat down next her. ‘Gordon always had ideas about building his own place from scratch, you know a proper house with plans,’ Sara said. ‘So we have a half-built new house that’s been half-built for ten years.’
‘So where is the new house?’
‘Down at the end of the property. You’ll have passed it driving up here but wouldn’t have noticed it in the dark. It’s a beautiful spot above the creek. We built a summer house down there when the kids were little, a place they could go and play and, when they were older, sleep out. Course we made sure they took the dogs with them. We’ll take you there tomorrow.’ She stood up. ‘Will you and Gil be all right in this room?
‘Oh,’ Veronika said, ‘I thought this was just for me.’
‘Ah, so you two aren’t… I just assumed you were.’
‘Well, not really. No.’
‘Ok. Well, I guess I could make up a bed for him on the couch.’
Veronika laughed, thinking of the nights she’d shared a bed or a room with him already. She shrugged. ‘No, don’t go to any trouble, it’s okay. Really. The bed’s big.’
‘But if you’re…’
‘Honestly, it’s fine. As a matter of fact, we’ve shared a room the past three nights, for one reason or another.’
Sara didn’t ask how come, but smiled. ‘Sounds like fate,’ she said, and turned to leave the room.
‘Oh, one question,’ Veronika said. ‘Anywhere around here where I can get a signal for my cell?’
‘Fraid not, but you can use our landline if you need to.’
Veronika was about to explain she was waiting for a text when Gil came struggling up the winding staircase with his luggage. Sara squeezed past and left.
He found her stretched out on the bed, with two large hand-embroidered cushions placed in the middle. Hero had been banished to the fireside – no dogs were allowed upstairs.
‘You know, I can sleep on the couch,’ he said, indicating the barrier.
