macCLOUD FALLS, page 9
‘The rest of you, many many thanks for all you’ve done – George, you and your boys probably saved his life. But he needs to be alone now.’
Big George looked down at her. ‘Ms Weaver, it was you. If you hadn’t come all the way up here from the city, we wouldn’t have known he was out there until it was too late. You and Rick raised the alarm. You’re the hero in this movie.’
Slowly, the ad hoc medical team filed out, leaving her and the dog alone with the figure lying on the bed, who still had his shorts on, but was otherwise naked. His arms and legs, his torso almost white, he looked like coconut ice candy. She could even see the outline of his sandals, sketched white on pink across his feet. Across his neck, redder than the rest, was the radiation rectangle he’d spoken about. She picked up a towel and dropped it on the bed next to him, telling him to take his shorts off, and turned her back.
Rick came in with a large jar of oats, went into the en-suite and turned the faucet on. ‘It won’t be ice cold,’ he called through. She appeared in the door on the bathroom behind him. ‘The water in these pipes is kinda lukewarm because it’s so hot out.’
‘Not too much,’ she said, as he tipped in the oatmeal and stirred it up with his hand. ‘Gil,’ she called, ‘Can you make it to the tub?’
A groan emanated from the bed. ‘This is daft,’ he said.
‘It’s a cure. My grandmother used it,’ she replied. ‘Come on, now.’
He managed to get up, towel tied round his waist, and staggered through to the tub. She took his upper arm, above the red where the t-shirt had offered some protection, and pulled the towel away.
‘Hey,’ he protested.
‘We’re not looking,’ she said, eyes closed.
He lowered himself into the murky water with a deep sigh.
‘How’s it feel?’ Rick asked, from behind them.
‘Surprisingly good,’ he said, lying back until only his head protruded.
‘Okay, twenty minutes. No more,’ she said, as she ushered Rick out. ‘If you stay in too long, it’ll lose effect and only dry your skin out even more.’
She closed the bathroom door.
Rick stood looking up at her, his face alert with the events of these strange hours. A day when drama came to his sleepy little town in the canyon.
‘I’ve got a room ready for you,’ Rick said. ‘17’, and he handed her the key. ‘It’s not the best, I’m afraid, but it’s all I got right now.’
She thanked him as he left, then threw the key on the bed and sat down heavily in the armchair, on top of Gil’s discarded clothes. Hero came over and laid his chin gently on her knee. From inside the bathroom came the sloshing of water.
‘Don’t drown,’ she called, stroking Hero’s head. ‘Not after all the trouble we’ve gone to.’
There was no response.
‘You alright?’ she called again, louder.
A weak voice sounded from the hollow chamber. ‘Mm-hm. Good porridge.’
‘You’re not supposed to eat it,’ she said, then laid her head back and relaxed for the first time that day. The phrase, a fish out of water came into her mind. That was what he was. A salmon that had come to the shallows and stranded there, trying to make headway in an alien element, not understanding where the water had gone and why flapping its tail no longer propelled it. She closed her eyes for a moment.
She woke with the noise of another train passing, and Hero’s barking. Gil was lying on the bed, with just a sheet pulled over his candy-striped body, in the light from a bedside lamp. He seemed to be awake too. He had a little smile on his face as he looked in her direction.
‘Talk about local atmosphere,’ he said, as the room seemed to shake.
She yawned and stretched. ‘What are you looking so smug about?’ she asked.
He turned his head slightly in her direction. Grinned.
‘Have you any idea how much trouble you’ve caused everyone?’
He didn’t reply, but turned his gaze to the ceiling.
‘It was worth it,’ he said quietly. She could barely see him in the gloom. ‘For what I wanted to find. What I was meant to find.’
‘What are you babbling about?’ she said, sitting up, rubbing her temples.
‘Did you ever read ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’?’ he asked.
‘Jules Verne? No. Why?’
‘The explorers are guided by the carved initials of Arne Saknussem.’
‘What’re you talking about?’ she said. ‘Can’t you speak plainly for once?’
‘I found his initials.’ He pulled out his camera, switched it on and flashed through the photos he’d been taking. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Look.’ It was a close up of the wall of a log cabin, or seemed to be to her. Then the batteries gave out.
‘Is this the place? The cabin? Well, I’m glad this wasn’t all for nothing. But what were you thinking, setting off into the mountains on foot? You weren’t having dark thoughts again, were you?’
‘I can’t describe it. Just had this feeling, I had to go. I didn’t know why. But I’ll be alright. I’m feeling better.’
‘You’re pumped full of painkillers. That’s why. Wait until they wear off. Listen, you should get some sleep, rest. Rick’s given me a room.’ She looked around her. ‘Did you see a key on the bed?’
‘A key? I don’t know.’
‘I put it on the bed, I’m sure. Maybe it fell down.’ She stood up and started searching the floor in the gloom. ‘Mind if I put on the main light?’
‘Wait. Hang on, there’s something I want to ask you,’ he said, ‘if you’re not too tired?’
‘Well, I guess I can wait a few minutes,’ she replied.
‘I was thinking, you drove up all the way up here for Vancouver? Why?’
‘You didn’t answer my messages and I couldn’t get hold of you. And then you sent that postcard with that thing about jumping the river. And I just had this feeling. Something was wrong.’
‘Wow. Instinct?’
She smiled. ‘Twinstinct. Isn’t that what they call it?’
‘Seriously, though, that was quite a thing to do. And I’m very glad you did.’
She sat down on the end of the bed, still in the half-light. ‘I may as well tell you. I was going to in the morning anyway. I read your journal. I was worried about you after the postcard you sent. I knew you’d gone missing, so I was searching the room for some clue, and you’d just left it laying there on the desk with this mysterious message no one could understand.’
‘What message?’
‘About the sacred valley.’
‘Ah yes. Anyway, I’m flattered to have a reader. What did you make of it?’’
‘I wasn’t too happy about you using me for a model for Martina.’
‘Don’t worry, it’ll never be published. I’ll never finish. I never do.’
‘Another great beginning? But why did you make her Czech?’
‘Just happened. I suppose it’s a subconscious homage – I love Czech writing. Hrabal, Škvorecký, Kundera. Kafka of course.’
‘And what makes you think you could pull that off? Do you know anything about Czechoslovakia?’
‘I don’t know. I just started, in Vancouver. It’s what came out. I didn’t expect it would grow the way it did.’
‘Huh… okay, we can talk about it tomorrow. We both need to get some sleep. Before the next train pulls through. Now where’s that key?’
She switched the light on, dazzling them both for a few seconds, searched the carpet, looked under the bed, but no sign of it was to be seen.
‘You could always sleep here,’ he suggested. ‘It’s a pretty big bed.’
‘I may have to,’ she said. ‘But it won’t be very comfortable for us.’
‘I don’t know. I’m pretty tired. I’ll be comatose in a while.’
She searched around for a bit longer, then gave up.
‘Wrap yourself in that sheet, then,’ she said. ‘That way I won’t accidentally touch your blisters.’
So she switched the light out, slipped off shoes, and got down on the bed beside him. There was a light top blanket and she pulled that around her, though it was very warm in the room. She lay for a while, unable to sleep. He was absolutely still next to her, and she thought he’d dropped off, but then he said, very softly, ‘You’re restless?’
A voice came slowly out of the darkness. ‘You know that bit of your story where Martina goes to Bowen?’
‘Yes.’
‘I told you I was going to visit a friend. And that scene you made up, in the car where she tells him about breaking up with her lover...’
‘I just thought it would be more interesting that way. If she had a famous Czech writer for a lover. I suppose that was the point where the fiction began to take over.’
‘What would you say if I was to tell you that I did go to see a guy?’
‘As you put it in the New World… Huh.’
They lay in darkness that hot summer night, windows open but still feeling the heat of the day, the gentle breeze providing some kind of relief. The sound of the great river rolled on, incessant and untroubled. The Scotsman had not been carried away in its powerful rippling currents.
Finally she spoke his name, questioning whether he was asleep. He said no, he felt as if he was burning up. After a while, she spoke again, asked him if she could read the book proposal he’d mentioned in his journal. He said yes, of course, he’d welcome her opinion, it was on his laptop. She got up and went over to the desk in the corner of the room, where the pile of books belonging to the innkeeper’s absent wife was just visible. She lifted the lid of the laptop and the light shone over the carpet towards Hero who, exhausted by the heat, lay sprawled at the foot of the bed. He told her the password was Olomouc – the town Martina came from. The home screen appeared, a few icons and apps. She saw ‘Book Proposal’ and another word file, ‘MacLeod Falls Journal’, and asked him what the second was. He said it was the story of his time here. She could read that too if she liked. So she clicked on the icon for the proposal. At first glance she could see his terminology was all wrong - probably offensive. No one said ‘native’ any longer. But she began to read it all, interested to know about this pioneer who her friend was so interested in.
A BOOK PROPOSAL
A study of the life and work of James Alexander Lyle
by Gilbert J. T. Johnson
James ‘Jimmie’ Lyle’s life is remarkable in many ways. He married a Native wife and was inducted into the N’laka’pamux tribe, becoming a trusted and valued friend who went on hunting trips with his adopted people. By chance, a visiting German ethnographer, Dr Franz Boas, happened to call at Cloud Falls where he met Jimmie. It was this encounter that began Lyle’s scholarly work, though his formal interest in the Native way of life predates Boas’s arrival. By that time Lyle was fluent in a number local Native languages, had corresponded with a local expert and written an essay on the ‘Carrier Indians’. However Boas was in a position to employ him in this work and provide him with certain essential materials, as he did a number of other people in the Pacific Northwest. At Boas’ prompting, Lyle’s adoption of new recording techniques pioneered by such as Edison allowed him to amass an amazing library of Native songs on wax cylinders, besides much priceless collecting and documenting in the fields of photography and material culture.
Franz Boas (1858-1942) is himself a most interesting figure; indeed, he has been called the ‘Father of Modern Anthropology’. Whatever his status, he was undoubtedly a very influential man in the field, whose reach stretched as far as Margaret Meade and the young Claude Lévi-Strauss, and his meeting with Jimmy Lyle was crucial in his early career as it gave him access to an intimacy with Native people he had previously struggled to attain. As he records in letters to his wife at the time, meeting Lyle renewed his faith in the fruitfulness of his fieldwork.
For Lyle, this encounter proved to be the beginning of a career which continued till his early death from cancer in 1922 at the age of 58. Lyle’s early work for Boas culminated in the publication in 1898 of a large collection of N’laka’pamux stories, with an introduction by Boas, published as a Memoir of the American Folk-Lore Society. In the coming decade he published a number of other key works in the field, and by 1913 was becoming something of a legend amongst travellers in these remote territories. As one contemporary commentator phrased it:
From the Customs officers of two nations to the humblest Indian child, Lyle’s word is our passport, and his presence greeted. He not only knows all the Indian guides, but has trained many of them.
In addition to the work he did for Boas, from 1911 he also worked for Edward Sapir in the Anthropology division of the Canadian Geological Survey. By the time of his death, he had amassed a considerable output: 2,200 pages of ethnographic text in 42 published sources, and a further 5,000 unpublished, and a great array of artefacts, photographs, sketches and wax cylinder recordings. But unlike Boas and his ilk, Lyle lived amongst his subjects and was struck not only by the myths and wonders of the Golden Age then disappearing, or even the ravages wrought by the European presence in the form of illness or strong drink, but by the malaise which had struck the very soul of the native people:
The belief that they are doomed to extinction seems to have a depressing effect on some of the Indians. At almost any gathering where chiefs or leading men speak, this sad, haunting belief is sure to be referred to...
So, while Lyle’s work as an ethnographer is of great importance, it is his engagement with the contemporary political situation facing the Native peoples he lived among that marks him out as a personality worthy of greater investigation for me. Even while Boas and his ilk were locating their Indian subjects as hunter-gatherers in a pre-contact Golden Age, their subjects were targets of aggressively assimilationist policy. Out of the large number of ethnographers working on the Pacific Northwest field, Jimmy Lyle was the only one who confronted that reality.
Strangely perhaps, Shetland plays a part in this politicization. After the death of his wife Lucy from tuberculosis in 1899, and prior to his second marriage in 1904 to a woman of Dutch descent with whom he had three children, Jimmy Lyle made his first and only trip home, where he met and conversed with the writer and early Socialist J.J. Haldane Burgess (1862-1927), a fellow Lerwegian and his near contemporary. Lyle was then able to give a name to the impulse and the action he hoped may assist the Natives in rescuing their fate from the oblivion the more negatively minded among them felt was inevitable.
Back in Canada, by November of 1902 he had become a member of The Socialist Party of British Columbia and was contributing to the journal ‘The Canadian Socialist.’ It was a time of great ferment in the Province due to increased pressures by white settlers and too many restrictions placed on fishing and hunting, and in 1903 some of the tribes began to ally and organize to deal with these issues. In 1906, these groups sent a delegation of three to England to discuss their concerns with King Edward VII.
Lyle’s role in all this is somewhat mysterious, but he was certainly of great importance. He records in 1909 that “the Interior tribes insisted upon my attending their meetings and helping them with their writing. Thus I commenced to act as their secretary and treasurer...” Subsequently Lyle was regularly in correspondence with government officials in both Victoria, the provincial administrative centre of BC, and Ottawa, the national capital. As evidence of his increasingly important function, the key letter setting out the Native case presented, at Kamloops, BC on August 25th 1910, to Sir Wilfred Laurier, then Premier of the Dominion of Canada, is an elegant and heart-felt plea. It is by no means without dignity, and is signed “Yours very sincerely, The Chiefs of the Shuswap, Okanagan and Couteau or Thompson tribes – Per their secretary, J.A. Lyle.” And in January of 1912, when a delegation of nine chiefs representing the Thompson, Okanagan, Shuswap, and Lillooet peoples, and calling themselves ‘The Indian Rights Association of British Columbia’, travelled to Ottawa make clear their concerns in the presence of then Premier Borden and his Cabinet, Lyle travelled with them as their interpreter.
Indeed, in these early years of the 20th century, Lyle put himself at the service of the Native people’s struggle for rights, as delegate, interpreter and secretary in their dealings with the Canadian state, even to the point of neglecting the duties for which Sapir had contracted him in favour of this political work. Today, in Canada, his memory is still cherished by the Native population of BC, as evidenced by the following record of a meeting that took place in Kamloops in 1999. Seventy-eight years after his death, about 100 people -- both white and native -- filled the Community Centre one afternoon to salute Lyle’s efforts to explore, record and promote the culture of the N’laka’pamux nation. The ceremony opened with a song by the Morning Star drum group, the national anthem and a prayer by Joan Anderson, an elder from the Cloud Falls Indian Band.
“Today is a powerful, good day,” said Devlin Mutch, chief of the Cloud Falls band. “Even now we are relearning the songs he recorded and trying to bring them back into our culture.” Cloud Falls band member Bill Mutch, 85, shared memories of Lyle with the audience. Having met the Scottish scholar in 1919, he was able to draw on personal and family tales. “This was known as Lyle’s country... and at the last, big meeting a Vernon chief did this great war dance. Lyle said ‘You dance very well but that will never win your country back.’
As I hope you’ll see, Lyle’s is a remarkable life-story. I appreciate you taking the time to read this outline and I trust it may interest you sufficiently to warrant further correspondence between us.
Yours sincerely
PS – I append a chronology of exploration and settlement of the province up to and including Lyle’s times, to which I intend to make in-depth reference throughout the proposed book. I appreciate that not everything here listed may be relevant to the final text, however I consider it to be crucial background which may help you to place this proposed book appropriately in your forthcoming catalogue. Indeed, I would welcome any advice on what the reader may wish omitted.
