The Diviners Read Online Free PDF Page A

it.”
    They both laughed, not uncomfortably.
    When Royland had gone, Morag wrapped the fish in aluminum foil (good God, why not fresh leaves or something?) and put it in the refrigerator (natural living–it should be an earth cellar or roothouse). Then, willing herself not to do so, she got out the snapshots again, and began looking at the ones taken after she had gone to the Logans’, right up through the years.
    She put the pictures away, finally, and walked over to theoval walnut-framed mirror which hung precariously from a nail above the sideboard.
    A tall woman, although not bizarrely so. Heavier than once, but not what you would call fat. Tanned, slightly leathery face. Admittedly strong and rather sharp features. Eyebrows which met in the middle and which she had ceased to pluck, thinking what the hell. Dark brown eyes, somewhat concealed ( good ) by heavy-framed glasses. Long, dead-straight hair, once black as tar, now quite evenly grey.
    The films were beginning again. Sneakily unfolding inside her head. She could not even be sure of their veracity, nor guess how many times they had been refilmed, a scene deleted here, another added there. But they were on again, a new season of the old films.
    I can smell the goddamn prairie dust on Hill Street, outside Christie’s palatial mansion.
    Hill Street, so named because it was on one part of the town hill which led down into the valley where the Wachakwa River ran, glossy brown, shallow, narrow, more a creek than a river. They said “crick,” there. Down in the valley the scrub oak and spindly pale-leafed poplars grew, alongside the clumps of chokecherry bushes and wolf willow. The grass there was high and thick, undulating greenly like wheat, and interspersed with sweet yellow clover. But on Hill Street there were only one or two sickly Manitoba maples and practically no grass at all. Hill Street was the Scots-English equivalent of The Other Side of the Tracks, the shacks and shanties at the north end of Manawaka, where the Ukrainian section-hands on the CPR lived. Hill Street was below the town; it was inhabited by those who had not and never would make good. Remittance men and their draggled families. Drunks. People perpetually on relief. Occasional labourers,men whose tired women supported the family by going out to clean the big brick houses on top of the hill on the streets shaded by sturdy maples, elms, lombardy poplars. Hill Street–dedicated to flops, washouts and general nogoods, at least in the view of the town’s better-off.
    Christie Logan’s house was halfway up the hill, and looked much the same as the other dwellings there. A square two-storey wooden box, once painted brown but when I knew it, no distinguishable colour, the paint having yielded long ago to the weather, blistering summers and bone-chilling blizzard-howling winters. Front porch floored with splintered unsteady boards. The yard a junk heap, where a few carrots and petunias fought a losing battle against chickweed, lamb’s quarters, creeping charlie, dandelions, couchgrass, old car axles, a decrepit black buggy with one wheel missing, pieces of iron and battered saucepans which might come in useful someday but never did, a broken babycarriage and two ruined armchairs with the springs hanging out and the upholstery torn and mildewed.
    I didn’t see it in that detail at first. I guess I must have seen it as a blur. How did it feel?
     
    Memorybank Movie: What Means “In Town”?
    Smelly. The house is smelly. It smells like pee or something, but not like a barn. Worse. Morag sits still on the kitchen chair. The two people are looking at her. Let them look. She will not let on. She will not say anything.
    “You’ll like living In Town, once you’re used to it,” the Big Fat Woman says.
    In Town? This does not seem like Town. Town is where the stores are, and you go in for ice cream sometimes, like with Mr. and Mrs. Pearl yesterday or when.
    The Big Fat Woman sighs. She is so