Maccloud falls, p.13
macCLOUD FALLS, page 13
Native Flower Seeds,
and English Gooseberries,
a Specialty.
At that moment, the video camera clicked itself off. It had reached its limit and shut down automatically. He got up, downloaded the files onto his laptop and set it up afresh, then watched the footage from the time he was out, 4x zip-by-speed. Trucks and other vehicles passed intermittently on the new highway while Cloud Falls lay bypassed. Every so often a snaking train slid along the far riverbank, the CNR line as opposed to the CPR on this side, running long and slow through the settlement, truck after truck. What looked like coal, and containers with legends in Chinese or Japanese from the orient, which was really occident here.
To the left of the shot, the ospreys danced, fast-forward – one leaving and returning. It became clear, watching for a while, that one was the giant chick and the other its mother, that the chick couldn’t yet fly. Then video dusk fell at equatorial speed, a mobile darkening meld of hues of grey and mauve, and soon after black, footage cut out.
He lay on the bed, stomach full of Colette’s stew, thinking again of the ospreys back home. He remembered that the name ‘Boat of Garten’ had puzzled him as a child. How could a place be a boat? And he remembered his father explaining how the boat was originally a ferry at Garten, across the river Spey, and that was how the name came to be. And it struck him that this was the Boat of Sigurd - his ferry, a crossing.
Drifting into a light sleep in the darkness of New Caledonia, listening to the river’s roar with the image of his crossing it, not jumping, a vision of his father woke him sharply, drowned in the sump in that garage of his, his wee kingdom in Duddingston, the dark oily pit below, the sump where he’d go with his spanners, his head-torch on, dressed in his old army boiler suit, washed so many times it was slowly turning from khaki to beige. He remembered how once as a wee laddie, curious, he went down there and the dark streaks of oil on gathered rain shining in the torch beam looked like the lochs of some alien planet. He’d wondered if sometime his father would simply be swallowed – never come in from the garage when his mother called him for supper. The dream he’d had was of that dread.
Then a noise began to emerge out of the river’s unchanging rush, a groan of metal shot through with shrieks slowly rising higher until the pitch was painful. Room 14 seemed to shake and he realised that CPR Ken and his truck had done the job, the train was off, shouting to itself loud enough to keep even the most exhausted tree-planter awake. And it went on and on, a mile long, filling the darkness, somehow terrifying and ushering an intrusive attack of painful cramped self-loathing – it came from nowhere but he suddenly felt he was as good as dead, a cancerous creature whose active existence had been hollowed out, almost empty, a shadow of the self he might have been had he not spent his life learning about other people, their adventures and heroic acts, gathering books and packaging them for still other people, a conduit through which lives and deeds of others passed, an observer when it came to the active. He had only lived in his head, retiring, shy and sensitive, a grown up child whose imagination ranged the world, engaged in all kinds of wonderful adventures. His parents’ home in their pleasant suburb encouraged that, they were reserved and mostly silent, the house was filled with raw material for imaginative exploration – the library his mother and father had gathered between them, throughout their adult lives. So he’d learned to read early, knew a great deal about the world without ever having travelled, could answer questions on ‘Top of the Form’ to his mother’s delight, but he voyaged without moving. From the first time he read Gulliver’s Travels, that children’s edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham Santa brought when he was six years old, his mind fixated on the strange and distant, and his studies followed accordingly, fascinated by the Wild West, cowboys and Indians, the dark heart of Africa, India and the East. But he wasn’t a traveller, the family never went anywhere outside Britain, the car trips that his parents were always taking rarely even crossed the border into England. He would sit in the back while his father drove and his mother navigated, the big Bartholomew’s road atlas open on her knees. Driving, touring, was a thing they shared, that brought them together, while he was in the back seat, elsewhere. He was always a reader, came to know a lot of stories about the world, yet in reality all he knew was books, and in a way, that’s the adult he became, sitting in the back seat of life, reading about faraway places, about the past. Of the present, the real world beyond the pathways of his narrow Edinburgh routines of auction, house clearance, bookshop and pub, beyond the columns of newspapers, he really knew very little. Maybe, in contrast to his safe childhood, his reading emphasised the aspect of terror in the unknown, simultaneously stimulating a desire to know and a fear of not knowing. His parents were afraid of the world, they’d lived through wars and foreign places were full of enemies to them – perhaps his parents’ caution made him overly timid and afraid, of taking risks, of love, or accident and death.
But the cancer changed everything. Something like that shifts a person’s perspective in the most fundamental way. He’d felt a kind of wild ecstatic need to live while still could, do what he could while he could, though of course what he could do was more circumscribed by the illness, and the treatment. Something in him that wanted to live had driven him to book that flight, to make his way to the airport, to board, fasten seatbelts and soar. To cross the fabled Rockies, so long a magical name is his gazetteer of knowledge. Sitting in his mother’s little garden after she died, watching the planes as they flew in and out of the airport, he had realised that if he was going to die too, which he was sooner or later, he should at least experience a little life first.
And then there was the puzzle of his father, who’d died when he was still so young, who had seemed very old, as old as his classmates’ grandfathers. He didn’t come to collect his son from school very often as he was mostly at work, and when he did, he waited at the corner, wouldn’t talk with other parents. He could be quite affectionate sometimes, but he was always distant. Affection meant he might ruffle his son’s hair, say ‘That’s my boy’ when he got a question right or a good report card, which he invariably did, but never did his father praise him with what might have been called an exclamation of delight, no matter what his boy did. It was more as if he knew that was what he ought to say. His father was preoccupied, he had his cars, and his cars were all. His cars he could control. He could fix whatever went wrong.
Or so it had seemed. Now, forty years later, after the involuntary disclosures of his mother’s dementia and his rummaging through her effects after she died, he knew that his father was born in Lerwick in 1884, to a widow in her thirties, a woman whose husband had been drowned whilst fishing from an open boat, who lived in the Shetland town until she herself died a very few years later. From the Scotland’s People website, he knew that his father had then lived in what was the town poorhouse for a while, cared for by his maternal grandmother. They were both on the census of 1891 at that address. He knew that he had enlisted in Leith in 1912, that he became a motorised vehicle driver and that he was ultimately the personal chauffeur of the Earl of Angus during the war, that a driver then meant mechanic too. He knew that, when the Armistice came, he was offered the opportunity to continue as the Earl’s personal chauffeur, but chose instead to emigrate to Canada. And he knew, as of a few months ago at his failing mother’s stove-side, in the dusk while the tea pot bubbled, that his father came here to Cloud Falls. Or so the story seemed to go.
Lying there in the stifling warmth of the canyon night, windows open in the hope of channelling the cooling breeze the river brought, he found himself wondering if he could even be sure of what he thought he knew. He tried to think back to when his father was alive. Although he was old, he was a kind of royalty in their parish, as he drove the big van for Jenner’s after they opened their depository on the edge of town, and everybody knew he’d been a general’s driver in the first war. He, his son, was proud of him in a roundabout way, not for what his father was whilst he knew him, but for what he had once been. He remembered when he died, how his mother sold the over-sized spotless Standard and the ageing Bentley, and bought a little sports car, an MG, second-hand – only two seats, one for her, and one for him, ‘her boy’. She went to work for Jenner’s too then, in accounts. They really were like royalty to some, or it felt like that, those first few years. They were proud of Jenner’s, the best shop in town, proud they had found a way to be safe and sound, to ultimately buying a house, having a car, and finally having a child.
He thought about his mother’s home territory in the green farmland of West Lothian. They often went to visit Grandma and Grandad. But Shetland, his father’s birthplace, always remained foreign to him. His father, whatever his experience of it was, didn’t talk about it. He didn’t seem to have any interest in it, which might have alerted him, if he’d been older, to something unhappy, deeply buried. His father’s voice, as far as he could recall, had the sibilance of Edinburgh’s softer accents. If anything, only the faintest hint of islands remained. Now he knew that his father had come from Shetland as a boy, orphaned, but as a child he’d wondered what had happened to his father’s family, his other grandparents.
So it was a surprise when one day, soon after the funeral, he had to go with his mother to meet his father’s cousin, a woman he hadn’t known existed. And it hardly seemed possible that she should be alive, she was so frail and old, so foreign, so Shetlandic in her ways and her speech, despite living in Leith. That was the first time he’d ever visited a proper old tenement, such a narrow dark staircase with people living on top of one another in such proximity. It seemed to him it must be a den of thieves, the kind of Dickensian underworld he’d read about, and he watched from the old aunt’s top flat window, worried that someone might make off with their car and leave them stranded there.
He slept fitfully, waking intermittently, but morning came, his first in the interior. Still half asleep, he sat up and gazed out the window. The sun hadn’t risen high enough to light the canyon floor, but the very top of the mountain opposite was lit with a dazzling yellow glow, while the grey river seemed to babble a foreign language. And then he noticed, in the grassland on the floodplain below the inn, a woman was walking, looking around her carefully, stepping, stooping – picking berries maybe – so he switched on the camera and zoomed in. She moved slowly with a light-footed grace, dark hair covering her face from view, and he felt centuries swirl around her red-patterned skirt as it swept through the shrubs. He laughed. It was a tartan check.
Further to the left, the ospreys caught his eye, wings folded on their nest, that awkward huddle of sticks. He zoomed in and behind them, across the scrubland at the very edge of focus, he noticed in the distance what must be the Indian Church referred to in the guide – and behind that, barely visible on the far side of the river, the glint of something he guessed was the waterfall that John MacLeod gave his name to – the wrong name, of course, like all of the settler names. He decided to go there after breakfast. He had it in mind to taste the water he could see cascade down the canyon wall in the distance.
As he showered he went over in his mind what he knew about MacLeod. He had settled here in Cloud Falls around 1870, was first listed as the settlement’s ‘Toll collector and Telegraph Operator’ in one of the province’s early directories he’d found. By the early 1880s, he owned most of the property on the north side of the river, and in addition to his orchard, he operated a general store, had an interest in a greenhouse, a stable, and the Morton House Hotel. MacLeod’s was one of first seed houses in western Canada, selling them in little brown paper bags with his name stamped on them. It was, for a while, quite an enterprise.
When he had dried himself off, he switched on his laptop to check a note he’d made in Vancouver, from the archive of The Colonist newspaper, a report that said: “MacCloud Falls is growing fast, and what with rival stores, hotels and railway enterprise is becoming quite a busy, bustling depot. ‘MacCloudville’ begins to assume quite the appearance of a small town, and presents a constant scene of business and enterprise. Mr. MacCloud’s new store looms up grandly, being a building some eighty feet long by thirty, two storeys high, and having projecting dormitory windows along the roof. Importing directly from Canada and Great Britain and appointed agent for a number of influential firms, Mr MacCloud eminently deserves to be considered one of the most enterprising and successful merchants of this upper country.”
The name was wrongly spelled throughout. He knew MacLeod was an Aberdonian whose father had been a shopkeeper in quite a poor quarter of that old city where he sold tobacco, whisky and essentials. After his father died, young John, then in his mid-twenties, appeared to have taken his share of what there was to inherit and set out for California, where there was gold to be found and fortunes to be made. He knew from some brief memoirs published in The Colonist shortly before MacLeod died that he had arrived in Victoria from the USA in 1859 where the pioneer spirit then building a new colony contrasted greatly with the decaying old town of Aberdeen he’d left behind. From the eloquence of his prose in those memoirs, it was easy to imagine the fine descriptions the émigré had sent home to his sister in Scotland, the one who had gone to Lerwick from Aberdeen as a schoolteacher and married a shopkeeper by the name of Lyle, who then had a first-born son called James. What tales of the wild frontier the émigré uncle must have told in his long letters to this Shetland family, sufficient indeed to turn a young boy’s head and cause him to follow into the Gold Country himself.
He clicked on the portrait of John MacLeod he’d found in the BC archives. It wasn’t dated, but he seemed quite young despite his full beard. Humour winked out from the lines around his eyes, eyes that gazed out at slightly different angles as if perhaps he squinted. A kindly quality too, but focused in scrutiny of something, the camera, the photographer, or something deeper maybe, an internal purpose, the fulfillment of a vision. His forehead was broad and his nose prominent, though the flash of the photo had obliterated some refinements of his features. He wore a checked jacket and a white cravat. In his breast pocket, almost lost in the corrupted image, was a pressed white handkerchief. This was the image of a man in his prime, confident of his schemes, the kind of picture he might have sent home to some prospective spouse or adoptee he was trying to persuade to join him on the frontier, the face of someone who was profiting from life in some satisfying way. There was nothing in his face to say he was a Scot, particularly – northern European, perhaps, but he could have been English, Welsh, Irish, French, German or Dutch or Scandinavian, or whatever.
He could not be sure, but guessed this was the uncle who the young Jimmy Lyle joined in 1884, the man whose optimistic gaze had looked at this place in the long canyon’s scope, had gauged its natural qualities, and foresaw in his waterfall the source of irrigation for the ranch he would establish. Had he at any point wondered about the rights of the native population to the land he staked? There was no evidence he had. But his adopted heir, his nephew, surely did later.
There was no one around in the dining room when the Scotsman went downstairs. The evidence of the tree planters having passed through was there in crumbs, banana skins and dirty dishes, though. Vince came through from the kitchen and greeted his guest, who asked about the books in the lounge as he filled his plate from the cold buffet. Vince told him they belonged to his absent wife, but didn’t seem inclined to talk this morning as he had the night before. Take anything you want, Vince said. It’s no skin off my nose. He made his apologies, said he had work to do and left.
The Scotsman ate quickly, packed a few things to take with him in his rucksack, and headed out into the thin morning sunlight, direct rays still to cascade over the ridge of crags. He crossed the empty Highway 8 in front of the inn towards the CPR rail-lines, where a fresh train of trucks stretched out of sight southwards, waiting for the hour when Ken got the message to make them roll. For now nothing moved in the CPR universe, except softly tumbling tumbleweed rolling slowly in a gentle breeze, infused with a scent – sagebrush, maybe.
He set out along the road in the direction of the falls. Up ahead, a small wooden sign bore the legend: CLOUD FALLS COMMUNITY HALL built 1907 by A. Clements. The numbers 3641 descended in a column beside it. The doors were locked, but the blocked-up windows had personalities – figures painted on boards, sharp black silhouettes on whitewash. In one was the outline of a man and a woman in what was clearly intended as native dress – with the schematic, in white on the man’s torso, of a spindly bird, perhaps an eagle. Above them a black sun concealed an air-vent. In the next window, a portly Western couple stood face to face, their profiles sharp below the point where two Stetsons met. In a third was a woman in tight bodice, a bustle, a three-feathered cocked hat – and in a small skylight above the door, a black silhouette cat.
He nosed around the outside. On the gable of the little hall was a commemorative wall of plaques, little brick-like tiles highlighted by means of relief, set into the plaster so that the names they bore protruded, but none at a height of more than four feet, as if perhaps the hands implanting them had belonged to children. He counted 77 – some he knew of, such as SPARK Jessie, the orchardist, her early-departed husband SPARK John, LYLE James, MACLEOD John, with CLEMENTS Archie, died 1922, above, as if denoting how he had superseded the early pioneer. And then there were names he didn’t know: BILLY Stage George; GOGLIN Ernie; MUTCH Forrest and Bill; WONG Ying Yee; BERGERON ‘Honest Paul’; SWARK ‘Potato’ Joe and Sarah. They spoke of a mix of cultures here among the good folk of the crossing – they did not mark graves, but were mementos of lives and deaths, surrounding their benefactor, the Vancouverite of propertied means who had installed the first power plant, and brought electricity to his hotel and to the citizens of the town he renamed Cloud Falls.
The Scotsman had read the story of how, in 1898, Clements had returned to Europe with his wife where they attended the World Exhibition in Paris and saw the latest horseless carriages, how he placed an order to have one of these vehicles shipped to him, how when it arrived more than three years later, he and Mrs Clements cruised down the two roads of Cloud Falls that led nowhere outside the town in this beautiful 1902 Wolsey with copper-coil radiator, high in the saddle with lamps on the side, and how the townspeople craned necks to capture a glimpse of this miraculous engine.
