Maccloud falls, p.15
macCLOUD FALLS, page 15
‘Really? Seems to me a lot of people who settled here were Scottish – you, know, from place-names and so on.’
‘Sure, a lot of Scots came out to BC. So what brings you up here?’ she asked as she set the longed-for glass of beer in front of him, and waited for his answer, although there was already a queue at the far end of the counter.
He took a long draw from the glass. It was ice-cold. Perfect. ‘I’m researching a story.’
‘You a writer?’
‘Sort of, yes. I’m staying over at the inn for a few days.’
‘So what’s it about?’ she asked again. A few voices called out to her, but she dismissed them with a gesture of her hand.
‘A man who came out here from Scotland in 1884. James Lyle. He was quite well-known around here at one time.’
‘Hmmm, name’s familiar, not sure why. Listen, as you can see, we’re a bit busy here right now, but if you want to stop by in the morning I’ll be free to chat then. I’d like to talk about Scotland with you. My great-grandmother was Marjory Kennedy-Fraser.’
‘The song-collector?’
‘You’ve heard of her?’
‘I certainly have. Her song settings were very popular once upon a time. I think I may have a few records somewhere back home.’
‘Really? That’s great. Listen, stop by here in the morning, around 11. I’ll ask around about that guy, what was his name?’
‘Jimmy Lyle.’
A leather-clad customer called to her from the far end of the bar. ‘Hey Marie, get yer sexy ass down here and serve your real customers.’
She shouted back, ‘At least this guy’s a gentleman with some manners!’ Then, to the Scotsman, she said, ‘Okay, I’ll ask if anybody knows about him. I’m from Alberta myself, we’ve only been here around eight years. But maybe some of regulars will have heard of him. What was it he did?’
‘He did a whole lot of different things. Came out to work on his uncle’s estate to begin with, but then he sort of went native, as they used to say. Married a local woman, one of how do you say it, the N’laka’pamux?’ He tried to wrap his tongue around the pronunciation as best he could.
Her face changed a little at that point, the welcoming smile a mention of Scotland had brought seemed to disappear. ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she muttered. Marie’s expression was hard to read. ‘Jimmy Lyle? And he lived round here when?’
‘From 1884 until around 1915.’
‘Guess that’s too long ago for anyone to remember him then,’ she said. The chapter began baying for her attention, so she turned away, heading back to their end. He lifted up his glass and drank down the rest of his Molson’s thirstily. The noise level was rising and the pizza was almost demolished. One or two of the bikers had fastened their attention on him now, and he felt their interest grow in a none too welcome manner. His knobbly white Scottish knees poked ridiculously out of those stupid shorts as he sat on his barstool. How could they bear to wear so much leather in these temperatures?
Just as he was draining his glass, Marie called over from where she was pouring still more lager. ‘Hey, by the way, if you wanna drop by later tonight, we’re having a special on food for the hockey match. 8 o’clock puck down. It’s Stanley Cup finals. First time the Canucks have got there since 94. Everybody’s really stoked about it.’
‘Well, I’ll see. Looks like it may get a bit rowdy here later.’
‘These guys? Na, don’t worry, they’re pussies. Be long gone up the canyon by then, anyway. This is just a stop-off for them. A pizza and a beer, then they’re gone. Tonight it’ll just be the locals, and there’s more than enough room for you. Besides, you’ll get a chance to talk to a few people about your story.’
He thanked her, said he just might do that. As he got down from the barstool, he took another look around the timber walls of the cabin at the array of bike memorabilia. ‘Amazing place,’ he told her. ‘I must have a proper look around when I come back.’
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘The guys often bring us stuff, you know, bike-stuff, photos. We get people from all over. Next week, if you’re still around, it’s the big canyon burn-up.’
He didn’t know what she meant, but she’d said it as if everyone should know. It sounded as if it might be some sort of bonfire, maybe for midsummer. She pointed towards the door. ‘Winner gets to do one of those.’ He looked in the direction she indicated, unsure what she was talking about, but before he could ask she had gone off to serve another leather-jacket, a big old man with a grey handlebar moustache.
Outside the bright sun was a shock and his eyes took a half-minute to adapt. When they had, the waiting herd of chrome beasts hadn’t moved, but they seemed less potentially aggressive, less fierce now that he’d seen their riders close up. That gloved middle finger, maybe it was just for the camera. He moved through the bikes, admiring the engineering and the aesthetic without really understanding either, but it reminded him his father had once owned a motor-bike, back in the days before he could afford a car. He’d seen photos of it, but the where and the when, the detail, was a mystery. And now, with his mother gone, how would he ever know? Maybe there would be something written on the rear of the photos? Sometimes she had done that, particularly in the early days when they were first together and touring. Just a name or a phrase, like ‘Boat of Garten – ospreys’.
His reverie was broken by the sound of a train on the far side of river. The little town of Cloud Falls lay between him and it. His highway walk had carried him north of it. The pub was the last building. As he stepped from the shadow of the log cabin, the sun caught the exposed skin on his neck again and he realised he really would have to get some sun-cream somehow. Maybe there was somewhere he could try besides the store? He thought he’d ask there.
As he walked down the road back into the town, he noticed the street sign read Acacia Avenue. This must be those acacias Lyle’s uncle John planted back in the 1870s, along the road that ran from his new store to his new house. They looked old enough, all gnarled by the desert extremes, some had clearly either died or been taken down, for the avenue now had a lot of gaps. But the scent of what remained was strong. He wondered if the people living here today such as Marie even knew why the acacias were here, how an old Scots pioneer had laid out his plans for a fruit farm, complete with beehives, and the aim of exporting acacia honey, all to be carried away to the south by the marvellous new railroad that came to course the canyon’s length and on to Vancouver.
The station at Cloud Falls was long gone now, but as he walked along Acacia Avenue he began to whistle ‘Canadian Pacific’, that Hank Snow song his country & western loving mother used to sing. He could picture the album cover even now, the dungaree-clad singer with red neckerchief, smiling puckishly, dwarfed by giant railroad wheels behind. Strange how these random childhood images persisted while so much of note was forgotten. The chorus came to him – Canadian Pacific, carry me ten thousand miles. Or was it two? He supposed two was more likely.
He knew the last spike on the railroad connecting eastern Canada with the new province of British Columbia had been driven close to here. Widow Spark had written about the sense of hopeful occasion that everyone felt for the new colony and its prosperity, when at last the dream of Lord Strathcona was fulfilled and the tracks reached the rapidly expanding new city of Vancouver, where the immense wealth of natural resource that land and sea had to offer would shape fortunes far more lasting, in a manner a deal more gracious than the greed for gold that had first tempted white men up the Fraser Valley and into the canyon. But that was all book learning, things he’d read 5000 miles away. He’d studied all he could, but this was detailed reality that no remote preparation could prepare him for.
The burning sun on his bare neck was not virtual, some digital version of sunshine. He suddenly felt exhausted, like a wave of the fatigue the radiotherapy had caused hit him. He felt weak, just a little ginger-haired dot, walking around pointlessly going nowhere, realising his own folly for smoking all those years, the futility of this mad adventure he’d set out on. Maybe he wasn’t even going to write the book. Cancer hadn’t changed him fundamentally. He felt like the same ‘fool boy’ his father sometimes used to chide.
Yet there had been so many peculiar coincidences, so many clues that seemed to draw him here, even right up until meeting the woman on the plane. And however tiny he felt in relation to this landscape, it was sublimely, wildly beautiful here, the way the river swept through the canyon, the way the scrubby slopes rose to the scarps above, to the great mass of rock that crowned it all. It was exhilarating. So he pushed the doubt away.
Dorothy was in the store. She reckoned it was just possible that Sally in the Post Office would have sun-block as she was the local agent for Avon, if he called by her in the old school. So he bought some more bottled water and set off in the direction he’d been given, walking deeper into the little huddle of settler houses musing on the thought of Avon calling on any of them here in the canyon. The town seemed deserted as he strolled down the road in the hot sun. No one sat on porches, no life showed except a couple of fairly fierce dogs that growled and barked as he passed. Luckily they were chained up and, though they pulled at the extreme of their tethers, could not escape.
The old school turned out to be the long low prefab with the community spirit sign he’d seen from the highway earlier. Sally’s post office was a small vestibule, probably once a cloakroom, with a kitchen in rear. A desk had been fashioned in the wall, and here he found the Post Officer, a little old grey-haired lady with half-frame glasses reading a magazine. She looked up lazily at first, even a little displeased at being interrupted, and then, as if adjusting her vision and noting he was a stranger, seemed interested.
‘Sun-block?’ she said, when he told her Dorothy had sent him. ‘Oh! Well, let me see.’ She got down off a tall stool, revealing just how tiny she was, and rummaged in a cupboard. She brought out Avon product after Avon product, and finally emerged with a squeezable tube, which she proudly placed on the counter.
‘Now let me see, with tax, that’s nine dollars straight. You just passing through?’ she asked, as he pulled out his wallet.
‘I’m staying at the inn for a while. I’m interested in a man who lived here long ago, that is, back around the turn of the century – the last century, I mean.’
Old Sally’s eyes lit. ‘Really? Now who might that be?’
‘A man called Lyle.’
‘Ah!’ she said. ‘Jimmy Lyle.’
It was the first positive response he’d had since he got there.
‘You’ve heard of him?’
‘Well, sure. He was a friend of my father’s. I don’t recall him myself, but my father sometimes talked about him. So what makes you so interested in Jimmy Lyle you’ve come all the way up here, and from Scotland too, I think from your accent?’
‘You’re right, I’m from Edinburgh. He’s a relative of mine, I think. And I’m thinking of writing a book about him, his life.’
‘Well, the people you should really talk to are Hesther and Kyle. They live in his old house, down by the river. You’ve maybe seen it? The one with the tipi out back? At least, that was one of his houses. He lived other places round here too, I believe.’
‘I saw the tipi earlier, yes. So, this Hesther and…’
‘… Kyle.’
‘Are they interested in Lyle?’
‘Oh yes, Hesther knows a lot about him. They’re not from here, you understand, they only just moved over from the island two years ago.’
‘The island?’
‘Vancouver Island – anyways, when they heard his old house was on the market, and they just upped sticks and bought it. That’s how keen they are on Jimmy Lyle.’
Although this seemed encouraging, there was something in the tone of her voice that suggested to him she didn’t altogether share the new arrivals’ enthusiasm.
‘So, could I call on them, do you think?’
‘Well, maybe, but they’re not always around. They travel all over the province to these gatherings, you know… other people like them.’ Again, there was hint of something like disapproval in the way she spoke, this sweet little old lady with her half-frame specs who kept the Post Office going, and perhaps the gossip mill too. He was curious. Villages all had sides, their local versus incomer tensions too. But ‘people like them’ seemed a heavy nuance. He had to ask.
‘So what kind of people are they?’
‘Oh, I don’t mean nothing, but I hear they’re involved in what folks on tv sometimes call the alternative lifestyle. If you know what I mean.’ She seemed to wink at him. What exactly could she mean?
He wasn’t sure how best to enquire, so he said, ‘I suppose having a tipi in your garden is a bit alternative. Do they live in it?’
‘No no, Hesther is a healer. A spiritual healer. She uses the tipi for her sessions.’
Again, something in way she spoke that last word seemed dismissive, if not outright disapproving. Sessions – in a tipi! Like it was some form of occult practice, and Post Office Sally couldn’t frank it with her rubber ink-stamp of approval.
‘So how long are you staying for?’ she asked.
‘I’ll be here a week or two, I think. I’m Bert, by the way. I want to see the places Jimmy Lyle lived, talk to people.’
‘Well you know, Wednesday is free soup day here in the centre. You’d be welcome to come along, and you’ll get to meet Hesther and Kyle that way too, because they’re ones who make the soup.’
‘Free soup day?’
‘Well, it’s not just soup, there’s bread and salads and sometimes people bring cakes and things they’ve made. It’s a new idea Kyle dreamt up, to try to bring the community together a bit. These days people don’t mix the way they used to do. It was a great place here once upon a time, back in the days of the Spark lady. She was Scottish, you know. She and her husband had a huge fruit farm, orchards all over the place and they grew all kinds of things, though apples were the main crop. She even won prizes for them at the Empire Exhibition in London, and the King of England himself asked for Widow Spark’s apples. It’s all in her book she wrote when she was old. I think I have a copy somewhere if you’re interested?’
‘Actually, I’ve read it. I’ve got a copy back in Scotland. It was very interesting,’ he said.
‘Well then, you’ll know she knew Jimmy Lyle very well, they even came out here together along with her husband – they were to work for his uncle, John MacLeod.’
‘Yes, that was all very interesting. She didn’t have too much to say about Jimmy Lyle in her book though.’
‘Well, why would she? It was her book, after all. Anyways, you can see her place from here, just across the school field there.’ She pointed through the window behind her towards a row of wooden houses.
‘I didn’t realise her house was still standing,’ he said, peering out. She seemed pleased to be able to tell him something he didn’t already know and came round to the customer’s side of the counter, then took him over to a bigger window in the schoolroom wall, so she could point out exactly where it was.
‘It’s in pretty bad shape right now, I’m afraid. I tried to get the community interested in preserving it, because it’s local history and dates right back, but so far we haven’t managed to do anything. Seems it’s owned by some of her great-grandchildren down in Vancouver and they can’t agree on who should get it, and so nothing happens. They don’t even come here now to take care of it, so every year it’s a little closer to being a ruin. It’s very sad when you think of everything she did for this community. But you can’t tell the young folk, they don’t want an old house like that, they want it all modern, open plan or whatever they call it. Not the kind of house I grew up in.’
She seemed to drift away into some memory or another. ‘I remember her,’ she said after a while. ‘Not clearly though. It would have been when I was around 5 or 6, just before she gave it up at the beginning of the war. A very small woman, but always well-dressed and busy.’
He thought then of his father, and asked if she had ever known a man by the name of Johnson, a young Scotsman who had lived here for a while in the thirties, but she shook her head and said no. Her eyes were narrowed behind her glasses, her forehead lined, as if searching through some vault of memory.
‘I’ll try to come along to free soup on Wednesday then, as you say. And thanks for this.’ He put the Avon sun cream in his bag. ‘So glad you had some. Had no idea the weather would be so hot up here.’
‘What?’ she asked. She hadn’t heard a word he’d said, so deep in the past had she been.
‘I said I’ll see you on Wednesday for free soup, then?’
‘Oh no, I won’t be there. The Post Office is closed on Wednesdays. But I’m very pleased to have met you, Mr…?’
‘Johnson… Bert Johnson.’ he told her.
‘And you’re from where, did you say?’
‘Scotland. Edinburgh.’
‘Ah! A lovely place. Or so I believe. Not that I’ve ever been to Britain. But no doubt we’ll be meeting again at some point if you’re staying a while. You could come for supper some evening. I’d like to hear more about what you’re writing.’
‘I haven’t really started the writing properly yet. This is just research, you know, taking notes and that sort of thing.’
‘Ah well, still, I hope we can have another chat. I have a lot more I could tell you about this place. Things not written down in any book. The secret history of Cloud Falls, you could say.’ And she winked at him again, behind her half-frame glasses, and chuckled to herself as if sucking on some very juicy little secrets that she might just be prepared to share. ‘I’m Mrs White, Sally, by the way.’ And she offered him a delicate little hand, covered in liver spots and slightly arthritic, the skin loose across thwarted bones. He shook it gently and she chuckled again. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you, Bert. I can tell you’re a historian like myself,’ she said.
‘That I am, Sally. I love nothing better,’ he told her, as he opened the door to leave.
