Maccloud falls, p.23
macCLOUD FALLS, page 23
Writing about Vancouver brought his cancer twin into the moment, and he felt the desire to be in touch with her, to see her smile again. Maybe he would on his way home. He had the little card she’d given him with her name and address. He decided to send her a postcard tomorrow, a picture of the river. Then he realised that this was the first time he’d thought about the return journey since he’d arrived. Had that great notion to jump in the river and die passed?
He woke to the sound of someone knocking on the door. He was lying naked on top of the bedclothes, no memory of when he’d stopped writing, no sense of how long he’d slept. His mind was still in Vancouver, somewhere in Stanley Park.
It was Vince at the door. Someone was on the motel phone, asking for the Scotsman. His first intuition was that she had somehow picked up his thoughts, had found the number somehow, but as he pulled on his clothes hurriedly, that seemed a little crazy. It could be Big George, calling to arrange that supper, or maybe Deeanna had heard he wanted to speak with her? But when he lifted the receiver, it was neither. It was the man who now lived in Lyle’s house down by the river, and he was calling to invite the Scotsman to visit. The summons was particular – an appointed hour, as if he had requested an audience: ‘Hester would be pleased if you could call on her today at noon at the Lyle house.’
The invitation was unexpected, but yes, he was indeed bidden to call on Hesther the healer. Only after he’d come off the phone did he wonder how they had known about him. Had news travelled somehow? If so, how? And the caller had completely circumnavigated small talk of the kind a stranger might be expected to engage in. Yet it seemed perfectly natural that they should call, and that he should go. Why hadn’t he gone there before? They were the ones who knew about Lyle, from what he’d established so far. Yet, since the first day, when he’d seen the tipi hidden among the wooden colonial houses, he’d regarded it as a kind of cuckoo in the settler nest, an anachronism. He was searching for the unknown, for the forgotten where most of the townsfolk were concerned, but here was someone who presumably knew as much if not more about the object of his quest as he did, someone who had relocated to the canyon to live in Lyle’s house. He felt curious, yet reluctant, as if meeting this healer might entail some loss, as if she might take from him an essential possession he had carried with the care he might have given to a passport or a plane ticket.
He knew the house well enough, directly across the river from the inn, on the road close to the CNR railway line, where once had been a station. He had zoomed in on it with the videocam, had walked past it more than once out of curiosity, but had never seen anyone around. A large spruce tree shaded the front, and various other shrubs hid all of the fence but the little wooden gateway. It had been built after Lyle had become something of a celebrity, following the publication of his study of the native people, and after his wife’s death. From here, with the station more or less at the end of his garden, he was able to travel both up country to Merritt and Kamloops, and down the canyon to Vancouver, just by stepping onto a train, giving lectures and calling on fellow experts as far away as Victoria and so forth. His life was very different then from the buckskinned adventurer in the early photo, driving a team of horses, or the lad who had arrived from Scotland in 1884, green behind the ears.
The Scotsman set off ahead of time, walked down along the railway tracks. A long chain of coal trucks was passing. He had become so familiar with the haulage he hardly noticed any more, these great snakes of metal that shunted a slow route by, rarely stopping. They seemed to have so little to do with the settlement itself. As he crossed the old bridge, the sun was already hot. He was glad of the limited shade where he could find it along the gnarled avenue of acacias. Somewhere in the distance a chainsaw started up, and a dog began to bark. Within seconds, others joined in.
He opened the rickety little gate and went up the porch steps, into the shade. The screen door was shut, but the window next to it was open and he could hear the sound of music from inside. He listened, trying to identify it, but the volume was too low. Something with a tinge of native drumming, something incantatory. Or was that his own expectation, projecting meaning on the barely audible?
No one had answered his hopeful knock, so he pushed the door. It was locked. He sat down on the swing settee on the porch. He was a little early, so maybe the healer wasn’t quite prepared. But for what?
Then, out of nowhere, it struck him he was about to see a healer. A flashback to the waiting room in the Cancer Unit where he had sat among fellow sufferers, all nervously attendant on the wisdom of the specialists. Some with scars where their faces should have been, some still unscarred but marked by the familiar terror of the unknown, the undone, the ghost of mortality flitting before them, intangible yet so very present. Had he travelled so far, five thousand miles, only to sit waiting under a spruce tree in the desert of North America for the wisdom of another kind of specialist?
It gave him a shudder, this reminder, of the fear he had sought to evade by getting on that plane. But there was no escape, he knew – the terror was inside him, just as the cancer was. He felt his red neck itch uncomfortably in the heat, and pulled his collar up, to protect it as he had been told to at the hospital. There was no forgetting. Maybe this was why he had shied away from meeting this Lyle enthusiast, while wandering around the town asking people who hadn’t heard of him what he meant to them?
The distant dog began to bark again. Across the river, on top of the electricity pole, the nesting ospreys were doing their dance again. He was too far off to see properly, but he could picture it, from what he already knew of their habits, the young monster reluctant to fly, to feed itself, the impatient parent clawing at its back. Then he heard a commotion from inside the house, and the door was unlocked. The Scotsman stood up and turned to see it creak open to reveal a small man of considerable years, whose long grey hair was pulled back in a ponytail. His features were handsome, his eyes seemed sharp-seeing. But what drew the gaze was a beautiful rainbow blanket slung around his shoulder. Whatever echoes of the cancer clinic may have been in his mind, the Scotsman quickly forgot.
‘Gilbert,’ the man said, before his visitor had a chance to speak, or wonder how he knew his full name, ‘Come in. We’re ready.’ He ushered him into the house with a sweep of his arm as dramatic as his garb. The transition from desert sun to shady interior took a moment and, as his eyes adjusted, the Scotsman saw a room which seemed as if it must be unchanged since Lyle’s era, judging by the colonial furniture. But he had no time to focus on this as he was shown into a kitchen equally antiquated, and then out of the house proper through the back door, down some wooden steps and into the waiting tipi. The whole process was so swift that he felt as if he had passed through two or three centuries in the space of thirty seconds.
The tipi was lit by the sunshine gently penetrating the cloth. The pattern of the moon waxing and waning he had observed from the highway with his zoom lens days before was now bright and clearly defined, as was the antler-like symbol that seemed to support it. Woven through the design were shapes which could have been animals, perhaps a bear, a wolf, a snake and a raven. But the Scotsman’s eyes had no time to fully distinguish them as they were drawn to the figure sitting in the centre of the tipi, a similarly grey-haired woman with a multi-coloured blanket around her shoulders.
In the centre of the tipi, below the smokehole, a fire of herbs smouldered, sending a thin spume into the air which seemed a mix of many scents he partly recognised, and some he did not. Was it sage? Was there cannabis? The music he had thought he heard when out front seemed to fill the space as did the aroma, and now it was clear, the swirling of a minimalist range of notes with an insistent drum beating across everything, then a voice singing very slowly a language he did not know.
‘Sit,’ the woman said. He looked for a seat, but there was none, so he sat cross-legged on the ground in front of her. She had her eyes closed, and breathed heavily through her nose, as if drawing in the air, as if smelling him. Again he couldn’t help but think of the day back home in Edinburgh where he had gone to see the consultants, the radiographer and the laser expert who’d said he could treat the cancer but that he would destroy his vocal cords at the same time. He laughed inadvertently, then thought it may be construed rude and stifled it. But the woman and the man just smiled.
‘You’ve come a long way,’ she said at last, opening her eyes. The Scotsman tried to focus on her face but she seemed enshadowed by the strangely patterned interior, as if she was a moon mother face, among many. He could feel her stare though, emanating out of the darkness.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Yes I have.’
‘And you’re searching for something very important to you, I feel that.’
The music stopped suddenly, dramatically. Was it the end of the CD or had some mystical force switched it off right on cue?
‘You struggle with unseen forces, with doubt,’ the woman said in a soft monotone. In his mind he thought, don’t we all, but immediately had the feeling that these people did not, that doubt was not an issue in their minds; that they believed in whatever they believed in wholeheartedly, were at ease with shadows. ‘And you’ve been ill. And you’ve suffered a great loss,’ she said. The scent from the smouldering fire was overpowering at that moment, as it belched ever thicker white clouds into the apex of the tipi, where it was swiftly sucked out into the daylight beyond.
‘All right.’ It was a totally inappropriate response, but it was all his dry mouth could muster at that moment. He had walked into a house, expecting handshakes and introductions, but instead had been teleported from porch to yard, into some kind of séance in a darkened tipi. How could she know about his mother, his illness?
Then, from the shadow, the man who must have been Kyle stepped forward. ‘Maybe Mr Johnson would like to hear about why we came to live here, Hesther,’ he said gently to her. She looked up, as if her trance had been broken.
‘Oh, yes, of course. I’m sorry. Gilbert, isn’t it?’ Her voice was then quite proper, quite colonial, though she looked like some native shaman or medicine woman. ‘Please forgive me, I had the strongest intuition when I saw you. I forgot you’re not here for that,’ she added.
‘Hesther is highly attuned, highly empathetic. Sometimes she feels things she can’t quite control,’ the ponytailed figure said in his low sonorous tone.
She nodded. ‘Yes, quite often. It’s a gift. It caused me much sorrow when I was young, but now with Kyle’s help and the discipline of an ordered life, I am better able to make use of it. But you’re here because of Jimmy Lyle, aren’t you? You are a relative, we heard.’
‘It’s an honour to meet anyone of his family,’ Kyle said. ‘Hesther and I have been followers for many years.’
‘Many years,’ she repeated. ‘It’s what brought us together in the first place.’
‘And it’s why we moved here, why we bought his house. As soon as we heard it was for sale, we just got onto the realtor and said whatever it takes, we want that property.’
The Scotsman felt relief at this return to the norms of social interaction, even if the three of them were still seated cross-legged in the tipi surrounded by incense-laden air in an isolated canyon five thousand miles from anything familiar. Yet it seemed quite ordinary, somehow, and the fact they seemed to know so much about him could be explained by the operation of the local grapevine, couldn’t it?
‘I see,’ he said, but his mind was lagging behind the conversation, still curious about her intuition. It had disturbed him. What exactly had she felt when they first met? He felt he must know. ‘When you say followers, what exactly do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Healers,’ Kyle answered. ‘Herbalists. You know he collected all kinds of information on the plants of the province and their uses by the First Nations? Ethnobotany.’
‘If it hadn’t been for Jim Lyle, who knows how much of that ancient wisdom may have been lost?’ she added.
The Scotsman was surprised. ‘I didn’t know that, no. I mean, I’ve read his book, and there’s some mention of certain…’
She interrupted. ‘No, this wasn’t published. But it was in his archive, hundreds of pages in note form. Kyle found it when he was a student.’
Kyle explained. ‘We’ve dedicated our lives to finding the plants he recorded and developing the science, which hasn’t been easy because so many of the names were only in the local tongue, and often Lyle himself wasn’t sure if his notes were correct, if he had written it down properly. And so much of the information has been lost in the last hundred years, you know, within the band themselves, what with the residential school system and all.’
‘There are very few fluent speakers left now,’ she said.
‘Less than twenty. And they are all pretty old.’
‘These are treatments and cures that have been around for centuries, maybe longer. They don’t stop being helpful just because the big drug companies don’t know anything about them.’
The Scotsman nodded. It was very interesting, of course it was, but still he had the feeling that he must learn what she had intuited about him when he first arrived. But before he could find the words to ask, Kyle spoke up. ‘Do tell us about yourself, Gilbert. Sally said you were interested in the history of the province, that you’re writing a book?’ So it was Sally Post Office who’d told them about him. Not some mysterious intuition. That explained some things. But not her knowing he was ill.
So he had to explain, once again that he had always wanted to know about Lyle’s life here, that he was a distant relative. That he wasn’t really a writer. They were interested, asked him all about Scotland, which neither of them knew much about, and in particular Shetland, the childhood home of their hero. He explained what he knew, and answered as many of their questions as he could.
‘He was only a youth when he came here,’ Hesther said. ‘He didn’t have time to live much of a life. Or am I wrong?’
The Scotsman realised that in this area of the great man’s life, he was the expert. And he began to tell them the story of Lyle’s family as he had researched it. They seemed to know little beyond their own sphere of interest, the ethnobotanical, in which they were secure in their expertise, and his own detailed knowledge of the birth of Cloud Falls seemed to surprise them.
The faint shadow of the sun on the tipi wall crept slowly round, rising as it did so in a gentle arc. At last silence enclosed them, and he was able to pose the question that had been troubling him. What exactly had she felt when he first arrived?
Hesther gave a gentle maternal smile, as if she had anticipated the moment. ‘I sensed you have been very ill, that you’re here looking for an answer to problems that have troubled you for a long time.’
‘That’s it?’ His voice came out strangely, almost like it wasn’t his. It all seemed a bit surreal. She merely smiled, her radiance palpable.
‘If you like, I’ll look deeper?’ she said in same calm monotone. His throat felt very dry. So he merely nodded and she closed her eyes, reached out her arms to him.
‘Give her your hands to hold,’ Kyle whispered.
As she took his hands in hers, he felt a great heat surge from her into him, as if he was being invaded by some force. She began to speak, slowly. ‘Your mind is full. Full of things that are irrelevant. Your body is weak. Energies are very out of balance. There’s something in you – some fear that has caused this. You don’t really believe you will be well, or find what you are looking for. It’s as if you have waited for death, merely playing out time until it comes for you. But you have the power to make a difference to your life and to those of others, you are not so ill or so doomed that you cannot still do remarkable life-changing things.’
Through his dry throat he croaked, ‘And will I?’
‘That, dear Gilbert, is undecided. You are the only one who can make the changes happen, and you must want them enough to believe in the possibility. I can’t tell you your future, that isn’t my gift. I can only sense what you feel at this moment, and help you to see the obstacles in your way. I believe you have always had the ability to do remarkable things but your own doubt has led you to avoid the task. Until now.’
‘Until now…’ he repeated. ‘I see.’
‘How much do you really want to live? Ask yourself that. And when you have an answer, you will know what you should do, you will find the…’
She stopped abruptly. ‘The what?’ he coaxed. ‘Find the what?’
‘The road you seek.’
‘To where?’
‘Somewhere you never believed existed.’
Immediately the thought of the secret cabin, deep in the sacred valley, came to the Scotsman’s mind. It was like a vision, the overgrown timber structure out of sight in what had once been a clearing, garden flowers now gone wild. He turned from the stares of his hosts, rubbed his forehead, slightly dizzied by the atmosphere, and the prospect of a road he suddenly felt he had to find, to believe in it. His knees seemed to insist he stood up, so he did.
‘This house,’ he said, ‘This wasn’t where Lyle lived when he was with his native wife, was it?’
‘No,’ Kyle answered. ‘This house was built in 1901, after he came back from Scotland.’
He sat down again, the vision of the cabin not quite gone, but now spectral on the edge of his consciousness, a future destination, a peripheral yet fundamental belief. ‘There was a cabin he lived in, one he built for his first wife. Do you happen to know where it is?’
Kyle laughed. ‘It’s a mystery. There is a cabin in the Echte valley near here, where he’s supposed to have lived. But we’re not sure that’s the real one. The original is probably lost.’
‘We don’t feel it,’ Hesther added. ‘I’m sure it isn’t.’
‘The Echte valley? Where exactly is that?’
‘Behind the falls,’ Kyle replied. ‘It’s where the town’s water comes from. There’s a path up behind the falls you have to follow.’
