An Audience of Chairs Read online

  No peace offering is needed today, but Murdoch decides he might as well stop in North Sydney on his way to Baddeck and pick up a fruit basket for his sister. He always brings her one this time of year as a Christmas present, although he never calls it that. Cheered by the thought that he’s getting the basket delivered well before Davina and he go west to visit their daughter, Ginger, he shoves Bing into the tape deck and listens to “White Christmas” while his fingers tap an accompaniment on the steering wheel.

  Moranna hears the car in the driveway and, looking out the kitchen window, watches as Murdoch, carrying a basket wrapped in Cellophane, negotiates his way around the stew of mud, gravel and snow in the yard. She opens the door and, while he removes his boots, takes the basket and places it in the sink, there being no other place to put it except on the floor, because the piano board, carving tools and dirty dishes take up all the space on the table. Waiting until he’s hung his jacket on the hook behind the door, Moranna reaches up and strokes his cheek, crooning, “Oh Murdoch, you shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.” She knows he can only have bought the pineapple, plums and kiwi fruit at Sobeys or Supervalu, the stores that put MacKenzie’s Grocery out of business after it had been in the family for three generations. Moranna’s stroking and crooning make Murdoch ill at ease, but he endures it unflinchingly, knowing it will cause trouble if he doesn’t. To distract his sister, he asks what he smells cooking.

  “Baked beans. Want some?”

  “Sure.” Although he’s eaten lunch and it’s past two o’clock, he won’t pass up Moranna’s baked beans. Davina used to make baked beans, soups and stews, but when her decorating business took off, she began relying on frozen dinners and Murdoch seldom eats homemade food any more.

  “I’ll just wash my hands,” he says, padding to the bathroom in his sock feet. Sitting in rockers near the stove, plates on their knees, they eat without speaking, as if chewing and swallowing requires concentration. Moranna keeps her eyes steadfastly on her brother, a lanky, heavy-boned man like their father. In the years after he married Davina, Murdoch gained weight, developing wide hips and a paunch, but about ten years ago Davina put him on a diet and now he’s bony and lean. Going by the photograph of their mother inside what was once her father’s Bible, it’s clear Murdoch looks like her. The photograph might have been taken just before Margaret left for Scotland, because it shows her standing in front of a car dressed in travelling clothes: a belted tweed coat with a fur collar and fur-trimmed galoshes. Hatless, her hair cut in bangs, the expression on her face is pensive and sombre in the way Murdoch’s face sometimes is.

  In spite of the three-year age difference between them, in the years following their mother’s death Murdoch and Moranna had been close, sharing moments of bewilderment and sweet concern, many of them here in Baddeck, where a generation earlier their father, Ian, and his brothers spent summers with Grandmother Georgina while Grandfather Murdoch remained in Sydney Mines to work in the store, rationing himself to Sunday family visits.

  After Ian’s parents died within a year of one another—his father from a second and fatal heart attack and his mother from an aneurysm—he inherited the Baddeck farmhouse by default. By then his twin brothers, Henry and James, having established a successful real-estate business in Sydney, had built themselves cottages side by side in Ingonish and had no interest in taking over the farmhouse, which eventually passed from Ian to Moranna. Although the property once included a large hay field, neither Ian nor his father ever ploughed or seeded it. They were businessmen, not farmers, and soon after Ian took over the property, he sold the hay field to the MacKays next door, who farmed it until ten years ago when they grassed over their sloping fields, changing their farm to parkland—that is how Moranna thinks of the MacKay property, as a park, whereas her heavily wooded six acres running between the Bay Road and the highway is more like a forest with its thick stand of trees surrounding the house and barn, the small orchard and vegetable garden.

  The year after Margaret’s death, Ian brought his children to Baddeck in July so that he could teach Moranna to swim—at seven, Murdoch could already swim but he hung around while their father gave his sister lessons and afterwards herded her through the water. Although the farmhouse was on the opposite side of the road from the water, the property included a beach on the Bras d’Or where Ian built a narrow dock with ladders at both the deep and shallow ends. His method of teaching his daughter to swim was to have her paddle from one ladder to another while he followed alongside in an inner tube, to avoid touching the bottom, which was mostly seaweed-covered stones with only the scattered patch of sand. The water was clear and warm, ideal for swimming but for lobsters and the purple jellyfish that sometimes branded swimmers’ arms and legs with painful stripes.

  Nowadays there aren’t many jellyfish in the lake, but when Moranna and Murdoch were children, jellyfish were so numerous that after a storm the beach became a gelatinous purple mass as hundreds of them were dashed against the stones by the waves. Sometimes the children took it upon themselves to rid the water of jellyfish by spearing them from beneath with long poles and dragging them ashore. One afternoon, bored with this pastime, they were sitting at the end of the dock dangling their feet idly above the water when Moranna asked Murdoch why their mother had gone to heaven. They were having such a good time that she may have been wondering why Margaret chose to be in heaven rather than here with them.

  “I dunno,” he said, staring into the water. “Dad said she drowned in Scotland.”

  “Couldn’t she swim?”

  “What a dumb question.” He sounded disgusted. “If she could swim, she wouldn’t be in heaven now, would she?”

  “Where’s Scotland?”

  “On the other side of the sea.”

  On the other side of the sea. So it was safe swimming in the Bras d’Or, which wasn’t a sea but a lake.

  Murdoch no longer swims and for exercise uses the treadmill Davina installed in the carpeted exercise room downstairs where, wearing weighted ankle and arm bracelets, she runs on the spot while watching videos—with the theatre gone, the only way to keep up with the latest movies is to watch them on video.

  But Moranna still swims in the lake, though not often because summer is her busiest season when tourists drop by at all hours of the day to look at her carvings, but occasionally, if the evening is particularly warm and sultry, she puts on a faded bathing suit and slips into the lake where she floats on her back, watching the early stars appear one by one in the purpling sky. She’s a strong swimmer, but fearful of the lake’s dark witching power she never stays in the water long. Afterwards she sits on the ramshackle dock and watches sailboats glide past Kidston Island. Behind her on the pebbled beach, beneath a misshapen spruce, is the rowboat never again used after her daughters were taken away and now wrecked beyond repair, its keel broken where it’s been sat or stomped on. She must remember to ask Bun the next time he’s here to help carry the boat across the road and chop it into kindling. She’s reminded herself to do this many times but always forgets it later, which is why the boat still remains beneath the spruce, buried under two feet of snow.

  Having put off the question as long as he could, Murdoch asks his sister why she attacked the Co-op workers.

  “They were making fun of me,” Moranna says. “And I didn’t attack them, Murdoch.”

  “Trevor said you grabbed one of them by the collar.”

  “I was only trying to make the goon recant.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just let those remarks pass. Why acknowledge them? Why give those guys that kind of empowerment?”

  Acknowledge. Empowerment. Moranna recognizes her nemesis speaking, the little girl who during the masquerade party went to mean Pearl when Moranna was being kind; timid, rabbity Davina who’s taken workshops on self-assertiveness, something Moranna has never required.

  Moranna tells her brother that for her to have walked through the produce department pretending s
he didn’t hear the offensive remark made by her inferiors would have meant ignoring an important principle, which was that people must respect one another.

  Murdoch shakes his head in disbelief. What a hypocrite his sister is, talking loftily about respecting others when as far as he can tell there are few people she deigns to respect. He doesn’t express this thought aloud; instead he tells his sister that she’s being overdramatic. He’s never liked, let alone understood, her flamboyant, extravagant nature.

  Sometimes Moranna chooses to ignore her brother’s comments and she does this now by asking if Ginger will be home for the holidays. Murdoch’s daughter, who’s a year older than Moranna’s daughter Bonnie, is thirty-seven, single and lives in Calgary, where she is legal counsel for Petro-Canada.

  “No, this year we’re going west to spend Christmas with her in the mountains. She’s flying us out on Aeroplan. Her new boyfriend has a condo in Banff, so it’s a skiing holiday for them. Davina and I will probably spend our time sightseeing and admiring the scenery.” Murdoch stifles a yawn. The combination of warmth and food has made him sleepy, not to mention the pill taken earlier with his lunch. According to Noel Robertson, his doctor and Janine’s husband, he’s in the early stages of an ulcer.

  “You’re tired,” Moranna says. “Why don’t you have a nap on my bed? The plastic divider is open so it’s warm in the bedroom.”

  Murdoch loathes the plastic divider that never fails to remind him of the overall ruin of the house: the loose tiles on the bathroom floor and the black mould scabbing the tiled wall; the cracked panes in the back windows, the ugly hole in the kitchen wall where his sister ripped out the telephone, the splintered plank floors and peeling paint, and everywhere the clutter of tools, wood, unwashed dishes, books and newspapers—Moranna never seems to put anything back in its place. Murdoch isn’t sure anything has a place and it’s a mystery to him how his sister ever finds anything. It’s a shame that the old house is so badly neglected because they don’t build houses as solid as this one any more. If it was cleaned, repaired and redecorated, by Davina of course, the house would become what it deserves to be—a country home of quality and good taste.

  Suppressing a yawn, Murdoch goes into the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face to wake himself up. He definitely does not want to nap on his sister’s bed. He’s napped there before and knows that not only will the bed be unmade but that dirty clothes will be mixed up with the bedding, making it a haven for dust mites. Not that he’s allergic to dust mites, he just doesn’t like the thought of them in the bed. But even with the splashes of water, his eyelids droop and he can’t stop yawning and supposes he should nap to avoid the possibility of drifting off in the car like that poor fellow last week who fell asleep at the wheel in broad daylight coming back from Marion Bridge. Telling Moranna to wake him in half an hour, Murdoch clears a space for himself on her bed and lies down. While he sleeps, his sister sits in the rocker, humming softly while listening to her brother’s measured breaths, pleased to have him to herself, a too rare occurrence, she thinks, in their lives.

  After their early childhood years she and Murdoch drifted apart like boats loosed from their moorings and were never close again. The distancing began during the last year they spent their summer holidays together in Baddeck. By age twelve, Murdoch completely ignored her, preferring to spend his time with three boys whose parents had summer cottages on the lake about half a mile along the road. With their father working in Sydney Mines, Moranna was either alone or with Edwina, who though good-natured could not compensate for the lack of friends. Moranna spent hours lying on her belly at the end of the dock admiring her reflection in the lake, and imagining that if she looked deep enough into the water she would see a beautiful woman, a fairy godmother perhaps, with long, swaying hair and a starfish wand that would grant her wish to have a circle of worshipful and admiring friends. From time to time she would look up and see her brother and his pals across the water where there was a swimming hole off Kidston Island, not far from the storybook lighthouse on the point. A half-dozen boys were shouting and splashing in the swimming hole and she guessed some of them must be Bell and Grosvenor children who came from the States every summer to spend their holidays at the house Sir Alexander Graham Bell built for his wife, Mabel, and named Beinn Breagh, which, Moranna’s father told her, meant beautiful mountain in Gaelic. While Murdoch frolicked with the children of famous people, Moranna lay on the dock, friendless and alone, until she was called back to the house to practise on the piano board her stepmother brought to Baddeck so that Moranna could continue to work on her scales. Supremely proud of the fact that she had perfect pitch, she rarely resisted practice sessions. Dr. Whitely, a doddery, yellow-fingered music professor who smelled of whisky and nicotine, had told her about “her ear” when he visited Sydney Mines to give her a grade-four piano exam. After instructing her to perform a number of exercises on the Mendelssohn piano, he announced that Moranna possessed the rare gift of perfect pitch and that if she worked hard, she might very well become a concert pianist. Dr. Whitely’s words often come to her mind and now, while her brother sleeps, not for the first time Moranna wonders how her life might have been different if she had taken up a career as a professional pianist.

  When Murdoch wakens, he and Moranna sit awhile in silence, the few scraps of conversation they have in common having already been used up. Murdoch’s in the habit of relying on his sister to keep a conversation going and today she’s in one of her pensive moods. From long habit, he avoids saying anything that might spark an argument—with his sister the most innocent remark can become an issue. At the door Moranna embraces Murdoch while he pats her awkwardly on the shoulder. Davina has told him that he isn’t nearly affectionate enough and he’s trying to improve in that regard, although not with Moranna.

  He and his sister grew up with few outward signs of affection and scarcely touched one other in childhood, not even holding hands the way his daughter did with her cousins, Bonnie and Brianna, the summer they were all together in this farmhouse. The memory of the three little girls holding hands can still bring Murdoch to tears. He remembers how much affection Moranna showed her children and her husband, although not to others until her boyfriend, Bun, arrived on the scene. Now she’s not only affectionate with Bun but also with himself, which makes him feel foolish and ill at ease. His sister is a person of extremes, and if he gives her a peck on the cheek she’ll be all over him and then what will he do? Knowing Moranna seldom receives mail and that weeks pass without her checking the mailbox at the end of the drive, he forestalls today’s embrace by telling his sister to look for the postcard he’ll send from Alberta. Then he returns to the car, relieved to be released from duty, at least for a while.

  THREE

  THE DAY AFTER MURDOCH’S visit, another blizzard sweeps down and Moranna decides to make a batch of Holier Than Thou bread. She enjoys the sensual pleasure of making bread, the thunk of soy flour tossed into the bowl, the crunch of flax seeds beneath the rolling pin, the smell of yeast foaming in the cup, the supple breathing of dough that swells like a muscle when caressed. Bun claims that watching her lean into the swelling dough arouses him, and soon after the loaves go in the oven, he will sometimes lead her to bed where they make love, enveloped by the aroma of baking bread.

  While the bread cools, Moranna takes out her tools and, clearing a space on the pine table for the Brahan Seer, sets to work. Almost four feet tall and made of cedar, the Seer is nearly finished. His body, hair and plaid are done—all the people in the clansmen series wear plaids. Today Moranna intends to work on the face, beginning with the sightless eyes—she always leaves the face until last.

  Great-Aunt Hettie told Moranna the story of the Brahan Seer when she was girl, and as she works she recalls her great-aunt speaking in a voice that defied challenge and contradiction.

  “Brahan Seer, Kenneth MacKenzie, Sombre Kenneth of the Prophecies, was born in Uig on the Isle of Lewis in the seventeenth century. He c
ouldn’t see the lochs or the stones of Uig, but he could see a long way into the future.”

  Moranna remembers asking why Kenneth couldn’t see the lochs or the stones.

  “He was blind, but when he was a lad, the spirit of a Norwegian princess gave his mother a round blue stone to pass on to him after she died and when he held this powerful stone in his hand he could see things other folk couldn’t see.”

  “What did he see?”

  “He saw ships sailing around the back of Tomnahurich Hill one hundred and fifty years before the Caledonian Canal was built.”

  “What else?”

  “He foresaw the clearances and the breakdown of the clans. Long before the cemetery was built, he prophesied that the Fairies Hill would one day be under lock and key, the dead chained inside.”

  “Brahan Seer was one of the great MacKenzies.”

  “He was indeed.”

  It was twenty years after Moranna heard this story that she began working as a wood sculptor. By then she was living alone in Baddeck and had weathered the collapse following the removal of her daughters. An autumn hurricane was battering the island, and when lightning struck a tree behind the barn with a resounding crack, she rushed out in torrential rain and saw the face of the deceased Great-Aunt Hettie in the splintered tree, her loosened hair streaming with water.

  “I have chosen you to be the Keeper of Our Clan,” Hettie said, her voice almost swallowed by the crash of thunder and slamming rain.