Taken by the Muse

by Anne Wheeler

  The next day, she dramatically waves down the bus on the highway, and we take it to town. She is very proud of her pension cheques from the government, and she has a stack of them. “I don’t know where they come from or who decided that I should have them. Maybe it’s because the government of Canada feels badly about what they did.” She knows the driver and most of the passengers. Everything she sees out the window is special; it’s as though this is the first time she has taken this ride. “Isn’t this good?” she exclaims with delight. “Being carried everywhere. In the old days, when an old person could not walk very far, they stayed in one place and died.”

  The town of Williams Lake has a typical main street, with one of everything. She shuffles into the bank, oblivious that our camera is following her, and waits patiently for her turn. She opens the envelopes, one by one, and hands over the cheques. Carefully she signs them with perfect penmanship. “I must pay the rent tomorrow, for me and my son,” she explains.

  Thanking the teller for turning the cheques into money, she leaves. “My father signed a treaty with the government. Ya. He didn’t think he got a very good deal from them. He’d never done anything like that before and he didn’t get any money for it, as least, not that I know about. But they send me this money, every month. He would be surprised to know this.”

  We don’t stay in town long. She has a short list of things to get before we head out — matches, tobacco, batteries for her radio, and some pumpkin seeds. “All the people here want is your money,” she declares, as we march through a mall. And she’s right.

  “Do you ever worry about not having enough money?” I ask her.

  She laughs. “I never had enough money. I am richer now than I ever was. Life was better when there was no money. When we lived in the forest, we loved one another. There was no stealing. No wastefulness. No drinking and getting mean. Sometimes we were cold, and sometimes people got sick — but as a child, I knew that I belonged and that made me strong.”

  As we walk back to her place from the bus crossing, along the ditch, she picks up more containers. “If we find enough glass bottles, I’ll make a bottle piano for my grandchildren when we get home. You put different amounts of water in each one. It’s a beautiful sound. You won’t believe it, but these bottles can sing! The sisters taught us how to do that. Yes, they taught us lots of things.”

  Long ago, Augusta saw a woman die, giving birth to her baby. It was a shock to her. When her first baby was about to be born, she sent her husband to get the doctor. She gave him some money, but he didn’t come home for days, so she went through the delivery alone. “I promised myself that I wasn’t going to let another woman go through something like that, alone. No. Not if I could help it. And when my husband did show up, he was drunk,” she tells me. “He said the doctor didn’t come because he couldn’t pay him. What kind of doctor is that? What kind of husband? He spent the money I saved, on drink! My husband died young, and I never got married again. Once is enough.”

  She bought a homesteading book and memorized the chapters on midwifery. And over the next fifty years, she went whenever she was called to deliver the babies, how many she doesn’t know. Hundreds, maybe thousands. “And I never lost one of them ... no, I never lost one. And I never charged anyone. I know doctors charged, even when they lost the baby! Yes they did.”

  It feels wrong that I should be getting paid to make this movie. Here is Augusta, sharing everything with me while living in poverty, without running water or electricity. There must be a way to pay her.

  The last thing we film, before leaving, is her playing the harmonica, and then her grandchildren (she is everyone’s granny) come and have a singsong with her. She is totally consumed by their efforts to learn the words, and we drive away unnoticed.

  Just a few days after I get back to Edmonton, I get a call from Taylor, raving about what he has seen. “But there’s a problem, Wheeler. That day you shot in the forest — the footage is lost.”

  “What do you mean, lost?”

  “Well, there was a light leak in the camera, not sure how it happened, something didn’t seal right, I don’t know ... so there’s a wide white strip right down one side of the image. It’s unusable.”

  “Well, then, let me re-shoot!”

  “No, can’t do that. There’s no money left to do that.”

  “But, that was important, very important. That was footage that can never be replaced. Nobody else knows what she knows! It was priceless.”

  “Sorry. Listen, you have lots of great stuff here for a fifteen-minute movie, and you’ll have trouble getting it down to that. She’s terrific. You don’t need it, trust me on this.” I hammer away at him, but it’s pointless. Augusta’s forest is out of the picture. I feel a heavy sense of loss. If I could afford to go back myself and shoot it, I would.

  I decide to cut the movie myself, mostly because I love watching her and listening to her, and I can put more money into other things, like music, which was budgeted pathetically low. We won’t need much music. She often talks right to the camera, with such warmth and humour that the content holds the audience on its own.

  It’s autumn when the little movie is completely finished and ready for a showing. I take the first answer print from the laboratory in Vancouver and drive north to Williams Lake to show Augusta what we’ve done together.

  I pick her up in my rental van and we head over to Edna’s on the reserve, where there is electricity. While they have coffee in the kitchen and chatter away in Shuswap about I don’t know what, I tack a white sheet up on Edna’s living room wall and set up the 16-mm projector. I pull the drapes closed and turn off the lights.

  “All right, you two,” I call to them, “it’s time to come and sit in here.” They did not see what I was doing while they were talking, cherishing their time together. As they come into the darkness and see the projector, they are bewildered. Saying nothing, Augusta takes a chair, places it in front of the projector and sits down staring into the lens. I realize that she thinks the projector is another camera and we’re going to shoot again. She’s ready to tell me her stories one more time.

  “Turn the chair around, Augusta. It’s going to be up there.”

  She looks around, surprised, “Edna, why is your sheet on the wall?”

  Edna is as perplexed as Augusta. They both think I’m daft.

  “Both of you. Turn your chairs around. Get comfortable. Look at the sheet on the wall. I have a surprise for you.” Amused, they reposition themselves, as I flip the switch on the projector and the reels start to turn.

  It is the best screening of my life. The first shot comes up of Augusta sweeping her raw wooden floor; it starts on her feet and tilts up, as we hear the transistor radio giving the local weather and messages. “That’s me! Edna, that’s me on your sheet! And that’s you, talking!” She not afraid or proud, just bedazzled, as though she is watching a bit of wizardry. There is a message from Edna to Augusta to catch the early bus to town — and now Augusta is flabbergasted, thinking that Edna is on the radio now, instead of right here beside her.

  I realize that she has never seen a film before, and had no idea what we were doing when we were here shooting it. To her, we were a group of young people interested in her stories, and she was happy to share what she knew to be true, with us.

  Completely in the moment, she talks to her other self on the sheet, cheering herself onward. We cut to the church and there she is sitting in a pew, wearing her best scarf. The organ begins. “All right Augusta, you sing in Shuswap! No one will stop you!” She sings the hymn in the living room with herself on the screen, loud and strong, but I have edited out a couple of verses and that trips her up momentarily. “Augusta, you missed two verses ... go back! You know all the words!”

  Sitting here in Edna’s living room she watches herself visit the graveyard, and weeps. She sees the headstone on the ground, and she mutters, “Who keeps pushing that over. I thought I fixed that ... here it is down again.”

&n
bsp; Beneath some scenes, there is the distant sound of a harmonica and she croons.

  The film ends with her walking down an ancient path along the river with credits rolling. Amongst the crawl of names, it is noted that the composer is Augusta Evans. She doesn’t notice that at all; she is still in a trance.

  When the film runs out, she turns to me, wide-eyed, “That was like a dream, just like a dream! Where did it go?”

  “It was wonderful,” agrees Edna. “The smokehouse was beautiful.” For a while, they don’t say another word, holding themselves in, mulling over what they have just seen. I rewind the film, and then ask, “Would you like to see it again?”

  “Again? We can see it again?” They are in disbelief. “It’s not gone?”

  We watch it a couple of times, and then Augusta realizes that all we need to make this happen is electricity! We pack it all up and she has me drive her all over the countryside, to show the movie to her family, her friends, and her priest, always introducing it the same way. “I have something to show you! We have put all my stories in this tin can, but we can take them out and put them on your wall. You will see!”

  I give her the cheque for the music — the harmonica playing I have used throughout the film is the score. She doesn’t understand at all, but signs the contract, grateful to have more money than she has ever seen in her life. We go to the bank to cash it and everyone there stays after work to watch the film.

  “What am I going to do with all this money?” she asks me.

  “You could get running water.”

  “I am moving to my cabin next week, for the winter. I don’t want anyone making a mess out there. Digging up the ground.”

  “Well, what would you like?” I ask.

  “A new gravestone for my boy. Could we get that?” she asks.

  “Of course. Whatever you want.”

  She holds my hand. I will never forget the strength in her grip, as she looks at me with tears in her eyes. Her face is a maze of lines mapping out what it is to be human. When she laughs, her eyes well up and tears flow freely. She sparkles with love and wisdom, living out her life in a quiet, truthful way. I don’t know if I have ever met a more enlightened soul. She’s mindlessly compassionate, has no ego, is always in the now, completely truthful and spontaneous. She is a true teacher by example — a guru gone unnoticed, but that matters not at all to her.

  “This is a good thing we did, Anne. These stories will live forever now, dancing on the wall, won’t they?”

  “Yes,” I assure her. “Forever.”

  “Then I have done what I was supposed to do.”

  I nod. I understand her sense of accomplishment.

  “Ya, I have done what I was supposed to do,” she repeats, “and you, my friend, have just begun.”

  “What do you mean? I ask.

  “Well, it’s time to tell your own stories — of what you know.”

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Start with yourself. Tell the stories no one else can.”

  Augusta Evans died at the age of 90, in 1978. Augusta (NFB,1976) is available on the National Film Board website at: www.nfb.ca/film/augusta/

  AUGUSTA EVANS OFF TO SEE HER MOVIE AT WILLIAMS LAKE, 1977.

  ANNE WHEELER ARCHIVES.

  Acknowledgements

  Having grown up without television, I was blessed with a childhood where music and storytelling were at the hub of every family gathering. For that reason I must acknowledge the raconteurs of my youth: my aunt Ruth MacLennan, who specialized in family lore, and my godfather Tom Payne, who spent decades in the Far North in search of gold. Both of them knew how to spin a yarn, titillating us with the remarkable unknown and their personal and secret observations that would otherwise be lost.

  So many others have encouraged me to write down my own tales of adventure in a style akin to my spoken presentations. In particular I give credit to Joy Coghill, Cheryl Malmo, Gail Carr, Charlene Roycht, Glynis Whiting, Linda Crossfield, Betsi Warland, Ali Liebert, and Tess Elsworthy who read my early attempts, critically responded, and gave me courage to move ahead. More recently, the members of my writing group in La Manzanilla have watched these stories change shape over the course of the last six years at readings and story slams — there is nothing like a listening audience to give you pure and honest feedback.

  Set in my twenties, these stories acknowledge several individuals who challenged me and shared their knowledge and wisdom. They are the stars, the mentors I most cherish. I will always be indebted to the people I worked with in the early years of my career, those at Filmwest Associates and the National Film Board of Canada, who taught me so much about crafting a narrative.

  In the later stages of bringing this book together Donaleen Saul became my guide, my confidant, my “substantiating” editor, which meant she worked with me for many months, defining the intention of each story. Together we gathered up a bevy of beta readers (thank you all), and reacted to their comments before sending the manuscript off, hoping to secure a publisher.

  Amazingly, NeWest Press — a publisher I have admired since its beginnings — responded and Eva Radford, a much-respected editor, was assigned to work with me, polishing the manuscript, reviewing every nuance, making sure the stories are clear and concise. It has been a gift.

  And finally I thank my extended family, my sons, and especially my beloved husband, Luben Izov, who has kept me emotionally and technically on course throughout this process. He is always there behind the scenes, ready to support and make my dreams come true.

  Alberta-born ANNE WHEELER earned degrees in mathematics and music, while performing in theatre whenever possible. Her first films were documentaries, but by the 1980s she was making Canadian features such as Bye Bye Blues, The Diviners, Better than Chocolate, and Loyalties, winning numerous national and international awards. A master storyteller, she has garnered seven honorary doctorates, an Order of Canada, and a Lifetime Achievement Award (being the first woman to do so) from the Directors Guild of Canada. She lives in White Rock, BC, and continues to write, direct, and mentor younger filmmakers.