An Audience of Chairs

by Joan Clark

  “What must I do?” Moranna shouted into the storm.

  “You must find a way of keeping the memory of our forebears alive,” Hettie said. “You still have the stories I gave you?”

  “I have them.” When her great-aunt was far advanced with stomach cancer, she mailed Moranna the scribbler containing the stories she had written down. On the scribbler’s cover were the words, to my grandniece for safekeeping.

  “Use the stories as you see me here,” Hettie murmured through the curtain of rain.

  Approaching the tree, Moranna peered at it closely, but she could no longer see her great-aunt’s face in the splintered wood. It had disappeared and in its place was the idea of carving her likeness in a tree. Even as the storm raged, Moranna began carving the image of Great-Aunt Hettie in a chunk of firewood, using the Scout knife she found in the kitchen drawer.

  Of Grandfather Murdoch’s three sons, only Moranna’s father visited Hettie until she died, making the forty-minute drive to Sydney several times a year, usually on a Sunday, parking his truck in front of her plain wooden house with its picket fence surrounding a strip of lawn and a vegetable garden.

  Hettie MacKenzie married Colin MacKenzie, her second cousin once removed, but was widowed after two years of marriage when Colin was killed in an accident at the steel mill. She continued teaching at Sydney Academy but never remarried. After a co-worker of her husband’s, Vern Marshall, came to the house to console her, they began seeing each other regularly. Hettie and Vern were discreet—he visited her house twice a week on poker nights and never stayed more than an hour or two. The affair went on for sixteen years before Vern’s wife found out and put a stop to it. To avoid losing face with his cronies, Vern let it slip that he had been carrying on with Hettie.

  In the wake of the scandal, Ian’s twin brothers, Henry and James, shunned their aunt, but Ian continued his visits, sometimes bringing along his children. By the time Moranna was thirteen, the affair with Vern Marshall had been long over and Hettie was living a monastic, almost punitive life, a denial perhaps that she had once been the mistress of an adulterer and had lost her job as a schoolteacher as a result. Winter and summer she covered herself in a long-sleeved black blouse, a black skirt, black stockings and shoes. Even her hair, screwed into a grey knot at the top of her head, was covered with a black lace cap. Her narrow face, which had once been full-cheeked and soft, was now cross-hatched with lines, the skin freckled brown from outdoor work. She owned a radio but did not play it on Sundays and frowned on those who did. Neither did she wind the grandfather clock in the hall and its pendulum hung silent and unmoving until Monday morning.

  Hettie didn’t admit to being poor and pointedly ignoring the groceries Ian carried into the kitchen, she instructed her niece and nephew to sit in the parlour where three straight-backed chairs waited to accommodate them. Hettie herself sat on the horsehair settee below a wall of framed family photographs. After a brief exchange about the weather, Hettie looked at Moranna, who had shot up since her last visit and had reached her adult height. “There is no doubt about it, Moranna, you are a true MacKenzie,” she said. “You are tall and you have the fair colouring of our people.”

  Murdoch’s turn was next and Hettie looked him over with a disparaging glance. “You favour your mother’s people, the McWeenys, who were a sept of the MacKenzies. All the great clans took in any number of septs who wanted their protection, which they gave in return for loyal service.” By now Murdoch had a silly grin on his face which their great-aunt ignored.

  “The MacKenzies were descended from the Kintail MacKenzies, whose chief, Kenneth of Kintail, obtained the first charter of land from King David in 1362. There are those who claim the MacKenzies came from Ireland, but that’s utter nonsense. The MacKenzies sprang from Gillian Og, the progenitor of the old Earls of Ross who arranged marriages with the Norwegian earls. Their honourable blood coursed through the blood of Ian Red Shanks and Colin the Red.”

  Ian listened, making no effort to intervene. It didn’t hurt his children to learn the MacKenzie family history and no one knew it better than his aunt, although he did wonder sometimes how much of it was made up. The family history, of course, was onesided, but there was nothing he could do about that, the McWeenys having severed all ties with him after Margaret’s death when they moved from Frizzleton without warning and without leaving a forwarding address.

  Hettie pointed to the photographs above her. “You can see for yourself from the pictures that the fairness predominates.” While Moranna studied the photos, her great-aunt explained that none of the earlier MacKenzies were represented on the wall. “Our pioneer forebears, the crofters who left the Isle of Lewis and came to Sydney in 1837, were too poor to have their photographs taken even if such a thing had been possible.”

  Moranna asked if her great-aunt had ever seen the pioneers.

  “I never saw Pioneer Ian because he died before I was born, but I recall seeing Grandmother Henrietta when I was a lass. She was nineteen when she married Big Ian, who was forty-five.”

  “How big was he?” Moranna asked. She was thinking of Giant MacAskill.

  “According to Grandmother, he was huge.” Hettie paused and permitted herself a sly look at Ian. “She never mentioned it, but he must have been big all over.” She snickered. “Ten inches is my guess.”

  From the snicker, Moranna knew Hettie had made a joke she didn’t understand and she frowned—her father never talked over her head and she didn’t like her great-aunt doing it now. The joke wasn’t over her brother’s head, and to cover his embarrassment Murdoch kept his eyes on the floor. Ian was shocked by Hettie’s crude insinuation. His aunt had always been strange, but at eighty-seven—or was it eighty-eight—she had become lewd, making him wonder if terminal rot had set in.

  Before Ian could say they should be getting on home, Hettie stood up and, reclaiming her imperious manner, announced she would make tea and that Moranna was to come into the kitchen and assist.

  Moranna was honoured to serve as her great-aunt’s assistant, and was certain she had been chosen to help because she was a true MacKenzie. While Murdoch watched in grim disgust—his sister hardly lifted a finger at home—Moranna followed her aunt into the kitchen where she obligingly arranged shortbreads on a plate and set cups and saucers on the tray while Hettie made the tea and told her a story.

  “Listen closely and I will tell you about the Kingdom of Dalriada in ancient Britain when dragons roamed Scotland and selkies swam in the sea.”

  Moranna asked about the selkies.

  “They were seal people, a kind of mermaid who lived along the shore,” Hettie’s gaze lingered on Moranna’s ripening breasts. “In those days women lived and worked apart from the men, meeting them only at the Mating Wheel, a circle of stones built on a hilltop and presided over by a woman who knew the lineage of every fertile daughter and son and who could mate with whom in order to produce healthy offspring.”

  Moranna thought this must be a menstruation story, meant to explain her monthly show of blood, but she wanted to hear it anyway because her great-aunt’s stories made a deeper impression than those she read in books.

  “There were some who regarded the Keeper of the Stones as a hag, a witch, a madwoman, and they avoided the wheel, mating instead whenever and with whomever they chose in the woods and fens surrounding the hill. But most heeded the Keeper’s careful seeding with the result that the Scots became a strong and vigorous people.”

  Moranna waited for her great-aunt to finish the story but Hettie did no such thing. Instead she looked at her with a peculiar gloating expression. “Don’t forget what I have told you,” she said and, placing the teapot on the tray, instructed her grandniece to carry it into the parlour.

  “Is that all?” Moranna said.

  Hettie did not reply. She knew this was a story whose completion was possible only after its listener had grown into its meaning.

  Although Moranna most often carves from pine, she has chosen to make th
e Brahan Seer out of cedar because it is inherently a subtle wood, presenting a naturally lined face that requires the lightest of hands to uncover the basic features. In a few hours the face is complete and all that remains is to oil the carving. When she works with cedar, she prefers to finish off with oil rather than paint—the only part of the wood that she paints is the plaid. Sometimes she mixes red with the oil and rubs it on the hair, but usually she relies on the oil alone.

  When the oiling is done, Moranna puts the Seer on a stool in the corner not far from the stove, where she thinks of him as listening to the music on the radio. Although she doesn’t like Christmas, she enjoys the music, especially Handel’s Messiah, and when it’s playing on the CBC, she conducts the chorus and hums along, tapping the audience of ladderback chairs with a wooden spoon when their attention slackens off.

  “All we like sheep,” she sings, “lift up your heads.”

  She’ll probably charge two hundred dollars for the Seer. She’d like to sell him for more, but two hundred cash is about all tourists will pay when she tells them she doesn’t accept credit cards. It’s not much, considering that it takes at least two weeks to finish a carving. Moranna completes about twenty carvings a year, usually making two of her bestsellers—which she accomplishes without duplicating them—if she duplicated her carvings, they wouldn’t be art, would they? She seldom sells all the carvings in one season but earns enough to get by. During her marriage, Moranna lived on the money her husband earned. After he took away their daughters and subsequently divorced her, handing her back to her father like a broken doll, she received no alimony, because at the time she was too ill to demand it through the law. When she eventually recovered, she had to find a way of supporting herself.

  Before he died, her father deeded the farmhouse to her and arranged for Murdoch to pay the tax, insurance and electrical bills out of a trust fund, but money was still required to cover daily expenses. Moranna first considered opening a bed and breakfast to take advantage of the tourist trade on the Cabot Trail—either coming or going, visitors driving around the Trail pass Baddeck. But the thought of changing bedsheets, including her own, put her off—it has always been Moranna’s opinion that time shouldn’t be wasted doing housework. She next considered establishing a market-garden business, selling produce from a roadside stand, augmenting sales with jars of apple jelly and cherry jam made from the half-dozen fruit trees in her orchard, but she became discouraged after two or three seasons of unreliable growing weather. When no further possibilities for making money presented themselves, she was visited by the miraculous appearance of her great-aunt’s face in the splintered tree and became a wood artist, carving the people in Hettie’s stories.

  Even after the road is ploughed, Moranna doesn’t go to the village—she’s boycotting the Co-op and avoiding the seasonal glitter and fuss. The toys and dolls in gift-shop windows depress her because they remind her of all the Christmases she has spent without her children. Moranna is accustomed to her own company and has persuaded herself that her time is much better spent alone than in the company of consumers. In any case, as long as she plays the piano board and listens to radio concerts, she is untroubled by loneliness, surrounded as she is by music. When it comes to playing and listening to music, she prefers being alone since people distract her from the purity of the moment. If, for instance, she’s listening to Bach’s cello suites, unless she’s alone she cannot reach the sublime pitch of exaltation required to appreciate the composer’s musical perfection.

  Pedestrian carols are being played on the radio when Reverend Andy Scott drops by with a bundle of newspapers the day before Christmas Eve. Declining to sit—where would he?—he stands on the back-door mat, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down as he speaks. Ruddy-cheeked with wiry brown hair, his looks belie his forty-three years. After telling Moranna he’s read her sermonette and thinks it worthy—a disappointing word—he soldiers on, explaining that while he agrees with some of her views, surely she understands that the piece is too provocative for him to preach to a conservative congregation. Before Moranna can challenge his remark and trap him in a discussion, he opens the door part way and invites her to attend the service on Christmas Eve. A friend from Toronto, Lesley Fellowes, will be speaking and he thinks Moranna will approve of what she has to say.

  “I prefer to ignore Christmas.”

  “But if you’re as interested as you say in knocking the consumerism out of Christmas, you should come.”

  Even Moranna has no answer for this.

  “And you might be interested in learning about Amnesty International.”

  “I already know about Amnesty International,” Moranna says. “I may spend my life within the walls of this farmhouse but that doesn’t mean I’m unaware of what’s going on in the world.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting you were unaware.” Andy says and smiles to let her know he has the kindest of intentions.

  “I’ll have you know I was once a world traveller, married to a foreign correspondent.” Moranna stops short of telling the new minister that she has two daughters living somewhere in the world. She rarely speaks of her children, although they are always on her mind, waiting in the wings.

  “Well, if you decide to go you may want to get a ride with Lottie MacKay. More snow is forecast so I wouldn’t recommend walking. I’m on my way to see Lyle now. Do you want me to ask Lottie to drop by?”

  “Sure.” Moranna’s already snipping the string on the bundle of papers.

  As predicted, it snowed heavily overnight, which doesn’t deter Lottie, who drives in all weather. When her truck pulls into the yard on Christmas Eve, Moranna is waiting in her long wool coat bought years ago at Frenchy’s, a used-clothing store. She’s arranged her hair in one long braid that hangs halfway down her back and is even wearing lipstick she found in the gummy soapdish beneath the bathroom sink. Jittery and nervous, it’s taken her hours to shake off the morning’s lethargy and she spent most of the day in bed. She put this down to not having another wood sculpture underway to get up for and is resolved that as soon as she returns from church she’ll begin working on Anne MacKenzie, a poet in the clansmen series. Moranna opens the door of the truck, but before she climbs in Lottie pushes a foil-wrapped parcel and a jar across the seat.

  “Plum pudding and sauce. Better put them inside before we go. Mind the jar. It’s hot.”

  “Oh Lottie, you are so kind,” she says, completely disarmed by her friend’s goodness.

  Unlike Rodney Kimball, who lives on the other side of the spruce hedge, Lottie is an ideal neighbour who minds her own business but is always ready to help. Wanting to stroke her friend’s face, impulsively Moranna reaches across the seat.

  “Get away with you,” Lottie says. “Run those things inside before they get cold.”

  A hummingbird of a woman who moves in a flash, Lottie is so tiny that her head barely clears the steering wheel. An English war bride, she operated a jeep during the London blitz and in spite of her age still drives as if she’s dodging bombs and hand grenades. Oblivious of the slippery roads or the speed limit, she roars into the village and thuds to a stop against a snowbank in front of the church and Moranna has to inch across the seat and get out Lottie’s side. Greenwood United is packed with families home for the holidays, and at the sight of the crowd, Moranna has a strong urge to bolt and might have if Lottie hadn’t had a firm grip on her arm. “You sit here,” she says, pushing Moranna into a chair against the back wall. “I’ll find a place up front where I can see better. We’ll meet up after the service.”

  Moranna is uneasy in crowds and doesn’t trust herself not to shout out a disparaging remark about Christmas. If the service becomes false and sentimental, she might do that. She’s done it before when the impulse to make her opinion known has taken hold. That’s why the previous minister, Hugh Campbell, disliked her. He had no patience for being interrupted midway through a sermon by her shouts and opinions. Although it’s warm inside the church, Moranna keeps
her coat on in case she decides to leave in a hurry, and pulling her braid from beneath the coat, she brushes the end of it against her lips, a habit she finds soothing.

  Standing with the congregation, she sings “O Little Town of Bethlehem” without aid of a hymnary—she knows the carol from listening to it being played on the radio and from having sung it so often when she was a girl. She never joined the choir of Carman United and wonders now why that was. For years Edwina conducted the church choir and was well aware that with her clear soprano and perfect pitch, Moranna would have made a valuable contribution. Perhaps Edwina invited her to join and for some reason she refused. Yes, that was probably it. Or maybe she joined and gave up because choir practices were an hour before school and even after her father pulled back the covers in the mornings, her body sometimes felt so heavily weighted that she had difficulty getting herself out of bed in time for school, let alone choir practice.

  The hymn ends and a dark-haired, pale-skinned girl, perhaps twelve years old, stands up and reads Matthew’s version of Jesus’ birth. Moranna doesn’t pay attention to the words because she can’t stop thinking that Brianna might have looked like this girl when she was the same age—her younger daughter had dark hair and pale skin. Years ago, on the sidewalk in front of the county courthouse, Moranna passed a girl who looked like the one reading the scripture and reached to stroke her cheek. “You remind me of my daughter,” she said, and alarmed, the girl ran off.

  On a summer day in 1978, when Moranna was beside the lake, sitting on the dock watching four-year-old twin girls play outside the next-door cottage, she asked if they would like to have a tea party at her house.

  “I live over there,” she said, pointing across the road.

  The twins clambered over the beach stones and climbed onto the dock to look at the house, barely visible at the end of the drive.