Free The Diviners by Margaret Laurence Page B

her these days.
    Nobody much teases Eva Winkler, any more, either, because Morag gives them the bejesus if they do. Eva is her friend, her one true friend. She loves Eva. She looks down on Eva, too, a bit, because Eva is gutless as a cleaned whitefish. It must be awful to be gutless. Gus Winkler still beats his kids, even Eva. He doesn’t even have to be drunk. In fact, he hardly ever drinks and then only beer. He just likes beating his kids, that’s all. You couldn’t imagine Eva, so pale-haired and always saying Oh sorry I didn’t mean to even when she’s done nothing, you couldn’t imagine her deserving it. Maybe Gus beats her because she’s gutless, like Mrs. Winkler, like all the kids, there. In some awful spooky way Morag can understand this. If you ask for it, you sure as hell get it. But she sticks up for Eva, because Eva is her friend. She doesn’t stick up for Eva with Gus, though. She never goes over there. She and Christie sit on the front porch and hear it happening. When it does, they never look at each other.
    Morag is the best girl pitcher on the ballfield, and also a good shortstop. She can even play ball with the boys, and sometimes does. The girls yell things at her, but Morag doesn’t care a fuck. They can’t hurt her. She’ll hurt them first. And when the boys laugh, she grins openmouth clowny, then pitches a twister, hard and fast.
    The teachers hate her. Ha ha. She isn’t a little flower, is why. That will be the day, when she tries to please a living soul.
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    Conversation Overheard from the Teachers’ Room
All of Them in There Gabbing at Recess
Miss McMurtrie:
oh, Skinner’s bad enough but at least he’s away from school half the time and not much missed by me I can tell you but Morag never misses a daysometimes I wonder what on earth I’m going to do with her you find her same Ethel
Miss Plowright:
how do you mean exactly
Miss McMurtrie:
well one day she’s boisterous and noisy chewing gum in class whispering drawing dirty pictures you know and then heavens the next day she’ll be so sullen not speaking to a soul and you can’t get a word out of her she won’t answer just sits there looking sullen if you take my meaning
Miss Plowright:
oh yes yes oh yes she was just like that in my class I always thought you know maybe she wasn’t well maybe not quite all there
Miss Crawford:
she was a timid little thing in grade one but she learned to read really quickly well not exactly timid more well just very quiet never spoke to a soul except that poor little Eva Whatsername
Miss McMurtrie:
well she is not timid now I can assure you but bright enough I think you’re wrong there Ethel she’s bright enough but doesn’t seem to give a hoot
Mr. Tate:
the home the home always look to the home old Christie and that half-witted wife of his
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    Morag doesn’t let on. If you let on, ever, you’re done for.
    â€œHow’d you get on today, Morag?” Christie says. “Let’s see what you’re copying out, there.”
    Christie’s brown cracked stained teeth. Like an old teapot. Ha ha. You can see them all when he grins while reading.
    â€œWhat in hell is this crap? I wandered lonely as a cloud. This Wordsworth, now, he was a pansy, girl, or no, maybe a daffodil? Clouds don’t wander lonely, for the good christ’s sake. Any man daft enough to write a line like that, he wantedhis head looked at, if you ask me. Look here, I’ll show you a poem, now, then.”
    Two large books she has never seen before, red binding a little bit warped, and really small print.
    â€œIn the days long long ago,” Christie says sternly, “he lived, this man, and was the greatest song-maker of them all, and all this was set down years later, pieced together from what old men and old women remembered, see, them living on far crofts hither and yon, and they sang and recited these poems as they had