Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [90]
“I didn’t mind catching them,” said my mother, “but I drew the line at cleaning them. That was our arrangement: he always gutted the fish.” They did have such arrangements – who did what. I’d grown up thinking of these as laws of nature. It was news to me that some of these arrangements had been set in place by her.
Then she mentioned something she’d never told me before.
“One summer,” she told me, “an Indian came to the Lab.”
“An Indian? You mean one of the Indians from the lake?” There were such Indians; they trapped and fished, and drifted by in canoes once in a while. People didn’t have much gasoline during the War. Nowadays the Indians have motorboats.
“No,” said my mother. “An Indian from India.”
It would have been like my father to have taken on this incongruous assistant. He wouldn’t have seen any difficulties for such an Indian, because there would have been none for him. Anyone who was serious about beetles was a friend of his. But what if the Indian was a vegetarian Hindu? What if he was a Muslim? There was always bacon, up there in the woods. If it was smoked it would keep for a long time, and was useful for frying things: eggs, if any, and Spam, and fish. Then you could rub the grease on your boots. What would a Muslim have done about the bacon?
“Was he nice?” I said. “The Indian?” There were no pictures of him, I was sure of that.
“I expect so,” said my mother. “He brought his tennis whites. And a tennis racquet.”
“Why would he do that?” I said.
“I don’t know,” said my mother.
But I knew. This young man from India must have thought he was going to the country – to what was meant by that word, once, in other places. He’d had in mind an English country house, where he could do a spot of shooting and riding and have tea on the lawn, and stroll among the herbaceous borders, and play some tennis.
He must have had an education to have qualified as one of the boys at the Lab, so he would have been from a wealthy and well-placed Indian family, with a lot of servants. The family would have thought him eccentric to have taken up the study of insects, but still, many of good family in England – such as Darwin – had done so in the past.
They had not however done so in a wilderness of this kind. How had this young Indian man wandered so far afield, across to a new continent and then right to the edge of the known world?
“What year was it?” I said. “Was it during the War? Was I born yet?” But my mother couldn’t remember.
It was around this time – when she was still walking, when she’d begun to fall down – that she told me another thing she’d never told me before. She was having a recurring dream, she said; the same dream over and over. It frightened her and made her sad, although she didn’t say this.
In the dream she was alone in the woods, walking by herself beside a small river. She wasn’t exactly lost, but no one else was around – none of the people who ought to have been there. Not our father, not my brother, not me; none of her own brothers and sisters, or her friends or parents. She didn’t know where they’d gone. Everything was very silent: no birds, no sound of water. Nothing above but the empty blue sky. She came to a high logjam across the river; it was blocking the path. She had to climb up on the slippery logs, hauling herself hand over hand, up and up and up, toward the air.
“And then what?” I said.
“That’s all there is to it,” she said. “It wakes me up. But then I have the same dream all over again.”
One question to ask would be about the dream – why was she having it? I used to wonder that. But the other question – one I’ve thought of only now – would