“The Last Hiding Place” by Terrence Heath

Is it just my imagination, or are there more and more novels coming out of the prairies these days which show the plight of natives trapped between ascendant white values and their own cultural and ideological ambitions? Perhaps it has something to do with the rise of native lobbies. Or perhaps novels about encounters between whites and natives have become a kind of escape literature, devoured by legions of guilt-ridden, middle-class liberals who prefer the vicarious contacts of literature to those they are unable to effect in life.

At any rate, here is Gabe who lives in rural Saskatchewan on a farm he is striving doggedly to make profitable in order to prove to everyone that he can be a success. He is a half-breed, middle-aged, and married to a white woman with “honey blonde” hair who has borne him several children. He has all the trappings of success, and he is proud of them, for he knows that his farm is “equal to any around.” The trouble is, Gabe feels restless despite his prosperity as an independent farmer, because “at some point he’d made a wrong turn and since then he’d done the right things but they were wrong because of that one wrong move.”

Gabe’s wrong move was to repudiate his real calling. When he was a boy, his Indian uncle had pointed out to him that he was not a farmer but a storyteller. But Gabe spurned the advice of his delightful but dissipated relative, and pursued instead the path that took him to his white wife, Lisa, the rambling farmhouse, two trucks, and mortgaged land. These he broods over with the despair befitting an urbanite in midlife crisis. He has not forgotten how much it cost him to achieve these symbols of success: alienation from his own people who branded him as self-important; resistance in the white community, jealous of success; 25 years of teeth-grinding labour. Still, he knows he has become cruel to his children and harsh with his wife, and he has reached a point of resolution: to make amends to his family and his own past, he will soften and bring joy and pleasure to their lives by indulging his children’s whims and his wife’s impulses. Perhaps he will even organize a trip to Disneyland, a fantasy Lisa has harboured tor years.

She too is unhappy with their limited provincial lifestyle. She has begun an affair with a local hired man whom she meets on back roads and in deserted fields. One of their trysts is observed by Gabe, and this moment provides the central dramatic impetus to the novel. Struck as if someone was “walking over his grave,” Gabe returns to the family home where he presides over a domestic kangaroo court that culminates in the killing of two policemen and Gabe’s abortive flight into the wilderness, home of his Indian ancestors, the “last hiding place” of the title.

Heath, whose previous The Truth and Other Stories was a sparkling collection of poetic tales, is a lively and serious writer. He is witty in recounting Uncle’s stories based around a fable character named “Whatif.” There is a delightful scene in which Uncle explains the creation of the world to the young Gabe, and when challenged with the Biblical version, points out that he knew Moses as an old man who sometimes got things mixed up so badly he told one story of creation and wrote down a different one. Another scene explains how the beaver got his flat tail—Whatif jumped up and down on it “until it was flat as a pancake.” These are the stories Gabe should have told to fulfill his vocation of storyteller: they provide playful and charming interludes to the novel’s main narrative line.

The vigorous writing in these sections points up the major strength of the novel as a whole, its clean and direct style. In narrative and dialogue, Heath controls language effectively, keeping tight rein where a less experienced hand might have become self-indulgent. Except for an almost irrational love affair with the word ‘almost,’ and a tendency to string together participial phrases (“When Gabe came to, awoke as if from a sleep after the first day of the hunt, from the exhausted sleep of exertion and tension, he was still squatting by the fence in the snow”), the prose is crisp and firm. It moves the action decisively forward.

What The Last Hiding Place sets out to perform, clearly, is the diagnosis of a people through the experience of an individual; and it deserves high praise for coming close to achieving that goal. Especially in the concluding sections, the novel is authoritative and imaginatively accurate in the way it carries that ring of authenticity we search for in fictions. Gabe’s stories, for example, are the measures of a culture and are themselves quite fine; as are the visions he induces in exile to compensate for his diminished boyhood.

Heath has something important to say about Gabe, which is that endings lie in beginnings. Unable to forge a life within mainstream white values, an artificial home for him, Gabe must return to his cultural underpinnings to find himself. But retreating is not returning, and in the end Gabe wonders if returning isn’t an illusion, too, for nothing can go back to being the way it was:

Nothing ever returned; he knew that now. There were no patterns, no circuits, no plans—nothing came back to where it started. There were no beginnings. He had been fooling himself.

Curiously, this declaration is followed by events which seem to disprove it: Gabe makes the ultimate return, the “four day walk to death” of his ancestors, and it is in this journey that Gabe discovers both repose from the travails of everyday life and happiness within himself. The last hiding place, it appears, is internal, not external; not landscape, but mindscape.

In another life, perhaps the one he passes to at the novel’s conclusion, Gabe would fill the role of storyteller Uncle prophesied for him. That happy conclusion brings The Last Hiding Place to both narrative end and fictional beginning. Gabe’s story is of a life aborted, and of a dream reawakened. Its closing moments re-issue a challenge to other lives gone equally wrong as Gabe’s. At the same time it demonstrates the powerful hold vision has in native culture, and the important role which re-awakening must play for modern natives caught between the crush of two cultures, one dead, the other powerless to be reborn. ■

Wayne Tefs’ first novel, Figures On a Wharf, will be published in the fall by Turnstone Press. An excerpt from the novel was published in the winter, 1983 edition of Arts Manitoba.