“Oh,” he says, just “Oh.”
The church is very beautiful at night with its festooned branches and glowing candles and the booming, joyous sounds that come from the choir loft. We go through the service as if we are mesmerized.
On the way home, although the stones have cooled, we remain happy and warm. We listen to the creak of the leather harness and the hiss of runners on the snow and begin to think of the potentiality of presents. When we are about a mile from home the horse senses his destination and breaks into a trot and then into a confident lope. My brother lets him go and we move across the winter landscape like figures freed from a Christmas card. The snow from the horse’s hooves falls about our heads like the whiteness of the stars.
After we have stabled the horse we talk with our parents and eat the meal our mother has prepared. And then I am sleepy and it is time for the younger children to be in bed. But tonight my father says to me, “We would like you to stay up with us a while,” and so I stay quietly with the older members of my family.
When all is silent upstairs Neil brings in the cartons that contain his “clothes” and begins to open them. He unties the intricate knots quickly, their whorls falling away before his agile fingers. The boxes are filled with gifts neatly wrapped and bearing tags. The ones for my younger brothers say “from Santa Claus” but mine are not among them any more, as I know with certainty they will never be again. Yet I am not so much surprised as touched by a pang of loss at being here on the adult side of the world. It is as if I have suddenly moved into another room and heard a door click lastingly behind me. I am jabbed by my own small wound.
But then I look at those before me. I look at my parents drawn together before the Christmas tree. My mother has her hand upon my father’s shoulder and he is holding his ever-present handkerchief. I look at my sisters, who have crossed this threshold ahead of me and now each day journey farther from the lives they knew as girls. I look at my magic older brother who has come to us this Christmas from half a continent away, bringing everything he has and is. All of them are captured in the tableau of their care.
“Every man moves on,” says my father quietly, and I think he speaks of Santa Claus, “but there is no need to grieve. He leaves good things behind.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alistair MacLeod
Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936 and was raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a clifftop cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work.
Until his retirement in 2000, Dr. MacLeod spent all of the winter months as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier University, the University of New Brunswick, and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph.D. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Indiana. Working alongside W.O. Mitchell, he was an inspiring teacher to generations of writers at the Banff Centre.
He was sixty-four years old when in 1999 he published his first novel, No Great Mischief, with its ringing final line “All of us are better when we’re loved.” Until the novel appeared his published fiction consisted of only two books containing fourteen short stories in all, including “To Every Thing There Is a Season.”
Among many other prizes, No Great Mischief won the IMPAC Award in Dublin, the world’s richest literary prize. The book appeared in translation in many countries around the world and the attendant fame happily contradicted Michael Ondaatje’s earlier description of him as “one of the great undiscovered writers of our time.” His short story collection, Island, containing all of his short stories, appeared in 2000 and also became a major best-seller. In 2005, this book, To Every Thing There Is a Season, won the Booksellers’ Choice Award at the Atlantic Book Awards.
Alistair MacLeod has given lectures and readings from his work in many cities in Canada and around the world. He and his wife, Anita, have six children and two grandchildren. They live in Windsor.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Peter Rankin
Peter Rankin was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in 1961 and grew up in Mabou Harbour and Mabou Coal Mines in a family of fourteen children. It was a traditional upbringing. “Gaelic was spoken often in our home and was my father’s first language,” he recalls. “Gaelic songs, fiddle music and storytelling were some of the many pastimes we enjoyed as children.”
His grandmother was an accomplished artist, a creator of prized hooked rugs, and young Peter’s drawings and paintings were so promising that some of his work was published when he was in high school. He then took a B.A. at St. Francis Xavier University and moved to Halifax, where he became a professional artist.
In time he returned to Cape Breton to become a fisherman, but he combines that work with his life as an artist. Traditional Cape Breton rural life is his favourite subject, and he has written, “I enjoy taking part in the work of a rural lifestyle, from working in the boats, the woods, the farm, carpentry or whatever. I feel that my artwork can then have that authenticity that comes from knowing and doing.”
Rankin’s illustrations in Making Room, a book for children by Joanne Taylor, won the 2004 Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration.
He lives in Mabou Coal Mines with his wife and their five children.
To Every Thing There Is a Season Page 2