He looks at me expectantly, smiling in the old affectionate way. “My cheque does not come until Monday,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m going out to the car. I’ll be right back.”
“All right,” he says. “Leave the door open.”
I go out into the hall and past the quiet closed doors and down the stairway into the street. The sun is shining brightly, which is almost a surprise, after the dimly lit interior. I pass through the space between the buildings to my car. Opening the trunk, I take out the bottle of brandy which I have purchased the night before in case of these exact circumstances. Brandy always works the fastest. I put it inside my sports coat and press it tightly against my ribs with my left arm and then retrace my route. The door is ajar and he is still sitting on the bed’s edge, hanging on to control his shaking hands.
“There is a shot glass in the cupboard,” he says as I take out the brandy bottle. I go to the cupboard to look for the shot glass. It is easy to find as there is not much else. It is a souvenir of Cape Breton with an outline of the island on it and some of the place names. It is a gift to him from my children, purchased as part of a bar set two summers ago. “Uncle Calum will like this,” they said, being too young to intend anything as sophisticated as irony.
I pour the brandy into the shot glass and walk across to the bed to offer it to him. He removes his right hand from the bed and grasps the glass, but it flies out of his hand immediately, bouncing against my thigh and falling to the floor. It does not break, and now I can see and feel the stain of the brandy as it spreads its dark outline on the left leg of my trousers. He replaces his hand quickly on the bed, as if it has been burned.
The mug without the handle does not work any better, although he is able to grasp it with both hands for a moment before the contents spill on his own crotch and between his legs to seep into his bed. I go a third time to the cupboard and get a plastic bowl, the unbreakable kind that mothers buy for babies in high chairs. I splash some of the brandy into the bottom of the bowl and take it to him. He places both of his huge hands beneath it and raises it to his lips while I continue to steady the rim that is closest to me. He makes slurping sounds as he tilts his head back and the brandy gurgles down his throat. Because he has tipped the bowl too far some of the brandy spills along the outside of his face and runs down his chin to mingle with the blood still flowing from the gash. I splash some more brandy into the bowl and give it to him. Almost immediately it begins to take effect. The shaking of his hands becomes less agitated as his dark eyes become more clear. Like the patient who receives the anaesthetic, his fear and trembling are reduced.
“Ah, ’ille bhig ruaidh,” he says. “We have come a long way, you and I, and there are no hard feelings. Do you remember Christy?”
“Yes,” I say. “Of course I remember Christy.”
“Ah, poor Christy. How she always kept her part of the bargain.” He pauses and then changes the subject. “I have been thinking the last few days of Calum Ruadh,” he says with an almost apologetic shrug.
“Oh yes,” I say.
“He was our great-great-great-grandfather, right?”
“Yes, he was.”
“Ah yes,” he says. “I wonder what he looked like.”
“I don’t know,” I say, “other than that he was supposed to be big and of course ruadh, red. He probably looked like the rest of us.”
“Like you, maybe,” he says.
“Well, you’re big,” I smile, “and you have Calum, his name.”
“Yes, I have his name, but you have his colour.” He pauses. “I wonder if his grave is still there?”
“Yes, but it is very near to the cliff’s edge now. The point of land is wearing away. Some years faster than others, depending on the storms.”
“Yes, I imagine so,” he says. “It was always so stormy there. It is almost as if his grave is moving out to sea, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Or the sea coming in to meet him. But the big boulder with his inscription on it is still there. We had the letters rechiselled and then painted them in with a new marine waterproof paint. They will last for a while.”
“Yes, for a while. Although they’ll eventually wear away too, and someone will have to recut them again – like before.” He pauses. “It is as if with the passing of time he moves deeper into the rock.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Deeper into the rock before he falls into the sea, perhaps? Do you remember how when the gales would blow, the spray from the sea would drench the boulder until it glistened?”
“Yes.”
“And when the boulder was wet you could see the letters more clearly?”
“Yes.” I say. “That’s right. You could.”
“Yes, more clearly in the storm than in fair weather. I have been thinking of that now, although I can’t remember if I ever thought about it then.”
He gets up from the bed and retrieves the mug without the handle from the floor. He is steadier now, and his hands no longer tremble. He takes the brandy bottle and sloshes some of the contents into the mug which a few moments ago he was unable to control. He is rising out of one state into another. Next he will achieve a kind of plateau where he will level off for perhaps an hour and then, depending on how much more alcohol he consumes, he will begin to go down what seems like the other side of the mountain. The late afternoon and early evening may or may not see him spitting blood or swaying in the shadows as he attempts to urinate in the sink, fumbling at the front of his trousers with his right hand while supporting himself with his left against the wall. And I will have to leave him then, to follow my headlights through the city and then back down the highway. Each of us repeating his own small history.
“Didn’t I mention this to you the last time you were here?” he asks, breaking my thoughts and returning to the subject of Calum Ruadh and his gravestone.
“No,” I say at first, hoping to save him embarrassment, and then, “Yes, yes you did.”
“Ah yes,” he says, “’ille bhig ruaidh. Will you have a drink? Have a drink with me?” He offers me my own brandy.
“No,” I say. “No, I don’t think so. I’d rather not. I have a long drive ahead of me. I have to go back.”
“Ah yes, you have to go back.” He gets up, still holding the brandy bottle, and walks to the window which looks out on the back alley, on the erratic fire escapes and the resting garbage and the ground-down glass.
“It is a nice day out there,” he says, as if looking at another country. “A nice September day. The blackfish are jumping off the Calum Ruadh’s Point. I can see them: the way they shine, so black and glistening. But they had better not come in too close. Do you remember the one who came to shore?”
“Yes, I remember him.”
“And how we hoped that the storm would take him back out, but it didn’t.”
“Yes, he couldn’t get back out.”
“No,” he says, turning from the window, “he couldn’t. Do you remember our parents?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Some things. I’m not sure how many of the memories are real and how many I’ve sort of made up from other people’s stories.”
“Ah yes,” he says. “And your sister, Catriona, the same.”
“Yes,” I say. “The same.”
He drinks again. This time directly from the bottle, which is now emptying rapidly.
“Poor Grandma and Grandpa,” he says. “They were good to you. As good as they knew how.”
“Yes,” I say. “They were.”
“ ‘Always look after your own blood,’ Grandma said.” His mood changes in an instant and he seems suddenly angry and suspicious. “I suppose that’s why you’re here?”
I am caught off guard by the sudden shift, trapped in the net of my own guilt and history.
“No,” I say. “Why no. Not really. No, it’s not that way at all.”
I look towards him, trying to gauge his mood as he sways
slightly on the balls of his sock feet before me. The golden September sunshine slants indirectly through the window behind his back and seems to silhouette him as the dust motes flicker in its beams. He appears like the actor in the spotlight of the afternoon performance. He is poised and potentially dangerous, and in spite of all the years of abuse, his body still responds to the old tense signals. He rocks forward now on his toes and then backwards on his heels while holding the brandy bottle lightly in his left hand, as if he might throw it. The fingers of his right hand open and close slowly and rhythmically; now into a fist and now into an extended hand. Then he laughs and the moment is past.
“Ah yes,” he says. “Yes, ’ille bhig ruaidh. I was only thinking. Go and get some more liquor. Brandy if you want, or wine or beer, and we will drink away the day together. And the night.”
“All right,” I say, stepping towards the door, perhaps too quickly, and feeling ashamed for seeming so eager to abandon the room I have driven so many miles to enter.
“What would you like? Beer? Wine?”
“Oh,” he says. “It doesn’t make much difference. It doesn’t make much difference.”
“Okay, I won’t be too long.”
“No big rush,” he says. “Take your time. I am not going anywhere and I have this.” He swings the amber brandy bottle and its contents back and forth in his left hand. “I will sit here and wait.”
I go out into the hallway and close the door behind me and then slump with temporary relief. It is the slump of students when they close the door of the examination room behind them, or of those who leave the dentist’s office after being told, “The fillings will be two weeks from today – but not today.” Or of the witness released from his cross-examination in the box.
As I stand in the hallway I hear him as he begins to sing on the other side of the door. He sings softly but resolutely – singing to himself in the manner that the drunken or the near-drunken often use to communicate with themselves:
“Chi mi bhuam, fada bhuam,
Chi mi bhuam, ri muir lain;
Chi mi Ceap Breatuinn mo luaidh
Fada bhuam thar an t-sail.”
He is singing “Cumha Ceap Breatuinn,” “Lament for Cape Breton,” which is one of those communal songs often sung by large groups of people or in situations where one person sings the verse and the group sings the chorus. It means something like:
I see far, far away.
I see far o’er the tide;
I see Cape Breton, my love,
Far away o’er the sea.
As I walk down the hallway I move out of earshot of the singer who recedes with each of my steps, but as I begin to descend the steep, sad stairs, beneath the forty-watt bulb, the song continues and I am almost surprised to realize it is no longer coming from him but from somewhere deep within me. It rises up to the extent that my own lips move in an almost reflex action:
“Gu bheil togradh ann am intinn
Bhi leibh mar a bha
Ged tha fios agam us cinnt
Ribh nach till mi gu brath.”
There’s a longing in my heart now
To be where I was
Though I know that it’s quite sure
I never shall return.
It is as if there is no break between his ending and my beginning; although the subject matter is much different, the verses and chorus come easily to my mind in the way, I suppose, that middle-aged former boy scouts remember the verses of “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” and “Oh, My Darling Clementine.” Sounds planted and dormant and flowering at the most unexpected times.
I am a twentieth-century man, I think, as I step out onto the street. And then another phrase of my grandmother’s comes to mind, “whether I like it or not.” I am a middle-aged man this September and indeed there is not much of the twentieth century left. If I continue to journey towards its end I will be fifty-five when the century closes, which is either young or old, perhaps, depending on your own point of view and attitude towards age and time. “We will live a long, long time,” said my grandfather of the clann Chalum Ruaidh, “if we are given the chance – and if we want to.” I try to square my shoulders in the September sun – as if I were auditioning for the part of “twentieth-century man” in a soon-to-be-released spectacular. “Ah,” haunts the voice of my oldest brother, “ah, ’ille bhig ruaidh. You’ve come at last. We have come a long way, you and I, and there are no hard feelings.” The voice pauses. “I have been thinking the last few days of Calum Ruadh. I wonder what he looked like?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know. Only what I have been told.”
“Ah,” says the voice. “Stay with me. Stay with me. You are still the gille beag ruadh.”
Still the gille beag ruadh. The phrase means “the little red boy” or “the little red-haired boy” and it was applied to me as far back as my memory goes. I remember thinking of it as my name and responding to it rather than to “Alexander,” which is what is on my birth certificate. And even on the first day of primary school, sitting behind my twin sister in my new clothes and clutching my newly purchased crayons in my too clean but sweating hands, I failed to respond when my true name was called from the roll.
“That’s you,” said a cousin, poking me from across the aisle.
“Who?” I said.
“That’s you,” he said. “That’s your name.”
Then, taking matters into his own control, he raised his hand and, pointing towards me, said directly to the teacher, “That’s him, gille beag ruadh, Alexander.”
Everyone laughed because I had missed my own name and the teacher, who was not from the area, became very flushed, probably because of the Gaelic phrase she did not understand. Thankfully, however, we were of the generation who were no longer beaten because we uttered Gaelic, “beaten for your own good,” as the phrase seemed to go, “so you will learn English and become good Canadian citizens.” Instead she merely asked, “Is your name Alexander?”
“Yes,” I said, having regained some shreds of composure.
“In the future, please answer when your name is called from the roll,” she said.
“I will,” I said to myself, making a sharp mental note to be on the lookout for the foreign sound in the future.
And also at that first recess, several bigger boys approached me, and one said, “Are you gille beag ruadh?”
“Yes,” I said, at first responding from habit and then, remembering my most recent lesson, “no, I’m not. Alexander. I’m Alexander.”
However, it seemed to make no difference: “The Calum Ruadh’s hair is red. It sets fire to their bed,” he chanted.
Again, under attack, I felt my lower lip trembling and I was afraid that I might cry.
“Leave him alone,” said another bigger boy in the group. “You’re part Calum Ruadh yourself,” and he ruffled my hair as he led the group away. I ran to join my sister, who was waiting for me a few yards away, and we went to play on the slides, which we had been told was a good thing to do at recess.
The Calum Ruadh who seems so present in thought and conversation in today’s Toronto was, as I mentioned earlier, my great-great-great-grandfather. And he came from Scotland’s Moidart to the New World in 1779. Sometimes it seems we know a lot about him, and at other times very little. “It is all relative,” as they say. No pun intended. There are some facts and perhaps some fantasies that change with our own perceptions and interests.
These seem the facts: He was married in Moidart to Anne MacPherson, and they had six children, three boys and three girls. While these children were still quite small, Anne MacPherson became ill and died “of the fever,” leaving him with what my grandparents referred to as “his care,” meaning his motherless children. Later, his wife’s younger sister, Catherine MacPherson, came to keep house for him and to look after her nieces and nephews and eventually to marry the man who was their father. They had six more children, again three boys and three girls. Anyone who knows the history of
Scotland, particularly that of the Highlands and the Western Isles in the period around 1779, is not hard-pressed to understand the reasons for their leaving.
They already had friends and relatives in North America. Many of them were in the Cape Fear River area of North Carolina – nearly all of them men, fighting at the time in the American War of Independence. Some of the older ones were on the side of the revolutionaries because they had decided to fight for a new life in the New World, and others fought on the British side because they remained stubbornly loyal to the British cause. At night they sang Gaelic songs to one another across the mountain meadows where they would fight on the following day. Singing Gaelic to their Highland friends and relatives across the glens of North Carolina: “Come on over and join us.” “You’re on the wrong side.” “Don’t be fools.” “The future is with us.”
Calum Ruadh was fifty-five in 1779 and had been twenty-one “at the time of the Forty-Five” when the call had gone out to “rise and follow Charlie.” Again there were friends and relatives singing and saying to one another: “Don’t be fools.” “You’re on the wrong side.” “Your loyalty is misplaced.” “Think about it.” Pressures from above as well as from all sides.
He and his wife and family had apparently talked about leaving for some time, and had made their plans quietly and contacted the emigration agent and agreed to meet him and his ship in one of the sheltered coves along the coastline, where he was picking up families such as theirs. Bound for Nova Scotia, “the land of trees,” although Calum Ruadh’s destination was Cape Breton, where, he had been told in a Gaelic letter, there would be land for him if he would come.
No Great Mischief Page 2