They were to leave on August 1, and the crossing would be perhaps six weeks with favourable winds. But in the weeks prior to the departure, the former Catherine MacPherson became ill and they did not know what to do. In the end they decided to go, having sold their cattle and given up the precious end timbers to their house, which in that land and in that time were hard to come by. Ironically, leaving a land with too few trees for one that was to have, perhaps, too many. They came down to the shore and waited, Calum Ruadh and his ill but hopeful wife and his twelve children. His eldest daughter was already married to a man named Angus Kennedy from the Isle of Canna and they waited also. One sees them in imagination’s mist, shuffling their feet and watching the horizon while the shapes of friends and relatives move in and out of the shadows. “Perhaps you’re making a mistake.” “You could be fools.” “The future is uncertain.”
They waited there, Calum Ruadh holding his violin and perhaps resting his foot on the wooden sea chest with its neatly divided compartments. All of them with some small provisions and with their money secreted inside their shoes. He was unaware that the French Revolution was coming and that a boy named Napoleon was but ten, and had not yet set out to conquer the world. Although he was not surprised, later, at the number of his own relatives who died before and during Waterloo, still shouting Gaelic war cries while fighting for the British against the resistant French. General James Wolfe, whom he perhaps did not remember from the Forty-Five, was already dead twenty years, dying with the Highlanders on the Plains of Abraham – the same Highlanders he had tried to exterminate some fourteen years before.
It is unlikely that Calum Ruadh had many thoughts of Wolfe in that August of 1779. His mind was likely filled with more immediate concerns as he prepared to leave Moidart – another MacDonald leaving Moidart yet again – although this time not to “rise and follow Charlie,” although that image and that music may have haunted the recesses of his mind.
As they waited on the shore, the dog who had worked with them for years and had been left to the care of neighbours ran about in a frenzy, sensing that something was wrong, and rolling in the sand and whining in her agitation. And when they began to wade out to the smaller boat which would take them to the waiting ship, she swam after them, her head cutting a V through the water and her anxious eyes upon the departing family she considered as her own. And as they were rowed towards the anchored ship, she continued to swim, in spite of shouted Gaelic threats and exhortations telling her to go back; swimming farther and farther from the land, until Calum Ruadh, unable to stand it any longer, changed his shouts from threats to calls of encouragement and, reaching over the side, lifted her soaked and chilled and trembling body into the boat. As she wriggled wetly against his chest and licked his face excitedly, he said to her in Gaelic, “Little dog, you have been with us all these years and we will not forsake you now. You will come with us.”
“That always got to me, somehow,” I remember my grandfather saying, “that part about the dog.”
The voyage was a bad one. The quarters below were cramped and overcrowded and were apparently modelled partially on those of the transport ships used to carry Highland soldiers to fight in the New World and partially on the quarters of the slave ships plying from Africa to ports of that same New World. Overcrowding being a matter of simple economic greed.
In fair weather the people could come above decks and move and clean themselves, but in this year of the stormy August crossing, they were unable to do so, and were forced to remain below in their own stench and confinement. Three weeks out, the former Catherine MacPherson died. Her death brought on, again, “by the fever” and no doubt hastened by the overcrowding and the wormy oatmeal and the tiny measures of brackish water. She was sewn in a canvas bag and thrown overboard, never to see the New World on which she had based such hopes. One week after her death the wife of Angus Kennedy gave birth. The child was called Catherine and was known ever afterwards as “Catriona na mara,” “Catherine of the Sea,” because of the circumstances of her birth.
As I said, these seem the facts, or some of them anyway, although the fantasies are my own. And as is the case with the Gaelic songs, I do not choose nor will myself to remember them. They are just there, from what, even in my relatively short life, seems like a long time ago. I remember my grandfather telling me the story one afternoon in early spring as we were out at the woodpile making kindlings – he chopping them and I carrying them in to dry. I was, perhaps, eleven and the geese were winging northward, flying over the still iced-in rivers and lakes – seeming fools for being so early yet being geometrically true to their intended course and purpose.
“After they landed on the shores of Pictou,” he said, “Calum Ruadh broke down and wept and he cried for two whole days and I guess they were all around him, including the dog, and no one knew what to do.”
“Cried?” I said incredulously. Because even by then I was conditioned by movies where the people all broke into applause when they saw the Statue of Liberty which their ship was approaching. Always they seemed to hug and dance and be happy at landing in the New World. And also the idea of a fifty-five-year-old man crying was a bit more than I was ready for. “Cried?” I said. “What in the world would he cry for?”
I remember the way my grandfather drove the axe into the chopping block – with such violent force that it became so deeply embedded he had difficulty in getting it out later – and he looked at me with such temporary anger in his eyes that I thought he would snatch me by my jacket front and shake me. His eyes said that he could not believe I was so stupid, but they said so only for a moment. He was, I suppose, somewhat like the teacher at the blackboard who explains and draws diagrams and gives examples, and then upon asking the question of understanding finds that no one has received his message – and fears in anger that everyone’s time has been utterly wasted. Or, perhaps, it is merely the mistake that adults sometimes make in talking to children, thinking that they are talking to other adults who share their knowledge and their views. Explaining the facts of life to those who have as yet no interest in such a subject, and who would probably be more interested in eating cookies.
“He was,” he said, composing himself and after a thoughtful moment, “crying for his history. He had left his country and lost his wife and spoke a foreign language. He had left as a husband and arrived as a widower and a grandfather, and he was responsible for all those people clustered around him. He was,” he said, looking up to the sky, “like the goose who points the V, and he temporarily wavered and lost his courage.
“Anyway,” he went on, “they waited there for two weeks, trying to get a shallop to take them across the water and here to Cape Breton. And then, I guess, he got better and ‘set his teeth,’ as they say, and resolved to carry on. It’s a good thing for us that he did.”
“What’s a shallop?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of my fear of ignorance.
He was not angry at the question but only laughed as he set about trying to free the embedded axe from the chopping block.
“I don’t really know,” he said. “It’s just the word they always used, ‘shallop.’ It’s sort of a small open boat. You can row it or use sails. Sort of like a dory. I think it’s originally a French word.”
As I gathered the kindlings that fell from his axe, another V of geese flew north. These seemed somehow lower, and it was almost as if one could hear the strong and regulated “whoosh” of their grasping, powerful, outstretched wings.
One sees the little group of people even now, as if we could, in imagination’s mist, rowing or sailing in their shallop or shallops across the choppy fall sea. Looking along the Cape Breton coastline, which would become the future subject of “Chi Mi Bhuam,” although they had no way of knowing that then. Nor did they know, probably, that once they landed they would be there “forever” – none of them in that boat ever returning to the mainland during their natural lives. One sees them with the “saved” dog, perhaps, in the sha
llop’s prow, the wind spray flattening the hair along her skull while she scanned the wooded coastline with her dark intelligent eyes. When the boat landed on the gravelled strand, the cousins who had written the Gaelic letter and the Micmacs who were at home “in the land of trees” helped them ashore and continued to help them through that first long winter.
Official settlement was not appreciated in Cape Breton at that time because of the many political and colonial uncertainties, but in 1784 Cape Breton was constituted a British province and those who were already “inhabitants” petitioned for the land they had been working. Calum Ruadh, after walking the hundred or so miles to Sydney, received “the paper” outlining in some formal sense his land in “the colony of Cape Breton.” He was sixty years old at the time. Thirty-six years later, after Cape Breton was re-annexed to Nova Scotia in 1820, he obtained new papers for the new province, but by this time there were local magistrates and he did not have to walk. It was probably just as well, as he was ninety-six at the time of the re-annexation and he had been in the New World for forty-one years. He continued to live for another fourteen years, giving his life a strange sort of balanced structure; living to be one hundred and ten years old; fifty-five in Scotland and a second fifty-five “in the land across the sea.” Of the second fifty-five, he spent five as a sort of energetic squatter and thirty-six as a “citizen of Cape Breton” and fourteen as a citizen of Nova Scotia. When he died, in 1834, it was thirty-three years before Confederation.
He was never a married man in the new country and that is, perhaps, why his grave seems doubly lonely, set as it is on the farthest jutting headland that points out to the sea, where it is caught by all of the many varying winds. Most of his children are buried in the early “official” graveyards beside their wives and husbands and sometimes, in the larger plots, surrounded by their own children and children’s children as well. Families in death, as they were in life. But Calum Ruadh is buried all alone, apparently where he wanted to be, marked only by a large boulder with the hand-chiselled letters which give his name and dates and the simple Gaelic line: Fois do t’anam. Peace to his Soul.
In the years that followed, some of Calum Ruadh’s many descendants expanded his original land holdings, while others moved farther along the coast and others deeper inland. Nearly all of them had large families, which led in turn to complex interrelationships and complicated genealogies, over all of which his name continued to preside. I remember as a high-school athlete, travelling to hockey games in communities which seemed a great distance away, sometimes playing in arenas but more often on windswept ponds beside the sea. And after our games we would be invited into the homes of our hosts, where we would inevitably be quizzed by their parents or grandparents. “What’s your name?” “What’s your father’s name?” “What’s your mother’s father’s name?” And almost without fail, in the case of myself and my cousins, there would come a knowing look across the face of our questioners and they would say, in response to our answer, “Ah, you are the clann Chalum Ruaidh,” as if that somehow explained everything. They would pronounce clann in the Gaelic way so that it sounded like “kwown.” “Ah, you are the clann Chalum Ruaidh,” meaning “Ah, you are the children (or the family) of the red Calum.” We would nod and accept this judgment, as the ice and snow dripped off our shin pads to form puddles on the linoleum floors. And later, when we were out of the house and thinking ourselves more
sophisticated than we were, we would laugh and sometimes imitate the people and their identification. “What is your father’s father’s father’s father’s name?” we would ask one another, carving our initials in the snow with our hockey sticks, and then answering our own questions, “Ah, now I know, you are the clann Chalum Ruaidh,” and we would laugh and flick snow at one another with the blades of our sticks.
There are a few physical characteristics of the clann Chalum Ruaidh which seem to have been passed on and, in some cases, almost to have been intensified. One seems a predisposition to have twins, most of whom are fraternal rather than identical. And another has to do with what is sometimes called “colouring.” Most of the people are fair-skinned, but within families some of the individuals have bright red hair while that of their brothers and sisters is a deep, intense and shining black. When my twin sister was seventeen, she decided for reasons of girlish vanity to dye her hair with a silver-blondish streak which rose from her forehead and swept in undulating waves through the heavy blackness of her own natural hair. Later, tiring of the effect, she attempted to dye the streak back to black, but could find no dye that would make it as black as it was before. I see her now, sometimes, in memory, sitting in her slip before her mirror and biting her lip in frustration close to tears, looking like those heroines of the Scottish ballads with “milk white skin and hair as black as the raven’s wing” and wishing to be someone else. My grandmother had little sympathy for her plight, saying with straightforward firmness, “It is good enough for you, for tampering with the hair God gave you.”
It was months before her hair grew to its own blackness again, and then almost simultaneously and ironically the first few strands of premature whiteness began to appear as they so often do, coming to the dark-haired at a very early age.
Many of the red-haired people also had eyes that were so dark as to be beyond brown and almost in the region of a glowing black. Such individuals would manifest themselves as strikingly unfamiliar to some, and as eerily familiar to others. When one of my sons was born in southwestern Ontario, the hospital staff said, “Either his hair will turn dark or his eyes will turn blue. Most red-haired people have blue eyes. No one looks like that.” There seemed little reason for me to say anything, given the circumstances of my own physical presence.
And once, years after my sister had married the petroleum engineer she met at the University of Alberta, her eleven-year-old son was pushing his bicycle up the incline of Calgary’s Sarcee Trail on a sunny summer afternoon. He was met, he said, by a car filled with men and bearing a banner which said “B.C. or Bust” strung across its grille. It passed him and then stopped in a slew of roadside gravel, and then, grinding into reverse, roared backwards towards him where he stood half frightened and clutching his handlebars. “What’s your name?” said one of the men, rolling down his window. “Pankovich,” he answered. And then one of the men in the back seat (“the one with the beer in his lap,” he said) leaned forward and asked, “What was your mother’s last name?” “MacDonald,” he answered. “See,” said the man to the car in general, “I told you.” And then another of the men reached into his pocket and passed him a fifty-dollar bill. “What’s this for?” asked my nephew named Pankovich. “It is,” said the man, “for the way you look. Tell your mother it is from clann Chalum Ruaidh.”
And then the car bearing “B.C. or Bust” moved into the flow of the summer highway, heading for the rolling foothills and the distant shimmering mountains.
“Mom,” said my nephew on arriving home, “What’s kwown calum rooah?”
“Why?” she asked, startled. “Where did you hear that?” And he told her his story and she, some of hers.
“I remember it so clearly,” my sister said to me later. “I was fixing my hair because we were going out to dinner that evening. It just struck me so suddenly that I started to cry, and I asked him what licence plates were on the car, but he said he hadn’t noticed. I would have liked to have found out who they were, and to have thanked them somehow – not for the money, of course, nor for him, but somehow for myself.” She extended her hands in front of her and then moved them sideways as if she were smoothing an imaginary tablecloth hung in air.
Both my twin sister and I were raised by our paternal grandparents and both of them were “of the Calum Ruadh,” which meant that they were cousins. So was our maternal grandfather, although we did not know him quite as well nor for as long; and in the manner of the more unknown, he seems now more intriguing. He was what was called “a come by chance,” which meant that he was
illegitimate and had been fathered by one of the Calum Ruadh men who went to work in the woods near Bangor, Maine, but never returned. Apparently my grandfather’s parents planned to marry in the spring when the husband-to-be would return with the money to begin their married lives; and his bride-to-be had given herself to him in that fall – in the manner that young girls give themselves to equally young soldiers before they depart for war – hoping they will come back, but uncertain and fearful as well. He must have been fathered in late October or early November because his birthday was August 3, and one has even now a haunting sympathy for them all. For the girl who discovers in the depth of winter she is pregnant by a man she cannot reach. And for the man who died, crushed beneath the load of logs on the skidway, perhaps without realizing he had set a life in motion, which would in turn result in even such a life as mine.
Apparently he was killed in January, although word did not filter out for some time, as it was a great distance and the season was winter and there were no telephones and postal service was uncertain and most of the people involved were still unilingually Gaelic-speaking. He was buried there, in winter, in the woods of Maine, and in the spring a cousin brought back his boots and his few possessions in a bundle. He had not been working long enough to earn anything substantial, and what he had put aside for his wedding was needed for his burial. As I said, one has a haunting sympathy for them all, for him and for the girl waiting in the depth of winter for a dead man who might free her of her shame. And for her also later in the hot summer months before the birth, poor and desperate and ashamed, with unknown expectations for her coming fatherless child.
Perhaps because of the circumstances of his conception, my maternal grandfather was an exceedingly careful man. He became an exceptional carpenter, finding great satisfaction in the exactitude of a craft where everything would turn out perfectly if you took the time to calculate it so. He did not marry until he was middle aged and had already designed and built his compact, perfect house within the town; and within his marriage he fathered but one perfect child, who was my mother. After the death of his wife in childbirth, he lived for a long time by himself, rising at exactly six a.m. and shaving and trimming his neat reddish moustache. His house was spotless, and within it he knew where everything was all of the time. And in the little building behind his house where he kept his shining tools it was the same. He was the kind of man you could go to with a request such as, “Do you have a screw nail that is exactly 1 ⅛ inch long?” And immediately he would go to the perfect little jar and there it would be.
No Great Mischief Page 3