Before going to bed he would set out his breakfast dishes for the next morning; again with great precision, his plate face down and his cup inverted upon its saucer with its handle always at the same angle, and with his knife and fork and spoon each in its proper place, as if he were in a grand hotel.
His shoes were always polished and in a shining row with their toes pointing outward beneath his neatly made bed, and his teapot was always placed on exactly the same spot upon his gleaming stove. “He is so clean, he makes you nervous,” said my other grandfather, who, while he had a great affection for him, was a very different kind of man.
Although he had a shot of whisky when he got up and one before he went to bed, he drank very little compared to many of the men his age, and although he could sometimes be inveigled into going to the taverns he never remained long and did not like them. “He’s always getting up to get a cloth to mop the table,” my other grandfather would complain, “and he sits far back from the table like this” (giving an imitation of a man at a table – close but distant) “because he’s afraid someone will spill beer on his pants. And he can’t stand the washrooms with all that piss on the floor.”
Neither did he like ribald songs nor off-colour stories in either English or Gaelic, and his face would redden at almost any sexual reference. Again, I suppose because of what he considered to be a certain ill-prepared sloppiness in his painful past. And stories about the man who rides the girl and then goes away were not, for him, particularly funny.
When my sister and I were small children we would visit him more out of duty than affection because he was the kind of man who did not appreciate muddy boots on his always scrubbed floor, nor did he appreciate having his hammer mislaid, nor his saw left out to rust in the rain. And if he were not home and we left scrawled childish notes on his door, he would encircle all the misspelled words with his carpenter’s pencil and later on our next visit ask us to spell them correctly because he so wanted everything to be “right.”
He was a strong taskmaster at homework, but not without his own humour. I remember one night, while staying with him, attempting to memorize history dates. “Confederation, 1867,” I chanted aloud. “Think of me,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I was born here in 1877. I am only ten years younger than Canada, and I am not very old.” It seemed an amazing thing at the time for he did seem old and so did Canada and I was not that strong at making distinctions, and did not realize what was young and what was old.
Although he was older and “different” than my other grandparents, they had a great affection and respect for him – not only because his only daughter had married their son and they shared that resulting pain, but I suppose also because he was their cousin and part of “clann Chalum Ruaidh,” although none of them remembered the young man who had fathered him in another century and who died on the winter skidway in the snow near Bangor, Maine.
“He has always stood by us,” said Grandma. “He has always been loyal to his blood. He has given us this chance.” “This chance” involved the story of how my grandparents became dwellers of the town rather than of the country. They had spent their early married years on the Calum Ruadh land, living with their in-laws for a while and then constructing their own unfinished house. They were always short of money and uncertain of their future and, apparently, even considered going to San Francisco, where Grandma’s sister, who had married Grandpa’s brother, had already gone and where they seemed to be prospering. But in the end they did not go. “The old people did not want us to go” was one explanation, but it seemed they really did not want to go themselves, although the idea persisted as fantasy, especially with Grandpa when he was in his cups. “I,” he would say, rising unsteadily but grandly from his chair and holding his glass in his hand, “could have gone to San Francisco.”
For a number of years, as their children came, they lived the uncertain “normal” lives of their time; Grandma washing her clothes in the brook and slapping them on the rocks and tending her precious garden in its stony soil. Grandpa fishing in the waters off the Calum Ruadh’s Point for a while in summer, and caring for his animals and working haphazardly in the woods in winter.
When they began to construct the new hospital in the town ten miles away, my other grandfather began to work there as a carpenter and eventually to take small contracts on certain portions of it, and when it began to rise above the ground as a sort of monument to the future sick, few people knew as much about it as did he. He realized that when it was completed it would have to be maintained, and decided to groom Grandpa for the job. “He would come at night,” Grandma would say, “with his blueprints all so neat and exact, and I would wipe away everything from the table and he would spread them out and we would study them by the kerosene lamp, and he would point out all the pipes and cables and which connected to which and he would show us how all the newfangled switches and latches worked, and then he would ask us questions, just like the teacher, and invent problems and ask how they might be solved. And sometimes he would explain things in Gaelic. Then he would have one drink of whisky and play a tune on the violin – which always seemed so strange in him, you would never think of him as playing the violin – and then he would go. He never spent the night with us. I used to think it was because we did not have an indoor bathroom and he was always so clean – ‘fastidious’ I heard him called once. Anyway it got so that I knew everything about the inner workings of the hospital myself.”
When it dawned on the authorities that the new hospital would need a maintenance man, Grandpa was, as he said, “really ready.” There were apparently some periods of tension when it seemed he might be on the wrong side of politics, but he was so dazzling in his interview that he simply overwhelmed any such opposition and was hired for the job. “I’m all set for life now,” he apparently said, patting his new pipe wrench in his new coveralls. “To hell with San Francisco.”
This was “the chance,” as I said, that led to my grandparents becoming dwellers of the town instead of dwellers of the country. It was, of course, but a short distance physically, and hardly any mental one at all. They lived on the outskirts of the town and they had a “yard” which consisted of almost two acres and they brought with them their chickens and their pig and their ever-present Calum Ruadh dogs, and for a while they even kept a cow. Their relatives visited them constantly, and because the town was also on the sea and because of the indented shoreline, they could look down along the coast and see the point of land from whence they came, and on clear nights they could see the lights glowing like earthbound stars where the distant dark horizon curved down towards the sea.
They were tremendously happy people, grateful for “the chance,” and never seeming to think much beyond it. “He is a really smart man,” said my other, more reflective grandfather of Grandpa, “if only he were more thoughtful.”
Still, it was he who had engineered the maintenance job for Grandpa and steered him towards it, almost, it seems, like the vocational guidance teacher, looking at the job and looking at the student and deciding (and hoping) that each might prove suitable for the other.
For his part, Grandpa would say, “I know one thing really well and that’s how to run this hospital. That’s enough for me.”
During their early married years, it seems, it was decided that Grandpa would earn whatever he could, and that he would then give everything there was to Grandma, except for a small allowance for tobacco and beer. She would then do almost everything else, which was no small accomplishment, considering that during their first twelve married years they produced nine living children. Before “the chance,” the earnings were erratic and unpredictable and Grandma was frequently hard-pressed, but after it, she too, like her husband, felt “all set for life,” and after her early years of “making do” with little, she felt privileged and almost “rich” beyond any of her earliest expectations. She was frugal and capable because, as she said, “I always had to be,” putting patches on the patches and hardl
y ever throwing anything away. And she believed with great dedication in a series of maxims. “Waste not, want not” was one, and “Always look after your blood” was another.
“He is the nicest man you could ever be around,” she frequently said of Grandpa. “And I should know. I have been sleeping with him for more than forty-five years. Some men,” she would add in ominous seriousness, “are nice as pie in public but within their own homes they are mean and miserly to those who have to live with them all the time. No one, perhaps, knows this except those who are captives within their houses. But he is never like that at all,” she would add, brightening at the very thought. “He is always cheerful and happy, and there is more to him than some people think.”
I think of my grandparents a great deal, and, as in the manner of the remembered Gaelic songs, I do not do so consciously. I do not awake in the morning and say, as soon as my feet hit the floor, “Today I must remember Grandma and Grandpa. I will devote ten whole minutes to their memory” – as if I were anticipating isometric exercises or a self-imposed number of push-ups to be done on the floor beside my bed. It does not work that way at all. But they drift into my mind in the midst of the quiet affluence of my office, where there is never supposed to be any pain but only the creation of a hopeful beauty. And they drift into the quiet affluence of my home, with its sunken living room and its luxuriously understated furniture. And they are there too on Grand Cayman or in Montego Bay or Sarasota or Tenerife or any of those other places to which we go, trying to pretend that, for us, there really is no winter. They drift in like the fine snow in the old Calum Ruadh house in which my brothers used to live; sifting in and around the window casings or under the doors, driven by the insistent and unseen wind, so that in spite of primitive weather stripping or the stuffing with old rags, it continued to persist, forming lines of quiet whiteness to be greeted with surprise.
I see my grandparents even now, in terms of their gestures and certain scenes. The way she would touch his inner thigh from behind, as he stood on the ladder, helping her with the spring housecleaning, which he hated but always did; and the way his knees would buckle at the surprise of the touch until he had composed himself and was able to turn, laughing, towards her, looking down from his ladder while holding the curtain rod or the cleaning cloth in his hand.
As they became older and he became somewhat deaf, they reverted almost totally to Gaelic – especially when they were alone. It was the language that one heard emanating from their bedroom late at night – his voice a bit too loud, the way it often is with the somewhat deaf who cannot hear the volume of their own utterances. It was the language of their courting days and they had always been more at ease with it, although, especially after “the chance,” they had become quite adept at English. If one passed the sometimes slightly opened door of their bedroom in the early morning, they were to be seen always sleeping in the same position. He, lying on his back, on the outside of the bed with his lips slightly parted and with his right arm extended and curved around her shoulders. And she, with her head upon his chest while the outline of her right arm extended down beneath the blankets, towards the familiarity between his legs. They were tremendously supportive of one another, never denying each other anything which came within their framework of knowledge. And confidently certain of how their lives should be.
Sometimes when he stayed too long at the taverns, as he sometimes did in his later years, he would exhaust his money and send a “runner” to Grandma, asking for more so that he might extend his socializing. She always gave it to him, saying, “He does not do this often. And it is little enough when you consider all he has given to us.” And once when a rather cryptic neighbour said, “If he were my husband, he would not get another cent,” Grandma, in her own indignation, said, “Yes, but he is not your husband. You look after your husband and I’ll look after mine.”
On one Christmas Eve, we waited and waited for him throughout the late afternoon and the early evening. He had gone to get his last-minute presents, but “must have stopped along the way,” as Grandma put it. “Maybe he took too much money for the presents,” she added. “Anyway, he will come by 6:30, because he knows that there are things to do, and that we must go to church later tonight, and anyway the taverns close at six on Christmas Eve.”
Sure enough at 6:30 he arrived; in a taxi, no less, accompanied by a number of erratic friends who helped him open the door and carry in his precious packages and then vanished back into the taxi, amidst off-key choruses of “Merry Christmas.”
“Hullo,” said Grandpa, weaving unsteadily across the kitchen floor. “Ciamar a tha sibh? Merry Christmas to all. Is everybody happy?”
He wobbled to his chair at the end of the kitchen table, where he sat swaying almost regularly, as if sitting on the deck of a departing, pitching boat. “How is everyone?” he said, waving to us blearily, his hand moving back and forth before his face, as if he were cleaning an imaginary windshield. “Great day to be alive,” he added, and then he sort of crumpled and fell off his chair in a rapid yet amazing sequence. It was like looking at those films which show the destruction of the building which has been cleverly laden with dynamite and then, in a matter of seconds, folds up and seems to vanish soundlessly before your eyes. A few tremors and shocks and then it crumbles.
“Holy Jesus, get that boat up before the tide rises” was one thing he said from the floor and the other was “Be sure that all the valves are shut off before you do it.” Two rather curious statements: one from his life before “the chance” and the other, perhaps, from after it, referring to the hospital. And then he was sound asleep. Even Grandma was a bit taken aback, looking down on him as he slept so peacefully, his mouth partly opened and his arms outstretched.
“Whatever will we do?” she mused, and then brightening she said, “I know.” And going to the box of leftover Christmas tree decorations she began to extract various ornaments and strands of foil rope and even a rather tarnished star. She placed the star at Grandpa’s head and deftly strung the rope about his limbs, and placed little balls and stars at strategic places on his outstretched limbs. She strung some Christmas icicles across his chest, where they looked vaguely like outworn war medals, and then sprinkled him with some artificial snow. The latter caused him to crinkle his nose, and it seemed for a moment that he might sneeze, but he slept on. And when she was finished her decorating, she took his picture. When Grandpa stirred later in the evening, he was at first almost afraid, seeming somewhat like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, awakening to find himself covered with small strands of silver foil, and for a while not really realizing just where he was nor what had happened to him. He did not move for a bit, allowing only his eyes to move about the room, until they finally came to rest on Grandma, who was sitting quietly in a chair not far from his feet. Then he lifted his right hand very slowly, looking at the snow and icicles that fell from it and at the green ball fastened to his middle finger.
“We thought that we would finish decorating you for Christmas,” she said, looking at both my sister and me. And then she began to laugh. Slowly, like someone trying to extricate himself from a wired and potentially explosive bomb, Grandpa sat up, moving carefully and trying not to disturb his strands and streamers. When he stood up and looked down at the place he had vacated, it was almost possible to see his outline on the floor, like a sort of reverse snow angel, with bits of artificial snow and some of the ornaments outlining the former boundaries of his limbs. Later that night, at church, when he turned his head in certain directions, the golden muted lights reflected on the wisps of artificial snow still found within his hair.
After the picture was developed, he kept it in his wallet for years until it began to crease and fall apart the way such pictures do and then he had Grandma dig out the old negative so that another copy might be made.
I think of it now as one of those “joke” pictures taken for high-school yearbooks and which, years later, seem to reveal more than was ever realized at the
time.
My twin sister and I were the youngest children in our family, and we were three on March 28 when it was decided that we would spend the night with our grandparents.
After he returned from naval service in the war, my father had applied for the position of lightkeeper on the island which seemed almost to float in the channel about a mile and half from the town which faced the sea. He had long been familiar with boats and the sea and, after passing the examination, was informed in a very formal letter that the job was his. He and my mother were overjoyed because it meant they would not have to go away, and the job reeked of security, which was what they wanted after the disruption of the years of war. The older generation was highly enthusiastic as well. “That island will stay there for a damn long time,” said Grandpa appreciatively, although he later apparently sniffed, “Any fool can look after a lighthouse. It is not like being responsible for a whole hospital.”
On the morning of March 28, which was the beginning of a weekend, my parents and their six children and their dog walked ashore across the ice. Their older sons, who were sixteen, fifteen, and fourteen, apparently took turns carrying my sister and me upon their shoulders, stopping every so often to take off their mitts and rub our faces so that our cheeks would not become so cold as to be frozen without our realizing it. Our father, accompanied by our brother Colin, who was eleven, walked ahead of us, testing the ice from time to time with a long pole, although there did not seem much need to do so for he had “bushed” the ice some two months earlier, meaning he had placed spruce trees upright in the snow and ice to serve as a sort of road guide for winter travellers.
No Great Mischief Page 4