Immediately, she raced down to the shore and started across, running low across the level ice and hurling herself without hesitation into the open water, swimming to the nearest pan and then leaping from one pan to the other while Grandpa watched her progress through his binoculars. “She made it,” he said, finally turning from the window. “Poor cú.”
She was still there, waiting for her vanished people to rise out of the sea, when the new lightkeeper, “a man from the way of Pictou,” nudged the prow of his boat against the wharf on the island’s rocky shore. She came scrambling down the rocks to meet him, with her hackles raised and her teeth bared, protecting what she thought was hers and snarling in her certainty. And he reached into the prow of his boat for his twenty-two rifle and pumped four bullets into her loyal waiting heart. And later he caught her by the hind legs and threw her body into the sea.
“She was descended from the original Calum Ruadh dog,” said Grandpa when he heard the news, pouring himself a water glass full of whisky which he drank without a flinch. “The one who swam after the boat when they were leaving Scotland. It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard.”
On May 15, my other grandfather came across his daughter’s purse while on one of his early-morning walks along the shore. It was still clasped tightly and inside it there was not much of value or interest to the larger world. There was a ten-dollar bill wrapped tightly within a handkerchief and the saleslip and guarantee for Colin’s parka – in case it should not prove to be quite adequate.
Some pointed out that it was ironic that my grandfather should find the purse, that it should somehow “come” to him. But Grandma said he found it because he walked along the shore each morning after rising; that he found it because he looked, and there was nothing mysterious about it at all. Nothing else, as I said, ever “came” nor was ever “found.” My grandfather kept the purse for many years until he gave it to my sister the week before her wedding.
This is the story of how my sister and I, as three-year-old children, planned “to spend the night” with our grandparents and remained instead for sixteen years until we left to go to university. This is a story of lives which turned out differently than was intended. And obviously much of this information is not really mine at all – not in the sense that I experienced it. For, as I said, while our parents were drowning, my sister and I were playing store. And in the generations a long time before, we did not see Calum Ruadh’s faithful dog swimming after her family to a life beyond the sea. And we did not see our great-great-great-grandmother, the former Catherine MacPherson, sewn into a canvas bag and thrown also into that same sea. But still, whatever its inaccuracies, this information has come to be known in the manner that family members come to know one another because they share such close proximity. Or as Grandma would say, “How could you not know that?”
“There are a lot of things I don’t know,” said Grandma, “but there are some things I really believe in. I believe you should always look after your blood. If I did not believe that,” she would say, “Where would you two be?”
Now in Toronto in the late September sun, I stand and hesitate in the country of Queen Street West. Here beyond the expensive restaurants and the region of towers, the battle between restoring and destroying goes on. “For Sale,” say some signs. “For Rent,” announce others. The cranes with their wrecking balls are silent but poised, surrounded by the mounds of rubble which they have recently erected.
The people pass and jostle in the street, speaking in various dialects of Chinese, speaking Greek, Portuguese, Italian, English. Items in the windows claim to be “Imported.” Brazen but wary pigeons flap their blue-grey wings and sometimes land to walk or waddle like pompous businessmen along the busy sidewalks. In the distance the protestors and counter-protestors move and mill. “Pacifists, Communists Love You.” “If You Don’t Think This Country Is Worth Defending, Go Somewhere Else.”
Once at an orthodontists’ conference in Dallas, a man noted my name tag and said to me, unexpectedly and improbably, “Who are these Ukrainians one is always hearing about in Canada?”
“They’re people from the Ukraine,” I said. “That’s where they’re from.”
“No,” he said. “There’s no such place. They’re Russians. I looked it up on the map.”
“No, they’re not Russians. The map changes.”
“When I look at a map,” he said, “I believe those lines. I believe it like I believe in an X-ray.”
“But an X-ray shows you more than the obvious lines,” I said rather pointlessly. “It tries to show you what’s beneath.”
“Look,” he said, “lines are lines, right? Either they’re there or they’re not. There aren’t any Ukrainians. They’re Russians.”
“It’s not that simple,” I said pointlessly again.
“I hear the Communists are taking over the medical system in Canada,” he said. “That’s why I asked the question.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not that simple either.”
“You keep saying everything’s not that simple,” he said. “To me there’s a right way and a wrong way and medicine is free enterprise. I bet I make triple what you do.”
“Probably so,” I said. “But I make enough.”
“You should come to Texas,” he said. “In our business, you’ve got to go where the money is and now the money is here in Texas. This is where the rich are, and they’re willing to pay to be beautiful.”
He looked again at my name tag. “With an Irish name like that,” he said, “you’d be in like Flynn. I changed my name. I mean my grandfather or someone did. To be more American. To fit in or whatever.”
“What was it before?” I said, looking at his tag, which read, “Hi! My Name Is Bill Miller.”
“I don’t know,” he laughed. “Who cares? It’s all in the past. Look, do you guys consider yourselves Canadians first or North Americans first?”
“Well …” I began.
“Never mind,” he said, laughing again and punching me lightly on the shoulder. “You’re going to say it’s not that simple. Have a good day.” He moved easily into the crowd.
I hesitate now, to consider my purchase. At times like this I never know what to buy. Perhaps I should buy vodka because it is supposed to contain fewer impurities. Perhaps I should buy the brown molasses-like ales from the British Isles because they contain “food value” and will keep the consumer alive for a while and after a fashion. “The clann Chalum Ruaidh will live for a long time,” said my grandfather. “If they are given the chance and if they want to.”
A young woman wearing a black T-shirt walks towards me. The slogan on the front reads, “Living in the past is not living up to our potential.”
After the death of my parents, my three brothers moved back to the old Calum Ruadh house my grandparents had lived in before the time of “their chance” which had allowed them to become “people of the town.” It had not been lived in permanently for many years, although various people lived in it during the summer months when life was not so hard or desperate. My brothers were considered too young to do the necessary maintenance required of the lightkeeper and, as I said, the job went almost immediately to “the man from Pictou,” who, like my father, was a veteran and had apparently been on a waiting list for such a civil service position.
None of my brothers returned to school after our parents’ death and it seems no one suggested that they should, or made any attempt to force such an action on them. Since moving to the island, they had been largely taught by my parents, although sometimes they attended the town schools. But now that, like so much else, seemed “over” and of the past. They turned instead towards the house and the land beside the sea, taking with them the remnant objects of our parents’ lives, objects to which various additions were gradually made.
When Grandpa and Grandma had become “people of the town,” they had given various possessions they no longer needed to their friends and relatives: fishing nets, saws,
chains, sets of harness, a colt, a calf. All of these, or items like them, came back to my brothers after a generation of absence and often much improved. The young mare, Christy, came that way and three young cattle and a dory which, while old, was newer than the one left behind by Grandpa. By the time the rotted ice had vanished, my brothers had their own few lobster traps ready, or were preparing to fish with various relatives, and attempting to plant a few potatoes and an acre or two of oats. Again, I say this now as if I knew about their lives, or heard the midnight stifled sobs of the youngest of my older brothers. But that was the spring my sister and I were more interested in the groundhog. We had just learned of the concept and it seemed of the most magnificent importance. “Do you think he will see his statue this year”? we had constantly asked our mother. “Not statue, shadow,” she had replied, often adding, “I hope not. I don’t think we could live through another six weeks of winter.”
It is hard when looking at the pasts of other people to understand the fine points of their lives. It is difficult to know the exact shadings of dates which were never written down and to know the intricacies of events which we have not lived through ourselves but only viewed from the distances of time and space. I think of this at times amidst the soft brown decor of my office where we never, ever raise our voices and where the gentle music attempts to soothe and dispel fear. And where the well-to-do sit with folded hands in attitudes of patient trust. Hoping that I might make them more beautiful than they were before. “Trying to improve on God,” as Grandma once sniffed.
“This will not hurt at all,” I say softly, showing them the diagrams and the X-rays, the “before” and the hopeful “afters”, tracing the fine lines of their jaws in pictures, discussing overbites and protrusions, looking at the present and to the future in terms of “what might be.”
I think of how little I know or knew of my three brothers the spring that I and my sister were three and when they were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen and our brother Colin was no more. Sealed forever in the perfection of the Eaton’s parka tied by our mother’s hands or behind the still, small necktie, which on his final appearance she did not touch at all.
I think of my brothers’ lives only as I viewed them later. Going as the gille beag ruadh to visit them in the summer or sometimes in the winter. Travelling at first in sleighs or wagons behind their horses and later in the old cars they were always buying or trading or working upon. Marvelling at the lives they seemed to be living, which were so different from mine or from my sister’s. And I do not know whether the specific memories come from the time when I was eight or ten or twelve or the years before or after, or how they stand out from the general ones which seem to pervade a longer length of time.
For a long time in the house where my brothers lived, there was neither plumbing nor electricity, and heat came from two stoves filled with wood they hauled with their horses from the shore. Some of the wood was driftwood and so filled with the “dried” salt water that it hissed and sputtered and gave off small explosions within the stove. Some of it was the near-useless black spruce they cut themselves with their bucksaws and crosscut saws from the stands where it grew so near the sea. Some of the trees had been exposed to the wind from the ocean for so long that particles of sand had become embedded within their trunks, into the very centre of their being, it seemed. And when the saw passed through them in the early darkness of the fall and winter evenings, streaks of blue and orange flame shot from them like the temporary streamers of a light show, flaring forth from the deep wood’s heart. Steel on sand, unseen in wood. “It is there in the daytime too,” said my brothers of the fire from the trees, “only you can’t see it then. It makes it hard to keep an edge on the saws.”
In the winter evenings my brothers would sit around their kitchen table bathed in the orange glow of their kerosene lamp, their gestures becoming exaggerated shadows thrown upon the walls, almost like friezes or the cave paintings of primitive men. Sometimes they would listen to their large box-like radio or play cards – “45’s” or “Auction,” either among themselves or with various friends and relatives, many of them of the clann Chalum Ruaidh, who came to pass the time of the long winter evenings. When they spoke it was often in Gaelic, which remained the language of the kitchen and the country for almost a generation after it became somewhat unfashionable in the living rooms of the town. In the time following their return to the old Calum Ruadh house and land, my brothers spoke Gaelic more and more, as if somehow by returning to the old land they had returned to the old language of that land as well. It being still the language of the place in which they worked.
Sometimes they would take the lids off the kitchen stove to provide more light and then the actual flames would flicker and flare in constantly changing patterns of orange and red and black, constantly changing patterns of colour and shadow within the stove and emanating from it to the surrounding walls and the dusky overhead ceiling. Sometimes those gathered would merely watch the fire and its shadows, but at other times it seemed to move them to tell stories of real or imagined happenings from the near or distant past. And if the older singers or storytellers of the clann Chalum Ruaidh, the seanaichies, as they were called, happened to be present they would “remember” events from a Scotland which they had never seen, or see our future in the shadows of the flickering flames.
In the winter, when my brothers went to bed, they seldom took off their clothes but often added extra old overcoats to the makeshift coverings of their beds, sometimes adding the robes and blankets which they used for their sleighs and their horses as well. In the morning the heads of the nails in the half-finished bedrooms would be white with frost, and the frost on the windowpanes would have to be scraped away with fingernails or melted by the warmth of breath before the outside world could be seen in its icy stillness. The water supply, which stood in two buckets on the table and which had been drawn from the ice-covered outside well, would be converted back to ice by the morning, and my brothers would smash the surface with hammers to get enough water for their tea. And after the fire had been lit, the buckets would be placed near the stove or even upon it, and after a while the ice on the bottom and around the sides of the bucket would thaw until it was possible to lift the inside circle of ice out of the bucket and place it, standing, in a dishpan. The circle would be of translucent crystal, like the perfect product turned out of the mould, bearing all the indentations and contours of the bucket which had shaped it, and with small bits of grass and leaves and sometimes tiny berries frozen within its shimmering transparency. Later, as the kitchen warmed, the ice would melt and, still later, the leaves and small berries would float unceremoniously in the tepid water and be lifted out by dippers or spoons or by the blades of knives as my brothers clutched their steaming tea. They seemed to have great difficulty in keeping intact cups within their house, or perhaps they were never really there to begin with. In any case they drank their tea from cups which had no handles or from jam jars or from the tops of thermos bottles.
I think of all this now much as I think I marvelled at it then. Marvelling, somehow, that they could live such different lives than I, while still somehow belonging to me, as I and my sister belonged to them. For at times they seemed almost more like our distant uncles than like our actual brothers. And they never paid attention to the regulations that governed our lives. Never paid attention to Canada’s Food Guide or to brushing their teeth before and after meals or to changing into clean pyjamas before going to bed. And at their house the bathroom was a bucket.
In those early years my sister and I were given advantages which my grandparents had been unable to give their own children. There was space enough for each of us to have individual rooms, which was a luxury my grandparents’ own children had not had. And my grandmother indulged her feminine fantasies in the clothes she purchased for my sister and in the elaborate doilies and afghans and bedspreads she crocheted and knitted and quilted for her bedroom. Grateful for “the chance” which had freed h
er from slapping her washing on the rocks and grateful too for the gift of time which she had not had much of when she was raising her own children. “We have a lot to be thankful for,” she often said, “even though we have had our losses.”
Throughout our formative years, my sister and I lived under the ambiguous circumstances of being the “lucky, unlucky” children, and of regarding our grandparents as our parents because they were closest to us in that role, while still yearning for the drowned idealized people who had gone into the sea.
Some weeks ago, my eye fell upon an article in one of those magazines you sometimes see in the waiting rooms of the orthodontist’s office. It was called “Rearing the Modern Child,” and one of the subheadings was entitled “Grandparents.” The modern parent must sometimes be wary of grandparents, the article warned, for grandparents have a tendency to be overindulgent and sometimes to act irresponsibly. “They often act this way,” the article stated, “because they know the child will eventually go to its own home and they will not be responsible for its behaviour in that area.”
The article pointed out that grandparents are generally more indulgent with their grandchildren than they were with their own children, “because modern psychological theory indicates that they do not love them quite so much.”
“You are lucky that you can live here all the time,” said our enraged cousin, the red-haired Alexander MacDonald who lived some fifteen miles away in the country and was visiting us on a particular afternoon. “Just because your parents died.”
We were all very young then, perhaps seven or eight, and my sister and I had laughed at him for spilling his tea into his saucer to cool it before drinking it from the same saucer. Later, in my room, he had punched me in the nose and I had hit him in return, and then we had fallen upon one another. As we wrestled back and forth across the room, he said, “They’re my grandparents too, you know.” He was stronger than I was and I can still feel the callouses on his small hands as they grappled about my face and neck. “No, they’re not,” I gasped, perhaps because I felt I was losing the physical battle or because of who knew what psychological theory. And then Grandpa was in the room. “Here, here,” he said. “What is going on in here?” and he grasped us both by our upper arms and lifted us off the floor so that our small angry feet kicked vainly in the useless air, even as we felt our arms and shoulders growing numb within his powerful hands.
No Great Mischief Page 6