By this time the boat was drifting sideways towards the rocky shore where Christy waited impatiently, tossing her head in the falling rain and nickering for our landing. We had to shake ourselves like people coming out of a mesmerizing trance to reach for the oars and to redirect our bow towards the land. Calum went over the side, although he had no oats, and Christy came down to meet him and nuzzled his extended palm, which was all he had to offer. And he patted her neck and crooned to her as always, even as he wiped his bloodied hands on her wet and glistening mane. And then he harnessed her as usual. But instead of hooking the chain into the boat’s ring he asked for a length of rope which he fastened to its end. And to the other end of the rope he fastened a length of light but tensile line and, climbing back into the boat, tied the line somehow around his tooth.
“Hold me down,” he said to his brothers. And when Christy heard the whistle, she bunched her shoulders and sprang forward as she was used to, without knowing she was tied to a man instead of to a boat. When her weight hit him, his head and the upper part of his body snapped forward but his brothers had braced their feet and set their shoulders and they held him firm as the yellowed infected tooth flew out and over the bow and rolled at the end of its line like a white and yellow seashell in the waters of the shore. It seemed very flimsy now in proportion to the pain that it had cost, and Christy stopped and looked over her shoulder the way she did when the chain had not been hooked properly to the boat’s ring or a piece of her harness had become disconnected or broken. She had felt little or no weight at all.
“Thank Christ,” he said, reaching over the side and scooping up handfuls of salt water which he splashed into his bleeding mouth, rinsing and spitting and coughing. “I was not angry at you, ‘ille bhig ruaidh,” he said, turning to me. “It was my tooth that was bothering me.” There was a cut on his lower lip where the line had sliced through at the zinging moment of tautness. It seemed to bleed with a bright clear redness all its own.
On Monday morning my office will be filled, as it was on Friday, with those who want to be more beautiful. Some are children whose parents have made their appointments for them. Some are referrals made by friends and colleagues who practise the more basic forms of dentistry. Others have sought me out from considerable distances in the hope that I might give them what they want and think they need.
There are some who would wish to alter their jawlines so that they might look more like current pop stars. Sometimes they bring pictures of what they would hope to be along with them. Shyly they bring the pictures forth from within their purses or from the inside pockets of their expensive jackets.
“You really do not need this,” I say to some of them. “Think of the future. If this were to happen, you might find out it is not really what you want at all.” I look at them carefully, as might the doctor advising the young man against a vasectomy. Quietly we talk about the consequences and the expectations.
In some cases we talk more basically about the impacted wisdom tooth, the mesiodens and the supernumerary teeth of children. I give them leaflets with titles such as “What May Happen After the Removal of an Impacted Tooth” or “Advice Following Oral Surgery.” The leaflets contain headings such as Pain, Swallowing, Swelling, along with advice on medication:
To reduce the density of pain, you must take the medication which is prescribed. Follow the instructions exactly. Do not wait for the pain to become too severe before taking the prescribed tablets; otherwise it may become more difficult to control. Should the pain become too intense please notify this office immediately.
Or:
Do not rinse the mouth until the following morning and then only gently. Rinsing too early and/or too frequently may prevent clotting and also healing. When rinsing use warm salt water which will help to flush out food particles lodged in the operated area. (Half a teaspoonful of salt in a glass of lukewarm water.) If in doubt do not hesitate to call this office.
Or (under the heading Complications Which May Occur):
Sometimes the hole left behind after the molar’s removal may remain for some time. Gradually it should fill in with bone and new tissue. Sometimes, as healing advances, small sharp splinters may work up through the tissue and be a source of discomfort and unexpected pain. Gradually, though, they should disappear. If in doubt do not hesitate to call this office.
Here in the September sun, on my reluctant way to purchase the alcohol which my eldest brother may or may not need, the newspapers rise on gusts of wind before my feet. Sometimes the sheets flap open and float like the roofs of pagodas revealing the different languages of their origin. The people jostle and bump momentarily on the way to their private destinations. The pigeons walk and flap, rising sometimes almost in concert with the newspapers. They cast their bright eyes everywhere and seem never to be surprised. One alights before me, but upon landing tilts sideways. I notice that its right foot is a pink and crumpled ball almost like a knob, and that it is crippled upon the sidewalk. When it rises in the wind, the defect is not noticeable and it seems to flap and fly like all the others. It rises above the greyness of the buildings, circles, and returns.
As my brothers grew older, they moved out more from their home and land. They became more restless, perhaps, the way all young men do. Indirectly we heard of their involvement in fights as they travelled what seemed like long distances over the winding roads of night: going to dances, going to play hockey, going sometimes merely “to see what was going on” ten or twenty or thirty or forty miles away. Sometimes Calum and my brothers were “saved” from their impetuosity by the members of clann Chalum Ruaidh who rallied to their aid in the distant darkness, and sometimes they themselves went to the aid of casual cousins and the various causes they espoused. Travelling in their patched-up and wired-together cars and being frequently stopped by the RCMP for driving without a headlight, driving without a tail light, driving without a muffler, driving without proper registration, driving on expired licence plates, driving under the influence of alcohol.
Old men and old women would tell my grandparents such third- or fourth-hand information while sitting in the kitchen drinking tea or perhaps some of Grandpa’s freely offered beer.
“I hope no harm will come to them,” Grandma would say, looking out her window towards the ocean which had swallowed up “the children” who were the parents of the young men under discussion. And again, “If only they had come to live with us, but they were too old to be children and still too young to be like men.”
“They are still only being young,” Grandpa would say, rising optimistically from his chair at the kitchen table. “I was young once myself,” he would say, winking at Grandma, “perhaps you remember.”
“Oh yes,” Grandma would say, “we were all young once. This, though, is different.”
Sometimes, at night, when I walked home from my other grandfather’s (after I had taken to going there to listen to him talk about his views on Highland history or to be tutored in chess), I would see my brothers rolling through the streets in whichever of the battered, rusted, reconstructed cars they were using at the time. In memory, it seems always to be winter, although I know it was not so. Yet they seem to ride most consistently through streets of muffled snow; to glide almost quietly, in spite of their imperfectly tuned engine, through the snow beneath the balding tires and through the flakes that slanted down, yellow and golden before their headlights.
Sometimes they would stop and talk, rolling down the windows but keeping the engine running. The falling snow would melt upon the heated hood and the windshield wipers would squeak back and forth describing arcs which cleansed imperfectly. The rumbling, coughing exhaust system held up by haywire would melt the snow on the street beneath it, turning it first to a carbon black before it vanished in an ever-widening and imperfectly jagged circle. Sometimes they would reach for bottles of beer beneath the seat, opening the bottles with their teeth and spitting the caps through the opened windows and down the side of the car and into the sn
ow. They would ask me how things were going and about my sister, who was also theirs, and sometimes they would offer me money, although they knew I did not need it. And then they would move off into adventures which, it seemed, were very different from mine. For by that time I was beginning to play “organized hockey” and was interested in my stamp collection and the “modern” music on the radio and the chessboard and the microscope which my other grandfather had given me for Christmas.
Sometimes, in the morning of the later summer months, Grandpa would find inside his porch, placed there beyond the door which he always left open, roasts from the deer which had been shot beneath “the lamp of the poor,” and sometimes gallon jugs of clear white moonshine. Grandma was more skeptical than usual of the moonshine, saying, “You never know what might be in it,” although Grandpa would maintain, “They would not bring it if there was anything wrong with it.”
“I hope they are not making that stuff themselves,” said my other grandfather. “Nothing good ever came of it.” And then he would add, with a shudder as he watched Grandpa emptying his glass, “How can you drink that stuff? Once when I was a young man, I was at a Saturday-night dance at a country schoolhouse. And out behind the building, where we had gone to urinate, someone offered me a drink from a jug. It was dark and on my second swallow I felt something going down my throat and then something like legs against my lips and teeth. They were huge dead June bugs – the kind that bang against the screen door in the summer. I spit the one out of my mouth, but I had already swallowed the other and then I started to vomit and I remember holding my legs apart, like a horse when he urinates, so I would not vomit on my new shoes and on my pants which I had spent the early evening ironing. Whoever had run off the shine from the still must have done so in the dark and did not know that the June bugs had fallen into it. It cured me forever.”
“Oh well,” said Grandpa. “They were probably pretty well pickled by the time they got to you. You can’t worry about everything.”
I think now, on this Toronto afternoon, of the different men who became my grandfathers even as they were many other things as well. I think of how Grandpa would go forth on such a mission as this of mine with boyish enthusiasm and of how he would return with his arms full of beer and wine; how he would step briskly up the dirty stairs and along the corridor lit by the forty-watt bulb, moving past the moans from behind the closed doors and through the stench of vomit and urine while seeming oblivious to it all. And of how he would enter the door and hope to sing his Gaelic songs and tell his jokes and his mildly off-colour stories, slapping his hand on his huge knee, while dispensing and trusting in his own form of medication. And of how my other grandfather’s pace would be even slower than mine, if he would go at all. And of how he would recoil and purse his lips and try to think of other solutions. Of how he might fix or mend or balance, wrinkling his forehead as he might do when confronted with filling out Grandpa’s income tax return, trying to make sense of the scribbled bits of information and the crumpled balls of paper which were supposed to serve as receipts and messages from the past.
One spring when he had completed Grandpa’s tax return, and after he had properly affixed his signature, and stroked his t’s with his careful fountain pen and replaced the cover on the ink bottle and was ready for Grandpa’s question, which was always “Do I get anything back?” he went over the form with me, pointing out how easy it really was if all the information were correct. Grandpa had lost interest in the project almost immediately upon entering the door, preferring to console himself with the available whisky and choosing to regard the whole process as a mystery not worth solving, brightening only when it was time to ask his question. When he was told he would get money back, although only a modest amount, he slapped Grandfather on the shoulder and said, “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald,” which is what Robert the Bruce was supposed to have said to the MacDonalds at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
“When the MacDonalds came back from the Battle of Killiecrankie,” said my grandfather thoughtfully, leaping ahead more than three and a half centuries in historical time, “it was in the fall of 1689. They had been away since May and in that time some of their children had been born and some of their parents had died. Their barley and oats had ripened, and they were already late for the season’s harvest.”
“But they had won,” said Grandpa, who, with spirits raised because of his promised tax refund, had seated himself at the table and poured himself another glass of whisky.
“Yes, they had won,” said Grandfather. “They had won the battle in the old way, but they had also lost a lot. They had lost the exciting young man who was their leader and their inspiration and who, somehow, gave them a belief in their cause. They carried his body from the field in their bloodied plaids and buried him in the churchyard. Perhaps it was the beginning of the end, for afterwards it was not the same – although they remained and fought for a man they did not much care for, after others who began with them had gone home.”
“Loyal as hell,” said Grandpa appreciatively.
“Yes, loyal to a cause which was becoming daily more muddled and which was to cost them dearly in the end,” said Grandfather reflectively. “Trying to hold their place. They lost a lot of men,” he added seriously. “A lot at Killiecrankie and more at Dunkeld after the major battle.”
“They were brave as hell,” said Grandpa with enthusiasm.
“Yes,” said Grandfather, “but I think they were also afraid.”
“Never,” said Grandpa, half rising tipsily from his chair, as if he would defend the honour of all the MacDonalds in the world. “Never was a MacDonald afraid.”
“I see them sometimes,” said my grandfather, looking at the table and seeming to see his vision rise from the envelope containing Grandpa’s tax return. “I see them sometimes coming home across the wildness of Rannoch Moor in the splendour of the autumn sun. I imagine them coming with their horses and their banners and their plaids tossed arrogantly over their shoulders. Coming with their broadswords and their claymores and their bull-hide targes decorated with designs of brass. Singing the choruses of their rousing songs, while the sun gleams off the shining of their weapons and the black and the redness of their hair.”
“Great,” said Grandpa, slapping his knee, as if he were watching a favourite television show or sitting in a theatre watching a movie.
“But sometimes,” said Grandfather, smiling almost half apologetically as if he might be spoiling Grandpa’s picture, “I imagine them thinking of the dead they left behind. Of the hundreds of bodies at the pass of Killiecrankie, even if they won, and of those left behind in the streets of Dunkeld. Of those who sought refuge in the houses and were burned alive when the houses were set aflame. I think of them carrying home their wounded, draped over the horses’ backs or on stretchers which were only plaids clutched in white-knuckled fists. Of the one-legged men with their arms thrown over their comrades’ shoulders, trying to hop back the long miles they had walked or run across in the months of spring. Trying to get back to Glengarry or Glencoe or Moidart or wherever they came from. Of the men with bleeding stumps where their hands used to be, or of those bleeding between the legs – ruined in that way,” he said quietly, looking at Grandpa. “Those who, if they ever got back, would never leave again. And of those who did not get back, although they had made it through the battle, but could not make it over the long, mountainous walk back home and were buried instead beneath cairns of stones in the rocky or the boggy earth, depending upon when and where they died. Never to get back in time for themselves or for those who waited for them.”
“Like your own father,” said Grandpa helpfully, by this time trying to make connections.
“When I think of them in this way,” said Grandfather, who had hesitated only momentarily, “I think of their thoughts in a different manner. Coming back the way they or their fathers had come some forty years before. They and their fathers coming back in 1645 over the mountains. Fighting
then for the Royalist cause or their own individuality. Led by Montrose and the poet Iain Lom across the high corries in late January and early February. Licking the oatmeal out of their palms, lapping the blood and gnawing the raw meat of the slaughtered winter deer because they were afraid of the betrayal of fires. When I think of them coming down bare-legged through the blizzards, with the sleet and ice in the black and redness of their hair, I think of them saying ‘Well, this better be worth it. Somehow.’ And here they are again, forty years later, coming back with the ambiguous thoughts of Killiecrankie.
“When I think of them in this way,” said Grandfather quietly and almost embarrassed because he seldom spoke for so long, “the sun does not shine in the fall on Rannoch Moor, but instead it is raining. Their feet within their brogues slip on the edges of the bog and they are tired and hungry. The rain runs down their necks and in rivulets from their hair, and falls from their eyelashes and their noses. They curse at the treacherous footing and when their larger weapons grow too heavy, they throw them away into the heather.”
“Well, we have to be going now,” said Grandpa, rising from his chair and seeming almost self-conscious because of the serious turn of the conversation. “But I will have one for the road.”
No Great Mischief Page 8