“Help yourself,” said Grandfather with a smile. “Take care. Beannachd leibh.”
On the way home through the darkened spring streets, Grandpa and I walked side by side, although sometimes his body lurched against mine. At a secluded spot, he stopped to urinate and said to me over his shoulder, “I liked the first picture best, didn’t you? The one about the MacDonalds coming home in the sun?” I did not know what to say, so only made a noncommittal sound which I hoped carried over the steaming hiss of his water. From the ponds beside the sea the frogs were in full chorus, singing forth the songs of their courtship, and out on the island, the light my parents once kept flashed its regulated warning, and far along the coast we could see the lights from the houses of clann Chalum Ruaidh, with those of my brothers bright among them.
When we arrived home, Grandpa said, “Well, I’m getting money back after all.” He had regained his old enthusiasm, and made the announcement as if he had filled out the form himself.
“God bless that man,” said Grandma. “All he has done for us all.”
“I told him,” said Grandpa. “I said, ‘My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald.’ ”
“Yes, indeed it is,” said Grandma. “He is a fine, good, lonely man who has lived a life without a father and without a wife and these last years without his only daughter. He has only these grandchildren,” she said, looking at me and my sister, who was doing her homework at the table. “Somehow, I wish they could be closer to him.”
“Oh, they are close enough,” said Grandpa. “They are young and he is serious. We can’t all be the same. But of course it’s just not age. He is just a bit older than we are, but he is different from you and me.” Then he added with a twinkle, “I bet you’d rather be married to me than to him?”
“Of course I’d rather be married to you,” said Grandma, as if she had said it all before. “I never wanted to be married to anyone else. But you know what I mean. Our house is always full of people. You have your friends and your beer and your songs, and although you are thoughtful and kind, you have a good time.”
“I think of him sometimes,” said Grandpa, as if he were summing it all up for the evening, “the way I think of Robert Stanfield. He might not be the kind of man you’d invite to sing and dance and do imitations at your party, but he is a good man nonetheless. I believe I’ll have a beer,” he said “to celebrate my tax refund.”
Two years ago on a sunny afternoon, I sat and listened to my sister, within the walls of her modernistic house, located high upon one of the more prestigious ridges of the new and hopeful Calgary. In the luxury of her understated living room we held the heavy crystal glasses filled with the amber liquid or placed them carefully on the leather-embossed coasters. In the bathrooms, discreetly located in angled alcoves, the toilets made no sound when they were flushed. The rushing waters all were stilled.
She had gone with her husband, the petroleum engineer named Pankovich, to the oil city of Aberdeen, she said. And one day when he was out on the North Sea she had rented a car and driven across the comparatively narrow but deceptive width of Scotland, below the Cairngorm mountains and through the pass of Killiecrankie. Because of the roads she had driven south, although her eventual destination was north, and she had skirted the edge of Rannoch Moor and told me that there she had remembered a T. S. Eliot poem about the moor that began “Here the crow starves.” Then she entered the stillness of Glencoe, where the MacDonalds were massacred in their beds early on the morning of February 13, 1692, by the government troops they had fed and sheltered for two weeks. Their tall and gigantic leader, “Mac Ian,” rising from his bed to answer the five a.m. knock upon his door while the blizzard raged outside. Offering his hospitable glass of whisky, even as he turned his back to pull on his trousers, only to have the bullet smash into the back of his head, causing him to pitch forward across his wife within their still-warm bed; his once-red hair, which had lightened with his advanced age, reverting suddenly back to the even brighter redness of his blood while the soldiers fell upon his wife and gnawed the rings from her fingers with their teeth.
“Scarcely a trace any more,” said my sister, “except the river and the mountains and the stones and their memories.”
And she had gone north to the place called Fort William, an Gearasdan, which was originally built to control those people whom Dr. Johnson described as “savage clans and roving barbarians” – although he had not minded accepting their hospitality. And then she had gone west a few miles to the high cemetery of Cille Choraill, where she stood, she said, with the wind in her hair, beside the Celtic cross of Iain Lom, bard na ceappach, the fierce poet of the high corries and the long march through the winter’s snows.
“The cross faces the mountains that he loved,” she said. “It is the way he wanted to be buried – and the place.”
“I guess he never had any doubts,” she continued. “You know, about loyalty and who and what he really loved and who he really hated. Never doubted the value of his verses, never doubted the worth of his poems nor the worth of the blood upon his hands. Never wavered in the intensity of what he cared for.”
“No,” I said, “I guess he didn’t. Or so they used to say.”
“Do you remember,” she asked, “when Grandpa would drink his whisky and how he would start to cry when he told the story about the dog going back across the ice to the island? Of how he let her go because she broke his heart. And of how she was shot by the man who didn’t know.”
“Yes,” I said, “shot by the man who grabbed her by the hind legs and threw her into the sea.”
“Oh, I think of that so many, many times. It was as if she had what the churches call a ‘strong faith,’ you know. That she waited and waited for them, thinking that they would come back, long after everyone else had given up hope. Thinking that they would come back and she would be waiting for them.”
“My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald,” I said, regretting it almost immediately.
“Oh, don’t mock,” she said.
“I wasn’t really,” I said. “I was just thinking of another occasion.”
“Well, I just think of her there, caring so much and dying for the island and for them. Trying to hold their place until they got back. She thought the island was theirs. Our parents and hers.”
“Yes,” I said, betrayed back by my own memories. “Grandpa used to say, ‘Poor cú.’ She was descended from the dog from Scotland, the one who swam after them in the boat in the 1700s and would have drowned if they had not cared for her the way she cared for them. Giving it everything she had.”
“Yes,” said my sister. “It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard. Oh,” she said, raising her hands towards her hair, “here am I, a grown woman, spending my time worrying about the decisions made by a dog.”
“No,” I said, reaching for her hand across the table, the way we used to do as children, “you are doing more than that. You know you are doing more than that.”
In the modernistic house in Calgary, we held hands across the table the way we used to do as children. Held hands the way we used to do on the Sunday afternoons after we had finished tracing our wistful fingers over the faces of our vanished parents: the faces looking up towards us from the photograph album spread out upon the table.
“Did you know,” she said after a while, “that Glencoe means Glen Cú, the Dog’s Glen, after mythological hounds that once were supposed to have run there?”
“Yes, I guess it makes sense when you think about it,” I said, “although I didn’t know about the mythological part. It seems somehow that I remember hearing it meant the Glen of Weeping.”
“That was Macaulay,” she said, “the historian. He just made it up after the event. The people gave it the other name years before they had any cause for weeping.”
“Is that the Macaulay who wrote ‘Horatio at the Bridge’ ” I asked, trying hard to remember the poems of distant high school.
“Yes,” she said.
“The same one. He was one of those people who went through history picking and choosing and embellishing.” She paused. “Still, I guess when you look at it now, one meaning can be true and the other can be accurate.”
The Alberta sun came through the window, infusing the amber liquid and the heavy crystal glasses with particles of light. We took the glasses in our hands and moved them in clockwise circles. The door opened and her children, arriving home from school, came into the room.
“Is there anything to eat?” they asked, “We’re starved.” The light reflected off the black and the redness of their hair.
Now across the canyons of Toronto streets, I hear the voices of the protestors, the chants and songs and slogans of their beliefs, and the equally strong voices of those opposed to them. “No cruise here,” they say. “A strong defence is not an offence.” “Say no to nuclear war.” “If it’s not worth fighting for.…” The sun hangs hot and high and golden, seeming to be above it all.
Once, on such a golden September afternoon, I was visiting my brothers, and the time now seems very long ago. It was a Sunday and one of those hot, calm days when there was not a ripple of wind and the ocean was so still it seemed almost like a painting. We were in the kitchen and had just finished eating when my oldest brother went to the window, “Look,” he said excitedly, “the blackfish, the pilot whales.”
Out of the stillness of the calm, blue ocean, they rose and rolled in glistening elegance. One after the other their black, arching backs broke the flatness of the sea, sending geysers of white water before them as they shattered the glass-like surface, the still, blue water being transformed into jets and fountains of streaming white – almost as if it were another element. There were, perhaps, twenty in all, although it was difficult to count them as they appeared and disappeared, now here and now there in the waters off the Calum Ruadh’s Point. All of us put everything aside and hurried the three quarters of a mile down to the shore to watch them. Standing on the extreme edge of the point, we shouted to them and offered our applause as they spouted and sported and turned and flipped, so near and yet so far in the splendour of their exuberant happiness.
Sometimes, said my brothers, the blackfish would follow their boat, and they loved applause and appreciated singing. If they vanished beneath the surface, my brothers would clap their hands in rhythmic unison like fans at a sporting event, and soon they would break the surface, sometimes so close to the boat as to be almost dangerous, drawn by the sound and the perceived good fellowship. They would leap and arch and then vanish again, although my brothers knew they were never far away but seemed like children involved in games of hide and seek, hoping to startle and surprise by their unexpected nearness. Sometimes when they were invisible my brothers would sing songs to them in either English or Gaelic and place small bets as to which set of lyrics would bring them whooshing to the surface, cavorting in their giant grace around the rocking boat.
But on this Sunday we were not in a boat, so we sang and shouted to them from the farthest extension of our land that reached out to the sea. For almost two hours we shouted and waved and sang and applauded to their magnificent response. Sometimes they came quite close to the shore, as if they were trying to hear what we were saying or else trying to show themselves off to a greater advantage. As they spouted and splashed we sang and shouted, yet as the sun moved on, we seemed to tire of the game sooner than they did and directed our steps inland, although still turning to shout and wave in a series of last-time farewells.
Later in the early evening, I went down to the shore to bring home my brothers’ milk cows and discovered one of the whales washed up on the rocks near the slip where my brothers drew their boat. I saw the crowds of crows and smaller predatory birds rising from the shore as I approached and it was not until I had taken farther steps that I recognized what must have been for them a great bonanza delivered by the sea.
The tide was out and he lay in his gigantic length upon the rocks, while the sea which was his element of grace lapped quietly some yards beyond him. Already the birds had pecked out his eyes and begun their work on his anus and reproductive system. There was a jagged tear about five feet in length which ran from his throat through his stomach and down into his abdomen, and some of his internal organs had spilled out upon the rocks. Already the heat of the still-present sun had begun to have its effect, and soon the odour would be pronounced. Out of the water, he was no longer black and glistening but dull and brown in the beginning stench of death.
I went home and told my brothers, and later they came down and we all looked upon him. We decided that he had not realized that the tide was falling and that in the afternoon’s high spirits he had come too close to the shore and in one of his undulating dives he had found not the expected depth of water but instead the submerged and jagged reef which had slashed his soft underbelly and left him disembowelled and unable to rise again. We thought of ourselves as deceptive male sirens who had lured him to his death, although we did not phrase our thoughts in such language at the time. My brothers, who were aware of practicality even in the face of death, feared that his presence and the resulting odour would interfere with the working of their boat. They feared he was too big to be towed back out to sea, even if they were able to fasten grappling hooks to him and pull him off the rocks with their boat at full throttle. The afternoon had ended differently than we had expected.
That night there came a great storm from off the sea. We heard the wind and the pellets of rain upon the windows as we lay within our beds and my brothers rose in great agitation, fearing that their drawn-up boat was not sufficiently out of the way of the mounting waves. All of us ran down to the sea in the dark, taking with us storm lanterns and flashlights and summoning the ever-faithful Christy. The waves were booming and high and it was almost impossible to stand on the wetness of the drenched and glistening boulders, and overhead there was no sign of the “lamp of the poor.” Even Christy was afraid as the high surf broke about her knees and her hooves slipped on the wet rocks she could not see. Calum grasped the cheek straps of her bridle in both his hands and we could hear him singing in Gaelic, loudly and clearly at the side of her head, in an attempt to steady and calm her, much as a parent might sing to a frightened child. Calum’s steady voice rose above the roar of the sea and she followed him as did we all, although the water swirled about our knees. We were able to hook the chain to the boat’s ring and to steady and balance the boat itself and to direct Christy inland and upward to the higher levels of the Calum Ruadh’s Point. On her final lunge, a gigantic wave smashed into the boat’s stern, lifting it forward with tremendous momentum, even as Christy scrambled upwards to the point. The wave which would have destroyed the boat if it had been fastened to its moorings became almost the agent of its deliverance since it seemed now high enough to be relatively safe. We flopped on our backs in exhaustion upon the wet moss and cranberry vines, knowing that the boat was high and beyond the ocean’s force for the duration of the night. In the darkness and excitement we had not paid any attention to the whale.
In the morning the storm’s rage was spent and, although the ocean rolled in a surly fashion, its temporary tantrum seemed to be over. We went down to the shore and the boat was safe and dry and none the worse for the night’s adventures. There was no sign of the whale and we were all relieved, assuming that the force of the waves had taken it back out to sea. But then we found, in a cluster of glistening boulders, its internal organs, trapped by the boulders which the waves had rolled upon them, yet still fluctuating to the sea. The grey intestines coiled and sloshed, as did the liver and the stomach and the great, gigantic heart.
Hundreds of yards inland, we later found the body itself, disguised beneath a small mountain of brown and tangled seaweed adorned with scattered stones and sticks of broken driftwood. The sea had taken the body in instead of out, and it stayed there for more than a year until only its bones were visible to the eye.
In the room my brother waits, seeing,
perhaps through the window of his imagination, the leaping sporting blackfish at play in the waters of the September sun. “Take your time,” he said. “I am not going anywhere.”
In the southland of Ontario, the contract pickers bend and reach within their circle of the sun and calculate quietly the gains and losses of their day and of their season. The weekend pickers are preparing to go home, and even farther south my own children play their beeping computer games within their shaded and muffled rec room. The patients who will fill my waiting room on Monday are getting through their weekend as well. The children, perhaps, trying not to think about Monday while actually thinking about it too much. The adults, always hopeful of beauty, are resigning themselves to the price they must pay. I am in the business of “improving on God,” as Grandma might say, and in the affluence of this part of North America both I and my patients have done pretty well.
When I was a student at the university in Halifax, and studying dentistry in the early stages, my professor invited me one evening to have a beer with him. We went to the tavern beneath the big hotel and he said, “You are capable of making a lot of money in this field, but you will never do it in the Maritimes. There is not a population here which cares enough about its teeth. Over 60 per cent of the people never go to a dentist until it is too late and most of the male population, anyway, are candidates for false teeth before they reach their twenties. They prefer to pull them rather than fix them. It’s almost as if they want to. Only Quebec and the aboriginal population have statistics that are as bad,” he said. “And Newfoundland. I never know whether to include it as part of the Maritimes or not.”
He was not a native of the Atlantic area, although he had been living in Halifax for some time because he liked the university and the city and the people.
No Great Mischief Page 9