I was young then and did not know what to say, listening to words of prophecy from the mouth of the great man with perfectly capped teeth. I was nervous in his presence and did not have enough money to buy my share of the beer. And I did not want to drink it, anyway, as I was afraid it would make me sleepy and I wanted to study for my exams. For I knew I had a chance for the various awards and scholarships and medals which might launch me on the way he was indicating.
But he did not mind when I switched to Coke and rolled the ice cubes circularly within the glass even as they melted to the touch of my warm and perspiring hands. I had never met anyone quite like him before and was suspicious of what he might want, and fearful that I might make some mental or verbal error which might jeopardize our tenuous student-professor relationship. As I drank more and more Coke and he more and more beer, I became increasingly edgy, feeling the caffeine filling my veins and imagining the pupils of my eyes dilating. His speech became more and more slurred and sometimes his reaching hand came down beside the glass instead of grasping it and sometimes he knocked it over, causing little waves of beer to slosh across the table, even as we moved discreetly away, both of us pretending that it had not happened. It seemed that a chasm gradually widened between us because of our drinking progress. As if one of us were on the shore and the other on a departing boat bound towards the open sea. Our voices becoming unintelligible to each other because of our different circumstances.
Yet it seemed he was sincerely interested in his profession and in me as part of it, and it seemed also, perhaps, that he was lonely in his way.
“Where did you say you came from?” he said, bending forward from the waist until his nose almost touched the glasses on the table – like one of those trick birds who dip their beaks forward in novelty-shop windows.
“Oh,” I said, startled by the simplicity or complexity of the question. “From Cape Breton.”
“Never been there,” he said. “Should I?”
“What?” I said.
“Go there?” he said. “Should I go there?”
“I don’t know,” I said, scurrying around inside my mind for some kind of suitable answer.
“Are your family dentists? Is your father a dentist?” he asked, still bobbing forward and backwards from the waist with measured regularity.
“No,” I said. “They’re not. He’s not.”
“Oh,” he said. “Most people who go into this profession come from dental families. But I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere. Look,” he said, leaning forward and grasping my shoulder firmly in his wet hand. “You’ve got to make teeth better, not just pull the fuckers out.”
That spring, at my graduation, the sun shone and the trees and flowers were in leaf and blossom as we paraded through our paces and received our awards and rewards, as the case might be. I had gone home two days earlier to drive the car which the father of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald had kindly offered to us for the graduation. Grandpa and Grandma came and my other grandfather as well, and also the parents of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald.
The afternoon before the graduation and after we were settled in our rooms, my grandfather said, “Show me where the library is, I want to look for something.” Grandpa said, “Are there any good taverns around here?” and Grandma and the others went off to buy presents for those they had left behind only hours before. My sister was graduating at the same time in distant Alberta, which seemed so far away that no one could attend – although we sent identical telegrams. And those of clann Chalum Ruaidh who followed my brothers, including the red-haired Alexander MacDonald, were near Ontario’s Elliot Lake, where they had been for nearly a month. There they were sinking shafts and developing drifts for Renco Development – rediscovering the uranium they had originally discovered some ten years earlier, now that the prices and markets made it once again worthwhile. Their telegrams came too, in a mixture of Gaelic and English accompanied by a cheque for five hundred dollars.
Before going to Elliot Lake, they had been at home for a short time on their return from Peru, that country uncertain of its borders. And they had spent a brief afternoon visiting me in Halifax on their way to Ontario. High in the mountains of Peru, where they had been sinking shafts, they told me the air was so thin that, at first, they suffered from soroche, the altitude sickness. Later, they said, they became more used to the height. Peru was strikingly beautiful, they said, although the people were poor and the political struggles intense. It was in the year before the military coup and they were warned to stay out of any political involvement and to keep to themselves and to do their work. And they were told, also, that if they should happen to run over an animal or even a person on the twisting mountain roads or in the single-street villages (speeding to their work in the mountains’ early-morning darkness) that they should not stop, for fear that they might be hacked to death. Instead they should continue to the next village and notify the authorities there, or those in Cerro de Pasco. Even at that time, it was a country of los desaparecidos, “the disappeared,” and many of the people were living as exiles within their own country. The national anthem, said my brothers, was Somos libres, somos lo siempre. We are free, let us always be so.
The day of the graduation, as I said, was sunny and golden, just the way such days are supposed to be. “Good for you,” said Grandpa as I stood in my mortar board and gown, clutching my various diplomas and awards and the offer of a summer Research Fellowship, while Grandma snapped the pictures. “Good for you, ’ille bhig ruaidh. This means you will never have to work again.” What he meant was that I would not spend my life pulling the end of the bucksaw or pushing the boat off the Calum Ruadh’s Point in freezing water up to my waist. “Jesus, though,” he added, “thirty-two teeth. Think if you had to be responsible for running a whole hospital.”
On the way home on that hot afternoon and early evening we were all taken with the changes in our lives and with our near and distant pasts.
“It is true,” said my grandfather after we had been travelling for about an hour. “I found it in the library in Halifax.”
“What?” asked Grandpa.
“Wolfe and the Highlanders at Quebec, on the Plains of Abraham. He was just using them against the French. He was suspicious of them and probably would have been satisfied if the French had killed them all. Just using them for his own goals, for as long as they might last.”
“But,” said Grandpa, “didn’t you tell me once that it was a French-speaking MacDonald who got them past the sentries? And that he was first up the cliff with the other Highlanders, that they pulled themselves up by grasping the roots of the twisted trees? Didn’t you tell me that?”
“Yes,” said my grandfather. “First up the cliff. Wolfe was still below in the boat. Think about it.”
“They were first because they were the best,” said Grandpa stoutly. “I think of them as winning Canada for us. They learned that at Culloden.”
“At Culloden they were on the other side,” said Grandfather in near exasperation. “MacDonald fought against Wolfe. Then he went to Paris. That’s where he learned his French. Then he was given a pardon so that he could fight for the British Army. He fought against Wolfe at Culloden and then fought for him years later at Quebec. Perhaps you can’t blame Wolfe for being suspicious under the circumstances. He had a memory like other men. Still MacDonald died fighting for the British Army, not against it. And one doesn’t like to think of people giving their best, even their lives, under deceptive circumstances.”
“No one knows all the thoughts of those men,” said Grandpa philosophically.
“No,” said Grandfather, “but some men do leave records of their thoughts. Wolfe referred to the Highlanders as his secret enemy and once, speaking of recruiting them as soldiers in a letter to his friend Captain Rickson, he made the cynical comment, ‘No great mischief if they fall.’ ”
“Speaking of wars,” said Grandma, who had remained silent throughout the conversation, “I got this le
tter from my sister in San Francisco the morning we left. But in all the excitement I forgot about it.”
Taking a letter from her purse, she began to read:
“Dear Catherine and Alexander:
Received your last letter and, as usual, we were very glad to get it. We were glad to learn that you were keeping well and looking forward to your trip to Halifax to attend Alexander’s graduation (or gille beag ruadh, as you have always called him). Very pleased also that his sister Catherine is graduating in Alberta. It is too bad that you could not attend her graduation as well, but we cannot be in two places at the one time, as we all know. Those children must be a source of great satisfaction to you both.
I am sure you were glad to see the other boys as well on their return from Peru. It is too bad that they could not stop off in San Francisco to see us, but we understand the complications of air tickets and immigration and all the rest of it. Maybe sometime. I hope they are doing well in Ontario. Speaking of Ontario, our own grandson Alexander has received his draft notice, which means that they want him for Vietnam. He does not want to go and now we don’t want him to go either. We supported the war under that nice President Kennedy, but it seems different now. Calum says he does not trust Lyndon Johnson’s eyes and that we at home here are not being told the truth and that the people over there (Vietnam) only want their own country for themselves. Anyway, there is a great deal of confusion over the war here now and many protests as you probably know from the newspapers and television and many of our young people are going to Canada.
If you could give us the address of your boys in Ontario and write to them, maybe they would help him. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ as the old saying goes and you know we would do the same for you.
Both of us are keeping well, although we are not getting any younger. I must close this now and make a cup of tea. It is too bad that you could not be here to join us. Calum says that if you were here we would have something stronger than tea. He says that in retirement he is going to start to make homebrew in the basement, so I guess the old habits die hard.
All our love and Beannachd leibh,
Your fond brother and sister,
Calum and Sarah.”
“Write them and tell them, ‘Yes,’ ” said Grandpa without a moment’s hesitation. “The boys will do it. They will help him there in Ontario. Gille beag ruadh here will tell them” he said, tapping me on the shoulder. “We have given you the best life we could. From the day you came to spend the night with us when you were three right through until now.”
“Yes,” said Grandma, “I will write to them as soon as I get home. And you can write to your brothers in Ontario. They are our grandchildren too, but you are our own gille beag ruadh.”
The sun continued to hang and burn in the sky as we travelled homeward through Pictou County. Near the Pictou County line my uncle tapped my shoulder and pointed out the window.
“There’s Barney’s River,” he said. “In 1938 your father and I came to work in the woods here. There were other people from the clann Chalum Ruaidh working in the camp and they sent word that there was work, but to bring our own axes as those in the camp were not sharpened well enough. It was in December and when we got off the train at Barney’s River Station it was night and the snow was deep and I still remember how cold it was.
“The camp was about twelve miles in there,” he said, gesturing with his hand at the receding hardwood hills, “and we started to walk in, hoping that we were following the right trail. It was one of those nights which was so cold that you could hear the trees exploding with the frost. Splitting open with a sound like gunshots. But we could see our way because of the whiteness of the snow and the full moon, the Lochran àigh nam bochd, ‘the lamp of the poor.’ Sometimes we would sing songs to keep ourselves company and regulate our walking to keep time with the songs, like in a march. And then we came over a hill and there was the camp beneath us. I remember that there were moose in the yard, looking for bits of hay around the doors of the barn where the horses were kept. When we came down, they just looked at us and hardly moved at all. They were more hungry than they were afraid. We opened the barn door and threw them some hay, threw it out on the snow, and then we went to sleep on the hay in the barn ourselves. It was warm because of the heat given off by the horses and we could hear the horses’ movements, their stompings and turnings and the rubbing of their necks on the mangers, even while we were asleep.
“We started work the next morning and we stayed until the end of March, until it was time to get ready for fishing. Going to work with the stars in the sky and coming back under the stars as well – cutting the stands of hardwood for a dollar a day.”
He paused and smiled briefly. “After we received our pay and before we returned to Cape Breton we went on the train to Truro. The streets were still covered with snow. There were no public taverns in Truro at the time, so we bought a little bottle for ourselves. We did not know where to drink it, so we went down a side street. There was a house with an outside staircase leading to the second floor. We went under the staircase to have our drink. Just as we were putting the bottle to our lips a woman came out on the upstairs landing and saw us standing beneath her. ‘Get out of there,’ she shouted ‘or I will call the police right this minute!’
Your father said “Pog mo thon,” assuming she would not know Gaelic.
‘Oh, you dears,’ she said. ‘Come in and have supper.’ She was part of Clann Chalum Ruaidh, and was both surprised and overjoyed to hear someone speaking Gaelic in Truro – regardless of what was actually said. When her husband came home he was as nice as could be, and we stayed for supper and then went to bed. I remember how white and clean the sheets were after what we were used to in the lumber camps. For years afterwards we used to send them a Christmas card, but then one year the card was returned. I guess they must have moved. Your father used to say ‘It’s not very often, you can say “kiss my rear end,” and get a splendid supper and a bed with clean sheets in return.’
“Another time,” he said, “we were in a lumber camp that was filled with rats. Before going to bed we used to take two or three loaves of bread and throw chunks of the bread on the floor, so the rats would not try to eat us in our beds.
“You know,” he said, stopping suddenly and placing his hand upon my shoulder as I drove, “I missed and still miss your father a great deal. I was with him longer than he was able to be with you, and Grandpa and Grandma here knew him in still a different way. Perhaps,” he said after a pause, “it’s just the same sadness in different packages.”
“Oh well,” said Grandma, “we should be grateful for what we’ve had. Some people never see their parents at all, and some men do not even know that they have children in the world.”
“I have never gotten over that,” said my grandfather quietly. “Not knowing whether my father ever knew that he might be responsible for me, or someone like me. I think it would have made a difference.”
“What could the man do?” said Grandpa. “He was young and it was not his fault that he was killed. He did not plan on things turning out the way they did. If he didn’t know about your life he didn’t know about his own death either – unless perhaps he saw it coming, and by then it was too late.”
“Once when I was a child,” said my grandfather, “I was being teased by the other children and I went to ask my mother a question. I don’t even know what the question was and probably didn’t then. Something inarticulate about the circumstances of my conception and why I was different. She slapped me so hard that she knocked me almost halfway across the room. ‘Don’t ever ask me anything like that again!’ she said. ‘Don’t you see that I have enough trouble with you as it is?’ So that was the end of that conversation – if you could call it that. She became a bitter woman, my mother, and perhaps you cannot blame her. She didn’t have an easy life.”
“No, she didn’t” said Grandma. “Under the circumstances she probably did the best she could.”
“Perhaps. I have always missed not having a picture of him,” said my grandfather. “An image of him in my mind. I am of the age now when I might well be a great-grandfather myself, but I am still looking for him. When I shave in the morning, even this past morning in Halifax, I look into the mirror and try to find him in my face, in my eyebrows or in the slant of my jaw or in my cheekbones – but then we all look quite a bit alike. But the one time in my life that I was drunk, I saw him in the mirror. I went to the sink to splash water on my face and when I looked up into the mirror he was standing there behind me. He had reddish hair and a reddish moustache and he was younger than I was at the time. Strange to see your father as younger than you are yourself. I turned around as quickly as I could, but I slipped on the water on the floor and fell and hit my head. When I got up I was still groggy and he was gone. It so unnerved me that I was never drunk again, but I have worn this moustache ever since.” He paused and touched the moustache with his right hand.
“And one other time, the night after my wife died, he came where I was sleeping and it was probably a dream. He came and stood beside the bed and he had on long woollen underwear, like Stanfields, the kind you would wear in a lumber camp in the winter. And he bent down and put his hand upon my shoulder. ‘Look after the little girl,’ he said, ‘and each of you will then be less alone.’ ”
The sun shone down upon the moving car, but the hottest part of the day was over. We were all silent for a while as the miles slipped past us and beneath us. And then we began to climb the Havre Boucher hill and the signs began to announce our closeness to Cape Breton. But before the climb and the signs we could see Cape Breton lying blue and green across the water before us and to our left.
“No more sad stories,” said Grandpa. “Let’s sing some songs.”
And then we all began to sing:
“Chi mi bhuam, fada bhuam,
Chi mi bhuam, ri muir lain;
No Great Mischief Page 10