Chi mi Ceap Breatuinn mo luaidh
Fada bhuam thar an t-sail.”
shouting out the names of the places as far as we could see them strung out along the coast; trying to change what was perhaps intended as a lament into a song of happiness and joy at our own homecoming.
Whenever our voices wavered or hesitated at the beginning of a new verse, we would turn to my grandfather and he would lead us clearly and without ever faltering. Again, as with his playing of the violin, it came almost as a renewed surprise – the fact that he was seldom associated with singing but still could do it so well.
“You never make a mistake,” said Grandma to him after the song was done.
“I try hard not to,” he said. “I try to do the best I can.”
We crossed the Canso Causeway. When the front wheels of the car touched Cape Breton, Grandpa said, “Thank Christ to be home again. Nothing bad can happen to us now.”
We still had an hour’s drive or perhaps more along the coast, but it was obvious that Grandpa already considered himself in “God’s country,” or “our own country,” as he called it. Reaching into his inside coat pocket, he pulled out a bottle of whisky he had apparently purchased in Halifax and, rolling down the half-open window, he wound up like a baseball pitcher and threw the cork as far as he could out into the waving grass beyond the road.
“We will damn well have to drink all of this now,” he said, raising the bottle triumphantly above his head. “When I was a young man,” he continued enthusiastically, buoyed up by his own good spirits, “when we would come home in the spring from working in the woods, I would get a hard-on as soon as my feet touched the ground of Cape Breton. Yes sir, it would snap right up to attention at the front of my pants. I couldn’t hold it down. We had buttons on our trousers then,” he added helpfully. “It was before they began to use zippers.”
“Hush,” said Grandma, nudging him in the ribs with her elbow, as if he had gone too far even for her.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s sing some more songs. Would anyone like a drink? ”
“Let’s sing,” said my grandfather. “Anything would be better than this.”
And so we sang as I drove my uncle’s car along the winding road beside the sea and towards the setting sun. We sang “Fail-ill-o Agus Ho Ro Eile,” “Mo Nighean Dubh,” “O Chruinneag,” “An T’altan Dubh,” “Mo Run Geal Dileas,” and “O Siud An Taobh A Ghabhainn.” We sang all the old songs, the songs that people working together used to sing to make a heavy task lighter.
And as we drove by the houses of “our own country,” Grandpa would identify or shout to his relatives as they stood beside their doors or walked about their yards or worked at the various tasks of early evening.
“There’s Aonghas Ruadh,” he would say. “There’s Mairi.” “There’s Gilleasbuig.” “There’s Domhnull Ruadh.” “Honk the horn.”
And I would honk the horn at his bidding and the people would wave back, recognizing the car and its occupants as it rolled along beside the sea. Sometimes when I would honk the horn, Grandpa would wave his whisky bottle out the window as if to emphasize the fact that he was having such a good time.
“Don’t be such a fool,” said my grandfather, who looked as if he wished he were somewhere else, “or the police will arrest us all.”
And we drove and waved and sang our songs and the sun glinted off my uncle’s car and touched the various colours of our hair and tinted the flat calm ocean and outlined the island off which my brother and parents had drowned, it seemed, so many years ago.
When we arrived home, we went first to drop off my grandfather at his house. “Come inside for a minute,” he said. “I have something to give you.” From inside his closet he took two carefully wrapped presents.
“Open them,” he said.
One was a hand-carved chess set which must have taken him a very long time to complete; the scrolls and curves of the individual pieces delicately and intricately seeming to move through the burnished wood. The other was a hand-carved plaque bearing the coat of arms and the motto of the MacDonalds. “My hope is constant in thee,” said the carefully raised and outlined letters.
“I made these for your sister as well,” he said shyly. “I sent them in the mail to Alberta about two weeks ago. I wanted to be sure that they would get there in time.”
“Thank you very much,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
I tried to imagine all the care that had gone into them – all the painstaking detail accomplished by his mind and hands and the fine-tempered tools that my sister and I, as children, used to leave out in the rain.
“Thank you very much,” I said again. “Thank you very much.”
As we drove towards home we waved again to the people on the streets, but it seemed they only half-raised their hands and looked at us too intently. When we drove into the yard there was a knot of people gathered about the doorstep and there was also smoke from the chimney. Someone who knew the house had raised the back window and gone in and started a fire and opened the doors from the inside.
The red-haired Alexander MacDonald had been killed that afternoon, the people said. The ore bucket had hit him in the shaft’s bottom and he had died instantly. My brothers had phoned. They were coming home with the body.
It was so sudden and so unexpected that there seemed no place to turn. Nothing to grasp nor to hold. It seemed so complex – that while I was going forth into a world of perfect teeth, his unanticipated death was waiting for him in a hole in the ground outside of Elliot Lake. And that even as I drove his parents’ car, and as we sang our songs, he was dying far away on the edge of the Canadian Shield. I thought of how we had fought as children and of how I had laughed at him for drinking his tea from his saucer. And I could feel his small but determined calloused hands on the back of my neck in the moment before Grandpa had interrupted us. And I thought of how we thought we had known who the lucky ones were.
“A lot has happened to us on this day,” said Grandma as she put her arms around the mother of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald. It was the first time I ever thought of my grandmother as old, seeing her there with the strain of the long day and the hot drive etched upon her face.
“A lot has happened to us on this day,” she said, “but we will have to face this. We will have to be strong. We can’t dissolve like a spoonful of sugar in a glass of water.”
“I bought him a shirt in Halifax,” my aunt said quietly. “A MacDonald plaid shirt. I was going to wrap it for him tonight.”
“Goddamn it,” said Grandpa, who was rapidly becoming sober under the impact of the news. “Goddamn it,” he said and, “Goddamn it once again.”
The remains of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald came from Sudbury to the airport at Sydney in one of those plastic bags the airlines use for ferrying the dead. The members of the clann Chalum Ruaidh who had been with him accompanied him home on his last and final journey, and I was asked by his father to meet the plane at Sydney. I went by myself so that there would be more room in the car for those who would be arriving.
It seemed a strange and solitary hundred-mile journey, following the winding road and climbing and descending the mountains in the same car that had been so crowded going to and coming from my graduation in Halifax. The slight odour of some of Grandpa’s spilled whisky still hovered about the car’s interior, and the radio played erratically as stations faded in and out because of the elevation and depths of the mountains and valleys and the sometimes dominant presence of the overhanging outcrops of rock. The radio gave the weather forecast and played the Scottish violin selections and announced the death and the funeral arrangements of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald. The time was early afternoon.
When the clann Chalum Ruaidh, led by my oldest brother, poured off the plane in Sydney, most of them were already far advanced in drink. Many of them were angry, and spoke in a mixture of English and Gaelic. The management of Renco Development was on a tight schedule and had objected to s
o many men wanting to leave for the funeral.
“It was only one man,” the management said. “The rest of you are still able to work. The job has to go forward.”
But the job had not gone forward at all, for all of them had quit. They had come out of the bunkhouses and up out of the drifts and the shaft’s bottom and some had flung their gear into the bush at the headframe’s site, the wrenches, still in the miner’s belts, clanging onto the stone of the hardened Canadian Shield. Some of them had collected their pay before they left, while others had not bothered.
Now they milled about the baggage carousel dispensing bits of information. “It was an accident,” some said, while others were not so sure. The hoistman had mixed up his signals and had sent the ore bucket hurtling down the shaft when he was supposed to be raising it. The red-haired Alexander MacDonald, thinking the bucket was going up, had moved into the sump to clean it and was trapped in the bottom. He had probably not even seen the bucket whistling down upon him. No one could be sure. Everyone had ideas. The main thing was that the red head of Alexander MacDonald was forever separated from his body and would not be reunited unless at the time of some future resurrection. For some reason I found myself thinking of “Mac Ian,” the leader of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, falling forward across his bed on February 13, 1692. Propelled forward and downward by the unseen and unexpected force at the back of his head. The redness of his hair dyed forever brighter by the crimson of his blood.
The luggage began to roll onto the baggage carousel, revolving and twisting on the way to its owners, who leaned forward from their waists with outstretched hands.
Because I had only the one car, and because so many people had come, the clann Chalum Ruaidh rented other cars and we set out in our convoy of confused and exhausted grief with my oldest brother leading the way. Perhaps Calum was too tired or too taken over by grief or too angry at his loss or too inebriated or too eager to get home. Perhaps a combination of all these factors led my brother to drive too fast on the highway leading home. Almost immediately his rental car began to pull away from the rest of us and by the time we saw the Seal Island Bridge and the waters of Bras d’Or it had already climbed Kelly’s Mountain on the other side and vanished from our view.
Later, beyond the mountain’s top and on a barren and desolate stretch of road, we saw the flashing red light of an RCMP cruiser ahead of us. It was pulled to the side of the road, but when we came abreast of it there was no evidence of any officers, although one of the cruiser’s doors was open. Some ten or fifteen miles farther, when the road straightened somewhat, we could see my brother’s car again in the distance ahead of us. And then after another ten miles or so on the brow of a high hill we saw more flashing lights and what seemed like a hastily constructed police barricade thrown up across the road some miles ahead of us. My brother’s car was descending the winding road ahead of us and we saw it glinting in the sun before it vanished into the valley. We watched for it to emerge from the valley floor and begin its ascent towards the flashing lights, but it never appeared. When we came to the valley floor ourselves there was still no sign of it, but on a secluded stretch of flatness there was a dirt road that veered to the left and seemed to vanish almost immediately into the overhanging trees at the base of the mountain. The road was invisible from our previous vantage point and also invisible to those who waited at the barricade ahead and above and around the bend. When we came to the road the dust was still hanging in the air and we could see the disturbed stones caused by the recent passage of the tires. We continued up and around the bend, and the police officers at the barricade waved us through.
When we arrived at my grandparents’ house the yard and roadway were full of cars, most of them belonging to the clann Chalum Ruaidh who had come to offer condolences and to welcome the living who had accompanied the dead. About a half-hour later the missing rental car rolled into the yard. It was covered with dust and splattered mud from the mountain roads and streams. My second brother was at the wheel and Calum was asleep in the front passenger seat. His right hand was closed into a fist, and the knuckles were bruised and swollen.
Apparently their car had been pulled over and my brother had gotten out and walked back towards the police cruiser. The officer had stepped out of his car and they met at the roadside in the space behind the rental car and in front of the police cruiser. No one had heard the details of the conversation, although they heard the voices rising in anger, and then my brother had turned away to walk back towards his own car. The officer had struck Calum from behind with something – a billy club or a flashlight – and his head had flopped forward, but he had regained his balance and, in turning, struck the officer in the mouth, knocking him over the bank and down into the roadside ditch.
Calum still lay sleeping in the front seat, and there was some fear that he might have been more seriously injured than was first realized. Clots and scales of blackened dried blood lay caked and matted in his hair and plastered along the back of his neck. We attempted to wake him and half carried and dragged him into Grandma’s kitchen, where she waved away Grandpa’s whisky and tried to ply him with cups of hot tea. The thin scar line on his lower lip turned white and purple by degrees.
Later in the afternoon three RCMP squad cars with lights flashing arrived at my grandparents’ house. They had probably recognized the car’s licence plates or gained information from the rental agency or the other police detachment. Obviously we were not very hard to find.
By this time my brother had recuperated somewhat and his eyes began to flash with anger as he pushed his chair back from the table.
“You,” said Grandpa, “go right upstairs to bed.” He said it with an authority he did not often show, and I was reminded of the time he had separated the red-haired Alexander MacDonald and myself and held us firmly at arm’s length while our small indignant feet kicked at the air. Calum looked at him in amazement and I was struck by the fact that not many people in recent years had told him what to do. Perhaps not since the death of my parents had he been the child who hears and accepts the authority of others, perhaps with resentment but not unmixed with a certain sense of relief and complex gratitude. His feet sounded on the stairway above us and we could hear him falling heavily upon the bed.
“The rest of us,” said Grandpa, “will go outside.”
There were probably thirty or forty of us standing on the lawn outside of Grandpa’s house looking at the three police cruisers with their flashing roof lights and the six officers standing nervously before them. The Calum Ruadh dogs cocked their ears and moved erratically through the crowd, as if sensing a great event was about to unfold within their lives.
“We’ve come for MacDonald,” said the officer in charge. There was a ripple of laughter through the crowd and various shouts of “Right here.” “Over here.” All of the officers were from outside the local area and it probably had not entered their minds that almost all of us were named MacDonald. Nobody moved except for the shuffling of feet. The red roof lights revolved in the afternoon sun and even the dogs were temporarily quiet.
Then the door banged and Grandma came out, drying her hands on her apron.
“This is ridiculous,” she said, moving through the crowd that parted before her like the water in front of a boat’s prow.
“This family has suffered a death,” she said to the officer, “and we would appreciate it if you would leave us alone during our period of mourning.”
The officer took off his hat as she spoke to him and then withdrew a few steps and beckoned his men around him. After a brief conversation he nodded to Grandma and then all of them got into their cars and drove away, turning off their revolving lights as they departed. Everyone was relieved, although we all stood rooted to our spots for a few seconds. Then the dogs began to stir and romp and we all went forward into a life of movement.
The wake of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald began the next day at noon. His body was transferred by the undertaker from the plastic
bag to the casket of oak which was set upon its trestles. The casket was closed because he was no longer recognizable to those who once knew and loved him. Instead his picture was placed upon the casket’s surface, the picture taken at his high-school graduation. His red hair was carefully combed and his dark eyes looked hopefully into the camera. There was a boutonnière in his lapel. Beside the picture there was a small stone chip from the original Calum Ruadh boulder. About the casket were the ferns and rushes from the Calum Ruadh land. It was still too early for the summer roses, the pink and blue lupins, the yellow buttercups or the purple irises with their splashed white centres. Still too early for the delicate pink morning glories growing from their tendrils among the rocks beside the sea. Growing low and close among the rocks and seeming to derive their sustenance from an invisible source, yet quick to die if plucked and removed.
On the third day and just before the funeral procession began, a letter came from the red-haired Alexander Macdonald addressed to his parents. It had been mailed on the morning of his death, before he had gone to work his final shift. It did not contain a great deal of information, only general comments about how well they were getting along and a cheque for two hundred and forty-five dollars. Both of his parents burst into tears, as if it were, somehow, the final straw. But then they embraced one another and composed themselves and went forth to what they saw as their immediate responsibilities.
On the day that we had fought as children, I remembered, his father seemed to have come to borrow money from Grandpa and Grandma. And I remembered how I had thought that the world had seemed unfair to me in terms of who had fathers and who did not. And that it had seemed unfair to him as well. Fathers helping sons and sons helping fathers in the mysteries of ability and time.
The funeral procession to the white country church stretched out for over a mile and the RCMP cruisers with their flashing lights sealed off the access roads as we passed through. We looked straight ahead, as did the officers, and neither of us acknowledged the other.
No Great Mischief Page 11