No Great Mischief

by Alistair Macleod

  The older woman said to the group she had brought in, “This is the woman I told you about.” Then she spoke to them in Gaelic and they all nodded their heads. I nodded back and it was a few seconds before I realized that she had spoken in Gaelic and that I had understood her. It seemed I had been away from the language for such a long, long time.

  They were all shy at first and then a woman about my own age said, “You have come a long way and your skirt is still wet from the water.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But it is all right,” she added. “You are here now. We will get you some dry clothes. One has to be careful of the water.”

  She said everything in Gaelic, and then I began to speak to her and to them in Gaelic as well. I don’t even remember what I said, the actual words or the phrases. It was just like it poured out of me, like some subterranean river that had been running deep within me and suddenly burst forth. And then they all began to speak at once, leaning towards me as if they were trying to pick up a distant but familiar radio signal even as they spoke. We spoke without stopping for about five minutes, although it might have been for a longer or shorter time. I don’t know. And I don’t even know what we said. The words themselves being more important than what they conveyed, if you know what I mean. And then all of us began to cry. All of us sobbing, either standing or sitting on our chairs in Moidart.

  “It is as if you had never left,” said the old man. “Yes,” said the others all at once, “as if you had never left.”

  Suddenly we were all shy again. Wiping our eyes self-consciously. It was like the period following passion. As if we had had this furious onslaught and now we might suddenly and involuntarily drop into a collective nap.

  “Would you like some tea?” said the woman I had met on the beach, rousing herself from her chair.

  “Yes, that would be nice.”

  “Or perhaps a dram?” she added.

  “Yes,” I said. “That would be nice also.”

  “Wait here,” she said, “and I will get it and some dry clothing as well.”

  She went through a door into an adjoining room.

  “Do they still have the red hair?” asked the woman when she returned.

  “Yes, some of them do.”

  “Aha,” said the old man from his chair.

  “And the twins? ”

  “Yes, I am a twin myself.”

  “Oh? Another girl?”

  “No, a brother. He has red hair.”

  “Oh,” they said, “a gille beag ruadh?”

  “Yes,” I said, “a gille beag ruadh. That’s what they called him. When he started school he didn’t know his given name.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said to my sister in her modernistic house in Calgary.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “You weren’t an orthodontist then, charging thousands for a set of braces. You were only a little boy.”

  “And the dog?” said the older woman. “All of the older people used to talk about the dog. I remember my grandparents saying that they had been told about the dog by previous generations. How she had jumped into the ocean and swam after the boat when it was leaving for America. The people who were left behind had gone up to the highest hill to wave goodbye and they could see the dog’s head carving a V through the ocean, swimming and swimming after the departing boat and after a while her head was just a speck and they could hear Calum Ruadh shouting and cursing at her, could hear his voice coming across the flatness of the ocean, shouting, ‘Go back, go back, you fool, go home. Go back, go back, you’re going to drown.’ ”

  “And then I suppose,” said the older woman, “he realized she would never go back. That she would try to swim to America. Or she would die in making the effort. And the people standing on the cliff, waving their bonnets or bright items of clothing in final farewell, heard his voice change. Heard it crack with emotion as he began to shout, ‘Come on. Come on, little dog, you can make it. Here! Here! Don’t give up! You can make it! Come on! I am here waiting for you.’

  “And the people on the cliff said they could see the speck of her head rise out of the ocean in response to his positive shouts. As if he gave her hope. And the V quickened and widened as she tried harder and harder. The man leaning over the side of the boat and banging the palm of his hand on its wooden side to offer encouragement and then reaching down to lift her from the water. That is the last picture anyone here ever had of that family,” said the woman. “After that, it was just waving from the cliffs until the ship itself became a tiny speck on the ocean, no bigger than the dog’s head had earlier been.”

  “Yes,” said the old man, nodding in the direction of the brown and white dogs, which lay like rugs beneath the table and the chairs in the stone house in Moidart. “It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard.”

  And my sister agreed and told them the story: “One of them was with my parents when they drowned. And she later died herself, on the island. Died from caring too much and trying too hard.”

  “How did your parents drown?” asked the people in unison. “We are sorry. Where was this island?”

  “Oh, I forgot you didn’t know,” said my sister. “I feel somehow that I have known you all my life and that you should know everything about me. I will tell you later.”

  “It is good that you feel that way,” said the woman with a smile, offering her a glass. “You are home now.”

  “Did you know,” asked my sister in her modernistic house in Calgary, “that after they landed, Calum Ruadh stabbed a man in Pictou?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think I ever heard that. Only that he was depressed.”

  “Well, he did” she said. “Grandfather told me. Do you know why he stabbed the man?”

  “No,” I said.

  “For kicking his dog,” she said quietly, looking directly into my eyes while drumming her fingers on the expensive table.

  “His dog was heavy with pups and the man kicked her in the stomach.”

  We went outside the house and looked down from the prestigious ridge. It was in the late afternoon and in the distance we could see the cars streaming east along the Trans-Canada Highway. Coming from Banff and the B.C. border. The sun glinted off their metallic rooftops and seemed to bounce in shafts of reflected golden light back towards the direction of the sky.

  Now in the Toronto streets the sun hangs high above the smog while the people jostle and bump on the way to their individual destinations. Some carry string bags filled with produce from their own original regions of the world. The barbecuing ducks rotate slowly behind the window glass and the disembowelled piglets hang from the steel hooks driven through their legs. Their small determined teeth are clamped fiercely shut in death and their pink and purple gums are visible behind their silent and retracted lips.

  In southwestern Ontario the pickers move across the flat hot fields or reach into the branches of the laden trees. The children of the families from the local towns and cities are even more weary now, and close to open rebellion. They long for their rec rooms and their video games and iced drinks and for long telephone conversations with their friends in which they can express the anguish of their pain. Their parents are by this time hot and tired and irritably exasperated by what they perceive as the non-cooperative attitude of the young. Now they no longer cajole but openly threaten. Angry fathers in their sweat-drenched undershirts, with their huge hands quivering at their sides, take giant steps across the green rows to confront the reluctant harvesters. “Why are you too lazy to pick the food you’re going to eat?” some will ask. “If you don’t smarten up you’ll be grounded. You’ll have to stay in your room for two weeks.” Soon such families will drive home in sullen silence, glumly looking out the windows at the fields and the orchards and the pickers left behind.

  The Jamaicans and the Mexican Mennonites and the French Canadians move with dexterity and quiet speed. Their strong sure fingers close and release automatically even as their eyes are planning
the next deft move. They do not bruise the fruit and their feet do not trample the branches or the vines. And they will not die from heart attacks between the green and flowering rows. They will work until the sun descends and then retire to their largely all-male quarters. Many are in Canada on agricultural work permits and when the season is done they must make the long journey back to their homes.

  Some are on “nine-month” contracts allowing them to stay in Canada for a maximum of nine continuous months. If they stay longer they become eligible for Canada’s social assistance and health programs. No one wishes them to become eligible for such programs except themselves. Sometimes, if they are in demand, they will leave the country for only a few days and then re-enter to begin another nine-month stay, or until they are no longer needed. Some have been following this pattern for decades while their children are continents and oceans away. They do not see their children or talk to them very often. Neither they nor their children ever visit the orthodontist. In the small houses in which they temporarily live they sit, at the end of the day, in their undershirts and on the edges of their steel-rimmed beds. The slowly revolving fans stir the humid air as those who are literate read their letters from home. Those who are less fortunate ask their friends to read and also to write for them. Sometimes they lie on top of their beds with their hands clasped beneath their heads and stare up at the chipboard ceiling. Sometimes they listen to music on cassettes, the rhythm and the dialect and the language often being foreign and indiscernible to those who pass by on the larger highways. Photographs sit on orange crates or the scarred night tables. On Monday morning when I smilingly greet my first patient, the small houses will be empty and the men will, already, have spent long hours in the sun.

  With no need for dexterity or speed I will pick and choose whatever liquors are before me, and perhaps it is not important. What is important is that I will return.

  In the heat of that summer our underground footage moved forward rapidly. We struck an area of a soft rock which yielded easily to our bits and to our powder and we began to run ahead of schedule. The time lost due to the death of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald was rapidly made up and Renco Development was more than satisfied. There was a suggestion that perhaps we were being paid too highly, especially since we had encountered the “soft rock.” Still, we pointed out that an agreement was an agreement and perhaps “hard rock” and hard times lay ahead for all of us, as they did for all those who worked within the rock-bound confines of the mine. Calum did the negotiations for all of us and no one wished to argue with him or be an obstacle in his path.

  After the departure of James MacDonald our music seemed to wilt within the summer’s heat and the French Canadians did not seem to play that much either. They withdrew more into the privacy of their own bunkhouses, as did we, and we viewed each other through eyes tinged with suspicion. Among ourselves the idea persisted that the French-Canadian hoistman on duty at the time had known that Alexander MacDonald was at the shaft’s bottom when he sent the ore bucket whistling down, that he had not been mistaken and confused his signals. We heard also that Fern Picard had approached Renco Development the day following Alexander MacDonald’s death with the proposition that he could bring in another crew of his own relatives from Temiskaming to replace clann Chalum Ruaidh in the shaft’s bottom. We heard, as well, that he and his men were aware of the private offer made by phone to us and that they were displeased because of the suspicion that we were being paid at a higher rate than they. We viewed them, as they did us, with a certain wariness; always on the lookout for the real or imagined slight or advantage; being like rival hockey teams, waiting for the right time to question stick measurements or illegal equipment; biding our time and keeping our eyes open. Still the work went on as we alternated our lives between the cool and dripping wetness underground and the stifling fly-infested heat on the summer surface.

  Sometimes I thought of the life that could have been mine had I remained in Halifax and accepted the summer research grant I had refused in order to come out here. It was true that in Halifax there was a very different kind of life, a life that included movie theatres and music and the possibilities to be found in libraries and laboratories. At times I missed, or imagined that I missed, the theatres and the restaurants which I hardly ever frequented or the discussions with classmates on the subjects of the day. There was a life, I knew, which was not so totally masculine nor dominated by the singleness of one profession.

  Sometimes my thoughts drifted to the small rented room and my Halifax boarding house. There I imagined my middle-aged landlady stifling in her own heat, fanning her face with the newspaper while sitting on her wooden chair with her stockings rolled down beneath her knees. Relieved yet bored by the absence of her transient students, having no belongings to rifle through while they were gone and no one to listen to her rules regarding the radio, and the houselights, and the closing of doors and the shovelling of her walk in winter. Sometimes I imagined my white-coated supervisors and colleagues moving on their soft-soled shoes across the polished floors of the air-conditioned labs, monitoring their trays of cultures and peering into their microscopes and sometimes encountering the flickers of boredom flashed back into their eyes from the fluorescent glare of washroom mirrors.

  I was also aware of a certain guilt concerning the death of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald, although I was not sure if the guilt really was or should have been mine. But there was a vague uneasiness associated with the circumstances and the timing of it all. I told myself that he had gone into the mine after high school because he was not academically inclined. But I knew also that he had done so, at least in part, to help the members of his family who had been haunted, through no fault of their own, by the echoes of a kind of regional, generational poverty which whispered and sighed with the insistence of the unseen wind. I realized that Alexander MacDonald had partially paid for the car which ferried me home from my splendid graduation, and I realized that the opportunity to thank him and make amends was now no longer there. I had often recreated the scene in which he had called me “lucky” because my parents had lost their lives, and the feeling of the callouses on his small, determined, hardworking hands seemed permanently bonded to the rising hair on the back of my neck. The touch of his small hands, it seemed, would now and forever be mine, although I told myself that his passing had affected others much more profoundly, and I had best not consider myself so precious.

  In the lulls between shifts my brothers often spoke of the landscape of their youth and their later young manhood. Far away on the edge of the Canadian Shield they recreated images of seasons and time separate from them by great distances of physical and mental geography. They remembered with great clarity their early lives upon the island: the clouds of gulls rising from the cliffs and the colony of seals at the island’s northern end. If one swam in summer, they said, you had to be careful of the male or bull seals; sometimes they would attack you, thinking you were intruding on their territory or threatening the members of their harem who lay basking on the rocks in the summer sun. And they spoke often of the miraculous fresh water well which burst from the rocks at the ocean’s edge.

  “Do you remember the well, ’ille bhig ruaidh?” they asked.

  “No, I don’t,” I said, “only what I have been told of it.”

  The well was nourished by an underground spring and its water was particularly sweet. It was frequented by humans and animals as well, and visitors from the mainland would take bottles of it back with them, thinking of it as a tonic or a particular refreshment. “Grandpa used to take bottles of it with him,” said my brothers, “he thought it fuelled sexual desire and was also a cure for arthritis.”

  I remember he used to call it “arthur-it is.” When the sea was agitated by storm, or even sometimes at high tide, the well would be submerged. It would become invisible to the eye beneath the pounding surf, and those who anticipated the vagaries of the sea would hasten to scoop pails of fresh water and “sav
e” them in a series of wooden barrels and puncheons secured to the rock above the high-water mark. In the full fury of storm it would seem as if the well had no existence, and even after the waves receded, its water would be salty and unfit to drink. But in a matter of hours it would “clear itself,” as they said. “We used to watch the animals,” said my brothers. “They would stand around it and when they began to drink, we knew the water was okay for us. For a long time there was fear that a severe storm might totally destroy it or reroute the water vein, but it never happened. It was always there in the calm following the storm. And even there when it seemed to be overwhelmed.”

  “Once, in March,” said my second brother, “Grandpa came across the ice with a load of hay. We were running short and we had no way of shoeing our horses so they could walk upon the ice. He borrowed a team of horses and had them shod with ‘ice-corks’ in their shoes and came across. He had ropes with rocks on each end strapped across the load so the hay would not blow away, and the brown dog was with him. The mother or grandmother of the one who was shot by the man who came from Pictou.