No Great Mischief

by Alistair Macleod

  “No,” I say, “he didn’t tell me that.”

  “Oh well,” he says, “perhaps at the time he thought you were too young. The past is not the same for everyone, but it catches up with you. I was thinking the other day of how the exhaust from our old cars used to be visible in the coldness of the winter air. Often we had smooth tires and we would have to gun the cars to get them up the icy inclines, but when we came to intersections we would have to stop and then the blue whiteness of the exhaust would overtake us. We could see it and smell it. We thought we had left it behind us somewhere back on the road, but when we slowed down it seemed to overtake and surround us. I guess we were not going fast or far enough. Funny to think of that in the hot weather,” he adds. “Maybe we always think of the season we’re not in.”

  “Yes, maybe we do.”

  I reach for a bottle of beer, not because I particularly want it but because it seems unsociable and almost patronizing to watch him drink so rapidly by himself. Later I will have to drive for close to four hours to join my wife and my colleagues for an almost compulsory dinner.

  “Did I tell you that I saw your old friend Marcel Gingras a few months ago? I was walking along the sidewalk and I saw three cars coming towards me. They were Cadillacs or Lincolns, big expensive cars, filled with men and the windows were rolled down and their tattooed arms were hanging over the side. I almost knew who they were before I recognized them because they drove in that same kind of arrogant fashion, staying close together and straddling two lanes on the streetcar tracks. I recognized their licence plates, Je me souviens, at about the same time I noticed their driving.

  “Marcel pulled his car up on the sidewalk as soon as he saw me and the others did the same. He was wearing a flowered shirt open almost to his belt, and sunglasses, and he had a gold chain around his neck and several large rings on his fingers. He had had his hair styled. It was long and wavy. Remember he used to always have a brush cut?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I remember.”

  “He put his car in park but didn’t shut the motor off and almost jumped onto the sidewalk where I was. It happened so fast that although I thought I recognized them as a group I wasn’t sure of him as an individual. I was carrying a bottle of cheap cooking sherry in a bag because it was all I could afford and I remember thinking, ‘Well, if I have to defend myself with this, I won’t miss the contents.’ I grasped the bottle by the neck but then he was upon me and put his arms around me in a hug.

  “‘Bonjour,’” he said, ‘I recognized you by your walk.’ He introduced me to the other men in the cars. ‘This is Calum Mor,’ he said. ‘Long time ago when we first came with Fern Picard, this was the best miner we ever saw.’

  “The men in the cars nodded their heads and held out their hands. They were all basically French-speaking, although two of them were MacKenzies, descendants of Wolfe’s soldiers from the Plains of Abraham. We talked for a while. They had heard that there was work driving a railroad tunnel from Sarnia under the river to the American side. Or that there was a tunnel near St. Louis and work near Boston. ‘Better money in the U.S.,’ said Marcel, rubbing his thumb against the first two fingers of his right hand in the old gesture. ‘Lots of people from Cape Breton in Massachusetts, in Waltham. We’ve been there before. Come with us.’

  “ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I couldn’t pass the X-ray.’ They all laughed and Marcel asked about you – ‘the book one,’ they used to call you. I told them what you did and he said he remembered that you were good at school. I gave him your number. Did he ever call you?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Anyway, we talked for a while. Traffic was building up behind them and people were getting annoyed. A policeman came along. At first he was impressed by their cars and thought I was merely an old alcoholic bothering the well-to-do. Then he noticed their licence plates.

  “ ‘You can’t block traffic like this on the street and on the sidewalk,’ he said. ‘Je ne parle pas l’anglais,’ said Marcel. The policeman turned to me. ‘I was just trying to give them directions,’ I said.

  “They put their cars in gear and began to drive off. The MacKenzies waved from the the back seat of the last car and Marcel put his hand out the window and waved. I remember the sun glinting off his rings.

  “The policeman said to me, ‘You better get home with your wine. What would you know about French?’ ”

  “I think I’ve told you that before,” said my brother. “It was unusual just to meet them like that.”

  “Yes, you have told me,” I say. “It was unusual. Marcel wanted to learn English more than anything in the world, he once told me. He offered me money to teach him. He thought it would guarantee him a job in Sudbury. Perhaps with Inco or one of the big companies.”

  The sun has moved across the sky so that its light no longer penetrates directly into the room. I nervously peel the label off my beer bottle. My brother staggers towards the sink, unzipping his trousers as he goes. Although he is still clear in his speech, his movements are erratic and he no longer cares about real or imagined niceties. Grandpa used to say, “It’s a great thing, drinking beer. It cleans out your system and it comes out of you the same colour as it goes in.” I am not sure how he would react to this present scene, or if his goodwill would extend this far.

  “Once, before everything happened,” Grandma once said to my twin sister and me, “we were all sitting around the table. It was years before you two or Colin were born. Grandpa had his beer bottle on the table and Calum was perhaps four or five. As he passed it the sun came through the window in a certain way that reflected off the glass and he saw his little boy’s reflection thrown back towards him. ‘Oh,’ Calum said, ‘I see myself in that beer bottle. It’s really me. It’s like I’m in there.’

  “He was so excited that I never forgot it. Later I saw him looking at the bottle, but the light had changed and he couldn’t find himself again. It seemed almost like a prophecy of what was to happen later. He was such a dear little boy.”

  “I have to go now,” I say, rising from my chair as Calum turns from the sink, the dark wet blotches visible on the front of his trousers and his zipper still undone. “But I will be back if not next week, the week after. I will leave you some money if you wish, to tide you over until Monday.”

  “Oh, I think I’ll be all right,” he says. “No need of that.”

  I reach into my pocket and feel for the crumpled roll of bills dampened by my own perspiration. I place the money on the table and try to avoid looking at it or counting it because it seems, somehow, so condescending.

  “Take care,” I say. “Beannachd leibh.” He approaches me and takes my right hand in his and places his left hand upon my shoulder. He is now swaying slightly and because he is still a big man his weight causes me to shift my own feet in an attempt to achieve balance.

  “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald,” he says with a smile. We lean into one another like two tired boxers in the middle of the ring. Each giving and seeking the support of the other.

  He turns towards the window and I leave and close the door.

  My exit from the city of Toronto seems fairly simple. The protestors and their opponents have apparently gone home. The traffic is heavy but not oppressive. Because it is late Saturday afternoon the ordinary commercial traffic of the weekdays is stilled and to the north of the city the major arteries reflect the comparative calm of the mid weekend. The desperate impatience of Friday and Sunday evenings is either past or yet to come, and the overloaded trailers and swaying boats seem to have attained their autumn destinations. People are trying to make the summer last as long as they are able.

  Through his sun-smudged window perhaps my brother sees Cape Breton’s high hardwood hills. There the colours have already come to the leaves, and slashes of red and gold glow within the greenery and beneath the morning’s mist. The fat deer move among the rotting, windfallen apples and the mackerel school towards the wind. At night one can hear the s
ound of the ocean as it nudges the land. Almost as if it is insistently pushing the land farther back. The sound is not of storm but rather one of patient persistence and it is not at all audible in the summer months. Yet now it is as rhythmical as the pulsing of the blood in its governance by the moon.

  The “lamp of the poor” is hardly visible in urban southwestern Ontario, although there are many poor who move disjointedly beneath it. And the stars are seldom clearly seen above the pollution of prosperity.

  “When I take transatlantic flights at night,” said my twin sister, once, in Calgary, “I look at the brightness of the stars and the constancy of the moon and, coming back, I always try to look down on the ocean. I think of Catherine MacPherson, our great-great-great-grandmother, sewn in a canvas bag and thrown overboard, never able to arrive at the new land nor get back to the old. I wonder what her thoughts were before she died, leaving everything she knew to be with the man who had married her sister. I often wonder if her Gaelic thoughts were somehow different because of her language, but I guess you think and dream in whatever language you are given.”

  “In the bunkhouses of the mining and construction camps,” I said, recalling an old image, “late at night you could hear the men dreaming in all their different languages. Sometimes they would shout phrases in Portuguese or Italian or Polish or Hungarian or whatever might be their language of origin. Shouts of encouragement or warning or fear or sometimes softer expressions of affection or of love. No one would know what they were saying except those with some kind of shared background. We used to dream ourselves, the older ones among us in Gaelic, and the French Canadians had their own dreams as well. And in South Africa, our brothers said, the Zulus also spoke at night.”

  “Remember,” asked my sister, “how Grandpa and Grandma used to dream, sometimes in English and sometimes in Gaelic, but towards the end their dreams were almost totally in Gaelic? It was as if they went back to the days when they were younger. As if it had always been the language of their hearts. Sometimes I think I dream in Gaelic myself but somehow I’m never sure. When I awake I am never quite certain, although the words seem still to be coursing through me. I ask Mike if he hears me talking in my sleep and he says he never does, but then he sleeps so soundly.

  “There is a passage by Margaret Laurence in The Diviners where Morag talks about lost languages lurking inside the ventricles of the heart. I return to that passage a lot and when I touch the book it flies open to that page, page 244.” I smiled at my sister.

  “When I first came west to study drama,” she continued, “my professor told me I would have to get rid of my accent unless I wanted to spend all my career in the role of an Irish maid. I didn’t even know I had an accent. I thought everyone spoke as I did. Do you ever think about that, about the way you speak, about the language of the heart and the language of the head?”

  “No,” I said, “in my world nothing like that matters. It is almost as if we are beyond language.”

  “Perhaps you are,” she said. “Perhaps that is part of the reason why people in your profession have such a high rate of suicide. Do you know that you have one of the highest suicide rates?”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “You have to be careful,” she said, with a flash of concern.

  “Oh, I’m careful.”

  She sighed. “Sometimes I am at Pearson airport between flights, and if I have time, I walk down to the departure gates for the East Coast flights. The gates always seem to be the farthest away and I cannot do it unless I have a lot of time. I have no real reason for going except that I want to be in the presence of those people. To listen to their accents and to share in their excitement. Sometimes there are business executives as well, but you can always recognize them because they sit apart and are not emotionally involved. I am always moved by those middle-aged Newfoundlanders from Fort McMurray trying to tell their children that Newfoundland is a place to be proud of, rather than ashamed of, and trying to justify their accents and the manner in which they speak. Does this seem silly to you?”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t seem silly at all.”

  “Once, I was at the Halifax gate and a woman said to me, ‘Isn’t it great to be going home?’ I was startled because maybe I thought I looked like one of those executives, but I guess I didn’t. She asked me where I was from and before I could think, I said, ‘Glenfinnan.’

  “ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘My husband is from there. It’s a very beautiful spot. There is an island off the coast. Do you know it?’

  “ ‘Yes, I know it.’

  “ ‘My husband’s name is Alexander MacDonald. Were you a MacDonald?’

  “ ‘Yes, I was.’

  “ ‘He is going to meet me in Halifax and I will introduce you to him,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you two are related.’

  “ ‘Perhaps we are,’ I said. ‘I am part of clann Chalum Ruaidh.’

  “ ‘So is he,’ she said.

  “Just then the attendant announced that all passengers with seats at the rear of the aircraft should proceed through the gate, so the woman gathered up all her packages. ‘See you at the luggage carousel,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget. My husband has red hair.’ And then she was gone. I wanted to wave to her or try to explain, but there was no time and she vanished beyond the attendant taking the boarding passes.

  “After she had gone, I stood at the gate for a long time. I watched them shut the plane’s doors and watched the plane itself as it taxied towards the runway and then lifted into the sky. And still I stood there. I didn’t realize how conspicuously solitary I was until an attendant came up to me.

  “ ‘Is there anything we can do for you, ma’am?’ he asked. ‘There is not another flight from this gate for more than an hour.’

  “ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry. No, there is nothing you can do for me.’

  “Did you know,” she said, changing the subject, “that James Wolfe had red hair?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “he did.”

  Now my car moves south and west towards the descending sun. Farther south the pickers view the day’s decline from differing perspectives. The urban families are glad the day is done and look forward to their evening meals and the comfort of rental videos and long conversations with their friends. The children will have school on Monday.

  The families of the Mexican Mennonites and the Jamaicans will pick until the sun goes down, as will the families of the French Canadians from New Brunswick and Quebec. For many of them school is, perhaps, a luxury and they see themselves within a foreign land where the authorities pay little attention to their existence. In New Brunswick, the academic year is altered to accommodate the needs of varied harvesters, and there is leniency in Quebec.

  Later in the season, when they are no longer needed, the pickers will leave their tiny cabins and begin their long return journeys. Sometimes the Mexican Mennonites will have trouble at the various borders because of the complications of their lives. Vehicles may have been purchased or, perhaps, children born since the time of their last border crossing. Sometimes when they attempt to enter the United States they will be pulled aside by the immigration authorities and the same may happen to them thousands of dusty miles later as they try to leave the state of Texas.

  They may be herded into small overcrowded rooms, clutching their vehicle permits, their creased and tattered birth certificates, their yellowed work visas, and their passports containing the uncertain photographs. The children will clasp their parents’ browned hands. They will be asked to take a number and later to answer the complicated question of exactly who they are.

  On their homeward journeys, the French Canadians may stop to visit their relatives in St. Catharines or in Welland before the final push. Reacting to economics, some will fill up their gas tanks on the Ontario side of the border because Ontario gasoline has traditionally been cheaper. Others motivated by patriotism will coast their near-empty cars across the border, filling their ta
nks with more expensive gas in Rivière-Beaudette or St. Zotique. All of them will point out to their children the superiority of Quebec’s highway rest areas compared to those of Ontario, indicating the plentitude of free hot water and the lack of the commercial pressures. They will rest easily within the boundaries of their region.

  In the period prior to their long homeward journeys, many of the men will work upon their cars. Nearly all of them are, by necessity, mechanically knowledgeable and they go to garages as rarely as they visit the dentist. In the sundowns of the late autumn evenings they will bend beneath the raised hoods. They will replace their water pumps and fuel pumps and seal their hissing hoses with strands of electrical tape. They will check their carburetors and clean their spark plugs and tighten their fan belts and listen with fearful practiced ears to the ticking of their engines. Later they will rotate their worn tires and check the lamps of their headlights for their journeys through the night. But that will be in the future. This late afternoon and evening there is still work to be done before the sun’s final descent and the achievement of Saturday night. Then, perhaps, there will be beer and the flickering television shows which come to many of them in a foreign language. They will lean forward and concentrate intently, taking their cues at times from the insistence of the canned-laugh tracks. Some will play cards and others dominoes.

  Tomorrow, which is Sunday, will see some of the single young men change their clothes and venture, perhaps, to the pebbly beaches. There they will often laugh too loudly and call out to the young women in their fractured versions of English, in French, in Spanish, or in Jamaican patois. They will receive basically unintelligible responses and console themselves by punching one another on their upper arms or heavily muscled shoulders.