No Great Mischief

by Alistair Macleod

  He seemed as tired as we were, as we went to retrieve his luggage at the baggage carousel. He had two duffel bags and a metal footlocker guarded by an iron hasp and a combination lock. We carried the luggage to the car. “Not much of a car,” he said, although his tone was non-committal. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Calum, also non-committal. He sounded, for a moment, like Grandma, falling back into the familiarity of cliché.

  “Here, you drive for the first part,” said my brother, tossing the keys in my direction. “We have to hurry up. We have to go on shift in a few hours.”

  He eased himself into the back seat while our new companion took the front.

  Outside of Sudbury the rocky landscape stretched on either side as we journeyed to the west and towards the descending sun.

  “Pretty barren around here,” said our cousin. “It looks like photographs of the moon.”

  “Any port in a storm,” said Calum. He paused for a second. “ ‘When you have to go there, they have to take you in,’ ” he added. “Isn’t that from a poem of some kind?” he asked, directing his eyes towards me via the rear-view mirror.

  “It’s from a poem by Robert Frost,” said our cousin. “It’s called ‘The Death of the Hired Man.’ ”

  I drove back as rapidly as I dared. Without the speedometer to guide me, I glanced frequently above the swinging dice and beyond the bobbing dog, hoping that I would not see the flashing lights of Paul Belanger or one of his fellow patrollers of the road. My companions’ heads tilted gradually towards their chests and soon they were both snoring softly.

  When we left Highway 17, my brother woke with a start. “Sorry I slept so long,” he said. “Here, I’ll drive the rest of the way.” We exchanged places. Our companion slept on. His red hair fell forward from his shoulder and his left hand lay limply on the soiled upholstery of the car’s seat. We noticed that he wore a Celtic ring upon his finger. The never-ending circle.

  When we arrived back at the camp we left the car in the parking lot and my brother handed me the keys. Each of us carried a piece of luggage past the security guard’s post. He was reading a paperback novel when we approached, and his shift was nearing its end.

  “Been to Sudbury,” said Calum. “This is our new man. He’ll have his identification in the morning. Cousin agam fhein,” he added with a smile. The security guard waved us in.

  On the path to our bunkhouse we met Marcel Gingras. “Bonjour,” he said, “comment ça va?”

  “Why don’t you speak English?” said our cousin. “This is North America.”

  Both Marcel and I raised our eyebrows. “Merci,” I said, tossing him his keys.

  Calum had gone on ahead and we followed him to the bunkhouse. Our crew was ready to work their shift and were waiting impatiently. They had ordered our lunch cans for us and after brief introductions we were on our way. I told the new Alexander MacDonald he could sleep in my bed for the night and we would make other arrangements in the morning. He seemed grateful. He stuffed his footlocker and his duffel bags under the bunk and lay down, still clothed, upon the blankets.

  The night seemed long because both Calum and I had slept little during the past two days, and sometimes our heavy steel-toed boots stumbled against the rocks and the yellow-hissing hoses which snaked behind us. The incessant hammering of steel on stone seemed to vibrate within our throbbing heads and sometimes I would rest my hand against the walls of rock to forestall the bouts of dizziness. The rest of the crew, however, were well rested and shouldered more than their burden. We waved to each other above the clamour. When we raised our hands to wave, the water within our gloves ran down to the bends of our elbows.

  The next morning we were bleary, but Alexander MacDonald was rested. We found among our luggage and assorted papers the pinkish-brown employment card that had belonged to the red-haired Alexander MacDonald. It was more fragile than the current plastic S.I.N. cards, but the numbers were still intact. Calum took the card to the timekeeper. “This man will be working with us tomorrow,” he said.

  Whether Renco Development knew the difference or cared did not seem terribly important. “Sometimes, to them,” said Calum, “we all look the same, and I guess we do. As long as the work goes forward.”

  We also found the security pass of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald, which allowed our new man to pass freely in and out of the gates.

  It was somehow as if the red-haired Alexander MacDonald had merely gone on a short vacation and had now returned to resume his appointed tasks. Perhaps that was how it would appear on a company payroll. Someone might ask, “Wasn’t this man here a few months ago? Maybe something happened to him, but now he has returned? ”

  More than fifteen hundred miles away the body of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald lay silently beneath the gentle earth. On the last day of his life he had been deeper in the earth than he now reposed in death. In the darkness of his oak casket, perhaps, his severed head lay quietly beside him. By now the hopeful spring vegetation had given way to that of summer and his parents had, no doubt, planted flowers on the brown mud beneath his cross.

  His ongoing documentation took on a life beyond his actual existence. It seemed as if a part of his life continued to go forth, as the hair and the fingernails of the dead continue to grow, beyond the cessation of their host. It was almost as if the new Alexander MacDonald was the beneficiary of a certain kind of gift. A gift from a dead donor who shared the same blood group and was colour-compatible, although the two had never met. A gift which might allow an extended life for each of them. An extended life, though false, allowing each of them to go forward. Not for a long journey. Just for a while.

  “The people of Glencoe,” said my sister once in her modernistic house in Calgary, “believed that when the herring came they were led by a king. When they were scooping up the silver bounty they were always on the lookout for the king of the herring because they did not want to harm him. They thought of him as a friend who was bringing them food and perhaps saving them from starvation. They believed that if they kept their trust in him, he would return each year and continue to be their benefactor. It seemed to work for a long, long time.”

  She paused and looked through her magnificent picture window at the city spread out before her, it seemed, like a painting in the sun.

  “Grandfather told me that story once,” she continued. “And then he asked, ‘What do you think of that?’

  “ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I like the part about believing in the king – even if he was just a herring.’ I was perhaps in Grade 7 or 8. Grandma had sent me over to his house with some cookies. Grandfather smiled and even laughed a little and poured me a glass of milk.

  “ ‘Think of it from the point of view of the other herring,’ he said. ‘They were really being betrayed by him. He was leading them to their deaths and they probably didn’t realize it until it was too late.’

  “I didn’t like the picture nearly as much once he told me that. It was as if I had to think too much.”

  “Perhaps the herring should have thought more,” I said.

  “The herring,” said my sister, “were following patterns as old as time. To me they flow above and beyond whatever we think of as thought. To me they are governed by the moon. And they are faithful in their force. There was an old Gaelic song that Grandma used to sing that was composed when the people were leaving Scotland. There was a line in it which said, ‘The birds will be back but we will not be back,’ or something like that. Do you remember it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “ ‘Fuadach nan Gaidheal,’ the ‘Dispersion of the Highlanders.’ ” We began to hum the song and then the Gaelic words came to us, hesitatingly at first, it seemed, and then gaining force, welling up from wherever it was that song was stored. We sang all that we knew in Gaelic, three verses and the chorus, looking to each other for clues at the beginning of lines when we seemed uncertain. When we finished we stood and looked at one another, almost embarrassed in our expensive clothes amidst the op
ulence of my sister’s majestic house.

  “Well,” she said, “I think of the herring like the returning birds. That they came back regardless of what had happened to the people. That they came back whether or not there were people on the shore waiting for them, whether or not there were people there who believed they had a king.”

  “Grandfather once said,” she continued, “that on Culloden Moor the Highlanders sang. Standing there with the sleet and rain in their faces, some of them sang. To cause fear or to bolster confidence or to offer consolation. None of the Highlanders ever went into battle without music.

  “Do you remember,” she asked after a pause, “how Grandpa and Grandma and all their friends used to sing? Grandma said that when she was newly married, all of the women used to take their washing down to the brook. They would make a fire and heat water in those black pots they used to have and they would sing all day, slapping the clothes on the rocks in perfect rhythm. And they would do the same thing when they were making blankets, fulling the cloth, all of them sitting at that long table. They believed the music made the work go faster. And the men all sang when they were pulling their ropes and their chains.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Remember when they were older? The house would be full of people and late in the evening they would sing those long, long songs with thirteen or fourteen verses. Grandpa would be addled because he was so full of beer and he would say to us, ‘Run over and get your grandfather. He knows all the verses.’ Grandfather would be sitting in his freshly scrubbed kitchen all by himself, reading his history book, but he would always come. When he would enter the kitchen, at first everyone would pause as if he were a foreign element entering their merriment. ‘It’s because he’s so damn smart and so damn sober and so damn clean,’ Grandpa would always say later; but then Grandfather would begin to sing and everyone would go along with him. ‘When he comes in,’ Grandpa used to say, ‘it’s like a stone dropped into a pool. It causes a ripple at first but then everything is fine.’

  “Remember,” I said, “how in the enthusiasm of the moment, they would sometimes veer into the opening lines of those mildly off-colour songs and then they would remember he was among them and raise their eyebrows or gesture towards him with their heads and try to change the song in mid-line? Otherwise he would put on his hat and walk out. He was like a precise clergyman who didn’t wish to be at a stag party.”

  “Yes,” said my sister. “He was always troubled by the sexual circumstances of his own birth. And perhaps also by the circumstances of our mother’s birth. Grandma used to say he felt guilty about his wife’s death – that if he had not impregnated her she would not have died in childbirth. They only had one year of married life.”

  We were silent for a moment.

  “Grandma once told me,” continued my sister, “that before our mother had her first period he came over to Grandma’s and asked her to explain ‘the facts’ to our mother, who was then just a little girl advancing towards puberty.

  “ ‘The poor dear man,’ Grandma said. ‘He came and sat on a chair with his hat on his knee and hummed and hawed and was all red in the face. I didn’t know what he wanted as he was usually so direct. When I finally found out I said, “Of course I’ll do it. There’s not much about menstruation that I don’t know.” ’

  “It was, I guess,” said my sister, “peculiar to his personality. He could iron our mother’s clothes and braid her hair. He could frame a house all by himself in two or three days and do quadratic equations without ever having gone to high school, but he couldn’t handle menstruation. He was raised in a house without a father, only a mother, and years later he was with a daughter who had no mother, only a father. He was always in the midst of loss. They say,” said my sister quietly, “that his mother used to beat him – just because he was born.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She was our great-grandmother. Her blood also runs through our veins.”

  “Yes, it does,” she said. “I often think of that.”

  “Once after a night of singing,” I said, “I walked home with him.” ‘Music,’ he said, ‘is the lubricant of the poor. All over the world. In all the different languages.’ ”

  “Yes, I think of that even when I watch the news.”

  “The Zulus,” I said, recalling earlier conversations, “always sing in the miners’ compounds. Our brothers said that after a while they could almost sing the songs, although they didn’t know their meaning. It was as if it were one musical people reaching out to join another.”

  “I don’t suppose,” she said after a moment of reflection, “that you sing at your work?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you subscribe to a concert series?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So do I,” she replied. “The performers are quite wonderful.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Sometimes when we attend concerts here or when we go to performances in Banff I look at the performers and then around me at the members of the audience. Sometimes the women, including myself, have exclusive dresses and the men are in tuxedos. I suppose it is the same where you are. ‘Most of those people,’ I say to myself, ‘go to the orthodontist.’ Am I right?”

  “Yes. Most of them go to the orthodontist.”

  “I don’t suppose,” she said, “that many of the Zulus go to the orthodontist?”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so.”

  “I don’t know why I think this way,” she said, “but I am always moved by those African documentaries. The Zulus thought their world would never end. They seemed to be such a tall athletic people. Swaggering and arrogant. They believed in their battle formations and in their songs and in their totems. They believed in their landscape and in their armies of the thousands. When they moved across the veldt, singing, people say the ground trembled under the impact of their bare feet. They believed they were invincible and I suppose, in human terms, they were. They just weren’t ready for machine guns, and the documentation that followed.

  “A few years ago,” she continued, “Mike and I went on one of those African safari tours. To see the animals on the plain at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, in the south of Kenya near the border of Tanzania. The animals will take your breath away. All the different species grazing together and followed by their natural predators. Almost intermixed with the animals are the Masai following the grass cycle with their cattle herds, living off the milk and blood of their cows. We would go early in the morning from a base camp in Land Rovers and all-terrain vehicles, armed with cameras and binoculars. The tour operators apologized for the presence of the Masai. They realized that we had paid a lot of money to see wildlife, not families of people following their cows. There were borders and boundaries to the game preserves and the national parks, explained the tour operators, but the Masai refused to recognize them. They just followed the water and grass. They had always been ‘troublesome,’ according to the tour operator, and when colonization first came to Kenya they had attacked rather than co-operated. ‘What will be done with them,’ asked a member of our tour group, ‘to get them out of this beautiful place?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said the tour operator. ‘Something. Soon, I hope.’

  “Sometimes,” said my sister, “when our vehicles passed the Masai on the plain, I would try to look into their eyes. Perhaps what I saw there, or imagined I saw, was a combination of fear mixed with disdain. We were high above on the roofs of rubber-tired vehicles and they were in bare feet on the ground.

  “But, this is a long digression,” she sighed. “What do I know of Africa, anyway? I’ve never been there in my bare feet.”

  We both got up, as if on cue, and looked out the window. The Bow River sparkled below us. It snaked and glimmered through the newness of the city built upon its banks.

  “Did you know,” she said, “that Calgary gets its name from a place located on the Isle of Mull?”

  “No,” I said. “Well, I’m not sure. I guess I haven’t thought about it very much.”
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  “Well, there are none of the native people there any more, either,” she said.

  “Everyone used to say that when our parents came in from the island, our mother would often go to visit her father, just by herself. Sometimes she would ask Grandpa and Grandma if it were okay if she could leave her small children with them for a while and then she would go to see him. They would sit there in his bright, clean kitchen drinking tea. I often think of the two of them sitting there together. I wonder what they talked about? They had been together longer than she was with her husband or he was with his wife. He had always been there for her and as Grandpa used to say, ‘That man is as solid as a rock.’ He had been with her through a lot of changes in her life, though, of course, not the last one, and no one could have foreseen that. Grandma said that when our mother was a little girl she was always dressed so meticulously and her hair always braided to perfection. Grandma said that he was trying hard to give her the care her mother might have given. Perhaps he was also trying to relive and improve upon his own situation as a child. Grandma said he told her that when he was a little boy he used to sit on the doorstep in his short pants and look down the road for the coming of his father. He used to wish and wish that his father would come and make his life better.” She paused. “It is hard to imagine Grandfather in short pants.”

  “I am sure they were clean,” I smiled.

  “Maybe they weren’t,” she said. “Maybe his cleanliness was a trait he later developed within himself. Anyway, his father never came. He never had even a picture of him. His mother would become enraged if he ever mentioned the circumstances of his own conception. Perhaps in addition to being bitter she was also embarrassed.

  “I think he was always haunted by the fact that the night he was conceived, if it even was at night, his father may just have been having a good time. A young man going off to the woods of Maine, like all those young soldiers you read about, going off to the wars. Perhaps that’s why he was always so ill at ease when Grandpa would start those little jokes about the man taking the girl behind the bushes. I think now I understand him more,” she said.