No Great Mischief

by Alistair Macleod

  There were reports of new uranium findings in the area where we worked. Perhaps Renco Development would begin sinking new shafts farther to the north? Canada led the world in the production of nickel and zinc. There were new mineral findings in Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Montana. Reportedly, experienced shaft and development miners were in demand, but a knowledge of English was required. My brothers said that when climbing to the high altitudes of Utah and Montana, it was sometimes necessary to adjust the carburetors of their cars because the air was so thin. The air, they said, was almost as rarefied as that of Peru.

  California led the United States in its number of draft evaders. It was reported that many such young men were working in Canada under assumed names. We read that 26,907 American soldiers had died since the beginning of the conflict. Cassius Clay expressed the opinion that he had no wish to join them. He had nothing against the Viet Cong, he said. Willie Mays continued his spectacular play for the San Francisco Giants. Dr. Benjamin Spock was given a two-year jail term in Boston because he was opposed to the draft. J. Edgar Hoover was still in control of the FBI and, perhaps, like a good quarterback, he did not let his external signs betray what his mind was really thinking. The knitting manufacturers of Toronto earned lucrative contracts for the production of green berets, as did the leading shoe manufacturer for the production of military footwear. Its spokesperson was later to say, “We made millions from that war and didn’t lose a man.”

  “I’m not here because I’m afraid,” said Alexander MacDonald. “I’m here because I’m not stupid.”

  The music of Bob Dylan wafted in on the tiny radios.

  Sometimes we talked about the Oakland Raiders and the San Francisco 49ers. The Montreal Canadiens possessed the Stanley Cup, which gave Marcel Gingras and his friends a certain sense of satisfaction. Some of them had the logo of the Canadiens on the windshields and the bumpers of their cars.

  In the country of Marcel Gingras, the Rouyn car dealer Réal Caouette had captured his people’s imagination. As leader of the Créditistes he had garnered fourteen seats in the recent election. Many people were surprised. Réal Caouette expressed no wish to secede from Canada. Rather he advocated the creation of an eleventh province. It would straddle the border of eastern Ontario and western Quebec. It would include places like Rouyn-Noranda, Cobalt, Temagami, Kirkland Lake, Larder Lake, Temiskaming, and Abitibi. His reasoning was that the people of that region had more in common with one another than they had with those whom they felt controlled their destinies from the distant cities of Toronto and Quebec City, people who shared neither their weather, their landscape, their daily concerns, nor their sensitivities. Quebec City and Toronto were cities which were remote in many different ways and, to a proportion of the people from the proposed new province, they were distant places that they had heard about but never seen. The proposed new province would be something like the Republic of Madawaska, that region of the country where the boundaries of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Maine are so close to one another that in the end they vanish within the consciousness of the region’s inhabitants. Once again, Quebec City is far away, as is Fredericton, while Augusta, the capital of Maine, is more distant still. The citizens of Madawaska sing their own songs, and they sing them mostly for and to themselves.

  The citizens of Réal Caouette’s proposed new province possessed a body of song as well. Sometimes Marcel Gingras would sing one or two songs to us, although they often surpassed our understanding. They affected him, though, quite deeply and sometimes his eyes would fill with embarrassed mist as he ran his hand over the tattered map, outlining the lines that did not visually exist. They existed, however, for him, and in the old dream: le pays des Laurentides.

  That summer Marcel Gingras greatly increased his English vocabulary. He was highly motivated and would pore over the discarded newspapers, wrinkling his brow in an attempt to make sense of what seemed like an unruly language. Sometimes, if there were few people around, he would bring the newspaper to me and point to individual words. I would scramble around for the French equivalent, relying on the not very well stocked warehouse of French I had acquired in high school and university. We could make progress with the nouns and verbs, but many of the abstractions were more complicated. It seemed almost possible, however, to live a life based on “person, place, and thing” plus action. Sometimes Marcel Gingras would point to a certain word and look inquiringly at Alexander MacDonald. Because we were of roughly the same age, he assumed we had the same smattering of French. He had no way of knowing we had come from different educational experiences, for to him we both looked pretty much the same.

  At first, perhaps, Alexander MacDonald viewed Marcel Gingras and his comrades as “quaint.” Later, perhaps, he viewed them as he might have viewed the large Hispanic or Mexican population of his native California. People who did not always speak the mainstream language, yet were very much there. Alexander MacDonald’s warehouse of Spanish words and phrases was likely equivalent to my ill-stacked one of French. I say all of this now as conjecture, because he was careful in what he chose not to reveal.

  Yet, as I said, he was sociable and affable. He would nod and smile when he met Fern Picard on the pathways and bore him none of the grudges which most of us carried. It was rumoured that sometimes, at night, he even ventured into the French-Canadian bunkhouses to play poker. It was said that at first they regarded him as a spy sent to seek out information across enemy lines. But then they saw that if he were a spy, he was a very naïve one. Maybe he was a bit unbalanced mentally? Maybe he needed protection from the realities of life?

  On the rare occasions when Marcel Gingras visited our bunkhouse he was regarded in much the same way. He was not appreciated historically, but as an individual struggling with a language not his own he was difficult to dislike. No one wished to hit him with a wrench.

  Possibly Marcel Gingras, Alexander MacDonald, and myself were protected for a while because we did not share the same history as the others. We shared some of it, but not all. None of us had been present at the brawls in Rouyn-Noranda, and no one had spent much time calling us “frogs” or “porridge eaters” or visiting real or imagined sabotage on us. We had not seen other people wearing our clothes. In many ways we did not bear the scars, and none of us had been present at the death of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald. I myself had been half a continent away. I was probably having my picture taken when the bucket came down upon him. There was probably a mortar board on my head in the instant when he had no head at all.

  So for us, the nail did not protrude in the same way. It was not as deeply embedded in the bottoms of our shoes.

  The new Alexander MacDonald appeared the most unaffected of all. Probably, as I have said, it was because he was the one who was the most removed from our immediate history. Concerning our relatively recent past he had nothing to forgive or to forget. Of all the members of our branch of clann Chalum Ruaidh, he was the only one amongst us who had never seen or known the dead man whose identification papers he carried upon his body.

  He continued, though, to work hard.

  One day Calum asked me, “Do you think he will stay with us for a long time?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He never mentions anything like that.”

  “If he were to stay with us for a while,” said Calum, “perhaps you could go back? I suppose it’s too late for your lab and your white coat. Is it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s too late for this year.”

  “Perhaps you would just like to go home for a rest?” he asked. “He is a good worker and perhaps now we could get along without you.

  “But perhaps,” he added, “if you were to leave he would not be as comfortable among the rest of us. I suppose it’s because of your agreement with Grandpa and Grandma that he’s here in the first place.”

  I considered it for a while. “I think I should stay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll go forward.”

  “Most people,”
Grandpa used to say, “try to do the right thing. If your parents knew they were going to drown, do you think they would have started across?”

  The work went forward.

  Alexander MacDonald worked hard, as did the rest of us. When he was not at work, he slept, it seemed, for only brief periods. Sometimes, late at night, I would awaken to see or to hear him moving in the darkness. Sometimes he would open his footlocker, where the clippings from his days of glory quietly reposed. At times when we were together, we would talk about sports teams or books or music or movies from the previous months. A Man for All Seasons, starring Paul Scofield, had won the major award the previous year. We both had seen it.

  On a Saturday in early August the hoist broke down. It was about three in the afternoon. We could move neither men nor material, so everything came to a halt. In terms of the contemporary world it would be as if the only elevator in a twenty-storey building ceased to function. Except, in our case, we were beneath the ground instead of above it. When we realized what had happened we began to climb our way to the surface. Beside the shaft there was a series of wooden ladders constructed in case of just such an emergency. So that we would not be trapped at the bottom.

  We began to climb upward in single file. The lights on our helmets shone upon the glistening rock and the water dripped from our helmets’ brims to beneath our collars, and then trickled in small, cold rivulets down our backs. Each man could only move as fast as the man before him. If you were too eager, your fingers would be stepped on by the steel-toed boots of the man above. Small rocks and bits of dislodged mud fell from our passage and from the bottoms of our boots. Those farther down the line were constantly bombarded by small showers of debris rattling upon their helmets. They had to keep their heads down while also attempting to look upward in order to grasp the next rung upon the ladder.

  If someone’s legs began to tremble or if breathing became hard, the individual might stop for a moment to catch his breath and to lean against the walls of stone. But if he did so, he would halt the progress of the climbers beneath him. Impatient voices would echo upward from the darkness. “What’s going on up there?” “Who’s holding up the line?” “Who’s sending these rocks down on top of me?” “We’ve got to get out of here. Greas ort! Hurry up!”

  We emerged wet and trembling to stand blinking under the rays of the blazing sun.

  At first the usual rumours circulated. The hoist was being repaired. It could not be repaired. A new one was being trucked in. The installation would take two hours. Perhaps it would take half a day. Perhaps a whole day. Because it was late Saturday afternoon, the suppliers were not answering their phones. In the end it seemed that nothing could be done until the conclusion of the weekend. We would not be able to descend again until, probably, Monday morning.

  Almost immediately, the taxis began to appear outside of the camp’s main gates. In retrospect it is hard to imagine how they got there so fast. Maybe they were forewarned. Sometimes I think of them as being akin to circling birds in the lower regions of the sky. Drawn by instinct or intuition. Aware that something is going to happen in the near landscape that will be beneficial to them all. These taxis, however, did not circle. They either waited near the entrance of the gates or drove directly into the adjacent parking lot. Those waiting for passengers were the former. Those with something to sell were the latter.

  As the sun continued its decline, we were beset by a certain restlessness. Generally when some of us were above ground, either resting or sleeping, the others were at work. But now we were all on the surface together. For a while some of us wrote letters or lay on our bunks and tried to listen to the radio. Some people played cards. Someone tried to play the violin, briefly, but then put it aside. We walked to the coffee shop and then returned. We waited for supper. In the dining hall there were more men than usual because no one was underground. People jostled one another. The cooks ran out of food. We returned to our bunkhouses. No one was particularly tired and it was too hot to sleep casually. We walked outside the camp gates. We walked to the parking lot. We sat on the rocks which were still warm from the earlier heat of the sun, or sat on the bumpers of some of the old cars. A man approached us and asked if we would like to have a good time. Calum said he didn’t think it was possible. The sun continued its decline and then it was dusk. We continued to sit on our rocks and our bumpers. Sometimes individuals would separate from the group and stand and urinate at the parking lot’s edge. We could hear the hiss and see the steam rising from the hot rocks.

  “What the hell!” said Alexander MacDonald. “I’m going to buy you guys a beer.” He approached one of the taxi drivers and soon two large cases of beer were deposited at our feet. There was also a bottle of cheap rye whisky. It must have cost a lot of money.

  Across the parking lot Fern Picard was sitting with his men. When he saw Alexander MacDonald make his purchase, he sent one of his men to do the same thing. It was almost as if he did not wish to be outdone.

  As the man passed our group, someone said, “Monkey see. Monkey do.”

  “Fuck off,” said Fern Picard’s man.

  We sat in the dusk and sipped on the warm beer. Some people passed the whisky bottle around. We thanked Alexander MacDonald.

  As it became darker, someone turned on a car radio. Alexander MacDonald got up and went back towards the bunkhouses. Later he returned and sat with us. There was movement among the French Canadians as well. Shadowy figures departed and returned. The stars began to appear and then the moon. It was our only light.

  Out of the semi-darkness Fern Picard appeared. “Maudits enfants de chienne,” he said and spat on the ground.

  He was standing over Calum, who was sitting on a rock. Calum perceived his disadvantage and bent forward slightly from the waist. “Fuck off,” he said. “Mind your own business.”

  Now we were aware of Fern Picard’s men moving out of the shadows to stand behind him. Those of us who were sitting rose to standing positions.

  “Vous êtes des voleurs et des menteurs,” said Fern Picard. “Vous êtes des trous de cul. Ta soeur!”

  Calum sprang forward from the rock, tackling Fern Picard below the knees and attempting to knock him backwards. Instead, because of Picard’s size and the way his feet were planted, he fell forward so that he was almost extended across Calum’s back. They rolled together across the rocky ground of the parking lot. And then they were all upon us, as we were upon them.

  Members of the various construction crews who happened to be in the parking lot moved away quickly, although some stayed to watch from the shadowy edges near the trees.

  “I didn’t come here to die in the boondocks,” I heard Alexander MacDonald say, as he vanished into the trees behind us.

  In the darkness there was only the muffled thuds of fists on flesh and the uneven gasps and grunts of great exertion. I rolled across the parking lot with my hands around the neck of a young man even as his hands pressed tightly against my throat. Each of us was trying to do the same thing to the other. Each of us was trying not to be on the bottom when our revolutions ended. If it seemed that he had me pinned upon my back and might complete his throttling, I would heave myself against his leg and roll to the right until our positions were reversed. He would do the same. Sometimes we would have to relinquish our grips on one another’s throats to regain our leverage. When we did so, we would each attempt to hit the other in the face with whatever hand was free. I did not even know his name.

  Someone kicked over one of the beer cases, and when the bottles were broken, their agitated contents foamed upward and outward beyond their circles of confinement. We could smell the yeasty odour in the air.

  I heard car doors or trunk lids slam, and then the sound of steel on stone. Someone had introduced car jacks or tire irons or wrenches or chains to the complications of the conflict.

  There are many things that people will do in the dark that they will not do in light. The man with his teeth fastened in his opponent’s ear, or t
he man trying to insert the blade of his pocket knife between his opponent’s ribs, will be embarrassed by the smallness of their actions if they are exposed to light. Suddenly someone turned on the headlights of some of the surrounding cars, and then the tenor of the conflict probably altered in some ways. Altered, but did not diminish.

  In the now well-lit arena my opponent and I rolled across the rocky surface. The backs of our shirts were bloodied because of the sharp stones that had penetrated the fabric. We could smell and taste the salty odour of our mingled blood.

  The car radio continued to play. Charley Pride was singing “Crystal Chandeliers.”

  Someone threw a huge heavy-duty pipe wrench either to us or at us. I was beneath my opponent when it landed with a clunk at our side. Our positions had altered so that now he was astride me, but I had a grip on each of his wrists so that he was unable to move his hands. He looked yearningly towards the wrench. Blood and spittle trickled down upon me from his chin.

  Calum fell beside me with a thud. He landed on his back but was able, partially, to block the fall with his shoulders so that his head did not land upon the stone. His face was covered with blood, and almost as he landed Fern Picard was on top of him, hitting him with his right fist and then his left. He forced his thumb against Calum’s windpipe. Calum’s eyes rolled upward in their sockets and his breath began to rattle.

  My opponent, noticing that I was distracted, suddenly jerked his right hand free and lunged sideways towards the wrench. I tried to recapture his escaped wrist and, as we rolled, our tangled bodies nudged the wrench not to us but in the opposite direction. The wrench came to neither of us. Instead it came to Calum. His hand closed around its handle, as it might around a final gift. He heaved himself upward, dislodging Fern Picard, and swung the wrench. The heavy heel of the wrench crunched into the skull of Fern Picard, and he fell with a gurgling sound. He lay on his back and his eyes rolled upward in their sockets. His huge hands twitched, and a dark stain appeared on the front of his trousers. Fern Picard was dead.