I recognize all the familiar landmarks, although it is dark and there are mountains of snow. Here is the place where Grandpa threw the top of his whisky bottle out the window the day we were returning from my graduation. The day the red-haired Alexander MacDonald was killed, although we did not know it then. The day his mother bought him the shirt.
I turn to Calum and he is still, though his eyes are wide open, looking at the road ahead. Once we sang to the pilot whales on a summer’s day. Perhaps we lured the huge whale in beyond his safe depth. And he died, disembowelled by the sharp rocks he could not see. Later his body moved inland, but his great heart remained behind.
By the glow of the dashboard lights I can see the thin scar on Calum’s lower lip beginning to whiten. This is the man whose tooth was pulled by a horse. This is the man who, in his youthful despair, went looking for a rainbow, while others thought he was just wasting gas.
The car crests a high hill and in the distance, across the white expanse of the ice, I can see the regulated blinking of the now-automated light. It is still miles away. Yet it sends forth its message from the island’s highest point. A light of warning or, perhaps, encouragement.
I turn to Calum once again. I reach for his cooling hand which lies on the seat beside him. I touch the Celtic ring. This is the man who carried me on his shoulders when I was three. Carried me across the ice from the island, but could never carry me back again.
Out on the island the neglected fresh-water well pours forth its gift of sweetness into the whitened darkness of the night.
Ferry the dead. Fois do t’anam. Peace to his soul.
‘All of us are better when we’re loved.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the spiritual assistance that came my way during the completion of this novel. I would like to express my appreciation to Hawthornden Castle International Retreat For Writers, Lasswade, Scotland, for providing me a place “to be at peace in decent ease.”
My thanks to Doug Gibson for his caring persistence, and to Ed Ducharme for his help and concern.
A.M.
Cape Breton,
August 1999
About the Author
Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936 and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work.
During the winter months Dr. MacLeod is a Professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier, the University of New Brunswick and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph.D. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Indiana. Working alongside W.O. Mitchell, he was an inspiring teacher to generations of writers at the Banff Centre.
He is such a careful and painstaking writer that his reputation in literary circles around the world is based on only fourteen short stories, collected in two books: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, published in 1976, and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun, which appeared in 1986.
As a result of the admiration excited by these books, Alistair MacLeod has given lectures and readings from his work in many cities in Canada and around the world. He and his wife Anita have six children: they live in Windsor.
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