Island

by Alistair Macleod

  The man took them then, the three dirty bills, the twenty, the ten and the one, and put them in the pocket of his still unbuttoned shirt. “Aye lad,” he said, “your father is a good man and your mother a good woman; now go on back and tell them what you’ve done, and if they come to me, why I’ll tell them, ‘Sure, he give it to me, a twenty, a ten, and a one,’ just like you did.”

  When he was at the door he heard his name immediately behind him and turned to find that Caudell had followed him on silent stockinged feet and was now standing directly in front of him. And then before he could move he saw the older man quickly and quietly tuck the three bills into the shirt pocket of his guest. “Now there,” he said, “there ain’t nothen wrong. There’s no lie. You give it to me and I took it. We’ll leave it be like that. Now go on home as I hear the army starten to move upstairs.”

  And he went out then into the new day and after a while he even whistled a bit, and he thought of how he’d knock the geometry exam dead next week and of how the football pads would settle with familiar friendliness upon his waiting shoulders that very afternoon. Already he could sense the shouts and hand-claps from the sun-drenched field and as he began to jog, he could hear the golden leaves as they turned beneath his feet.

  THE RETURN

  (1971)

  It is an evening during the summer that I am ten years old and I am on a train with my parents as it rushes toward the end of eastern Nova Scotia. “You’ll be able to see it any minute now, Alex,” says my father excitedly, “look out the window, any minute now.”

  He is standing in the aisle by this time with his left hand against the overhead baggage rack while leaning over me and over my mother who is in the seat by the window. He has grasped my right hand in his right and when I look up it is first into the whiteness of his shirt front arching over me and then into the fine features of his face, the blueness of his eyes and his wavy reddish hair. He is very tall and athletic-looking. He is forty-five.

  “Oh, Angus, sit down,” says my mother with mingled patience and exasperation, “he’ll see it soon enough. We’re almost there. Please sit down; people are looking at you.”

  My left hand lies beside my mother’s right on the green upholstered cushion. My mother has brown eyes and brown hair and is three years younger than my father. She is very beautiful and her picture is often in the society pages of the papers in Montreal, which is where we live.

  “There it is,” shouts my father triumphantly. “Look, Alex, there’s Cape Breton!” He takes his left hand down from the baggage rack and points across us to the blueness that is the Strait of Canso, with the gulls hanging almost stationary above the tiny fishing boats and the dark green of the spruce and fir mountains rising out of the water and trailing white wisps of mist about them like discarded ribbons hanging about a newly opened package.

  The train lurches and he almost loses his balance and quickly has to replace his hand on the baggage rack. He is squeezing my right hand so hard he is hurting me and I can feel my fingers going numb within his grip. I would like to mention it but I do not know how to do so politely and I know he does not mean to cause me pain.

  “Yes, there it is,” says my mother without much enthusiasm. “Now you can sit down like everybody else.”

  He does so but continues to hold my hand very fiercely. “Here,” says my mother not unkindly, and passes him a Kleenex over my head. He takes it quietly and I am reminded of the violin records which he has at home in Montreal. My mother does not like them and says they all sound the same so he only plays them when she is out and we are alone. Then it is a time like church, very solemn and serious and sad and I am not supposed to talk but I do not know what else I am supposed to do; especially when my father cries.

  Now the train is getting ready to go across the water on a boat. My father releases my hand and starts gathering our luggage because we are to change trains on the other side. After this is done we all go out on the deck of the ferry and watch the Strait as we groan over its placid surface and churn its tranquillity into the roiling turmoil of our own white-watered wake.

  My father goes back into the train and reappears with the cheese sandwich which I did not eat and then we go to the stern of the ferry where the other people are tossing food to the convoy of screaming gulls which follows us on our way. The gulls are the whitest things that I have ever seen; whiter than the sheets on my bed at home, or the pink-eyed rabbit that died, or the winter’s first snow. I think that since they are so beautiful they should somehow have more manners and in some way be more refined. There is one mottled brown, who feels very ill at ease and flies low and to the left of the noisy main flock. When he ventures into the thick of the fray his fellows scream and peck at him and drive him away. All three of us try to toss our pieces of cheese sandwich to him or into the water directly before him. He is so lonesome and all alone.

  When we get to the other side we change trains. A blond young man is hanging from a slowly chugging train with one hand and drinking from a bottle which he holds in the other. I think it is a very fine idea and ask my father to buy me some pop. He says he will later but is strangely embarrassed. As we cross the tracks to our train, the blond young man begins to sing: “There once was an Indian maid.” It is not the nice version but the dirty one which I and my friends have learned from the bigger boys in the sixth grade. I have somehow never before thought of grown-ups singing it. My parents are now walking very fast, practically dragging me by the hand over the troublesome tracks. They are both very red-faced and we all pretend we do not hear the voice that is receding in the distance.

  When we are seated on the new train I see that my mother is very angry. “Ten years,” she snaps at my father, “ten years I’ve raised this child in the city of Montreal and he has never seen an adult drink liquor out of a bottle, nor heard that kind of language. We have not been here five minutes and that is the first thing he sees and hears.” She is on the verge of tears.

  “Take it easy, Mary,” says my father soothingly. “He doesn’t understand. It’s all right.”

  “It’s not all right,” says my mother passionately. “It’s not all right at all. It’s dirty and filthy and I must have been out of my mind to agree to this trip. I wish we were going back tomorrow.”

  The train starts to move and before long we are rattling along the shore. There are fishermen in little boats who wave good-naturedly at the train and I wave back. Later there are the black gashes of coal mines which look like scabs upon the greenness of the hills and the blueness of the ocean and I wonder if these are the mines in which my relatives work.

  This train goes much slower than the last one and seems to stop every five minutes. Some of the people around us are talking in a language that I know is Gaelic although I do not understand it, others are sprawled out in their seats, some of them drowsing with their feet stuck out in the aisle. At the far end of the aisle two empty bottles roll endlessly back and forth, clinking against themselves and the steel-bottomed seats. The coach creaks and sways.

  The station is small and brown. There is a wooden platform in front of it illuminated by lights which shine down from two tall poles and are bombarded by squads of suicidal moths and June bugs. Beneath the lights there are little clusters of darkly clad men who talk and chew tobacco, and some ragged boys about my own age who lean against battered bicycles waiting for the bundles of newspapers that thud on the platform before their feet.

  Two tall men detach themselves from one of the groups and approach us. I know they are both my uncles although I have seen only the younger one before. He lived at our house during part of the year that was the first grade, and used to wrestle with me on the floor and play the violin records when no one was in. Then one day he was gone forever, to survive only in my mother’s neutral “It was the year your brother was here,” or the more pointed “It was the year your drunken brother was here.”

  Now both men are very polite. They shake hands with my father and say “Hello, Ang
ie” and then, taking off their caps, “How do you do” to my mother. Then each of them lifts me up in the air. The younger one asks me if I remember him and I say “Yes” and he laughs and puts me down. They carry our suitcases to a taxi and then we all bounce along a very rough street and up a hill, bump, bump, and stop before a large dark house which we enter.

  In the kitchen of the house there are a great many people sitting around a big coal-burning stove even though it is summer. They all get up when we come in and shake hands and the women put their arms around my mother. Then I am introduced to the grandparents I have never seen. My grandmother is very tall with hair almost as white as the afternoon’s gulls and eyes like the sea over which they flew. She wears a long black dress with a blue checkered apron over it and lifts me off my feet in powerful hands so that I can kiss her and look into her eyes. She smells of soap and water and hot rolls and asks me how I like living in Montreal. I have never lived anywhere else so I say I guess it is all right.

  My grandfather is short and stocky with heavy arms and very big hands. He has brown eyes and his once-red hair is almost all white now except for his eyebrows and the hair of his nostrils. He has a white moustache which reminds me of the walrus picture at school and the bottom of it is stained brown by the tobacco that he is chewing even now and spitting the juice into a coal scuttle which he keeps beside his chair. He is wearing a blue plaid shirt and brown trousers supported by heavy suspenders. He too lifts me up although he does not kiss me, and he smells of soap and water and tobacco and leather. He asks me if I saw any girls that I liked on the train. I say “No,” and he laughs and lowers me to the floor.

  And now it is later and the conversation has died down and the people have gradually filtered out into the night until there are just the three of us, and my grandparents, and after a while my grandmother and my mother go upstairs to finalize the sleeping arrangements. My grandfather puts rum and hot water and sugar into two glasses and gives one to my father and then allows me to sit on his lap even though I am ten, and gives me sips from his glass. He is very different from Grandpa Gilbert in Montreal who wears white shirts and dark suits with a vest and a gold watch-chain across the front.

  “You have been a long time coming home,” he says to my father. “If you had come through that door as often as I’ve thought of you, I’d’ve replaced the hinges a good many times.”

  “I know, I’ve tried, I’ve wanted to, but it’s different in Montreal, you know.”

  “Yes, I guess so. I just never figured it would be like this. It seems so far away and we get old so quickly and a man always feels a certain way about his oldest son. I guess in some ways it is a good thing that we do not all go to school. I could never see myself being owned by my woman’s family.”

  “Please don’t start that already,” says my father a little angrily. “I am not owned by anybody and you know it. I am a lawyer and I am in partnership with another lawyer who just happens to be my father-in-law. That’s all.”

  “Yes, that’s all,” says my grandfather and gives me another sip from his glass. “Well, to change the subject, is this the only one you have after being married eleven years?”

  My father is now red-faced like he was when we heard the young man singing. He says heatedly, “You know you’re not changing the subject at all. I know what you’re getting at. I know what you mean.”

  “Do you?” asks my grandfather quietly. “I thought perhaps that was different in Montreal too.”

  The two women come downstairs just as I am having another sip from the glass. “Oh, Angus, what can you be thinking of?” screams my mother rushing protectively toward me.

  “Mary, please!” says my father almost desperately, “there’s nothing wrong.”

  My grandfather gets up very rapidly, sets me on the chair he has just vacated, drains the controversial glass, rinses it in the sink and says, “Well, time for the working class to be in bed. Good night all.” He goes up the stairs walking very heavily and we can hear his boots as he thumps them on the floor.

  “I’ll put him to bed, Mary,” says my father nodding toward me. “I know where he sleeps. Why don’t you go to bed now? You’re tired.”

  “Yes, all right,” says my mother very gently. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. Good night.” She kisses me and also my grandmother and her footsteps fade quietly up the stairs.

  “I’m sorry, Ma, she didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” says my father.

  “I know. She finds it very different from what she’s used to. And we are older and don’t bounce back the way we once did. He is seventy-six now and the mine is hard on him and he feels he must work harder than ever to do his share. He works with different ones of the boys and he tells me that sometimes he thinks they are carrying him just because he is their father. He never felt that way with you or Alex but of course you were all much younger then. Still, he always somehow felt that because those years between high school and college were so good that you would both come back to him some day.”

  “But Ma, it can’t be that way. I was twenty then and Alex nineteen and he was only in his early fifties and we both wanted to go to college so we could be something else. And we paid him back the money he loaned us and he seemed to want us to go to school then.”

  “He did not know what it was then. Nor I. And when you gave him back the money it was as if that was not what he’d had in mind at all. And what is the something you two became? A lawyer whom we never see and a doctor who committed suicide when he was twenty-seven. Lost to us the both of you. More lost than Andrew who is buried under tons of rock two miles beneath the sea and who never saw a college door.”

  “Well, he should have,” says my father bitterly, “so should they all instead of being exploited and burrowing beneath the sea or becoming alcoholics that cannot even do that.”

  “I have my alcoholic,” says my grandmother now standing very tall, “who was turned out of my Montreal lawyer’s home.”

  “But I couldn’t do anything with him, Ma, and it’s different there. You just can’t be that way, and – and – oh hell, I don’t know. If I were by myself he could have stayed forever.”

  “I know,” says my grandmother now very softly, putting her hand upon his shoulder, “it’s not you. But it seems that we can only stay forever if we stay right here. As we have stayed to the seventh generation. Because in the end that is all there is – just staying. I have lost three children at birth but I’ve raised eight sons. I have one a lawyer and one a doctor who committed suicide, one who died in coal beneath the sea and one who is a drunkard and four who still work the coal like their father and those four are all that I have that stand by me. It is these four that carry their father now that he needs it, and it is these four that carry the drunkard, that dug two days for Andrew’s body and that have given me thirty grandchildren in my old age.”

  “I know, Ma,” says my father, “I know that and I appreciate it all, everything. It is just that, well somehow we just can’t live in a clan system any more. We have to see beyond ourselves and our own families. We have to live in the twentieth century.”

  “Twentieth century?” says my grandmother spreading her big hands across her checkered apron. “What is the twentieth century to me if I cannot have my own?”

  It is morning now and I awake to the argument of the English sparrows outside my window and the fingers of the sun upon the floor. My parents are in my room discussing my clothes. “He really doesn’t need them,” says my father patiently. “But, Angus, I don’t want him to look like a little savage,” replies my mother as she lays out my newly pressed pants and shirt at the foot of the bed.

  Downstairs I learn that my grandfather has already gone to work, and as I solemnly eat my breakfast like a little old man beyond my years, I listen to the violin music on the radio and watch my grandmother as she spreads butter on the top of the baking loaves and pokes the coals of her fire with a fierce enthusiasm that sends clouds of smoke billo
wing up to spread themselves against the yellowed paint upon her ceiling.

  Then the little boys come in and stand shyly against the wall. There are seven of them and they are all between six and ten. “These are your cousins,” says my grandmother to me and to them she says, “this is Alex from Montreal. He is come to visit with us and you are to be nice to him because he is one of our own.”

  Then I and my cousins go outside because it is what we are supposed to do and we ask one another what grades we are in and I say I dislike my teacher and they mostly say they like theirs which is a possibility I have never considered before. And then we talk about hockey and I try to remember the times I have been to the Forum in Montreal and what I think about Richard.

  And then we go down through the town, which is black and smoky and has no nice streets nor flashing lights like Montreal, and when I dawdle behind I suddenly find myself confronted by two older boys who say: “Hey, where’d y’get them sissy clothes?” I do not know what I am supposed to do until my cousins come back and surround me like the covered wagons around the women and children of the cowboy shows, when the Indians attack.

  “This is our cousin,” say the oldest two simultaneously and I think they are very fine and brave for they too are probably a little bit ashamed of me, and I wonder if I would do the same for them. I have never before thought that perhaps I have been lonely all of my short life and I wish that I had brothers of my own – even sisters perhaps.