Too well I know all of the reasons put forth against her staying here. That it is lonely and isolated. That the house is old and heated only by stoves and illuminated but dimly by kerosene lamps. That there is no telephone. That in the winter, members of her family must bring up her few groceries on snowmobiles when they can get through, and that they are uncertain of what they then might find. That the animals are awkward and expensive and that she might fall and stumble while moving about them within their winter barns.
But I know also, as do most of us here, those other aspects of her life. Her dislike of institutions and her scorn of the “ease” associated with them. After her husband’s death it was suggested by “authorities” from Halifax that she could never survive here and that it would “be better for everyone” if she were to move or put some of her children up for adoption or even in an orphanage. It would be “easier,” they said. All of us here in this overcrowded room in the early 1970s with our rum and with our music are in some ways the result of her contradiction of such suggestions. Seventy years later. “I would never have my children taken from me to be scattered about like the down of a dead thistle,” she has often said. “I would not be that dead. It does not matter that some things are difficult. No one has ever said that life is to be easy. Only that it is to be lived.” I have come today, partially at least, hoping to find such strength for the living of my life and the meeting of my death.
The music stops and the sun moves westward. Younger children begin to whisper in their parents’ ears that they are hungry and that they would like to leave. The tension seems to mount and crackle. We are waiting for the lightning that will provide us with release; looking at the balancing stone and waiting for its fall.
Suddenly and unexpectedly my grandmother says, “I hope none of you are worrying about me. Calum has said that he is going to stay here with me and now everything will be just fine.”
There is a period of unbelieving silence followed by a great gush of relief. As if the plug of a bathtub or the valve of a tire has suddenly set free the contents that had been so controlled and well contained. People look at one another and at me in stunned amazement. The solution seems so perfect that it is almost impossible to comprehend. Much too good really to be true. My parents look at me in wonder that is mingled with relief. They have been uncertain concerning my unexpected return here from Ontario with what seems like no thought of ever going back. “Perhaps he will teach in the high school here,” I have heard them say to one another. “Perhaps he is tired and needs a rest.” I have not told them or anyone else that I have returned because I know I am to die and do not know where else to do it.
Now it seems that their questions have been temporarily answered and they are glad to know that I have had some plan during the days of this past time. They nod their heads and smile across the room, though still in wonder. My grandmother smiles as if she has just played her great trump card and looks about her in temporary triumph. I have not the courage to destroy the lie she so wishes to be true.
Almost immediately there is a great movement toward departure. It is as if they are afraid that their unexpected and magical gift might suddenly vanish should they stay too long within its presence. “Good-bye for now,” they say. “See you later.” “So long.” “Take care.”
The car doors slam, the motors start and the tires turn. The poles of the gate are slid back and then replaced by my father who is the last to leave. He waves to my grandmother and to me as we remain standing in the doorway. He is the middle link of our three generations. Then he too gets into his car beside my mother and drives away. We are left all alone.
Going back into the kitchen my grandmother busies herself in setting out the supper dishes. She takes the plates from the shelves and the knives and forks from the sliding drawers. The dogs who have been outside for most of the afternoon now return to flop upon the floor and resume their roles of quiet watchfulness. The sun is moving toward the sea.
“It is no good, Grandma,” I say finally. “It is not going to work.”
“What?” she says, keeping her back to me and reaching for the cups and saucers.
“What you told them. That I will stay here. It is not going to work.” For a moment I teeter in hesitation but it seems that now I must go on. “It is not going to work,” I say, “because I am going to die.”
She turns and looks at me sharply and there is a flicker of fear upon her face which she banishes quickly. “Yes, I know,” she laughs. “We all are. Sometime.”
“It is no longer sometime,” I say. “It is very soon. Only months. I am not going to see another spring. I will be of no use to you here nor any to myself. The doctors have said so.”
“Don’t be silly,” she says. “You are only twenty-six. Your life is just beginning.”
She looks at me with almost an indulgent tolerance for the silliness of my ideas and for my distortion of reality. Like the fond mother who is told by her imaginative child that he has seen a giraffe and an elephant upstairs in his bedroom. I feel great affection for you, the look says, even though you do not know what you are talking about.
For an instant I wish that it were so. To be as silly as she thinks I am and to be back in the time when bruises could be washed away by kisses and for her to be right and me thankfully wrong.
“No,” I say. “It is true. Really true.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, and now the true note of fear begins to sound in her voice. I wonder if it matches my own.
We sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table and look across at each other, across what seems the vast difference of our separated years. We make some attempts at conversation but they are not very successful.
Suddenly my grandmother leans across the table and grasps my hand in hers. “Oh Calum, Calum,” she says. “What are we going to do? What are we going to do? What is to become of us?”
The gesture is almost a replica of the one from the earlier afternoon. In looking at her hands I notice that I have never finished trimming her fingernails. I do not know what to say. She holds my hand so fiercely, as if I might pull her from the dark waters of a dream. I try to respond to the pressure with my own hands, for I too had somehow hoped I might be saved. Suddenly both of us burst into tears. We are weeping for each other and for ourselves. We two who had hoped to find strength in each other meet now instead in only this display of weeping weakness. The dogs cock their ears and whine softly. Moving from one of us to the other they rest their trusting heads upon our laps and look into our eyes.
Sometimes in the darkness of our fear it is difficult to distinguish the dream from the truth. Sometimes we wake from the dream beyond the midnight hour and it is so much better than the world to which we wake that we would will ourselves back into its soothing comfort. Sometimes the reverse is true and we would pinch ourselves or scrape our knuckles against the bed frame’s steel. Sometimes the nightmare knows no lines.
Lying rigid now in this bed of my parents’ house all the images and emotions of the past day meet and swirl in the outer and inner darkness. The hopes and fears of my past and present jostle and intertwine. Sometimes when seeing the end of our present, our past looms ever larger, because it is all we have or think we know. I feel myself falling back into the past now, hoping to have more and more past as I have less and less future. My twenty-six years are not enough and I would want to go farther and farther back through previous generations so that I might have more of what now seems so little. I would go back through the superstitions and the herbal remedies and the fatalistic war cries and the haunting violins and the cancer cures of cobwebs. Back through the knowledge of being and its end as understood through second sight and spectral visions and the intuitive dog and the sea bird’s cry. I would go back to the priest with the magic hands. Back to the faith healer if only I had more faith. Back to anything rather than to die at the objective hands of mute, cold science.
I see that old but young MacCrimmon quietly composing the musi
c of his own death before leaving permanently the darkened shores of his misty Skye. I hear the music now and it is almost like a bell, even as I see him falling silently through the dark. How strange, I think, that anyone should even consider a violin as sounding like a bell.
I get up from my bed and put on my clothes and walk silently and carefully through the sleeping house. Outside it is very quiet. There is no industry in this region and late at night the silence is profound. The music seems to come from the ocean, off the quiet Gulf, and, no, it is not to be confused with anything else. It is not a bird or a radio or a shunting train or a passing car. It is not coming from anyone’s party. It is only itself, strangely familiar in its unfamiliar way.
And then almost in response to the bell I hear the howls of the three black-and-white border collies. They come borne on the night’s stillness, drifting along the lonely coastline that leads from Rankin’s Point. First the oldest dog and then the second and then the third. I can distinguish each dog’s cry and I can comprehend the message that their anguished voices bear. I will not be able to save my grandmother now, I know, any more than I was able to save her in the earlier afternoon.
My car follows its probing headlights up and down and around the hairpinned darkness of the road to Rankin’s Point. Some of the turns are so extreme that it is easy to overdrive the headlights. Sometimes the lights shine straight ahead into the darkness of the green foliage even as the road cuts unexpectedly to the right or to the left and becomes at least temporarily invisible. I follow it easily as if guided through a dream.
At “The Little Turn of Sadness” my headlights pick up the eyes of the waiting dogs. They are lying in different positions in the middle of the road and their eyes glow out of the darkness like the highlighted points of a waiting triangle. Red and gleaming they serve as markers and as warnings; somewhat, I think, like the signal buoys of the harbour or the lights along an airstrip’s edge.
When I leave the car they are glad to see me. He will know what to do, they seem to say. They are dogs who for centuries have been bred for the guiding and guarding of life. They are not the guardians of junkyards or used-car lots or closed-down supermarkets. Not the guardians of steel and stone but of lives as fragile and as uncertain as their own. Running silently to protect the sheep from the crumbling cliff or crouched beside the lamb with the broken leg, they have always worked closely with their human masters and have waited for them when faced with problems beyond their strength. Now they are glad that I have come and move toward me.
My grandmother lies in the middle of the road at the spot where the little brook washes over the roadbed before the steepness of the final climb. I kneel beside her and take her hands into mine. They are still warm to the touch and the fingernails are still untrimmed. No need for that now. There are no marks visible upon her body and her eyes are open and stare upwards into the darkness of the sky. The twining Scottish thistles are still pinned to the collar of her dress. This is the ending that we have.
I rise and climb the steep road until I am standing at the cliff’s edge which faces out to sea. I turn my head to the left and try to look up the coast to the home and buildings of Rankin’s Point, but I cannot see in the darkness. For the first time in the centuries since the Scottish emigrations there is no human life at the end of this dark road. I turn again to the open sea and concentrate very hard on seeing something but it is no use. My grandmother cannot see Prince Edward Island now nor ever will again. I look down into the darkness beneath my feet but there too there is only a darkened void although I can hear the water lapping gently on the boulders far below.
The music that my grandmother played in the long-ago morning of this day moves slowly through my mind. I cannot tell if it comes from without or from within and then it does not seem to matter. The darkness rises within me in dizzying swirls and seems to yearn for that other darkness that lies without. I reach for the steadying gate post or the chair’s firm seat but there is nothing for the hand to touch. And then as with the music, the internal and the external darkness reach to become as one. Flowing toward one another they become enjoined and indistinct and as single as perfection. Without a seam, without a sound, they meet and unite all.
THE CLOSING DOWN OF SUMMER
(1976)
It is August now, towards the end, and the weather can no longer be trusted. All summer it has been very hot. So hot that the gardens have died and the hay has not grown and the surface wells have dried to dampened mud. The brooks that flow to the sea have dried to trickles and the trout that inhabit them and the inland lakes are soft and sluggish and gasping for life. Sometimes they are seen floating dead in the over-warm water, their bodies covered with fat grey parasites. They are very unlike the leaping, spirited trout of spring, battling and alive in the rushing, clear, cold water; so electrically filled with movement that it seems no parasite could ever lodge within their flesh.
The heat has been bad for fish and wells and the growth of green, but for those who choose to lie on the beaches of the summer sun the weather has been ideal. This is a record year for tourists in Nova Scotia, we are constantly being told. More motorists have crossed the border at Amherst than ever before. More cars have landed at the ferry docks in Yarmouth. Motels and campsites have been filled to capacity. The highways are heavy with touring buses and camper trailers and cars with the inevitable lobster traps fastened to their roofs. Tourism is booming as never before.
Here on this beach, on Cape Breton’s west coast, there are no tourists. Only ourselves. We have been here for most of the summer. Surprised at the endurance and consistency of the heat. Waiting for it to break and perhaps to change the spell. At the end of July we said to ourselves and to each other, “The August gale will come and shatter all of this.” The August gale is the traditional storm that comes each August, the forerunner of the hurricanes that will sweep up from the Caribbean and beat and lash this coast in the months of autumn. The August gale with its shrieking winds and crashing muddied waves has generally signalled the unofficial end of summer and it may come in August’s very early days. But this year, as yet, it has not come and there are only a few days left. Still we know that the weather cannot last much longer and in another week the tourists will be gone and the schools will reopen and the pace of life will change. We will have to gather ourselves together then in some way and make the decisions that we have been postponing in the back of our minds. We are perhaps the best crew of shaft and development miners in the world and we were due in South Africa on the seventh of July.
But as yet we have not gone and the telegrams from Renco Development in Toronto have lain unanswered and the telephone calls have been unreturned. We are waiting for the change in the weather that will make it impossible for us to lie longer on the beach and then we will walk, for the final time, the steep and winding zigzagged trail that climbs the rocky face of Cameron’s Point. When we reach the top of the cliff we will all be breathing heavily and then we will follow the little path that winds northward along the cliffs edge to the small field where our cars are parked, their hoods facing out to sea and their front tires scant feet from the cliffside’s edge. The climb will take us some twenty minutes but we are all still in good shape after a summer of idleness.
The golden little beach upon which we lie curves in a crescent for approximately three-quarters of a mile and then terminates at either end in looming cliffs. The north cliff is called Cameron’s Point after the family that once owned the land, but the south cliff has no name. Both cliffs protect the beach, slowing the winds from both north and south and preserving its tranquillity.
At the south cliff a little brook ends its journey and plummets almost vertically some fifty feet into the sea. Sometimes after our swims or after lying too long in the sand, we stand underneath its fall as we would a shower, feeling the fresh water fall upon our heads and necks and shoulders and run down our bodies’ lengths to our feet which stand within the sea.
All of us have stood an
d turned our naked bodies unknown, unaccountable times beneath the spraying shower nozzles of the world’s mining developments. Bodies that when free of mud and grime and the singed-hair smell of blasting powder are white almost to the colour of milk or ivory. Perhaps of leprosy. Too white to be quite healthy; for when we work we are often twelve hours in the shaft’s bottom or in the development drifts, and we do not often feel the sun. All summer we have watched our bodies change their colour and seen our hair grow bleached and ever lighter. Only the scars that all of us bear fail to respond to the healing power of the sun’s heat. They seem to stand out even more vividly now, long running pink welts that course down our inner forearms or jagged saw-toothed ridges on the taut calves of our legs.
Many of us carry one shoulder permanently lower than the other where we have been hit by rockfalls or the lop of the giant clam that swings down upon us in the narrow closeness of the shaft’s bottom. And we have arms that we cannot raise above our heads, and touches of arthritis in our backs and in our shoulders, magnified by the water that chills and falls upon us in our work. Few of us have all our fingers and some have lost either eyes or ears from falling tools or discharged blasting caps or flying stone or splintering timbers. Yet it is damage to our feet that we fear most of all. For loss of toes or damage to the intricate bones of heel or ankle means that we cannot support our bodies for the gruelling twelve-hour stand-up shifts. And injury to one foot means that the other must bear double its weight, which it can do for only a short time before poor circulation sets in to numb the leg and make it, too, inoperative. All of us are big men, over six feet tall and near two hundred pounds, and our feet have at the best of times a great deal of pressure bearing down upon them.
Island Page 16