Island

by Alistair Macleod

  The sleigh had been a gift from an uncle, so I hung on to it and carried it with both hands before me like an ineffectual shield against the wind and snow. I lowered my head as much as I could and turned it sideways so the wind would beat against my head instead of directly into my face. Sometimes I would turn and walk backward for a few steps. Although I knew it was not the wisest thing to do, it seemed at times the only way to breathe. And then I began to feel the water sloshing about my feet.

  Sometimes when the tides or currents ran heavily and the ice began to separate, the water that was beneath it would well up and wash over it, almost as if it were reflooding it. Sometimes you could see the hard ice clearly beneath the water but at other times a sort of floating slush was formed mingling with snow and “slob” ice which was not yet solid. It was thick and dense and soupy and it was impossible to see what lay beneath it. Experienced men on the ice sometimes carried a slender pole so they could test the consistency of the footing which might or might not lie before them, but I was obviously not one of them, although I had a momentary twinge for the pole I had used to dislodge the seal. Still, there was nothing to do but go forward.

  When I went through, the first sensation was almost of relief and relaxation, for the water initially made me feel much warmer than I had been on the surface. It was the most dangerous of false sensations, for I knew my clothes were becoming heavier by the second. I clung to the sleigh somewhat as a raft and lunged forward with it in a kind of up-and-down motion, hoping that it might strike some sort of solidity before my arms became so weighted and sodden that I could no longer lift them. I cried out then for the first time into the driving snow.

  He came almost immediately, although I could see he was afraid and the slobbing slush was up to his knees. Still, he seemed to be on some kind of solid footing, for he was not swimming. I splashed towards him and when almost there, desperately threw the sleigh before me and lunged for the edge of what seemed like his footing, but it only gave way as if my hands were closing on icy insubstantial porridge. He moved forward then, although I still could not tell if what supported him would be of any use to me. Finally I grasped the breast strap of his harness. He began to back up then, and as I said, he was tremendously strong. The harness began to slide forward on his shoulders but he continued to pull as I continued to grasp and then I could feel my elbows on what seemed like solid ice and I was able to hook them on the edge and draw myself, dripping and soaking, like another seal out of the black water and onto the whiteness of the slushy ice. Almost at once my clothes began to freeze. My elbows and knees began to creak when I bent them as if I were a robot from the realm of science fiction and then I could see myself clothed in transparent ice as if I had been coated with shellac or finished with clear varnish.

  As the fall into the winter sea had at first seemed ironically warm, so now my garments of ice seemed a protection against the biting wind, but I knew it was a deceptive sensation and that I did not have much time before me. The dog faced into the wind and I followed him. This time he stayed in sight, and at times even turned back to wait for me. He was cautious but certain and gradually the slush disappeared, and although we were still in water, the ice was hard and clear beneath it. The frozen heaviness of my clothes began to weigh on me and I could feel myself, ironically, perspiring within my suit of icy armour. I was very tired, which I knew was another dangerous sensation. And then I saw the land. It was very close and a sudden surprise. Almost like coming upon a stalled and unexpected automobile in a highway’s winter storm. It was only yards away, and although there was no longer any ice actually touching the shore, there were several pans of it floating in the region between. The dog jumped from one to the other and I followed him, still clutching the sleigh, and missing only the last pan which floated close to the rocky shore. The water came only to my waist and I was able to touch the bottom and splash noisily on land. We had been spared again for a future time and I was never to know whether he had reached the shore himself and come back or whether he had heard my call against the wind.

  We began to run toward home, and the land lightened and there were touches of evening sun. The wind still blew but no snow was falling. Yet when I looked back, the ice and the ocean were invisible in the swirling squalls. It was like looking at another far and distant country on the screen of a snowy television.

  I became obsessed, now that I could afford the luxury, with not being found disobedient or considered a fool. The visitors’ vehicles were still in the yard, so I imagined most of the family to be in the parlour or living room, and I circled the house and entered through the kitchen, taking the dog with me. I was able to get upstairs unnoticed and get my clothes changed, and when I came down I mingled with everybody and tried to appear as normal as I could. My own family was caught up with the visitors and only general comments came my way. The dog, who could not change his clothes, lay under the table with his head on his paws and he was also largely unnoticed. Later as the ice melted from his coat, a puddle formed around him, which I casually mopped up. Still later someone said, “I wonder where that dog has been, his coat is soaking wet.” I was never to tell anyone of the afternoon’s experience, or that he had saved my life.

  Two winters later I was sitting at a neighbour’s kitchen table when I looked out the window and saw the dog as he was shot. He had followed my father and also me and had been sitting rather regally on a little hill beside the house and I suppose had presented an ideal target. But he had moved at just the right or wrong time and instead of killing him, the high-powered bullet smashed into his shoulder. He jumped into the air and turned his snapping teeth upon the wound, trying to bite the cause of the pain he could not see. And then he turned towards home, unsteady but still strong on three remaining legs. No doubt he felt, as we all do, that if he could get home he might be saved, but he did not make it, as we knew he could not, because of the amount of blood on the snow and the wavering pattern of his three-legged tracks. Yet he was, as I said, tremendously strong and he managed almost three-quarters of a mile. The house he sought must have been within his vision when he died, for we could see it quite clearly when we came to his body by the roadside. His eyes were open and his tongue was clenched between his teeth and the little blood he had left dropped red and black on the winter snow. He was not to be saved for a future time any more.

  I learned later that my father had asked the neighbour to shoot him and that we had led him into a kind of ambush. Perhaps my father did so because the neighbour was younger and had a better gun or was a better shot. Perhaps because my father did not want to be involved. It was obvious he had not planned on things turning out so messy.

  The dog had become increasingly powerful and protective, to the extent that people were afraid to come into the yard. And he had also bitten two of the neighbour’s children and caused them to be frightened of passing our house on their journeys to and from school. And perhaps there was also the feeling in the community that he was getting more than his share of the breeding: that he travelled farther than other dogs on his nightly forays and that he fought off and injured the other smaller dogs who might compete with him for female favours. Perhaps there was fear that his dominance and undesirable characteristics did not bode well for future generations.

  This has been the writing down of a memory triggered by the sight of a golden dog at play in the silent snow with my own excited children. After they came in and had their hot chocolate, the wind began to blow; and by the time I left for work, there was no evidence of their early-morning revels or any dog tracks leading to the chain-link fence. The “enclosed” dog looked impassively at me as I brushed the snow from the buried windshield. What does he know? he seemed to say.

  The snow continues to drift and to persist as another uncertainty added to those we already have. Should we be forced to drive tonight, it will be a long, tough journey into the wind and the driving snow which is pounding across Ontario and Quebec and New Brunswick and against the granite coast
of Nova Scotia. Should we be drawn by death, we might well meet our own. Still, it is only because I am alive that I can even consider such possibilities. Had I not been saved by the golden dog, I would not have these tight concerns, or children playing in the snow or, of course, these memories. It is because of him that I have been able to come this far in time.

  It is too bad that I could not have saved him as well, and my feelings did him little good as I looked upon his bloodied body there beside the road. It was too late and out of my control and even if I had known the possibilities of the future it would not have been easy.

  He was with us only for a while and brought his own changes, and yet he still persists. He persists in my memory and in my life and he persists physically as well. He is there in this winter storm. There in the golden-grey dogs with their black-tipped ears and tails, sleeping in the stables or in the lees of woodpiles or under porches or curled beside the houses which face toward the sea.

  THE TUNING OF PERFECTION

  (1984)

  He thought of himself, in the middle of that April, as a man who had made it through another winter. He was seventy-eight years old and it seems best to give his exact age now, rather than trying to rely on such descriptions as “old” or “vigorous” or “younger than his years.” He was seventy-eight and a tall, slim man with dark hair and brown eyes and his own teeth. He was frequently described as “neat” because he always appeared clean-shaven and the clothes he wore were clean and in order. He wore suspenders instead of a belt because he felt they kept his trousers “in line” instead of allowing them to sag sloppily down his waist, revealing too much of his shirt. And when he went out in public, he always wore shoes. In cold or muddy weather, he wore overshoes or rubbers or what he called the “overboots” – the rubber kind with the zippers in the front, to protect his shoes. He never wore the more common rubber boots in public – although, of course, he owned them and kept them neatly on a piece of clean cardboard in a corner of his porch.

  He lived alone near the top of the mountain in a house which he himself had built when he was a much younger man. There had once been another house in the same clearing, and the hollow of its cellar was still visible as well as a few of the moss-covered stones that had formed its early foundation. This “ex-house” had been built by his great-grandfather shortly after he had come from the Isle of Skye and it was still referred to as “the first house” or sometimes as “the old house,” although it was no longer there. No one was really sure why his great-grandfather had built the house so high up on the mountain, especially when one considered that he had been granted a great deal of land and there were more accessible spots upon it where one might build a house. Some thought that since he was a lumberman he had wanted to start on top of the mountain and log his way down. Others thought that because of the violence he had left in Scotland he wanted to be inaccessible in the new world and wanted to be able to see any potential enemies before they could see him. Others thought that he had merely wanted to be alone, while another group maintained that he had built it for the view. All of the reasons became confused and intermingled with the passing of the generations and the distancing of the man from Skye. Perhaps the theory of the view proved the most enduring because although the man from Skye and the house he built were no longer visible, the view still was. And it was truly spectacular. One could see for miles along the floor of the valley and over the tops of the smaller mountains and when one looked to the west there was the sea. There it was possible to see the various fishing boats of summer and the sealing ships of winter and the lines of Prince Edward Island and the flat shapes of the Magdalen Islands and, more to the east, the purple mass of Newfoundland.

  The paved road or the “main road” which ran along the valley floor was five miles by automobile from his house, although it was not really that far if one walked and took various short cuts: paths and footbridges over the various tumbling brooks and creeks that spilled down the mountain’s side. Once there had been a great deal of traffic on such paths, people on foot and people with horses, but over the years as more and more people obtained automobiles, the paths fell into disuse and became overgrown, and the bridges that were washed away by the spring freshets were no longer replaced very regularly or very well.

  The section of winding road that led to his house and ended in his yard had been a bone of contention for many years, as had some of the other sections as well. Most of the people on the upper reaches of the mountain were his relatives, and they were all on sections of the land granted to the man from Skye. Some of the road was “public” and therefore eligible to be maintained by the Department of Highways. Other sections of it, including his, were “private,” so they were not maintained at all by government but only by the people living along them. As he lived a mile above the “second last” or the “second” house – depending upon which way you were counting – he did not receive visits from the grader or the gravel truck, or the snow plough in winter. It was generally assumed that the Department of Highways was secretly glad that it did not have to send its men or equipment up the twisting switchbacks and around the hairpin turns that skirted the treacherous gullies containing the wrecks of rolled and abandoned cars. The Department of Highways was not that fussy about the slightly lower reaches of the road, either, and there were always various petitions being circulated, demanding “better service for the tax dollar.” Still, whenever the issue of making a “private” section of the road “public” was raised, there were always counter-petitions that circulated and used phrases like “keeping the land of our fathers ours.” Three miles down the mountain, though (or two miles up), there was a nice wide “turn-around” for the school bus, and up to and including that spot the road was maintained as well as any other of its kind.

  He did not mind living alone up on the mountain, saying that he got great television reception, which was of course true – although it was a relatively new justification. There was no television when he built the house in the two years prior to 1927 and when he was filled with the fever of his approaching marriage. Even then, people wondered why he was “going up the mountain” while many of the others were coming down, but he paid them little mind, working at it in determined perfection in the company of his twin brother and getting the others only when it was absolutely necessary: for the raising of the roof beams and the fitting of the gables.

  He and his wife had been the same age and were almost consumed by one another while they were still quite young. Neither had ever had another boyfriend or girlfriend but he had told her they would not marry until he had completed the house. He wanted the house so that they could be “alone together” as soon as they were married, rather than moving in with in-laws or relatives for a while, as was frequently the custom of the time. So he had worked at it determinedly and desperately, anticipating the time when he could end “his life” and begin “their lives.”

  He and his twin brother had built it in “the old way,” which meant making their own plans and cutting all the logs themselves and “snigging” them out with their horses and setting up their own saw mill and planing mill. And deciding also to use wooden pegs in the roof timbers instead of nails; so that the house would move in the mountain’s winds – like a ship – move but not capsize, move yet still return.

  In the summer before the marriage, his wife-to-be had worked as hard as he, carrying lumber and swinging a hammer; and when her father suggested she was doing too much masculine work, she had replied, “I am doing what I want to do. I am doing it for us.”

  During the building of their house, they often sang together and the language of their singing was Gaelic. Sometimes one of them would sing the verses and the other the chorus and, at other times, they would sing the verses and choruses together and all the way through. Some of the songs contained at least fifteen or twenty verses and it would take a long time to complete them. On clear still days all of the people living down along the mountain’s side and even below in the
valley could hear the banging of their hammers and the youthful power of their voices.

  They were married on a Saturday in late September and their first daughter was born exactly nine months later, which was an item of brief and passing interest. And their second daughter was born barely eleven months after their first. During the winter months of that time he worked in a lumber camp some fifteen miles away, cutting pulp for $1.75 a cord and getting $40.00 a month for his team of horses as well. Rising at five-thirty and working until after seven in the evening and sleeping on a bunk with a mattress made from boughs.

  Sometimes he would come home on the weekends, and on the clear, winter nights she would hear the distinctive sound of his horses’ bells as they left the valley floor to begin their ascent up the mountain’s side. Although the climb was steep, the horses would walk faster because they knew they were coming home, even breaking into a trot on the more level areas and causing their bells to accelerate accordingly. Sometimes he would get out of the wood sleigh and run beside the horses or ahead of them in order to keep warm and also to convince himself that he was getting home faster.

  When she heard the bells she would take the lamp and move it from one window to the other and then take it back again and continue to repeat the procedure. The effect was almost that of a regularly flashing light, like that of a lighthouse or someone flicking a light switch off and on at regulated intervals. He would see the light now at one window and then in the other, sent down like the regulated flashing signals his mares gave off when in heat; and although he was exhausted, he would be filled with desire and urge himself upwards at an even greater rate.