Island

by Alistair Macleod

  After he had stabled his horses and fed them, he would go into their house and they would meet one another in the middle of the kitchen floor, holding and going into one another sometimes while the snow and frost still hung so heavily on his clothes that they creaked when he moved or steamed near the presence of the stove. The lamp would be stilled on the kitchen table and they would be alone. Only the monogamous eagles who nested in the hemlock tree even farther up the mountain seemed above them.

  They were married for five years in an intensity which it seemed could never last, going more and more into each other and excluding most others for the company of themselves.

  When she went into premature labour in February of 1931, he was not at home because it was still six weeks before the expected birth and they had decided that he would stay in the camp a little longer in order to earn the extra money they needed for their fourth child.

  There had been heavy snows in the area and high winds and then it had turned bitterly cold, all in the span of a day and a half. It had been impossible to get down from the mountain and get word to him in the camp, although his twin brother managed to walk in on the second day, bringing him the news that everyone on the mountain already knew: that he had lost his wife and what might have been his first-born son. The snow was higher than his twin brother’s head when they saw him coming into the camp. He was soaked with perspiration from fighting the drifts, and pale and shaking, and he began to throw up in the yard of the camp almost before he could deliver his message.

  He had left immediately, leaving his brother behind to rest, while following his incoming tracks back out. He could not believe it, could not believe that she had somehow gone without him, could not believe that in their closeness he was still the last to know and that in spite of hoping “to live alone together” she had somehow died surrounded by others, but without him and really alone in the ultimate sense. He could not believe that in the closeness of their beginning there had been separation in their end. He had tried to hope that there might be some mistake; but the image of his brother, pale and shaken and vomiting in the packed-down snow of the lumber camp’s yard, dispelled any such possibility.

  He was numb throughout all of the funeral preparations and the funeral itself. His wife’s sisters looked after his three small daughters who, while they sometimes called for their mother, seemed almost to welcome the lavish attention visited upon them. On the afternoon following the funeral the pneumonia which his twin brother had developed after his walk into the camp worsened, and he had gone to sit beside his bed, holding his hand, at least able to be present this time, yet aware of the disapproving looks of Cora, his brother’s wife, who was a woman he had never liked. Looks which said: If he had not gone for you, this would never have happened. Sitting there while his brother’s chest deepened in spite of the poultices and the liniments and even the administrations of the doctor who finally made it up the mountain road and pronounced the pneumonia “surprisingly advanced.”

  After the death of his brother the numbness continued. He felt as those who lose all of their family in the midnight fire or on the sinking ship. Suddenly and without survivors. He felt guilt for his wife and for his brother’s fatherless children and for his daughters who would now never know their mother. And he felt terribly alone.

  His daughters stayed with him for a while as he tried to do what their mother had done. But gradually his wife’s sisters began to suggest that the girls would be better off with them. At first he opposed the idea because both he and his wife had never been overly fond of her sisters, considering them somehow more vulgar than they were themselves. But gradually it became apparent that if he were ever to return to the woods and earn a living, someone would have to look after three children under the age of four. He was torn for the remainder of the winter months and into the spring, sometimes appreciating what he felt was the intended kindness of his in-laws and at other times angry at certain overheard remarks: “It is not right for three little girls to be alone up on that mountain with that man, a young man.” As if he were more interesting as a potential child molester than simply as a father. Gradually his daughters began to spend evenings and weekends with their aunts, and then weeks, and then, in the manner of small children, they no longer cried when he left, or clung to his legs, or sat in the window to await his approach. And then they began to call him “Archibald,” as did the other members of the households in which they lived. So that in the end he seemed neither husband nor brother nor even father but only “Archibald.” He was twenty-seven years old.

  He had always been called Archibald or sometimes in Gaelic “Gilleasbuig.” Perhaps because of what was perceived as a kind of formality that hung about him, no one ever called him “Arch” or the more familiar and common “Archie.” He did not look or act “like an Archie,” as they said. And with the passing of the years, letters came that were addressed simply to “Archibald” and that bore a variety of addresses covering a radius of some forty miles. Many of the letters in the later years came from the folklorists who had “discovered” him in the 1960s and for whom he had made various tapes and recordings. And he had come to be regarded as “the last of the authentic old-time Gaelic singers.” He was faithfully recorded in the archives at Sydney and Halifax and Ottawa and his picture had appeared in various scholarly and less scholarly journals; sometimes with the arms of the folklorists around him, sometimes holding one of his horses and sometimes standing beside his shining pickup truck which bore a bumper sticker which read “Suas Leis A’ Ghaidlig.” Sometimes the articles bore titles such as “Cape Breton Singer: The Last of His Kind” or “Holding Fast on Top of the Mountain” or “Mnemonic Devices in the Gaelic Line” – the latter generally being accompanied by a plethora of footnotes.

  He did not really mind the folklorists, enunciating the words over and over again for them, explaining that “bh” was pronounced as “v” (like the “ph” in phone is pronounced “f,” he would say), expanding on the more archaic meanings and footnoting himself the words and phrases of local origin. Doing it all with care and seriousness in much the same way that he filed and set his saws or structured his woodpile.

  Now in this April of the 1980s he thought of himself, as I said earlier, as a man of seventy-eight years who had made it through another winter. He had come to terms with most things, although never really with the death of his wife; but that too had become easier during the last decades, although he was still bothered by the sexual references which came because of his monastic existence.

  Scarcely a year after “the week of deaths,” he had been visited by Cora, his twin brother’s wife. She had come with her breath reeking of rum and placed the bottle on the middle of his kitchen table.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “It’s time me and you got together.”

  “Mmmm,” he said, trying to make the most non-committal sound he could think of.

  “Here,” she said, going to his cupboard and taking down two of his sparkling glasses and splashing rum into them. “Here,” she said, sliding a glass towards him across the table and seating herself opposite him. “Here, have a shot of this. It will put lead in your pencil,” and then after a pause, “although from what I’ve heard there’s no need of that.”

  He was taken aback, somehow imagining her and his twin brother lying side by side at night discussing his physicality.

  Heard what? he wondered. Where?

  “Yeah,” she said. “There’s not much need of you being up here on this mountain by yourself and me being by myself farther down. If you don’t use it, it’ll rust off.”

  He was close to panic, finding her so lonely and so drunkenly available and so much unlike the memory of his own wife. He wondered if she remembered how much they disliked each other, or thought they did. And he wondered if he were somehow thought of as being interchangeable with his dead brother. As if, because they were twins, their bodies must somehow be the same, regardless of their minds.

  “
I bet it’s rusty right now,” she said and she leaned the upper part of her body across the table so that he could smell the rum heavy on her breath even as he felt her fingers on his leg.

  “Mmmm,” he said, getting up rapidly and walking towards the window. He was rattled by her overt sexuality, the way a shy middle-aged married man might be when taken on a visit to a brothel far from his home – not because what is discussed is so foreign to him, but rather because of the manner and the approach.

  Outside the window the eagles were flying up the mountain, carrying the twigs, some of them almost branches, for the building of their home.

  “Mmmm,” he said, looking out the window and down the winding road to the valley floor below.

  “Well,” she said, getting up and downing her drink. “I guess there’s no fun here. I just wanted to say hello.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, thank you.”

  She lurched towards the door and he wondered if he should open it for her or if that would be too rash.

  But she opened it herself.

  “Well,” she said as she went out into the yard, “you know where I’m at.”

  “Yes,” he said, gaining confidence from her departing back, “I know where you are.”

  Now on this morning in April half a century later, he looked out his window at the eagles flying by. They were going down into the valley to hunt, leaving their nest with their four precious eggs for the briefest time. Then he recognized the sound of a truck’s motor. He recognized it before it entered the yard, in the way his wife had once recognized the individual sound of his horses’ bells. The truck was muddy and splattered, not merely from this spring trip up the mountain but from a sort of residual dirt perhaps from the previous fall. It belonged to his married granddaughter, who had been christened Sarah but preferred to be known as Sal. She wheeled her truck into the yard, getting out of it inches from his door and almost before it had stopped. She wore her hair in a ponytail, although she seemed too old for that, and her tight-fitting jeans were slipped inside her husband’s rubber boots. He was always slightly surprised at her ability to chew gum and smoke cigarettes at the same time and was reminded of that now as she came through his door, her lipstick leaving a red ring around her cigarette as she removed it from her mouth and flicked it out into the yard. She wore a tight-fitting T-shirt with the words “I’m Busted” across her chest.

  “Hi, Archibald,” she said, sitting in the chair nearest the window.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “What’s new?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” he replied, and then after a pause, “Would you like some tea?”

  “Okay,” she said. “No milk. I’m watching my figure.”

  “Mmmm,” he said.

  He looked at her from the distance of his years, trying to find within her some flashes of his wife or even of himself. She was attractive in her way, with her dark eyes and ready mouth, although shorter than either he or his wife.

  “Had two phone calls,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, always feeling a bit guilty that he had no telephone and that messages had to be left with others farther down the mountain.

  “One is from a guy who wants to buy your mare. You’re still interested in selling?”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “The other is about Gaelic singing. They want us to sing in Halifax this summer. This is the year of ‘Scots Around the World.’ All kinds of people will be there, even some of the Royal Family. We’ll be there for a week. They haven’t decided on the pay yet but it’ll be okay and they’ll pay our accommodation and our transportation.”

  “Oh,” he said, becoming interested and cautious at the same time. “What do you mean by us?”

  “Us. You know, the family. They want twenty of us. There’ll be a few days of rehearsal there and then some concerts and we’ll be on television. I can hardly wait. I have to do lots of shopping in Halifax and it will be a chance to sleep in without Tom bothering me. We won’t even have to be at the theatre or studio or whatever until noon.” She lit another cigarette.

  “What do they want us to sing?” he asked.

  “Oh, who cares?” she said. “It’s the trip that’s important. Some of the old songs. They’re coming to audition us or something in two or three weeks. We’ll sing Fear A’ Bhata or something,” she said, and butting her cigarette on her saucer and laying her gum beside it on the table, she began to sing in a clear, powerful voice:

  Fhir a’ bhata, na ho ro eile,

  Fhir a’ bhata, na ho ro eile,

  Fhir a’ bhata, na ho ro eile,

  Mho shoraidh slan leat ’s gach ait’ an teid thu

  Is tric mi ’sealltainn o ’n chnoc a ’s airde

  Dh’fheuch am faic mi fear a’ bhata,

  An tig thu ’n diugh, no ’n tig thu ’maireach;

  ’S mur tig thu idir, gur truagh a tha mi.

  Only when she sang did she remind him somewhat of his wife, and again he felt the hope that she might reach that standard of excellence.

  “You’re singing it too fast,” he said cautiously when she had finished. “But it is good. You’re singing it like a milling song. It’s supposed to be a lament for a loved one that’s lost.”

  He sang it himself slowly, stressing the distinction of each syllable.

  She seemed interested for a while, listening intently before replacing her gum and lighting another cigarette, then tossing the still-lighted match into the stove.

  “Do you know what the words mean?” he said when he had finished.

  “No,” she said. “Neither will anybody else. I just make the noises. I’ve been hearing the things since I was two. I know how they go. I’m not dumb, you know.”

  “Who else are they asking?” he said, partially out of interest and partially to change the subject and avoid confrontation.

  “I don’t know. They said they’d get back to us later. All they wanted to know now was if we were interested. The man about the mare will be up later. I got to go now.”

  She was out of the door almost immediately, turning her truck in a spray of gravel that flicked against his house, the small stones pinging against his windowpane. A muddied bumper sticker read: “If you’re horny, honk your horn.”

  He was reminded, as he often was, of Cora, who had been dead now for some fifteen years and who had married another man within a year of her visit to him with her open proposal. And he was touched that his granddaughter should seem so much like his brother’s wife instead of like his own.

  The man who came to buy the mare was totally unlike any other horse buyer he had ever seen. He came in a suit and in an elaborate car and spoke in an accent that was difficult to identify. He was accompanied by Carver, who was apparently his guide, a violent young man in his thirties from the other side of the mountain. Carver’s not-unhandsome face was marred by a series of raised grey scars and his upper lip had been thickened as a result of a fight in which someone had swung a logging chain into his mouth, an action which had also cost him his most obvious teeth. He wore his wallet on a chain hooked to his belt and scuffed his heavy lumberman’s boots on the cardboard in Archibald’s porch before entering the kitchen. He was by the window and rolled a cigarette while the horse buyer talked to Archibald.

  “How old is the mare?”

  “Five,” said Archibald.

  “Has she ever had a colt?”

  “Why, yes,” said Archibald, puzzled by the question. Usually buyers asked if the horse would work single or double or something about its disposition or its legs or chest. Or if it would work in snow or eat enough to sustain a heavy work schedule.

  “Do you think she could have another colt?” he asked.

  “Why, I suppose,” he said, almost annoyed, “if she had a stallion.”

  “No problem,” said the man.

  “But,” said Archibald, driven by his old honesty, “she has never worked. I have not been in the woods that much lately and I always used the old mare, her
mother, before she died. I planned to train her but never got around to it. She’s more like a pet. She probably will work, though. They’ve always worked. It’s in the stock. I’ve had them all my life.” He stopped, almost embarrassed at having to apologize for his horses and for himself.

  “Okay,” said the man. “No problem. She has had a colt, though?”

  “Look,” said Carver from his seat near the window, snuffing out his cigarette between his callused thumb and forefinger, “he already told you that. I told you this man don’t lie.”

  “Okay,” said the man, taking out his chequebook.

  “Don’t you want to see her first?” asked Archibald.

  “No, it’s okay,” the man said. “I believe you.”

  “He wants nine hundred dollars,” said Carver. “She’s a young mare.”

  “Okay,” said the man, to Archibald’s amazement. He had been hopeful of perhaps seven hundred dollars or even less since she had never worked.

  “You’ll take her down in your truck later?” the man said to Carver.

  “Right on!” said Carver and they left, the man driving with a peculiar caution as if he had never been off pavement before and was afraid that the woods might swallow him.

  After they left, Archibald went out to his barn to talk to the mare. He led her out to the brook to drink, then to the door of the house where she waited while he went in and rummaged for some bread to offer her as a farewell treat. She was young and strong and splendid and he was somehow disappointed that the buyer had not at least seen her so that he could appreciate her excellent qualities.

  Shortly after noon Carver drove his truck into the yard. “Do you want a beer?” he said to Archibald, motioning towards the open case on the seat beside him.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Archibald said. “We may as well get this over with.”

  “Okay,” said Carver. “Do you want to lead her on?”

  “No, it’s okay,” said Archibald. “She’ll go with anybody.”