Island

by Alistair Macleod

  “Still, that doesn’t matter so much either as we only need two or three.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “The problem with that group is the way they look.”

  “The way they look?” said Archibald. “Shouldn’t it be the way they sing?”

  “Not really,” said the producer. “See, these performances have a high degree of visibility. You’re going to be on stage for four nights and the various television networks are all going to be there. This is, in total, a big show. It’s not a regional show. It will be national and international. It will probably be beamed back to Scotland and Australia and who knows where else. We want people who look right and who’ll give a good impression of the area and the province.”

  Archibald said nothing.

  “You see,” said the producer, “we’ve got to have someone we can zoom in on for close-ups, someone who looks the part. We don’t want close-ups of people who have had their faces all carved up in brawls. That’s why you’re so good. You’re a great-looking man for your age, if you’ll pardon me. You’re tall and straight and have your own teeth, which helps both your singing and appearance. You have a presence. The rest of your group have nice voices, especially the women, but without you, if you’ll pardon me, they’re kind of ordinary. And then,” he added almost as an afterthought, “there is your reputation. You’re known to the folklorists and people like that. You have credibility. Very important.”

  Archibald was aware of Sal’s truck coming into the yard and knew that she had seen the producer’s car on its way up the mountain.

  “Hi,” she said, “what’s new?”

  “I think you’re all set but it’s up to your grandfather,” the producer said.

  “What about the MacKenzies?” asked Archibald.

  “Garbage. No good at all. An old woman playing a tape recorder while seven or eight people tried to sing along with it. Wasted our time. We wanted people that were alive, not some scratchy tape.”

  “Mmmm,” said Archibald.

  “Anyway, you’re on. But we’d like a few changes.”

  “Changes?”

  “Yeah, first of all we’ll have to cut them. That was what I was trying to get around to last night. You’re only going to be on stage for three or four minutes each night and we’d like to get two songs in. They’re too long. The other problem is they’re too mournful. Jesus, even the titles, ‘My Heart is Heavy,’ ‘The Drowning of the Men.’ Think about it.”

  “But,” said Archibald, trying to sound reasonable, “that’s the way those songs are. You’ve got to hear them in the original way.”

  “I’ve got to go now,” said Sal. “Got to see about babysitters and that. See you.”

  She left in her customary spray of gravel.

  “Look,” said the producer, “I’ve got to put on a big show. Maybe you could get some songs from the other group.”

  “The other group?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “Carver’s. Anyway, think about it. I’ll call you in a week and we can finalize it and work out any other details.” And then he was gone.

  In the days that followed Archibald did think about it. He thought about it more than he had ever thought he would. He thought of the impossibility of trimming the songs and of changing them and he wondered why he seemed the only one in his group who harboured such concerns. Most of the others did not seem very interested when he mentioned it to them, although they did seem interested in shopping lists and gathering the phone numbers of long-absent relatives and friends in Halifax.

  One evening Carver met Sal on her way to Bingo and told her quite bluntly that he and his group were going.

  “No, you’re not,” she said, “we are.”

  “Wait and see,” said Carver. “Look, we need this trip. We need to get a boat engine and we want to buy a truck. You guys are done. Done like a dinner. It matters too much to that Archibald and you’re all dependent on him. Us, we’re adjustable.”

  “As if we couldn’t be adjustable!” said Sal with a laugh as she told of the encounter at their last practice before the anticipated phone call. The practice did not go well as far as Archibald was concerned, although no one else seemed to notice.

  The next day when Archibald encountered Carver at the general store down in the valley, he could not resist asking: “What did you sing for that producer fellow?”

  “Brochan Lom,” said Carver with a shrug.

  “Brochan Lom,” said Archibald incredulously. “Why, that isn’t even a song. It’s just a bunch of nonsense syllables strung together.”

  “So what!” said Carver. “He didn’t know. No one knows.”

  “But it’s before the Royal Family,” said Archibald, surprising even himself at finding such royalist remnants still within him.

  “Look,” said Carver, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “what did the Royal Family ever do for me?”

  “Of course people know,” said Archibald, pressing on with weary determination. “People in audiences know. Other singers know. Folklorists know.”

  “Yeah, maybe so,” said Carver with a shrug, “but me, I don’t know no folklorists.”

  He looked at Archibald intently for a few seconds and then gathered up his tobacco and left the store.

  Archibald was troubled all of that afternoon. He was vaguely aware of his relatives organizing sitters and borrowing suitcases and talking incessantly but saying little. He thought of his conversation with Carver, on the one hand, and strangely enough, he thought of Mrs. MacKenzie on the other. He thought of her with great compassion, she who was probably the best of them all and who had tried the hardest to impress the man from Halifax. The image of her in the twilight of the valley of the MacKenzies playing the tape-recorded voices of her departed family to a man who did not know the language kept running through his mind. He imagined her now, sitting quietly with her knitting needles in her lap, listening to the ghostly voices which were there without their people.

  And then that night Archibald had a dream. He had often had dreams of his wife in the long, long years since her death and had probably brought them on in the early years by visiting her grave in the evenings and sometimes sitting there and talking to her of their hopes and aspirations. And sometimes in the nights following such “conversations” she would come to him and they would talk and touch and sometimes sing. But on this night she only sang. She sang with a clarity and a beauty that caused the hairs to rise on the back of his neck even as the tears welled to his eyes. Every note was perfect, as perfect and clear as the waiting water droplet hanging on the fragile leaf or the high suspended eagle outlined against the sky at the apex of its arc. She sang to him until four in the morning, when the first rays of light began to touch the mountain top. And then she was gone.

  Archibald awoke relaxed and refreshed in a way that he had seldom felt since sleeping with his wife so many years before. His mind was made up and he was done thinking about it.

  Around nine o’clock Sal’s truck came into the yard. “That producer fellow is on the phone,” she said. “I told him I’d take the message but he wants to talk to you.”

  “Okay,” said Archibald.

  In Sal’s kitchen the receiver swung from its black spiral cord.

  “Yes, this is Archibald,” he said, grasping it firmly. “No, I don’t think I can get them down to three minutes or speed them up at all. No, I don’t think so. Yes, I have thought about it. Yes, I have been in contact with others who sing in my family. No, I don’t know about Carver. You’ll have to speak to him. Good-bye.”

  He was aware of the disappointment and grumpiness that spread throughout the house, oozing like a rapid ink across a blotter. In the next room he heard a youthful voice say: “All he had to do was shorten the verses in a few stupid, old songs. You’d think he would have done it for us, the old coot.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Sal, “but I just couldn’t do it.”

  “Do you want a drive home in the truck?” she asked.
>
  “No,” he said, “never mind, I can walk.”

  He began to walk up the mountain with an energy and purpose that reminded him of himself as a younger man. He felt that he was “right” in the way he had felt so many years before when he had courted his future bride and when they had decided to build their house near the mountain’s top, even though others were coming down. And he felt as he had felt during the short and burning intensity of their brief life together. He began almost to run.

  In the days that followed, Archibald was at peace. One day Sal dropped in and said that Carver was growing a moustache and a beard.

  “They told him the moustache would cover his lip and with the beard his scars would be invisible on TV,” she sniffed. “Make-up will do wonders.”

  Then one rainy night after he was finished watching the international and national and regional news, Archibald looked out his window. Down on the valley floor he could see the headlights of the cars following the wet pavement of the main highway. People bound for larger destinations who did not know that he existed. And then he noticed one set of lights in particular. They were coming hard and fast along the valley floor and although still miles away, they seemed to be coming with a purpose all their own. They “looked” different from the other headlights, and in one of those moments of knowledge mixed with intuition Archibald said aloud to himself. “That car is coming here. It is coming for me.”

  He was rattled at first. He was aware that his decision had caused ill feelings among some members of his family, as well as various in-laws and others strung out in a far-flung and complicated web of connections he could barely comprehend. He knew also that because of the rain many of the men had not been in the woods that much lately and were perhaps spending their time in the taverns talking too much about him and what he had done. He watched as the car swung off the pavement and began its ascent, weaving and sloughing up the mountain in the rain.

  Although he was not a violent man, he did not harbour any illusions about where or how he lived. “That Archibald,” they said, “is nobody’s fool.” He thought of this now as he measured the steps to the stove where the giant poker hung. He had had it made by a blacksmith in one of the lumber camps shortly after his marriage. It was of heavy steel, and years of poking it into the hot coals of his stove had sharpened its end to a clean and burnished point. When he swung it in his hand its weight seemed like an ancient sword. He lifted his wooden table easily and placed it at an angle which he hoped was not too obvious in the centre of the kitchen, with its length facing the door.

  “If they come in the door,” he said, “I will be behind the table and in five strides I can reach the poker.” He practised the five strides just to make sure. Then he put his left hand between his legs to adjust himself and straightened his suspenders so that they were perfectly in line. And then he went to the side of the window to watch the coming car.

  Because of the recent rains, sections of the road had washed away and at certain places freshets and small brooks cut across it. Sometimes the rains washed down sand and topsoil as well, and the trick was never to accelerate on such washed-over sections for fear of being buried in the flowing water and mud. Rather, one gunned the motor on the relatively stable sections of the climb (where there was “bottom”) and trusted to momentum to get across the streams.

  Archibald watched the progress of the car. Sometimes he lost its headlights because of his perspective and the trees, but only momentarily. As it climbed, swerving back and forth, the wet branches slapping and silhouetted against its headlights, Archibald began to read the dark wet roadway in his own mind. And he began to read the driver’s reflexes as he swung out from the gullies and then in close to the mountain’s wall. He began almost to admire the driver. Whoever that is, he thought, is very drunk but also very good.

  The car hooked and turned into his yard without any apparent change in speed, its headlights flashing on his house and through his window. Archibald moved behind his table and stood, tall and balanced and ready. Before the sound of the slamming car door faded, his kitchen door seemed to blow in and Carver stood there unsteadily, blinking in the light with the rain blowing at his back and dripping off his beginning beard.

  “Yeah,” he said over his shoulder, “he’s here, bring it in.”

  Archibald waited, his eyes intent upon Carver but also sliding sideways to his poker.

  They came into his porch and there were five of them, carrying boxes.

  “Put them on the floor here,” said Carver, indicating a space just across the threshold. “And try not to dirty his floor.”

  Archibald knew then he would be all right and moved out from behind his table.

  “Open the boxes,” said Carver to one of the men. The boxes were filled with forty-ounce bottles of liquor. It was as if someone were preparing for a wedding.

  “These are for you,” said Carver. “We bought them at a bootlegger’s two hours ago. We been away all day. We been to Glace Bay and to New Waterford and we were in a fight in the parking lot at the tavern in Bras D’Or, and a couple of us got banged up pretty bad. Anyway, not much to say.”

  Archibald looked at them framed in the doorway leading to his porch. There was no mystery about the kind of day they had had, even if Carver had not told him. Even now, one of them, a tall young man, was rocking backwards on his heels, almost literally falling asleep on his feet as he stood in the doorway. There was a fresh cut on Carver’s temple which could not be covered by either his moustache or his beard. Archibald looked at all the liquor and was moved by the total inappropriateness of the gift; bringing all of this to him, the most abstemious man on the mountain. Somehow it moved him even more. And he was aware of its cost in many ways.

  He also envied them their closeness and their fierceness and what the producer fellow had called their tremendous energy. And he imagined it was men like them who had given, in their recklessness, all they could think of in that confused and stormy past. Going with their claymores and the misunderstood language of their war cries to “perform” for the Royal Families of the past. But he was not sure of that either. He smiled at them and gave a small nod of acknowledgement. He did not quite know what to say.

  “Look,” said Carver, with that certainty that marked everything he did. “Look, Archibald,” he said. “We know. We know. We really know.”

  AS BIRDS BRING FORTH THE SUN

  (1985)

  Once there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea. And the man had a dog of which he was very fond. She was large and grey, a sort of staghound from another time. And if she jumped up to lick his face, which she loved to do, her paws would jolt against his shoulders with such force that she would come close to knocking him down and he would be forced to take two or three backward steps before he could regain his balance. And he himself was not a small man, being slightly over six feet and perhaps one hundred and eighty pounds.

  She had been left, when a pup, at the family’s gate in a small handmade box and no one knew where she had come from or that she would eventually grow to such a size. Once, while still a small pup, she had been run over by the steel wheel of a horse-drawn cart which was hauling kelp from the shore to be used as fertilizer. It was in October and the rain had been falling for some weeks and the ground was soft. When the wheel of the cart passed over her, it sunk her body into the wet earth as well as crushing some of her ribs; and apparently the silhouette of her small crushed body was visible in the earth after the man lifted her to his chest while she yelped and screamed. He ran his fingers along her broken bones, ignoring the blood and urine which fell upon his shirt, trying to soothe her bulging eyes and her scrabbling front paws and her desperately licking tongue.

  The more practical members of his family, who had seen run-over dogs before, suggested that her neck be broken by his strong hands or that he grasp her by the hind legs and swing her head against a rock, thus putting an end to her misery. But he would not do it.

  Inst
ead, he fashioned a small box and lined it with woollen remnants from a sheep’s fleece and one of his old and frayed shirts. He placed her within the box and placed the box behind the stove and then he warmed some milk in a small saucepan and sweetened it with sugar. And he held open her small and trembling jaws with his left hand while spooning in the sweetened milk with his right, ignoring the needle-like sharpness of her small teeth. She lay in the box most of the remaining fall and into the early winter, watching everything with her large brown eyes.

  Although some members of the family complained about her presence and the odour from the box and the waste of time she involved, they gradually adjusted to her; and as the weeks passed by, it became evident that her ribs were knitting together in some form or other and that she was recovering with the resilience of the young. It also became evident that she would grow to a tremendous size, as she outgrew one box and then another and the grey hair began to feather from her huge front paws. In the spring she was outside almost all of the time and followed the man everywhere; and when she came inside during the following months, she had grown so large that she would no longer fit into her accustomed place behind the stove and was forced to lie beside it. She was never given a name but was referred to in Gaelic as cù mòr glas, the big grey dog.

  By the time she came into her first heat, she had grown to a tremendous height, and although her signs and her odour attracted many panting and highly aroused suitors, none was big enough to mount her, and the frenzy of their disappointment and the longing of her unfulfilment were more than the man could stand. He went, so the story goes, to a place where he knew there was a big dog. A dog not as big as she was, but still a big dog, and he brought him home with him. And at the proper time he took the cù mòr glas and the big dog down to the sea where he knew there was a hollow in the rock which appeared only at low tide. He took some sacking to provide footing for the male dog and he placed the cù mòr glas in the hollow of the rock and knelt beside her and steadied her with his left arm under her throat and helped position the male dog above her and guided his blood-engorged penis. He was a man used to working with the breeding of animals, with the guiding of rams and bulls and stallions and often with the funky smell of animal semen heavy on his large and gentle hands.