Island

by Alistair Macleod

  On the day of the remembered story, though, the sea was almost serene as I placed the lobsters in the sack and prepared to hide them behind the bait bucket and under our oilers in the stern of the boat. Before we secreted the sack, we leaned over the side and scooped up water in the bailing bucket and soaked the sack to insure the health and life of the lobsters kept within. The wet sack moved and cracked with the shape and sound of the lobsters and it reminded me vaguely of sacks of kittens which were being taken to be drowned. You could see the movement but not the individuals.

  My father straightened from his last dip over the side and passed the dripping bucket carefully to me. He steadied himself with his left hand on the gunwale and then seated himself on the thwart and faced toward the north. I gave the lobsters another soaking and moved to place them behind the bait bucket. There was still some bait remaining but we would not have need of it any more so I threw it over the side. The pieces of blue-grey mackerel turned and revolved before I lost sight of them within the water. The day before yesterday we had taken these same mackerel out of the same sea. We used nets for the spring mackerel because they were blind and could not see to take a baited hook; but in the fall, when they returned, the scales had fallen from their eyes and they would lunge at almost anything thrown before them. Even bits of other mackerel ground up and mixed with salt. Mackerel are a windward fish and always swim against the wind. If the wind is off the land, they swim toward the shore and perhaps the waiting nets; but if the wind blows in the opposite direction, they face out to sea and go so far out some years that we miss them altogether.

  I put the empty bait bucket in front of the sack of lobsters and placed an empty crate upside down and at an angle over them so that their movements would not be noticeable. And I casually threw our oilers over them as well.

  Ahead of us on the land and to the north of the wharf with its waiting trucks was the mile-long sandy beach cut by the river that acted as an erratic boundary between the fishing grounds of ourselves and our neighbours, the Mac Allesters. We had traditionally fished to the right of the river and they to the left, and apparently for many years it was constant in its estuary. But in recent years the river mouth, because of the force of storms and tides and the build-up of sand, had become undependable as a visual guide. The shifting was especially affected by the ravages of the winter storms, and some springs the river might empty almost a mile to the north or the south of its previous point of entry. This had caused a tension between ourselves and the MacAllesters because, although we traditionally went to the same grounds, the boundary was no longer fixed and we had fallen into accusations and counter-accusations; sometimes using the actual river when it suited our purpose, and when it did not, using an earlier and imaginary river which we could no longer see.

  The MacAllesters’ boat was going in ahead of us now and I waved to Kenneth MacAllester, who had become a rather lukewarm friend because of the tension between our families. He was the same age as I, and he waved back, although the other two men in the boat did not.

  At an earlier time when Kenneth MacAllester and I were friends and in about grade six he told me a story while we were walking home from school in the spring. He told me that his grandmother was descended from a man in Scotland who possessed Da Shealladh, two sights or the second sight, and that by looking through a hole in a magical white stone he could see distant contemporary events as well as those of the future. Nearly all of his visions came true. His name was either Munro or MacKenzie and his first name was Kenneth and the eye he placed to the stone for his visions was cam or blind in the sense of ordinary sight. He was a favourite of the powerful man for whom he worked, but he and the man’s wife were jealous and disliked each other. Once when the powerful man was in Paris there was a big party on his estate. In one version “the prophet” commented rather unwisely on the paternity of some of the children present. In another version the man’s wife asked him mockingly if he could “see” her husband in Paris but he refused. However, she insisted. Putting the stone to his eye he told her that her husband was enjoying himself rather too much with ladies in Paris and had little thought of her. Enraged and embarrassed, she ordered him to be burned in a barrel of tar into which spikes had been driven from the outside. In one version the execution took place right away, but in another it did not take place until some days later. In the second version the man was returning home when he heard the news and saw the black smoke rising. He spurred his horse at utmost speed toward the point where he saw the billowing smoke and called out in an attempt to stop the burning and save his friend, but his horse died beneath him, and though he ran the rest of the way, he arrived too late for any salvation.

  Before the prophet died he hurled his white stone as far as he could out into the lake and told the lady that the family would come to an end years hence. And he told her that it would end when there was a deaf-and-dumb father who would outlive his four sons and then all their lands would pass into the hands of strangers. Generations later the deaf-and-dumb father was apparently a fine, good man who was helpless in the face of the prophecy he knew too much about and which he saw unfolding around him with the death of each of his four loved sons. Unable again to offer any salvation.

  I thought it was a tremendous story at the time, and Kenneth picked up a white stone from the roadside and held it to his eye to see if “prophecy” would work for him.

  “I guess I really wouldn’t want it to work,” he said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t want to be blind,” and he threw the stone away. At that time he planned on joining the Air Force and flying toward the sun and being able to see over the tops of mountains and across the sea.

  When we got to his house we were still talking about the story and his mother cautioned us not to laugh at such things. She went and found a poem by Sir Walter Scott, which she read aloud to us. We did not pay much attention to it, but I remember the lines which referred to the father and his four doomed sons:

  Thy sons rose around thee in light and in love

  All a father could hope, all a friend could approve;

  What ’vails it the tale of thy sorrows to tell?

  In the springtime of youth and of promise they fell!

  Now, as I said, the MacAllesters’ boat was going in ahead of us, loaded down with its final catch and with its stern and washboard piled high with traps. We had no great wish to talk to the MacAllesters at the wharf and there were other boats ahead of us as well. They would unload their catches first and pile their traps upon the wharf and it would be some time before we would find a place to dock. My father cut our engine. There was no need to rush.

  “Do you see Canna over there?” he asked, pointing to the north where he was facing. “Do you see the point of Canna?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I see it. There it is.”

  There was nothing very unusual about seeing the point of Canna. It was always visible except on the foggiest days or when there was rain or perhaps snow. It was twenty miles away by boat, and on the duller days it reached out low and blue like the foot of a giant’s boot extended into the sea. On sunny days like this one it sparkled in a distant green. The clearings of the old farms were visible and above them the line of the encroaching trees, the spruce and fir of a darker green. Here and there the white houses stood out and even the grey and weather-beaten barns. It was called after the Hebridean island of Canna, “the green island” where most of its original settlers were born. It was the birthplace of my grandmother, who was one of the girls in the white smocks at the Canna lobster factory in that long-ago time.

  “It was about this time of year,” said my father, “that your Uncle Angus and I went by ourselves to visit our grandmother at the point of Canna. We were eleven at the time and had been asking our parents for weeks to let us go. They seemed reluctant to give us any answer and all they would say was ‘We will see’ or ‘Wait and see.’ We wanted to go on the smack boat when it was making its final run of the season. We wanted to go with the men on th
e smack who were buying lobsters and they would set us ashore at the wharf at Canna point and we would walk the mile to our grandmother’s house. We had never gone there by ourselves before. We could hardly remember being there because if you went by land you had to travel by horse and buggy and it was a long way. First you had to go inland to the main road and drive about twenty miles and then come back down toward the shore. It was about twice as far by land as it was by sea and our parents went about once a year. Usually by themselves, as there was not enough room for others in the buggy. If we did not get to go on the smack, we were afraid that we would not get to go at all. ‘Wait and see’ was all they said.”

  It seemed strange to me, as my father spoke, to think of Canna as far away. By that time it took perhaps three-quarters of an hour by car, even though the final section of the road was often muddy and dangerous enough in the wet months of spring and fall and often blocked by snow in the winter. Still, it was not hard to get there if you really wanted to, and so the old letters from Canna which I discovered in the upstairs attic seemed quite strange and from another distant time. It seemed hard to believe that people only twenty miles away would write letters to one another and visit only once a year. But at that time the distance was hard to negotiate, and there were no telephones.

  My father and his brother Angus were twins and they had been named after their grandfathers so their names were Angus and Alex. It was common for parents to name their first children after their own parents and it seemed that almost all of the men were called Angus or Alex. In the early years of the century the Syrian and Lebanese pedlars who walked the muddy country roads beneath their heavy backpacks sometimes called themselves Angus or Alex so that they would sound more familiar to their potential customers. The pedlars, like the Gaelic-speaking people in the houses which they visited, had very little English, so anything that aided communication was helpful. Sometimes they unfolded their bolts of cloth and displayed their shining needles before admirers who were unable to afford them, and sometimes, sensing the situation, they would leave the goods behind. Later, if money became available, the people would say, “Put aside what we owe Angus and Alex in the sugar bowl so that we can pay them when they come.”

  Sometimes the pedlars would carry letters from one community to the other, to and from the families of the different Anguses and Alexes strung out along the coast. Distinguishing the different families, although their names were much the same, and delivering letters which they could not read.

  My father and his brother continued to pester their parents who continued to say “Wait and see,” and then one day they went to visit their father’s mother who lived in a house quite close to theirs. After they had finished the lunch she had given them, she offered to “read” their teacups and to tell them of the future events revealed in the tea leaves at the bottoms of their cups: “You are going on a journey,” she said, peering into the cups as she turned them in her hands. “You are going to cross water. And to take food with you. You will meet a mysterious woman who has dark hair. She will be quite close to you. And …” she said, turning the cups in her hands to see the formation of the leaves better, “and … oh … oh … oh.”

  “What?” they asked. “What?”

  “Oh, that’s enough for today,” she said. “You had better be getting home or they will be worrying about you.”

  They ran home and burst into their parents’ kitchen. “We are going on a trip to Canna,” they said. “Grandma told us. She saw it in the tea leaves. She read it in our cups. We are going to take a lunch. We are going across the water. She said we were going.”

  The morning they left they were dressed in their best clothes and waiting at the wharf long before the smack was due, clutching their lunches in their hands. It was sunny when the boat left the wharf but as they proceeded along the coast it became cloudy and then it began to rain. The trip seemed long in the rain and the men told them to go into the boat’s cabin where they would be dry and where they could eat their lunch. The first part of the trip seemed to be spoiled by rain.

  It was raining heavily when the boat approached the wharf at Canna point. It was almost impossible to see the figures on the wharf or to distinguish them as they moved about in their heavy oil slickers. The lobster buyers were in a hurry, as were the wet men impatiently waiting for them in the rain.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” said the men in the smack to their young passengers.

  “Yes,” they said, although they were not quite sure because the rain obscured the landmarks that they thought they would remember.

  “Here,” said the men in the smack, handing them two men’s oil slickers from the boat’s cabin. “Wear these to help keep you dry. You can give them back to us sometime.”

  They climbed up the iron ladder toward the wharf’s cap and the busy men reached their hands down to help and pull them up.

  The men were busy and because of the rain no one on the wharf asked them where they were going, and they were too shy and too proud to ask. So they turned the cuffs of the oil slickers back over their wrists and began to walk up the muddy road from the wharf. They were still trying to keep their best clothes clean and pick their spots carefully, placing their good shoes where there were fairly dry spots and avoiding the puddles and little rivulets which rolled the small stones along in their course. The oil slickers were so long that the bottoms of them dragged on the muddy road and sometimes they lifted them up in the way that older ladies might lift the hems of their skirts when stepping over a puddle or some other obstacle in the roadway. When they lifted them, the muddy bottoms rubbed against their good trousers so they let them fall again. Then their shoes were almost invisible and they could hear and feel the tails of the coats dragging behind them as they walked. They were wet and miserable inside the long coats, as well as indistinguishable to anyone who might see the small forms in the long coats walking along the road.

  After they had walked for half a mile they were overtaken by an old man in a buggy who stopped and offered them a ride. He, too, was covered in an oil coat, and his cap was pulled down almost to his nose. When he stopped to pick them up, the steam rose from his horse as they clambered into the wagon beside him. He spoke to them in Gaelic and asked them their names and where they were from and where they were going.

  “To see our grandmother,” they said.

  “Your grandmother?” he asked.

  “Yes,” they said. “Our grandmother.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Your grandmother, are you sure?”

  “Of course,” they said, becoming a bit annoyed. For although they were more uncertain than they cared to admit, they did not want to appear so.

  “Oh,” he said, “all right then. Would you like some peppermints?” And he reached deeply into a pocket beneath his oil coat and brought out a brown paper bag full of peppermints. Even as he passed the bag to them, the raindrops pelted upon it and it became soggy and began to darken in deterioration.

  “Oh,” he said, “you may as well keep all of them. I got a whole lot more of them for the store. They just came in on the boat.” He pointed to some metal containers in the back of the buggy.

  “Are you going to spend the night with your grandmother?” he asked.

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Oh,” he answered, pulling on the reins and turning the horse into the laneway of a yard.

  He drove them to the door of the house and helped them down from the buggy while his horse stomped its impatient hooves in the mud and tossed its head in the rain.

  “Would you like me to go in with you?” he asked.

  “No,” they said, impatient for him to be gone and out of sight.

  “All right,” he said and spoke to his uneasy horse which began to trot down the laneway, the buggy wheels throwing hissing jets of mud and water behind them.

  They hesitated for a while outside the doorway of the house, waiting for the man to go out of sight and feeling ridiculous for standing in the rai
n. But halfway down the lane he stopped and looked back. And then he stood up in the buggy and shouted to them and made a “go-forward” gesture with his hand toward the house. They opened the door then and went in because they felt embarrassed and did not want to admit that he had brought them to the wrong house.

  When they went in, they found themselves in the middle of a combined porch and entranceway which was cluttered with an odd collection of household and farming utensils. Baking pans and jars and sealers and chamber pots and old milk pails and rakes and hoes and hayforks and bits of wire and lengths of chain. There was very little light, and in the gloom something started up from their feet and bounced against their legs and then into a collection of jars and pails, causing a crashing cacophony of sound. It was a half-grown lamb, and it bleated as it bounded toward the main door, dropping bits of manure behind it. In the same instant and in response to the sound, the main door opened and the lamb leaped through it and into the house.

  Framed in the doorway was a tall old woman clad in layers of clothing, even though it was summer, and wearing wire-framed glasses. On either side of her were two black dogs. They were like collies, although they had no white markings. They growled softly but deep within their throats and the fur on the back of their necks rose and they raised their upper lips to reveal their gleaming teeth. They were poised on the tips of their paws and their eyes seemed to burn in the gloom. She lowered a hand to each of their heads but did not say anything. Everyone seemed to stare straight ahead. The boys would have run away but they were afraid that if they moved, the dogs would be upon them, so they stayed where they were as still as could be. The only sound was the tense growling of the dogs. “Có a th’ann?” she said in Gaelic. “Who’s there?”

  The boys did not know what to say because all the possible answers seemed so complicated. They moved their feet uneasily, which caused the dogs to each take two steps forward as if they were part of some rehearsed choreography. “Co a th’ann?” she said, repeating the question. “Who’s there?”