They continued to bring her food and to leave it at the door of her porch. Sometimes she cursed at them but at other times she was quieter. One day while they were talking she extended her hand with the long fingernails to the face of Mac an Amharuis. She ran the balls of her fingers and the palm of her hand from his hair down over his eyes and nose and his lips and his chin and down along the buttons of his shirt and below his belt to between his legs; and then her hand closed for an instant and she grasped what she had held before but would never see again.
Mac an Amharuis and his wife had no children of their own. It was thought that it caused a great sadness within her and perhaps a tension because, as people said, “It’s sure as hell not his fault.” Their childlessness was thought also to prey on him and to lead to periodic drinking binges, although he never mentioned it to anyone. For the most part, they were helpful and supportive of each other and no one knew what they talked about when they were alone and together in their bed at night.
This, I guess, is my retelling of the story told by the young man of Canna to my father and his brother at a time when they were all young and on the verge of war. All of the information that spilled out of him came because it was there to be released and he was revealing more than he realized to his attentive listeners. The story was told in Gaelic, and as the people say, “It is not the same in English,” although the images are true.
When the war was over, the generous young man from Canna was dead; and my father’s brother had lost his leg.
My father returned to Kintail and the life that he had left, the boat and the nets and the lobster traps. All of them in the cycle of the seasons. He married before World War II; and when he was asked to go again, he went with the other Highlanders from Cape Breton, leaving his wife pregnant, perhaps without realizing it.
On the beach at Normandy they were emptied into ten feet of water as the rockets and shells exploded around them. And in the mud they fell face-down, leaving the imprints of their faces temporarily in the soil, before clawing their way some few feet forward. At the command they rose, as would a wave trying to break farther forward on the shore. And then all of it seemed to happen at once. Before my father’s eyes there rose a wall of orange flame and a billowing wave of black smoke. It rose before him even as he felt the power of the strong hand upon his left shoulder. The grip was so powerful that he felt the imprint of the fingers almost as a bruise; and even as he turned his searing eyes, he fell back into his own language. “Co a th’ ann?” he said. “Co a th’ ann? Who’s there?” And in the instant before his blindness, he recognized the long brown fingers on his shoulder with their pointed fingernails caked in dirt. “ ’Se mi-fhìn,” she said quietly. “It is myself.”
All of the soldiers in front of my father were killed and in the spot where he stood there was a crater, but this was told to him because he was unable ever to see it for himself.
Later he was told that on the day of his blinding, his grandfather, the man known to some as Mac an Amharuis, died. Mac an Amharuis was a man of over a hundred years at the time of his death and his eyes had become covered with the cataracts of age. He did not recognize, either by sight or sound, any of the people around him, and much of his talk was of youth and sex and of the splendid young stallion with the loose rope around its neck. And much of it was of the green island of Canna which he had never literally seen and of the people riding their horses at Michaelmas and carrying the bodies of their dead round toward the sun. And of the strong-willed St. Columba determined to be ascetic with his “back turned on Ireland” and the region of his early love. And of walls of flame and billowing smoke.
When I began this story I was recounting the story which my father told to me as he faced the green hills of Canna on the last day of the lobster season a long time ago. But when I look on it now I realize that all of it did not come from him, exactly as I have told it, on that day. The part about seeing his grandfather in the barn and much of the story of the young man from Canna came instead from his twin brother who participated in most of the events. Perhaps because of the loss of his leg, my father’s brother became one of those veterans from World War I who spent a lot of their time in the Legion Hall. When he spoke to me he had none of the embarrassment which my father sometimes showed when discussing certain subjects. Perhaps my father, by omitting certain parts of his story, was merely repeating the custom of his parents who did not reveal to him at once everything there was to be shown.
But perhaps the story also went into me because of other events which happened on that day. After my father had finished, we started our engine and went into the wharf. By the time we arrived, the MacAllesters had gone and many of the other men as well. We hoisted the lobsters to the wharf’s cap and I looked at the weight that the scales showed.
Whether the buyers noticed the concealed lobsters behind the crate we were never to know, but they said nothing. We unloaded our traps on the wharf and then climbed up the iron ladder and talked casually to the buyers and received our money. We planned to come back later for the lobsters behind the crate.
There were still other fishermen about and most of them shared my father’s good mood because they were glad that the season had ended and pleased to have the money which was their final payment. Someone offered us a ride in a truck to the Legion and we went.
The Legion Hall was filled with men, most of them fishermen, and the noise was loud and the conversation boisterous. Toward the back of the hall I noticed Kenneth MacAllester with a number of his relatives. Both of us were underage but it did not matter a great deal. If you looked as if you were old enough, no one asked any questions. My father’s brother and a number of our own relatives were at a table in the middle. They waved to us and I moved toward them. Behind me, my father followed, touching my belt from time to time for guidance. Most of the men pulled in their feet as we approached so that my father would not stumble. The crutch my uncle used in place of his missing leg was propped up across a chair and he removed it as we approached and leaned it against the table so that he could offer the chair to my father. We sat down and my uncle gave me some money to go to the bar for beer. Coming back, I passed another table of MacAllesters. They were relatives of our neighbours and although I recognized them I did not know them very well. One of them said something as I passed but I did not hear what he said and it seemed best not to stop. The afternoon grew more boisterous and bottles and glasses began to shatter on the cement floor. And then there was a shower of droplets over our head.
“What’s that?” said my father.
Two of the MacAllesters from the table I had passed were throwing quarts of beer to their relatives at the back of the hall. They were standing up like quarterbacks and spiralling the open quarts off the palms of their hands and I saw Kenneth reach up and catch one as if he were a wide receiver. The quarts, for the most part, stayed upright; but as they revolved and spun, their foaming contents sprinkled or drenched those seated beneath them.
“Those bastards,” said my uncle.
The two of them came over to the table. They were about thirty, and strong and heavily muscled.
“Who are you talking to?” one of them said.
“Never mind,” said my uncle. “Go and sit down.”
“I asked you a question,” he said. And then turning to me he added, “I asked you a question before, too. What’s the matter, can’t some of you hear? I just thought that some of you couldn’t see.”
There was a silence then that began to spread to the neighbouring tables and the conversations slowed and the men took their hands off their bottles and their glasses.
“I asked you your age,” he said, still looking at me. “Are you the oldest or the youngest?”
“He’s the only one,” said the other man. “Since the war, his father is so blind he can’t find his way into his wife’s cunt to make any more.”
I remember my uncle reaching for the bottom of his crutch, and he swung it like a baseball bat from hi
s sitting position. And I remember the way he planted his one leg onto the floor even as he swung. And I remember the crutch exploding into the nose and mouth of the man and his blood splashing down upon us and then the overturning of tables and chairs and the crashing of broken glass. And I remember also two of the MacAllesters who were our neighbours reaching our table with amazing speed. Each of them went to a side of my father’s chair, and they lifted it up with him still sitting upon it. And they carried him as carefully as if he were eggs or perhaps an object of religious veneration, and the men who were smashing their fists into one another’s mouths moved out of their way when they saw them coming. They deposited him with great gentleness against the far wall where they felt no harm could come to him, bending their knees in unison as they lowered his chair to the floor. And then each of them placed a hand upon his shoulder as one might comfort a frightened child. And then one of them picked up a chair and smashed it over the head of my cousin, who had his brother by the throat.
Someone grabbed me and spun me around but I could see by his eyes that he was intent on someone across the hall and that I was merely in his way. And then I saw Kenneth coming toward me, as I half expected him to. It was like the bench-clearing brawls at the hockey games when the goalies seek each other out because they have the most in common.
I saw him coming with his eyes intent upon me and because I knew him well I believed that he would leap from a spot about three strides ahead of him and that the force of his momentum would carry us backward and I would be on the bottom with my head on the cement floor. It all took perhaps a fraction of a second, his leap and my bending and moving forward and sideways, either to go toward him or to get out of the way, and my shoulder grazing his hip as he was airborne with his hands stretched out before him and his body parallel to the floor. He came crashing down on top of the table, knocking it over and forward and beneath him to the cement.
He lay face-down and still for a moment and I thought he was unconscious, and then I saw the blood spreading from beneath his face and reddening the shards of different-coloured glass.
“Are you all right?” I said, placing my hand upon his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just my eye.”
He sat up then with his hands over his face and the blood streaming down between his fingers. I was aware of a pair of rubber boots beside us, and then a man’s voice. “Stop,” he shouted to the brawling hall. “For Christ’s sake, stop, someone’s been hurt.”
In retrospect, and even then, it seemed like a strange thing to say because when one looked at the bloodied men it seemed that almost everyone had been hurt in some way, although not to the same degree. But given the circumstances, he said exactly the right thing, and everyone stopped and unclenched his fist and released his grip on his opponent’s throat.
In the rush to the doctor and to the hospital, everyone’s original plans went awry. No one thought of the lobsters we had hidden and saved for our end-of-the-season feast; and when we discovered them days later, it was with something like surprise. They were dead and had to be thrown back into the sea, perhaps to serve as food for the spring mackerel with the scales upon their eyes.
That night two cars of MacAllesters came to our house. They told us that Kenneth’s eye was lost; and Mr. MacAllester, who was about my father’s age, began to cry. The two young men who were throwing the beer held their caps in their hands, and their knuckles were still raw and bleeding. Both of them apologized to my father. “We didn’t see it getting that out of hand,” one of them said. My uncle came in from another room and said that he shouldn’t have swung the crutch.
Mr. MacAllester said that if my father would agree, all of us should stop using the fickle river as the boundary between our fishing grounds and take our sightings instead from the two rocky promontories on either side of the beach. One family would fish off the beach one year and the other the next. My father agreed. “I can’t see the boundary anyway,” he said with a smile. It all seemed so simple in hindsight.
This has been the telling of a story about a story but like most stories it has spun off into others and relied on others and perhaps no story every really stands alone. This began as the story of two children who long ago went to visit their grandparents but who, because of circumstances, did not recognize them when they saw them. As their grandparents did not see them. And this is a story related by a man who is a descendant of those people. The son of a father who never saw his son but knew him only through sound or by the running of his fingers across the features of his face.
As I write this, my own small daughter comes in from kindergarten. She is at the age where each day she asks a riddle and I am not supposed to know the answer. Today’s question is, “What has eyes but cannot see?” Under the circumstances, the question seems overwhelmingly profound. “I don’t know,” I say and I feel I really mean it.
“A potato,” she shouts and flings herself into my arms, elated and impressed by her own cleverness and by my lack of understanding.
She is the great-great-granddaughter of the blind woman who died in flames and of the man called Mac an Amharuis; and both of us, in spite of our age and comprehension, are indeed the children of uncertainty.
Most of the major characters in this story are, as the man called Mac an Amharuis once said of others, “all gone” in the literal sense. There remains only Kenneth MacAllester, who works as a janitor for a soap company in Toronto. Unable ever to join the Air Force and fly toward the sun and see over the tops of mountains and across the ocean because of what happened to his eye on that afternoon so long ago. Now he has an artificial eye and, as he says, “Only a few people know the difference.”
When we were boys we would try to catch the slippery spring mackerel in our hands and look into the blindness of their eyes, hoping to see our own reflections. And when the wet ropes of the lobster traps came out of the sea, we would pick out a single strand and then try to identify it some few feet farther on. It was difficult to do because of the twisting and turning of the different strands within the rope. Difficult ever to be certain in our judgements or to fully see or understand. Difficult then to see and understand the twisted strands within the rope. And forever difficult to see and understand the tangled twisted strands of love.
ISLAND
(1988)
All day the rain fell upon the island and she waited. Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room.
She poked the fire within the stove, turning the half-burned lengths of wood so that they would burn more evenly. Some of the wood lengths were old fence posts or timbers that had been hauled from the shore before being cut into sizes that would fit the stove. Some of them contained ancient nails which were bent and twisted deep into the wood’s core. When the fire was very hot, they glowed to a cherry red, reminiscent of a blacksmith’s shop or, perhaps, their earliest casting. They would glow in the intense heat while the wood was consumed around them and, in the morning, they would be shaken down with the ashes, black and twisted but still there in the greyness of the ashpan. On days when the fire burned with less intensity because the wood was damp or the draughts poor, they remained a rusted brown while the damp wood sputtered and hissed reluctantly before releasing them from the coffins in which they were confined. Today was such a day.
She went to the window and looked out once more. Beneath the table the three black-and-white dogs followed her with their eyes but made no other movement. They had been outside several times during the day and the wetness of their coats gave off the odour of damp woollen garments which have been hung to dry. When they came in, they shook themselves vigorously besid
e the stove, causing a further sputtering and hissing, as the water droplets fell against the heated steel.
Through the window and the beaded sheets of rain she could see the grey shape of tir mòr, the mainland, more than two miles away. Because of her failing sight and the nature of the weather she was not sure if she could really see it. But she had seen it in all weathers and over so many decades that the image of it was clearly in her mind, and whether she actually saw it or remembered it, now, seemed to make no difference.
The mainland was itself but another large island although most people did not think of it in that way. It was, as many said, larger than the province of Prince Edward Island and even some European countries and it had paved roads and cars and now even shopping centres and a fairly large population.
On rainy or foggy evenings such as this, it was always hard to see and to understand the mainland, but when the sun shone it was clearly visible with its white houses and red or grey barns, and with the green lawns and fields surrounding the houses while the rolling mountains of dark green spruce rose behind them. At night the individual houses, and the communities they formed, seemed to be magnified because of the lights. In the daytime if you looked at a certain spot you might see only one house and perhaps a barn, but at night there might be several lights shining from the different windows of the house, and perhaps a light at the barn and other lights shining from hydro poles in the yard, or in the driveway or along the road. And there were the moving lights caused by the headlights of the travelling cars. It all seemed more glamorous at night, perhaps because of what you could not see, and conversely a bit more disappointing in the day.
She had been born on the island at a time so long ago that there was now nobody living who could remember it. The event no longer lived in anybody’s mind, nor was it recorded with accuracy anywhere on paper. She had been born a month prematurely, at the beginning of the spring break-up when crossing from the island to the mainland was impossible.
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