One summer she realized with a shock that her child-bearing years were over and that that part of her life was past.
Mainland boat operators began to offer “trips around the island,” taking tourists on circumnavigational voyages. Very often because of time limitations they did not land but merely circled or anchored briefly offshore. When the boats approached the dogs barked, bringing her to her door or sometimes to the water’s edge. At first she was not aware of the image she presented to the tourists with their binoculars or their cameras. Nor was she aware of how she was described by the operators of the boats. Standing at the edge of the sea in her dishevelled men’s clothing and surrounded by her snarling dogs, she later realized, she had passed into folklore. She had, without realizing it, become “the mad woman of the island.”
It was on a hot summer’s day, some years later, when, in answer to the barking of the dogs, she looked out the window and saw the big boat approaching. The men wore tan-coloured uniforms and the Canadian flag flew from the mast. They tied the boat to the remnants of the wharf and began to climb toward the house as she called off the dogs. The decision had been made, they told her quietly, while sitting in the kitchen, to close the lighthouse officially. The light would still shine but it would be maintained by “modern technology.” It would operate automatically and be serviced by supply boats which would come at certain times of the year or, in emergency, they added, by helicopter. It would, however, be maintained in its present state for approximately a year and a half. After that, they said, she would have “to live somewhere else.” They got up to leave and thanked her for her decades of fine service.
After they had gone she walked the length and width of the island. She repeated all the place names, many of them in Gaelic, and marvelled that the places would remain but the names would vanish. “Who would know?” she wondered, that this spot had once been called achadh nan caoraich, or that another was called creig a bhoird. And who, she thought, with a catch in her heart, would ever know of Aite na cruinneachadh and of what had transpired there. She looked across the landscape, repeating the phrases of the place-names as if they were those of children about to be abandoned without knowledge of their names. She felt like whispering their names to them so they would not forget.
She realized with a type of shock that in spite of generations of being people “of the island” they had never really owned it in any legal sense. There was nothing physical of it that was, in strict reality, formally theirs.
That autumn and winter her rituals seemed without meaning. There was no need of so many supplies because the future was shorter and she approached each winter task with the knowledge that it would be her last. She approached spring with a longing born of confused emotions. She who wanted to leave and wanted to return and wanted to stay felt the approaching ache of those who leave the familiar behind. She felt, perhaps, as those who leave bad places or bad situations or bad marriages behind them. As those who must look over their shoulders one last time and who say quietly to themselves, “Oh, I have given a lot of my life to this, such as it was, and such was I. And no matter where I go, I will never be the same.”
That April as the ice broke, for her the final time, she was drying the dishes and looking through the window. Because of her failing eyesight she did not see the boat until it was almost at the remains of the wharf, and the dogs did not make their usual sound. She saw the man bending to loop the boat’s rope to the wharf and as he did so his cap fell off and she saw the redness of his hair. It seemed to flash and reflect in the April sun like the sudden and different energy of spring. She wrapped the damp dish towel around her hand as if it were a bandage and then she as quickly unwrapped it again.
He started up the path toward the house and the dogs ran happily beside him. She stood in the doorway uncertainly. As he approached she realized that he was talking to the dogs and his accent was slightly unfamiliar. He seemed about twenty years of age and his eyes were very blue. He had an earring in his ear.
“Hello,” he said, extending his hand. “I don’t know if you recognize me.”
It had been so long and so much had happened that she did not know what to say. Her hand tightened on the cloth she was still holding. She stepped aside to let him enter the house and watched as he sat on a chair.
“Do you stay here all the time?” he asked, looking around the kitchen, “even in the winter?”
“Yes,” she said. “Most of the time.”
“Were you born here?”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess so.”
“It must be lonely,” he said, “but I guess some people are lonely no matter where they are.”
She looked at him as if he were a ghost.
“Would you like to live somewhere else?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
He raised his hand and touched the earring as if to make certain it was still there. His glance travelled about the kitchen, seeming to rest lightly on each of the familiar objects. She realized that the kitchen had hardly changed since that other April visit so long ago. She could not think of what to say.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked after a moment of awkward silence.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m pressed for time right now but perhaps we’ll have it later.”
She nodded although she was not certain of his meaning. The dogs lay under the table, now and then thumping the floor with their tails. Through the window she could see the white gulls hanging over the ocean which was still dotted with cakes of floating ice.
He looked at her carefully, as if remembering, and he smiled. Neither of them seemed to know just what to say.
“Well,” he said getting up suddenly. “I have to go now. I’ll see you later. I’ll come back.”
“Wait,” she said rising as quickly, “please don’t go,” and she almost added the word “again.”
“I’ll be back,” he said, “in the fall. And then I will take you with me. We will go and live somewhere else.”
“Yes,” she said and then added almost as an afterthought, “Where have you been?”
“In Toronto,” he said. “I was born there. They told me on the mainland that you are my grandmother.”
She looked at him as if he were a genetic wonder, which indeed he seemed to be.
“Oh,” she said.
“I have to go now,” he repeated, “but I’ll see you later. I’ll come back.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes, we will.”
And then he was gone. She sat transfixed, not daring to move. Part of her felt that she should rush and call him back and another fearful part told her she should not know what she might see. Finally she went to the window. Halfway across to the mainland there was a single man in a boat but she could make no clear identification. She did not say anything to anyone about the visit. She could think of no way she could tactfully introduce it. After years of secrecy it seemed a dangerous time to bring up the subject of the red-haired man. Perhaps, again, no one else had seen him? She did not wish to add further evidence to her designation as “the mad woman of the island.” She scanned the faces of her relatives carefully but could find nothing. Perhaps he had visited them, she thought, and they had told him not to come. Perhaps they considered themselves in the business of not disturbing the disturbed.
Now as the October rain fell she added yet another stick to the fire. She was no longer bothered by the declining stock of wood because she would not need it for the winter. The rains fell, turning more to the consistency of hail and she knew this by the sound as well as by her sight. She looked away from the door as she had so many years ago, the first time at the table rock. Deliberately not looking in the direction of his possible coming so that she could not see him not coming if that was the way it was supposed to be. She waited, listening to the regular patterns of the rain, and wondered if she were on the verge of sleep. Suddenly the door blew open and the hail-like rain skittered across the floor.
The wet dogs moved from beneath the table and she heard them rather than saw. Perhaps she should mop the wet floor, she thought, but then she remembered that they planned to tear the house down anyway and its cleanliness seemed like a minor virtue. The water rippled across the floor in rolling little wind-driven waves. The dog came in, its nails clacking across the floor even as little spurts of water rose from beneath its padded paws. It came and laid its head upon her lap. She got up, not daring to believe. Outside it was wet and windy and she followed the dog down the darkened path. And then in the revolving cycle of the high lighthouse light she saw in a single white instant the dark shape of the boat bobbing at the wharf and his straight but dripping form by the corner of the shanties.
They moved toward each other.
“Oh,” she said, digging her fingernails into the dampness of his neck.
“I told you I’d come back,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh yes. You did.”
She ran her fingers over his face in the darkness and when the light revolved again she saw the blueness of his eyes and his red hair darkened by the dripping water. He was not wearing any earring.
“How old are you?” she asked, embarrassed by the girlish triviality of the question which had bothered her all these years.
“Twenty-one,” he said. “I thought I told you.”
He took her hands and walked backward while facing her, down to the darkness of the bobbing boat and the rolling sea.
“Come,” he said. “Come with me. It is time we went to live somewhere else.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes we will.”
She dug her nails into the palms of his hands as he guided her over the spume-drenched rocks.
“This boat,” he said, “has to be back before dawn.”
The wind was rising as the temperature was dropping. The hail-like rain had given way to stinging snow and the ground they left behind was beginning to freeze.
A dog barked once. And when the light revolved, its solitary beam found no MacPhedrans on the island or the sea.
CLEARANCES
(1999)
In the early morning he was awakened by the dog’s pulling at the Condon’s woollen blanket, which was the top covering upon his bed. The blanket was now a sort of yellow-beige although at one time, he thought, it must have been white. The blanket was made from the wool of the sheep he and his wife used to keep and it was now over half a century old. When they used to shear the sheep in the spring they would set aside some of the best fleeces and send them to Condon’s Woollen Mill in Charlottetown; and after some months, it seemed miraculously, the box of blankets would arrive. In the corner of each blanket would be a label which read, “William Condon and Sons, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island,” and the Condon’s Latin motto, which was Clementia in Potentia.
Once, when they were much older, their married son, John, and his wife had taken them on a trip to Prince Edward Island. It was in July and they left Cape Breton on a Friday and came back on Sunday afternoon. This was in the time before the Anne of Green Gables craze and they did not really know what people were supposed to visit on Prince Edward Island, so on Saturday morning they went to look at Condon’s Woollen Mill because it was the name that was most familiar to them. And there it sat. He remembered that they had put on their good clothes although they did not know why, and that he had placed his hat upon his knee because of the perspiration that gathered on his hatband and on his brow. They did not get out of their car but merely looked at the woollen mill through the haze of the July heat. Perhaps they had expected to see Mr. Condon or one of his sons busily converting wool into blankets, but they saw nothing. Later his wife was to tell her friends, “We visited Condon’s Woollen Mill on Prince Edward Island,” as if they had visited a religious shrine or a monument of historical significance and, he thought, she was probably right.
Sometimes in the early passion of their love they would throw the blanket back over his shoulder toward the foot of the bed, or sometimes it would land on the floor by the bed’s side. Later, when their ardour had cooled, he would retrieve it and spread it carefully over his wife’s shoulders and his own. His wife always slept on the side of the bed closest to the wall, while he slept on the outside in a protective manner. He was always the last person to go to bed and the first to rise. It was the sleeping pattern followed by his own parents and his grandparents as well.
The blanket had been on them when his wife died; died without a sound or a shudder. He had been talking to her for a while in the early morning darkness. He had on his heavy woollen Stanfield’s underwear and she her winter nightgown, and the bed was warm from their mutual heat. At first he had thought she was playing a trick on him by refusing to answer or that she was still sleeping, but then in an instant of full wakefulness he recognized the absence of her regular breathing and reached his hand, in the winter darkness, towards her quiet face. It was cool to his touch because of its exposure to the winter air, but when he grasped her hand which lay beneath the blankets it was still warm and seemed to close around his own. He got up, and, trying not to panic, phoned his married children who lived nearby. At first they seemed sceptical in their early morning grogginess, asking him if he was “sure.” Perhaps she was only sleeping more soundly than usual? He noticed the whiteness of his knuckles as he grasped the telephone receiver too tightly, trying to get a grip, not only on the receiver, but on the whole frightening situation. Trying to control his voice and remain calm in delivering a message he did not want to deliver and they did not wish to receive. Finally they seemed convinced, but then he noticed the panic rising in their own voices even as he attempted to control it in his own. He found himself trying to recapture the soothing tone of his early fatherhood, speaking to his married, middle-aged children in a manner he might have used thirty or forty years ago in the face of some childhood disaster. With the coming of the VCR and the microwave and the computer and digital recording and so much more, both he and his wife felt that they were becoming the children and he sometimes recognized in his children’s voices that adult tone of impatience that might have been his at an earlier time. Sometimes he thought the tone bordered on condescension. But now the roles were suddenly reversed once again. “We will have to do the best we can,” he heard himself saying. “I will phone the ambulance and the doctor and the clergyman. It is still early in the morning and most of the world is not yet awake. We will contact the authorities before making any long-distance calls. No, there is no reason to come over here right away. I am fine for a while.”
He went back to the bed and pulled the Condon’s woollen blanket over her face, but before he did so, he laid his cheek against what he thought of as the stilled beating of her heart.
The previous summer she had been given a variety of multicoloured pills by the doctor, but they had caused dizziness and drowsiness and a variety of skin eruptions, and she had said, “I wanted to feel better, not worse.” One summer’s day she opened the screen door and flung all of the pills into the yard. The flock of hens, who always responded to the table scraps flying from the door, raced towards the bounty. Later, five of the most aggressive hens were found dead. “If they did that to the hens,” she had said, “what would they do to me?” He had agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to join her in a pact of secrecy. “You don’t tell children everything,” she had said. “You know that.”
It was now ten years later and, of course, he did not think all of these thoughts as the dog pulled at the blanket. Still, they would all come to him later, as they had every day since her death.
He still lived in the house his grandfather had built. It was a large wooden house modelled after the others of its time. It had always appeared quite splendid from the outside but the inside, particularly the upstairs, had remained unfinished for years. For him and his wife it had been their project “to finish it” over the decades of their marriage. They had worked at converting the vast upstairs expanse into individual rooms, drywalling one room and w
allpapering another whenever money was available. By the time they had finished the upstairs rooms, the children for whom the rooms had been intended had already begun to leave home; their older daughters going first, as had their aunts, to Boston or Toronto. Now there was only himself and his dog, and when he visited the upstairs rooms they seemed like a museum that he had had a hand in creating.
When he was a child, the vast upstairs contained only one room with a door, where his grandfather slept. The rest had been roughly sectioned into a girls’ side and a much smaller boys’ side, as he was the only boy. The sections were separated by a series of worn blankets strung on wires. His parents had slept downstairs in the room he occupied now.
As his parents’ only son he had gone into the fishing boat with his father when he was eleven or twelve. His grandfather would go with them, sitting on an overturned bait bucket, chewing and spitting tobacco and rising frequently to attempt urination over the boat’s side. The old man, he realized now, probably suffered from prostate trouble but had never in all his life been to a doctor. His grandfather seemed always to understand the weather and the tides and where the fish were, as if operating by private radar. They fished for lobster and haddock and herring and hake. In the summer they set their hereditary salmon net.
They conducted almost all of their lives in Gaelic, as had the previous generations for over one hundred years. But in the years between the two world wars they realized, when selling their cattle or lambs or their catches of fish, that they were disadvantaged by language. He remembered his grandfather growing red in the face beneath his white whiskers as he attempted to deal with the English-speaking buyers. Sending Gaelic words out and receiving English words back; most of the words falling somewhere into the valley of noncomprehension that yawned between them. Across the river the French-speaking Acadians seemed the same, as did the Mi’kmaq to the east. All of them trapped in the beautiful prisons of the languages they loved. “We will have to do better than this,” said his grandfather testily. “We will have to learn English. We will have to go forward.”
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