Remembrance

by Alistair Macleod

  And I know also that the pet shops and even the Humane Society are reluctant to take kittens, especially if they are black. There is more of a chance should the kittens be calico or tortoiseshell. I can usually tell which of the clients in my office will try very hard for the placement of such kittens. Our clinics do euthanasia as well.

  We are planning to expand our business to include the sale of pet supplies: dishes and baskets, and bowls and beds, and monograms and grave markers and even puppy pyjamas. Although some kittens are euthanized, some “teacup dogs” are valued at $40,000. There is a great love out there for life of the right kind, and for some, great care is given.

  I pull to the side of the gravel road and stand to urinate. In the darkness of the early morning, the sky is beginning to lighten. There are no headlights approaching from either direction. The coyote pack yips to the north. I am only a mile from my grandfather’s house, and although it is still dark, I imagine that the men to whom I travel are already standing in the yard. They are always up early, although there is no need.

  Perhaps they are up early because of a habit instilled in them by an even older man, a man whom I never saw but who exists in remembrance with the adjective austere attached to him. He was my grandfather’s father and apparently died in the same bed in which he was born and probably conceived. Although he was austere, both of the men to whom I travel maintain that he “saved” them, each in his way, and in so doing probably saved me as well, although I was far distant in his future. He apparently used to say to them that no one who was in bed after seven in the morning amounted to anything. This may be questionable, but all of us are early risers.

  They will see the headlights coming through the trees. They will be standing side by side as they have supported each other for more than half a century. One man near ninety and the other in his late sixties. They are like two adjacent trees that do not touch but share the same root system, although I must admit that this analogy goes a bit too far.

  Once, the older man shot the other in the ankle, rendering him permanently crippled and thus altering the path and direction of his life. It all came about directly or indirectly because of the war, which we are commemorating today. This is the older man’s last Remembrance Day where he will be standing straight and trim in his blue blazer, with his poppy firmly affixed, and his beret worn at a certain, almost rakish, angle. His eyesight is failing and his driving is erratic. Seventy years ago, in a time no one but himself remembers, he was a young man, driven energetically by sexual desire, who joined the army because of poverty and the opportunity to serve his country. And, indeed, “the war changed everything.”

  My name is David MacDonald, and I am here at the request of my father, whose name is also David MacDonald and who was once shot by the older man, whose name is David MacDonald as well. We are all part of history and “how the war changed everything,” and how this time came out of that time.

  An hour ago, I passed the sleeping and prosperous dairy farm established by my other grandparents. It was still in darkness, its silos rising like confident monuments to modern-day agriculture. These grandparents are gone now, but I will see some of their descendants later at the cenotaph. They were Dutch, and their daughter, my mother, married my father when she was a young girl barely out of her teens.

  After the war, Holland was a disaster and the Dutch government encouraged many of its young people to emigrate because it did not know what to do with them. Canada, because of “the liberation,” was “a friend,” and there were opportunities in the new country that did not exist in the old.

  The Dutch came by the thousands, many of them to Nova Scotia. Because a number of them were basically agricultural people, they purchased and settled on farms that were at first viewed as marginal or non-productive. My MacDonald grandfather jokes that after he liberated the Dutch, the Dutch followed him to Nova Scotia. The Nova Scotia government advanced loans to thousands of potential farmers so that they might establish themselves with machinery and seed for crops and the necessary animals. By the time the loans were due, all but one family had paid them off entirely. The part about the loans was told to me by my Dutch relatives, so perhaps we are just trying to gild our own lilies. I have often wondered though about “the one family.” No one seems to know where this “one family” lived, so perhaps it is similar to the Dutch supposedly having nine words for clean, although no one seems able to recite all of them.

  My Dutch grandfather once told me that during the dark days of the German occupation, a young girl who was his relative was “keeping company” with a young German soldier. Her family was in the underground resistance, and her grandfather kept a scribbler with the names and addresses of his fellow resisters in a drawer beneath his socks and underwear. She had often seen the scribbler but, in the manner of the young, paid little attention to it. One day in a discussion with her young man, the subject of the scribbler came up. He asked her if she could get him the scribbler and in return he would give her a tiny radio that played all the current pop songs. She agreed to the bargain. Most of the people whose names were in the scribbler were lined up and shot, including some members of her immediate family. The people were shot early in the morning when most of them were still in their nightclothes.

  The soldiers never came for my grandparents. No one knows why. Perhaps the soldiers had other things to do. Perhaps they ran out of bullets. Perhaps that particular page of the scribbler was torn out. Perhaps they turned two pages at once. Perhaps the scribbler itself was lost and trampled in the mud beneath muddy boots. It all seemed based on the fickleness of chance and the desperation of those caught up in the war.

  After the Liberation, the girl’s hair was cut off because she had been a collaborator, but her life was spared because it was felt she had suffered—and would suffer—enough. She, too, apparently came to Canada and blended in with the Dutch families in Ontario. Her descendants raise flowers for the large urban markets of southern Ontario. We all make mistakes, especially during war.

  Because my father was permanently maimed, he became, in his small community, a figure of some sympathy and the recipient of “a government job.” The job, with the Department of Highways, was running the road grader in summer and the snowplow in winter.

  It was traditional at this time that if there was a change of government, all the employees of the defeated government would be fired and replaced by those from the winning side. My father, however, was more or less “left alone,” and considered himself fortunate for most of his working life.

  One winter his snowplow went off the road in a blinding blizzard. Prior to the event, he had been almost frozen, protected in his cab by only a thin sheet of plastic. He had found it necessary to urinate on his hands so that he might restore some warmth and movement in his fingers, in order to handle his controls. After the accident, he limped toward the nearest light. Inside the house was a family of Dutch immigrants, including my mother. The house was warm and sparkling in its cleanliness. At this time, he and David MacDonald were living alone, dining on potatoes and salt pork or fish, with occasionally a can of beans. He was amazed at the difference in lives and at the possibilities that lay before him.

  I am thinking of this as I stand by the road. Everything going back to the war.

  In the darkness of this Remembrance Day I will go to stand with the David MacDonalds. First, they will see the headlights of my car coming though the trees. All three of us up too early for the day that lies ahead. I will smile when my grandfather embraces me and says, “Thank you for coming.” Sometimes he adds, with a smile, “We vets have to stick together.” He knows it’s a bad joke but likes the punning repetition.

  He sees me, as I see myself, as a link in a chain reaching back to the Second World War and to its aftermath. “He has never denied his love,” says my father, “and we will remember that.” I do not know the intimacies of their lives, only what I have been told. But sometimes in Toronto, I lay aside the Journal of the American Veterin
ary Medical Association and put on hold my possible expansion into the world of puppy pyjamas. And there comes to me the image of my father as a small chilled child, without underwear, laying his tear-stained cheeks against the icy whiskers of the man he worshipped as his father.

  I do not know who my father’s biological father was, and I do not know if even the senior David MacDonald knows. Perhaps the information died with my grandmother and her two daughters, who were my aunts. All of them splayed out on the highway at the wooden bridge near Tatamagouche. Never to make it to the New Brunswick border, nor to Montreal, where there were reported to be merry-go-rounds. Perhaps the young woman who was my grandmother was not only sexually enthusiastic but also hopeful of leaving behind what she perceived as poverty, and hopeful of starting a new life beyond the New Brunswick border. Because she was in a hurry to get on with her life, she left one of her children behind in the barn.

  The senior David MacDonald told me that he and his fellow soldiers once made a return visit to the Holland they had liberated years before. They were in their blazers and berets with their medals on their chests. They were older men but still able to march in formation. The Dutch lined both sides of the streets and applauded them. He said that in Apeldoorn, among the congratulatory signs, he first noticed signs of a different nature. They were held up by middle-aged people and were directed at the Canadian soldiers. They asked a simple question, “Are you my father?” In 1946, it was reported that there were seven thousand children born of Canadian soldiers who were once billeted in the Netherlands. These children, too, had, in their way, been left behind by young men who were eager to get on with their lives. Most of the old men were in marching formation and directed their eyes straight ahead.

  I put my car in gear and drive toward the waiting men. They will see my headlights coming through the trees. All of us are early on this Remembrance Day. All of our lives were affected by a war that brought its changes down upon us. Some of us were saved by actions, and some by accident, as the past produced the present.

  I feel and hear the gravel turn as I drive toward the light. I go to stand and take my place within the continuum of time.

  — THE END —

  About the Author

  Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936 and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a clifftop cabin looking west toward Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work.

  Until his retirement in 2000, Dr. MacLeod spent all of his winter months as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier University, the University of New Brunswick, and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph.D. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Indiana. Working alongside W.O. Mitchell, he was an inspiring teacher to generations of writers at the Banff Centre.

  He has published two internationally acclaimed collections of short stories: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986). In 2000, these two books, accompanied by two previously unpublished stories, were brought together into a single-volume edition entitled Island: The Collected Stories. In 1999, MacLeod published his first novel, No Great Mischief, with its ringing final line: “All of us are better when we’re loved.” Among many other prizes, No Great Mischief won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the Trillium Book Award for Fiction, the CAA–MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction, and at the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards, MacLeod won for Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year. In 2004, his well-known Christmas story, To Every Thing There Is a Season, appeared as a short gift book, illustrated by Peter Rankin.

  In the years since then, MacLeod has received many further honours, becoming an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in the United States winning the Lannan Award and the PEN /Malamud Award. He continues to receive honorary degrees, and has given lectures and readings from his work in cities around the world. He and his wife, Anita, have six children and eight grandchildren. They live in Windsor when they are not in Cape Breton.

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  Remembrance is an original story commissioned from the author by the Vancouver Writers Fest. The story was first published as a limited-edition chapbook by the Vancouver Writers Fest to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2012.

  The author would like to thank Doug Gibson for his help and editorial insight.

  The Vancouver Writers Fest would like to thank Doug Gibson, Peter Cocking, and Jessica Sullivan for donating their time and expertise to this project; Rob Sanders for his advice; and Bonnie Mah for her generous donation.

  Thanks to McClelland & Stewart and Random House of Canada Limited for their support and for publishing an e-book edition of Remembrance.

  Also by Alistair MacLeod

  The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

  (stories, 1976)

  The stories in Alistair MacLeod’s first collection are remarkably simple – a family is drawn together by shared and separate losses, a child’s reality conflicts with his parents’ memories, a young man struggles to come to terms with the loss of his father. Yet each piece of writing in this critically acclaimed collection is infused with a powerful life of its own, a precision of language and a scrupulous fidelity to the reality of time and place, of sea and Maritime farm. Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, the seven stories of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood map the close bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child.

  As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories

  (stories, 1986)

  The superbly crafted stories collected in Alistair MacLeod’s second book of stories depict men and women acting out their “own peculiar mortality” against the haunting landscape of Cape Breton Island. In a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, MacLeod describes a vital present inhabited by the unquiet spirits of a Highland past, invoking memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations even in the midst of unremitting change. As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories confirms MacLeod’s international reputation as a storyteller of rare talent and inspiration.

  No Great Mischief

  (novel, 1999)

  Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards for Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year.

  Alexander MacDonald guides us through his family’s mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in “the land of trees,” where his descendants became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past. Elegiac, hypnotic, by turns joyful and sad, No Great Mischief is a spellbinding story of family, loyalty, exile, and of the blood ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came.

  Island: The Collected Stories

  (stories, 2000)

  Alistair MacLeod has been hailed internationally as a master of the short story. Now MacLeod’s collected stories, including two never before published, are gathered together for the first time in Island. These sixteen superbly crafted stories, most of them firmly based in Cape Breton even if its people stray elsewhere, depict men and women living out their lives against the haunting landscape that surrounds them. Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, MacLeod maps the close
bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child, and invokes memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations, even in the midst of unremitting change. Eloquent, humane, powerful, and told in a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, the stories in this astonishing collection seize us from the outset and remain with us long after the final page.

  To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story

  (story, 2004)

  The story is simple, seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy. As an adult he remembers the way things were back home on the farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. The time was the 1940s, but the hens and the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the horse made it seem ancient. The family of six children excitedly waits for Christmas and two-year-old Kenneth, who liked Halloween a lot, asks, “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas? I think I’ll be a snowman.” They wait especially for their oldest brother, Neil, working on “the Lake boats” in Ontario, who sends intriguing packages of “clothes” back for Christmas. On Christmas Eve he arrives, to the delight of his young siblings, and shoes the horse before taking them by sleigh through the woods to the nearby church. The adults, including the narrator for the first time, sit up late to play the gift-wrapping role of Santa Claus. The story is simple, short and sweet, but with a foretaste of sorrow. Not a word is out of place. Matching and enhancing the text are black and white illustrations by Peter Rankin, making this book a perfect little gift. For readers from nine to ninety-nine, our classic Christmas story by one of our greatest writers.

  For more information about these and other titles, please visit

  www.randomhouse.ca.