I would wait then for the bouncers and the line drives and the ground balls with delicious intensity. I would hope that each ball would be hit to me, and I do not recall any of them getting by. I would lunge and leap and bend and fall and pivot and turn and then hope that the next one might once again be mine. In my small area of the earth it seemed that everything was under my control.
The Tuning of Perfection
HE THOUGHT of himself, in the middle of that April, as a man who had made it through another winter. He was seventy-eight years old and it seems best to give his exact age now, rather than trying to rely on such descriptions as “old” or “vigorous” or “younger than his years.” He was seventy-eight and a tall, slim man with dark hair and brown eyes and his own teeth. He was frequently described as “neat” because he always appeared clean-shaven and the clothes he wore were clean and in order. He wore suspenders instead of a belt because he felt they kept his trousers “in line” instead of allowing them to sag sloppily down his waist, revealing too much of his shirt. And when he went out in public, he always wore shoes. In cold or muddy weather, he wore overshoes or rubbers or what he called “overboots” – the rubber kind with the zippers in the front, to protect his shoes. He never wore the more common rubber boots in public – although, of course, he owned them and kept them neatly on a piece of clean cardboard in a corner of his porch.
He lived alone near the top of the mountain in a house which he himself had built when he was a much younger man. There had once been another house in the same clearing, and the hollow of its cellar was still visible as well as a few of the moss-covered stones which had formed its early foundation. This “ex-house” had been built by his great-grandfather shortly after he had come from the Isle of Skye and it was still referred to as “the first house” or sometimes as “the old house,” although it was no longer there. No one was really sure why his great-grandfather had built the house so high up on the mountain, especially when one considered that he had been granted a great deal of land and there were more accessible spots upon it where one might build a house. Some thought that since he was a lumberman he had wanted to start on top of the mountain and log his way down. Others thought that because of the violence he had left in Scotland he wanted to be inaccessible in the new world and wanted to be able to see any potential enemies before they could see him. Others thought that he had merely wanted to be alone, while another group maintained that he had built it for the view. All of the reasons became confused and intermingled with the passing of the generations and the distancing of the man from Skye. Perhaps the theory of the view proved the most enduring because although the man from Skye and the house he built were no longer visible, the view still was. And it was truly spectacular. One could see for miles along the floor of the valley and over the tops of the smaller mountains and when one looked to the west there was the sea. There it was possible to see the various fishing boats of summer and the sealing ships of winter and the lines of Prince Edward Island and the flat shapes of the Magdalen Islands and, more to the east, the purple mass of Newfoundland.
The paved road or the “main road” which ran along the valley floor was five miles by automobile from his house, although it was not really that far if one walked and took various short cuts: paths and footbridges over the various tumbling brooks and creeks that spilled down the mountain’s side. Once there had been a great deal of traffic on such paths, people on foot and people with horses, but over the years as more and more people obtained automobiles, the paths fell into disuse and became overgrown, and the bridges which were washed away by the spring freshets were no longer replaced very regularly or very well.
The section of winding road that led to his house and ended in his yard had been a bone of contention for many years, as had some of the other sections as well. Most of the people on the upper reaches of the mountain were his relatives and they were all on sections of the land granted to the man from Skye. Some of the road was “public” and therefore eligible to be maintained by the Department of Highways. Other sections of it, including his, were “private” so they were not maintained at all by government but only by the people living along them. As he lived a mile above the “second last” or the “second” house – depending upon which way you were counting – he did not receive visits from the grader or the gravel truck, or the snow plough in winter. It was generally assumed that the Department of Highways was secretly glad that it did not have to send its men or equipment up the twisting switchbacks and around the hairpin turns which skirted the treacherous gullies containing the wrecks of rolled and abandoned cars. The Department of Highways was not that fussy about the slightly lower reaches of the road either and there were always various petitions being circulated, demanding “better service for the tax dollar.” Still, whenever the issue of making a “private” section of the road “public” was raised, there were always counter-petitions that circulated and used phrases like “keeping the land of our fathers ours.” Three miles down the mountain, though (or two miles up), there was a nice wide “turn-around” for the school bus, and up to and including that spot the road was maintained as well as any other of its kind.
He did not mind living alone up on the mountain, saying that he got great television reception, which was of course true – although it was a relatively new justification. There was no television when he built the house in the two years prior to 1927 and when he was filled with the fever of his approaching marriage. Even then, people wondered why he was “going up the mountain” while many of the others were coming down, but he paid them little mind, working at it in determined perfection in the company of his twin brother and getting the others only when it was absolutely necessary: for the raising of the roof beams and the fitting of the gables.
He and his wife had been the same age and were almost consumed by one another while they were still quite young. Neither had ever had another boyfriend or girlfriend but he had told her they would not marry until he had completed the house. He wanted the house so that they could be “alone together” as soon as they were married, rather than moving in with in-laws or relatives for a while, as was frequently the custom of the time. So he had worked at it determinedly and desperately, anticipating the time when he could end “his life” and begin “their lives.”
He and his twin brother had built it in “the old way,” which meant making their own plans and cutting all the logs themselves and “snigging” them out with their horses and setting up their own saw mill and planing mill. And deciding also to use wooden pegs in the roof timbers instead of nails; so that the house would move in the mountain’s winds – like a ship -move but not capsize, move yet still return.
In the summer before the marriage, his wife-to-be had worked as hard as he, carrying lumber and swinging a hammer; and when her father suggested she was doing too much masculine work, she had replied, “I am doing what I want to do. I am doing it for us.”
During the building of their house, they often sang together and the language of their singing was Gaelic. Sometimes one of them would sing the verses and the other the chorus and, at other times, they would sing the verses and choruses together and all the way through. Some of the songs contained at least fifteen or twenty verses and it would take a long time to complete them. On clear still days all of the people living down along the mountain’s side and even below in the valley could hear the banging of their hammers and the youthful power of their voices.
They were married on a Saturday in late September and their first daughter was born exactly nine months later, which was an item of brief and passing interest. And their second daughter was born barely eleven months after their first. During the winter months of that time he worked in a lumber camp some fifteen miles away, cutting pulp for $1.75 a cord and getting $40.00 a month for his team of horses as well. Rising at five-thirty and working until after seven in the evening and sleeping on a bunk with a mattress made from boughs.
Sometimes he would come home
on the weekends and on the clear, winter nights she would hear the distinctive sound of his horses’ bells as they left the valley floor to begin their ascent up the mountain’s side. Although the climb was steep, the horses would walk faster because they knew they were coming home, even breaking into a trot on the more level areas and causing their bells to accelerate accordingly. Sometimes he would get out of the wood sleigh and run beside the horses or ahead of them in order to keep warm and also to convince himself that he was getting home faster.
When she heard the bells she would take the lamp and move it from one window to the other and then take it back again and continue to repeat the procedure. The effect was almost that of a regularly flashing light, like that of a lighthouse or someone flicking a light switch off and on at regulated intervals. He would see the light now at one window and then in the other, sent down like the regulated flashing signals his mares gave off when in heat; and although he was exhausted, he would be filled with desire and urge himself upwards at an even greater rate.
After he had stabled his horses and fed them, he would go into their house and they would meet one another in the middle of the kitchen floor, holding and going into one another sometimes while the snow and frost still hung so heavily on his clothes that they creaked when he moved or steamed near the presence of the stove. The lamp would be stilled on the kitchen table and they would be alone. Only the monogamous eagles who nested in the hemlock tree even farther up the mountain seemed above them.
They were married for five years in an intensity which it seemed could never last, going more and more into each other and excluding most others for the company of themselves.
When she went into premature labour in February of 1931, he was not at home because it was still six weeks before the expected birth and they had decided that he would stay in the camp a little longer in order to earn the extra money they needed for their fourth child.
There had been heavy snows in the area and high winds and then it had turned bitterly cold, all in the span of a day and a half. It had been impossible to get down from the mountain and get word to him in the camp, although his twin brother managed to walk in on the second day, bringing him the news that everyone on the mountain already knew: that he had lost his wife and what might have been his first-born son. The snow was higher than his twin brother’s head when they saw him coming into the camp. He was soaked with perspiration from fighting the drifts and pale and shaking and he began to throw up in the yard of the camp almost before he could deliver his message.
He had left immediately, leaving his brother behind to rest, while following his incoming tracks back out. He could not believe it, could not believe that she had somehow gone without him, could not believe that in their closeness he was still the last to know and that in spite of hoping “to live alone together” she had somehow died surrounded by others, but without him and really alone in the ultimate sense. He could not believe that in the closeness of their beginning there had been separation in their end. He had tried to hope that there might be some mistake; but the image of his brother, pale and shaken and vomiting in the packed-down snow of the lumber camp’s yard, dispelled any such possibility.
He was numb throughout all of the funeral preparations and the funeral itself. His wife’s sisters looked after his three small daughters who, while they sometimes called for their mother, seemed almost to welcome the lavish attention visited upon them. On the afternoon following the funeral the pneumonia which his twin brother had developed after his walk into the camp worsened and he had gone to sit beside his bed, holding his hand, at least able to be present this time, yet aware of the disapproving looks of Cora, his brother’s wife, who was a woman he had never liked. Looks which said: If he had not gone for you, this would never have happened. Sitting there while his brother’s chest deepened in spite of the poultices and the liniments and even the administrations of the doctor who finally made it up the mountain road and pronounced the pneumonia “surprisingly advanced.”
After the death of his brother the numbness continued. He felt as those who lose all of their family in the midnight fire or on the sinking ship. Suddenly and without survivors. He felt guilt for his wife and for his brother’s fatherless children and for his daughters who would now never know their mother. And he felt terribly alone.
His daughters stayed with him for a while as he tried to do what their mother had done. But gradually his wife’s sisters began to suggest that the girls would be better off with them. At first he opposed the idea because both he and his wife had never been overly fond of her sisters, considering them somehow more vulgar than they were themselves. But gradually it became apparent that if he were ever to return to the woods and earn a living, someone would have to look after three children under the age of four. He was torn for the remainder of the winter months and into the spring, sometimes appreciating what he felt was the intended kindness of his in-laws and at other times angry at certain overheard remarks: “It is not right for three little girls to be alone up on that mountain with that man, a young man.” As if he were more interesting as a potential child molester than simply as a father. Gradually his daughters began to spend evenings and weekends with their aunts and then weeks and then in the manner of small children, they no longer cried when he left, or clung to his legs, or sat in the window to await his approach. And then they began to call him “Archibald,” as did the other members of the households in which they lived. So that in the end he seemed neither husband nor brother nor even father but only “Archibald.” He was twenty-seven years old.
He had always been called Archibald or sometimes in Gaelic “Gilleasbuig.” Perhaps because of what was perceived as a kind of formality that hung about him, no one ever called him “Arch” or the more familiar and common “Archie.” He did not look or act “like an Archie,” as they said. And with the passing of the years, letters came that were addressed simply to “Archibald” and which bore a variety of addresses covering a radius of some forty milles. Many of the letters in the later years came from the folklorists who had “discovered” him in the 1960s and for whom he had made various tapes and recordings. And he had come to be regarded as “the last of the authentic old-time Gaelic singers.” He was faithfully recorded in the archives at Sydney and Halifax and Ottawa and his picture had appeared in various scholarly and less scholarly journals; sometimes with the arms of the folklorists around him, sometimes holding one of his horses and sometimes standing beside his shining pickup truck which bore a bumper sticker which read “Suas Leis A’ Ghaidlig.” Sometimes the articles bore titles such as “Cape Breton Singer: The Last of His Kind” or “Holding Fast on Top of the Mountain” or “Mnemonic Devices in the Gaelic Line” – the latter generally being accompanied by a plethora of footnotes.
He did not really mind the folklorists, enunciating the words over and over again for them, explaining that “bh” was pronounced as “v” (like the “ph” in phone is pronounced “f,” he would say), expanding on the more archaic meanings and footnoting himself the words and phrases of local origin. Doing it all with care and seriousness in much the same way that he filed and set his saws or structured his woodpile.
Now in this April of the 1980s he thought of himself, as I said earlier, as a man of seventy-eight years who had made it through another winter. He had come to terms with most things, although never really with the death of his wife; but that too had become easier during the last decades, although he was still bothered by the sexual references which came because of his monastic existence.
Scarcely a year after “the week of deaths,” he had been visited by Cora, his twin brother’s wife. She had come with her breath reeking of rum and placed the bottle on the middle of his kitchen table.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “It’s time me and you got together.”
“Mmmm,” he said, trying to make the most non-committal sound he could think of.
“Here,” she said, going to his cupboard and taking down t
wo of his sparkling glasses and splashing rum into them. “Here,” she said, sliding a glass towards him across the table and seating herself opposite him. “Here, have a shot of this. It will put lead in your pencil,” and then after a pause, “although from what I’ve heard there’s no need of that.”
He was taken aback, somehow imagining her and his twin brother lying side by side at night discussing his physicality.
Heard what? he wondered. Where?
“Yeah,” she said. “There’s not much need of you being up here on this mountain by yourself and me being by myself farther down. If you don’t use it, it’ll rust off.”
He was close to panic, finding her so lonely and so drunkenly available and so much unlike the memory of his own wife. He wondered if she remembered how much they disliked each other, or thought they did. And he wondered if he were somehow thought of as being interchangeable with his dead brother. As if, because they were twins, their bodies must somehow be the same, regardless of their minds.
“I bet it’s rusty right now,” she said and she leaned the upper part of her body across the table so that he could smell the rum heavy on her breath even as he felt her fingers on his leg.
“Mmmm,” he said, getting up rapidly and walking towards the window. He was rattled by her overt sexuality, the way a shy middle-aged married man might be when taken on a visit to a brothel far from his home – not because what is discussed is so foreign to him, but rather because of the manner and the approach.
Outside the window the eagles were flying up the mountain, carrying the twigs, some of them almost branches, for the building of their home.
“Mmmm,” he said, looking out the window and down the winding road to the valley floor below.
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun Page 9