This is how the cù mòr glas a’ bhàis came into our lives, and it is obvious that all of this happened a long, long time ago. Yet with succeeding generations it seemed the spectre had somehow come to stay and that it had become ours – not in the manner of an unwanted skeleton in the closet from a family’s ancient past but more in the manner of something close to a genetic possibility. In the deaths of each generation, the grey dog was seen by some – by women who were to die in childbirth; by soldiers who went forth to the many wars but did not return; by those who went forth to feuds or dangerous love affairs; by those who answered mysterious midnight messages; by those who swerved on the highway to avoid the real or imagined grey dog and ended in masses of crumpled steel. And by one professional athlete who, in addition to his ritualized athletic superstitions, carried another fear or belief as well. Many of the man’s descendants moved like careful hemophiliacs, fearing that they carried unwanted possibilities deep within them. And others, while they laughed, were like members of families in which there is a recurrence over the generations of repeated cancer or the diabetes which comes to those beyond middle age. The feeling of those who may say little to others but who may say often and quietly to themselves, “It has not happened to me,” while adding always the cautionary “yet.”
I am thinking all of this now as the October rain falls on the city of Toronto and the pleasant, white-clad nurses pad confidently in and out of my father’s room. He lies quietly amidst the whiteness, his head and shoulders elevated so that he is in that hospital position of being neither quite prone nor yet sitting. His hair is white upon his pillow and he breathes softly and sometimes unevenly, although it is difficult ever to be sure.
My five grey-haired brothers and I take turns beside his bedside, holding his heavy hands in ours and feeling their response, hoping ambiguously that he will speak to us, although we know that it may tire him. And trying to read his life and ours into his eyes when they are open. He has been with us for a long time, well into our middle age. Unlike those boys in that boat of so long ago, we did not see him taken from us in our youth. And unlike their youngest brother who, in turn, became our great-great-grandfather, we did not grow into a world in which there was no father’s touch. We have been lucky to have this large and gentle man so deep into our lives.
No one in this hospital has mentioned cù mòr glas a’ bhàis. Yet as my mother said ten years ago, before slipping into her own death as quietly as a grownup child who leaves or enters her parents’ house in the early hours, “It is hard to not know what you do know.”
Even those who are most sceptical, like my oldest brother who has driven here from Montreal, betray themselves by their nervous actions. “I avoided the Greyhound bus stations in both Montreal and Toronto,” he smiled upon his arrival, and then added, “Just in case.”
He did not realize how ill our father was and has smiled little since then. I watch him turning the diamond ring upon his finger, knowing that he hopes he will not hear the Gaelic phrase he knows too well. Not having the luxury, as he once said, of some who live in Montreal and are able to pretend they do not understand the “other” language. You cannot not know what you do know.
Sitting here, taking turns holding the hands of the man who gave us life, we are afraid for him and for ourselves. We are afraid of what he may see and we are afraid to hear the phrase born of the vision. We are aware that it may become confused with what the doctors call “the will to live” and we are aware that some beliefs are what others would dismiss as “garbage.” We are aware that there are men who believe the earth is flat and that the birds bring forth the sun.
Bound here in our own peculiar mortality, we do not wish to see or see others see that which signifies life’s demise. We do not want to hear the voice of our father, as did those other sons, calling down his own particular death upon him.
We would shut our eyes and plug our ears, even as we know such actions to be of no avail. Open still and fearful to the grey hair rising on our necks if and when we hear the scrabble of the paws and the scratching at the door.
Vision
I DON’T REMEMBER when I first heard the story but I remember the first time that I heard it and remembered it. By that I mean the first time it made an impression on me and more or less became mine; sort of went into me the way such things do, went into me in such a way that I knew it would not leave again but would remain there forever. Something like when you cut your hand with a knife by accident, and even as you’re trying to staunch the blood flowing out of the wound, you know the wound will never really heal totally and your hand will never look quite the same again. You can imagine the scar tissue that will form and be a different colour and texture from the rest of your skin. You know this even as you are trying to stop the blood and trying to squeeze the separated edges of skin together once more. Like trying to squeeze together the separated banks of a small and newly discovered river so that the stream will be subterranean once again. It is something like that, although you know in one case the future scar will be forever on the outside while the memory will remain forever deep within.
Anyway, on this day we were about a mile and a half offshore but heading home on the last day of the lobster season. We could see the trucks of the New Brunswick buyers waiting for us on the wharf and because it was a sunny day, light reflected and glinted off the chrome trim and bumpers of the waiting trucks and off their gleaming rooftops as well. It was the last day of June and the time was early afternoon and I was seventeen.
My father was in good spirits because the season was over and we had done reasonably well and we were bringing in most of our gear intact. And there seemed no further need to rush.
The sea was almost calm, although there was a light breeze at our backs and we throttled down our engine because there really was no reason to hurry into the wharf for the last and final time. I was in the stern of the boat steadying the piled lobster traps which we had recently raised from the bottom of the sea. Some of them still gleamed with droplets of salt water and streamers of seaweed dangled from their lathes. In the crates beside my feet the mottled blue-green lobsters moved and rustled quietly, snapping their tails as they slid over one another with that peculiar dry/wet sound of shell and claws over shell and claws. Their hammer claws had been pegged and fastened shut with rubber bands so they would not mutilate each other and so decrease their value.
“Put some of those in a sack for ourselves,” said my father, turning his head back over his right shoulder as he spoke. He was standing ahead of me, facing the land and urinating over the side. His water fell into the sea and vanished into the rolling swell of the boat’s slow passage.
“Put them in the back there,” he said, “behind the bait bucket, and throw our oilers over them. They will want everything we’ve got, and what they won’t see won’t hurt them. Put in some markets too, not just canners.”
I took a sack and began to pick some lobsters out of the crate, grasping them at the end of their body shells or by the ends of their tails and being careful not to get my fingers snapped. For even with their hammer claws banded shut there was still a certain danger.
“How many do you want?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, turning with a smile and running his hand along the front of his trousers to make sure his fly was closed, “as many as you want. Use your own good judgement.”
We did not often take home lobsters for ourselves because they were so expensive and we needed the money they would bring. And the buyers wanted them with a desperation almost bordering on frenzy. Perhaps even now as I bent over the crate they were watching from the wharf with binoculars to see if any were being concealed. My father stood casually in front of me, once more facing the land and shielding my movements with his body. The boat followed its set course, its keel cutting the blue-green water and turning it temporarily into white.
There was a time long ago when the lobsters were not thought to be so valuable. Probably because the markets of
the larger world had not yet been discovered or were so far away. People then ate all they wanted of them and even used them for fertilizer on their fields. And those who did eat them did not consider them to be a delicacy. There is a quoted story from the time which states that in the schools you could always identify the children of the poor because they were the ones with lobster in their sandwiches. The well-to-do were able to afford bologna.
With the establishment of the New England market, things changed. Lobster factories were set up along the coast for the canning of the lobsters at a time before good land transportation and refrigeration became common. In May and June and into July the girls in white caps and smocks packed the lobster meat into burnished cans before they were steam sealed. And the men in the smack boats brought the catches to the rickety piers which were built on piles and jutted out into the sea.
My fathers mother was one of the girls, and her job was taking the black vein out of the meat of the lobster’s tail before the tail was coiled around the inside of the can. At home they ate the black vein along with the rest of the meat, but the supervisors at the factory said it was unsightly. My father’s father was one of the young men standing ready in the smack boat, wearing his cap at a jaunty angle and uttering witty sayings and singing little songs in Gaelic to the girls who stood above him on the wharf. All of this was of course a long time ago and I am just trying to recreate the scene.
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 clacked 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 towards 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 anymore 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 towards 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 Í 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 which acted as an erratic boundary between the fishing grounds of ourselves and our neighbours, the MacAllesters. 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 buildup 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 towards 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 towards 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 the smack who were buying lobsters and they would set us ashore at the wharf of 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 towards 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.”
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun Page 13