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 towards 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 backwards 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 towards 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 facedown 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 ever 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, enthused 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 towards 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 to be ever 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.
Afterword
BY JANE URQUHART
Each time I read the stories in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories I am struck by the largeness of Alistair MacLeod’s main characters. This is not only a largeness of physical stature but also, and more important, a largeness of soul, a generosity of spirit. Reflective and emotional without being self-conscious, his men are intimate, not just with women and children, but with the rough beauty of their geography, the old sorrows of their family legends, the sanctity of work, the mating cycles and slaughter of their animals; in short, with life itself. Although the presence of the “anima” in general is strong and benign in these stories, they are really about the masculine spirit, its strengths and its vulnerabilities. Time and again we are put in mind of the old Celtic heroes, of Oisin arguing ethics with Saint Patrick or of Finn McCool mourning the loss of his beloved dog Bran. And yet, at the same time, we are brought into closer contact with the men who are part of our own world and who are our friends and our family.
Like many other Canadians of Irish or Scottish background, MacLeod himself was brought up in the midst of a tribal, Celtic family much given to remembering the past and measuring the present in terms of it. In such families the tales of previous generations are told spontaneously and repetitively as a means of establishing both geographically and emotionally where the family has been, where it is now, and where it is going. In MacLeod’s fiction the “voice” of the oral tradition is never far away and in some cases is as close as the opening sentences of a story. “Once there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea,” we are told in “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun.” “And the man had a dog of which he was very fond.” In the space of a few short sentences we, the readers, have joined the family, have entered the rooms of their houses, and have gathered together to hear the remainder of the tale. By the time the story is finished, the identification is so complete that we feel the hair rising on the backs of our own necks and hear the claws of the cù mòr glas, the big grey dog, scratching at our own doors. Moreover, a brilliant transformation has taken place. By skilfully interweaving past and present, recurring images and sensual detail, MacLeod creates a complex tapestry out of a seemingly simple and much-told family tale.
MacLeod’s stories have been called – albeit with great admiration – traditional, even conservative, by a literary world cluttered with theories and “isms.” They are, however, in their portrayal of an ancestral past that continually affects the present and in their sense of deep yearning for forsaken landscapes, as fresh and as complex as the present moment. We Canadians are, after all, a nation composed of people longing for a variety of abandoned homelands and the t
ribes that inhabited them, whether these be the distant homelands of our recent immigrants, the abducted homelands of our native peoples, the rural homelands vacated by the post-war migrations to the cities, or the various European or Asian homelands left behind by our earliest settlers. All of us have been touched in some way or another by this loss of landscape and of kin, and all of us are moved by the sometimes unidentifiable sorrow that accompanies such a loss. We are also moved, however, by the comfort we are afforded when an artist of the calibre of Alistair MacLeod carries such sorrowful and penetrating themes towards us in his gentle and capable hands.
These themes are not only Canadian ones, of course, they are universal – migration having been always a part of the human experience – and in MacLeod’s stories, as in all great art, the universal becomes clearer and sharper when we are brought into intimate contact with the particular. I am always impressed, for instance, by the tension MacLeod creates in this country of vast distances and brutal weather by the anticipated journey home. A young man wishing to return to Cape Breton for Christmas from a job on Ontario lake freighters is dependent on the Great Lakes freezing, on the one hand, and on the highways being free of crippling blizzards on the other. A boy relies on a golden dog to guide him towards his warm kitchen and away from his death on a partly frozen sea. A crew of shaft and development miners knows that if one of them dies underground, as is so often the case, his comrades will make the dangerous winter journey to ferry the broken body back to the ancestral graveyard. A group of scattered relatives is aware that they will attempt to drive the long highways home to attend the funeral of a loved one despite the fear that the journey will be rendered impossible by winter, circumstance, change, or the fact that the return itself may be almost too painful to be borne. As the exiled narrator in “Winter Dog” laments:
Should we be forced to drive tonight, it will be a long, tough journey into the wind and the driving snow which is pounding across Ontario and Quebec and New Brunswick and against the granite coast of Nova Scotia. Should we be drawn by death, we might well meet our own.
And in the middle of the long, multi-layered, and disturbing story entitled “Vision,” the grandfather quotes the poem reputed to have been uttered thirteen hundred years ago by Saint Colum Cille upon his exile from Ireland:
There is a grey eye
Looking back on Ireland,
That will never see again
Her men or her women.
Early and late my lamentation,
Alas, the journey I am making;
This will be my secret bye-name
“Back turned on Ireland.”
MacLeod’s stories are resonant with the lamentations of exiles, and strong within these lamentations is the desire to preserve that which was, and even that which is, against the heartbreaking ravages of time; to preserve, not necessarily with factual accuracy, but rather with something that one can only call, trite though it sounds, emotional truth. Like the fishermen in “Vision” and in the interests of this goal, MacLeod defines his boundaries by making use of “the actual river” when it suits his purposes or, when it does not, “an earlier imaginary river which [he] can no longer see.” Hence a tale from the past sheds as much clear light on a character or a situation as a contemporary word or deed and, in the end, preservation is accomplished by establishing the timelessness of legend.
To explore timelessness, preservation, and emotional truth is among the purest of literary intentions and, because of this, the seven stories in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories seem to move effortlessly from the author’s heart to the page and then to leap back from the page into the heart of the reader. This is not to suggest that there is anything resembling a “stream-of-consciousness” approach in the writing. In fact, MacLeod is so “care-full,” in the true sense of the word, that quite the opposite is true. All of the stories have been “tuned to perfection” both technically and emotionally and with such care that they burst into sensual life as we read. We see and feel the cold, wet nose of a beloved dog, the delicate form of an embryo calf exposed within the slaughtered body of its mother, captured lobsters moving awkwardly on the floor of a fishing boat. But, most important, we are witness to a deepness of caring that reveals itself with brutality and tenderness, a deepness of caring that binds man to woman, father to son, man to animal, and humanity to kin and landscape.
The depth of caring that is examined in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun is as much active as it is reflective in its expression. All of the protagonists are men whose lives are inexorably bound to the physical: the netting of fish, the husbandry of animals, the carving of rock from the bowels of the earth. Almost immediately the reader comes to trust the heavy, muscular presence of such men who in many cases carry the history of their physicality around with them in the form of wounds or scars. Even the entry of a family story concerning old sorrows into the mind and memory of a young man is described actively, physically, and compared to wounds and scars. “You know,” says the narrator in “Vision,” “the future scar will be forever on the outside while the memory will remain, forever, deep within.” By associating memory with blood and body, MacLeod suggests that emotion is biological and genetic and can never, therefore, be connected to that which is ephemeral or casual.
In the end it is this utter absence of the casual that gives MacLeod’s stories their enormous power and raises them to the level of myth. “Second Spring” is much more than the tale of a Maritime boy “smitten with the calf club wish.” It reaches back through time to all the sacred bulls and cows that have existed in Celtic, Greek, and Eastern myth. The cù mòr glas, which in the title story operates, for one family, as a sort of canine banshee, is equally Finn McCool’s great dog Bran loping across the Giant’s Causeway from Ireland to Scotland and Charon’s dog Cerebus guarding the gates to the underworld and keeping watch over the River Styx. In “Vision” references to second sight, blindness, memory, and a constant shifting of understanding call to mind the blindfolded figure of justice and cause us to examine the nature of perception itself.
One winter night I was fortunate enough to hear Alistair MacLeod read from new fiction. I took home from that evening images of knives and forks being placed on a kitchen floor by children playing store, a nocturnal winter landscape viewed through glass, and, in the distance, one lantern going dark and another coming to rest far out on the ice. Like the old masters in W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” MacLeod is never wrong about suffering and understands “how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;” or “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” But it is not the leisurely turning away that commands the focus of MacLeod’s attention. Somewhere around the middle of the piece he read that night, he described a dog whose passion leads him to a tragedy as final as the one that visited his lantern-carrying owners. Someone, a grandfather I believe, says, “It was in those dogs to care too much, to try too hard,” meaning that this exaggerated trying and caring was bred into such dogs in Scotland over 150 years ago. Sitting in the audience and hearing that line, I was suddenly convinced that MacLeod was describing not only a certain breed of dog but all of his characters, animal and human, and the writer himself, engaged in his craft.
This is what we want from our best authors: not merely that they care and try but that they care too much and try too hard, that the intensification of feeling and of meaning manifests itself in their hearts and in their work. We come away from the stories in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories with that desire completely satisfied, our own world view intensified, enlarged, and enriched. And we come away understanding more clearly “the twisted strands within the rope,” the difficult, “tangled twisted strands of love.”
BY ALISTAIR MACLEOD
FICTION
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976)
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986)
No Great Mischief (1999)
Island (2000)
Acknowledgements
The stories listed below originally appeared in the following publications:
“The Closing Down of Summer” in The Fiddlehead, Number 111, Fall 1976; reprinted in Fiddlehead Greens: Stories from the Fiddlehead, Oberon, 1979. “Winter Dog” in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Number 40/41, 1981. “To Every Thing There Is a Season” in the Globe and Mail, December 24, 1977. “Second Spring” in Canadian Fiction Magazine, Number 34/35, 1980. “The Tuning of Perfection” in The Cape Breton Collection, Pottersfield Press, Nova Scotia, 1984. “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun” in event magazine, Volume 14, Number 2, 1985.
I would like to thank Kerstin Mueller of the Eastern Counties Regional Libraries and Roddie Coady of the Coady and Tompkins Memorial Library for providing me with much-needed and much-appreciated writing space.
I would also like to thank A. G. MacLeod, Murdina Stewart and the University of Windsor for their different kinds of help and cooperation. The translations of the longer Gaelic songs are from Beyond the Hebrides (1977), edited by Donald A. Fergusson. Again, my thanks.
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