No Great Mischief (11 page)

There are some who would wish to alter their jawlines so that they might look more like current pop stars. Sometimes they bring pictures of what they would hope to be along with them. Shyly they bring the pictures forth from within their purses or from the inside pockets of their expensive jackets.

“You really do not need this,” I say to some of them. “Think of the future. If this were to happen, you might find out it is not really what you want at all.” I look at them carefully, as might the doctor advising the young man against a vasectomy. Quietly we talk about the consequences and the expectations.

In some cases we talk more basically about the impacted wisdom tooth, the mesiodens and the supernumerary teeth of children. I give them leaflets with titles such as “What May Happen After the Removal of an Impacted Tooth” or “Advice Following Oral Surgery.” The leaflets contain headings such as
Pain, Swallowing, Swelling
, along with advice on medication:

To reduce the density of pain, you must take the medication which is prescribed. Follow the instructions exactly. Do not wait for the pain to become too severe before taking the prescribed tablets; otherwise it may become more difficult to control. Should the pain become too intense please notify this office immediately.

Or:

Do not rinse the mouth until the following morning and then only gently. Rinsing too early and/or too frequently may prevent clotting and also healing. When rinsing use warm salt water
which will help to flush out food particles lodged in the operated area. (Half a teaspoonful of salt in a glass of lukewarm water.) If in doubt do not hesitate to call this office.

Or (under the heading Complications Which May Occur):

Sometimes the hole left behind after the molar’s removal may remain for some time. Gradually it should fill in with bone and new tissue. Sometimes, as healing advances, small sharp splinters may work up through the tissue and be a source of discomfort and unexpected pain. Gradually, though, they should disappear. If in doubt do not hesitate to call this office.

Here in the September sun, on my reluctant way to purchase the alcohol which my eldest brother may or may not need, the newspapers rise on gusts of wind before my feet. Sometimes the sheets flap open and float like the roofs of pagodas revealing the different languages of their origin. The people jostle and bump momentarily on the way to their private destinations. The pigeons walk and flap, rising sometimes almost in concert with the newspapers. They cast their bright eyes everywhere and seem never to be surprised. One alights before me, but upon landing tilts sideways. I notice that its right foot is a pink and crumpled ball almost like a knob, and that it is crippled upon the sidewalk. When it rises in the wind, the defect is not noticeable and it seems to flap and fly like all the others. It rises above the greyness of the buildings, circles, and returns.

As my brothers grew older, they moved out more from their home and land. They became more restless, perhaps, the way all young men do. Indirectly we heard of their involvement in fights as they travelled what seemed like long distances over the winding roads of night: going to dances, going to play hockey, going sometimes merely “to see what was going on” ten or twenty or thirty or forty miles away. Sometimes Calum and my brothers were “saved” from their impetuosity by the members of
clann Chalum Ruaidh
who rallied to their aid in the distant darkness, and sometimes they themselves went to the aid of casual cousins and the various causes they espoused. Travelling in their patched-up and wired-together cars and being frequently stopped by the
RCMP
for driving without a headlight, driving without a tail light, driving without a muffler, driving without proper registration, driving on expired licence plates, driving under the influence of alcohol.

Old men and old women would tell my grandparents such third- or fourth-hand information while sitting in the kitchen drinking tea or perhaps some of Grandpa’s freely offered beer.

“I hope no harm will come to them,” Grandma would say, looking out her window towards the ocean which had swallowed up “the children” who were the parents of the young men
under discussion. And again, “If only they had come to live with us, but they were too old to be children and still too young to be like men.”

“They are still only being young,” Grandpa would say, rising optimistically from his chair at the kitchen table. “I was young once myself,” he would say, winking at Grandma, “perhaps you remember.”

“Oh yes,” Grandma would say, “we were all young once. This, though, is different.”

Sometimes, at night, when I walked home from my other grandfather’s (after I had taken to going there to listen to him talk about his views on Highland history or to be tutored in chess), I would see my brothers rolling through the streets in whichever of the battered, rusted, reconstructed cars they were using at the time. In memory, it seems always to be winter, although I know it was not so. Yet they seem to ride most consistently through streets of muffled snow; to glide almost quietly, in spite of their imperfectly tuned engine, through the snow beneath the balding tires and through the flakes that slanted down, yellow and golden before their headlights.

Sometimes they would stop and talk, rolling down the windows but keeping the engine running. The falling snow would melt upon the heated hood and the windshield wipers would squeak back and forth describing arcs which cleansed imperfectly. The rumbling, coughing exhaust system held up by haywire would melt the snow on the street beneath it, turning it first to a carbon black before it vanished in an ever-widening and imperfectly jagged circle. Sometimes they would reach for
bottles of beer beneath the seat, opening the bottles with their teeth and spitting the caps through the opened windows and down the side of the car and into the snow. They would ask me how things were going and about my sister, who was also theirs, and sometimes they would offer me money, although they knew I did not need it. And then they would move off into adventures which, it seemed, were very different from mine. For by that time I was beginning to play “organized hockey” and was interested in my stamp collection and the “modern” music on the radio and the chessboard and the microscope which my other grandfather had given me for Christmas.

Sometimes, in the morning of the later summer months, Grandpa would find inside his porch, placed there beyond the door which he always left open, roasts from the deer which had been shot beneath “the lamp of the poor,” and sometimes gallon jugs of clear white moonshine. Grandma was more skeptical than usual of the moonshine, saying, “You never know what might be in it,” although Grandpa would maintain, “They would not bring it if there was anything wrong with it.”

“I hope they are not making that stuff themselves,” said my other grandfather. “Nothing good ever came of it.” And then he would add, with a shudder as he watched Grandpa emptying his glass, “How can you drink that stuff? Once when I was a young man, I was at a Saturday-night dance at a country schoolhouse. And out behind the building, where we had gone to urinate, someone offered me a drink from a jug. It was dark and on my second swallow I felt something going down my throat and then something like legs against my lips and teeth. They were huge
dead June bugs – the kind that bang against the screen door in the summer. I spit the one out of my mouth, but I had already swallowed the other and then I started to vomit and I remember holding my legs apart, like a horse when he urinates, so I would not vomit on my new shoes and on my pants which I had spent the early evening ironing. Whoever had run off the shine from the still must have done so in the dark and did not know that the June bugs had fallen into it. It cured me forever.”

“Oh well,” said Grandpa. “They were probably pretty well pickled by the time they got to you. You can’t worry about everything.”

I think now, on this Toronto afternoon, of the different men who became my grandfathers even as they were many other things as well. I think of how Grandpa would go forth on such a mission as this of mine with boyish enthusiasm and of how he would return with his arms full of beer and wine; how he would step briskly up the dirty stairs and along the corridor lit by the forty-watt bulb, moving past the moans from behind the closed doors and through the stench of vomit and urine while seeming oblivious to it all. And of how he would enter the door and hope to sing his Gaelic songs and tell his jokes and his mildly off-colour stories, slapping his hand on his huge knee, while dispensing and trusting in his own form of medication. And of how my other grandfather’s pace would be even slower than mine, if he would go at all. And of how he would recoil and purse his lips and try to think of other solutions. Of how he might fix or mend or balance, wrinkling his forehead as he might do when confronted with filling out Grandpa’s income tax return, trying to
make sense of the scribbled bits of information and the crumpled balls of paper which were supposed to serve as receipts and messages from the past.

One spring when he had completed Grandpa’s tax return, and after he had properly affixed his signature, and stroked his t’s with his careful fountain pen and replaced the cover on the ink bottle and was ready for Grandpa’s question, which was always “Do I get anything back?” he went over the form with me, pointing out how easy it really was if all the information were correct. Grandpa had lost interest in the project almost immediately upon entering the door, preferring to console himself with the available whisky and choosing to regard the whole process as a mystery not worth solving, brightening only when it was time to ask his question. When he was told he would get money back, although only a modest amount, he slapped Grandfather on the shoulder and said, “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald,” which is what Robert the Bruce was supposed to have said to the MacDonalds at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

“When the MacDonalds came back from the Battle of Killiecrankie,” said my grandfather thoughtfully, leaping ahead more than three and a half centuries in historical time, “it was in the fall of 1689. They had been away since May and in that time some of their children had been born and some of their parents had died. Their barley and oats had ripened, and they were already late for the season’s harvest.”

“But they had won,” said Grandpa, who, with spirits raised because of his promised tax refund, had seated himself at the table and poured himself another glass of whisky.

“Yes, they had won,” said Grandfather. “They had won the battle in the old way, but they had also lost a lot. They had lost the exciting young man who was their leader and their inspiration and who, somehow, gave them a belief in their cause. They carried his body from the field in their bloodied plaids and buried him in the churchyard. Perhaps it was the beginning of the end, for afterwards it was not the same – although they remained and fought for a man they did not much care for, after others who began with them had gone home.”

“Loyal as hell,” said Grandpa appreciatively.

“Yes, loyal to a cause which was becoming daily more muddled and which was to cost them dearly in the end,” said Grandfather reflectively. “Trying to hold their place. They lost a lot of men,” he added seriously. “A lot at Killiecrankie and more at Dunkeld after the major battle.”

“They were brave as hell,” said Grandpa with enthusiasm.

“Yes,” said Grandfather, “but I think they were also afraid.”

“Never,” said Grandpa, half rising tipsily from his chair, as if he would defend the honour of all the MacDonalds in the world. “Never was a MacDonald afraid.”

“I see them sometimes,” said my grandfather, looking at the table and seeming to see his vision rise from the envelope containing Grandpa’s tax return. “I see them sometimes coming home across the wildness of Rannoch Moor in the splendour of the autumn sun. I imagine them coming with their horses and their banners and their plaids tossed arrogantly over their shoulders. Coming with their broadswords and their claymores and their bull-hide targes decorated with designs of brass.
Singing the choruses of their rousing songs, while the sun gleams off the shining of their weapons and the black and the redness of their hair.”

“Great,” said Grandpa, slapping his knee, as if he were watching a favourite television show or sitting in a theatre watching a movie.

“But sometimes,” said Grandfather, smiling almost half apologetically as if he might be spoiling Grandpa’s picture, “I imagine them thinking of the dead they left behind. Of the hundreds of bodies at the pass of Killiecrankie, even if they won, and of those left behind in the streets of Dunkeld. Of those who sought refuge in the houses and were burned alive when the houses were set aflame. I think of them carrying home their wounded, draped over the horses’ backs or on stretchers which were only plaids clutched in white-knuckled fists. Of the one-legged men with their arms thrown over their comrades’ shoulders, trying to hop back the long miles they had walked or run across in the months of spring. Trying to get back to Glengarry or Glencoe or Moidart or wherever they came from. Of the men with bleeding stumps where their hands used to be, or of those bleeding between the legs – ruined in
that
way,” he said quietly, looking at Grandpa. “Those who, if they ever got back, would never leave again. And of those who did not get back, although they had made it through the battle, but could not make it over the long, mountainous walk back home and were buried instead beneath cairns of stones in the rocky or the boggy earth, depending upon when and where they died. Never to get back in time for themselves or for those who waited for them.”