No Great Mischief (13 page)

But on this Sunday we were not in a boat, so we sang and shouted to them from the farthest extension of our land that reached out to the sea. For almost two hours we shouted and waved and sang and applauded to their magnificent response. Sometimes they came quite close to the shore, as if they were trying to hear what we were saying or else trying to show themselves off to a greater advantage. As they spouted and splashed we sang and shouted, yet as the sun moved on, we
seemed to tire of the game sooner than they did and directed our steps inland, although still turning to shout and wave in a series of last-time farewells.

Later in the early evening, I went down to the shore to bring home my brothers’ milk cows and discovered one of the whales washed up on the rocks near the slip where my brothers drew their boat. I saw the crowds of crows and smaller predatory birds rising from the shore as I approached and it was not until I had taken farther steps that I recognized what must have been for them a great bonanza delivered by the sea.

The tide was out and he lay in his gigantic length upon the rocks, while the sea which was his element of grace lapped quietly some yards beyond him. Already the birds had pecked out his eyes and begun their work on his anus and reproductive system. There was a jagged tear about five feet in length which ran from his throat through his stomach and down into his abdomen, and some of his internal organs had spilled out upon the rocks. Already the heat of the still-present sun had begun to have its effect, and soon the odour would be pronounced. Out of the water, he was no longer black and glistening but dull and brown in the beginning stench of death.

I went home and told my brothers, and later they came down and we all looked upon him. We decided that he had not realized that the tide was falling and that in the afternoon’s high spirits he had come too close to the shore and in one of his undulating dives he had found not the expected depth of water but instead the submerged and jagged reef which had slashed his soft underbelly and left him disembowelled and unable to rise again. We thought of ourselves as deceptive male sirens who had lured him
to his death, although we did not phrase our thoughts in such language at the time. My brothers, who were aware of practicality even in the face of death, feared that his presence and the resulting odour would interfere with the working of their boat. They feared he was too big to be towed back out to sea, even if they were able to fasten grappling hooks to him and pull him off the rocks with their boat at full throttle. The afternoon had ended differently than we had expected.

That night there came a great storm from off the sea. We heard the wind and the pellets of rain upon the windows as we lay within our beds and my brothers rose in great agitation, fearing that their drawn-up boat was not sufficiently out of the way of the mounting waves. All of us ran down to the sea in the dark, taking with us storm lanterns and flashlights and summoning the ever-faithful Christy. The waves were booming and high and it was almost impossible to stand on the wetness of the drenched and glistening boulders, and overhead there was no sign of the “lamp of the poor.” Even Christy was afraid as the high surf broke about her knees and her hooves slipped on the wet rocks she could not see. Calum grasped the cheek straps of her bridle in both his hands and we could hear him singing in Gaelic, loudly and clearly at the side of her head, in an attempt to steady and calm her, much as a parent might sing to a frightened child. Calum’s steady voice rose above the roar of the sea and she followed him as did we all, although the water swirled about our knees. We were able to hook the chain to the boat’s ring and to steady and balance the boat itself and to direct Christy inland and upward to the higher levels of the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point. On her final lunge, a gigantic wave smashed into the boat’s stern, lifting
it forward with tremendous momentum, even as Christy scrambled upwards to the point. The wave which would have destroyed the boat if it had been fastened to its moorings became almost the agent of its deliverance since it seemed now high enough to be relatively safe. We flopped on our backs in exhaustion upon the wet moss and cranberry vines, knowing that the boat was high and beyond the ocean’s force for the duration of the night. In the darkness and excitement we had not paid any attention to the whale.

In the morning the storm’s rage was spent and, although the ocean rolled in a surly fashion, its temporary tantrum seemed to be over. We went down to the shore and the boat was safe and dry and none the worse for the night’s adventures. There was no sign of the whale and we were all relieved, assuming that the force of the waves had taken it back out to sea. But then we found, in a cluster of glistening boulders, its internal organs, trapped by the boulders which the waves had rolled upon them, yet still fluctuating to the sea. The grey intestines coiled and sloshed, as did the liver and the stomach and the great, gigantic heart.

Hundreds of yards inland, we later found the body itself, disguised beneath a small mountain of brown and tangled seaweed adorned with scattered stones and sticks of broken driftwood. The sea had taken the body in instead of out, and it stayed there for more than a year until only its bones were visible to the eye.

In the room my brother waits, seeing, perhaps through the window of his imagination, the leaping sporting blackfish at play in the waters of the September sun. “Take your time,” he said. “I am not going anywhere.”

In
the southland of Ontario, the contract pickers bend and reach within their circle of the sun and calculate quietly the gains and losses of their day and of their season. The weekend pickers are preparing to go home, and even farther south my own children play their beeping computer games within their shaded and muffled rec room. The patients who will fill my waiting room on Monday are getting through their weekend as well. The children, perhaps, trying not to think about Monday while actually thinking about it too much. The adults, always hopeful of beauty, are resigning themselves to the price they must pay. I am in the business of “improving on God,” as Grandma might say, and in the affluence of this part of North America both I and my patients have done pretty well.

When I was a student at the university in Halifax, and studying dentistry in the early stages, my professor invited me one evening to have a beer with him. We went to the tavern beneath the big hotel and he said, “You are capable of making a lot of money in this field, but you will never do it in the Maritimes. There is not a population here which cares enough about its teeth. Over 60 per cent of the people never go to a dentist until it is too late and most of the male population, anyway, are candidates for false teeth before they reach their twenties. They prefer
to pull them rather than fix them. It’s almost as if they
want
to. Only Quebec and the aboriginal population have statistics that are as bad,” he said. “And Newfoundland. I never know whether to include it as part of the Maritimes or not.”

He was not a native of the Atlantic area, although he had been living in Halifax for some time because he liked the university and the city and the people.

I was young then and did not know what to say, listening to words of prophecy from the mouth of the great man with perfectly capped teeth. I was nervous in his presence and did not have enough money to buy my share of the beer. And I did not want to drink it, anyway, as I was afraid it would make me sleepy and I wanted to study for my exams. For I knew I had a chance for the various awards and scholarships and medals which might launch me on the way he was indicating.

But he did not mind when I switched to Coke and rolled the ice cubes circularly within the glass even as they melted to the touch of my warm and perspiring hands. I had never met anyone quite like him before and was suspicious of what he might want, and fearful that I might make some mental or verbal error which might jeopardize our tenuous student-professor relationship. As I drank more and more Coke and he more and more beer, I became increasingly edgy, feeling the caffeine filling my veins and imagining the pupils of my eyes dilating. His speech became more and more slurred and sometimes his reaching hand came down beside the glass instead of grasping it and sometimes he knocked it over, causing little waves of beer to slosh across the table, even as we moved discreetly away, both of us pretending that it had not happened. It seemed that a chasm gradually
widened between us because of our drinking progress. As if one of us were on the shore and the other on a departing boat bound towards the open sea. Our voices becoming unintelligible to each other because of our different circumstances.

Yet it seemed he was sincerely interested in his profession and in me as part of it, and it seemed also, perhaps, that he was lonely in his way.

“Where did you say you came from?” he said, bending forward from the waist until his nose almost touched the glasses on the table – like one of those trick birds who dip their beaks forward in novelty-shop windows.

“Oh,” I said, startled by the simplicity or complexity of the question. “From Cape Breton.”

“Never been there,” he said. “Should I?”

“What?” I said.

“Go there?” he said. “Should I go there?”

“I don’t know,” I said, scurrying around inside my mind for some kind of suitable answer.

“Are your family dentists? Is your father a dentist?” he asked, still bobbing forward and backwards from the waist with measured regularity.

“No,” I said. “They’re not. He’s not.”

“Oh,” he said. “Most people who go into this profession come from dental families. But I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere. Look,” he said, leaning forward and grasping my shoulder firmly in his wet hand. “You’ve got to make teeth
better
, not just pull the fuckers out.”

That spring, at my graduation, the sun shone and the trees and flowers were in leaf and blossom as we paraded through our
paces and received our awards and rewards, as the case might be. I had gone home two days earlier to drive the car which the father of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald had kindly offered to us for the graduation. Grandpa and Grandma came and my other grandfather as well, and also the parents of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald.

The afternoon before the graduation and after we were settled in our rooms, my grandfather said, “Show me where the library is, I want to look for something.” Grandpa said, “Are there any good taverns around here?” and Grandma and the others went off to buy presents for those they had left behind only hours before. My sister was graduating at the same time in distant Alberta, which seemed so far away that no one could attend – although we sent identical telegrams. And those of
clann Chalum Ruaidh
who followed my brothers, including the red-haired Alexander MacDonald, were near Ontario’s Elliot Lake, where they had been for nearly a month. There they were sinking shafts and developing drifts for Renco Development – rediscovering the uranium they had originally discovered some ten years earlier, now that the prices and markets made it once again worthwhile. Their telegrams came too, in a mixture of Gaelic and English accompanied by a cheque for five hundred dollars.

Before going to Elliot Lake, they had been at home for a short time on their return from Peru, that country uncertain of its borders. And they had spent a brief afternoon visiting me in Halifax on their way to Ontario. High in the mountains of Peru, where they had been sinking shafts, they told me the air was so thin that, at first, they suffered from
soroche
, the altitude sickness. Later, they said, they became more used to the height. Peru was
strikingly beautiful, they said, although the people were poor and the political struggles intense. It was in the year before the military coup and they were warned to stay out of any political involvement and to keep to themselves and to do their work. And they were told, also, that if they should happen to run over an animal or even a person on the twisting mountain roads or in the single-street villages (speeding to their work in the mountains’ early-morning darkness) that they should not stop, for fear that they might be hacked to death. Instead they should continue to the next village and notify the authorities there, or those in Cerro de Pasco. Even at that time, it was a country of
los desaparecidos
, “the disappeared,” and many of the people were living as exiles within their own country. The national anthem, said my brothers, was
Somos libres, somos lo siempre
. We are free, let us always be so.

The day of the graduation, as I said, was sunny and golden, just the way such days are supposed to be. “Good for you,” said Grandpa as I stood in my mortar board and gown, clutching my various diplomas and awards and the offer of a summer Research Fellowship, while Grandma snapped the pictures. “Good for you,
’ille bhig ruaidh
. This means you will never have to work again.” What he meant was that I would not spend my life pulling the end of the bucksaw or pushing the boat off the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point in freezing water up to my waist. “Jesus, though,” he added, “thirty-two teeth. Think if you had to be responsible for running a whole hospital.”