No Great Mischief (21 page)

The Jamaicans and the Mexican Mennonites and the French Canadians move with dexterity and quiet speed. Their strong sure fingers close and release automatically even as their eyes are planning the next deft move. They do not bruise the fruit and their feet do not trample the branches or the vines. And they will not die from heart attacks between the green and flowering rows. They will work until the sun descends and then retire to their largely all-male quarters. Many are in Canada on agricultural work permits and when the season is done they must make the long journey back to their homes.

Some are on “nine-month” contracts allowing them to stay in Canada for a maximum of nine continuous months. If they stay longer they become eligible for Canada’s social assistance and health programs. No one wishes them to become eligible for such programs except themselves. Sometimes, if they are in demand, they will leave the country for only a few days and then re-enter to begin another nine-month stay, or until they are no longer needed. Some have been following this pattern for decades while their children are continents and oceans away. They do not see their children or talk to them very often. Neither they nor their children ever visit the orthodontist. In the small houses in which they temporarily live they sit, at the end of the day, in their undershirts and on the edges of their steel-rimmed beds. The slowly revolving fans stir the humid air as those who are literate read their letters from home. Those who are less fortunate ask their friends to read and also to write
for them. Sometimes they lie on top of their beds with their hands clasped beneath their heads and stare up at the chipboard ceiling. Sometimes they listen to music on cassettes, the rhythm and the dialect and the language often being foreign and indiscernible to those who pass by on the larger highways. Photographs sit on orange crates or the scarred night tables. On Monday morning when I smilingly greet my first patient, the small houses will be empty and the men will, already, have spent long hours in the sun.

With no need for dexterity or speed I will pick and choose whatever liquors are before me, and perhaps it is not important. What is important is that I will return.

In
the heat of that summer our underground footage moved forward rapidly. We struck an area of a soft rock which yielded easily to our bits and to our powder and we began to run ahead of schedule. The time lost due to the death of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald was rapidly made up and Renco Development was more than satisfied. There was a suggestion that perhaps we were being paid too highly, especially since we had encountered the “soft rock.” Still, we pointed out that an agreement was an agreement and perhaps “hard rock” and hard times lay ahead for all of us, as they did for all those who worked within the rock-bound confines of
the mine. Calum did the negotiations for all of us and no one wished to argue with him or be an obstacle in his path.

After the departure of James MacDonald our music seemed to wilt within the summer’s heat and the French Canadians did not seem to play that much either. They withdrew more into the privacy of their own bunkhouses, as did we, and we viewed each other through eyes tinged with suspicion. Among ourselves the idea persisted that the French-Canadian hoistman on duty at the time had
known
that Alexander MacDonald was at the shaft’s bottom when he sent the ore bucket whistling down, that he had
not
been mistaken and confused his signals. We heard also that Fern Picard had approached Renco Development the day following Alexander MacDonald’s death with the proposition that he could bring in another crew of his own relatives from Temiskaming to replace
clann Chalum Ruaidh
in the shaft’s bottom. We heard, as well, that he and his men were aware of the private offer made by phone to us and that they were displeased because of the suspicion that we were being paid at a higher rate than they. We viewed them, as they did us, with a certain wariness; always on the lookout for the real or imagined slight or advantage; being like rival hockey teams, waiting for the right time to question stick measurements or illegal equipment; biding our time and keeping our eyes open. Still the work went on as we alternated our lives between the cool and dripping wetness underground and the stifling fly-infested heat on the summer surface.

Sometimes I thought of the life that could have been mine had I remained in Halifax and accepted the summer research grant I had refused in order to come out here. It was true that in
Halifax there was a very different kind of life, a life that included movie theatres and music and the possibilities to be found in libraries and laboratories. At times I missed, or imagined that I missed, the theatres and the restaurants which I hardly ever frequented or the discussions with classmates on the subjects of the day. There was a life, I knew, which was not so totally masculine nor dominated by the singleness of one profession.

Sometimes my thoughts drifted to the small rented room and my Halifax boarding house. There I imagined my middle-aged landlady stifling in her own heat, fanning her face with the newspaper while sitting on her wooden chair with her stockings rolled down beneath her knees. Relieved yet bored by the absence of her transient students, having no belongings to rifle through while they were gone and no one to listen to her rules regarding the radio, and the houselights, and the closing of doors and the shovelling of her walk in winter. Sometimes I imagined my white-coated supervisors and colleagues moving on their soft-soled shoes across the polished floors of the air-conditioned labs, monitoring their trays of cultures and peering into their microscopes and sometimes encountering the flickers of boredom flashed back into their eyes from the fluorescent glare of washroom mirrors.

I was also aware of a certain guilt concerning the death of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald, although I was not sure if the guilt really was or should have been mine. But there was a vague uneasiness associated with the circumstances and the timing of it all. I told myself that he had gone into the mine after high school because he was not academically inclined. But I knew also that he had done so, at least in part, to help the members of his family
who had been haunted, through no fault of their own, by the echoes of a kind of regional, generational poverty which whispered and sighed with the insistence of the unseen wind. I realized that Alexander MacDonald had partially paid for the car which ferried me home from my splendid graduation, and I realized that the opportunity to thank him and make amends was now no longer there. I had often recreated the scene in which he had called me “lucky” because my parents had lost their lives, and the feeling of the callouses on his small, determined, hardworking hands seemed permanently bonded to the rising hair on the back of my neck. The touch of his small hands, it seemed, would now and forever be mine, although I told myself that his passing had affected others much more profoundly, and I had best not consider myself so precious.

In
the lulls between shifts my brothers often spoke of the landscape of their youth and their later young manhood. Far away on the edge of the Canadian Shield they recreated images of seasons and time separate from them by great distances of physical and mental geography. They remembered with great clarity their early lives upon the island: the clouds of gulls rising from the cliffs and the colony of seals at the island’s northern end. If one swam in summer, they said, you had to be careful of the male or bull seals; sometimes
they would attack you, thinking you were intruding on their territory or threatening the members of their harem who lay basking on the rocks in the summer sun. And they spoke often of the miraculous fresh water well which burst from the rocks at the ocean’s edge.

“Do you remember the well,
’ille bhig ruaidh?
” they asked.

“No, I don’t,” I said, “only what I have been told of it.”

The well was nourished by an underground spring and its water was particularly sweet. It was frequented by humans and animals as well, and visitors from the mainland would take bottles of it back with them, thinking of it as a tonic or a particular refreshment. “Grandpa used to take bottles of it with him,” said my brothers, “he thought it fuelled sexual desire and was also a cure for arthritis.”

I remember he used to call it “arthur-it is.” When the sea was agitated by storm, or even sometimes at high tide, the well would be submerged. It would become invisible to the eye beneath the pounding surf, and those who anticipated the vagaries of the sea would hasten to scoop pails of fresh water and “save” them in a series of wooden barrels and puncheons secured to the rock above the high-water mark. In the full fury of storm it would seem as if the well had no existence, and even after the waves receded, its water would be salty and unfit to drink. But in a matter of hours it would “clear itself,” as they said. “We used to watch the animals,” said my brothers. “They would stand around it and when they began to drink, we knew the water was okay for us. For a long time there was fear that a severe storm might totally destroy it or reroute the water vein, but it never happened.
It was always there in the calm following the storm. And even there when it seemed to be overwhelmed.”

“Once, in March,” said my second brother, “Grandpa came across the ice with a load of hay. We were running short and we had no way of shoeing our horses so they could walk upon the ice. He borrowed a team of horses and had them shod with ‘ice-corks’ in their shoes and came across. He had ropes with rocks on each end strapped across the load so the hay would not blow away, and the brown dog was with him. The mother or grandmother of the one who was shot by the man who came from Pictou.

“He had fortified himself with two or three bottles of rum to ‘protect’ him from the cold, as he said. We could see him approaching the island, the dog running ahead of him, and then the team of horses pulling the sleigh. The horses were brown with white stars on their foreheads, one was the mother or grandmother of Christy and the other was one of her colts. I remember our father saying, ‘Look how in step they are. They raise and set their feet in perfect unison. They have the same rhythm. If you were to buy another horse and pair it with one of them, they could not pull the load in the same way, because they would always be slightly out of step. They are like dancers or singers from the same family. They are always perfectly in tune. And in time. And have a harmony all of their own.

“The horses moved forward,” my brother continued, “confident in the sharp corks upon their shoes which bit into the ice and gave them a purchase on the slippery surface. In spite of the cold they were sweating from the heaviness of their load, and
the white froth beneath their collars emphasized the hoary whiteness of their coats as their perspiration froze upon them. Frost upon frost moving across the whiteness of the ice.

“As they approached we could hear Grandpa singing Gaelic songs to himself out on the ice. We knew he was slightly inebriated because he was singing some of the verses out of sequence and repeating others which he had just finished. We went down to the edge of the ice to guide him ashore. After we had unloaded the hay and stabled the horses and had something to eat, Grandpa lay down for a nap, but then he got up and said he was going back. He had slept longer than he intended and darkness was not far away. Everyone wanted him to stay for the night, but he said he was planning to play cards with his friends later on, and that the horses would be eager to get home, and without the load behind them they would make the crossing rapidly. After he left our father said, ‘It is difficult for a man ever to give advice to his father. Even if you try to think of him as just another man he is still your father and you are his child, regardless of how old you have become.’

On the return journey Grandpa apparently fell asleep, comforted by the warmth of his winter robes and his rum and trusting to his horses and his dog. When the sleigh stopped he assumed he was in the yard of the horses’ owner and leaped out of the sleigh and began unharnessing them. It was then that he noticed the dark water slashing before him. The ice had “opened” and the dog had stopped and then the horses. Darkness had fallen and his fingers were too numb to reharness the horses and he knew he would have difficulty getting them
to turn back towards the island so he finished unharnessing them and let them go.