No Great Mischief (28 page)

“Yes,” I said, “ ‘
Fuadach nan Gaidheal,’
the ‘Dispersion of the Highlanders.’ ” We began to hum the song and then the Gaelic words came to us, hesitatingly at first, it seemed, and then gaining force, welling up from wherever it was that song was stored. We sang all that we knew in Gaelic, three verses and the chorus, looking to each other for clues at the beginning of lines when we seemed uncertain. When we finished we stood and looked at one another, almost embarrassed in our expensive clothes amidst the opulence of my sister’s majestic house.

“Well,” she said, “I think of the herring like the returning birds. That they came back regardless of what had happened to the people. That they came back whether or not there were
people on the shore waiting for them, whether or not there were people there who believed they had a king.”

“Grandfather once said,” she continued, “that on Culloden Moor the Highlanders sang. Standing there with the sleet and rain in their faces, some of them sang. To cause fear or to bolster confidence or to offer consolation. None of the Highlanders ever went into battle without music.

“Do you remember,” she asked after a pause, “how Grandpa and Grandma and all their friends used to sing? Grandma said that when she was newly married, all of the women used to take their washing down to the brook. They would make a fire and heat water in those black pots they used to have and they would sing all day, slapping the clothes on the rocks in perfect rhythm. And they would do the same thing when they were making blankets, fulling the cloth, all of them sitting at that long table. They believed the music made the work go faster. And the men all sang when they were pulling their ropes and their chains.”

“Yes,” I said. “Remember when they were older? The house would be full of people and late in the evening they would sing those long, long songs with thirteen or fourteen verses. Grandpa would be addled because he was so full of beer and he would say to us, ‘Run over and get your grandfather. He knows all the verses.’ Grandfather would be sitting in his freshly scrubbed kitchen all by himself, reading his history book, but he would always come. When he would enter the kitchen, at first everyone would pause as if he were a foreign element entering their merriment. ‘It’s because he’s so damn smart and so damn sober and so damn clean,’ Grandpa would always say later; but then Grandfather would begin to sing and everyone would go along
with him. ‘When he comes in,’ Grandpa used to say, ‘it’s like a stone dropped into a pool. It causes a ripple at first but then everything is fine.’

“Remember,” I said, “how in the enthusiasm of the moment, they would sometimes veer into the opening lines of those mildly off-colour songs and then they would remember he was among them and raise their eyebrows or gesture towards him with their heads and try to change the song in mid-line? Otherwise he would put on his hat and walk out. He was like a precise clergyman who didn’t wish to be at a stag party.”

“Yes,” said my sister. “He was always troubled by the sexual circumstances of his own birth. And perhaps also by the circumstances of our mother’s birth. Grandma used to say he felt guilty about his wife’s death – that if he had not impregnated her she would not have died in childbirth. They only had one year of married life.”

We were silent for a moment.

“Grandma once told me,” continued my sister, “that before our mother had her first period he came over to Grandma’s and asked her to explain ‘the facts’ to our mother, who was then just a little girl advancing towards puberty.

“ ‘The poor dear man,’ Grandma said. ‘He came and sat on a chair with his hat on his knee and hummed and hawed and was all red in the face. I didn’t know what he wanted as he was usually so direct. When I finally found out I said, “Of course I’ll do it. There’s not much about menstruation that I don’t know.” ’

“It was, I guess,” said my sister, “peculiar to his personality. He could iron our mother’s clothes and braid her hair. He could frame a house all by himself in two or three days and do
quadratic equations without ever having gone to high school, but he couldn’t handle menstruation. He was raised in a house without a father, only a mother, and years later he was with a daughter who had no mother, only a father. He was always in the midst of loss. They say,” said my sister quietly, “that his mother used to beat him – just because he was born.”

“Yes,” I said. “She was our great-grandmother. Her blood also runs through our veins.”

“Yes, it does,” she said. “I often think of that.”

“Once after a night of singing,” I said, “I walked home with him.” ‘Music,’ he said, ‘is the lubricant of the poor. All over the world. In all the different languages.’ ”

“Yes, I think of that even when I watch the news.”

“The Zulus,” I said, recalling earlier conversations, “always sing in the miners’ compounds. Our brothers said that after a while they could almost sing the songs, although they didn’t know their meaning. It was as if it were one musical people reaching out to join another.”

“I don’t suppose,” she said after a moment of reflection, “that you sing at your work?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you subscribe to a concert series?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So do I,” she replied. “The performers are quite wonderful.”

“Yes, they are.”

“Sometimes when we attend concerts here or when we go to performances in Banff I look at the performers and then around me at the members of the audience. Sometimes the women,
including myself, have exclusive dresses and the men are in tuxedos. I suppose it is the same where you are. ‘Most of those people,’ I say to myself, ‘go to the orthodontist.’ Am I right?”

“Yes. Most of them go to the orthodontist.”

“I don’t suppose,” she said, “that many of the Zulus go to the orthodontist?”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“I don’t know why I think this way,” she said, “but I am always moved by those African documentaries. The Zulus thought their world would never end. They seemed to be such a tall athletic people. Swaggering and arrogant. They believed in their battle formations and in their songs and in their totems. They believed in their landscape and in their armies of the thousands. When they moved across the veldt, singing, people say the ground trembled under the impact of their bare feet. They believed they were invincible and I suppose, in human terms, they were. They just weren’t ready for machine guns, and the documentation that followed.

“A few years ago,” she continued, “Mike and I went on one of those African safari tours. To see the animals on the plain at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, in the south of Kenya near the border of Tanzania. The animals will take your breath away. All the different species grazing together and followed by their natural predators. Almost intermixed with the animals are the Masai following the grass cycle with their cattle herds, living off the milk and blood of their cows. We would go early in the morning from a base camp in Land Rovers and all-terrain vehicles, armed with cameras and binoculars. The tour operators
apologized for the presence of the Masai. They realized that we had paid a lot of money to see wildlife, not families of people following their cows. There were borders and boundaries to the game preserves and the national parks, explained the tour operators, but the Masai refused to recognize them. They just followed the water and grass. They had always been ‘troublesome,’ according to the tour operator, and when colonization first came to Kenya they had attacked rather than co-operated. ‘What will be done with them,’ asked a member of our tour group, ‘to get them out of this beautiful place?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said the tour operator. ‘Something. Soon, I hope.’

“Sometimes,” said my sister, “when our vehicles passed the Masai on the plain, I would try to look into their eyes. Perhaps what I saw there, or imagined I saw, was a combination of fear mixed with disdain. We were high above on the roofs of rubber-tired vehicles and they were in bare feet on the ground.

“But, this is a long digression,” she sighed. “What do I know of Africa, anyway? I’ve never been there in my bare feet.”

We both got up, as if on cue, and looked out the window. The Bow River sparkled below us. It snaked and glimmered through the newness of the city built upon its banks.

“Did you know,” she said, “that Calgary gets its name from a place located on the Isle of Mull?”

“No,” I said. “Well, I’m not sure. I guess I haven’t thought about it very much.”

“Well, there are none of the native people there any more, either,” she said.

“Everyone used to say that when our parents came in from the island, our mother would often go to visit her father, just by
herself. Sometimes she would ask Grandpa and Grandma if it were okay if she could leave her small children with them for a while and then she would go to see him. They would sit there in his bright, clean kitchen drinking tea. I often think of the two of them sitting there together. I wonder what they talked about? They had been together longer than she was with her husband or he was with his wife. He had always been there for her and as Grandpa used to say, ‘That man is as solid as a rock.’ He had been with her through a lot of changes in her life, though, of course, not the last one, and no one could have foreseen that. Grandma said that when our mother was a little girl she was always dressed so meticulously and her hair always braided to perfection. Grandma said that he was trying hard to give her the care her mother might have given. Perhaps he was also trying to relive and improve upon his own situation as a child. Grandma said he told her that when he was a little boy he used to sit on the doorstep in his short pants and look down the road for the coming of his father. He used to wish and wish that his father would come and make his life better.” She paused. “It is hard to imagine Grandfather in short pants.”

“I am sure they were clean,” I smiled.

“Maybe they weren’t,” she said. “Maybe his cleanliness was a trait he later developed within himself. Anyway, his father never came. He never had even a picture of him. His mother would become enraged if he ever mentioned the circumstances of his own conception. Perhaps in addition to being bitter she was also embarrassed.

“I think he was always haunted by the fact that the night he was conceived, if it even was at night, his father may just have
been having a good time. A young man going off to the woods of Maine, like all those young soldiers you read about, going off to the wars. Perhaps that’s why he was always so ill at ease when Grandpa would start those little jokes about the man taking the girl behind the bushes. I think now I understand him more,” she said.

“Perhaps that’s why he became so interested in history,” she went on. “He felt that if you read everything and put the pieces all together the real truth would emerge. It would be, somehow, like carpentry. Everything would fit together just so, and you would see in the end something like ‘a perfect building called the past.’ Perhaps he felt that if he couldn’t understand his immediate past, he would try to understand his distant past.”

“Not so easy,” I said.

“I know not so easy,” she answered. “And he knew it too. But he tried, and he was interested, and he tried to pass it on to us. Living out here where everything is so new, I miss all of those people,” she continued. “I miss them as a group and then sometimes I try to separate our parents from the group. Sometimes perhaps you and I idealize our parents too much because we scarcely remember them. They are the ‘idea’ of parents rather than real people. Perhaps we are doing the same thing that Grandfather was doing with that young man who was his father.”

“Perhaps it’s genetic,” I said. “And I’m not mocking.”

“Oh yes, genetic,” she said. “Sometimes I think of
clann Chalum Ruaidh
. All of those people with their black and red hair. Like you and me. All of them intertwined and intermarried for two hundred years here in Canada and who knows for how
many years before. In Moidart and Keppoch, in Glencoe and Glenfinnan and Glengarry.”

“Don’t forget the prince,” I said. “He had red hair.”

“I’m not forgetting the prince,” she said. “Still, you can’t have generic parents. You only have two individuals. Sometimes I have thoughts and feelings and I say to myself, ‘I wonder if my mother ever thought or felt like this?’ It would be nice to ask her. Perhaps that’s the type of thing she used to discuss with her father when they were drinking their tea. I suppose this is the way adopted children feel when they wish to seek out their biological parents. They are perhaps looking for foreshadowings of themselves. Forerunners. Signs of the way that they themselves might later develop. In our case, though,” she said with a smile, “I guess we were hardly adopted. We were left with more than Grandfather, who never even had a picture of his father.”

“On the day of my graduation,” I said, “he told us that his father came to him twice: in a vision and in a dream. He saw him in the vision as a younger man than he was himself – probably, I suppose, because he had been stopped by death and time. He remembered what he looked like, although, of course, he had never seen him in a physical way. In the vision he unnerved him, but in the dream he consoled him and, I guess, gave him advice as to how he might live his daughter’s life and his, for a while.

“The day before,” I continued, “he had confirmed his suspicions about Wolfe. Authenticated that passage where Wolfe refers to the Highlanders as ‘a secret enemy.’ It sort of changes the conventional picture of Wolfe with his ‘brave Highlanders.’ ”

“I suppose,” she said, “you can be brave and also misunderstood. Brave and betrayed. After Culloden many of those Gaelic-speaking soldiers went to France. After they were pardoned and came back to fight under Wolfe they could speak French as well as Gaelic.
Two
languages that probably didn’t make Wolfe feel particularly comfortable with his circumstances.”

“If MacDonald had not been able to speak French, to fool the sentries, the history of Canada might be different,” I added.

“Who knows?” she said. “If the MacDonalds had been placed on the right of the line instead of the left, Culloden might have been different. They believed it was their traditional spot since Bannockburn, but their commanders were largely of a different culture. They didn’t know what they were talking about, and probably thought of them as being sulky or petulant, which they probably were. Muttering to themselves in the strangeness of their Gaelic language.”