No Great Mischief (32 page)

That winter Calum was convicted of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment at Kingston Penitentiary. The judge, noting what he called the accused’s long history of violent transgressions, said that he hoped the sentence would serve as an example for those who chose to break the law.

One of my brothers went back to the Bridge River Valley of British Columbia. He had worked there as a miner as a young man, and now he drives the school bus among the narrow mountain passes.

The other went to Scotland. He was standing on the railway platform at Glasgow’s Queen Street Station when a red-haired

man approached him. “Hello, MacDonald,” said the man. “
Ciamar a tha sibh
– how are you?”

“
Glé mhath
,” he replied.

“I’m waiting for the train to the Highlands,” said the man. “I suppose you are too. We have time for a dram in the station bar.”

“Well,” said my brother, “I guess I have time.”

“When I first saw you,” said the man, “I thought you were from the Highlands, but now that I hear you talk you sound like you’re from Canada.”

“Yes, I’m from Canada. From Cape Breton.”

“Oh,” said the man, “the land of trees. That’s where a lot of the people went after it all happened. I have probably more relatives there than I have here. Too bad about it all.”

“Yes, too bad about it all.”

“Well,” said the man, brightening, “however long you’ve been gone, you haven’t gone that far to look and talk like you do. What goes around, comes around, I suppose. There is a fish farm near where I live. Come and have a look at it. Maybe you’d like to stay for a while. We can always make room. We can always fit you in. ‘Come to the Highlands with me,’ as the song says.”

“Maybe I will,” said my brother. “A few things happened. I was just trying to leave the past for a while.”

“Interesting place to come for that,” laughed the man. “Perhaps you’re coming to the past. Anyway, get yourself a ticket. Then we’ll go to the bar. We’ll talk about
Bliadhna Thearlaich
– Charlie’s Year: 1745-6. If only the ships had come from France!”

Grandpa died from jumping up in the air and trying to click his heels together twice. There were a lot of people in his house that evening and he had already attempted to do it on two occasions. Grandma, who was always encouraging, said, “Try it once more. The third time is the charm.” He leapt up into the air and then collapsed for the last time on his floor. Neither my sister nor I nor our three brothers were there to see his final fall. Earlier in the evening they had been playing cards. They were playing “Auction” and he had been banging his fist on the table enthusiastically whenever he had the ace of hearts. “I wish I could get as much satisfaction out of having the ace of hearts,” Grandfather had often said about him.

When he died, Grandfather said, “What an absolutely foolish way for a man to die.” He clasped his hands tightly until his knuckles turned white. Since the death of his daughter no one had ever seen him cry.

Later Grandma said, “Although they were so different they were each other’s closest friends. Throughout their lives, they were each a balance to the other.”

Grandfather died reading a book called
A History of the Scottish Highlands
. His finger marked the page and the book flipped closed around his finger and his glasses slipped down on
his nose. He was reading about the massacre of Glencoe, the old story of betrayal from within and without. He was reading about the “troublesome” man who was killed to serve as an example to those who chose to break the law. The self-reliant man who was overtaken by his own history.

As would be expected, Grandfather left everything in order. He had a list of his pallbearers and the music he wanted performed at his funeral service. As his coffin came down the aisle, the violinist played “Patrick MacCrimmon’s Lament for the Children” and on the way to the graveyard the piper played “I Mourn for the Highlands.” As we were leaving the church, a woman said, “Who is going to look after us now?”

He had appointed me as the executor of his will. He left his books and his house to my sister, who was his only female descendant, and he divided what money he had among his grandsons.

Neither of my grandfathers died in the hospital which the one had built and the other had maintained. Calum was unable to come to either funeral.

Grandma lived to be one hundred and ten, the same age as her ancestor
Calum Ruadh
. After Grandpa died, she kept all his clothes hanging where he left them. His jackets and his caps hung on their nails in the porch and for a long time you could smell his familiar odour when you entered the house. The specific odour of his tobacco and his spilled beer and his humour and his jolly kindness. The brown dogs lay beneath the hanging clothes for months, their noses resting upon their crossed paws. Caring a lot and trying hard.

Once, he had said to Grandfather, “You should get yourself a girlfriend.”

“And you,” said Grandfather, “should mind your own business.”

Grandma continued to work hard. Her physical strength and endurance, in time, exceeded her other capacities. Towards the end, revellers would see houselights burning brightly at two a.m. Within the house she would have her dinner table set for eleven. Her pots would be boiling merrily on the stove and she would be brushing her hands on her apron. “There now,” she would say to the brown dogs, after checking the interior of her oven. “Nearly done. We just need the pickles and then we will be ready. It will only take a minute. A stitch in time saves nine.”

After she moved to the nursing home our visits would take on a quality both foreign and familiar. Sometimes I tried to reach her in regard to my own past, but she had more past than I. Always I think of those visits of the past in the present tense.

“It’s a nice day today,” she says. “It will be good for fishing and for hanging out a wash.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Are you from around here?” she asks.

“Yes, well, no. Well, yes.”

“You have lovely clothes,” she says. “You must have a good job. My husband had a good job. He ran the hospital. We always had a regular paycheque. We never wanted for anything. He was a very generous man, my husband.”

She pauses.

“One of my sons has a good job too,” she continues. “He was in the war, in the navy. Now he is the lightkeeper on the island over there. Look, you can see it through the window. The government supplies him with a big boat and everything. He is
married to a lovely girl. The daughter of our friend. They have six children. The youngest two are twins. A boy and a girl. Sometimes they stay at our house for a while. They are never any trouble. Do you have children?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Do they make their own beds? ”

“Well, sometimes,” I reply.

“You should encourage them to make their own beds,” she says. “It’s good training for life. I have a grandson who lives in southern Ontario. I visited him once. He is a dentist and is a rich man. He and his wife have a lovely big house. They have a cleaning lady. Think of that! When I visited them I used to want to clean the house before the cleaning lady came. I wouldn’t want someone else to come in and find a mess, unmade beds and such. I hope you make your own bed. Do you?”

“Well,” I say, “perhaps not as often as I used to.”

“You should. It only takes a minute.”

She pauses again.

“I have a granddaughter,” she says. “She acts in plays and things like that. Probably like those plays on television. Do you watch television?”

“No,” I say, “not much.”

“Sometimes in the afternoon, the people here watch television in the lounge. Oh, those people on television” she flaps her hands sympathetically forward from her lap, “the problems that they have.”

After a moment, she begins again. “Most of us are Scottish people here,” she tells me. “We are Highlanders. All up and down this coast and inland, too. A lot of us are descended from a man
who came here long ago. He was married to a woman in Scotland and they had six children. She died and then he married her sister and they had six more children. She died too while they were making the crossing. He was not a young man when he came here, but not an old one either. He was fifty-five. I think that perhaps he was often lonely, but he was determined and tried his best. He is buried all by himself down by the shore.

“For a long time we never left here,” she says. “We were here as a Gaelic-speaking group, and a lot of people never left the island. My husband used to tell a little joke. A man was supposed to have asked another man, ‘Were you ever off Cape Breton Island?’ And the man was supposed to have said, ‘Only one time. Once I climbed a tree.’ My husband was like that. He was always full of little jokes. He used to pick them up in the taverns or wherever he went and then he would tell them to me when we were in bed at night.”

She looks down at her hands.

“Then the men began to go away. At first to work in the woods during the winter. To mainland Nova Scotia, and then to New Brunswick, to the Miramichi, and then to the state of Maine. Some of them never came back. And then families. My sister and I were married to two brothers. I was her bridesmaid. They went to San Francisco and we never saw them again, although we wrote to one another for years. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ we always said.

“Later a lot of people went to the hard-rock mines. All over Canada and the States. To South America and Africa and all those places. They used to send pictures and postcards and some of
them brought home those African masks. Once our grandsons brought us a kitten from Northern Ontario.”

She is silent for a moment.

“I don’t know what happened to some of them out there,” she says.

The clack of dogs’ nails are heard on the polished floor and two brown dogs enter the room. They go towards her and lick her hand. Suddenly she is back in the present. She leans forward, as if we are conspirators. “Dogs are not allowed in here,” she says. “It’s a rule, but a lot of the staff here are my relatives so when the dogs come they just look the other way. The dogs come to visit me every day. They are very loyal. Everybody likes them.

“Do you have dogs?” she asks.

“No, I don’t.”

“You should,” she says. “They are man’s best friend. Sometimes I think dogs have more sense than half the people.” And then she asks, “Do you know any French people?”

“Yes,” I smile, “I know some.”

“When I used to read I used to think that they were a lot like us. That they were alone with their landscape for a long, long time. That it went into them somehow. Our friend used to say that long ago in Scotland they were our friends, part of the ‘auld alliance,’ they used to call it. Did you ever hear of that?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it.”

“Are they nice?”

“Who?”

“The French people.”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“I suppose they are like the rest of us. Some are nice and some are not so nice.”

“I suppose so,” I say.

“Are you married?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, “I’m married.”

“I was too,” she says. “I was married very young. My husband kept pestering me. He said we would be happy and he was right. Neither of us ever wavered. ‘All of us are better when we’re loved,’ he used to say. A lot of people wouldn’t think my husband would ever say anything like that.