No Great Mischief (5 page)

Both my twin sister and I were raised by our paternal grandparents and both of them were “of the
Calum Ruadh,”
which meant that they were cousins. So was our maternal grandfather, although we did not know him quite as well nor for as long; and in the manner of the more unknown, he seems now more intriguing. He was what was called “a come by chance,” which meant that he was illegitimate
and had been fathered by one of the
Calum Ruadh
men who went to work in the woods near Bangor, Maine, but never returned. Apparently my grandfather’s parents planned to marry in the spring when the husband-to-be would return with the money to begin their married lives; and his bride-to-be had given herself to him in that fall – in the manner that young girls give themselves to equally young soldiers before they depart for war – hoping they will come back, but uncertain and fearful as well. He must have been fathered in late October or early November because his birthday was August 3, and one has even now a haunting sympathy for them all. For the girl who discovers in the depth of winter she is pregnant by a man she cannot reach. And for the man who died, crushed beneath the load of logs on the skidway, perhaps without realizing he had set a life in motion, which would in turn result in even such a life as mine.

Apparently he was killed in January, although word did not filter out for some time, as it was a great distance and the season was winter and there were no telephones and postal service was uncertain and most of the people involved were still unilingually Gaelic-speaking. He was buried there, in winter, in the woods of Maine, and in the spring a cousin brought back his boots and his few possessions in a bundle. He had not been working long enough to earn anything substantial, and what he had put aside for his wedding was needed for his burial. As I said, one has a haunting sympathy for them all, for him and for the girl waiting in the depth of winter for a dead man who might free her of her shame. And for her also later in the hot summer months before the birth, poor and desperate and ashamed, with unknown expectations for her coming fatherless child.

Perhaps because of the circumstances of his conception, my maternal grandfather was an exceedingly careful man. He became an exceptional carpenter, finding great satisfaction in the exactitude of a craft where everything would turn out perfectly if you took the time to calculate it so. He did not marry until he was middle aged and had already designed and built his compact, perfect house within the town; and within his marriage he fathered but one perfect child, who was my mother. After the death of his wife in childbirth, he lived for a long time by himself, rising at exactly six a.m. and shaving and trimming his neat reddish moustache. His house was spotless, and within it he knew where everything was all of the time. And in the little building behind his house where he kept his shining tools it was the same. He was the kind of man you could go to with a request such as, “Do you have a screw nail that is exactly 1 ⅛ inch long?” And immediately he would go to the perfect little jar and there it would be.

Before going to bed he would set out his breakfast dishes for the next morning; again with great precision, his plate face down and his cup inverted upon its saucer with its handle always at the same angle, and with his knife and fork and spoon each in its proper place, as if he were in a grand hotel.

His shoes were always polished and in a shining row with their toes pointing outward beneath his neatly made bed, and his teapot was always placed on exactly the same spot upon his gleaming stove. “He is so clean, he makes you nervous,” said my other grandfather, who, while he had a great affection for him, was a very different kind of man.

Although he had a shot of whisky when he got up and one before he went to bed, he drank very little compared to many of
the men his age, and although he could sometimes be inveigled into going to the taverns he never remained long and did not like them. “He’s always getting up to get a cloth to mop the table,” my other grandfather would complain, “and he sits far back from the table like this” (giving an imitation of a man at a table – close but distant) “because he’s afraid someone will spill beer on his pants. And he can’t stand the washrooms with all that piss on the floor.”

Neither did he like ribald songs nor off-colour stories in either English or Gaelic, and his face would redden at almost any sexual reference. Again, I suppose because of what he considered to be a certain ill-prepared sloppiness in his painful past. And stories about the man who rides the girl and then goes away were not, for him, particularly funny.

When my sister and I were small children we would visit him more out of duty than affection because he was the kind of man who did not appreciate muddy boots on his always scrubbed floor, nor did he appreciate having his hammer mislaid, nor his saw left out to rust in the rain. And if he were not home and we left scrawled childish notes on his door, he would encircle all the misspelled words with his carpenter’s pencil and later on our next visit ask us to spell them correctly because he so wanted everything to be “right.”

He was a strong taskmaster at homework, but not without his own humour. I remember one night, while staying with him, attempting to memorize history dates. “Confederation, 1867,” I chanted aloud. “Think of me,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I was born here in 1877. I am only ten years younger than Canada, and I am not very old.” It seemed an amazing thing at
the time for he
did
seem old and so did Canada and I was not that strong at making distinctions, and did not realize what was young and what was old.

Although he was older and “different” than my other grandparents, they had a great affection and respect for him – not only because his only daughter had married their son and they shared that resulting pain, but I suppose also because he was their cousin and part of
“clann Chalum Ruaidh,”
although none of them remembered the young man who had fathered him in another century and who died on the winter skidway in the snow near Bangor, Maine.

“He has always stood by us,” said Grandma. “He has always been loyal to his blood. He has given us this chance.” “This chance” involved the story of how my grandparents became dwellers of the town rather than of the country. They had spent their early married years on the
Calum Ruadh
land, living with their in-laws for a while and then constructing their own unfinished house. They were always short of money and uncertain of their future and, apparently, even considered going to San Francisco, where Grandma’s sister, who had married Grandpa’s brother, had already gone and where they seemed to be prospering. But in the end they did not go. “The old people did not want us to go” was one explanation, but it seemed they really did not want to go themselves, although the idea persisted as fantasy, especially with Grandpa when he was in his cups. “I,” he would say, rising unsteadily but grandly from his chair and holding his glass in his hand, “could have gone to San Francisco.”

For a number of years, as their children came, they lived the uncertain “normal” lives of their time; Grandma washing her
clothes in the brook and slapping them on the rocks and tending her precious garden in its stony soil. Grandpa fishing in the waters off the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point for a while in summer, and caring for his animals and working haphazardly in the woods in winter.

When they began to construct the new hospital in the town ten miles away, my other grandfather began to work there as a carpenter and eventually to take small contracts on certain portions of it, and when it began to rise above the ground as a sort of monument to the future sick, few people knew as much about it as did he. He realized that when it was completed it would have to be maintained, and decided to groom Grandpa for the job. “He would come at night,” Grandma would say, “with his blueprints all so neat and exact, and I would wipe away everything from the table and he would spread them out and we would study them by the kerosene lamp, and he would point out all the pipes and cables and which connected to which and he would show us how all the newfangled switches and latches worked, and then he would ask us questions, just like the teacher, and invent problems and ask how they might be solved. And sometimes he would explain things in Gaelic. Then he would have one drink of whisky and play a tune on the violin – which always seemed so strange in him, you would never think of him as playing the violin – and then he would go. He never spent the night with us. I used to think it was because we did not have an indoor bathroom and he was always so clean – ‘fastidious’ I heard him called once. Anyway it got so that
I
knew everything about the inner workings of the hospital myself.”

When it dawned on the authorities that the new hospital
would need a maintenance man, Grandpa was, as he said, “really ready.” There were apparently some periods of tension when it seemed he might be on the wrong side of politics, but he was so dazzling in his interview that he simply overwhelmed any such opposition and was hired for the job. “I’m all set for life now,” he apparently said, patting his new pipe wrench in his new coveralls. “To hell with San Francisco.”

This was “the chance,” as I said, that led to my grandparents becoming dwellers of the town instead of dwellers of the country. It was, of course, but a short distance physically, and hardly any mental one at all. They lived on the outskirts of the town and they had a “yard” which consisted of almost two acres and they brought with them their chickens and their pig and their ever-present
Calum Ruadh
dogs, and for a while they even kept a cow. Their relatives visited them constantly, and because the town was also on the sea and because of the indented shoreline, they could look down along the coast and see the point of land from whence they came, and on clear nights they could see the lights glowing like earthbound stars where the distant dark horizon curved down towards the sea.

They were tremendously happy people, grateful for “the chance,” and never seeming to think much beyond it. “He is a really smart man,” said my other, more reflective grandfather of Grandpa, “if only he were more thoughtful.”

Still, it was he who had engineered the maintenance job for Grandpa and steered him towards it, almost, it seems, like the vocational guidance teacher, looking at the job and looking at the student and deciding (and hoping) that each might prove suitable for the other.

For his part, Grandpa would say, “I know
one thing
really well and that’s how to run this hospital. That’s enough for me.”

During their early married years, it seems, it was decided that Grandpa would earn whatever he could, and that he would then give everything there was to Grandma, except for a small allowance for tobacco and beer. She would then do almost everything else, which was no small accomplishment, considering that during their first twelve married years they produced nine living children. Before “the chance,” the earnings were erratic and unpredictable and Grandma was frequently hard-pressed, but after it, she too, like her husband, felt “all set for life,” and after her early years of “making do” with little, she felt privileged and almost “rich” beyond any of her earliest expectations. She was frugal and capable because, as she said, “I always had to be,” putting patches on the patches and hardly ever throwing anything away. And she believed with great dedication in a series of maxims. “Waste not, want not” was one, and “Always look after your blood” was another.

“He is the nicest man you could ever be around,” she frequently said of Grandpa. “And I should know. I have been sleeping with him for more than forty-five years. Some men,” she would add in ominous seriousness, “are nice as pie in public but within their own homes they are mean and miserly to those who have to live with them all the time. No one, perhaps, knows this except those who are captives within their houses. But he is never like that at all,” she would add, brightening at the very thought. “He is always cheerful and happy, and there is more to him than some people think.”

I
think of my grandparents a great deal, and, as in the manner of the remembered Gaelic songs, I do not do so consciously. I do not awake in the morning and say, as soon as my feet hit the floor, “Today I
must
remember Grandma and Grandpa. I will devote
ten whole minutes
to their memory” – as if I were anticipating isometric exercises or a self-imposed number of push-ups to be done on the floor beside my bed. It does not work that way at all. But they drift into my mind in the midst of the quiet affluence of my office, where there is never supposed to be any pain but only the creation of a hopeful beauty. And they drift into the quiet affluence of my home, with its sunken living room and its luxuriously understated furniture. And they are there too on Grand Cayman or in Montego Bay or Sarasota or Tenerife or any of those other places to which we go, trying to pretend that, for us, there really is no winter. They drift in like the fine snow in the old
Calum Ruadh
house in which my brothers used to live; sifting in and around the window casings or under the doors, driven by the insistent and unseen wind, so that in spite of primitive weather stripping or the stuffing with old rags, it continued to persist, forming lines of quiet whiteness to be greeted with surprise.