As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (22 page)

MacLeod’s stories have been called – albeit with great admiration – traditional, even conservative, by a literary world cluttered with theories and “isms.” They are, however, in their portrayal of an ancestral past that continually affects the present and in their sense of deep yearning for forsaken landscapes, as fresh and as complex as the present moment. We Canadians are, after all, a nation composed of people longing for a variety of abandoned homelands and the tribes that inhabited them, whether these be the distant homelands of our recent immigrants, the abducted homelands of our native peoples, the rural homelands vacated by the post-war migrations to the cities, or the various European or Asian homelands left behind by our earliest settlers. All of us have been touched in some way or another by this loss of landscape and of kin, and all of us are moved by the sometimes unidentifiable sorrow that accompanies such a loss. We are also moved, however, by the comfort we are afforded when an
artist of the calibre of Alistair MacLeod carries such sorrowful and penetrating themes towards us in his gentle and capable hands.

These themes are not only Canadian ones, of course, they are universal – migration having been always a part of the human experience – and in MacLeod’s stories, as in all great art, the universal becomes clearer and sharper when we are brought into intimate contact with the particular. I am always impressed, for instance, by the tension MacLeod creates in this country of vast distances and brutal weather by the anticipated journey home. A young man wishing to return to Cape Breton for Christmas from a job on Ontario lake freighters is dependent on the Great Lakes freezing, on the one hand, and on the highways being free of crippling blizzards on the other. A boy relies on a golden dog to guide him towards his warm kitchen and away from his death on a partly frozen sea. A crew of shaft and development miners knows that if one of them dies underground, as is so often the case, his comrades will make the dangerous winter journey to ferry the broken body back to the ancestral graveyard. A group of scattered relatives is aware that they will attempt to drive the long highways home to attend the funeral of a loved one despite the fear that the journey will be rendered impossible by winter, circumstance, change, or the fact that the return itself may be almost too painful to be borne. As the exiled narrator in “Winter Dog” laments:

And in the middle of the long, multi-layered, and disturbing story entitled “Vision,” the grandfather quotes the poem
reputed to have been uttered thirteen hundred years ago by Saint Colum Cille upon his exile from Ireland:

MacLeod’s stories are resonant with the lamentations of exiles, and strong within these lamentations is the desire to preserve that which was, and even that which is, against the heartbreaking ravages of time; to preserve, not necessarily with factual accuracy, but rather with something that one can only call, trite though it sounds, emotional truth. Like the fishermen in “Vision” and in the interests of this goal, MacLeod defines his boundaries by making use of “the actual river” when it suits his purposes or, when it does not, “an earlier imaginary river which [he] can no longer see.” Hence a tale from the past sheds as much clear light on a character or a situation as a contemporary word or deed and, in the end, preservation is accomplished by establishing the timelessness of legend.

To explore timelessness, preservation, and emotional truth is among the purest of literary intentions and, because of this, the seven stories in
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories
seem to move effortlessly from the author’s heart to the page and then to leap back from the page into the heart of the reader. This is not to suggest that there is anything resembling a “stream-of-consciousness” approach in the writing. In fact, MacLeod is so “care-full,” in the true sense of the word, that quite the opposite is true. All of the stories have been “tuned to
perfection” both technically and emotionally and with such care that they burst into sensual life as we read. We see and feel the cold, wet nose of a beloved dog, the delicate form of an embryo calf exposed within the slaughtered body of its mother, captured lobsters moving awkwardly on the floor of a fishing boat. But, most important, we are witness to a deepness of caring that reveals itself with brutality and tenderness, a deepness of caring that binds man to woman, father to son, man to animal, and humanity to kin and landscape.

The depth of caring that is examined in
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun
is as much active as it is reflective in its expression. All of the protagonists are men whose lives are inexorably bound to the physical: the netting of fish, the husbandry of animals, the carving of rock from the bowels of the earth. Almost immediately the reader comes to trust the heavy, muscular presence of such men who in many cases carry the history of their physicality around with them in the form of wounds or scars. Even the entry of a family story concerning old sorrows into the mind and memory of a young man is described actively, physically, and compared to wounds and scars. “You know,” says the narrator in “Vision,” “the future scar will be forever on the outside while the memory will remain, forever, deep within.” By associating memory with blood and body, MacLeod suggests that emotion is biological and genetic and can never, therefore, be connected to that which is ephemeral or casual.

In the end it is this utter absence of the casual that gives MacLeod’s stories their enormous power and raises them to the level of myth. “Second Spring” is much more than the tale of a Maritime boy “smitten with the calf club wish.” It reaches back through time to all the sacred bulls and cows that have existed in Celtic, Greek, and Eastern myth. The
cù mòr glas
, which in the title story operates, for one family, as a sort of canine banshee, is equally Finn McCool’s great dog Bran loping across the Giant’s Causeway from Ireland to Scotland and
Charon’s dog Cerebus guarding the gates to the underworld and keeping watch over the River Styx. In “Vision” references to second sight, blindness, memory, and a constant shifting of understanding call to mind the blindfolded figure of justice and cause us to examine the nature of perception itself.

One winter night I was fortunate enough to hear Alistair MacLeod read from new fiction. I took home from that evening images of knives and forks being placed on a kitchen floor by children playing store, a nocturnal winter landscape viewed through glass, and, in the distance, one lantern going dark and another coming to rest far out on the ice. Like the old masters in W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” MacLeod is never wrong about suffering and understands “how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;” or “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” But it is not the leisurely turning away that commands the focus of MacLeod’s attention. Somewhere around the middle of the piece he read that night, he described a dog whose passion leads him to a tragedy as final as the one that visited his lantern-carrying owners. Someone, a grandfather I believe, says, “It was in those dogs to care too much, to try too hard,” meaning that this exaggerated trying and caring was bred into such dogs in Scotland over 150 years ago. Sitting in the audience and hearing that line, I was suddenly convinced that MacLeod was describing not only a certain breed of dog but all of his characters, animal and human, and the writer himself, engaged in his craft.

This is what we want from our best authors: not merely that they care and try but that they care
too
much and try
too
hard, that the intensification of feeling and of meaning manifests itself in their hearts and in their work. We come away from the stories in
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other
Stories
with that desire completely satisfied, our own world view intensified, enlarged, and enriched. And we come away understanding more clearly “the twisted strands within the rope,” the difficult, “tangled twisted strands of love.”

The stories listed below originally appeared in the following publications:

“The Closing Down of Summer” in
The Fiddlehead
, Number 111, Fall 1976; reprinted in
Fiddlehead Greens: Stories from the Fiddlehead
, Oberon, 1979. “Winter Dog” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine
, Number 40/41, 1981. “To Every Thing There Is a Season” in the
Globe and Mail
, December 24, 1977. “Second Spring” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine
, Number 34/35, 1980. “The Tuning of Perfection” in
The Cape Breton Collection
, Pottersfield Press, Nova Scotia, 1984. “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun” in
event
magazine, Volume 14, Number 2, 1985.

I would like to thank Kerstin Mueller of the Eastern Counties Regional Libraries and Roddie Coady of the Coady and Tompkins Memorial Library for providing me with much-needed and much-appreciated writing space.

I would also like to thank A. G. MacLeod, Murdina Stewart and the University of Windsor for their different kinds of help and cooperation. The translations of the longer Gaelic songs are from
Beyond the Hebrides
(1977), edited by Donald A. Fergusson. Again, my thanks.