No Great Mischief (20 page)
Later, as she slept, she was strangely awakened and there was the form of a woman standing by her bedside. She sat up and the form moved to the foot of the bed and seemed to beckon to her. She dug her elbow into her husband’s back but could not awaken him. The room was in semi-darkness, but because it was summer and Aberdeen so far north it was brighter than one might expect. She looked more closely, straining her eyes. The form moved towards the door and then seemed to vanish. She got up slowly and walked towards the door herself. She tried it cautiously, but it was locked. She opened the door and looked down the hall. Halfway down there was a man in a kilt, sleeping on the floor with his room key still clutched in his hand. She went back into her room and pulled open the drapes. She looked out the window. It was quite bright, but the street was deserted. The only sound came from the gulls hanging in the air. She went to the hallway once again. The man was gone. It was four a.m.
When her husband awakened she asked him if he recalled the woman who brushed by them on the stairs. He said he didn’t remember. He was going out to look at the oil towers in the North Sea, he said. He would be gone for two days.
At breakfast she looked for both the young woman and the man in the kilt but could not find either.
“Why don’t you rent a car,” said her husband, “and take a drive? Go wherever you want.”
It was late in the day when she entered what she knew had been called the “rough bounds” of Moidart. Entered what the visiting scholar called “these horrid parts.” Passed the rhododendrons and the fassfern, went to look for Castle Tioram, the castle destroyed according to the prophecy, and walked across to see its remains at low tide. Could hardly get back to her car in time, she said, because the tide began to rise. Had to take off her shoes and hold them in her hand. Her skirt was wet and dripping. Got into her car and drove along the narrow winding tracks, watchful for the sheep and mindful to pull over to one side at the sight of rare approaching vehicles. Went to another spot near the sea and walked along the rocks looking at the seaweed and a pair of splashing seals. Listened to the crying of the gulls. Saw the form of an older woman approaching her, carrying a bag in her hand. Later she learned the bag contained winkles, which the woman had been gathering at low tide.
And then, she said, she met the woman face to face, and they looked into each other’s eyes.
“You are from here,” said the woman.
“No,” said my sister, “I’m from Canada.”
“That may be,” said the woman. “But you are really from here. You have just been away for a while.”
She walked with the woman to the low stone house and three brown and white dogs ran to meet them, running low to the ground with their ears flattened against their heads.
“They won’t bother you,” said the woman. “They will recognize you by your smell.”
The dogs licked her hand and wagged their tails.
“This woman is from Canada,” said my sister’s guide to an old man who sat on a wooden chair inside the house. “But she is really from here. She has just been away for a while.”
Although it was summer the inside of the stone house was cold and damp. “It reminded me of the cellars at home,” my sister said.
“Oh,” said the old man and my sister could not judge his degree of comprehension. He had on a soiled tartan shirt covered with a black sweater and wore a cloth cap. His eyes seemed rheumy and she thought he might be hard of hearing and that, perhaps, his mind wandered.
“Co tha seo?”
he said, looking at her more closely.
“Clann Chalum Ruaidh,”
she said.
“Ha,” he said, continuing his gaze.
“Wait here,” said the woman, and she went out, leaving them together.
“Did you come far?” he said.
“From Canada,” she said, again uncertain of his degree of comprehension.
“Ha,” he said, “the land of trees. A lot of the people went there on the ships. And some to America. And some to Australia, the country back of the sun. Almost all gone now,” he said, looking out of the window. “They are the lucky ones,” he added, as if talking to himself, “the ones who went to Canada.”
“Tell me,” he said, looking closely at her once again, “Is it true that in Canada the houses are made of wood?”
“Yes,” she said. “Some of them.”
“Oh,” he said. “But wouldn’t such houses be cold? Wouldn’t they rot?”
“No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe some of them in time.”
“What a strange thing,” he said. “I often wondered about it. Houses made of wood.”
There was a pause.
“The prince was here, you know,” he said suddenly.
“The prince?” she said.
“Yes, the prince. Bonnie Prince Charlie. Right at this very spot. He came from France in the summer of 1745 to fight for Scotland’s crown. We were always close to France,” he added dreamily, looking out the window again. “It was called ‘the auld alliance.’ ”
“Oh yes,” said my sister. “I’ve heard.”
“He was only twenty-five,” he said, suddenly becoming animated by the story. “Although he was our prince, he was raised in France and spoke mainly French, while we spoke Gaelic. Almost a thousand men went with him from here. The
Bratach Ban
, the white and crimson banner, was blessed at Glenfinnan by MacDonald. Most of the men went from here by boat, although some walked.
“We could have won” he said excitedly, “if the boats had come from France. We could have won if the rest of the country had joined with us. It was worth fighting for, our own land and our own people, and our own way of being.”
He had become so excited by his story that he leaned forward, from the waist, in my sister’s direction and his large hands which grasped his knees turned white along the ridges of his knuckles.
“The prince had red hair,” he said, suddenly changing his mind and lowering his voice in a quiet conspiracy. “And was said
to be very fond of girls. Some of us,” he whispered, “may be descendants of the prince.”
The door opened and the older woman came in accompanied by a number of people of different ages.
“Some of them,” my sister recalled to me, “had red hair and some had hair as black or blacker than my own. All of them had the same eyes. It was like being in Grandpa and Grandma’s kitchen.” I sat back as my sister continued with her story:
The older woman said to the group she had brought in, “This is the woman I told you about.” Then she spoke to them in Gaelic and they all nodded their heads. I nodded back and it was a few seconds before I realized that she had spoken in Gaelic and that I had understood her. It seemed I had been away from the language for such a long, long time.
They were all shy at first and then a woman about my own age said, “You have come a long way and your skirt is still wet from the water.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But it is all right,” she added. “You are here now. We will get you some dry clothes. One has to be careful of the water.”
She said everything in Gaelic, and then I began to speak to her and to them in Gaelic as well. I don’t even remember what I said, the actual words or the phrases. It was just like it poured out of me, like some subterranean river that had been running deep within me and suddenly burst forth. And then they all began to speak at once, leaning towards me as if they were trying to pick up a distant but familiar radio signal even
as they spoke. We spoke without stopping for about five minutes, although it might have been for a longer or shorter time. I don’t know. And I don’t even know what we said. The words themselves being more important than what they conveyed, if you know what I mean. And then all of us began to cry. All of us sobbing, either standing or sitting on our chairs in Moidart.
“It is as if you had never left,” said the old man. “Yes,” said the others all at once, “as if you had never left.”
Suddenly we were all shy again. Wiping our eyes self-consciously. It was like the period following passion. As if we had had this furious onslaught and now we might suddenly and involuntarily drop into a collective nap.
“Would you like some tea?” said the woman I had met on the beach, rousing herself from her chair.
“Yes, that would be nice.”
“Or perhaps a dram?” she added.
“Yes,” I said. “That would be nice also.”
“Wait here,” she said, “and I will get it and some dry clothing as well.”
She went through a door into an adjoining room.
“Do they still have the red hair?” asked the woman when she returned.
“Yes, some of them do.”
“Aha,” said the old man from his chair.
“And the twins? ”
“Yes, I am a twin myself.”
“Oh? Another girl?”
“No, a brother. He has red hair.”
“Oh,” they said, “a
gille beag ruadh?”
“Yes,” I said, “a
gille beag ruadh
. That’s what they called him. When he started school he didn’t know his given name.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said to my sister in her modernistic house in Calgary.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “You weren’t an orthodontist then, charging thousands for a set of braces. You were only a little boy.”
“And the dog?” said the older woman. “All of the older people used to talk about the dog. I remember my grandparents saying that they had been told about the dog by previous generations. How she had jumped into the ocean and swam after the boat when it was leaving for America. The people who were left behind had gone up to the highest hill to wave goodbye and they could see the dog’s head carving a V through the ocean, swimming and swimming after the departing boat and after a while her head was just a speck and they could hear
Calum Ruadh
shouting and cursing at her, could hear his voice coming across the flatness of the ocean, shouting, ‘Go back, go back, you fool, go home. Go back, go back, you’re going to drown.’ ”
“And then I suppose,” said the older woman, “he realized she would never go back. That she would try to swim to America. Or she would die in making the effort. And the people standing on the cliff, waving their bonnets or bright
items of clothing in final farewell, heard his voice change. Heard it crack with emotion as he began to shout, ‘Come on. Come on, little dog, you can make it. Here! Here! Don’t give up! You can make it! Come on! I am here waiting for you.’
“And the people on the cliff said they could see the speck of her head rise out of the ocean in response to his positive shouts. As if he gave her hope. And the V quickened and widened as she tried harder and harder. The man leaning over the side of the boat and banging the palm of his hand on its wooden side to offer encouragement and then reaching down to lift her from the water. That is the last picture anyone here ever had of that family,” said the woman. “After that, it was just waving from the cliffs until the ship itself became a tiny speck on the ocean, no bigger than the dog’s head had earlier been.”
“Yes,” said the old man, nodding in the direction of the brown and white dogs, which lay like rugs beneath the table and the chairs in the stone house in Moidart. “It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard.”
And my sister agreed and told them the story: “One of them was with my parents when they drowned. And she later died herself, on the island. Died from caring too much and trying too hard.”
“How did your parents drown?” asked the people in unison. “We are sorry. Where was this island?”
“Oh, I forgot you didn’t know,” said my sister. “I feel somehow that I have known you all my life and that you should know everything about me. I will tell you later.”
“It is good that you feel that way,” said the woman with a smile, offering her a glass. “You are home now.”
“Did you know,” asked my sister in her modernistic house in Calgary, “that after they landed,
Calum Ruadh
stabbed a man in Pictou?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I ever heard that. Only that he was depressed.”
“Well, he did” she said. “Grandfather told me. Do you know why he stabbed the man?”
“No,” I said.
“For kicking his dog,” she said quietly, looking directly into my eyes while drumming her fingers on the expensive table.
“His dog was heavy with pups and the man kicked her in the stomach.”
We went outside the house and looked down from the prestigious ridge. It was in the late afternoon and in the distance we could see the cars streaming east along the Trans-Canada Highway. Coming from Banff and the B.C. border. The sun glinted off their metallic rooftops and seemed to bounce in shafts of reflected golden light back towards the direction of the sky.
Now in the Toronto streets the sun hangs high above the smog while the people jostle and bump on the way to their individual destinations. Some carry string bags filled with produce from their own original regions of the world. The barbecuing ducks rotate slowly behind the window glass and the disembowelled piglets hang from the steel hooks driven through their legs. Their small determined teeth are clamped fiercely shut in death and their pink and purple gums are visible behind their silent and retracted lips.
In southwestern Ontario the pickers move across the flat hot fields or reach into the branches of the laden trees. The children of the families from the local towns and cities are even more weary now, and close to open rebellion. They long for their rec rooms and their video games and iced drinks and for long telephone conversations with their friends in which they can express the anguish of their pain. Their parents are by this time hot and tired and irritably exasperated by what they perceive as the non-cooperative attitude of the young. Now they no longer cajole but openly threaten. Angry fathers in their sweat-drenched undershirts, with their huge hands quivering at their sides, take giant steps across the green rows to confront the reluctant harvesters. “Why are you too lazy to pick the food you’re going to eat?” some will ask. “If you don’t smarten up you’ll be grounded. You’ll
have to stay in your room for two weeks.” Soon such families will drive home in sullen silence, glumly looking out the windows at the fields and the orchards and the pickers left behind.