No Great Mischief (3 page)

“And how we hoped that the storm would take him back out, but it didn’t.”

“Yes, he couldn’t get back out.”

“No,” he says, turning from the window, “he couldn’t. Do you remember our parents?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Some things. I’m not sure how many of the memories are real and how many I’ve sort of made up from other people’s stories.”

“Ah yes,” he says. “And your sister, Catriona, the same.”

“Yes,” I say. “The same.”

He drinks again. This time directly from the bottle, which is now emptying rapidly.

“Poor Grandma and Grandpa,” he says. “They were good to you. As good as they knew how.”

“Yes,” I say. “They were.”

“ ‘Always look after your own blood,’ Grandma said.” His mood changes in an instant and he seems suddenly angry and suspicious. “I suppose that’s why you’re here?”

I am caught off guard by the sudden shift, trapped in the net of my own guilt and history.

“No,” I say. “Why no. Not really. No, it’s not that way at all.”

I look towards him, trying to gauge his mood as he sways slightly on the balls of his sock feet before me. The golden September sunshine slants indirectly through the window behind his back and seems to silhouette him as the dust motes flicker in its beams. He appears like the actor in the spotlight of the afternoon performance. He is poised and potentially
dangerous, and in spite of all the years of abuse, his body still responds to the old tense signals. He rocks forward now on his toes and then backwards on his heels while holding the brandy bottle lightly in his left hand, as if he might throw it. The fingers of his right hand open and close slowly and rhythmically; now into a fist and now into an extended hand. Then he laughs and the moment is past.

“Ah yes,” he says. “Yes,
’ille bhig ruaidh
. I was only thinking. Go and get some more liquor. Brandy if you want, or wine or beer, and we will drink away the day together. And the night.”

“All right,” I say, stepping towards the door, perhaps too quickly, and feeling ashamed for seeming so eager to abandon the room I have driven so many miles to enter.

“What would you like? Beer? Wine?”

“Oh,” he says. “It doesn’t make much difference. It doesn’t make much difference.”

“Okay, I won’t be too long.”

“No big rush,” he says. “Take your time. I am not going anywhere and I have this.” He swings the amber brandy bottle and its contents back and forth in his left hand. “I will sit here and wait.”

I go out into the hallway and close the door behind me and then slump with temporary relief. It is the slump of students when they close the door of the examination room behind them, or of those who leave the dentist’s office after being told, “The fillings will be two weeks from today – but
not
today.” Or of the witness released from his cross-examination in the box.

As I stand in the hallway I hear him as he begins to sing on the other side of the door. He sings softly but resolutely – singing to
himself in the manner that the drunken or the near-drunken often use to communicate with themselves:

He is singing “
Cumha Ceap Breatuinn
,” “Lament for Cape Breton,” which is one of those communal songs often sung by large groups of people or in situations where one person sings the verse and the group sings the chorus. It means something like:

As I walk down the hallway I move out of earshot of the singer who recedes with each of my steps, but as I begin to descend the steep, sad stairs, beneath the forty-watt bulb, the song continues and I am almost surprised to realize it is no longer coming from him but from somewhere deep within me. It rises up to the extent that my own lips move in an almost reflex action:

It is as if there is no break between his ending and my beginning; although the subject matter is much different, the verses and chorus come easily to my mind in the way, I suppose, that middle-aged former boy scouts remember the verses of “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” and “Oh, My Darling Clementine.” Sounds planted and dormant and flowering at the most unexpected times.

I am a twentieth-century man, I think, as I step out onto the street. And then another phrase of my grandmother’s comes to mind, “
whether I like it or not.”
I am a middle-aged man this September and indeed there is not much of the twentieth century left. If I continue to journey towards its end I will be fifty-five when the century closes, which is either young or old, perhaps, depending on your own point of view and attitude towards age and time. “We will live a long, long time,” said my grandfather of the
clann Chalum Ruaidh
, “if we are given the chance – and if we want to.” I try to square my shoulders in the September sun – as if I were auditioning for the part of “twentieth-century man” in a soon-to-be-released spectacular. “Ah,” haunts the voice of my oldest brother, “ah,
’ille bhig ruaidh
.
You’ve come at last. We have come a long way, you and I, and there are no hard feelings.” The voice pauses. “I have been thinking the last few days of
Calum Ruadh
. I wonder what he looked like?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know. Only what I have been told.”

“Ah,” says the voice. “Stay with me. Stay with me. You are still the
gille beag ruadh.”

Still
the
gille beag ruadh
. The phrase means “the little red boy” or “the little red-haired boy” and it was applied to me as far back as my memory goes. I remember thinking of it as my name and responding to it rather than to “Alexander,” which is what is on my birth certificate. And even on the first day of primary school, sitting behind my twin sister in my new clothes and clutching my newly purchased crayons in my too clean but sweating hands, I failed to respond when my true name was called from the roll.

“That’s you,” said a cousin, poking me from across the aisle.

“Who?” I said.

“That’s you,” he said. “That’s your name.”

Then, taking matters into his own control, he raised his hand and, pointing towards me, said directly to the teacher, “That’s him,
gille beag ruadh
, Alexander.”

Everyone laughed because I had missed my own name and the teacher, who was not from the area, became very flushed, probably because of the Gaelic phrase she did not understand. Thankfully, however, we were of the generation who were no longer beaten because we uttered Gaelic, “beaten for your own good,” as the phrase seemed to go, “so you will learn English and become good Canadian citizens.” Instead she merely asked, “Is your name Alexander?”

“Yes,” I said, having regained some shreds of composure.

“In the future, please answer when your name is called from the roll,” she said.

“I will,” I said to myself, making a sharp mental note to be on the lookout for the foreign sound in the future.

And also at that first recess, several bigger boys approached me, and one said, “Are you
gille beag ruadh?
”

“Yes,” I said, at first responding from habit and then, remembering my most recent lesson, “no, I’m not. Alexander. I’m Alexander.”

However, it seemed to make no difference: “The
Calum Ruadh’s
hair is red. It sets fire to their bed,” he chanted.

Again, under attack, I felt my lower lip trembling and I was afraid that I might cry.

“Leave him alone,” said another bigger boy in the group. “You’re part
Calum Ruadh
yourself,” and he ruffled my hair as he led the group away. I ran to join my sister, who was waiting for me a few yards away, and we went to play on the slides, which we had been told was a good thing to do at recess.

The
Calum Ruadh
who seems so present in thought and conversation in today’s Toronto was, as I mentioned earlier, my
great-great-great-grandfather. And he came from Scotland’s Moidart to the New World in 1779. Sometimes it seems we know a lot about him, and at other times very little. “It is all relative,” as they say. No pun intended. There are some facts and perhaps some fantasies that change with our own perceptions and interests.

These seem the facts: He was married in Moidart to Anne MacPherson, and they had six children, three boys and three girls. While these children were still quite small, Anne MacPherson became ill and died “of the fever,” leaving him with what my grandparents referred to as “his care,” meaning his motherless children. Later, his wife’s younger sister, Catherine MacPherson, came to keep house for him and to look after her nieces and nephews and eventually to marry the man who was their father. They had six more children, again three boys and three girls. Anyone who knows the history of Scotland, particularly that of the Highlands and the Western Isles in the period around 1779, is not hard-pressed to understand the reasons for their leaving.

They already had friends and relatives in North America. Many of them were in the Cape Fear River area of North Carolina – nearly all of them men, fighting at the time in the American War of Independence. Some of the older ones were on the side of the revolutionaries because they had decided to fight for a new life in the New World, and others fought on the British side because they remained stubbornly loyal to the British cause. At night they sang Gaelic songs to one another across the mountain meadows where they would fight on the following day. Singing Gaelic to their Highland friends and relatives across the
glens of North Carolina: “Come on over and join us.” “You’re on the wrong side.” “Don’t be fools.” “The future is with us.”

Calum Ruadh
was fifty-five in 1779 and had been twenty-one “at the time of the Forty-Five” when the call had gone out to “rise and follow Charlie.” Again there were friends and relatives singing and saying to one another: “Don’t be fools.” “You’re on the wrong side.” “Your loyalty is misplaced.” “Think about it.” Pressures from above as well as from all sides.

He and his wife and family had apparently talked about leaving for some time, and had made their plans quietly and contacted the emigration agent and agreed to meet him and his ship in one of the sheltered coves along the coastline, where he was picking up families such as theirs. Bound for Nova Scotia, “the land of trees,” although
Calum Ruadh’s
destination was Cape Breton, where, he had been told in a Gaelic letter, there would be land for him if he would come.

They were to leave on August 1, and the crossing would be perhaps six weeks with favourable winds. But in the weeks prior to the departure, the former Catherine MacPherson became ill and they did not know what to do. In the end they decided to go, having sold their cattle and given up the precious end timbers to their house, which in that land and in that time were hard to come by. Ironically, leaving a land with too few trees for one that was to have, perhaps, too many. They came down to the shore and waited,
Calum Ruadh
and his ill but hopeful wife and his twelve children. His eldest daughter was already married to a man named Angus Kennedy from the Isle of Canna and they waited also. One sees them in imagination’s
mist, shuffling their feet and watching the horizon while the shapes of friends and relatives move in and out of the shadows. “Perhaps you’re making a mistake.” “You could be fools.” “The future is uncertain.”

They waited there,
Calum Ruadh
holding his violin and perhaps resting his foot on the wooden sea chest with its neatly divided compartments. All of them with some small provisions and with their money secreted inside their shoes. He was unaware that the French Revolution was coming and that a boy named Napoleon was but ten, and had not yet set out to conquer the world. Although he was not surprised, later, at the number of his own relatives who died before and during Waterloo, still shouting Gaelic war cries while fighting for the British against the resistant French. General James Wolfe, whom he perhaps did not remember from the Forty-Five, was already dead twenty years, dying with the Highlanders on the Plains of Abraham – the same Highlanders he had tried to exterminate some fourteen years before.

It is unlikely that
Calum Ruadh
had many thoughts of Wolfe in that August of 1779. His mind was likely filled with more immediate concerns as he prepared to leave Moidart – another MacDonald leaving Moidart yet again – although this time not to “rise and follow Charlie,” although that image and that music may have haunted the recesses of his mind.

As they waited on the shore, the dog who had worked with them for years and had been left to the care of neighbours ran about in a frenzy, sensing that something was wrong, and rolling in the sand and whining in her agitation. And when they began to wade out to the smaller boat which would take them to the
waiting ship, she swam after them, her head cutting a V through the water and her anxious eyes upon the departing family she considered as her own. And as they were rowed towards the anchored ship, she continued to swim, in spite of shouted Gaelic threats and exhortations telling her to go back; swimming farther and farther from the land, until
Calum Ruadh
, unable to stand it any longer, changed his shouts from threats to calls of encouragement and, reaching over the side, lifted her soaked and chilled and trembling body into the boat. As she wriggled wetly against his chest and licked his face excitedly, he said to her in Gaelic, “Little dog, you have been with us all these years and we will not forsake you now. You will come with us.”