Island

INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
ALISTAIR MACLEOD’S SHORT STORIES:

Alistair MacLeod’s short stories have gained him a world-wide audience. They have appeared in every English-speaking country and have been translated into many other languages, including Italian, Norwegian, Gaelic and Urdu. The stories, included in two books shaped with patient care,
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
(1976) and
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun
(1986), led Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín to include him in their selection
The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950
, and inspired the Irish novelist Tóibín to say, “Reading these two books, knowing that I could tell other readers about them, was the high point of The Modern Library Project for me.”

By 1999 the sixty-four-year-old university professor’s reputation as a short story writer stood so high that his first novel,
No Great Mischief
, was awaited with breathless anticipation. When the book finally appeared, in September of that year, it was promptly hailed as a masterpiece, and became a Canadian bestseller. It also attracted eager publishers from many other countries.

In turn, the success of
No Great Mischief has
created a keen interest in Alistair MacLeod’s short stories. This book is issued in response to that demand. All sixteen of his lovingly crafted stories are contained here, organized chronologically, in the order in which they first appeared in print. They are accompanied by no commentary, no explanations, no critical apparatus. These are Alistair MacLeod’s stories, and they speak for themselves.

Douglas M. Gibson
January 2000

T
here are times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth. There are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks and mumbling for words before I realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters by the pier.

At such times only the grey corpses on the overflowing ashtray beside my bed bear witness to the extinction of the latest spark and silently await the crushing out of the most recent of their fellows. And then because I am afraid to be alone with death, I dress rapidly, make a great to-do about clearing my throat, turn on both faucets in the sink and proceed to make
loud splashing ineffectual noises. Later I go out and walk the mile to the all-night restaurant.

In the winter it is a very cold walk, and there are often tears in my eyes when I arrive. The waitress usually gives a sympathetic little shiver and says, “Boy, it must be really cold out there; you got tears in your eyes.”

“Yes,” I say, “it sure is; it really is.”

And then the three or four of us who are always in such places at such times make uninteresting little protective chit-chat until the dawn reluctantly arrives. Then I swallow the coffee, which is always bitter, and leave with a great busy rush because by that time I have to worry about being late and whether I have a clean shirt and whether my car will start and about all the other countless things one must worry about when one teaches at a great Midwestern university. And I know then that that day will go by as have all the days of the past ten years, for the call and the voices and the shapes and the boat were not really there in the early morning’s darkness and I have all kinds of comforting reality to prove it. They are only shadows and echoes, the animals a child’s hands make on the wall by lamplight, and the voices from the rain barrel; the cuttings from an old movie made in the black and white of long ago.

I first became conscious of the boat in the same way and at almost the same time that I became aware of the people it supported. My earliest recollection of my father is a view from the floor of gigantic rubber boots and then of being suddenly elevated and having my face pressed against the stubble of his cheek, and of how it tasted of salt and of how he smelled of salt from his red-soled rubber boots to the shaggy whiteness of his hair.

When I was very small, he took me for my first ride in the boat. I rode the half-mile from our house to the wharf on his shoulders and I remember the sound of his rubber boots galumphing along the gravel beach, the tune of the indecent little song he used to sing, and the odour of the salt.

The floor of the boat was permeated with the same odour and in its constancy I was not aware of change. In the harbour we made our little circle and returned. He tied the boat by its painter, fastened the stern to its permanent anchor and lifted me high over his head to the solidity of the wharf. Then he climbed up the little iron ladder that led to the wharf’s cap, placed me once more upon his shoulders and galumphed off again.

When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precocious excursion and asked, “How did you like the boat?” “Were you afraid in the boat?” “Did you cry in the boat?” They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be very important to everyone.

My earliest recollection of my mother is of being alone with her in the mornings while my father was away in the boat. She seemed to be always repairing clothes that were “torn in the boat,” preparing food “to be eaten in the boat” or looking for “the boat” through our kitchen window which faced upon the sea. When my father returned about noon, she would ask, “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” It was the first question I remember asking: “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” “Well, how did things go in the boat today?”

The boat in our lives was registered at Port Hawkesbury. She was what Nova Scotians called a Cape Island boat and was designed for the small inshore fishermen who sought the lobsters
of the spring and the mackerel of summer and later the cod and haddock and hake. She was thirty-two feet long and nine wide, and was powered by an engine from a Chevrolet truck. She had a marine clutch and a high-speed reverse gear and was painted light green with the name
Jenny Lynn
stencilled in black letters on her bow and painted on an oblong plate across her stern. Jenny Lynn had been my mother’s maiden name and the boat was called after her as another link in the chain of tradition. Most of the boats that berthed at the wharf bore the names of some female member of their owner’s household.

I say this now as if I knew it all then. All at once, all about boat dimensions and engines, and as if on the day of my first childish voyage I noticed the difference between a stencilled name and a painted name. But of course it was not that way at all, for I learned it all very slowly and there was not time enough.