Island (11 page)

In the kitchen of the house there are a great many people sitting around a big coal-burning stove even though it is
summer. They all get up when we come in and shake hands and the women put their arms around my mother. Then I am introduced to the grandparents I have never seen. My grandmother is very tall with hair almost as white as the afternoon’s gulls and eyes like the sea over which they flew. She wears a long black dress with a blue checkered apron over it and lifts me off my feet in powerful hands so that I can kiss her and look into her eyes. She smells of soap and water and hot rolls and asks me how I like living in Montreal. I have never lived anywhere else so I say I guess it is all right.

My grandfather is short and stocky with heavy arms and very big hands. He has brown eyes and his once-red hair is almost all white now except for his eyebrows and the hair of his nostrils. He has a white moustache which reminds me of the walrus picture at school and the bottom of it is stained brown by the tobacco that he is chewing even now and spitting the juice into a coal scuttle which he keeps beside his chair. He is wearing a blue plaid shirt and brown trousers supported by heavy suspenders. He too lifts me up although he does not kiss me, and he smells of soap and water and tobacco and leather. He asks me if I saw any girls that I liked on the train. I say “No,” and he laughs and lowers me to the floor.

And now it is later and the conversation has died down and the people have gradually filtered out into the night until there are just the three of us, and my grandparents, and after a while my grandmother and my mother go upstairs to finalize the sleeping arrangements. My grandfather puts rum and hot water and sugar into two glasses and gives one to my father and then allows me to sit on his lap even though I am ten, and gives me
sips from his glass. He is very different from Grandpa Gilbert in Montreal who wears white shirts and dark suits with a vest and a gold watch-chain across the front.

“You have been a long time coming home,” he says to my father. “If you had come through that door as often as I’ve thought of you, I’d’ve replaced the hinges a good many times.”

“I know, I’ve tried, I’ve wanted to, but it’s different in Montreal, you know.”

“Yes, I guess so. I just never figured it would be like this. It seems so far away and we get old so quickly and a man always feels a certain way about his oldest son. I guess in some ways it is a good thing that we do not all go to school. I could never see myself being owned by my woman’s family.”

“Please don’t start that already,” says my father a little angrily. “I am not owned by anybody and you know it. I am a lawyer and I am in partnership with another lawyer who just happens to be my father-in-law. That’s all.”

“Yes, that’s all,” says my grandfather and gives me another sip from his glass. “Well, to change the subject, is this the only one you have after being married eleven years?”

My father is now red-faced like he was when we heard the young man singing. He says heatedly, “You know you’re not changing the subject at all. I know what you’re getting at. I know what you mean.”

“Do you?” asks my grandfather quietly. “I thought perhaps that was different in Montreal too.”

The two women come downstairs just as I am having another sip from the glass. “Oh, Angus, what can you be thinking of?” screams my mother rushing protectively toward me.

“Mary, please!” says my father almost desperately, “there’s nothing wrong.”

My grandfather gets up very rapidly, sets me on the chair he has just vacated, drains the controversial glass, rinses it in the sink and says, “Well, time for the working class to be in bed. Good night all.” He goes up the stairs walking very heavily and we can hear his boots as he thumps them on the floor.

“I’ll put him to bed, Mary,” says my father nodding toward me. “I know where he sleeps. Why don’t you go to bed now? You’re tired.”

“Yes, all right,” says my mother very gently. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. Good night.” She kisses me and also my grandmother and her footsteps fade quietly up the stairs.

“I’m sorry, Ma, she didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” says my father.

“I know. She finds it very different from what she’s used to. And we are older and don’t bounce back the way we once did. He is seventy-six now and the mine is hard on him and he feels he must work harder than ever to do his share. He works with different ones of the boys and he tells me that sometimes he thinks they are carrying him just because he is their father. He never felt that way with you or Alex but of course you were all much younger then. Still, he always somehow felt that because those years between high school and college were so good that you would both come back to him some day.”

“But Ma, it can’t be that way. I was twenty then and Alex nineteen and he was only in his early fifties and we both wanted to go to college so we could be something else. And we paid him
back the money he loaned us and he seemed to want us to go to school then.”

“He did not know what it was then. Nor I. And when you gave him back the money it was as if that was not what he’d had in mind at all. And what is the something you two became? A lawyer whom we never see and a doctor who committed suicide when he was twenty-seven. Lost to us the both of you. More lost than Andrew who is buried under tons of rock two miles beneath the sea and who never saw a college door.”

“Well, he should have,” says my father bitterly, “so should they all instead of being exploited and burrowing beneath the sea or becoming alcoholics that cannot even do that.”

“I have my alcoholic,” says my grandmother now standing very tall, “who was turned out of my Montreal lawyer’s home.”

“But I couldn’t do anything with him, Ma, and it’s different there. You just can’t be that way, and – and – oh hell, I don’t know. If I were by myself he could have stayed forever.”

“I know,” says my grandmother now very softly, putting her hand upon his shoulder, “it’s not you. But it seems that we can only stay forever if we stay right here. As we have stayed to the seventh generation. Because in the end that is all there is – just staying. I have lost three children at birth but I’ve raised eight sons. I have one a lawyer and one a doctor who committed suicide, one who died in coal beneath the sea and one who is a drunkard and four who still work the coal like their father and those four are all that I have that stand by me. It is these four that carry their father now that he needs it, and it is these four that carry the drunkard, that dug two days for Andrew’s
body and that have given me thirty grandchildren in my old age.”

“I know, Ma,” says my father, “I know that and I appreciate it all, everything. It is just that, well somehow we just can’t live in a clan system any more. We have to see beyond ourselves and our own families. We have to live in the twentieth century.”

“Twentieth century?” says my grandmother spreading her big hands across her checkered apron. “What is the twentieth century to me if I cannot have my own?”

It is morning now and I awake to the argument of the English sparrows outside my window and the fingers of the sun upon the floor. My parents are in my room discussing my clothes. “He really doesn’t need them,” says my father patiently. “But, Angus, I don’t want him to look like a little savage,” replies my mother as she lays out my newly pressed pants and shirt at the foot of the bed.

Downstairs I learn that my grandfather has already gone to work, and as I solemnly eat my breakfast like a little old man beyond my years, I listen to the violin music on the radio and watch my grandmother as she spreads butter on the top of the baking loaves and pokes the coals of her fire with a fierce enthusiasm that sends clouds of smoke billowing up to spread themselves against the yellowed paint upon her ceiling.

Then the little boys come in and stand shyly against the wall. There are seven of them and they are all between six and ten. “These are your cousins,” says my grandmother to me and to them she says, “this is Alex from Montreal. He is come to visit with us and you are to be nice to him because he is one of our own.”

Then I and my cousins go outside because it is what we are supposed to do and we ask one another what grades we are in and I say I dislike my teacher and they mostly say they like theirs which is a possibility I have never considered before. And then we talk about hockey and I try to remember the times I have been to the Forum in Montreal and what I think about Richard.

And then we go down through the town, which is black and smoky and has no nice streets nor flashing lights like Montreal, and when I dawdle behind I suddenly find myself confronted by two older boys who say: “Hey, where’d y’get them sissy clothes?” I do not know what I am supposed to do until my cousins come back and surround me like the covered wagons around the women and children of the cowboy shows, when the Indians attack.

“This is our cousin,” say the oldest two simultaneously and I think they are very fine and brave for they too are probably a little bit ashamed of me, and I wonder if I would do the same for them. I have never before thought that perhaps I have been lonely all of my short life and I wish that I had brothers of my own – even sisters perhaps.

My almost-attackers wait awhile, scuffing their shoes on the ashy sidewalk, and then they separate and allow us to pass like a little band of cavalry going through the mountains.

We continue down through the town and farther beyond to the seashore where the fishermen are mending their gear and pumping the little boats in which they allow us to play. Then we skip rocks on the surface of the sea and I skip one six times and
then stop because I know I have made an impression and doubt if I am capable of an encore.

And then we climb up a high, high hill that tumbles into the sea and a cousin says we will go to see the bull who apparently lives about a mile away. We are really out in the country now and it is getting hot and when I go to loosen my tie the collar button comes off and is forever lost in the grass through which we pass.

The bull lives in a big barn and my cousins ask an old man who looks like my grandfather if he expects any cows today. He says that he does not know, that you cannot tell about those things. We can look at the bull if we wish but we must not tease him nor go too close. He is very big and brown and white with a ring in his nose and he paws the floor of his stall and makes low noises while lowering his head and swinging it from side to side. Just as we are ready to leave, the old man comes in carrying a long wooden staff which he snaps onto the bull’s nose ring. “Well, it looks like you laddies are in luck,” he says, “now be careful and get out of the way.” I follow my cousins, who run out into a yard where a man who has just arrived is standing, holding a nervous cow by a halter and we sit appreciatively on the top rail of the wooden fence and watch the old man as he leads out the bull who is now moaning and dripping and frothing at the mouth. I have never seen anything like this before and watch with awe this something that is both beautiful and terrible, and I know that I will somehow not be able to tell my mother, to whom I have told almost everything important that has happened in my young life.

And later as we leave, the old man’s wife gives us some apples and says, “John, you should be ashamed of yourself; in front of
these children. There are some things that have to be but are not for children’s eyes.” The chastised old man nods and looks down upon his shoes but then looks up at us very gravely from beneath his bushy eyebrows, looks at us in a very special way and I know that it is only because we are all boys that he does this and that the look as it excludes the woman simultaneously includes us in something that I know and feel but cannot understand.

We go back then to the town and it is late afternoon and we have eaten nothing but the apples and as we climb the hill toward my grandparents’ house I see my father striding down upon us with his newspaper under his arm.

He is not disturbed that I have stayed away so long and seems almost to envy us our unity and our dirt as he stands so straight and lonely in the prison of his suit and inquires of our day. And so we reply, as children do, that we have been “playing,” which is the old inadequate message sent forth across the chasm of our intervening years to fall undelivered and unreceived into the nothingness between.

He is going down to the mine, he says, to meet the men when they come off their shift at four and he will take me if I wish. So I separate from my comrade-cousins and go back down the hill holding on to his hand, which is something I do not often do. I think that I will tell him about the bull but instead I ask, “Why do all the men chew tobacco?”

“Oh,” he says, “because it is a part of them and of their way of life. They do that instead of smoking.”

“But why don’t they smoke?”

“Because they are underground so much of their lives and they cannot light a match or a lighter or carry any open flame
down there. It’s because of the gas. Flame might cause an explosion and kill them all.”

“But when they’re not down there they could smoke cigarettes like Grandpa Gilbert in a silver cigarette holder and Mama says that chewing tobacco is a filthy habit.”

“I know, but these people are not at all like Grandpa Gilbert and there are things that Mama doesn’t understand. It is not that easy to change what is a part of you.”

We are approaching the mine now and everything is black and grimy and the heavily laden trucks are groaning past us. “Did you used to chew tobacco?”

“Yes, a very long time ago, before you were ever thought of.”

“And was it hard for you to stop?”

“Yes it was, Alex,” he says quietly, “more difficult than you will ever know.”

We are now at the wash-house and the trains from the underground are thundering up out of the darkness and the men are jumping off and laughing and shouting to one another in a way that reminds me of recess. They are completely black, with the exception of little white half-moons beneath their eyes and the eyes themselves. My grandfather is walking toward us between two of my uncles. He is not so tall as they nor does he take such long strides and they are pacing themselves to keep even with him the way my father sometimes does with me. Even his moustache is black or a very dirty grey except for the bottom of it where the tobacco stains it brown.