Island (18 page)

Before the final two-mile climb there is one last almost right-angled turn and again the spilling, cascading brook and the washed-over roadbed and the plugged and useless sluice. The road rising from the spot is solid rock, and on wet days it is impossible for a car to make the climb. The tires will spin and the rear of the car will slew to the right and hang above the four-hundred-foot drop that falls to the crashing surf which booms and pounds the smooth and rounded boulders far below. Three years ago a lovers’ quarrel resulted in a car being stolen from the village below and then pushed over the towering cliff. For weeks the police and the insurance companies and various high-priced towing companies attempted to reach it but with no success. All of the cables and the extended booms and the huge tow trucks that were reared back on their hind and doubled wheels, and the men motioning with their gloved hands or hanging on ropes at the sea cliff’s wall did nothing to raise the twisted bits of metal that were scattered far below. Finally some men in a small fishing
dory were able to get close enough to the cliffs base to wade ashore in water up to their waists and retrieve what remained of the engine. Now if one hangs over the perilous edge the remaining bits of automobile can still be seen strewn along the wet cliff’s base. Here the twisted chassis and there the detached body and yards away the steering wheel and the trunk lid and a crumpled, twisted door. The cormorants and the gulls walk carefully amidst the twisted wreckage as if hoping that each day may bring them something that they had previously missed. They peck with curiosity at the gleaming silver knobs and the selector buttons of the once-expensive radio.

The sharp, right-angled turn and its ascending steepness has always been called by us “The Little Turn of Sadness” because it is here that my grandfather died so many years ago on a February night when he somehow fell as he walked or staggered toward his home which was a steep two miles away. He had already covered the six miles from the village when he lost his footing on the ice-covered rock, falling backwards and shattering the rum bottle he carried within his safe back pocket. Now as I feel my own blood, diseased and dying, I think of his, the brightest scarlet, staining the moon-white snow while the joyous rabbits leaped and pirouetted beneath the pale, clear moon. It was a bright and quiet night without a breath of wind, as my grandmother has often told us. All night she kept looking out across the death-white fields for the form of her returning husband. Her eyes became so strained that as the dawn approached the individual spruce trees at the clearing’s edge began to take his shape and size and seemed to move toward the house. First one and then another appearing to move and take
on human form. Once she was so certain that she went to the door and opened it, only to stare again across the whitened, empty stillness of the silent winter snow.

In the morning she sent her oldest son, who was ten at the time, to walk along the frozen cliffs; and when he returned, white and breathless, the news he brought was already expected. Shortly after he left, she has often said, she began to hear the death ring or the sound of the death bell in her right ear. It came from off the frozen Gulf of St. Lawrence, borne on the stillness and, no, it was not to be confused with the crying of the white and drifting seals. And then, almost in response to the bell, she had heard the howls of the three black-and-white border collies that had accompanied her son. Their howls drifted back along the coastline, first the oldest dog and then the second and then the third. She had been able to distinguish each dog’s cry and to comprehend the message that their anguished voices bore. At that time and in those sounds she realized that life for her and for her children would never be the same. She was twenty-six and expecting her seventh child.

Later she and her older children hitched the best of their brown-dappled horses to the wood sleigh and went forth to meet their husband and father for the final time. The children cried and the tears froze to their reddened cheeks. The horse began to snort and tremble long before he reached the rigid, log-like figure, and then to rear and plunge. Finally he lunged to the side, breaking the shafts of the precious sleigh and adding another stick of destruction to the steadily mounting pile. They had had to abandon the sleigh then and return with the horse and then come back again with the children’s coasting sleigh
and lengths of rope with which to bind the grisly burden it was to bear.

The dogs lay restlessly about the stiffened corpse, black against the silent snow. Sometimes they whined softly and licked the frozen opened eyes or the grotesquely parted purple lips with the protruding tongue or nuzzled an out-flung half-curved arm. Then they would flop back again into the snow, covering their noses with their paws while following everything with their deep brown eyes. Sensing too that their lives had changed, and not knowing what to do.

Somehow they managed the final two miles, though their own feet slipped on the icy rocks and they fell forward several times when the strained rope parted. Because the sleigh was so small there was only room for the upper part of the body, and the legs and heels hung over the end and dragged along the jagged, stony road. Twice the body almost slipped off completely and when they reached the house the heels of the rubber boots were worn through to the frozen flesh. The heel of the bottle which had killed him still contained, almost miraculously, a half inch of the dark sweet rum, while the neck with its firmly fastened cork was also still intact. Between the perfect top and the perfect bottom all was shattered and splintered and driven deeply into the frozen hip and thigh.

Now this scene of winter death seems strangely out of place amidst the drunken intensity of the summer’s splendour. Like an improbable sequence of old black-and-white pictures taken once in the long ago. Taken of people it is impossible to ever know or to fully understand.

The sun is rising above the mountains and touching the freshly washed earth. The raindrops glisten and sparkle, and the fog and mists that hang above the dirt roads of high places rise and vanish toward the sky. The bobolinks and red-winged blackbirds bounce and sing from the tips of their springing willows. Orange butterflies glide and float on the drafts of air and the chattering squirrels and chipmunks sprint along the fallen logs like busy proprietors doing morning inspection. The earth is alive, refreshed and new.

It does not take long for the rocks above “The Little Turn of Sadness” to dry, and my car in its lowest gear grinds slowly and reluctantly up the steep incline, nearly swinging out and over the hanging ledge, then settling more steadily to the stony and almost familiar roadbed.

For the next two miles the road continues to climb and wind along the cliffs high ledge. In some places erosion has caused the roadside to crumble and fall into the sea. It would be impossible for two vehicles to meet and pass upon such narrowness, but there is little likelihood of such an occurrence.

Now and then upon the left I see the remains of the old stone fences and also tiny patches of still-cleared land indicating where houses had once stood. The grey granite stones of their foundations are still visible, covered now with green and velvet moss. Now and then a stone flue stands with phallic reality amidst the rubble of the house that has fallen down around it. Only the strength of stone has survived the ravages of time and seasons.

A mile from my grandmother’s house her sheep begin to appear, grazing or lying along the roadside and sometimes right
in the middle of the road. They are the white-faced Cheviots that she has had for as long as I can remember and there is almost a timelessness about them. Open-faced and independent, they do not flock together as do the more conventional Oxfords and Suffolks. As the car approaches, the young lambs bound and scramble out of its way, bleating over their shoulders to the patient, watchful ewes. The thick-shouldered rams, with their heavy, swinging scrota almost dragging on the ground, move only at the last minute and then begrudgingly. Their flickering eyes seem to say they would as soon lower their heads and charge as relinquish this stony trail which they obviously consider to be theirs.

For decades my grandmother has been concerned about the purity and well-being of these sheep. She has worried about strange rams interbreeding and diluting her “stock.” And she has worried about young dogs wild with spring and bloodlust running them over the cliffs to sea-washed deaths. Now there is no need to worry. All the other flocks and dogs from the fallen houses have gone, and it is only her sheep whose bleating cries reverberate across these high cleansed hills.

At the road’s end I stop to slide back the poles of the old gate before the final entrance to her yard. As I bend, the blood bursts from my nostrils, splashing scarletly upon my shoes, and there is a dizzying lightness bordering on black within my head. I straighten and place my hands on the gateposts for steadiness and lift my face to the sun to reverse the blood’s thick flow. I can feel it coursing sweetly through the back of my mouth and down the darkened passages of my throat. To avoid further bending, I slide the bottom pole back by hooking my right foot underneath it
and then stand and wait for the bleeding to cease. I dab at my nostrils and lips with the pieces of Kleenex that I now carry in place of standard handkerchiefs.

The car, with its clutch disengaged, rolls easily down the small incline into the yard. There is no need to even start the motor. I close the gate, watched with interest by various farm animals who are not in the least alarmed. Almost all of my grandmother’s animals are descended from livestock that has been here for a long, long time and over the years they have taken on distinctive colourings and characteristics that are all their own. They seem now the same animals that I have always known and heard described, and seen in the faded photographs of the albums of my mind. The three brown-dappled horses, rolling in the slickness of their summer fat, have an almost maroon tinge to their coats when the sun strikes them at certain angles. They have identical white stars in their foreheads and a solitary white spot the size of a large coin on their barrelled chests. They have always been called either Star or Tena. They have always held their heads high when drawing even the heaviest of loads and have been perfectly in step with each other, their hoofbeats falling in unison through the regulated choreography of their fiercely inbred generations. They have been sure-footed in the snow and long-winded on the hills. They have crossed the drift ice in the blinding blizzards and galloped the cartloads of seaweed ashore across the briny rocks. For years they have refused to eat any hay except that grown upon this hilly farm; as if smelling and tasting within it their own urine, manure and sweat. As if they are part of some great ecological plan, converting themselves into hay and the hay in turn into their wine-dappled sun-strong selves.

Now standing about this yard, whisking their too-long tails and tossing their forelocks out of their eyes, they are idle and at ease. They have felt neither bridle nor harness nor shoes for years and the youngest, who is close to ten, has never felt them at all. He is so old now, in the years of a horse, that it is unlikely that he ever will.

They have become almost pets, waiting for my grandmother to open her door and offer them bits of apple or pieces of stale, dried bread. Yet in their deep, dark eyes and in the muscles that bunch and ripple within their shoulders their power can still be seen. They are like the eyes and muscles of certain animals at the zoo; eyes and muscles that say,
Yes, we are here and we are alive and we eat our food, but we were not bred for this kind of life nor did we come from it nor is this all we are. Look closely at us and you will see
.

The brindled cows with their in-curved horns are busily grazing about the grassy knolls. Because my grandmother no longer tends them as she used to, nor uses their cream-rich milk for her butter and cheese, they too seem wasted and unused. They are followed by overgrown calves who nurse and butt at their swollen and distended udders. Some of their udders are caked and hardened, and mastitis has set in. It would be close to impossible to redeem them now and they will never more fill to overflowing the warm and brimming pails. A black hen with gold flecks around her neck is clucking to her chickens. The chickens are too young for this time of year and will not likely survive the fall.

Entering the porch that leads to my grandmother’s house it is necessary to step down. With the passage of the years the house has sunk into the earth. The stone foundation of more than a
century has worked itself deep into the soil and now all doors are forced to open inward. The porch is filled with tools and clothes and items from the past. A manual cream separator is on the left, a hand scythe hangs on the wall to the right, and beside it a wire stretcher and a meat grinder. Bits of harness and rope and cans offence staples, nails, hammers, gunny sacks and fishing rods hang from the spikes driven deep into the wooden beams. Shapeless rain jackets, hats, gloves, and worn-out shoes and boots hang and lie cluttered in a corner.

In the kitchen my grandmother sits at her table drinking her morning tea. She has not seen nor heard my arrival and she is staring out the window that looks upon the sea. There the gulls are curving and turning in the sparkling sun. The three black-and-white border collies raise their eyes when I enter but they do not move. They lie about the floor like tossed and familiar rugs. One is under the table, one against the wood box at the stove, and the third beside my grandmother’s chair. Unlike my grandmother, they have been aware of my approach for some time. They have recognized the sound of the motor groaning along the cliffs edge and heard the gate poles slide and the opening of the door and the footstep on the sill. They have heard it all and felt no cause for movement or alarm. I enter now to make my presence fully known and to take my place in time.

Turning from the window with her teacup in her hand, my grandmother is startled to see me and also embarrassed that I have come upon her so silently and unannounced. She is becoming frightened, although she will not admit it, of the loss of her senses, and she fears the silence of the deaf and the darkness of the blind. None of this has happened to her as yet but
there are clutching moments seen in her face, as now, that say such thoughts are there.