Island (19 page)

“Oh, you are here, Calum,” she says. “I’ve been expecting you.”

I know that she has as I have been expecting to come, lying in the bed at my parents’ house in the village below since three
A.M.
, listening to the rain upon the roof and thinking of how slippery the rocks of the road might be. Thinking of walking the eight-mile distance in the almost unfathomable rural darkness when the rain clouds blot out the moon and stars and there is only the sound of water: the thunking of the large-dropped rain into the earth and into the splashing, invisible brooks and on the right the lapping and moaning of the sea. Knowing that I will never walk that skin-drenched journey again, any more than will my never-seen grandfather, dead now for seventy years, the biblical life span of three score years and ten.

“I came as soon as I could,” I say. “As soon as I thought the cliff would be dry enough for the car to climb.”

“Oh yes,” she says. “Would you like some tea? The kettle has just finished boiling.”

“Yes, all right, I will get it myself,” I say as I move about her familiar kitchen, digging into the old square tea can which drifted ashore from one of the long-ago wrecked vessels carrying the precious cargo from Ceylon. I gather the tea into my fist and drop it into the teapot and add the water from the steaming kettle.

“They will not be here for a while,” she says, “not likely until the afternoon.”

She seats herself more comfortably at the end of the table.

“Get yourself some biscuits from out of the tin. I made them early this morning. Give some to the dogs.”

Obediently I go to another tin and take out four biscuits. They are still warm to the touch. I butter one for myself and toss one to each of the lying, watchful dogs. They catch them while they are still in the air, then flick out their long, pink tongues for any crumbs that may have fallen on the floor. The floor remains as spotless as before, as if the action had never happened. Like footsteps in the water, I think. No trace remains behind.

I sit opposite my grandmother at the other end of the table and look with her out across the azure sea. The sun is higher now and the mists have all burned off. It is the kind of day that at one time would have allowed us to see Prince Edward Island.
On a clear day you can see Prince Edward Island
, we would say. Not “forever,” just Prince Edward Island. Now it does not seem to matter.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life
, comes to my mind. The slogan from the many “modern” posters, desk mottoes, greeting cards, bookmarks, record jackets, bumper stickers and graffiti walls. I raise the teacup to my lips, half-hopeful it might burn me more fiercely into life.

“Why do you drink your tea like that?” asks my grandmother. “You will burn yourself. One would think you had never drunk tea before.”

“It is all right,” I say. “I was only trying something.”

We sit for a long time, quietly sipping our tea and looking through the window. We do not say what is on our minds nor make inquiries of each other. We are resting and appearing normal, almost as athletes quietly conserving our energy for the
game that lies some hours down our road. The bees buzz from the lilacs at the base of the house and bounce drunkenly against the window. The barn swallows with their delicately forked tails flash their orange breasts and dart and swoop after invisible insects. The dogs lie silently, moving only their eyes, conserving their strength as well. We are drowsy and waiting in the summer’s heat.

I have come to see my grandmother on this day almost as the double agent of the spy movies. I have come somehow hoping that I might find a way of understanding and of coming to terms with death; yet deep down I know that I will find only the intensity of life and that I am, after all, but twenty-six, and in the eyes of others, in the youngness of my years.

My grandmother gets up and goes for her violin, which hangs on a peg inside her bedroom door. It is a very old violin and came from the Scotland of her ancestors, from the crumbled foundations that now dot and haunt Lochaber’s shores. She plays two Gaelic airs –
Gun Bhris Mo Chridh’ On Dh ’Fhalbh Thu
(My Heart Is Broken Since Thy Departure) and
Cha Till Mi Tuille
(Never More Shall I Return, or, MacCrimmon’s Lament). Her hands have suffered stiffness and the lonely laments waver and hesitate, as do the trembling fingers upon the four taut strings. She is very moved by the ancient music and there are tears within her eyes.

On the night of this day and on this afternoon as well, two of her grandchildren and one great-grandchild will gyrate and play the music of their time, the music of the early 1970s. They are at other destinations on that other road that leads into the
larger world. One is in Las Vegas and two on Toronto’s Yonge Street strip. They swivel and stomp beneath kaleidoscopic lights, stepping nimbly over the cords that bind their instruments to the high-powered amplifiers. Their long hair floats and swirls about their shoulders and their hard-driving booted heels are as insistent as their rhythms. Here in the quietness of Rankin’s Point, at another road’s end, the body out of which they came and to which they owe their lives has trouble controlling the last quavering notes of Never More Shall I Return.

“That is the lament of the MacCrimmons,” she says when she has finished. “Your grandfather was part MacCrimmon. They were the greatest musicians in the Scottish Highlands. There is a cairn erected to their memory on the Isle of Skye. Your uncles saw it during the war.”

“Yes, I know,” I say. “You’ve told me.”

“The MacCrimmons were said to be given two gifts,” she says, “the gift of music and the gift of foreseeing their own deaths. Those gifts are supposed to follow in all their bloodlines. They are not gifts of the ordinary world.”

High on the rafters of the barn that stands outside, my grandfather had written in the blackest of ink the following statement: “We are the children of our own despair, of Skye and Rum and Barra and Tiree.” No one knows why he wrote it or when, and even the “how” gives cause for puzzlement. In that time before ballpoint pens or even fountain pens, did he climb such heights holding an ink bottle in one hand and a straight nibbed pen in the other? And what is the significance of ancestral islands long left and never seen? Blown over now
by Atlantic winds and touched by scudding foam. What does it mean to all of us that he died as he did? And had he not, how would our grandmother’s life have been different and the lives of her children and even mine as I have known it, and still feel it as I sit here on this day?

I can know my grandfather only through recreated images of his life and death. Images of the frozen snow and the hot blood turned to crust upon it; blood, hot and sweet with rum and instantly converted like the sweet and boiling maple sap upon the winter’s snow.

I would like to realize and understand now my grandmother’s perception of death in all its vast diversity. For even the fixedness of death and the accidents that are its agents have changed throughout the years of her many-sequenced life. Three of her brothers, as young men, perished in the accidental ways that grew out of their lives – lives that were as intensely physical as the deaths that marked their end. One as a young man in the summer sun when the brown-dappled horses bolted and he fell into the teeth of a mowing machine. A second in a storm at sea when the vessel sank while plying its way across the straits to Newfoundland. A third frozen upon the lunar ice fields of early March when the sealing ship became separated from its men in a sudden obliterating blizzard.

How lonely now and distant these lives and deaths of my grandmother’s early life. And how different from the lives and deaths of the three sons she has outlived. Men who left the crying gulls and hanging cliffs of Rankin’s Point to take the road into the larger world to fashion careers and lives that would never have been theirs on this tiny sea-washed farm. Careers
that were as modern and as affluent as the deaths that marked their termination. Real estate brokers and vice-presidents of grocery chains and buyers for haberdashery firms seldom die in the daily routines of the working lives that they have chosen. The pencil and the telephone replace the broken, dangling reins and the marlinespike and the sealing club; and the adjusted thermostats and the methodic Muzak produce a regulated urban order far removed from the uncertainty of the elements and the unpredictability of suddenly frightened animals.

None of these men died at their work or directly from it, yet die they did in deaths that seem even more bizarre and Grecianly ironic than those of the previous generation. One of them choked on a piece of steak in an expensive Montreal restaurant. A second died at Pompano Beach from too much of the sun he had gone to find. The third died while jogging through the streets of Mississauga at five
A.M
. Yet perhaps death by affluence is but the same in the end as that achieved through physical labour and perhaps it is only because I now have no choice of either that first one and then the other seems desperately more frightening.

Outside the window the blackbirds and cowbirds hop with familiarity around the brindled cows. They call out their raucous comments to one another and sometimes perch boldly upon the cattle’s spines. A single, white-tailed hawk glides silently back and forth, sometimes above the land and then beyond the cliff’s edge out toward the sea. His shadow slides beneath him across the summer grass but is not reflected within the deep, blue water. It is as if the mirror were perhaps too profound. He does not go far out to sea but circles and climbs and
returns across the land; silent and graceful, holding his wings with rigid and controlled beauty, he bears with eloquence the message of his gifted life.

Within the house all is silent except for the ticking of the white Westclox on its shelf above the table. The dogs drowse with half-closed eyes. Lost within our own thoughts, we stay, as in a picture, quiet and immobile for a long, long time.

“Well, I suppose I must get ready. They will soon be here,” says my grandmother, rising from her seat at the end of the table and seeming to break the spell.

Within her bedroom which opens off the kitchen, I can see or sense the combing of her long, white hair. She leans to one side and combs it away from her body, her left hand running along its electric smoothness ahead and behind of the comb she wields with her right.

Later she emerges, fastening a brooch of entwined Scottish thistles to the collar of her recently ironed dress. I recognize both the brooch and the dress as gifts that I have purchased for her at earlier times. For an instant I see myself once more in the press of pre-Christmas shoppers in Toronto, jostling and elbowing, moving on and off the crowded elevators and the humming, slanting escalators that stretch between the floors.

I know that in her trunks and scattered jewel boxes there are layers of dresses and mounds of brooches as good as these; yet she has chosen what she has quite consciously. Few of the others, I realize, will recognize what she wears, and there is of course no reason that they should. I am struck once more by the falseness of the brooch, for Scottish thistles do not twine.
Perhaps at the time of its purchase I was being more symbolic than I had ever thought.

Returning to her bedroom she emerges once more with a pair of scissors and draws her chair up close to mine. Without saying anything I begin to trim her fingernails. They are long and yellowed and each is bordered by a thin layer of grime.

Trimming the yellowed, unclean fingernails of my grandmother I realize that I am admitted now to the silent, secret communication that the strong have always known in their relationship with the weak. It is the strength and knowledge that my grandmother has previously so fiercely exercised over her own children and in many cases her children’s children as well. The strength and knowledge leading into and from the awful privacy of all our secret inadequacies, which is the standard that the previous generation waves always over the one that follows. The awareness and memory of dirty diapers and bed wettings and the first attempts at speech and movement; of the birth and death of Santa Claus and of the myriad childish hopes and fears of the lost time; of the lonely screaming nightmares of childhood terror; of nocturnal emissions and of real and imagined secret sins. The strength and knowledge of actual physical support and the giving and sustaining of such physical life and perhaps even love. I have never thought of my grandmother so much in terms of love as in terms of strength. Perhaps, I think now, because the latter has always been so much more visible.

Down in the village at this time I imagine my own father, now nearing seventy, preparing for his journey here to meet us. Nervously brushing his snow-white hair and slapping his face
with talcum powder, still half-afraid of his mother’s inspection, bound too by those complex cords of strength and knowledge. He cannot, of course, remember ever seeing the father that was his own.

Suddenly my grandmother seizes my right hand and presses it fiercely between both of hers. The scissors that I have held clatter to the floor and I can feel the intensity of her life yearning and pressing outward through the pressure of her palms. “Oh, Calum,” she says, “what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

I do not know whether I am more shocked by the unexpectedness of the question or by what seems to be its enormity, given the circumstances. The doctor has said that I should try to live “the rest of my life” in as normal a fashion as possible. I have, he has said, “perhaps some months,” in which I may continue to live and to appear as normal. I am reminded of the summer chickens outside my grandmother’s door, doomed by their time of life not to survive the fall.

“Oh stay with me, Calum,” she says, “and I will tell them so when they come. Find yourself a nice girl and get married. You are twenty-six and it is time to be thinking of such things. You have always liked it here, and the land and the animals are as good as ever. You can make a good life here for all of us. I have left you everything in my will.”