Island (36 page)

Then one rainy night after he was finished watching the international and national and regional news, Archibald looked out his window. Down on the valley floor he could see the
headlights of the cars following the wet pavement of the main highway. People bound for larger destinations who did not know that he existed. And then he noticed one set of lights in particular. They were coming hard and fast along the valley floor and although still miles away, they seemed to be coming with a purpose all their own. They “looked” different from the other headlights, and in one of those moments of knowledge mixed with intuition Archibald said aloud to himself. “That car is coming here. It is coming for
me
.”

He was rattled at first. He was aware that his decision had caused ill feelings among some members of his family, as well as various in-laws and others strung out in a far-flung and complicated web of connections he could barely comprehend. He knew also that because of the rain many of the men had not been in the woods that much lately and were perhaps spending their time in the taverns talking too much about him and what he had done. He watched as the car swung off the pavement and began its ascent, weaving and sloughing up the mountain in the rain.

Although he was not a violent man, he did not harbour any illusions about where or how he lived. “That Archibald,” they said, “is nobody’s fool.” He thought of this now as he measured the steps to the stove where the giant poker hung. He had had it made by a blacksmith in one of the lumber camps shortly after his marriage. It was of heavy steel, and years of poking it into the hot coals of his stove had sharpened its end to a clean and burnished point. When he swung it in his hand its weight seemed like an ancient sword. He lifted his wooden table easily
and placed it at an angle which he hoped was not too obvious in the centre of the kitchen, with its length facing the door.

“If they come in the door,” he said, “I will be behind the table and in five strides I can reach the poker.” He practised the five strides just to make sure. Then he put his left hand between his legs to adjust himself and straightened his suspenders so that they were perfectly in line. And then he went to the side of the window to watch the coming car.

Because of the recent rains, sections of the road had washed away and at certain places freshets and small brooks cut across it. Sometimes the rains washed down sand and topsoil as well, and the trick was never to accelerate on such washed-over sections for fear of being buried in the flowing water and mud. Rather, one gunned the motor on the relatively stable sections of the climb (where there was “bottom”) and trusted to momentum to get across the streams.

Archibald watched the progress of the car. Sometimes he lost its headlights because of his perspective and the trees, but only momentarily. As it climbed, swerving back and forth, the wet branches slapping and silhouetted against its headlights, Archibald began to read the dark wet roadway in his own mind. And he began to read the driver’s reflexes as he swung out from the gullies and then in close to the mountain’s wall. He began almost to admire the driver. Whoever that is, he thought, is very drunk but also very good.

The car hooked and turned into his yard without any apparent change in speed, its headlights flashing on his house and through his window. Archibald moved behind his table and
stood, tall and balanced and ready. Before the sound of the slamming car door faded, his kitchen door seemed to blow in and Carver stood there unsteadily, blinking in the light with the rain blowing at his back and dripping off his beginning beard.

“Yeah,” he said over his shoulder, “he’s here, bring it in.”

Archibald waited, his eyes intent upon Carver but also sliding sideways to his poker.

They came into his porch and there were five of them, carrying boxes.

“Put them on the floor here,” said Carver, indicating a space just across the threshold. “And try not to dirty his floor.”

Archibald knew then he would be all right and moved out from behind his table.

“Open the boxes,” said Carver to one of the men. The boxes were filled with forty-ounce bottles of liquor. It was as if someone were preparing for a wedding.

“These are for you,” said Carver. “We bought them at a bootlegger’s two hours ago. We been away all day. We been to Glace Bay and to New Waterford and we were in a fight in the parking lot at the tavern in Bras D’Or, and a couple of us got banged up pretty bad. Anyway, not much to say.”

Archibald looked at them framed in the doorway leading to his porch. There was no mystery about the kind of day they had had, even if Carver had not told him. Even now, one of them, a tall young man, was rocking backwards on his heels, almost literally falling asleep on his feet as he stood in the doorway. There was a fresh cut on Carver’s temple which could not be covered by either his moustache or his beard. Archibald looked at all the
liquor and was moved by the total inappropriateness of the gift; bringing all of this to him, the most abstemious man on the mountain. Somehow it moved him even more. And he was aware of its cost in many ways.

He also envied them their closeness and their fierceness and what the producer fellow had called their tremendous energy. And he imagined it was men like them who had given, in their recklessness, all they could think of in that confused and stormy past. Going with their claymores and the misunderstood language of their war cries to “perform” for the Royal Families of the past. But he was not sure of that either. He smiled at them and gave a small nod of acknowledgement. He did not quite know what to say.

“Look,” said Carver, with that certainty that marked everything he did. “Look, Archibald,” he said. “We know. We know. We
really
know.”

O
nce there was a family with a Highland name who lived beside the sea. And the man had a dog of which he was very fond. She was large and grey, a sort of staghound from another time. And if she jumped up to lick his face, which she loved to do, her paws would jolt against his shoulders with such force that she would come close to knocking him down and he would be forced to take two or three backward steps before he could regain his balance. And he himself was not a small man, being slightly over six feet and perhaps one hundred and eighty pounds.

She had been left, when a pup, at the family’s gate in a small handmade box and no one knew where she had come from or that she would eventually grow to such a size. Once, while still a small pup, she had been run over by the steel wheel of a horse-drawn cart which was hauling kelp from the shore to be used as fertilizer. It was in October and the rain had been falling for
some weeks and the ground was soft. When the wheel of the cart passed over her, it sunk her body into the wet earth as well as crushing some of her ribs; and apparently the silhouette of her small crushed body was visible in the earth after the man lifted her to his chest while she yelped and screamed. He ran his fingers along her broken bones, ignoring the blood and urine which fell upon his shirt, trying to soothe her bulging eyes and her scrabbling front paws and her desperately licking tongue.

The more practical members of his family, who had seen run-over dogs before, suggested that her neck be broken by his strong hands or that he grasp her by the hind legs and swing her head against a rock, thus putting an end to her misery. But he would not do it.

Instead, he fashioned a small box and lined it with woollen remnants from a sheep’s fleece and one of his old and frayed shirts. He placed her within the box and placed the box behind the stove and then he warmed some milk in a small saucepan and sweetened it with sugar. And he held open her small and trembling jaws with his left hand while spooning in the sweetened milk with his right, ignoring the needle-like sharpness of her small teeth. She lay in the box most of the remaining fall and into the early winter, watching everything with her large brown eyes.

Although some members of the family complained about her presence and the odour from the box and the waste of time she involved, they gradually adjusted to her; and as the weeks passed by, it became evident that her ribs were knitting together in some form or other and that she was recovering with the resilience of the young. It also became evident that she would
grow to a tremendous size, as she outgrew one box and then another and the grey hair began to feather from her huge front paws. In the spring she was outside almost all of the time and followed the man everywhere; and when she came inside during the following months, she had grown so large that she would no longer fit into her accustomed place behind the stove and was forced to lie beside it. She was never given a name but was referred to in Gaelic as
cù mòr glas
, the big grey dog.

By the time she came into her first heat, she had grown to a tremendous height, and although her signs and her odour attracted many panting and highly aroused suitors, none was big enough to mount her, and the frenzy of their disappointment and the longing of her unfulfilment were more than the man could stand. He went, so the story goes, to a place where he knew there was a big dog. A dog not as big as she was, but still a big dog, and he brought him home with him. And at the proper time he took the
cù mòr glas
and the big dog down to the sea where he knew there was a hollow in the rock which appeared only at low tide. He took some sacking to provide footing for the male dog and he placed the
cù mòr glas
in the hollow of the rock and knelt beside her and steadied her with his left arm under her throat and helped position the male dog above her and guided his blood-engorged penis. He was a man used to working with the breeding of animals, with the guiding of rams and bulls and stallions and often with the funky smell of animal semen heavy on his large and gentle hands.

The winter that followed was a cold one and ice formed on the sea and frequent squalls and blizzards obliterated the offshore islands and caused the people to stay near their fires much of the
time, mending clothes and nets and harness and waiting for the change in season. The
cù mòr glas
grew heavier and even larger until there was hardly room for her around the stove or under the table. And then one morning, when it seemed that spring was about to break, she was gone.

The man and even his family, who had become more involved than they cared to admit, waited for her but she did not come. And as the frenzy of spring wore on, they busied themselves with readying their land and their fishing gear and all of the things that so desperately required their attention. And then they were into summer and fall and winter and another spring which saw the birth of the man and his wife’s twelfth child. And then it was summer again.

That summer the man and two of his teenaged sons were pulling their herring nets about two miles offshore when the wind began to blow off the land and the water began to roughen. They became afraid that they could not make it safely back to shore, so they pulled in behind one of the offshore islands, knowing that they would be sheltered there and planning to outwait the storm. As the prow of their boat approached the gravelly shore, they heard a sound above them, and looking up they saw the
cù mòr glas
silhouetted on the brow of the hill which was the small island’s highest point.

“M’eudal cù mòr glas”
shouted the man in his happiness –
m’eudal
meaning something like dear or darling; and as he shouted, he jumped over the side of his boat into the waist-deep water, struggling for footing on the rolling gravel as he waded eagerly and awkwardly toward her and the shore. At the same time, the
cù mòr glas
came hurtling down toward him in a shower
of small rocks dislodged by her feet; and just as he was emerging from the water, she met him as she used to, rearing up on her hind legs and placing her huge front paws on his shoulders while extending her eager tongue.

The weight and speed of her momentum met him as he tried to hold his balance on the sloping angle with the water rolling gravel beneath his feet, and he staggered backwards and lost his footing and fell beneath her force. And in that instant again, as the story goes, there appeared over the brow of the hill six more huge grey dogs hurtling down towards the gravelled strand. They had never seen him before; and seeing him stretched prone beneath their mother, they misunderstood, like so many armies, the intention of their leader.

They fell upon him in a fury, slashing his face and tearing aside his lower jaw and ripping out his throat, crazed with blood-lust or duty or perhaps starvation. The
cù mòr glas
turned on them in her own savagery, slashing and snarling and, it seemed, crazed by their mistake; driving them bloodied and yelping before her, back over the brow of the hill where they vanished from sight but could still be heard screaming in the distance. It all took perhaps little more than a minute.