Island (48 page)

“This boat,” he said, “has to be back before dawn.”

The wind was rising as the temperature was dropping. The hail-like rain had given way to stinging snow and the ground they left behind was beginning to freeze.

A dog barked once. And when the light revolved, its solitary beam found no MacPhedrans on the island or the sea.

I
n the early morning he was awakened by the dog’s pulling at the Condon’s woollen blanket, which was the top covering upon his bed. The blanket was now a sort of yellow-beige although at one time, he thought, it must have been white. The blanket was made from the wool of the sheep he and his wife used to keep and it was now over half a century old. When they used to shear the sheep in the spring they would set aside some of the best fleeces and send them to Condon’s Woollen Mill in Charlottetown; and after some months, it seemed miraculously, the box of blankets would arrive. In the corner of each blanket would be a label which read, “William Condon and Sons, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island,” and the Condon’s Latin motto, which was
Clementia in Potentia
.

Once, when they were much older, their married son, John, and his wife had taken them on a trip to Prince Edward Island.
It was in July and they left Cape Breton on a Friday and came back on Sunday afternoon. This was in the time before the Anne of Green Gables craze and they did not really know what people were supposed to visit on Prince Edward Island, so on Saturday morning they went to look at Condon’s Woollen Mill because it was the name that was most familiar to them. And there it sat. He remembered that they had put on their good clothes although they did not know why, and that he had placed his hat upon his knee because of the perspiration that gathered on his hatband and on his brow. They did not get out of their car but merely looked at the woollen mill through the haze of the July heat. Perhaps they had expected to see Mr. Condon or one of his sons busily converting wool into blankets, but they saw nothing. Later his wife was to tell her friends, “We visited Condon’s Woollen Mill on Prince Edward Island,” as if they had visited a religious shrine or a monument of historical significance and, he thought, she was probably right.

Sometimes in the early passion of their love they would throw the blanket back over his shoulder toward the foot of the bed, or sometimes it would land on the floor by the bed’s side. Later, when their ardour had cooled, he would retrieve it and spread it carefully over his wife’s shoulders and his own. His wife always slept on the side of the bed closest to the wall, while he slept on the outside in a protective manner. He was always the last person to go to bed and the first to rise. It was the sleeping pattern followed by his own parents and his grandparents as well.

The blanket had been on them when his wife died; died without a sound or a shudder. He had been talking to her for a while in the early morning darkness. He had on his heavy
woollen Stanfield’s underwear and she her winter nightgown, and the bed was warm from their mutual heat. At first he had thought she was playing a trick on him by refusing to answer or that she was still sleeping, but then in an instant of full wakefulness he recognized the absence of her regular breathing and reached his hand, in the winter darkness, towards her quiet face. It was cool to his touch because of its exposure to the winter air, but when he grasped her hand which lay beneath the blankets it was still warm and seemed to close around his own. He got up, and, trying not to panic, phoned his married children who lived nearby. At first they seemed sceptical in their early morning grogginess, asking him if he was “sure.” Perhaps she was only sleeping more soundly than usual? He noticed the whiteness of his knuckles as he grasped the telephone receiver too tightly, trying to get a grip, not only on the receiver, but on the whole frightening situation. Trying to control his voice and remain calm in delivering a message he did not want to deliver and they did not wish to receive. Finally they seemed convinced, but then he noticed the panic rising in their own voices even as he attempted to control it in his own. He found himself trying to recapture the soothing tone of his early fatherhood, speaking to his married, middle-aged children in a manner he might have used thirty or forty years ago in the face of some childhood disaster. With the coming of the VCR and the microwave and the computer and digital recording and so much more, both he and his wife felt that
they
were becoming the children and he sometimes recognized in his children’s voices that adult tone of impatience that might have been his at an earlier time. Sometimes he thought the tone bordered on condescension. But now the roles
were suddenly reversed once again. “We will have to do the best we can,” he heard himself saying. “I will phone the ambulance and the doctor and the clergyman. It is still early in the morning and most of the world is not yet awake. We will contact the authorities before making any long-distance calls. No, there is no reason to come over here right away. I am fine for a while.”

He went back to the bed and pulled the Condon’s woollen blanket over her face, but before he did so, he laid his cheek against what he thought of as the stilled beating of her heart.

The previous summer she had been given a variety of multicoloured pills by the doctor, but they had caused dizziness and drowsiness and a variety of skin eruptions, and she had said, “I wanted to feel better, not worse.” One summer’s day she opened the screen door and flung all of the pills into the yard. The flock of hens, who always responded to the table scraps flying from the door, raced towards the bounty. Later, five of the most aggressive hens were found dead. “If they did that to the hens,” she had said, “what would they do to me?” He had agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to join her in a pact of secrecy. “You don’t tell children everything,” she had said. “You know that.”

It was now ten years later and, of course, he did not think all of these thoughts as the dog pulled at the blanket. Still, they would all come to him later, as they had every day since her death.

He still lived in the house his grandfather had built. It was a large wooden house modelled after the others of its time. It had always appeared quite splendid from the outside but the inside, particularly the upstairs, had remained unfinished for years. For him and his wife it had been their project “to finish it” over the decades of their marriage. They had worked at converting
the vast upstairs expanse into individual rooms, drywalling one room and wallpapering another whenever money was available. By the time they had finished the upstairs rooms, the children for whom the rooms had been intended had already begun to leave home; their older daughters going first, as had their aunts, to Boston or Toronto. Now there was only himself and his dog, and when he visited the upstairs rooms they seemed like a museum that he had had a hand in creating.

When he was a child, the vast upstairs contained only one room with a door, where his grandfather slept. The rest had been roughly sectioned into a girls’ side and a much smaller boys’ side, as he was the only boy. The sections were separated by a series of worn blankets strung on wires. His parents had slept downstairs in the room he occupied now.

As his parents’ only son he had gone into the fishing boat with his father when he was eleven or twelve. His grandfather would go with them, sitting on an overturned bait bucket, chewing and spitting tobacco and rising frequently to attempt urination over the boat’s side. The old man, he realized now, probably suffered from prostate trouble but had never in all his life been to a doctor. His grandfather seemed always to understand the weather and the tides and where the fish were, as if operating by private radar. They fished for lobster and haddock and herring and hake. In the summer they set their hereditary salmon net.

They conducted almost all of their lives in Gaelic, as had the previous generations for over one hundred years. But in the years between the two world wars they realized, when selling their cattle or lambs or their catches of fish, that they were
disadvantaged by language. He remembered his grandfather growing red in the face beneath his white whiskers as he attempted to deal with the English-speaking buyers. Sending Gaelic words out and receiving English words back; most of the words falling somewhere into the valley of noncomprehension that yawned between them. Across the river the French-speaking Acadians seemed the same, as did the Mi’kmaq to the east. All of them trapped in the beautiful prisons of the languages they loved. “We will have to do better than this,” said his grandfather testily. “We will have to learn English. We will have to go forward.”

He himself had enlisted in the Second World War to escape what seemed like poverty and, perhaps, as well to seek adventure. Of the latter he found too much and had promised and prayed in the trenches of the dying young that if he were saved he would return home never to leave again. He had prayed in Gaelic, looking across the flames to the German trenches. Prayed in Gaelic because it was more reflexively natural and he felt he could make himself more clearly understood to God in the prayers of his earliest language. It seemed his prayers had been answered and in the subsequent years he was able to repress the most horrific of the memories, choosing to recall only one remarkable week of respite.

In that week, he was on furlough in London and, armed with scraps of paper bearing place names and addresses, he took the train to Glasgow. From Glasgow he took another train and then another. As he switched trains and journeyed farther to the north and to the west, he was aware of the soft sounds of Gaelic around him. At first he was surprised, hearing the language only
as what seemed like subliminal whispers, but as the train stopped and started in the small rural stations the Gaelic-speaking population began to intensify and the soft language to dominate. At one station a shepherd got on with his dog.
“Greas ort
(Hurry up),” he said to the dog, and then,
“Dean suidhe
(Sit down).”
“S’e thu fhein a tha tapaidh
(It is yourself that’s smart),” he added as the dog sat beside him and looked with interest at the passing moors and mountains.

Sitting there in his Canadian uniform he was aware of his difference and his similarity. Quietly, he took from his pocket the scribbled addresses and bits of information. Haltingly he said to the shepherd
“Ciamar a tha sibh?
(How are you?)
Nach eil e latha breagha a th’ann?
(Isn’t it a nice day?)”

Instantly the train coach fell silent and all eyes turned towards him.
“Glé mhath. S’egu dearbh. Tha e blath agus grianach
. (Very well. Yes, it’s sunny and warm),” said the shepherd, and then eyeing his epaulette said in measured English, “You are from Canada? You are from the Clearances?” He uttered both statements in the form of questions and pronounced the word “Clearances” as if it were a place instead of a matter of historical eviction.

“Yes,” he replied, “I guess so.”

Beyond the train’s windows the empty moors stretched to the base of the mist-shrouded mountains. The tumbling white-watered streams cascaded down the mountains’ sides and a lonely eagle circled over the stone foundations of a vanished people.

“Long time ago,” he said to the shepherd, “since we left for Canada.”

“Probably lucky,” said the shepherd. “Nothing much here any more.”

They were quiet for a time. Each of them alone with his own thoughts.

“Tell me, though,” said the shepherd, “is it possible that in Canada you can own and keep your land?”

“Yes,” he said, “it is.”

“Fancy that,” replied the shepherd. He was an older man who reminded him of his father.

During the remainder of the week, he tried to do it all. Aided by the information on the scraps of paper and his new-found friends and friends of friends, he went on boats up the inland lochs and across the straits to the offshore islands which he found inhabited mainly by wind and crying seabirds. He found the crumbled gravestones, some bearing his name, beneath the waist-high bracken. Where once people had lived in their hundreds and their thousands, there now stretched only the unpopulated emptiness of the vast estates with their sheep-covered hills or the islands which had become bird sanctuaries or shooting ranges for the well-to-do. He saw himself as the descendant of victims of history and changing economic times, betrayed, perhaps, by politics and poverty as well.

In the evenings around the hospitable whisky bottle he tried to explain the landscape of Cape Breton.

“How would you plant crops amidst all the trees?” inquired his shy hosts.

“Oh, the trees had to be cleared first,” he explained. “I guess beginning with my great-great-grandfather. They cut the trees and cleared the land of stones.”

“After the war will you go back to these cleared lands?” they asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I will go back if I get the chance.”

In the late afternoons and early evenings he looked across the western ocean, beyond the point of Ardnamurchan, and tried to visualize Cape Breton and his family at their tasks.