No Great Mischief (23 page)

He reaches for the nearest case and rips open the cardboard top with his huge hands, which are steadier now after his consumption of the brandy. I notice that the brandy is almost gone; perhaps two inches of it remains in the heel of the bottle. The brandy is like a transfusion and one can almost see it flowing through him. It reddens his face and highlights the crosswork of tiny damaged purple veins high above his cheekbones and beneath his eyes. The huge veins on the backs of his hands have become distended as the fluid pulses through them.

As he removes the beer bottle he twists off the cap in a single motion. No need to open it with one’s teeth any more. He throws the cap towards the wastebasket, but he misses and it lands with a small clatter upon the floor. He offers the bottle to me. “Not now,” I say. “Maybe I’ll have one later. I have to drive back. We have to go out to dinner tonight.”

He smiles and then gulps from the bottle. Then he moves towards the brandy bottle and swallows the remainder of its contents.

“Now that I have the beer,” he says, “there is no need to save this.”

He drinks more beer to ease the burning sensation of the brandy. The beer bottle is now either half full or half empty, depending on one’s point of view.

“It’s a nice day on the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point today,” he says, moving towards the window. “I listen to the national weather forecast every morning to check on the Cape Breton weather. I did it even when I was in Kingston. Even when we were in the mine and the actual weather didn’t matter for our work, it was still an interest. I guess we were so close to it for so long, always thinking of tides and storms and weather for hay and the winds that might damage the boat or bring the mackerel or herring. And of course the shifting and changes of the ice,” he adds after a pause, directing his glance through the grimy, sun-shot window. The dust motes flutter in the rays of the sun. He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Remember when we lived in the old house and we would go outside right before going to bed to check the weather for the next day? To feel for moisture in the air and dew on the grass, to check the direction of the wind and to listen to the sound of the ocean and to look at the stars and the moon? Do you remember? ”

“Yes, I remember.”

He turns from the window to face me. “Poor Grandpa,” he says, “he had an old joke about an older couple who go outside before bedtime to check on the weather but also to relieve themselves. The woman makes a comment about the moon, but the man thinks she is referring to his penis. He says something like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s low now but it always rises during the night,’ or ‘Later when its darker it will rise up higher,’ something like that. Do you remember? Did he ever tell you that?”

“No,” I say, “he didn’t tell me that.”

“Oh well,” he says, “perhaps at the time he thought you were too young. The past is not the same for everyone, but it catches
up with you. I was thinking the other day of how the exhaust from our old cars used to be visible in the coldness of the winter air. Often we had smooth tires and we would have to gun the cars to get them up the icy inclines, but when we came to intersections we would have to stop and then the blue whiteness of the exhaust would overtake us. We could see it and smell it. We thought we had left it behind us somewhere back on the road, but when we slowed down it seemed to overtake and surround us. I guess we were not going fast or far enough. Funny to think of that in the hot weather,” he adds. “Maybe we always think of the season we’re not in.”

“Yes, maybe we do.”

I reach for a bottle of beer, not because I particularly want it but because it seems unsociable and almost patronizing to watch him drink so rapidly by himself. Later I will have to drive for close to four hours to join my wife and my colleagues for an almost compulsory dinner.

“Did I tell you that I saw your old friend Marcel Gingras a few months ago? I was walking along the sidewalk and I saw three cars coming towards me. They were Cadillacs or Lincolns, big expensive cars, filled with men and the windows were rolled down and their tattooed arms were hanging over the side. I almost knew who they were before I recognized them because they drove in that same kind of arrogant fashion, staying close together and straddling two lanes on the streetcar tracks. I recognized their licence plates,
Je me souviens
, at about the same time I noticed their driving.

“Marcel pulled his car up on the sidewalk as soon as he saw me and the others did the same. He was wearing a flowered shirt
open almost to his belt, and sunglasses, and he had a gold chain around his neck and several large rings on his fingers. He had had his hair styled. It was long and wavy. Remember he used to always have a brush cut?”

“Yes,” I said, “I remember.”

“He put his car in park but didn’t shut the motor off and almost jumped onto the sidewalk where I was. It happened so fast that although I thought I recognized them as a group I wasn’t sure of him as an individual. I was carrying a bottle of cheap cooking sherry in a bag because it was all I could afford and I remember thinking, ‘Well, if I have to defend myself with this, I won’t miss the contents.’ I grasped the bottle by the neck but then he was upon me and put his arms around me in a hug.

“
‘Bonjour,’
” he said, ‘I recognized you by your walk.’ He introduced me to the other men in the cars. ‘This is
Calum Mor
,’ he said. ‘Long time ago when we first came with Fern Picard, this was the best miner we ever saw.’

“The men in the cars nodded their heads and held out their hands. They were all basically French-speaking, although two of them were MacKenzies, descendants of Wolfe’s soldiers from the Plains of Abraham. We talked for a while. They had heard that there was work driving a railroad tunnel from Sarnia under the river to the American side. Or that there was a tunnel near St. Louis and work near Boston. ‘Better money in the U.S.,’ said Marcel, rubbing his thumb against the first two fingers of his right hand in the old gesture. ‘Lots of people from Cape Breton in Massachusetts, in Waltham. We’ve been there before. Come with us.’

“ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I couldn’t pass the X-ray.’ They all laughed and Marcel asked about you – ‘the book one,’ they used to call you. I told them what you did and he said he remembered that you were good at school. I gave him your number. Did he ever call you?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Anyway, we talked for a while. Traffic was building up behind them and people were getting annoyed. A policeman came along. At first he was impressed by their cars and thought I was merely an old alcoholic bothering the well-to-do. Then he noticed their licence plates.

“ ‘You can’t block traffic like this on the street and on the sidewalk,’ he said.
‘Je ne parle pas l’anglais,’
said Marcel. The policeman turned to me. ‘I was just trying to give them directions,’ I said.

“They put their cars in gear and began to drive off. The MacKenzies waved from the the back seat of the last car and Marcel put his hand out the window and waved. I remember the sun glinting off his rings.

“The policeman said to me, ‘You better get home with your wine. What would you know about French?’ ”

“I think I’ve told you that before,” said my brother. “It was unusual just to meet them like that.”

“Yes, you have told me,” I say. “It was unusual. Marcel wanted to learn English more than anything in the world, he once told me. He offered me money to teach him. He thought it would guarantee him a job in Sudbury. Perhaps with Inco or one of the big companies.”

The sun has moved across the sky so that its light no longer penetrates directly into the room. I nervously peel the label off my beer bottle. My brother staggers towards the sink, unzipping his trousers as he goes. Although he is still clear in his speech, his movements are erratic and he no longer cares about real or imagined niceties. Grandpa used to say, “It’s a great thing, drinking beer. It cleans out your system and it comes out of you the same colour as it goes in.” I am not sure how he would react to this present scene, or if his goodwill would extend this far.

“Once, before everything happened,” Grandma once said to my twin sister and me, “we were all sitting around the table. It was years before you two or Colin were born. Grandpa had his beer bottle on the table and Calum was perhaps four or five. As he passed it the sun came through the window in a certain way that reflected off the glass and he saw his little boy’s reflection thrown back towards him. ‘Oh,’ Calum said, ‘I see myself in that beer bottle. It’s really me. It’s like I’m in there.’

“He was so excited that I never forgot it. Later I saw him looking at the bottle, but the light had changed and he couldn’t find himself again. It seemed almost like a prophecy of what was to happen later. He was such a dear little boy.”

“I have to go now,” I say, rising from my chair as Calum turns from the sink, the dark wet blotches visible on the front of his trousers and his zipper still undone. “But I will be back if not next week, the week after. I will leave you some money if you wish, to tide you over until Monday.”

“Oh, I think I’ll be all right,” he says. “No need of that.”

I reach into my pocket and feel for the crumpled roll of bills dampened by my own perspiration. I place the money on the
table and try to avoid looking at it or counting it because it seems, somehow, so condescending.

“Take care,” I say. “
Beannachd leibh.”
He approaches me and takes my right hand in his and places his left hand upon my shoulder. He is now swaying slightly and because he is still a big man his weight causes me to shift my own feet in an attempt to achieve balance.

“My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald,” he says with a smile. We lean into one another like two tired boxers in the middle of the ring. Each giving and seeking the support of the other.

He turns towards the window and I leave and close the door.

My exit from the city of Toronto seems fairly simple. The protestors and their opponents have apparently gone home. The traffic is heavy but not oppressive. Because it is late Saturday afternoon the ordinary commercial traffic of the weekdays is stilled and to the north of the city the major arteries reflect the comparative calm of the mid weekend. The desperate impatience of Friday and Sunday evenings is either past or yet to come, and the overloaded trailers and swaying boats seem to have attained their autumn destinations. People are trying to make the summer last as long as they are able.

Through his sun-smudged window perhaps my brother sees Cape Breton’s high hardwood hills. There the colours have already come to the leaves, and slashes of red and gold glow within the greenery and beneath the morning’s mist. The fat deer move among the rotting, windfallen apples and the mackerel school towards the wind. At night one can hear the sound of the ocean as it nudges the land. Almost as if it is insistently
pushing the land farther back. The sound is not of storm but rather one of patient persistence and it is not at all audible in the summer months. Yet now it is as rhythmical as the pulsing of the blood in its governance by the moon.

The “lamp of the poor” is hardly visible in urban southwestern Ontario, although there are many poor who move disjointedly beneath it. And the stars are seldom clearly seen above the pollution of prosperity.

“When
I take transatlantic flights at night,” said my twin sister, once, in Calgary, “I look at the brightness of the stars and the constancy of the moon and, coming back, I always try to look down on the ocean. I think of Catherine MacPherson, our great-great-great-grandmother, sewn in a canvas bag and thrown overboard, never able to arrive at the new land nor get back to the old. I wonder what her thoughts were before she died, leaving everything she knew to be with the man who had married her sister. I often wonder if her Gaelic thoughts were somehow different because of her language, but I guess you think and dream in whatever language you are given.”

“In the bunkhouses of the mining and construction camps,” I said, recalling an old image, “late at night you could hear the men dreaming in all their different languages. Sometimes they would
shout phrases in Portuguese or Italian or Polish or Hungarian or whatever might be their language of origin. Shouts of encouragement or warning or fear or sometimes softer expressions of affection or of love. No one would know what they were saying except those with some kind of shared background. We used to dream ourselves, the older ones among us in Gaelic, and the French Canadians had their own dreams as well. And in South Africa, our brothers said, the Zulus also spoke at night.”

“Remember,” asked my sister, “how Grandpa and Grandma used to dream, sometimes in English and sometimes in Gaelic, but towards the end their dreams were almost totally in Gaelic? It was as if they went back to the days when they were younger. As if it had always been the language of their hearts. Sometimes I think I dream in Gaelic myself but somehow I’m never sure. When I awake I am never quite certain, although the words seem still to be coursing through me. I ask Mike if he hears me talking in my sleep and he says he never does, but then he sleeps so soundly.