No Great Mischief (24 page)

“There is a passage by Margaret Laurence in
The Diviners
where Morag talks about lost languages lurking inside the ventricles of the heart. I return to that passage a lot and when I touch the book it flies open to that page, page 244.” I smiled at my sister.

“When I first came west to study drama,” she continued, “my professor told me I would have to get rid of my accent unless I wanted to spend all my career in the role of an Irish maid. I didn’t even know I had an accent. I thought everyone spoke as I did. Do you ever think about that, about the way you speak, about the language of the heart and the language of the head?”

“No,” I said, “in my world nothing like that matters. It is almost as if we are beyond language.”

“Perhaps you are,” she said. “Perhaps that is part of the reason why people in your profession have such a high rate of suicide. Do you know that you have one of the highest suicide rates?”

“Yes, I know that.”

“You have to be careful,” she said, with a flash of concern.

“Oh, I’m careful.”

She sighed. “Sometimes I am at Pearson airport between flights, and if I have time, I walk down to the departure gates for the East Coast flights. The gates always seem to be the farthest away and I cannot do it unless I have a lot of time. I have no real reason for going except that I want to be in the presence of those people. To listen to their accents and to share in their excitement. Sometimes there are business executives as well, but you can always recognize them because they sit apart and are not emotionally involved. I am always moved by those middle-aged Newfoundlanders from Fort McMurray trying to tell their children that Newfoundland is a place to be proud of, rather than ashamed of, and trying to justify their accents and the manner in which they speak. Does this seem silly to you?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t seem silly at all.”

“Once, I was at the Halifax gate and a woman said to me, ‘Isn’t it great to be going home?’ I was startled because maybe I thought I looked like one of those executives, but I guess I didn’t. She asked me where I was from and before I could think, I said, ‘Glenfinnan.’

“ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘My husband is from there. It’s a very beautiful spot. There is an island off the coast. Do you know it?’

“ ‘Yes, I know it.’

“ ‘My husband’s name is Alexander MacDonald. Were you a MacDonald?’

“ ‘Yes, I was.’

“ ‘He is going to meet me in Halifax and I will introduce you to him,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you two are related.’

“ ‘Perhaps we are,’ I said. ‘I am part of
clann Chalum Ruaidh.’

“ ‘So is he,’ she said.

“Just then the attendant announced that all passengers with seats at the rear of the aircraft should proceed through the gate, so the woman gathered up all her packages. ‘See you at the luggage carousel,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget. My husband has red hair.’ And then she was gone. I wanted to wave to her or try to explain, but there was no time and she vanished beyond the attendant taking the boarding passes.

“After she had gone, I stood at the gate for a long time. I watched them shut the plane’s doors and watched the plane itself as it taxied towards the runway and then lifted into the sky. And still I stood there. I didn’t realize how conspicuously solitary I was until an attendant came up to me.

“ ‘Is there anything we can do for you, ma’am?’ he asked. ‘There is not another flight from this gate for more than an hour.’

“ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry. No, there is nothing you can do for me.’

“Did you know,” she said, changing the subject, “that James Wolfe had red hair?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “he did.”

Now
my car moves south and west towards the descending sun. Farther south the pickers view the day’s decline from differing perspectives. The urban families are glad the day is done and look forward to their evening meals and the comfort of rental videos and long conversations with their friends. The children will have school on Monday.

The families of the Mexican Mennonites and the Jamaicans will pick until the sun goes down, as will the families of the French Canadians from New Brunswick and Quebec. For many of them school is, perhaps, a luxury and they see themselves within a foreign land where the authorities pay little attention to their existence. In New Brunswick, the academic year is altered to accommodate the needs of varied harvesters, and there is leniency in Quebec.

Later in the season, when they are no longer needed, the pickers will leave their tiny cabins and begin their long return journeys. Sometimes the Mexican Mennonites will have trouble at the various borders because of the complications of their lives. Vehicles may have been purchased or, perhaps, children born since the time of their last border crossing. Sometimes when they attempt to enter the United States they will be pulled aside by the immigration authorities and the same may happen to
them thousands of dusty miles later as they try to leave the state of Texas.

They may be herded into small overcrowded rooms, clutching their vehicle permits, their creased and tattered birth certificates, their yellowed work visas, and their passports containing the uncertain photographs. The children will clasp their parents’ browned hands. They will be asked to take a number and later to answer the complicated question of exactly who they are.

On their homeward journeys, the French Canadians may stop to visit their relatives in St. Catharines or in Welland before the final push. Reacting to economics, some will fill up their gas tanks on the Ontario side of the border because Ontario gasoline has traditionally been cheaper. Others motivated by patriotism will coast their near-empty cars across the border, filling their tanks with more expensive gas in Rivière-Beaudette or St. Zotique. All of them will point out to their children the superiority of Quebec’s highway rest areas compared to those of Ontario, indicating the plentitude of free hot water and the lack of the commercial pressures. They will rest easily within the boundaries of their region.

In the period prior to their long homeward journeys, many of the men will work upon their cars. Nearly all of them are, by necessity, mechanically knowledgeable and they go to garages as rarely as they visit the dentist. In the sundowns of the late autumn evenings they will bend beneath the raised hoods. They will replace their water pumps and fuel pumps and seal their hissing hoses with strands of electrical tape. They will check their carburetors and clean their spark plugs and tighten their fan belts and listen with fearful practiced ears to the ticking of their
engines. Later they will rotate their worn tires and check the lamps of their headlights for their journeys through the night. But that will be in the future. This late afternoon and evening there is still work to be done before the sun’s final descent and the achievement of Saturday night. Then, perhaps, there will be beer and the flickering television shows which come to many of them in a foreign language. They will lean forward and concentrate intently, taking their cues at times from the insistence of the canned-laugh tracks. Some will play cards and others dominoes.

Tomorrow, which is Sunday, will see some of the single young men change their clothes and venture, perhaps, to the pebbly beaches. There they will often laugh too loudly and call out to the young women in their fractured versions of English, in French, in Spanish, or in Jamaican patois. They will receive basically unintelligible responses and console themselves by punching one another on their upper arms or heavily muscled shoulders.

During those months on the Canadian Shield, when the life of Marcel Gingras touched mine, it seemed as if we were like gently nudging planets or perhaps helium-filled balloons. We came in contact with one another but did not collide and although our outer perimeters brushed we were still deep within the private areas of our own circumferences. Sometimes when the shifts were changing we
would nod to one another. And once or twice the management of Renco Development asked me if I would help him to interpret the signals of the hoist or to read the directions on the dynamite cases. On two nights when there were breakdowns, Renco Development paid each of us to sit high on the headframe’s deck and explore the basics of the French and English languages.

We would begin with the obvious parts of our bodies, pointing by turns to our heads, our eyes, our mouths and shouting, “la tête,”
“les yeux,” “la bouche”
to ourselves and the twinkling stars. Later we would move to the contents of our lunch cans, shouting, “apple” and “
la pomme”
and “cake” and
“le gâteau”
and “bread” and
“le pain”
as we held up each item for the other’s scrutiny. He would punch the air with enthusiasm when the answers were correct and we would move from the designations of food to whatever objects of work lay before us on the deck-room floor, pointing to
une chaîne, la dynamite, la poudre, la poudre de mine
, being impressed and surprised by how similar many of our words were although our accents were different. It seemed, at times, as if Marcel Gingras and I had been inhabitants of different rooms in the same large house for a long, long time. There was a rumour that Renco Development planned to train both of us as hoistmen in some near or distant time.

During that period Renco Development was eager to meet its own objectives and deadlines, as were we. All of us joined in the relentless rush towards the black and radiating uranium which lay beyond the walls of rock.

In the dark and dripping coldness of the underground and the stifling heat of the surface bunkhouses, time seemed to compress and expand almost simultaneously. When we were
underground it was impossible to distinguish night from day. If we went to work at seven in the evening we would emerge at seven in the morning at first unaware that we had gone to work on one day and emerged on another. We would blink our eyes to the unfamiliar sun. At times we seemed like jet-lagged travellers, passing through time zones where everything appeared to be the same but was also somehow different. In the cloying daytime heat of the bunkhouses it was often difficult to sleep, the sheets clinging damply to our bodies and the perspiration beading upon our brows. On awakening, it was at times a challenge to focus upon the time of the day or the day of the week or even the week within the month. It was easy to become annoyed at the radio playing in the next room, or to become irritated by interruptions to the boring familiar rituals we had ourselves grown tired of following.

One hot sticky day I heard a voice saying, “Hey, hey,” as I became aware of someone pushing on my shoulder. I had been sleeping in a sweaty troubled way, and at first the voice and the nudging seemed to come from a muffled distance. As the voice and the nudging grew more intense I opened my eyes to a worried-looking security guard. He would advance, nudge, and say, “Hey, hey,” and then jump back a short distance, as if he feared he were touching a dangerous trap which might uncoil and do him harm.

“What? What?” I said, trying to swim up from the uncertain regions of bleary sleep.

“Are you Alexander MacDonald?” he asked, still standing at what he assumed to be a safe distance from his newly awakened objective.

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

“Well, you’re wanted on the phone. Come to the front gate. You know I’m not supposed to take or to deliver phone calls or leave the gate, but this is long distance, so hurry up.”

He turned and walked quickly through the door in a state of what seemed like relieved agitation.

I looked at my watch and glanced rapidly around at my surroundings. It was eleven a.m. and no one else was in the room. I pulled on my trousers and my open shoes and followed the route the security guard had taken. By the time I got to the door his diminishing form was already entering the plywood hut.

The telephone swung at the end of its coiling cord.

“Hello,” I said.

“Ciamar a tha sibh?”
said Grandpa from far away. “How are you?” he repeated in English.

“Okay,” I said. “How are you?”

“Not bad for an old man. I wanted to tell you he’s coming tomorrow.”