Island (33 page)

He was numb throughout all of the funeral preparations and the funeral itself. His wife’s sisters looked after his three small daughters who, while they sometimes called for their mother, seemed almost to welcome the lavish attention visited upon them. On the afternoon following the funeral the pneumonia which his twin brother had developed after his walk into the camp worsened, and he had gone to sit beside his bed, holding his hand, at least able to be
present
this time, yet aware of the disapproving looks of Cora, his brother’s wife, who was a woman he had never liked. Looks which said: If he had not gone for
you
, this would never have happened. Sitting there while his brother’s chest deepened in spite of the poultices and the liniments and even the administrations of the doctor who finally made it up the mountain road and pronounced the pneumonia “surprisingly advanced.”

After the death of his brother the numbness continued. He felt as those who lose all of their family in the midnight fire or on the sinking ship. Suddenly and without survivors. He felt guilt for his wife and for his brother’s fatherless children and for his daughters who would now never know their mother. And he felt terribly alone.

His daughters stayed with him for a while as he tried to do what their mother had done. But gradually his wife’s sisters began to suggest that the girls would be better off with them. At first he opposed the idea because both he and his wife had never been overly fond of her sisters, considering them somehow more vulgar than they were themselves. But gradually it became apparent that if he were ever to return to the woods and earn a living, someone would have to look after three children under the age of four. He was torn for the remainder of the winter months and into the spring, sometimes appreciating what he felt was the intended kindness of his in-laws and at other times angry at certain overheard remarks: “It is not right for three little girls to be alone up on that mountain with that man, a
young
man.” As if he were more interesting as a potential child molester than simply as a father. Gradually his daughters began to spend evenings and weekends with their aunts, and then weeks, and then, in the manner of small children, they no longer cried when he left, or clung to his legs, or sat in the window to await his approach. And then they began to call him “Archibald,” as did the other members of the households in which they lived. So that in the end he seemed neither husband nor brother nor even father but only “Archibald.” He was twenty-seven years old.

He had always been called Archibald or sometimes in Gaelic “Gilleasbuig.” Perhaps because of what was perceived as a kind of formality that hung about him, no one ever called him “Arch” or the more familiar and common “Archie.” He did not look or act “like an Archie,” as they said. And with the passing
of the years, letters came that were addressed simply to “Archibald” and that bore a variety of addresses covering a radius of some forty miles. Many of the letters in the later years came from the folklorists who had “discovered” him in the 1960s and for whom he had made various tapes and recordings. And he had come to be regarded as “the last of the authentic old-time Gaelic singers.” He was faithfully recorded in the archives at Sydney and Halifax and Ottawa and his picture had appeared in various scholarly and less scholarly journals; sometimes with the arms of the folklorists around him, sometimes holding one of his horses and sometimes standing beside his shining pickup truck which bore a bumper sticker which read “Suas Leis A’ Ghaidlig.” Sometimes the articles bore titles such as “Cape Breton Singer: The Last of His Kind” or “Holding Fast on Top of the Mountain” or “Mnemonic Devices in the Gaelic Line” – the latter generally being accompanied by a plethora of footnotes.

He did not really mind the folklorists, enunciating the words over and over again for them, explaining that “bh” was pronounced as “v” (like the “ph” in phone is pronounced “f,” he would say), expanding on the more archaic meanings and footnoting himself the words and phrases of local origin. Doing it all with care and seriousness in much the same way that he filed and set his saws or structured his woodpile.

Now in this April of the 1980s he thought of himself, as I said earlier, as a man of seventy-eight years who had made it through another winter. He had come to terms with most things, although never really with the death of his wife; but that too had
become easier during the last decades, although he was still bothered by the sexual references which came because of his monastic existence.

Scarcely a year after “the week of deaths,” he had been visited by Cora, his twin brother’s wife. She had come with her breath reeking of rum and placed the bottle on the middle of his kitchen table.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “It’s time me and you got together.”

“Mmmm,” he said, trying to make the most non-committal sound he could think of.

“Here,” she said, going to his cupboard and taking down two of his sparkling glasses and splashing rum into them. “Here,” she said, sliding a glass towards him across the table and seating herself opposite him. “Here, have a shot of this. It will put lead in your pencil,” and then after a pause, “although from what I’ve
heard
there’s no need of that.”

He was taken aback, somehow imagining her and his twin brother lying side by side at night discussing his physicality.

Heard
what?
he wondered.
Where?

“Yeah,” she said. “There’s not much need of you being up here on this mountain by yourself and me being by myself farther down. If you don’t use it, it’ll rust off.”

He was close to panic, finding her so lonely and so drunkenly available and so much unlike the memory of his own wife. He wondered if she remembered how much they disliked each other, or thought they did. And he wondered if he were somehow thought of as being interchangeable with his dead
brother. As if, because they were twins, their bodies must somehow be the same, regardless of their minds.

“I bet it’s rusty right now,” she said and she leaned the upper part of her body across the table so that he could smell the rum heavy on her breath even as he felt her fingers on his leg.

“Mmmm,” he said, getting up rapidly and walking towards the window. He was rattled by her overt sexuality, the way a shy middle-aged married man might be when taken on a visit to a brothel far from his home – not because what is discussed is so foreign to him, but rather because of the manner and the approach.

Outside the window the eagles were flying up the mountain, carrying the twigs, some of them almost branches, for the building of their home.

“Mmmm,” he said, looking out the window and down the winding road to the valley floor below.

“Well,” she said, getting up and downing her drink. “I guess there’s no fun here. I just wanted to say hello.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, thank you.”

She lurched towards the door and he wondered if he should open it for her or if that would be too rash.

But she opened it herself.

“Well,” she said as she went out into the yard, “you know where I’m at.”

“Yes,” he said, gaining confidence from her departing back, “I know where you are.”

Now on this morning in April half a century later, he looked out his window at the eagles flying by. They were going down into the valley to hunt, leaving their nest with their four precious eggs for the briefest time. Then he recognized the sound of a
truck’s motor. He recognized it before it entered the yard, in the way his wife had once recognized the individual sound of his horses’ bells. The truck was muddy and splattered, not merely from this spring trip up the mountain but from a sort of residual dirt perhaps from the previous fall. It belonged to his married granddaughter, who had been christened Sarah but preferred to be known as Sal. She wheeled her truck into the yard, getting out of it inches from his door and almost before it had stopped. She wore her hair in a ponytail, although she seemed too old for that, and her tight-fitting jeans were slipped inside her husband’s rubber boots. He was always slightly surprised at her ability to chew gum and smoke cigarettes at the same time and was reminded of that now as she came through his door, her lipstick leaving a red ring around her cigarette as she removed it from her mouth and flicked it out into the yard. She wore a tight-fitting T-shirt with the words “I’m Busted” across her chest.

“Hi, Archibald,” she said, sitting in the chair nearest the window.

“Hi,” he said.

“What’s new?”

“Oh, nothing much,” he replied, and then after a pause, “Would you like some tea?”

“Okay,” she said. “No milk. I’m watching my figure.”

“Mmmm,” he said.

He looked at her from the distance of his years, trying to find within her some flashes of his wife or even of himself. She was attractive in her way, with her dark eyes and ready mouth, although shorter than either he or his wife.

“Had two phone calls,” she said.

“Oh,” he said, always feeling a bit guilty that he had no telephone and that messages had to be left with others farther down the mountain.

“One is from a guy who wants to buy your mare. You’re still interested in selling?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“The other is about Gaelic singing. They want us to sing in Halifax this summer. This is the year of ‘Scots Around the World.’ All kinds of people will be there, even some of the Royal Family. We’ll be there for a week. They haven’t decided on the pay yet but it’ll be okay and they’ll pay our accommodation and our transportation.”

“Oh,” he said, becoming interested and cautious at the same time. “What do you mean by us?”

“Us
. You know, the family. They want twenty of us. There’ll be a few days of rehearsal there and then some concerts and we’ll be on television. I can hardly wait. I have to do lots of shopping in Halifax and it will be a chance to sleep in without Tom bothering me. We won’t even have to be at the theatre or studio or whatever until noon.” She lit another cigarette.

“What do they want us to sing?” he asked.

“Oh, who cares?” she said. “It’s the trip that’s important. Some of the old songs. They’re coming to audition us or something in two or three weeks. We’ll sing
Fear A’ Bhata
or something,” she said, and butting her cigarette on her saucer and laying her gum beside it on the table, she began to sing in a clear, powerful voice:

Only when she sang did she remind him somewhat of his wife, and again he felt the hope that she might reach that standard of excellence.

“You’re singing it too fast,” he said cautiously when she had finished. “But it is good. You’re singing it like a milling song. It’s supposed to be a lament for a loved one that’s lost.”

He sang it himself slowly, stressing the distinction of each syllable.

She seemed interested for a while, listening intently before replacing her gum and lighting another cigarette, then tossing the still-lighted match into the stove.

“Do you know what the words mean?” he said when he had finished.

“No,” she said. “Neither will anybody else. I just make the noises. I’ve been hearing the things since I was two. I know how they go. I’m not dumb, you know.”

“Who else are they asking?” he said, partially out of interest and partially to change the subject and avoid confrontation.

“I don’t know. They said they’d get back to us later. All they wanted to know now was if we were interested. The man about the mare will be up later. I got to go now.”

She was out of the door almost immediately, turning her truck in a spray of gravel that flicked against his house, the small stones pinging against his windowpane. A muddied bumper sticker read: “If you’re horny, honk your horn.”

He was reminded, as he often was, of Cora, who had been dead now for some fifteen years and who had married another man within a year of her visit to him with her open proposal. And he was touched that his granddaughter should seem so much like his brother’s wife instead of like his own.

The man who came to buy the mare was totally unlike any other horse buyer he had ever seen. He came in a suit and in an elaborate car and spoke in an accent that was difficult to identify. He was accompanied by Carver, who was apparently his guide, a violent young man in his thirties from the other side of the mountain. Carver’s not-unhandsome face was marred by a series of raised grey scars and his upper lip had been thickened as a result of a fight in which someone had swung a logging chain into his mouth, an action which had also cost him his most obvious teeth. He wore his wallet on a chain hooked to his belt and scuffed his heavy lumberman’s boots on the cardboard in Archibald’s porch before entering the kitchen. He was by the window and rolled a cigarette while the horse buyer talked to Archibald.

“How old is the mare?”

“Five,” said Archibald.

“Has she ever had a colt?”

“Why, yes,” said Archibald, puzzled by the question. Usually buyers asked if the horse would work single or double or something about its disposition or its legs or chest. Or if it would work in snow or eat enough to sustain a heavy work schedule.

“Do you think she could have another colt?” he asked.

“Why, I suppose,” he said, almost annoyed, “if she had a stallion.”

“No problem,” said the man.

“But,” said Archibald, driven by his old honesty, “she has never worked. I have not been in the woods that much lately and I always used the old mare, her mother, before she died. I planned to train her but never got around to it. She’s more like a pet. She probably will work, though. They’ve always worked. It’s in the stock. I’ve had them all my life.” He stopped, almost embarrassed at having to apologize for his horses and for himself.