No Great Mischief (19 page)

If one walked in the area of such cars at night one could hear the moans and groans as well as the snatches of muffled conversations. Sometimes the oral sounds were diminished by the creaking of the shifting springs beneath the soiled upholstery.

One morning Calum and I went for a walk outside the camp gates. We had just come off our night shift and eaten our breakfast and although we were tired the sun hung in the sky like a molten ball forecasting the coming heat and the difficulty of sleep for our weary bodies. We decided to postpone the effort of sleep and walked out of the gates, over the small grey stones of the crushed still gravel, and towards the direction of the parking lot. And then we could hear the sound of the fiddle hanging or beckoning us in the promised heat of the day. We looked at each other,
recognizing the tune of “MacNab’s Hornpipe,” which was a classic piece at the Cape Breton square dances. The music was coming from one of the abandoned cars and as we were drawn in its direction we focused upon what had once been an elegant dark-blue Crown Victoria with its grille now smashed and its hood buckled back so that it looked like the peaked roof of a house. It sat on its wheel rims, as someone had removed the tires and also, it appeared, its trunk lid. Most of the glass from the windshield and the windows was broken and only the jagged edges remained, seeming, even in the summer’s heat, like the beginning slivers of ice at the edge of an autumn pond.

Through the broken front window we could see the form of a small man hunched forward in the passenger seat. He moved his whole body as he played, and his right foot tapped out the beat on the floor mat of the car even as the bow flew over the four taut strings. Although it was still early in the morning, beads of perspiration were already beginning to form on his upper lip and his forehead. He looked up at us through the broken glass of the window and smiled. “
Cousin agam fhein
,” he said in a mixture of English and Gaelic, looking directly at my shirt although not quite into my eyes. He wore a soiled red baseball cap which read “Last Stop Hotel” above the sketch of a gigantic fish leaping towards a lure. He was a James Bay Cree, he said, and his grandfather or his great-grandfather, he was not sure which, had been a man from Scotland who had plied the trade routes of the north in the years when fur was king. This was the man’s fiddle, he said, offering us the battered instrument. He told us that his own name was James MacDonald and he had recognized the tartan on
the shirt of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald, which I had been wearing at the time. The English/Gaelic phrase meant “cousin of my own.”

“What do you call that tune you were playing?” asked my brother as he turned the fiddle within his hands.

“I call it ‘Crossing the Minch,’ ” he said and nodded towards the fiddle. “That’s the name that came down with it.”

“Come with us,” said my brother, “and we will get you something to eat.”

At the security gates Calum said, “
Cousin agam fhein
,” and gestured towards James MacDonald. And then in response to the guard’s puzzlement he added, “He’s with us.”

My brother and the guard looked into one another’s eyes for an instant. And then the guard, who was nearing the end of his shift and did not want to be involved in a confrontation, waved us through.

We took James MacDonald to our bunkhouse and someone went to the cookhouse and brought back a basket of food. Mounds of bacon and toast, and hard-boiled eggs wrapped in a napkin, and stacks of hotcakes, and a thermos of coffee. He was ravenous and seemed to eat almost one-third of his fragile weight at a single sitting. And then he took his fiddle and went outside and sat on one of the benches.

He was, as Calum said, “a wonderful player” and my brothers brought out their own fiddle and took turns playing with him. And then out of the bunkhouses of the French Canadians came their leader, big Fern Picard, with some of his men. They watched us for a moment from a distance, and then went inside and returned with their own fiddles and their spoons. Two of
them brought harmonicas and one of them a button accordion. They sat on the benches beside us, which we had never seen them do before, and joined in the music. After a while one of them got up and went into his bunkhouse, where he ripped two sheets of plywood off the wall and brought them out to the sundrenched benches.

“For
la Bastringue
,” he said. “
La danse d’étapes.”

He slid one sheet under the feet of the French musicians and as he did so they lifted their legs but remained seated and continued to play without missing a note, and when the wood was in place their feet came down in perfect unison. The toes of their shoes struck the wood as one, and then the sound of leather on wood became one with the music. The staccato rhythm of the percussion blended with the clacking of the spoons and echoed and amplified the soaring sound of the more conventional instruments.

“
Le gigeur,”
said the man who had brought the plywood, nodding in the direction of his nearest fiddler. The man smiled and nodded his head slightly to the left, without raising his chin, which was tucked tightly into the angled base of his violin. As his fingers and feet flew and as he moved to and with the music, only the area around his waist remained still. I noticed that he was wearing one of my brothers’ belts.

The sun moved higher and heatedly across the sky, yet no one seemed to think of sleep. It was as if we had missed the train to sleep and there was nothing we could do about it in our present state.

The music dipped and soared and the leather-soled shoes snapped against the reverberating wood. Sometimes a fiddler
would announce the name of a tune and the others would nod in recognition and join him in “The Crooked Stovepipe” or “Deeside” or “Saint Anne’s Reel,” “The Farmer’s Daughter” or “
Brandy Canadien
.” At other times the titles seemed lost or perhaps never known, although the tunes themselves would be recognizable after the first few bars. “Ah yes,” the fiddlers would nod in recognition, “A ha,” “
Mais oui,”
and they would join one another in the common fabric of the music. Gradually the titles from the different languages seemed to fade away almost entirely, and the music was largely unannounced or identified merely as “la
bastringue;”
“an old hornpipe,”
“la guigue”;
“a wedding reel”;
“un reel sans nom.”

“Sometimes,” said James MacDonald after finishing a tune which everyone knew by sound though not by name, “it is like a man have a son and he is far away and does not give the son a name.” He paused. “But the son is there anyways,” he added shyly, as though embarrassed by the fact that he had said so much.

The music continued and its tempo seemed to rise. Someone dragged the second sheet of plywood into the dusty square in front of the musicians and tried to arrange it evenly as a primitive platform for stepdancing. It was difficult because of the ribs of rock which protruded through the scanty soil. Small stones were placed under the wood at strategic corners in an attempt to construct a level surface. The dancers took turns, although sometimes two men would attempt to share the quivering wooden rectangle. Some danced in the “old” way with their torsos straight and their arms held stiffly by their sides. Others moved their whole bodies.

“We need some beer,” someone said.

A hat was placed by the dancer’s platform and soon it was filled with money. Someone placed a stone on top of the money so it would not blow away, although there did not seem to be any breeze. Later, the hat and money vanished and still later the cases of warm beer appeared, purchased from the nervous bootleggers in the parking lot and smuggled somehow past or around the security guard’s post. Some opened the beer with bottle openers attached to key chains, others with the blades of pocket knives, others with their teeth, spitting the caps before them onto the dusty rock. The perspiration beaded on the foreheads of the musicians and the dancers and formed dark circles beneath their arms.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” said the superintendent as he unexpectedly appeared from around the corner of one of the bunkhouses.

The fiddlers fell silent and the dancing feet stilled. The silence seemed even more profound in the absence of the music.

“Who the hell are you?” he said, stepping in front of James MacDonald, who averted his eyes and began to put away his fiddle.

“How did you get in here?” he asked, this time more forcefully while towering over the small man who was still seated on the bench. James MacDonald shrugged his shoulders in a non-committal fashion and turned the palms of his hands upward to complete the gesture.

“He’s with us,” said my brother, stepping forward from the small knot of men which had gathered at one side.

“
Cousin agam fhein
,” said someone from the crowd and there was a nervous ripple of laughter.

The superintendent turned sharply in the direction of the voice. He was a man who understood neither French nor Gaelic nor Cree and he did not like hearing phrases in languages he did not understand.

“Get him out of here,” he said, turning back to my brother and indicating James MacDonald with his foot. They looked at one another for what seemed like a long time.

“And get the beer out of here too,” he said more quietly and averting his gaze. “You know it’s illegal within the camp gates. I’ll expect you all on your shifts tonight.”

He turned on his heel and walked away.

The musicians began to gather up their instruments. Someone threw a beer bottle into the bush and we waited until we heard its distant explosion on an unseen rock. The man who had brought the plywood sheets carried a case of beer into his bunkhouse and left the wood behind. James MacDonald said something to himself in Cree and smiled resignedly, as if he had seen it all before.

“Never mind him,” said my brother to James MacDonald. “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. You can stay with us as long as you like.”

That night we went to work with the sound of the music still in our ears. For the first hour we were quiet and almost lightheaded because of all the beer and the fact we had not eaten or slept all day. And the air seemed fouler than usual and the stench of the powder stronger. Later the pounding of the steel drill bits into the stone contributed to our mild nausea and seemed to evoke a similar pounding within our heads. Our underwear was
drenched with sweat and we rummaged in our lunch cans for oranges to ease our dehydration.

When we came to the surface in the morning the music seemed to have happened a long time ago. We stood under the showers as the water lashed down upon us. The hair on our bodies flattened against our skins, all of it lying in the same direction. Far away when the wind and the sea blew across the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point the grass lay flat upon the flesh of earth, clinging by its roots in water and in wind and rising again when the storm subsided. When we left the wash house we realized that it had rained heavily during the night and as we approached the bunkhouses we noticed the two sheets of plywood from the previous day. They were muddied and dirty and seemed already to be warping due to the pressure of the rain. The French Canadians took one sheet and we the other, and we threw them into the bush behind our dwellings.

James MacDonald was asleep with all his clothes on in Calum’s bed. The cap which read “Last Stop Hotel” was on the floor beside him. My brother crawled into the bed of one of our cousins who had gone to his shift as we were coming off ours.

James MacDonald remained with us for two days. He had no money and asked for work. My brother took him with us on two shifts and paid him in cash at the end of each. We all contributed some kind of underground clothing, although it was difficult to find garments and footwear to fit his small stature. He was deadly frightened of the underground and could not adjust to the confined spaces and the darkness, and the stench of powder, and the assault of noise. And he was not strong enough to do even
the lightest tasks, and mucking machines and the loud and unexpected noises caused him to jump and cower against the walls of stone. Once, on one of his rounds the superintendent noticed him but did not say anything. We were making good progress at the time and our footage was ahead of schedule. One early afternoon when we awoke from our post-shift sleep, we realized that both James MacDonald and his fiddle were gone.

“He was not made to do this anyway” said my brother after the realization had settled in. “He’s better off away from the underground.” Two weeks later someone told us we were wanted at the camp gates. One of the native girls was there and led us to the shell of the once-elegant Crown Victoria. Lying on the seat was a haunch of moosemeat carefully wrapped in cheesecloth, although the blood was seeping through. Pinned to the cheesecloth was the torn sheet from a calendar. “Thanks,” read the single word printed in pencil, and then there was a picture of a fiddle and a sketch of a gigantic fish leaping towards a lure.

Once, said my sister in Calgary, she was in the oil city of Aberdeen with her husband, the petroleum engineer named Pankovich. They had been to a splendid dinner at one of the grand hotels and were in the company of oil executives and their wives from Houston and Denver. They had eaten too much and drunk too much and
wobbled their way through parodies of Scottish dancing. Later as they ascended the stairs to their room, she met a young woman, perhaps it was one of the maids, she could not be sure, who brushed against her and murmured something to her in Gaelic. When the phrase registered, she looked around, but the woman was gone.