No Great Mischief (29 page)

“Troublesome,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “MacDonald of Glencoe in the previous century was considered troublesome as well. That’s why they shot him in the back of the head when he turned to offer them whisky. Talk about betrayal. He thought a piece of paper would protect him.”

“Oh well,” I said, “as Grandpa used to say, ‘No more sad stories.’ ”

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “But when I read about Montcalm he seemed to face almost the same problem. A lot of his troops were French Canadians. They had been ‘in the country of winter,’ as they say, for generations. They had evolved differently and knew their land, and he was a
français de France
.

And he didn’t know what to do with his allies, the Indians. He didn’t understand them or their language or their customs or their methods of attack. He felt their independence was indicative of untrustworthiness. Did you know,” she added, “that the Indians believed that if they saw a dog in their dreams it would mean they’d win the battle?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Well, anyway,” she said, “Montcalm probably felt he was in command of a lot of undisciplined primitives, and they probably thought of him as effete, with his ruffed clothes and strange European battle formations. No wonder he kept looking yearningly out to sea for the ships from France.”

“Yes,” I said, “if only the ships had come from France.”

“Before the Plains of Abraham,” she said, “Wolfe launched an attack, a landing at Beauport. They were badly beaten back and he was furious at the Highlanders because they wouldn’t retreat until they had carried their own wounded from the field. They waded back in the face of fire to get their own people, although they had been ordered to leave them there. It wasn’t a very sound military tactic, I suppose, but by that time they were probably fighting with their hearts rather than their heads. The French in front of them and Wolfe and the boats behind them, and their wounded on the Beauport shore. They didn’t know about his earlier letter describing them. I still remember some of the phrasing: ‘They are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to a rough country, and no great mischief if they fall.’

“I suppose I seem to be trivializing it,” she said, “but they seem at times like a great sports team which may have lost faith in its management or its coach, but are out there anyway in the
bloodied mud and the smoke, giving their hearts and their sinew not for ‘management’ but for the shared history of one another.

“In my modernistic mind,” she added, “I sometimes imagine Wolfe standing there with his calculator. I know it is untrue and unfair to him. He was supposed to be a great general and he did have red hair. I’m not a very good military historian,” she admitted. “If I had been there myself, I probably would have wept. More so if I had read the letter.

“Perhaps I think about all this too much,” she said. “Both Grandpa and Grandma used to say, ‘If you spend too much time thinking you’ll never get your work done.’ ”

“Yes,” I said, “and they worked very hard, especially Grandma.”

“I know,” she said. “When we had to do our work, cleaning our rooms or doing the dishes or scrubbing the floor, I used to say sometimes, ‘But I’m tired.’ She used to say, ‘Everybody’s tired, dear. I’m tired. The world doesn’t stop because we’re tired. So hurry up and it will be all done in a minute.’ And sometimes if her own tiredness were showing she would say, ‘I bet if your brother Colin were alive he wouldn’t be whining about cleaning his room. You’ve already passed him in age, and he will never grow older. Poor little soul. He was so happy the last time I saw him in his new coat. We should all be grateful that we’re alive and have each other, so hurry up and make your bed. Your older brothers in the country would probably like to have clean rooms.’

“ ‘But they never make their beds,’ I said. ‘They never have to clean the bathroom. They don’t even have a bathroom.’

“ ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You should consider their lives.’ ”

My sister was silent for a moment.

“Calum once told me,” I said, “that when they went back to the country, they went one day to cut a timber for the skidway they were making for their boat. They went into a tightly packed grove of spruce down by the shore. In the middle of the grove, they saw what they thought was the perfect tree. It was tall and straight and over thirty feet high. They notched it as they had been taught and then they sawed it with a bucksaw. When they had sawed it completely through, nothing happened. The tree’s upper branches were so densely intertwined with those of the trees around it that it just remained standing. There was no way it could be removed or fall unless the whole grove was cut down. It remained like that for years. Perhaps it is still there. When the wind blew, the whole grove would move and sigh. Because all of the trees were evergreen they never lost their foliage, and the supporting trees extended their branches every year. If you walked by the grove, Calum said, you would never realize that in its midst there was a tall straight tree that was severed at its stump.”

“I guess things are not always as they appear,” she said. “In any of our lives. When I first wanted to be an actress both Grandpa and Grandma thought it was strange. ‘Why would you want to be an actress?’ they asked. ‘Why would you want to spend your life trying to pretend you’re somebody else? Wouldn’t it be easier just to be yourself?’ ” She touched her fingers to her hair. “Let’s look at the photo album.”

We took out the photo album and looked at the pictures of our vanished parents. All of the pictures were taken out of doors.
There are no pictures of our parents by themselves. They are always in large groups of
clann Chalum Ruaidh
. Sometimes they are holding children and sometimes they have their arms draped over the shoulders of whoever is standing next to them. Because there are so many people in the pictures, the amateur photographer had to stand far back to incorporate them all within the lens. In one, our father is down one knee in the front row, and our mother is behind him with her left hand on his shoulder. She is holding Colin in the crook of her right arm and he has his thumb in his mouth. Our father has his hands clasped around the brown dog, who is sitting on the ground in front of him. His fingers are interlaced across her chest and her head is tilted back and upwards towards his face. She is trying hard to lick his chin.

We touched the faces of our vanished parents and our older brother who, unnaturally, became our younger brother, stopped like his great-grandfather by death and time. We looked at the dog in her devoted happiness.

“Poor
cú
,” said my sister. “She went through the ice with them and then swam back and came to get help. Later she died, I guess, for a lost cause but she didn’t know that. Gave every fibre of her small being. Never wavered. As Grandpa used to say, ‘You can’t ask more.’ Cared too much. Tried too hard.”

We continued to look at the pictures. “I thought, with modern technology,” said my sister, “I could separate our parents from these large groups. I took these pictures to a photo studio and asked if it were possible to isolate our parents and then have their individual photographs enlarged. Blown up. I would like to have their pictures on the wall. The photo studio tried, but it would not work. As the photographs became larger
the individual features of their faces became more blurred. It was as if in coming closer they became more indistinct. After a while I stopped. I left them with their group. It seemed the only thing to do.

“If you stay another day,” she suggested, “we can go to Banff tomorrow. In Banff you can ‘see the weather’ on the mountains. You can see patches of rain and areas of sunlight and cloud formations that shift and change. And patterns of mist that rise and descend, that cover and reveal. It is very beautiful.

“Remember as children when we used to look across at the weather on the island? Sometimes it would be raining where we were, but the sun would be shining there. And sometimes it would be the reverse. Sometimes in the snow or the fog we could not see it at all, but then ‘the weather would lift,’ as Grandpa used to say, and there it would be. Constant in its way.”

“I remember,” I said. “Yes, I can stay another day.”

She smiled. “Do you know where Wolfe was when he wrote his ‘no great mischief if they fall’ letter to Captain Rickson?”

“No, I don’t.”

“It was written from Banff,” she said. “Banff, Scotland. Wolfe was not very happy there. Banff was dreary and cold and he didn’t like the people. He was probably happy to get to Quebec, although he didn’t know what was ahead of him.”

She was silent for a while. “Maybe we can go farther than Banff,” she said. “Maybe we can go as far as the Great Divide.”

The new Alexander MacDonald seemed, to casual eyes, just another one of us. To Renco Development and the French Canadians and the construction crews and the dining hall staff he seemed to be a part of the fabric we presented to the outside world.

Because it was thought he might have more in common with me, he moved into my bunkhouse, and one of our cousins moved to an adjoining building.

He had been an outstanding high-school quarterback and as he talked I remembered some of the clippings his grandparents had sent to Grandma and Grandpa. He had some of his clippings from the San Francisco area newspapers with him, folded neatly in a manila envelope, carefully preserved at the bottom of his footlocker. They told of his strong arm, his ability to read his opponent’s defences, his ingenuity and his quickness in making last-minute decisions. Many of them stressed the fact that he was absolutely fearless. He would stay in the pocket until the last possible split-second, undeterred by the large hulking linemen thundering down upon him. “MacDonald Leads Team to Victory in Dying Seconds,” read one. “Red MacDonald Brings Home Yet Another Championship,” “MacDonald Engineers Come-From-Behind Triumph,” “MacDonald Voted to All-Star Team,” read others.

Once, he told me his grandfather said to him, “You’re not afraid of anything. You would be great for war. If I were at Culloden I’d want you by my side.”

We were lying on our bunks looking at his clippings. “Culloden was where they lost,” he said, “right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But they won some of the time?”

“Yes,” I said, “they won some of the time.”

“My grandfather gave me this ring,” he said, holding up his left hand. “It’s a Celtic design. The never-ending circle.”

“I noticed it,” I said, “the first day that you came.”

Our cousin had been highly recruited by various universities, but nearing the conclusion of his final season he had been badly injured in a game. He had remained in the pocket a portion of a second too long and, perhaps, his bravery had betrayed him in the end. His left leg had been firmly planted just before he released the ball, and it had supported most of his weight. When he was blindsided, the leg crumpled beneath him. The ligaments of his left knee were torn, and although he underwent reconstructive surgery he was never to regain his former quickness and lateral movement. The recruiting universities lost interest, fearing that he might be
damaged goods, but apparently he recovered enough agility to be deemed fit for military service.

And he was tremendously athletic; quick in his movements and poised and balanced upon his feet, and muscled and strong from his years of disciplined training. Those of us who saw him for the first time that summer could not imagine that he might ever have been better, physically, at an earlier time; although when he stood next to us in the showers, the scars from his surgery were jaggedly visible on the raised pink flesh that surrounded his knee.

He was also, or so it seemed, in the words of his grandfather, “not afraid of anything.”

“He catches on to things really quickly,” said Calum. “I was worried he would be bothered by the underground, by the dynamite and the darkness and the heaviness of the work, but he never complains. He always pulls his weight and you only have to show him how to do something once.”

He was also very adaptable socially. He would talk willingly on most subjects and was quick to pick up the prevailing attitudes of those around him. He mingled easily with people from other groups but was careful never to reveal his true identity. And when he played poker, which few of us did, he was unusually successful because neither his facial expression nor his body movements gave any indication of what cards he was concealing in his hand.