No Great Mischief (4 page)

“That always got to me, somehow,” I remember my grandfather saying, “that part about the dog.”

The voyage was a bad one. The quarters below were cramped and overcrowded and were apparently modelled partially on those of the transport ships used to carry Highland soldiers to fight in the New World and partially on the quarters of the slave ships plying from Africa to ports of that same New World. Overcrowding being a matter of simple economic greed.

In fair weather the people could come above decks and move and clean themselves, but in this year of the stormy August crossing, they were unable to do so, and were forced to remain below in their own stench and confinement. Three weeks out, the former Catherine MacPherson died. Her death brought on, again, “by the fever” and no doubt hastened by the overcrowding and the wormy oatmeal and the tiny measures of brackish water. She was sewn in a canvas bag and thrown overboard, never to see the New World on which she had based such hopes. One
week after her death the wife of Angus Kennedy gave birth. The child was called Catherine and was known ever afterwards as
“Catriona na mara
,” “Catherine of the Sea,” because of the circumstances of her birth.

As I said, these seem the facts, or some of them anyway, although the fantasies are my own. And as is the case with the Gaelic songs, I do not choose nor will myself to remember them. They are just there, from what, even in my relatively short life, seems like a long time ago. I remember my grandfather telling me the story one afternoon in early spring as we were out at the woodpile making kindlings – he chopping them and I carrying them in to dry. I was, perhaps, eleven and the geese were winging northward, flying over the still iced-in rivers and lakes – seeming fools for being so early yet being geometrically true to their intended course and purpose.

“After they landed on the shores of Pictou,” he said, “
Calum Ruadh
broke down and wept and he cried for two whole days and I guess they were all around him, including the dog, and no one knew what to do.”

“Cried?” I said incredulously. Because even by then I was conditioned by movies where the people all broke into applause when they saw the Statue of Liberty which their ship was approaching. Always they seemed to hug and dance and be
happy
at landing in the New World. And also the idea of a fifty-five-year-old man crying was a bit more than I was ready for. “Cried?” I said. “What in the world would he cry for?”

I remember the way my grandfather drove the axe into the chopping block – with such violent force that it became so deeply embedded he had difficulty in getting it out later – and he
looked at me with such temporary anger in his eyes that I thought he would snatch me by my jacket front and shake me. His eyes said that he could not believe I was so stupid, but they said so only for a moment. He was, I suppose, somewhat like the teacher at the blackboard who explains and draws diagrams and gives examples, and then upon asking the question of understanding finds that no one has received his message – and fears in anger that everyone’s time has been utterly wasted. Or, perhaps, it is merely the mistake that adults sometimes make in talking to children, thinking that they are talking to other adults who share their knowledge and their views. Explaining the facts of life to those who have as yet no interest in such a subject, and who would probably be more interested in eating cookies.

“He was,” he said, composing himself and after a thoughtful moment, “crying for his history. He had left his country and lost his wife and spoke a foreign language. He had left as a husband and arrived as a widower and a grandfather, and he was responsible for all those people clustered around him. He was,” he said, looking up to the sky, “like the goose who points the V, and he temporarily wavered and lost his courage.

“Anyway,” he went on, “they waited there for two weeks, trying to get a shallop to take them across the water and here to Cape Breton. And then, I guess, he got better and ‘set his teeth,’ as they say, and resolved to carry on. It’s a good thing for us that he did.”

“What’s a shallop?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of my fear of ignorance.

He was not angry at the question but only laughed as he set about trying to free the embedded axe from the chopping block.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “It’s just the word they always used, ‘shallop.’ It’s sort of a small open boat. You can row it or use sails. Sort of like a dory. I think it’s originally a French word.”

As I gathered the kindlings that fell from his axe, another V of geese flew north. These seemed somehow lower, and it was almost as if one could hear the strong and regulated “whoosh” of their grasping, powerful, outstretched wings.

One sees the little group of people even now, as if we could, in imagination’s mist, rowing or sailing in their shallop or shallops across the choppy fall sea. Looking along the Cape Breton coastline, which would become the future subject of “Chi
Mi Bhuam
,” although they had no way of knowing that then. Nor did they know, probably, that once they landed they would be there “forever” – none of them in that boat ever returning to the mainland during their natural lives. One sees them with the “saved” dog, perhaps, in the shallop’s prow, the wind spray flattening the hair along her skull while she scanned the wooded coastline with her dark intelligent eyes. When the boat landed on the gravelled strand, the cousins who had written the Gaelic letter and the Micmacs who were at home “in the land of trees” helped them ashore and continued to help them through that first long winter.

Official settlement was not appreciated in Cape Breton at that time because of the many political and colonial uncertainties, but in 1784 Cape Breton was constituted a British province and those who were already “inhabitants” petitioned for the land they had been working.
Calum Ruadh
, after walking the hundred or so miles to Sydney, received “the paper” outlining in some formal sense his land in “the colony of Cape Breton.” He was
sixty years old at the time. Thirty-six years later, after Cape Breton was re-annexed to Nova Scotia in 1820, he obtained new papers for the new province, but by this time there were local magistrates and he did not have to walk. It was probably just as well, as he was ninety-six at the time of the re-annexation and he had been in the New World for forty-one years. He continued to live for another fourteen years, giving his life a strange sort of balanced structure; living to be one hundred and ten years old; fifty-five in Scotland and a second fifty-five “in the land across the sea.” Of the second fifty-five, he spent five as a sort of energetic squatter and thirty-six as a “citizen of Cape Breton” and fourteen as a citizen of Nova Scotia. When he died, in 1834, it was thirty-three years before Confederation.

He was never a married man in the new country and that is, perhaps, why his grave seems doubly lonely, set as it is on the farthest jutting headland that points out to the sea, where it is caught by all of the many varying winds. Most of his children are buried in the early “official” graveyards beside their wives and husbands and sometimes, in the larger plots, surrounded by their own children and children’s children as well. Families in death, as they were in life. But
Calum Ruadh
is buried all alone, apparently where he wanted to be, marked only by a large boulder with the hand-chiselled letters which give his name and dates and the simple Gaelic line:
Fois do t’anam
. Peace to his Soul.

In
the years that followed, some of
Calum Ruadh’s
many descendants expanded his original land holdings, while others moved farther along the coast and others deeper inland. Nearly all of them had large families, which led in turn to complex interrelationships and complicated genealogies, over all of which his name continued to preside. I remember as a high-school athlete, travelling to hockey games in communities which seemed a great distance away, sometimes playing in arenas but more often on windswept ponds beside the sea. And after our games we would be invited into the homes of our hosts, where we would inevitably be quizzed by their parents or grandparents. “What’s your name?” “What’s your father’s name?” “What’s your mother’s father’s name?” And almost without fail, in the case of myself and my cousins, there would come a knowing look across the face of our questioners and they would say, in response to our answer, “Ah, you are the
clann Chalum Ruaidh
,” as if that somehow explained everything. They would pronounce
clann
in the Gaelic way so that it sounded like “kwown.” “Ah, you are the
clann Chalum Ruaidh,”
meaning “Ah, you are the children (or the family) of the red Calum.” We would nod and accept this judgment, as the ice and snow dripped off our shin pads to form puddles on the linoleum floors. And later, when we were out of the house and thinking ourselves more

sophisticated than we were, we would laugh and sometimes imitate the people and their identification. “What is your father’s father’s father’s father’s name?” we would ask one another, carving our initials in the snow with our hockey sticks, and then answering our own questions, “Ah, now I know, you are the
clann Chalum Ruaidh,”
and we would laugh and flick snow at one another with the blades of our sticks.

There are a few physical characteristics of the
clann Chalum Ruaidh
which seem to have been passed on and, in some cases, almost to have been intensified. One seems a predisposition to have twins, most of whom are fraternal rather than identical. And another has to do with what is sometimes called “colouring.” Most of the people are fair-skinned, but within families some of the individuals have bright red hair while that of their brothers and sisters is a deep, intense and shining black. When my twin sister was seventeen, she decided for reasons of girlish vanity to dye her hair with a silver-blondish streak which rose from her forehead and swept in undulating waves through the heavy blackness of her own natural hair. Later, tiring of the effect, she attempted to dye the streak back to black, but could find no dye that would make it as black as it was before. I see her now, sometimes, in memory, sitting in her slip before her mirror and biting her lip in frustration close to tears, looking like those heroines of the Scottish ballads with “milk white skin and hair as black as the raven’s wing” and wishing to be someone else. My grandmother had little sympathy for her plight, saying with straightforward firmness, “It is good enough for you, for tampering with the hair God gave you.”

It was months before her hair grew to its own blackness again, and then almost simultaneously and ironically the first few
strands of premature whiteness began to appear as they so often do, coming to the dark-haired at a very early age.

Many of the red-haired people also had eyes that were so dark as to be beyond brown and almost in the region of a glowing black. Such individuals would manifest themselves as strikingly unfamiliar to some, and as eerily familiar to others. When one of my sons was born in southwestern Ontario, the hospital staff said, “Either his hair will turn dark or his eyes will turn blue. Most red-haired people have blue eyes. No one looks
like that.”
There seemed little reason for me to say anything, given the circumstances of my own physical presence.

And once, years after my sister had married the petroleum engineer she met at the University of Alberta, her eleven-year-old son was pushing his bicycle up the incline of Calgary’s Sarcee Trail on a sunny summer afternoon. He was met, he said, by a car filled with men and bearing a banner which said “B.C. or Bust” strung across its grille. It passed him and then stopped in a slew of roadside gravel, and then, grinding into reverse, roared backwards towards him where he stood half frightened and clutching his handlebars. “What’s your name?” said one of the men, rolling down his window. “Pankovich,” he answered. And then one of the men in the back seat (“the one with the beer in his lap,” he said) leaned forward and asked, “What was your mother’s last name?” “MacDonald,” he answered. “See,” said the man to the car in general, “I told you.” And then another of the men reached into his pocket and passed him a fifty-dollar bill. “What’s this for?” asked my nephew named Pankovich. “It is,” said the man, “for the way you look. Tell your mother it is from
clann Chalum Ruaidh.”

And then the car bearing “B.C. or Bust” moved into the flow of the summer highway, heading for the rolling foothills and the distant shimmering mountains.

“Mom,” said my nephew on arriving home, “What’s kwown calum rooah?”

“Why?” she asked, startled. “Where did you hear that?” And he told her his story and she, some of hers.

“I remember it so clearly,” my sister said to me later. “I was fixing my hair because we were going out to dinner that evening. It just struck me so suddenly that I started to cry, and I asked him what licence plates were on the car, but he said he hadn’t noticed. I would have liked to have found out who they were, and to have thanked them somehow – not for the money, of course, nor for him, but somehow for myself.” She extended her hands in front of her and then moved them sideways as if she were smoothing an imaginary tablecloth hung in air.