The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

by Alistair Macleod

  And his mother said, still evenly, “To the people you took it from. The Lord has been good to us and it seems He wouldn’t want none of this.”

  He burst into tears of anger and sorrow and hopelessness, and tried to explain: “But you don’t understand. The Lord has nothing to do with it. I didn’t steal it. It’s mine. I won it. I can’t give it back. I don’t even know their names.”

  His father said, “You heard your mother,” so he stormed out of the house and stood at the gate, crying, until Donny came out and he was forced to stop. In his pocket his hand clutched the little ball that was now the thirty-one dollars, three bills that were soaked from the sweat of his perspiring palms. He looked at the sleeping soon-to-be-awakened city and did not know what to do.

  He started to walk then but soon he was running. Down several streets and across several others in the almost-light of early morning. He slowed down just as he entered the Caudells’ yard, trying to walk slowly as if just out for a stroll, though breathing heavily.

  He found Everett Caudell in the kitchen, sitting by himself with a cup of coffee and listening to his little radio as it valiantly tried to pull in the fast-fading signal from Wheeling, West Virginia. The others were still in bed and he himself was not completely dressed, being still in his stockinged feet, and with his heavy shirt yet unbuttoned and his trousers not yet firmly fastened by the broadness of his heavy belt.

  “How do, Jesse?” he said as casually as if he had been whittling a stick on his doorstep in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. “How ya bin? Coffee?”

  He was surprised first because he hadn’t been asked why he was about at such an hour but the surprise was shortlived and soon buried beneath the avalanche of his reason for coming. “Here,” he said, pulling the three criminal, sweat-stained bills from his pocket and thrusting them at the man, “here, take them. They’re for you – you lost last night.”

  The big man said kindly: “Take it easy lad. Sit down now. What’s all this? What’s all this?” and he began to fill his pipe as if there were all the time in the world and the world were never to end. And the words tumbled out then, one after the other, on top of one another, passed and thundered and banged one against the other, like the coal when it comes bounding down the chutes, which was one of the few images he remembered from Kentucky, crashing and rolling and pounding, in big lumps and little ones, and the big being broken into the small, and he ended saying: “I’ve got to give it to someone, and it’s for you because you lost and I won – and I shouldn’t have.”

  The man took them then, the three dirty bills, the twenty, the ten and the one, and put them in the pocket of his still unbuttoned shirt. “Aye lad,” he said, “your father is a good man and your mother a good woman; now go on back and tell them what you’ve done, and if they come to me, why I’ll tell them, ‘Sure, he give it to me, a twenty, a ten, and a one,’ just like you did.”

  When he was at the door he heard his name immediately behind him and turned to find that Caudell had followed him on silent stockinged feet and was now standing directly in front of him. And then before he could move he saw the older man quickly and quietly tuck the three bills into the shirt pocket of his guest. “Now there,” he said, “there ain’t nothen wrong. There’s no lie. You give it to me and I took it. We’ll leave it be like that. Now go on home as I hear the army starten to move upstairs.”

  And he went out then into the new day and after a while he even whistled a bit, and he thought of how he’dknock the geometry exam dead next week and of how the football pads would settle with familiar friendliness upon his waiting shoulders that very afternoon. Already he could sense the shouts and hand-claps from the sun-drenched field and as he began to jog, he could hear the golden leaves as they turned beneath his feet.

  SIX

  The Boat

  THERE ARE times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth. There are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks and mumbling for words before I realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters by the pier.

  At such times only the grey corpses on the overflowing ashtray beside my bed bear witness to the extinction of the latest spark and silently await the crushing out of the most recent of their fellows. And then because I am afraid to be alone with death, I dress rapidly, make a great to-do about clearing my throat, turn on both faucets in the sink and proceed to make loud splashing ineffectual noises. Later I go out and walk the mile to the all-night restaurant.

  In the winter it is a very cold walk and there are often tears in my eyes when I arrive. The waitress usually gives a sympathetic little shiver and says, “Boy, it must be really cold out there; you got tears in your eyes.”

  “Yes,” I say, “it sure is; it really is.”

  And then the three or four of us who are always in such places at such times make uninteresting little protective chit-chat until the dawn reluctantly arrives. Then I swallow the coffee which is always bitter and leave with a great busy rush because by that time I have to worry about being late and whether I have a clean shirt and whether my car will start and about all the other countless things one must worry about when he teaches at a great Midwestern university. And I know then that that day will go by as have all the days of the past ten years, for the call and the voices and the shapes and the boat were not really there in the early morning’s darkness and I have all kinds of comforting reality to prove it. They are only shadows and echoes, the animals a child’s hands make on the wall by lamplight, and the voices from the rain barrel; the cuttings from an old movie made in the black and white of long ago.

  I first became conscious of the boat in the same way and at almost the same time that I became aware of the people it supported. My earliest recollection of my father is a view from the floor of gigantic rubber boots and then of being suddenly elevated and having my face pressed against the stubble of his cheek, and of how it tasted of salt and of how he smelled of salt from his red-soled rubber boots to the shaggy whiteness of his hair.

  When I was very small, he took me for my first ride in the boat. I rode the half-mile from our house to the wharf on his shoulders and I remember the sound of his rubber boots galumphing along the gravel beach, the tune of the indecent little song he used to sing, and the odour of the salt.

  The floor of the boat was permeated with the same odour and in its constancy I was not aware of change. In the harbour we made our little circle and returned. He tied the boat by its painter, fastened the stern to its permanent anchor and lifted me high over his head to the solidity of the wharf. Then he climbed up the little iron ladder that led to the wharf’s cap, placed me once more upon his shoulders and galumphed off again.

  When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precocious excursion and asked, “How did you like the boat?” “Were you afraid in the boat?” “Did you cry in the boat?” They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be very important to everyone.

  My earliest recollection of my mother is of being alone with her in the mornings while my father was away in the boat. She seemed to be always repairing clothes that were “torn in the boat,” preparing food “to be eaten in the boat” or looking for “the boat” through our kitchen window which faced upon the sea. When my father returned about noon, she would ask, “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” It was the first question I remember asking: “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” “Well, how did things go in the boat today?”

  The boat in our lives was registered at Port Hawkesbury. She was what Nova Scotians called a Cape Island boat and was designed for the small inshore fishermen who sought the lobster
s of the spring and the mackerel of summer and later the cod and haddock and hake. She was thirty-two feet long and nine wide, and was powered by an engine from a Chevrolet truck. She had a marine clutch and a high speed reverse gear and was painted light green with the name Jenny Lynn stencilled in black letters on her bow and painted on an oblong plate across her stern. Jenny Lynn had been my mother’s maiden name and the boat was called after her as another link in the chain of tradition. Most of the boats that berthed at the wharf bore the names of some female member of their owner’s household.

  I say this now as if I knew it all then. All at once, all about boat dimensions and engines, and as if on the day of my first childish voyage I noticed the difference between a stencilled name and a painted name. But of course it was not that way at all, for I learned it all very slowly and there was not time enough.

  I learned first about our house which was one of about fifty which marched around the horseshoe of our harbour and the wharf which was its heart. Some of them were so close to the water that during a storm the sea spray splashed against their windows while others were built farther along the beach as was the case with ours. The houses and their people, like those of the neighbouring towns and villages, were the result of Ireland’s discontent and Scotland’s Highland Clearances and America’s War of Independence. Impulsive emotional Catholic Celts who could not bear to live with England and shrewd determined Protestant Puritans who, in the years after 1776, could not bear to live without.

  The most important room in our house was one of those oblong old-fashioned kitchens heated by a wood- and coal-burning stove. Behind the stove was a box of kindlings and beside it a coal scuttle. A heavy wooden table with leaves that expanded or reduced its dimensions stood in the middle of the floor. There were five wooden homemade chairs which had been chipped and hacked by a variety of knives. Against the east wall, opposite the stove, there was a couch which sagged in the middle and had a cushion for a pillow, and above it a shelf which contained matches, tobacco, pencils, odd fish-hooks, bits of twine, and a tin can filled with bills and receipts. The south wall was dominated by a window which faced the sea and on the north there was a five-foot board which bore a variety of clothes hooks and the burdens of each. Beneath the board there was a jumble of odd footwear, mostly of rubber. There was also, on this wall, a barometer, a map of the marine area and a shelf which held a tiny radio. The kitchen was shared by all of us and was a buffer zone between the immaculate order of ten other rooms and the disruptive chaos of the single room that was my father’s.

  My mother ran her house as her brothers ran their boats. Everything was clean and spotless and in order. She was tall and dark and powerfully energetic. In later years she reminded me of the women of Thomas Hardy, particularly Eustacia Vye, in a physical way. She fed and clothed a family of seven children, making all of the meals and most of the clothes. She grew miraculous gardens and magnificent flowers and raised broods of hens and ducks. She would walk miles on berry-picking expeditions and hoist her skirts to dig for clams when the tide was low. She was fourteen years younger than my father, whom she had married when she was twenty-six and had been a local beauty for a period of ten years. My mother was of the sea as were all of her people, and her horizons were the very literal ones she scanned with her dark and fearless eyes.

  Between the kitchen clothes rack and barometer, a door opened into my father’s bedroom. It was a room of disorder and disarray. It was as if the wind which so often clamoured about the house succeeded in entering this single room and after whipping it into turmoil stole quietly away to renew its knowing laughter from without.

  My father’s bed was against the south wall. It always looked rumpled and unmade because he lay on top of it more than he slept within any folds it might have had. Beside it, there was a little brown table. An archaic goose-necked reading light, a battered table radio, a mound of wooden matches, one or two packages of tobacco, a deck of cigarette papers and an overflowing ashtray cluttered its surface. The brown larvae of tobacco shreds and the grey flecks of ash covered both the table and the floor beneath it. The once-varnished surface of the table was disfigured by numerous black scars and gashes inflicted by the neglected burning cigarettes of many years. They had tumbled from the ashtray unnoticed and branded their statements permanently and quietly into the wood until the odour of their burning caused the snuffing out of their lives. At the bed’s foot there was a single window which looked upon the sea.

  Against the adjacent wall there was a battered bureau and beside it there was a closet which held his single ill-fitting serge suit, the two or three white shirts that strangled him and the square black shoes that pinched. When he took off his more friendly clothes, the heavy woollen sweaters, mitts and socks which my mother knitted for him and the woollen and doeskin shirts, he dumped them unceremoniously on a single chair. If a visitor entered the room while he was lying on the bed, he would be told to throw the clothes on the floor and take their place upon the chair.

  Magazines and books covered the bureau and competed with the clothes for domination of the chair. They further overburdened the heroic little table and lay on top of the radio. They filled a baffling and unknowable cave beneath the bed, and in the corner by the bureau they spilled from the walls and grew up from the floor.

  The magazines were the most conventional: Time, Newsweek, Life, Maclean’s Family Herald, Reader’s Digest. They were the result of various cut-rate subscriptions or of the gift subscriptions associated with Christmas, “the two whole years for only $3.50.”

  The books were more varied. There were a few hardcover magnificents and bygone Book-of-the-Month wonders and some were Christmas or birthday gifts. The majority of them, however, were used paperbacks which came from those second-hand bookstores which advertise in the backs of magazines: “Miscellaneous Used Paperbacks 10¢ Each.” At first he sent for them himself, although my mother resented the expense, but in later years they came more and more often from my sisters who had moved to the cities. Especially at first they were very weird and varied. Mickey Spillane and Ernest Haycox vied with Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, and the Penguin Poets edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived in the same box as a little book on sex technique called Getting the Most Out of Love. The former had been assiduously annotated by a very fine hand using a very blue-inked fountain pen while the latter had been studied by someone with very large thumbs, the prints of which were still visible in the margins. At the slightest provocation it would open almost automatically to particularly graphic and well-smudged pages.

  When he was not in the boat, my father spent most of his time lying on the bed in his socks, the top two buttons of his trousers undone, his discarded shirt on the ever-ready chair and the sleeves of the woollen Stanfield underwear, which he wore both summer and winter, drawn half way up to his elbows. The pillows propped up the whiteness of his head and the goose-necked lamp illuminated the pages in his hands. The cigarettes smoked and smouldered on the ashtray and on the table and the radio played constantly, sometimes low and sometimes loud. At midnight and at one, two, three and four, one could sometimes hear the radio, his occasional cough, the rustling thud of a completed book being tossed to the corner heap, or the movement necessitated by his sitting on the edge of the bed to roll the thousandth cigarette. He seemed never to sleep, only to doze, and the light shone constantly from his window to the sea.

  My mother despised the room and all it stood for and she had stopped sleeping in it after I was born. She despised disorder in rooms and in houses and in hours and in lives, and she had not read a book since high school. There she had read Ivanhoe and considered it a colossal waste of time. Still the room remained, like a rock of opposition in the sparkling waters of a clear deep harbour, opening off the kitchen where we really lived our lives, with its door always open and its contents visible to all.

  The daughters of the room and of the house were very beautiful. They were tall and willowy like my mother and had her fine facial
features set off by the reddish copper-coloured hair that had apparently once been my father’s before it turned to white. All of them were very clever in school and helped my mother a great deal about the house. When they were young they sang and were very happy and very nice to me because I was the youngest and the family’s only boy.

  My father never approved of their playing about the wharf like the other children, and they went there only when my mother sent them on an errand. At such times they almost always overstayed, playing screaming games of tag or hide-and-seek in and about the fishing shanties, the piled traps and tubs of trawl, shouting down to the perch that swam languidly about the wharf’s algae-covered piles, or jumping in and out of the boats that tugged gently at their lines. My mother was never uneasy about them at such times, and when her husband criticized her she would say, “Nothing will happen to them there,” or “They could be doing worse things in worse places.”

  By about the ninth or tenth grade my sisters one by one discovered my father’s bedroom and then the change would begin. Each would go into the room one morning when he was out. She would go with the ideal hope of imposing order or with the more practical objective of emptying the ashtray, and later she would be found spellbound by the volume in her hand. My mother’s reaction was always abrupt, bordering on the angry. “Take your nose out of that trash and come and do your work,” she would say, and once I saw her slap my youngest sister so hard that the print of her hand was scarletly emblazoned upon her daughter’s cheek while the broken-spined paperback fluttered uselessly to the floor.

  Thereafter my mother would launch a campaign against what she had discovered but could not understand. At times although she was not overly religious she would bring in God to bolster her arguments, saying, “In the next world God will see to those who waste their lives reading useless books when they should be about their work.” Or without theological aid, “I would like to know how books help anyone to live a life.” If my father were in, she would repeat the remarks louder than necessary, and her voice would carry into his room where he lay upon his bed. His usual reaction was to turn up the volume of the radio, although that action in itself betrayed the success of the initial thrust.