The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

by Alistair Macleod

  So I told him one night very resolutely and very powerfully that I would remain with him as long as he lived and we would fish the sea together. And he made no protest but only smiled through the cigarette smoke that wreathed his bed and replied, “I hope you will remember what you’ve said.”

  The room was now so filled with books as to be almost Dickensian, but he would not allow my mother to move or change them and he continued to read them, sometimes two or three a night. They came with great regularity now, and there were more hard covers, sent by my sisters who had gone so long ago and now seemed so distant and so prosperous, and sent also pictures of small red-haired grandchildren with baseball bats and dolls which he placed upon his bureau and which my mother gazed at wistfully when she thought no one would see. Red-haired grandchildren with baseball bats and dolls who would never know the sea in hatred or in love.

  And so we fished through the heat of August and into the cooler days of September when the water was so clear we could almost see the bottom and the white mists rose like delicate ghosts in the early morning dawn. And one day my mother said to me, “You have given added years to his life.”

  And we fished on into October when it began to roughen and we could no longer risk night sets but took our gear out each morning and returned at the first sign of the squalls; and on into November when we lost three tubs of trawl and the clear blue water turned to a sullen grey and the trochoidal waves rolled rough and high and washed across our bows and decks as we ran within their troughs. We wore heavy sweaters now and the awkward rubber slickers and the heavy woollen mitts which soaked and froze into masses of ice that hung from our wrists like the limbs of gigantic monsters until we thawed them against the exhaust pipe’s heat. And almost every day we would leave for home before noon, driven by the blasts of the northwest wind, coating our eyebrows with ice and freezing our eyelids closed as we leaned into a visibility that was hardly there, charting our course from the compass and the sea, running with the waves and between them but never confronting their towering might.

  And I stood at the tiller now, on these homeward lunges, stood in the place and in the manner of my uncle, turning to look at my father and to shout over the roar of the engine and the slop of the sea to where he stood in the stern, drenched and dripping with the snow and the salt and the spray and his bushy eyebrows caked in ice. But on November twenty-first, when it seemed we might be making the final run of the season, I turned and he was not there and I knew even in that instant that he would never be again.

  On November twenty-first the waves of the grey Atlantic are very very high and the waters are very cold and there are no signposts on the surface of the sea. You cannot tell where you have been five minutes before and in the squalls of snow you cannot see. And it takes longer than you would believe to check a boat that has been running before a gale and turn her ever so carefully in a wide and stupid circle, with timbers creaking and straining, back into the face of storm. And you know that it is useless and that your voice does not carry the length of the boat and that even if you knew the original spot, the relentless waves would carry such a burden perhaps a mile or so by the time you could return. And you know also, the final irony, that your father like your uncles and all the men that form your past, cannot swim a stroke.

  The lobster beds off the Cape Breton coast are still very rich and now, from May to July, their offerings are packed in crates of ice, and thundered by the gigantic transport trucks, day and night, through New Glasgow, Amherst, Saint John and Bangor and Portland and into Boston where they are tossed still living into boiling pots of water, their final home.

  And though the prices are higher and the competition tighter, the grounds to which the Jenny Lynn once went remain untouched and unfished as they have for the last ten years. For if there are no signposts on the sea in storm there are certain ones in calm and the lobster bottoms were distributed in calm before any of us can remember and the grounds my father fished were those his father fished before him and there were others before and before and before. Twice the big boats have come from forty and fifty miles, lured by the promise of the grounds, and strewn the bottom with their traps and twice they have returned to find their buoys cut adrift and their gear lost and destroyed. Twice the Fisheries Officer and the Mounted Police have come and asked many long and involved questions and twice they have received no answers from the men leaning in the doors of their shanties and the women standing at their windows with their children in their arms. Twice they have gone away saying: “There are no legal boundaries in the Marine area”; “No one can own the sea”; “Those grounds don’t wait for anyone.”

  But the men and the women, with my mother dark among them, do not care for what they say, for to them the grounds are sacred and they think they wait for me.

  It is not an easy thing to know that your mother lives alone on an inadequate insurance policy and that she is too proud to accept any other aid. And that she looks through her lonely window onto the ice of winter and the hot flat calm of summer and the rolling waves of fall. And that she lies awake in the early morning’s darkness when the rubber boots of the men scrunch upon the gravel as they pass beside her house on their way down to the wharf. And she knows that the footsteps never stop, because no man goes from her house, and she alone of all the Lynns has neither son nor son-in-law that walks toward the boat that will take him to the sea. And it is not an easy thing to know that your mother looks upon the sea with love and on you with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue.

  But neither is it easy to know that your father was found on November twenty-eighth, ten miles to the north and wedged between two boulders at the base of the rock-strewn cliffs where he had been hurled and slammed so many many times. His hands were shredded ribbons as were his feet which had lost their boots to the suction of the sea, and his shoulders came apart in our hands when we tried to move him from the rocks. And the fish had eaten his testicles and the gulls had pecked out his eyes and the white-green stubble of his whiskers had continued to grow in death, like the grass on graves, upon the purple, bloated mass that was his face. There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair.

  SEVEN

  The Road to Rankin’s Point

  I AM speaking now of a July in the early 1970’s and it is in the morning just after the sun has risen following a night of heavy rains. My car moves through the quiet village which is yet asleep except for those few houses which have sent fishermen to their nets and trawls some hours before. From such houses the smoke whisks and curls lazily before slanting off at the insistence of the almost imperceptible southeast wind. Upon my right the Gulf of St. Lawrence is flat and blue, dotted here and there with the white fishing boats intent on their quiet work. It has been a bad year for lobsters because of the late ice and then the early storms which destroyed so much of the precious gear. During the last week of the lobster season many of the fishermen did not even visit their traps, preferring to remain drunk and discouraged on the beach or within the dampened privacy of their little shanties.

  Now since the lobster season’s conclusion on July first, it can be at least thankfully forgotten along with the vague feelings of hope tinged with guilt that accompanied its final days. The boats presently riding on the Gulf are after a variety of “ground fish,” with some few after salmon. They are getting six cents a pound for hake and twelve for cod and no one has seen a haddock for a long, long time. In the cities of Ontario fresh cod sells for $1.65 a pound and the “dried cod” upon which most of us were raised and so heartily despised has become almost a delicacy which sells for $2.15 a pound. “Imagine that,” says my grandmother, “who would have ever thought?” Across Cabot Strait in Newfoundland the prices are three to four cents lower and there is talk that the fishermen may strike. All this runs through my mind now although it does not really occupy it. Like the vaguely heard melody of some tuned-down r
adio station heard softly in the background.

  At the outskirts of the village the narrow paved road turns to the left, away from the sea, and begins its journey inland and outward. If followed relentlessly it will take you almost anywhere in North America; perhaps to Central and to South America as well. It will remain narrow and unpretentious and “slow” in the caution that it demands of its drivers for approximately fifty miles. Then it will join the maple-leafed Trans-Canada Highway and together they will boom across the Canso Causeway and off Cape Breton Island and out into the world. As the water of the tributary joins the major river, its traffic and its travellers will blend and mingle within the rushing stream. They will become the camper trailers with their owners’ names emblazoned on their sides, and the lumbering high-domed motor homes and the overcrowded station wagons with the dogs forever panting through the rear windows. They will become the high-powered “luxury” products of Detroit, loaded with extras and zooming at eighty miles per hour from service station to service station, as if by speed alone they might somehow outrace the galloping depreciation which even now threatens to overtake and engulf them. They will become the scuttling Volkswagens in the “slow” lanes on the long hills and the grinding trucks with their encased and T-shirted drivers carrying the continent’s goods and the weaving, swerving motorcyclists with their helmets reflecting the slanting sun.

  By night these travellers will all be miles away; comparing mileages, filling their radiators and looking at their maps. They will be sitting around campfires and sweating in the motels. Some will be in the havens of their homes while others will follow the probing paths of their bugspattered headlights deep into the darkened night. Some few will end in the twisted, spectacular wreckages, later moaning incoherently in the unknown hospitals or lying beneath the quiet sheets of death while authorities search through glove compartments and check out licence numbers prior to notifying the next of kin. It is a big, fast, brutal road that leads into the world on this July day and there is no longer any St. Christopher to be the patron saint of travellers.

  But for me, in this my twenty-sixth year, it is not into the larger world that I go today. And the road that I follow feeds into no other that will take the traveller to the great adventures of the wild unknown. Instead, at the village’s end its veers sharply to the right, leaves the pavement behind and almost immediately begins to climb along the rocky cliffs that hang high above the sea. It winds its tortuous, clinging way for some eight miles before it ends quite abruptly and permanently in my grandmother’s yard. There the sea cliff slants down almost vertically and it is as if the road runs into it as it would into a wall. At the wall’s base and at the road’s end nestles my grandmother’s tiny farm; her buildings and her home. Above this last small cultivated outpost and jutting beyond it out to sea is the rocky promontory of Rankin’s Point. As one cannot drive beyond it, neither can one see beyond it farther up the coast. It is an end in every way and it is to the beginning of this conclusion that my car now begins its long ascent.

  For the first two miles there are still houses strung out along both sides of the road but soon such signs of formal habitation fall behind; and as the road becomes steeper, rockier and more narrow the wildness of the summer’s beauty falls and splashes down upon it even to the extent that it is close to lost. The overreaching branches of the silver birch, the maple and the poplar slap across the hood and windshield impeding vision and almost the passage of the road itself. The alders lean and hang from the left bank, their sticky buds smearing the car door’s sides and leaving stains that will annoy car washers for a long, long time. The wild flowers burst and hang in all their shortlived, giddy, aromatic profusion. When the tough but delicate red-and-white roses are nudged by the car they cascade and strew their fragile, perfumed petals across its hood even as their thorns scratch the finished lacquer of its sides. Everything has its price, they seem to say. The sweet red-and-white clover swarms with bees. The yellow buttercups flutter and the white and gold-green daisies dip and sway. The prickly Scottish thistles are in their lavender bloom and the wild buckwheat and rioting raspberry bushes form netted tapestries of the darkest green. As the road dips and twists around many of its hairpinned turns the icy little streams cascade across it; washing it out in a minor way, the water flowing across the gullied roadbed instead of beneath it through the broken, plugged and unused wooden sluices. At such spots near the fresh water’s edge the bluebells cling to the velvet-mossed stones and the blue-and-purple irises march downward to the wetness. The gentle, large-eyed rabbits hop trustingly near the road which is so untravelled that it holds for them neither fear nor any threat of death. The road is now but a minor intrusion that the wildness will reclaim.

  Before the final two-mile climb there is one last almost right-angled turn and again the spilling, cascading brook and the washed-over roadbed and the plugged and useless sluice. The road rising from the spot is solid rock and on wet days it is impossible for a car to make the climb. The tires will spin and the rear of the car will slew to the right and hang above the four-hundred-foot drop that falls to the crashing surf which booms and pounds the smooth and rounded boulders far below. Three years ago a lovers’ quarrel resulted in a car being stolen from the village below and then pushed over the towering cliff. For weeks the police and the insurance companies and various high-priced towing companies attempted to reach it but with no success. All of the cables and the extended booms and the huge tow trucks that were reared back on their hind and doubled wheels and the men motioning with their gloved hands or hanging on ropes at the sea cliff’s wall did nothing to raise the twisted bits of metal that were scattered far below. Finally some men in a small fishing dory were able to get close enough to the cliff’s base to wade ashore in water up to their waists and retrieve what remained of the engine. Now if one hangs over the perilous edge the remaining bits of automobile can still be seen strewn along the wet cliff’s base. Here the twisted chassis and there the detached body and yards away the steering wheel and the trunk lid and a crumpled, twisted door. The cormorants and the gulls walk carefully amidst the twisted wreckage as if hoping that each day may bring them something that they had previously missed. They peck with curiosity at the gleaming silver knobs and the selector buttons of the once-expensive radio.

  The sharp, right-angled turn and its ascending steepness has always been called by us “The Little Turn of Sadness” because it is here that my grandfather died so many years ago on a February night when he somehow fell as he walked or staggered toward his home which was a steep two miles away. He had already covered the six miles from the village when he lost his footing on the ice-covered rock, falling backwards and shattering the rum bottle he carried within his safe back pocket. Now as I feel my own blood, diseased and dying, I think of his, the brightest scarlet, staining the moon-white snow while the joyous rabbits leaped and pirouetted beneath the pale, clear moon. It was a bright and quiet night without a breath of wind, as my grandmother has often told us. All night she kept looking out across the death-white fields for the form of her returning husband. Her eyes became so strained that as the dawn approached the individual spruce trees at the clearing’s edge began to take his shape and size and seemed to move toward the house. First one and then another appearing to move and take on human form. Once she was so certain that she went to the door and opened it only to stare again across the whitened, empty stillness of the silent winter snow.

  In the morning she sent her oldest son, who was ten at the time, to walk along the frozen cliffs; and when he returned, white and breathless, the news he brought was already expected. Shortly after he left, she has often said, she began to hear the death ring or the sound of the death bell in her right ear. It came from off the frozen Gulf of St. Lawrence borne on the stillness and, no, it was not to be confused with the crying of the white and drifting seals. And then almost in response to the bell she had heard the howls of the three black-and-white border collies that had accompanied her son. Their
howls drifted back along the coastline, first the oldest dog and then the second and then the third. She had been able to distinguish each dog’s cry and to comprehend the message that their anguished voices bore. At that time and in those sounds she realized that life for her and for her children would never be the same. She was twenty-six and expecting her seventh child.

  Later she and her older children hitched the best of their brown-dappled horses to the wood sleigh and went forth to meet their husband and father for the final time. The children cried and the tears froze to their reddened cheeks. The horse began to snort and tremble long before he reached the rigid, log-like figure and then to rear and plunge. Finally he lunged to the side, breaking the shafts of the precious sleigh and adding another stick of destruction to the steadily mounting pile. They had had to abandon the sleigh then and return with the horse and then come back again with the children’s coasting sleigh and lengths of rope with which to bind the grizzly burden it was to bear.

  The dogs lay restlessly about the stiffened corpse, black against the silent snow. Sometimes they whined softly and licked the frozen opened eyes or the grotesquely parted purple lips with the protruding tongue or nuzzled an out-flung half-curved arm. Then they would flop back again into the snow, covering their noses with their paws while following everything with their deep brown eyes. Sensing too that their lives had changed and not knowing what to do.

  Somehow they managed the final two miles though their own feet slipped on the icy rocks and they fell forward several times when the strained rope parted. Because the sleigh was so small there was only room for the upper part of the body, and the legs and heels hung over the end and dragged along the jagged, stony road. Twice it almost slipped off completely and when they reached the house the heels of the rubber boots were worn through to the frozen flesh. The heel of the bottle which had killed him still contained, almost miraculously, a half inch of the dark sweet rum while the neck with its firmly fastened cork was also still intact. Between the perfect top and the perfect bottom all was shattered and splintered and driven deeply into the frozen hip and thigh.