The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

by Alistair Macleod

  Within the house all is silent except for the ticking of the white Westclox on its shelf above the table. The dogs drowse with half-closed eyes. Lost within our own thoughts, we stay, as in a picture, quiet and immobile for a long, long time.

  “Well, I suppose I must get ready. They will soon be here,” says my grandmother, rising from her seat at the end of the table and seeming to break the spell.

  Within her bedroom which opens off the kitchen, I can see or sense the combing of her long, white hair. She leans to one side and combs it away from her body, her left hand running along its electric smoothness ahead and behind of the comb she wields with her right.

  Later she emerges, fastening a broach of entwined Scottish thistles to the collar of her recently ironed dress. I recognize both the broach and the dress as gifts that I have purchased for her at earlier times. For an instant I see myself once more in the press of pre-Christmas shoppers in Toronto, jostling and elbowing, moving on and off the crowded elevators and the humming, slanting escalators that stretch between the floors.

  I know that in her trunks and scattered jewel boxes there are layers of dresses and mounds of broaches as good as these; yet she has chosen what she has quite consciously. Few of the others, I realize, will recognize what she wears, and there is of course no reason that they should. I am struck once more by the falseness of the broach, for Scottish thistles do not twine. Perhaps at the time of its purchase I was being more symbolic than I had ever thought.

  Returning to her bedroom she emerges once more with a pair of scissors and draws her chair up close to mine. Without saying anything I begin to trim her fingernails. They are long and yellowed and each is bordered by a thin layer of grime.

  Trimming the yellowed, unclean fingernails of my grandmother I realize that I am admitted now to the silent, secret communication that the strong have always known in their relationship with the weak. It is the strength and knowledge that my grandmother has previously so fiercely exercised over her own children and in many cases her children’s children as well. The strength and knowledge leading into and from the awful privacy of all our secret inadequacies which is the standard that the previous generation waves always over the one that follows. The awareness and memory of dirty diapers and bed wettings and the first attempts at speech and movement; of the birth and death of Santa Claus and of the myriad childish hopes and fears of the lost time; of the lonely screaming nightmares of childhood terror; of nocturnal emissions and of real and imagined secret sins. The strength and knowledge of actual physical support and the giving and sustaining of such physical life and perhaps even love. I have never thought of my grandmother so much in terms of love as in terms of strength. Perhaps, I think now, because the latter has always been so much more visible.

  Down in the village at this time I imagine my own father, now nearing seventy, preparing for his journey here to meet us. Nervously brushing his snow-white hair and slapping his face with talcum powder, still half afraid of his mother’s inspection, bound too by those complex cords of strength and knowledge. He cannot, of course, remember ever seeing the father that was his own.

  Suddenly my grandmother seizes my right hand and presses it fiercely between both of hers. The scissors that I have held clatter to the floor and I can feel the intensity of her life yearning and pressing outward through the pressure of her palms. “Oh, Calum,” she says, “what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

  I do not know whether I am more shocked by the unexpectedness of the question or by what seems to be its enormity, given the circumstances. The doctor has said that I should try to live “the rest of my life” in as normal a fashion as possible. I have, he has said, “perhaps some months,” in which I may continue to live and to appear as normal. I am reminded of the summer chickens outside my grandmother’s door, doomed by their time of life to not survive the fall.

  “Oh stay with me, Calum,” she says, “and I will tell them so when they come. Find yourself a nice girl and get married. You are twenty-six and it is time to be thinking of such things. You have always liked it here and the land and the animals are as good as ever. You can make a good life here for all of us. I have left you everything in my will.”

  Outside the window I see the piles of roughened field stones picked by the strong, worn fingers of my grandmother’s hands in earlier times. I see the falling rail fences and the outbuildings in need of paint and shingles. And the barn that contains my grandfather’s only message. This is the “everything” left to me, I am told, by my grandmother’s will. Yet no one has ever given me “everything” before and it is true that I have always liked it here amidst the loneliness and the privacy and the crying gulls. And I have thought of it many times during my “absent” years spent teaching the over-urbanized high school students of Burlington and Don Mills in the classrooms that always seemed so overheated. I have returned now, I think, almost as the diseased and polluted salmon, to swim for a brief time in the clear waters of my earlier stream. The returning salmon knows of no “cure” for the termination of his life.

  I feel the blackened dizziness as it swirls within my head and clutch the chair’s seat for support.

  “What is the matter with you?” asks my grandmother. “You look like you are going to faint. Do you want a drink of water?”

  “No,” I say. “It will soon pass. It will soon be over.”

  The dogs, as if in concert, lift their heads and cock their ears and rise from their recumbent positions to move toward the door. They have heard the cars grinding along the cliff’s edge some miles away. Neither my grandmother nor I can hear anything but we know that we are seeing the coming of sound to finer ears than ours. It is almost as if we can see the sound itself through an exchanging of the senses. Sometimes by looking at the face of the person on the telephone, you can see the nature of the news that is received although your ears hear only the silence that is no sound at all.

  “They are coming,” says my grandmother, giving a final pat to her hair.

  The distant procession consists of members of her family and they are bound on an expedition which might best be entitled “What to do about Grandma?” It is an expedition which has set out with various degrees of optimism for the past fifteen years or so and it has always been launched in the summer when the maximum forces are available. In the summer, numbers of my grandmother’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and even great-great-grandchildren return from their scattered destinations on the roads of the larger world. Joining forces with the relatives who are residents of the region, they map and plan strategies which they hope will suit their purpose. Each year in the face of pleas and tears and petitions and almost threats, my grandmother has remained firm in her refusal to be moved from this her home. I see her quietly gathering her inner resources now, preparing her front of strength almost as if she is checking out her equipment. Images of old Cecil B. DeMille spectaculars come to mind, those pictures in which the attackers are repulsed from their desired heights by having boulders rolled down upon them or balls of flaming fire; sometimes they feel their scaling ladders tipped backwards so that they fall with screams and outstretched limbs. And yet our sympathy seems never to lie with them but instead with those who are besieged.

  This year’s strategy involves the nursing home in the village below and it is planned as an alternative to last year’s failure which was called “living with us” and which was put forth by different people who varied greatly in their enthusiasm and reluctance. The advantages of the nursing home are “privacy” and “being with people near her own age” and “not having to worry about her meals” and receiving what is vaguely described as “care.” There are various other “advantages” of the same type. On and on.

  My grandmother has visited the nursing home at different times to see certain people who are her friends and she has hated it as much as do the friends she goes to see. Clutching her fingers in parchment hands they whisper to her in Gaelic which most of the
staff can no longer understand. They tell her of real and imagined atrocities: that when the visitors leave the staff steal the Kleenex and the chocolates, that poison is being put in the food, that they are strapped to armchairs and wheelchairs for a long time, sitting in their own excrement and urine until their heads flop over onto their shoulders. What does it mean that old women in nursing homes suffer from real and imagined atrocities? And are the imagined ones less terrifying because they are not true?

  Perhaps all of us, if we think of it, can see ourselves at some future time unable to use the bedpan in some place called Sunny Brae or Sunny Brook or Sunny Acres or Sunshine Villa; listening while the nurses’ aides chew gum and talk about their dates (also real and imagined), “Oh he didn’t” “Did he?” “You’ve got to be kidding!” Having our bodies hosed down by people who know too much about bodies and what they do or fail to do and how they finally end. This now I know is bearing down on me. It is ironically too distant and too close.

  Once more I am concerned with my falseness and my cowardice. For I have been sent here on this day even as I have come of my own volition. I have been sent to make the initial request of my grandmother. “Perhaps she will go if Calum asks her,” they have said. “If anyone can convince her it will be Calum.” But Calum has done nothing but sit here all this morning. He has done nothing because he does not believe in this year’s strategy any more than he did in that of the previous year. And in a secret place within his heart he hopes that it will fail.

  Now as the cars begin to appear before the pole gate, I see myself as the failed advance rider sent out to scout the territory for the war party that is to follow. Or as an upside-down St. John the Baptist sent to prepare a false way for unlikely prophets. Or as the anguished and befuddled Judas already too close to his halter. At least I will not have to kiss her on the cheek.

  After the cars have rolled into the yard, the people spill from them in all their vast variety. I stand at the door as an uncertain welcoming committee of one while my grandmother sits inside as she always does on such occasions. They are almost as a group of brightly coloured summer birds, these members of my family, chatting and laughing in plaid pants (with and without cuffs) and floral tops and sport shirts. Slacks, flares, denims, sandals and various “looks” that come from the variety of the worlds they inhabit and the ages that they are going through. Vaguely I think that they do not look much like people who are supposed to have the “gift” of foreseeing their own deaths.

  They move into the house, smiling at me and patting me on the shoulder, some of them looking hopefully into my eyes for any message that might be found. Within the house which has not enough chairs, they arrange themselves as best they can, the children sitting on the floor with their arms around their knees. Soon they will run outside to play or be frightened by the animals that are so alien to many of them but for the present they must sit quietly because it is “polite.”

  Soon they begin to take the pictures. “Here is one of three generations,” they say. “And now one of you and Mary and the baby. Four generations.” Dutifully my grandmother holds her latest great-grandchild on her lap while her son and his daughter stand on either side of her. The people appear frozen as they look into the camera’s lens.

  Once as a boy in the summer following the last year of high school, my first cousin and I worked with my uncle on a ship taking barrels of salt fish to the islands of the West Indies and bringing back puncheons of dark and illegal rum. Upon our return we would anchor off the village in the still summer nights while the small local fishing boats plied diligently back and forth without lights and with muffled engines, landing the puncheons on the sandy beaches for the men who waited for them in the darkened pickup trucks.

  Once, in Jamaica, my cousin and I were stopped on a street by a boy our own age who showed us a card and asked us to follow him. He took us to a brothel which was so unlike anything we had ever seen that we were actually afraid. When we finally convinced him we did not want “fun” he ushered us into the “picture room” which was only slightly less spectacular. Beautiful girls of all colours and races were being photographed in erotic poses with frightened young men who were about our own age. They undressed the young men and twined their hair about their genitals and brushed their penises with their lips. An energetic little dark-skinned man raced from one posing couple to the next, wheeling a bulky camera before him, shouting directions and asking the first names of the young men. Periodically he would disappear behind a curtain and emerge with the pictures. Across the front of each picture the same hand had written almost identical messages: “To John, my one and only love, Zelda.” “To Tim, my one and only love, Tanya.” “To George, my one and only love, Goldie.”

  “Coast Guard, mon!” said our acquaintance. Later we learned that the frightened and virginal-looking young men were members of a group of naval cadets from a Florida-based ship. They would keep the pictures in their wallets and show them secretly to their future friends, saying something like, “That’s my girlfriend back home,” and wait for the appreciative wows.

  I think now that the photographs being taken here today share that same artificiality. In the family groupings in which people are relentlessly encouraged to smile, one cannot always see the desperate hopes and fears that flutter behind the eyes, or fully reach the darkest truth.

  Glancing through the window I see my grandmother’s maroon-coloured horses and darkly brindled cattle moving about the automobiles that seem to fill the yard. Some of the automobiles bear the names of animals: Mustang, Pinto, Maverick. Soon children will have to be dispatched so that the real animals will not scratch or mar their metallized near namesakes.

  As the afternoon moves on, the conversation rises and falls. People take flasks of rum from their pockets and pour drinks. My father and my uncles and aunts take the violin from its peg and play the complicated jigs and reels gracefully and without effort. All of them grasp the bow in the same spot and in the same manner and bend their wrists in an identical way. It is a style older than any of our memories and produces what we call “our sound.” People remove harmonicas from handbags and pockets and the younger ones bring in guitars. Others rattle the kitchen spoons between their fingers and upon their thighs. My grandmother dances with each of her sons and then with the other men. She swings lightly and easily within my arms. There is no one in the nursing home who has lived as long as she.

  The afternoon grows heightened and more animated while the question hovers like a whining, buzzing insect at the backs of all our minds. No one dares ask it and yet we are afraid to leave. From time to time people look hopefully toward me, raising their eyebrows, looking for a sign. My grandmother continues to dance and swing with easy grace. She is getting through her day. If I can only hang on for another little while, her eyes seem to say, I can win this. I will not be defeated. I think of her at twenty-six, pregnant and surrounded by weeping children, pulling home the frozen corpse of her husband on a children’s sleigh. Perhaps saying the same thing. I cannot fathom how many times she must have said it in the seventy years between.

  Too well I know all of the reasons put forth against her staying here. That it is lonely and isolated. That the house is old and heated only by stoves and illuminated but dimly by kerosene lamps. That there is no telephone. That in the winter members of her family must bring up her few groceries on snowmobiles when they can get through and that they are uncertain of what they then might find. That the animals are awkward and expensive and that she might fall and stumble while moving about them within their winter barns.

  But I know also, as do most of us here, those other aspects of her life. Her dislike of institutions and her scorn of the “ease” associated with them. After her husband’s death it was suggested by “authorities” from Halifax that she could never survive here and that it would “be better for everyone” if she were to move or put some of her children up for adoption or even in an orphanage. It would be “easier,” they said. All of
us here in this overcrowded room in the early 1970’s with our rum and with our music are in some ways the result of her contradiction of such suggestions. Seventy years later. “I would never have my children taken from me to be scattered about like the down of a dead thistle,” she has often said. “I would not be that dead. It does not matter that some things are difficult. No one has ever said that life is to be easy. Only that it is to be lived.” I have come today, partially at least, hoping to find such strength for the living of my life and the meeting of my death.

  The music stops and the sun moves westward. Younger children begin to whisper in their parents’ ears that they are hungry and that they would like to leave. The tension seems to mount and crackle. We are waiting for the lightning that will provide us with release; looking at the balancing stone and waiting for its fall.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly my grandmother says, “I hope none of you are worrying about me. Calum has said that he is going to stay here with me and now everything will be just fine.”

  There is a period of unbelieved silence followed by a great gush of relief. As if the plug of a bathtub or the valve of a tire has suddenly set free the contents that had been so controlled and well contained. People look at one another and at me in stunned amazement. The solution seems so perfect that it is almost impossible to comprehend. Much too good really to be true. My parents look at me in wonder that is mingled with relief. They have been uncertain concerning my unexpected return here from Ontario with what seems like no thought of ever going back. “Perhaps he will teach in the high school here,” I have heard them say to one another. “Perhaps he is tired and needs a rest.” I have not told them or anyone else that I have returned because I know I am to die and do not know where else to do it.