The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

by Alistair Macleod

  Now it seems that their questions have been temporarily answered and they are glad to know that I have had some plan during the days of this past time. They nod their heads and smile across the room, though still in wonder. My grandmother smiles as if she has just played her great trump card and looks about her in temporary triumph. I have not the courage to destroy the lie she so wishes to be true.

  Almost immediately there is a great movement toward departure. It is as if they are afraid that their unexpected and magical gift might suddenly vanish should they stay too long within its presence. “Good-bye for now,” they say. “See you later.” “So long.” “Take care.”

  The car doors slam, the motors start and the tires turn. The poles of the gate are slid back and then replaced by my father who is the last to leave. He waves to my grandmother and to me as we remain standing in the doorway. He is the middle link of our three generations. Then he too gets into his car beside my mother and drives away. We are left all alone.

  Going back into the kitchen my grandmother busies herself in setting out the supper dishes. She takes the plates from the shelves and the knives and forks from the sliding drawers. The dogs who have been outside for most of the afternoon now return to flop upon the floor and resume their roles of quiet watchfulness. The sun is moving toward the sea.

  “It is no good, Grandma,” I say finally. “It is not going to work.”

  “What?” she says, keeping her back to me and reaching for the cups and saucers.

  “What you told them. That I will stay here. It is not going to work.” For a moment I teeter in hesitation but it seems that now I must go on. “It is not going to work,” I say, “because I am going to die.”

  She turns and looks at me sharply and there is a flicker of fear upon her face which she banishes quickly. “Yes, I know,” she laughs. “We all are. Sometime.”

  “It is no longer sometime,” I say. “It is very soon. Only months. I am not going to see another spring. I will be of no use to you here nor any to myself. The doctors have said so.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “You are only twenty-six. Your life is just beginning.”

  She looks at me with almost an indulgent tolerance for the silliness of my ideas and for my distortion of reality. Like the fond mother who is told by her imaginative child that he has seen a giraffe and an elephant upstairs in his bedroom. I feel great affection for you, the look says, even though you do not know what you are talking about.

  For an instant I wish that it were so. To be as silly as she thinks I am and to be back in the time when bruises could be washed away by kisses and for her to be right and me thankfully wrong.

  “No,” I say. “It is true. Really true.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, and now the true note of fear begins to sound in her voice. I wonder if it matches my own.

  We sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table and look across at each other, across what seems the vast difference of our separated years. We make some attempts at conversation but they are not very successful.

  Suddenly my grandmother leans across the table and grasps my hand in hers. “Oh Calum, Calum,” she says. “What are we going to do? What are we going to do? What is to become of us?”

  The gesture is almost a replica of the one from the earlier afternoon. In looking at her hands I notice that I have never finished trimming her fingernails. I do not know what to say. She holds my hand so fiercely as if I might pull her from the dark waters of a dream. I try to respond to the pressure with my own hands for I too had somehow hoped I might be saved. Suddenly both of us burst into tears. We are weeping for each other and for ourselves. We two who had hoped to find strength in each other meet now instead in only this display of weeping weakness. The dogs cock their ears and whine softly. Moving from one of us to the other they rest their trusting heads upon our laps and look into our eyes.

  Sometimes in the darkness of our fear it is difficult to distinguish the dream from the truth. Sometimes we wake from the dream beyond the midnight hour and it is so much better than the world to which we wake that we would will ourselves back into its soothing comfort. Sometimes the reverse is true and we would pinch ourselves or scrape our knuckles against the bed frame’s steel. Sometimes the nightmare knows no lines.

  Lying rigid now in this bed of my parents’ house all the images and emotions of the past day meet and swirl in the outer and inner darkness. The hopes and fears of my past and present jostle and intertwine. Sometimes when seeing the end of our present our past looms ever larger because it is all we have or think we know. I feel myself falling back into the past now, hoping to have more and more past as I have less and less future. My twenty-six years are not enough and I would want to go farther and farther back through previous generations so that I might have more of what now seems so little. I would go back through the superstitions and the herbal remedies and the fatalistic war cries and the haunting violins and the cancer cures of cobwebs. Back through the knowledge of being and its end as understood through second sight and spectral visions and the intuitive dog and the sea bird’s cry. I would go back to the priest with the magic hands. Back to the faith healer if only I had more faith. Back to anything rather than to die at the objective hands of mute, cold science.

  I see that old but young MacCrimmon quietly composing the music of his own death before leaving permanently the darkened shores of his misty Skye. I hear the music now and it is almost like a bell even as I see him falling silently through the dark. How strange, I think, that anyone should even consider a violin as sounding like a bell.

  I get up from my bed and put on my clothes and walk silently and carefully through the sleeping house. Outside it is very quiet. There is no industry in this region and late at night the silence is profound. The music seems to come from the ocean, from off the quiet Gulf, and, no, it is not to be confused with anything else. It is not a bird or a radio or a shunting train or a passing car. It is not coming from anyone’s party. It is only itself, strangely familiar in its unfamiliar way.

  And then almost in response to the bell I hear the howls of the three black-and-white border collies. They come borne on the night’s stillness drifting along the lonely coastline that leads from Rankin’s Point. First the oldest dog and then the second and then the third. I can distinguish each dog’s cry and I can comprehend the message that their anguished voices bear. I will not be able to save my grandmother now, I know, any more than I was able to save her in the earlier afternoon.

  My car follows its probing headlights up and down and around the hairpinned darkness of the road to Rankin’s Point. Some of the turns are so extreme that it is easy to overdrive the headlights. Sometimes the lights shine straight ahead into the darkness of the green foliage even as the road cuts unexpectedly to the right or to the left and becomes at least temporarily invisible. I follow it easily as if guided through a dream.

  At “The Little Turn of Sadness” my headlights pick up the eyes of the waiting dogs. They are lying in different positions in the middle of the road and their eyes glow out of the darkness like the highlighted points of a waiting triangle. Red and gleaming they serve as markers and as warnings; somewhat, I think, like the signal buoys of the harbour or the lights along an airstrip’s edge.

  When I leave the car they are glad to see me. He will know what to do, they seem to say. They are dogs who for centuries have been bred for the guiding and guarding of life. They are not the guardians of junkyards or used-car lots or closed-down supermarkets. Not the guardians of steel and stone but of lives as fragile and as uncertain as their own. Running silently to protect the sheep from the crumbling cliff or crouched beside the lamb with the broken leg, they have always worked closely with their human masters and have waited for them when faced with problems beyond their strength. Now they are glad that I have come and move toward me.

  My grandmother lies in the middle of the road at the spot where the little brook washes over the roadbed before the steepness of
the final climb. I kneel beside her and take her hands into mine. They are still warm to the touch and the fingernails are still untrimmed. No need for that now. There are no marks visible upon her body and her eyes are open and stare upwards into the darkness of the sky. The twining Scottish thistles are still pinned to the collar of her dress. This is the ending that we have.

  I rise and climb the steep road until I am standing at the cliff’s edge which faces out to sea. I turn my head to the left and try to look up the coast to the home and buildings of Rankin’s Point, but I cannot see in the darkness. For the first time in the centuries since the Scottish emigrations there is no human life at the end of this dark road. I turn again to the open sea and concentrate very hard on seeing something but it is no use. My grandmother cannot see Prince Edward Island now nor ever will again. I look down into the darkness beneath my feet but there too there is only a darkened void although I can hear the water lapping gently on the boulders far below.

  The music that my grandmother played in the long-ago morning of this day moves slowly through my mind. I cannot tell if it comes from without or from within and then it does not seem to matter. The darkness rises within me in dizzying swirls and seems to yearn for that other darkness that lies without. I reach for the steadying gate post or the chair’s firm seat but there is nothing for the hand to touch. And then as with the music, the internal and the external darkness reach to become as one. Flowing toward one another they become enjoined and indistinct and as single as perfection. Without a seam, without a sound, they meet and unite all.

  Afterword

  BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Since its publication in 1976, Alistair MacLeod’s The Lost Salt Gift of Blood has become a Canadian classic. These lovingly and fastidiously crafted short stories are set in Cape Breton, an area of Canada remote to many Canadians though with a reputation of being a Maritime region of particular beauty and isolataton. There is, however, nothing foreign or narrowly “regional” about The Lost Salt Gift of Blood; reading MacLeod, one is led to think of the kindred worlds of Frank O’Connor’s and Edna O’Brien’s Ireland, A.E. Coppard’s vanished England, the doomed Midlands of D.H. Lawrence. One thinks too of those extraordinary watercolours of Winslow Homer that take for their specific subjects the people and seascapes of Prout’s Neck, Maine, and Cullercoats, England. To suggest that the mythic human drama defines itself by way of such localized, precisely rendered worlds is in a sense to state what is obvious – when one is speaking of art of the highest quality. But in contemplating the work at hand one is likely to forget such generalizations in the sheer urgency of the experience.

  Consider the openings of MacLeod’s stories: “ ‘We’ll just have to sell him,’ I remember my mother saying with finality” (“In the Fall”); “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” (“The Boat”); “I am speaking now of a July in the early 1970’s” (“The Road to Rankin’s Point”). And with what authority and ease the natural world enters the world of narrative dialectics by way of MacLeod’s limpid prose: “Now in the early evening the sun is flashing everything in gold. It bathes the blunt grey rocks that loom yearningly out toward Europe and it touches upon the stunted spruce and the low-lying lichens and the delicate hardy ferns and the ganglia-rooted moss and the tiny tough rock cranberries. The grey and slanting rain squalls have swept in from the sea and then departed with all the suddenness of surprise marauders” (“The Lost Salt Gift of Blood”). This is an art that conceals itself, an employment of language so refined, yet so marvelously colloquial in its rhythms, that one is apt to forget that it is art, and not a blunt transcribing of life nearly, at times, too candid to be borne.

  Because MacLeod is so natural a storyteller, so clearly an heir of what might be called the “oral tradition,” it should be noted that this writerly vision has evolved by way of such masters as Hardy, Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner (the young Joyce of Dubliners, that is, and the young Hemingway of In Our Time). He so skilfully employs the present tense (“On the twenty-eighth day of June, 1960, which is the planned day of my deliverance, I awake at exactly six A.M. to find myself on my eighteenth birthday” [“The Vastness of the Dark”]) that it is never obtrusive but works, as Joyce Cary argued, to give to the reader that sudden feeling of insecurity that comes to a traveller in unmapped country; a sense of immediacy, cinematic in its vividness.

  The Lost Salt Gift of Blood contains seven stories, and it took seven years for them to be written. This is to confirm our sense that there is nothing in the volume at hand that has not been deliberated at length; nothing written in haste, or for ephemeral purposes. Virtually all of these stories, one feels, might be expanded into novels, and, indeed, they give the satisfying sense of being part of a large, generous, imaginative whole, not mere fragments. The voice varies from story to story, but it is recognizably the same voice, addressing us from out of the same authorial consciousness.

  These are tales of ritual-like initiation and sacrifice. In one, a child realizes adult complicity in death; in another, a young man comes to terms with the meaning of “manhood” and the connections, radiating outward like the tendrils of a living organism, between himself and his blood kin. In still another, a young man living far from Cape Breton feels himself both isolated and defined by his father’s sacrifice for him. If I were to name a single underlying motive for MacLeod’s fiction, I would say that it is the urge to memorialize, the urge to sanctify. This is a sense both primitive and “modernist” that if one sets down the right words in the right, talismanic order, the purely finite and local is transcended and the voiceless is given a voice. Ballads that link the living with their Scottish ancestors are sung by wholly unself-conscious men and women. They are likely to be accompanied by a boy like John who, in the collection’s title story, seems “as all mouth-organ players the world over: his right foot tapping out the measures and his small shoulders now round and hunched above the cupped hand instrument.” What is passing is the more urgently prized, as poets and writers of fiction have always known, from Hardy to Yeats to Joyce to MacLeod and his fellow Cape Bretoner D.R. MacDonald, another gifted elegist of the contemporary Maritimes.

  In such fiction, with its autobiographical nuances and authority, the narrator is often a witness. And the reader, by way of the narrator, becomes a witness. In “In the Fall,” we participate not only in the child-narrator’s shock at the death of a cherished horse but in the child-narrator’s doomed rebelliousness against the intransigent facts of life (and death) that that horse symbolizes. In “The Boat,” that most appallingly beautiful of stories, the father in dying is memorialized in such incantatory prose –

  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.

  – that the reader is made to understand he is no solitary man; his sacrifice of himself (he who was never suited to be a fisherman, nor ever wanted to be one!) no solitary sacrifice. One is reminded of the ancient English and Scottish ballads, in which the motive to preserve, to honour, to celebrate, to mourn and bear witness took the form of song.

  In Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, one encounters the narrator as son and brother but above all as witness: embarked upon a life’s enterprise of forging not the conscien
ce of his race, like young Stephen Dedalus, but being the means by which its conscience is expressed. For thoughts that lie too deep for tears, as we know, are not the sole province of those who can express them. I have always considered the term “regional literature” misleading as well as condescending. Isn’t fiction set in our world capitals (London, New York City, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto) regional literature in the most literal sense? Doesn’t it depend for its power, if it has power, on the specifics of streets, neighbourhoods, the vagaries of local accents and local weather, the contours of landscape its inhabitants take to be permanent, and of enduring significance? In this sense all literature is regional; or, conversely, no literature is regional. Alistair MacLeod’s Cape Breton is everywhere. And immediately accessible to us.

  BY ALISTAIR MACLEOD

  FICTION

  The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976)

  As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986)

  No Great Mischief (1999)

  Island (2000)

  Acknowledgements

  The selections in this volume originally appeared in the following periodicals, to which grateful acknowledgement is due:

  In the Fall: Tamarack Review, October 1973.

  The Vastness of the Dark: The Fiddlehead, Winter 1971.

  The Lost Salt Gift of Blood: The Southern Review, Winter 1974; Best American Short Stories, 1975.

  The Return: The Atlantic Advocate, November 1971.

  The Golden Gift of Grey: Twigs VII, 1971.

  The Boat: The Massachusetts Review, 1968; Best American Short Stories, 1969.

  The Road to Rankin’s Point: Tamarack Review, Winter 1976.