As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (20 page)

They slept late the next day and when they awoke and went downstairs it was still raining and blowing. And then the Syrian pedlars, Angus and Alex, knocked on the door. They put their heavy wet leather packs upon the kitchen floor and told the boys’ mother that there had been a death in Canna. The Canna people were sending word but they had heard the
news earlier in the day from another pedlar arriving from that direction and he had asked them to carry the message. The pedlars and the boys’ parents talked for awhile and the boys were told to “go outside and play” even though it was raining. They went out to the barn.

Almost immediately the boys’ parents began to get ready for the journey. The ocean was by this time too rough for a boat and they had already hauled their boat up at the end of the lobster season. They readied their horse and buggy and later in the afternoon they were gone. They were away for five days and when they returned they were drawn and tired.

Through bits and pieces of conversation, the boys learned that it was the blind woman’s house which had burned and she within it.

Later, and they were not sure just when, they gathered other details and bits of information. She had been at the stove, it was thought, and her clothes had caught fire. The animals had burned with her. Most of their bones were found before the door to which they had gone to seek escape but she had been unable to open it for them or, it seemed, for herself.

Over the weeks the details blended in with their own experience. They imagined her strong hands pulling down the wainscotting of her own house and placing it in the fire, consuming her own house somehow from within as it was later to consume her. And they could see the fire going up the front of her layers of dirty clothing. Consuming the dirt which she herself had been unable to see. Rising up the front of her clothing, rising up above her shoulders towards her hair, the imaginary orange flames flickering and framing her face and being reflected in the staring lenses of her glasses.

And they imagined the animals too. The savage faithful dogs which were twins snarling at the doorway with their fur in flames, and the lusty cats engaged in their growling copulation in the corner, somehow keeping on, driven by their own heat while the other heat surrounded them, and the bleating
lamb with its wool on fire. And in the space between the walls the mewing unseen kittens, dying with their eyes still closed.

And sometimes they imagined her top, in her porch or in her house or standing by the roadside in the rain.
Cò a th’ann?
they heard her call in their imagination and in their dreams.
Cò a th’ann? Cò a th’ann?
Who’s there? Who’s there? And one night they dreamed they heard themselves answer.
’Se mi-fhìn
they heard themselves say as with one voice. It is myself.

My father and his brother never again spent a week on the green hills of Canna. Perhaps their lives went by too fast or circumstances changed or there were reasons that they did not fully understand themselves.

And one Sunday six years later when they were in church the clergyman gave a rousing sermon on why young men should enlist in World War I. They were very enthusiastic about the idea and told their parents that they were going to Halifax to enlist although they were too young. Their parents were very upset and went to the clergyman in an attempt to convince him it was a mistake. The clergyman was their friend and came to their house and told them it was a general sermon for the day. “I didn’t mean
you
,” he added, but his first success was better than his second.

They left the next day for Halifax, getting a ride to the nearest railroad station. They had never been on a train before and when they arrived, the city of Halifax was large and awesome. At the induction centre their age was easily overlooked but the medical examination was more serious. Although they were young and strong, the routine tests seemed strange and provoked a tension within them. They were unable to urinate in a bottle on request and were asked to wait awhile and then try again. But sitting on two chairs wishing for urine did little good. They drank more and more water and waited and tried but it did not work. On their final attempt, they were discussing their problem in Gaelic while standing in a tiny cubicle with their legs spread apart and their trousers opened.
Unexpectedly a voice from the next cubicle responded to them in Gaelic.

The voice belonged to a young man from Canna who had come to enlist as well but who did not have their problem. “Can we ‘borrow’ some of that?” they asked, looking at his full bottle of urine.

“Sure,” he said, “no need to give it back,” and he splashed some of his urine into each of their waiting bottles. All of them “passed” the test; and later in the alleyway behind the induction centre and standing in the steam of their own urine, they began to talk to the young man from Canna. His grandfather owned the store in Canna, he said, and was opposed to his coming to enlist.

“Do you know Alex?” they asked and mentioned their grandfather’s formal name.

He seemed puzzled for a moment and then brightened. “Oh,” he said,
“Mac an Amharuis
, sure, everyone knows him. He’s my grandfather’s friend.”

And then, perhaps because they were far from home and more lonely and frightened than they cared to admit, they began to talk in Gaelic. They began with the subject of
Mac an Amharuis
, and the young man told them everything he knew. Surprised perhaps at his own knowledge and at having such attentive listeners.
Mac an Amharuis
translates as “Son of Uncertainty,” which meant that he was illegitimate or uncertain as to who his father was. He was supposed to be tremendously talented and clever as a young man but also restless and reluctant to join the other young men of Canna in their fishing boats. Instead he saved his money and purchased a splendid stallion and travelled the country offering the stallion’s services. He rode on the stallion’s back with only a loose rope around its neck for guidance.

He was also thought to be handsome and to possess a “strong nature” or “too much nature,” which meant that he was highly sexed. “Some say,” said the young man, “that he
sowed almost as much seed as the stallion and who knows who might be descended from him. If we only knew, eh?” he added with a laugh.

Then he became involved with a woman from Canna. She was thought to be “odd” by some because she was given to rages and uncertainty and sometimes she would scream and shout at him in public. At times he would bring back books and sometimes moonshine from wherever he went with the stallion. And sometimes they would read quietly together and talk and at other times they would curse and shout and become physically violent.

And then he became possessed of
Da Shealladh
, the second sight. It seemed he did not want it and some said it came about because of too much reading of the books or perhaps it was inherited from his unknown father. Once he “saw” a storm on the evening of a day which was so calm that no one would believe him. When it came in the evening the boats could not get back and all the men were drowned. And once when he was away with the stallion, he “saw” his mother’s house burn down and when he returned he found that it had happened on the very night he saw it and his mother was burned to death.

It became a weight upon him and he could not stop the visions or do anything to interfere with the events. One day after he and the woman had had too much to drink they went to visit a well-known clergyman. He told the clergyman he wanted the visions to stop but it did not seem within his power. He and the woman were sitting on two chairs beside each other. The clergyman went for the Bible and prayed over it and then he came and flicked the pages of the Bible before their eyes. He told them the visions would stop but that they would have to give up one another because they were causing a scandal in the community. The woman became enraged and leaped at the clergyman and tried to scratch out his eyes with her long nails. She accused
Mac an Amharuis
of deceiving her and said that he was willing to exchange their stormy
relationship for his lack of vision. She spat in his face and cursed him and stormed out the door.
Mac an Amharuis
rose to follow her but the clergyman put his arms around him and wrestled him to the floor. He was far gone in drink and within the clergyman’s power.

They stopped appearing with one another and
Mac an Amharuis
stopped travelling with the stallion and bought himself a boat. He began to visit the woman’s younger sister, who was patient and kind. The woman moved out of her parents’ house and into an older house nearer the shore. Some thought she moved because she could not stand
Mac an Amharuis
visiting her sister, and others thought that it was planned to allow him to visit her at night without anyone seeing.

Within two months
Mac an Amharuis and
the woman’s sister were married. At the wedding the woman cursed the clergyman until he warned her to be careful and told her to leave the building. She cursed her sister too and said, “You will never be able to give him what I can.” And as she was going out the door, she said to
Mac an Amharuis
either “I will never forgive you” or “I will never forget you.” Her voice was charged with emotion but her back was turned to them and the people were uncertain whether it was a curse or a cry.

The woman did not come near anyone for a long time and people saw her only from a distance, moving about the house and the dilapidated barn, caring for the few animals which her father had given her, and muffled in clothes as autumn turned to winter. At night people watched for a light in her window. Sometimes they saw it and sometimes they did not.

And then one day her father came to the house of his daughter and
Mac an Amharuis
and said that he had not seen a light for three nights and he was worried. The three of them went to the house but it was cold. There was no heat when they put their hands on the stove and the glass of the windowpanes
was covered with frost. There was not anybody in any of the rooms.

They went out into the barn and found her lying in a heap. Most of the top part of her body was still covered by layers of clothes, although the lower part was not. She was unconscious or in something like a frozen coma and her eyes were inflamed, with beads of pus at their corners. She had given birth to twin girls and one of them was dead but the other somehow still alive, lying on her breast amidst her layers of clothing. Her father and
Mac an Amharuis
and her sister carried the living into the house and started a fire in the stove and sent for the nearest medical attention, which was some miles away. Later they also carried in the body of the dead baby and placed it in a lobster crate, which was all that they could find. When the doctor came, he said he could not be certain of the baby’s exact time of birth but he felt that it would live. He said that the mother had lost a great deal of blood and he thought she might have lacerated her eyes during the birth with her long fingernails and that infection had set in, caused perhaps by the unsanitary conditions within the barn. He was not sure if she would live and, if she did, he feared her sight would never be restored.

Mac an Amharuis
and his wife cared for the baby throughout the days that the woman was unconscious, and the baby thrived. The woman herself began to rally and the first time she heard the baby cry she reached out instinctively for it but could not find it in the dark. Gradually, as she recognized, by sound, the people around her, she began to curse them and accused them of having sex when she could not see them. As she grew stronger, she became more resentful of their presence and finally asked them to leave. She began to rise from her bed and walk with her hands before her, sometimes during the day and sometimes during the night because it made no difference to her. And once they saw her with a knife in her
hand. They left her then, as she had requested them to do and perhaps because they were afraid. And because there seemed no other choice, they took the baby with them.

They continued to bring her food and to leave it at the door of her porch. Sometimes she cursed at them but at other times she was more quiet. One day while they were talking she extended her hand with the long fingernails to the face of
Mac an Amharuis
. She ran the balls of her fingers and the palm of her hand from his hair down over his eyes and nose and his lips and his chin and down along the buttons of his shirt and below his belt to between his legs; and then her hand closed for an instant and she grasped what she had held before but would never see again.

Mac an Amharuis
and his wife had no children of their own. It was thought that it caused a great sadness within her and perhaps a tension because, as people said, “It’s sure as hell not
his
fault.” Their childlessness was thought also to prey on him and to lead to periodic drinking binges, although he never mentioned it to anyone. For the most part, they were helpful and supportive of each other and no one knew what they talked about when they were alone and together in their bed at night.

This, I guess, is my retelling of the story told by the young man of Canna to my father and his brother at a time when they were all young and on the verge of war. All of the information that spilled out of him came because it was there to be released and he was revealing more than he realized to his attentive listeners. The story was told in Gaelic, and as the people say, “It is not the same in English,” although the images are true.

When the war was over, the generous young man from Canna was dead and my father’s brother had lost his leg.

My father returned to Kintail and the life that he had left, the boat and the nets and the lobster traps. All of them in the cycle of the seasons. He married before World War II; and when he was asked to go again, he went with the other High-landers
from Cape Breton, leaving his wife pregnant, perhaps without realizing it.

On the beach at Normandy they were emptied into ten feet of water as the rockets and shells exploded around them. And in the mud they fell facedown, leaving the imprints of their faces temporarily in the soil, before clawing their way some few feet forward. At the command they rose, as would a wave trying to break farther forward on the shore. And then all of it seemed to happen at once. Before my father’s eyes there rose a wall of orange flame and a billowing wave of black smoke. It rose before him even as he felt the power of the strong hand upon his left shoulder. The grip was so powerful that he felt the imprint of the fingers almost as a bruise; and even as he turned his searing eyes, he fell back into his own language. “
Cò
a th’ann?”
he said. “
Cò
a th’ann?
Who’s there?” And in the instant before his blindness, he recognized the long brown fingers on his shoulder with their pointed fingernails caked in dirt. “
’Se mi-fhìn”
she said quietly. “It is myself.”