Island by Alistair MacLeod Read Free Book Online

was my father’s in earlier, younger days. “Would it be all right if I use that old packsack sometime?” I had asked as casually as possible some months before, trying to make my plans for it sound like some weary camping expedition. “Sure,” he had said in an even, noncommittal fashion.
    Now I pack it quietly, checking with my ballpoint pen the items that I have listed on the back of the envelope kept beneath my pillow. Four pairs of underwear, five pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, four shirts, one towel, some handkerchiefs, a gabardine jacket, a plastic raincoat and a shaving set. The latter is the only item that is new and unused and is the cheapest that Gillette manufactures. Up until this time I have always used my father’s razor, which is battered and verdigris green from years of use. I have used it for some years now – more often, at times, than my questionable beard demanded.
    As I move down the stairs there is still no movement from the two larger rooms across the hall and for this I am most grateful. I do not really know how to say good-bye as I have never before said it to anyone and, because I am uncertain, I wish to say it now to as few as possible. Who knows, though, perhaps I may even be rather good at it. I lay the packsack down on the second stair from the bottom where it is not awfully visible and walk into the kitchen. My mother is busy at her stove and my father is standing with his back to the room looking through the window over a view of slate-grey slag heaps and ruined skeletal mine tipples and out toward the rolling sea. They are not greatly surprised to see me as it is often like this, just the three of us in the quiet early morning. But today I cannot afford to be casual and I must say what must be said in the short space of time occupied by only the three of us. “I think I’ll go away today,” I say, trying to sound as offhand as possible. Only a slight change in the rhythm of my mother’s poking at the stove indicates that she has heard me, and my father still stands looking through the window out to sea. “I think I’ll go right now,” I add, my voice sort oftrailing off, “before the others get up. It will be easier that way.”
    My mother moves the kettle, which has started to boil, toward the back of the stove, as if stalling for time, then she turns and says, “Where will you go? To Blind River?”
    Her response is so little like that which I anticipated that I feel strangely numb. For I had somehow expected her to be greatly surprised, astounded, astonished, and she is none of these. And her mention of Blind River, the centre of Northern Ontario’s uranium mines, is something and someplace that I had never even thought of. It is as if my mother had not only known that I was to leave but had even planned my route and final destination. I am reminded of my reading in school of the way Charles Dickens felt about the blacking factory and his mother’s being so fully in favour of it. In favour of a life for him which he considered so terrible and so far beneath his imagined destiny.
    My father turns from the window and says, “You are only eighteen today, perhaps you could wait awhile. Something might turn up.” But within his eyes I see no strong commitment to his words and I know he feels that waiting is at best weary and at worst hopeless. This also makes me somehow rather disappointed and angry as I had thought somehow my parents would cling to me in a kind of desperate fashion and I would have to be very firm and strong.
    “What is there to wait for?” I say, asking a question that is useless and to which I know the all-too-obvious answer. “Why do you want me to stay here?”
    “You misunderstand,” says my father, “you are free to go if you want to. We are not forcing you or asking you to do anything. I am only saying that you do not
have
to go now.”
    But suddenly it becomes very important that I
do
go now, because it seems things cannot help but get