Island by Alistair MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page A

worse. So I say, “Good-bye. I will write, but it will not be from Blind River.” I add the last as an almost unconscious little gibe at my mother.
    I go and retrieve my packsack and then pass back through the house, out the door and even through the little gate. My parents follow me to the gate. My mother says, “I was planning a cake for today …” and then stops uncertainly, her sentence left hanging in the early morning air. She is trying to make amends for her earlier statement and rather desperately gropes her way back to the fact of my birthday. My father says, “Perhaps you should go over home. They may not be there if and when you come again.”
    It is but a half block to “over home,” the house of my father’s parents, who have always been there as long as I can remember and who have always provided a sort of haven for all of us through all our little storms, and my father’s statement that they will not be there forever is an intimation of something that I have never really considered before. So now I move with a sort of apprehension over the ashes and cinder-filled potholes of the tired street toward the old house blackened with the coal dust of generations. It is as yet hardly seven A.M. and it is as if I am some early morning milkman moving from one house to another to leave good-byes instead of bottles beside such quiet doors.
    Inside my grandparents’ house, my grandfather sits puffing his pipe by the window, while passing the beads of his rosary through fingers which are gnarled and have been broken more times than he can remember. He has been going deaf for some time and he does not turn his head when the door closes behindme. I decide that I will not start with him because it will mean shouting and repetition and I am not sure I will be able to handle that. My grandmother, like my mother, is busy at her stove. She is tall and white-haired and although approaching eighty she is still physically imposing. She has powerful, almost masculine hands and has always been a big-boned person without ever having been heavy or ever having any difficulty with her legs. She still moves swiftly and easily and her eyesight and hearing are perfect.
    “I am going away today,” I say as simply as I can.
    She pokes with renewed energy at her stove and then answers: “It is just as well. There is nothing for one to do here anyway. There was never anything for one to do here.”
    She has always spoken with the Gaelic inflection of her youth and in that detached third-person form which I had long ago suggested that she modernize.
    “Come here, James,” she says and takes me into her pantry, where with surprising agility she climbs up on a chair and takes from the cupboard’s top shelf a huge cracked and ancient sugar bowl. Within it there are dusty picture postcards, some faded yellow payslips which seem ready to disintegrate at the touch, and two yellowed letters tied together with a shoelace. The locations on the payslips and on the postcards leap at me across a gulf of dust and years: Springhill, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Yellowknife, Britannia Beach, Butte, Virginia City, Escanaba, Sudbury, Whitehorse, Drumheller, Harlan, Ky., Elkins, W. Va., Fernie, B.C., Trinidad, Colo. – coal and gold, copper and lead, gold and iron, nickel and gold and coal. East and West and Northand South. Mementoes and messages from places that I so young and my grandmother so old have never seen.
    “Your father was under the ground in all those places,” she says half-angrily, “the same way he was under the ground here before he left and under it after he came back. It seems we will be underground long enough when we are dead without seeking it out while we are still alive.”
    “But still,” she says after a quiet pause and in a sober tone, “it was what he was good at and wanted to do. It was just not what I wanted him to do, or at least I did not want him to do it here.”
    She unties the shoelace and shows me the two