Island by Alistair MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page B

letters. The first is dated March 12, 1938, and addressed General Delivery, Kellogg, Idaho: “I am getting old now and I would like very much if you would come back and take my working place at the mine. The seam is good for years yet. No one has been killed for some time now. It is getting better. The weather is mild and we are all fine. Don’t bother writing. Just come. We will be waiting for you. Your fond father.”
    The second bears the same date and is also addressed General Delivery, Kellogg, Idaho: “Don’t listen to him. If you return here you will never get out and this is no place to lead one’s life. They say the seam will be finished in another few years. Love, Mother.”
    I have never seen my grandfather’s handwriting before and for some reason, although I knew he read, I had always thought him unable to write. Perhaps, I think now, it is because his hands have been so broken and misshapen; and, with increasing age, hard to control for such a fine task as writing.
    The letters are written with the same broad-nibbed pen in an ink which is of a blackness that I have never seen and somehow these letters now seem like a strangely old and incompatible married couple, each cancelling out the other’s desires while bound together by a single worn and dusty lace.
    I go out of the pantry and to the window where my grandfather sits. “I am going away today,” I shout, leaning over him.
    “Oh yes,” he says in a neutral tone of voice, while continuing to look out the window and finger his rosary. He does not move and the pipe smoke curls upward from his pipe which is clenched between his worn and strongly stained teeth. Lately he has taken to saying, “Oh yes,” to almost everything as a means of concealing his deafness and now I do not know if he has really heard me or is merely giving what seems a standard and safe response to all of the things he hears but partially if at all. I do not feel that I can say it again without my voice breaking and so I turn away. At the door I find that he has shuffled behind me.
    “Don’t forget to come back, James,” he says, “it’s the only way you’ll be content. Once you drink underground water it becomes a part of you like the blood a man puts into a woman. It changes her forever and never goes away. There’s always a part of him running there deep inside her. It’s what will wake you up at night and never ever leave you alone.”
    Because he knows how much my grandmother is opposed to what he says he has tried to whisper to me. But he is so deaf that he can hardly hear his own voice and he has almost shouted in the way deaf people do; his voice seems to echo and bounce off the walls of his house and to escape out into the sunshot morning air. I offer him my hand to shake and find it almostcrushed in the crooked broken force of his. I can feel the awful power of his oddly misshapen fingers, his splayed and flattened too-broad thumb, the ridges of the toughened, blackened scars and the abnormally large knobs that are his twisted misplaced knuckles. And I have a feeling for a terrible moment that I may never ever get away or be again released. But he finally relaxes and I feel that I am free.
    Even potholed streets are lonely ones when you think you may not see them again for a very long time or perhaps forever. And I travel now mostly the back streets because I am conspicuous with my packsack and I do not want any more conversations or attempted and failed and futile explanations. At the outskirts of the town a coal truck stops for me and we travel for twenty-five miles along the shoreline of the sea. The truck makes so much noise and rides so roughly that conversation with the driver is impossible and I am very grateful for the noisy silence in which we are encased.
    By noon, after a succession of short rides in a series of oddly assorted vehicles, I am finally across the Strait of Canso, off Cape Breton Island and at last upon my way. It is only when I have left