A while back a friend gave me a collection of short stories by Alistair MacLeod, a Canadian writer whose stories are mostly set on Cape Breton and the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia.
I read a couple of the stories and really enjoyed them. But then the book was put aside and got buried under a giant pile of things waiting to be read and I never had the chance to finish it.
But a couple of weeks ago my girlfriend and I took a trip to the Eastern Shore to visit my friends DeeDee and Jeremy.
I spotted “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood” on my bookshelf just moments before we departed, and almost as an afterthought I stuffed it into my backpack.
It was a good decision. There’s something about reading literature while visiting the very place that it captured.
TLSGOB enhanced my experience in Nova Scotia and really made the place come alive. The lonely, socked-in coves and beaches, the rugged, harsh headlands – even the hardy, colourful people we met took on new meaning when seen through MacLeod’s lens.
There are seven stories in this collection, and it took MacLeod seven years to write.
It’s not surprising that years of labour went into this project. Stories about miners, fishermen, Cape Bretoners returning home after years away, only to feel like the had never left, the desperate struggle to hang onto a way of life that is steadily eroding into the Atlantic – you feel as though MacLeod has lived each of these lives and he’s speaking from inside the heart of his characters and from the very soil where his ancestors are buried.
The Road to Rankin’s Point, in particular, I found, to be a haunting, heartbreaking story that seems to represent a microcosm for a disappearing way of life.
“But for me, in this my 26th years, it is not into the larger world that I go today. And the road that I follow feeds into no other that will take the traveler to the great adventures of the wild unknown. Instead, at the village’s end it veers sharply to the right, leaves the pavement behind and almost immediately begins to climb along the rocky cliffs that hang high above the sea. It winds its torturous, clinging way for some eight miles before it ends quite abruptly and permanently in my grandmother’s yard…Above this last small cultivated outpost and jutting beyond it out to sea is the rocky promontory of Rankin’s Point. As one cannot drive beyond it, neither can one see beyond it farther up the coast. It is an end in every way and it is to the beginning of this conclusion that my car now begins its long ascent.”
In this story Calum, a young man returns to Cape Breton from Toronto to visit his grandmother, part of an annual family reunion that he says could better be titled “What to do about Grandma.”
And as he travels the tangled, overgrown road to her home on Rankin’s Point he recounts the beautiful tragedy of his family history.
“The sharp, right-angled turn and its ascending steepness has always been called by us 'The Little Turn of Sadness' because it is here that my grandfather died so many years ago on a February night when he somehow fell as he walked or staggered toward his home which was a steep two miles away. He had already covered the six miles from the village when he lost his footing on the ice-covered rock, falling backwards and shattering the rum bottle he carried within his safe back pocket. Now, as I feel my own blood diseased and dying, I think of his, the brightest scarlet, staining the moon-white snow while the joyous rabbits leapt and pirouetted beneath the pale, clear moon.”
And every inch of the journey described the unique scenery and way of life that only exists there – bringing the reader along until his – my – heart swells with the beauty of the scenery and the loss this young man and his family has endured.
In another story, the one for which the book is titled, the main character describes driving across the country to revisit the fishing village that was once his home. Like all small towns, his return is somehow expected, though he gave no word of his plans.
Long-lost relatives open their home to him and in a pattern that seems timelessly ingrained in these people there is supper, followed by weather reports on the shortwave radio, and then music as a young boy plays harmonica and the old couple sings.
“Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court your men
They’re like the stars on a summer’s morning
First they’ll appear and then they’re gone.
I wish I were a tiny sparrow
And I had wings and I could fly
I’d fly away to my own true loves
And all he’d ask I would deny
Alas I’m not a tiny sparrow
I have not wings nor can fly
And on this earth in grief and sorrow
I am bound until I die.
Like their way of life, the words of their song seem to take on an agelessness that could characterize centuries of Cape Bretoners or their Irish or Scottish forefathers.
The narrator says:
“Stranded here, alien of my middle-generation, I tap my leather foot self-consciously upon the linoleum. The words sweep up and swirl about my head. Fog does not touch like the snow yet it is more heavy and more dense. Oh moisture comes in many forms!”
The power, the strength of the stories contained in this book is proven by this: As I sit in this trendy, downtown Toronto coffee shop, surrounded by busy successful, up and coming city-types, I’m still able to disappear completely into these pages and tune out the conversations and the pretension and the smell of money that permeates everything here, and allow myself to be tugged irresistible by the heartstrings back to the Eastern Shore.
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