Read Online Island by Alistair MacLeod - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Alistair MacLeod
Tags: Contemporary, Classics
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he may die. And I do not know in what darkness she may then cry out his name nor to whom. I do not know very much of anything, it seems, except that I have been wrong and dishonest with others and myself. And perhaps this man has left footprints on a soul I did not even know that I possessed.
It is dark now on the outskirts of Springhill when the car’s headlights pick me up in their advancing beams. It pulls over to the side and I get into its back seat. I have trouble closing the door behind me because there is no handle so I pull on the crank that is used for the window. I am afraid that even it may come off in my hand. There are two men in the front seat and I can see only the outlines of the backs of their heads and I cannot tell very much about them. The man in the back seat beside me is not awfully visible either. He is tall and lean but from what I see of his face it is difficult to tell whether he is thirty or fifty. There are two sacks of miner’s gear on the floor at his feet and I put my sack there too because there isn’t any other place.
“Where are you from?” he asks as the car moves forward. “From Cape Breton,” I say and tell him the name of my home.
“We are too,” he says, “but we’re from the Island’s other side. I guess the mines are pretty well finished where you’re from. They’re the old ones. They’re playing out where we’re from too. Where are you going now?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t know.”
“We’re going to Blind River,” he says. “If it doesn’t work there we hear they’ve found uranium in Colorado and are getting ready to start sinking shafts. We might try that, but this is an old car and we don’t think it’ll make it to Colorado. You’re welcome to come along with us, though, if you want. We’ll carry you for a while.”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll have to make up my mind.”
The car moves forward into the night. Its headlights seek out and follow the beckoning white line which seems to lift and draw us forward, upward and inward, forever into the vastness of the dark.
“I guess your people have been on the coal over there for a long time?” asks the voice beside me.
“Yes,” I say, “since 1873.”
“Son of a bitch,” he says, after a pause, “it seems to bust your balls and it’s bound to break your heart.”
T HE G OLDEN G IFT OF G REY
(1971)
A t midnight he looked up at the neon Coca-Cola clock and realized with a taut emptiness that he had already stayed too late and perhaps was even now forever lost. He lowered his eyes and then quickly raised them again with the rather desperate hope that he might on a second try somehow catch the clock by surprise and find the hands somewhere else, at nine or ten perhaps, but it was no use. There they were, perfectly vertical, like a rigid arrow of accusation seeming to condemn by their very rigidity and righteousness everything in the world that was not so straight and stern as they themselves.
He felt sick at first and almost numb along his arms and down through his wrists and into his fingers, the way he had felt the time he had been knocked out in the high school football game. He moved his shoulders beneath his shirt in an attempt to shake off the chill and ran his tongue nervouslyover his lips and travelled his eyes then around the pool table to the men with the cue-sticks in their hands and to the stained brown-black wood that framed the table’s squareness. There were three quarters on the wood indicating that three challengers still remained. And he looked then at the soft, velvet green of the table itself, that held him, he thought, like a lotus land, and finally to the blackness of the eight-ball and the whiteness of the cue, good and evil he thought, paradoxically flowering here on the greenness of this plain. He was in his first real game, and it had somehow become a series of games, a marathon that had begun
It is dark now on the outskirts of Springhill when the car’s headlights pick me up in their advancing beams. It pulls over to the side and I get into its back seat. I have trouble closing the door behind me because there is no handle so I pull on the crank that is used for the window. I am afraid that even it may come off in my hand. There are two men in the front seat and I can see only the outlines of the backs of their heads and I cannot tell very much about them. The man in the back seat beside me is not awfully visible either. He is tall and lean but from what I see of his face it is difficult to tell whether he is thirty or fifty. There are two sacks of miner’s gear on the floor at his feet and I put my sack there too because there isn’t any other place.
“Where are you from?” he asks as the car moves forward. “From Cape Breton,” I say and tell him the name of my home.
“We are too,” he says, “but we’re from the Island’s other side. I guess the mines are pretty well finished where you’re from. They’re the old ones. They’re playing out where we’re from too. Where are you going now?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t know.”
“We’re going to Blind River,” he says. “If it doesn’t work there we hear they’ve found uranium in Colorado and are getting ready to start sinking shafts. We might try that, but this is an old car and we don’t think it’ll make it to Colorado. You’re welcome to come along with us, though, if you want. We’ll carry you for a while.”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll have to make up my mind.”
The car moves forward into the night. Its headlights seek out and follow the beckoning white line which seems to lift and draw us forward, upward and inward, forever into the vastness of the dark.
“I guess your people have been on the coal over there for a long time?” asks the voice beside me.
“Yes,” I say, “since 1873.”
“Son of a bitch,” he says, after a pause, “it seems to bust your balls and it’s bound to break your heart.”
T HE G OLDEN G IFT OF G REY
(1971)
A t midnight he looked up at the neon Coca-Cola clock and realized with a taut emptiness that he had already stayed too late and perhaps was even now forever lost. He lowered his eyes and then quickly raised them again with the rather desperate hope that he might on a second try somehow catch the clock by surprise and find the hands somewhere else, at nine or ten perhaps, but it was no use. There they were, perfectly vertical, like a rigid arrow of accusation seeming to condemn by their very rigidity and righteousness everything in the world that was not so straight and stern as they themselves.
He felt sick at first and almost numb along his arms and down through his wrists and into his fingers, the way he had felt the time he had been knocked out in the high school football game. He moved his shoulders beneath his shirt in an attempt to shake off the chill and ran his tongue nervouslyover his lips and travelled his eyes then around the pool table to the men with the cue-sticks in their hands and to the stained brown-black wood that framed the table’s squareness. There were three quarters on the wood indicating that three challengers still remained. And he looked then at the soft, velvet green of the table itself, that held him, he thought, like a lotus land, and finally to the blackness of the eight-ball and the whiteness of the cue, good and evil he thought, paradoxically flowering here on the greenness of this plain. He was in his first real game, and it had somehow become a series of games, a marathon that had begun
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