Read Online No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod - Free Book Online

Lament for the Children.”
    “We have suffered a great loss, but we have other children and we have each other,” said Grandma. “Nobody knows the depths of that man’s sorrow.”
    In the time after the wake, the older
Calum Ruadh
men who often sat around my grandparents’ kitchen would sometimes offer my sister and me handfuls of coins because they could not think of anything else to do. Sometimes they would refer to us as the “lucky” children and sometimes as the “unlucky” children.
“M’eudail
on the little girl,” they would say or, “Poor
‘ille bhig ruaidh
, you have a long road ahead of you.”
    They say that beneath the ice there is always a layer of air between it and the actual water. And that if you are swept under, the thing to do is to try to turn on your back until you can almost press your mouth and nostrils against the underside of the ice which will, at least, allow you to breathe. And then you must keep your eyes open so that you can see the hole that you came through, and try to work yourself back towards it. If you close your eyes in the freezing salt, you may become disoriented, and therefore doomed, because you do not have much time. And if the currents are running strongly, they may take you under such a distance, and so quickly, that your most rapid reaction may prove, in the end, to be too slow.
    I have often thought of my parents as upside down beneath the ice. Almost the way you see potato bugs on the underside of the leaf. Their hands and knees pushing upwards in something resembling a macabre fetal position, trying to press their mouths against the underside of the top which kept them down. Trying to breathe in order that they might somehow stay alive.
    In the weeks that followed their loss, the sun shone brightly and the currents were strong, and the ice turned black beneath its own whiteness, as if eaten by a hidden cancer which only now began to make itself visible. And within a few days what hadbeen a white and seeming certain expanse became but a view of bobbing cakes and swirling chunks, turning and reflecting in the light and grey-blue water.
    Twice, before the breakup, the dog left my grandparents’ house and crossed to the island looking for her people, and twice my uncles crossed to bring her back. The second time Grandpa tied her with a chain to the doorstep, but she whined, or “whinged,” as they said, so visibly and so mournfully that the next morning Grandpa let her go. “Because she was breaking my heart,” he said.
    Immediately, she raced down to the shore and started across, running low across the level ice and hurling herself without hesitation into the open water, swimming to the nearest pan and then leaping from one pan to the other while Grandpa watched her progress through his binoculars. “She made it,” he said, finally turning from the window. “Poor cú.”
    She was still there, waiting for her vanished people to rise out of the sea, when the new lightkeeper, “a man from the way of Pictou,” nudged the prow of his boat against the wharf on the island’s rocky shore. She came scrambling down the rocks to meet him, with her hackles raised and her teeth bared, protecting what she thought was hers and snarling in her certainty. And he reached into the prow of his boat for his twenty-two rifle and pumped four bullets into her loyal waiting heart. And later he caught her by the hind legs and threw her body into the sea.
    “She was descended from the original
Calum Ruadh
dog,” said Grandpa when he heard the news, pouring himself a water glass full of whisky which he drank without a flinch. “The one whoswam after the boat when they were leaving Scotland. It was
in
those dogs to care too much and to try too hard.”
    On May 15, my other grandfather came across his daughter’s purse while on one of his early-morning walks along the shore. It was still clasped tightly and inside it there was not much of value or interest to the larger world.