No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod

I think of my grandparents a great deal, and, as in the manner of the remembered Gaelic songs, I do not do so consciously. I do not awake in the morning and say, as soon as my feet hit the floor, "Today I must remember Grandma and Grandpa. I will devote ten whole minutes to their memory" -- as if I were anticipating isometric exercises or a self-imposed number of push-ups to be done on the floor beside my bed. It does not work that way at all. But they drift into my mind in the midst of the quiet affluence of my office, where there is never supposed to be any pain but only the creation of a hopeful beauty. And they drift into the quiet affluence of my home, with its sunken living room and its luxuriously understated furniture. And they are there too on Grand Cayman or in Montego Bay or Sarasota or Tenerife or any of those other places to which we go, trying to pretend that, for us, there really is no winter. They drift in like the fine snow in the old Calum Ruaidh house in which my brothers used to live; sifting in and around the window casings or under the doors, driven by the insistent and unseen wind, so that in spite of primitive weather stripping or the stuffing with old rags, it continued to persist, forming lines of quiet whiteness to be greeted with surprise.

A man drives from Halifax to Toronto to visit his older brother, and buy him a couple cases of the liquor he can no longer do without. Nearly three hundred years earlier, a Scotsman of the clan MacDonald sets out for the New World, having buried one wife already and burying another while at sea. The point of land in Cape Breton where he lands will bear his name forever: Calum Ruaidh Point. Between these two lifetimes stretches a long history of poor but hardy Highlanders who scraped a living out of the Cape Breton landscape, as fishermen and lighthouse keepers, parted from their ancestral homeland. To some extent they live as aliens in Canada, visitors from a country most of them have never seen, but their attachment to Cape Breton, somehow, only seems to become clear when they, the clan MacDonald, dissipate into a further diaspora across Canada and the United States.

The dentist who drives to Toronto is Alexander MacDonald, the narrator. His life, told as a kind of thread that is woven with the lives of parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins, is punctuated by several significant deaths. The first is the death of his parents, who disappear into a hole in the ice on a winter's day and are never found. "I went to my grandparents' for the night," he describes, "and I never left." It is impossible to imagine him living with his three older brothers, who share their ancestral house in a kind of primeval masculine state, using a bucket for a toilet and sleeping in their clothes. From an early age, it's understood that Alexander--typically identified as gille bhig ruaidh, the little red boy--will be different; he will go to school, become a dentist. But when his cousin, also named Alexander MacDonald, is killed in a mining accident alongside the same brothers in Ontario, the narrator is conscripted to make up the number, and spends a formative summer in the mines himself:

I was also aware of a certain guilt concerning the death of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald, though I was not sure if the guilt really was or should have been mine. But there was a vague uneasiness associated with the circumstances and the timing of it all. I told myself that he had gone into the mine after high school because he was not academically inclined. But I knew also that he had done so, at least in part, to help the members of his family who had been haunted, through no fault of their own, by the echoes of a kind of regional, generational poverty which whispered and sighed with the insistence of the unseen wind. I realized that Alexander MacDonald had partially paid for the car which ferried me home from my splendid graduation, and I realized that the opportunity to thank him and make amends was now no longer there. I had often recreated the scene in which he had called me "lucky" because my parents had lost their lives, and the feeling of the callouses on his small, determined, hard-working hands seemed permanently bonded to the rising hair on the back of my neck. The touch of his small hands, it seemed, would now and forever be mine, although I told myself that his passing had affected others much more profoundly, and I had best not consider myself so precious.

The men of the mines are proud Highlanders, doubly estranged from home, and locked in enmity with their French Canadian counterparts. Among his brothers in the mines, narrator Alexander reflects on the way that history, the story of the generations, comes to bear on men, and how its burdens can lead to strange violence. In a turn both grim and funny, a third Alexander MacDonald appears: an American cousin fleeing the Vietnam War who wears that history lightly, and whose flippant ignorance of it leads to another, final murder. Two Alexander MacDonalds, I'd wager, is symbolic enough, but three begins to look downright silly, and yet the wistful plainspokenness of MacLeod's language, like a Maritime Willa Cather, makes it work.

One small thing I appreciated about No Great Mischief is the way the narrator, as he drives across Ontario, watches the itinerant farmers, from Mexico and Guatemala and other places, at work in Canadian fields. He imagines their lives, their hard work, the refuge of a nightly beer or two, the boredom of their children. The point, as I read it, is that the story of the clann Calum Ruaidh is one repeated the world over by people making a home far from home. Without MacLeod's light touch it might seem heavy handed, but here it's perfect and subtle. Like his story collection Island, No Great Mischief evokes the rocky, hardscrabble environment of Nova Scotia in a way few novels have ever really been able to evoke a place, but it also manages to find something universal about family, about history, about what is owed to our ancestors--and their descendants.