No Great Mischief Read online

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR

  No Great Mischief

  “A triumph of fiction.… [MacLeod’s] storytelling is taut and lucid. His characters possess strength and depth. They linger in your mind.”

  – The Economist (U.K.)

  “[A] mesmerizing, evocative story, infused with grace and wisdom.”

  – Jury Citation, Trillium Award

  “MacLeod’s world of Cape Breton … has become a permanent part of my own inner library.”

  – New York Times Book Review

  “A masterpiece of storytelling.”

  – Time Out (London)

  “This book is a jewel.… Destined to become one of the most memorable Canadian novels of the decade.…”

  – Hamilton Spectator

  “A haunting and beautiful book.… MacLeod’s descriptions are remarkable.”

  – Montreal Gazette

  “No Great Mischief is a lesson in the art of storytelling.”

  – Times Literary Supplement

  “The work speaks of great loves … and tragic losses that will move readers in every corner of the world.”

  – Publishers Weekly

  “[MacLeod’s] writing is of a quality that most writers can only dream of achieving.”

  – National Post

  BOOKS BY ALISTAIR MACLEOD

  The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976)

  As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986)

  No Great Mischief (novel, 1999)

  Island: The Collected Stories (2000)

  To Every Thing There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story

  (with illustrations by Peter Rankin, 2004)

  Copyright © 1999 by Alistair MacLeod

  Cloth edition published 1999

  First Emblem Editions publication 2001

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement on the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacLeod, Alistair

  No great mischief

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-547-2

  I. Title.

  PS8575.L459N62 2001 C813’.54 C99-932113-7

  PR9199.3.M3342N6 2001

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the creation of the author’s imagination.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  This book is for Anita, “mo bhean ’s mo ghraidh.”

  Appreciation also to our children: Alexander, Lewis,

  Kenneth, Marion, Daniel, and Andrew.

  Not to forget our lost son Donald.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  As I begin to tell this, it is the golden month of September in southwestern Ontario. In the splendid autumn sunshine the bounty of the land is almost overwhelming, as if it is the manifestation of a poem by Keats. Along Highway 3 the roadside stands are burdened down by baskets of produce and arrangements of plants and flowers. Signs invite you to “pick your own” and whole families can be seen doing exactly that: stooping and straightening or staggering with overflowing bushel baskets, or standing on ladders that reach into the trees of apple and of pear.

  On some of the larger farms much of the picking is done by imported workers; they too, often, in family groups. They do not “pick your own” but pick instead for wages to take with them when they leave. This land is not their own. Many of them are from the Caribbean and some are Mennonites from Mexico and some are French Canadians from New Brunswick and Quebec.

  On the land that has already been picked over, the farmers’ tractors move across the darkening fields, ploughing down the old crops while preparing for the new. Flocks of hopeful and appreciative gulls follow raucously behind them.

  Once, outside of Leamington, my grandmother, who was visiting at the time, burst into tears at the sight of the rejected and overripe tomatoes which were being ploughed under. She wept for what she called “an awful waste” and had almost to be restrained from running into the fields to “save” the tomatoes from their fate in the approaching furrows. She was fifteen hundred miles from her preserving kettle, and had spent decades of summers and autumns nurturing her few precious plants in rocky soil and in shortened growing seasons. In the fall she would take her few surviving green tomatoes and place and turn them on the windowsills, hoping they might ripen in the weakened sun which slanted through her windowpanes. To her they were precious and rare and hard to come by. The lost and wasted tomatoes which she saw outside of Leamington depressed my grandmother for days. She could not help it, I suppose. Sometimes it is hard to choose or not to choose those things which bother us at the most inappropriate of times.

  I think of this now as my car moves along this rich and golden highway on its way to my eventual destination of Toronto. It is a journey which I make on Saturdays, and it is a drive which I begin early in the morning although there really is no reason why it should begin at such an early time. In the fall and in the spring I take the longer but more scenic routes: Highway 2 and Highway 3 and even sometimes Highways 98 or 21. They are meandering and leisurely and there is something almost comforting in passing houses where the dogs still run down to the roadside to bark at the wheels of the passing cars – as if, for them, it were a real event. In the more extreme seasons of summer and winter, there is always the 401. The 401, as most people hearing this will know, is Ontario’s major highway and it runs straight and true from the country that is the United States to the border of Quebec, which some might also consider another country. It is a highway built for the maximum movement of people and of goods
and it is flat and boring and as efficient as can be. It is a sort of symbol, I suppose, if not of the straight and narrow at least of the very straight or “the one true way.” You can only join it at certain places and if your destination is directly upon it, it will move you as neatly as the conveyor belt moves the tomatoes. It will be true to you if you are true to it and you will never, never, ever become lost.

  Regardless of the route of entrance, the realization of the city of Toronto is always something of a surprise. It is almost as if a new set of reflexes must be mastered to accommodate the stop and go of the increased traffic, and more careful thought must be given to the final destination.

  In the downtown area along Yonge Street and to the west, the anti-nuclear protestors are walking and carrying their signs. “One, two, three, four,” they chant, “we don’t want a nuclear war.” “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to radiate.” Marching parallel to them and on the opposite side of the street an equally determined group glowers across the strained division. “Pacifists, Communists Love You,” “If You Don’t Like What This Country Stands For, Go Somewhere Else,” “Canada, Love It or Leave It,” proclaim their signs.

  In the area around Queen Street West which runs between Yonge Street and Spadina Avenue, I begin to look more carefully and to drive more slowly, thinking that I might meet him in the street, almost as if he might be coming to meet me, regardless of the direction of my approach. But today he is not seen, so I manoeuvre my car for a short way through the back alleys with their chained-down garbage cans and occasionally chained-down dogs, and over broken glass which is so crushed and flattened it is now no threat or danger to any tire. The makeshift fire escapes and back stairways lean haphazardly and awkwardly against their buildings, and from the open doorways and windows a mixture of sounds comes falling down: music and songs from various countries and voices loud on the verge of quarrel and the sounds of yet more breaking glass.

  In the autumn sunshine, I lock my car in the afternoon alley and step between walls into the street crowded with bargain shoppers and barking proprietors and seekers of refuse. In the grimy windows hand-lettered cardboard signs offer almost everything, it seems, at less than its true worth.

  Between these storefront doors, there are often other doors that the casual person might not notice because they seem so commonplace. They are often painted brown and may or may not have numbers above them, often with one digit missing or hanging crookedly from their nails. When you open these doors, there may or may not be a row of mailboxes, some bearing names stuck on with grey adhesive tape. Almost all of these buildings, though, have a wooden stairway that leads steeply up to a hall lit by a yellow forty-watt bulb, and along this hallway and sometimes along other hallways above it are the people who live above the street-level stores. Contrary to the myth, few of the people who live here are the owners of the stores beneath them. They are, instead, people who do not own much of anything. Generally even their furniture, such as it is, is not their own and when they move, as they often do, they do not look in the Yellow Pages for any selection of moving companies.

  Although there are some couples, most of the people are single and most of them are men and most of them are beyond middle age. Sometimes there are whole corridors occupied by men only. They are generally in those buildings where the apartments are very small or consist of a single room. In such corridors there is a small bathroom at one end and it serves all the residents of the floor. It is the kind of bathroom where the lock never works and people who sit on the toilet hold one foot against the door to keep it closed. Sometimes potential users shout at the closed door, “Is there anybody in there?” much as they might if they were members of a large family in the early rush of pre-breakfast hours. Inside the bathroom the toilet paper is chained down by an elaborate system of interwoven links, and the dim light bulb is surrounded by a wire cage so it will not be stolen and taken back to one of the rooms. In the old salvaged sink, one of the taps will never shut off properly and there is generally a yellowed stain left by the constant trickle of the running water. Hot water is often scarce, and sometimes on the upper floors it does not exist at all.

  Behind the closed doors one can hear vague sounds. The most dominant one is, perhaps, that of men coughing and spitting. Almost all of the men smoke quite heavily, some of them rolling their own cigarettes, sitting in their underwear on the edges of their beds. There is also the sound of radios and of the very tiny portable television sets which sit on tables or on top of the nearly empty refrigerators. Few of the people eat very much. Many of the rooms do not contain stoves, or ones with workable ovens. Tomato soup is heated on top of hot plates and filled with crackers. The smell of burnt toast is often present, and sometimes jars of instant coffee or boxes of tea bags sit on windowsills or on archaic radiators beside packages of purchased cookies so laced with preservatives that they may sit there for months without any signs of change.

  It is into such a doorway that I turn now, leaving the sun behind me on the street. And it is such a stairway that I climb, towards the hallway above. This is the third time that he has lived at this address in recent years, circling back and making agreements with the landlord for whom he, at one time, did some work as a handyman. The landlord nearly always takes him back because he is reasonably dependable, and they have at least a few years of some sort of shared past. The landlord, who sells wine in brown paper bags to his tenants, has his own share of problems, which he is quite willing to share with anyone who will listen. It is not easy, he says, having tenants who move in the night without paying their rent; or who steal and sell some of the furniture he and his wife have provided; or who make duplicate keys to lend to their friends. It is not easy, he says, having the police call him at home in the evenings, when he is watching television, to report disturbances; and it is not easy for him when people stab one another with kitchen knives in quarrels over their wine; or when they are found dead in their urine-soaked beds, strangled and choked on strands of their own vomit, and he does not know any next of kin to contact. Generally, he says, the bodies are “given to science.” “But,” he adds, “that’s the good thing about you. I always know who to contact – just in case.” He is a short, portly man who has prospered greatly since coming from Europe as a child. He is proud of his children, who have all gone to university and who smile with perfect teeth from their pictures in his wallet.

  As I move down the hallway, I am troubled, as always, by the fear of what I might find. If my knock is unanswered and if the door is locked, I will listen with my ear close to the keyhole for the sound of his uneven breathing. If I do not hear that, I will go back to the street and the neighbourhood and visit the taverns where the draught beer glasses sit in sloppy unwiped puddles which drip onto the floor and where the men have trouble zipping up their trousers as they weave erratically out of the washrooms.

  But today when I knock, his voice says almost immediately, “Come in.”

  “The door’s locked,” I say, after trying it.

  “Oh, just a minute,” he says. “Just a minute.” There is the sound of three unsteady steps and then a tremendous crash, followed by a silence.

  “Are you all right?” I ask.

  “Oh yes,” comes the answer, “just a minute. I’ll be right there.”

  The lock is turned and the door is opened, and as I enter, he is standing there, holding on to the doorknob for support with both of his huge hands, swaying sideways as the door moves inward and towards him. He is in his sock feet, and his brown work pants are held up by a broad brown leather belt. He wears no outer shirt other than the white, now yellowed, woollen underwear which he wears during all seasons.

  “Ah,” he says, speaking in a mixture of English and Gaelic. “Ah, ’ille bhig ruaidh, you’ve come at last.” He steps backwards, pulling the door towards him and still clutching its knob for support. There is a gash above his left eyebrow, caused, it seems, from the crashing fall against the steel frame which protrudes beyond th
e mattress at the foot of his bed. The blood flows down his face beneath his ear, and then under his chin and down his neck until it vanishes into the hair on his chest beneath his underwear. It does not drip on the floor, although one almost expects to see it, eventually, perhaps emerging beneath the cuffs of his trouser legs. But for now it seems to follow the contours of his face, as the mountain river follows the land before falling into the sea.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” I say, looking around for something such as Kleenex to staunch the flow.

  “No,” he says. “What do you mean?” and then following the direction of my gaze he takes his left hand from the doorknob and touches his cheek. He looks at the blood on his fingertips with surprise. “No,” he says. “It is nothing, just a scratch.”

  He relinquishes the doorknob completely and staggers backwards until he falls in a jangling sitting position upon the protesting springs of the unmade bed. When his hands are removed from the doorknob they shake violently; but now, sitting on the edge of the bed, he places them on either side of him and holds the bedframe’s steel. He hangs on to it fiercely, until his huge and broken knuckles whiten, and then finally his trembling hands are stilled.

  “As long as I have something to hang on to,” he says, swaying back and forth, “I am okay.”

  I look around the small familiar room and its spartan neatness. There is no evidence that he has eaten today and there does not seem to be any food visible. In a wastebasket beside the sink, there is one of those amber bottles in which oversweet and low-priced wine is sold. It is empty.

  “Do you want anything to eat?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, then after a pause, “nothing to eat.” He emphasizes the last word and smiles. His eyes are as dark as my own, and his hair, which was black, is now a rich, luxurious white. It is the only thing about him that has continued to flourish, rising above his forehead in succeeding waves and, because it is untrimmed, now extending over his ears and too far down his neck. It is almost a sign, as is the case with so many men who eat too little and drink too much. Almost as if the alcohol were a mysterious kind of plant food, causing the topmost leaves to flourish while the plant itself grows numb.