The Lost Salt Gift of Blood Read online

  The Author

  ALISTAIR MACLEOD was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936. He lived on the Prairies until the age of ten when his parents moved back to the family farm on Cape Breton.

  After obtaining his Teacher’s Certificate from the Nova Scotia Teachers College, MacLeod took his B.A. and B.Ed. (1960) from St. Francis Xavier University, his M.A. (1961) from the University of New Brunswick, and his Ph.D. (1968) from the University of Notre Dame. He taught at Indiana University from 1966 until 1969, then moved to the University of Windsor, where he was Professor of English and Creative Writing.

  MacLeod’s fiction roots itself in carefully delineated and haunting settings, only to transcend the settings in humane explorations of the personal struggles that challenge and often defeat men and women of all time.

  Alistair MacLeod resides in Windsor, Ontario.

  THE NEW CANADIAN LIBRARY

  General Editor: David Staines

  ADVISORY BOARD

  Alice Munro

  W. H. New

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Copyright © 1976 by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  Afterword copyright © 1989 by The Ontario Review, Inc.

  First published in 1976 by McClelland & Stewart

  New Canadian Library edition 1989

  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 of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacLeod, Alistair

  The lost salt gift of blood

  (New Canadian library)

  Bibliography: p.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-548-9

  I. Title. II. Series

  PS8575.L46L68 1989 C813′.54 C89-093675-7

  PR9199.3.M2579L68 1989

  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.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One - In the Fall

  Chapter Two - The Vastness of the Dark

  Chapter Three - The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

  Chapter Four - The Return

  Chapter Five - The Golden Gift of Grey

  Chapter Six - The Boat

  Chapter Seven - The Road to Rankin’s Point

  Afterword

  Other Books by This Author

  Acknowledgements

  ONE

  In the Fall

  WE’LL JUST have to sell him,” I remember my mother saying with finality. “It will be a long winter and I will be alone here with only these children to help me. Besides he eats too much and we will not have enough feed for the cattle as it is.”

  It is the second Saturday of November and already the sun seems to have vanished for the year. Each day dawns duller and more glowering and the waves of the grey Atlantic are sullen and almost yellow at their peaks as they pound relentlessly against the round smooth boulders that lie scattered as if by a careless giant at the base of the ever-resisting cliffs. At night, when we lie in our beds, we can hear the waves rolling in and smashing, rolling in and smashing, so relentless and regular that it is possible to count rhythmically between the thunder of each: one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four.

  It is hard to realize that this is the same ocean that is the crystal blue of summer when only the thin oil-slicks left by the fishing boats or the startling whiteness of the riding seagulls mar its azure sameness. Now it is roiled and angry, and almost anguished; hurling up the brown dirty balls of scudding foam, the sticks of pulpwood from some lonely freighter, the caps of unknown men, buoys from mangled fishing nets and the inevitable bottles that contain no messages. And always also the shreds of blackened and stringy seaweed that it has ripped and torn from its own lower regions, as if this is the season for self-mutilation – the pulling out of the secret, private, unseen hair.

  We are in the kitchen of our house and my mother is speaking as she energetically pokes at the wood and coal within her stove. The smoke escapes, billows upward and flattens itself out against the ceiling. Whenever she speaks she does something with her hands. It is as if the private voice within her can only be liberated by some kind of physical action. She is tall and dark with high cheek-bones and brown eyes. Her hair which is very long and very black is pulled back severely and coiled in a bun at the base of her neck where it is kept in place by combs of coral.

  My father is standing with his back toward us and is looking out the window to where the ocean pounds against the cliffs. His hands are clasped behind his back. He must be squeezing them together very tightly because they are almost white – especially the left. My father’s left hand is larger than his right and his left arm is about three inches longer than normal. That is because he holds his stevedore’s hook in his left hand when he works upon the waterfront in Halifax. His complexion is lighter than my mother’s and his eyes are grey which is also the predominant colour of his thinning hair.

  We have always lived on the small farm between the ocean and the coal-mining town. My father has always worked on his land in the summer and at one time he would spend his winters working within the caverns of the coal mine. Later when he could bear the underground no longer he had spent the time from November to April as an independent coal-hauler or working in his woodlot where he cut timbers for the mine roof’s support. But it must have been a long time ago for I can scarcely remember a time when the mine worked steadily or a winter when he has been with us and I am almost fourteen. Now each winter he goes to Halifax but he is often a long time in going. He will stand as he does now, before the window, for perhaps a week or more and then he will be gone and we will see him only at Christmas and on the odd weekend; for he will be over two hundred miles away and the winter storms will make travelling difficult and uncertain. Once, two years ago, he came home for a weekend and the blizzard came so savagely and with such intensity that he could not return until Thursday. My mother told him he was a fool to make such a journey and that he had lost a week’s wages for nothing – a week’s wages that she and six children could certainly use. After that he did not come again until it was almost spring.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to keep him another winter,” he says now, still looking out the window. “We’ve kept him through all of them before. He doesn’t eat much now since his teeth have gone bad.”

  “He was of some use before,” says my mother shortly and rattling the lids of her stove. “When you were home you used him in the woods or to haul coal – not that it ever got us much. These last years he’s been worthless. It would be cheaper to rent a horse for the summer or perhaps even hire a tractor. We don’t need a horse anymore, not even a young one, let alone one that will probably die in March after we’ve fed him all that time.” She replaces the stove-lids – all in their proper places.

  They are talking about our old horse Scott who has been with us all of my life.
My father had been his driver for two winters in the underground and they had become fond of one another and in the time of the second spring, when he left the mine forever, the man had purchased the horse from the Company so that they might both come out together to see the sun and walk upon the grass. And that the horse might be saved from the blindness that would inevitably come if he remained within the deeps; the darkness that would make him like itself.

  At one time he had even looked like coal, when his coat was black and shiny strong, relieved by only a single white star in the centre of his forehead; but that too was a long time ago and now he is very grey about the eyes and his legs are stiff when he first begins to walk.

  “Oh, he won’t die in March,” says my father, “he’ll be okay. You said the same thing last fall and he came through okay. Once he was on the grass again he was like a two-year-old.”

  For the past three or four years Scott has had heaves. I guess heaves come to horses from living too near the ocean and its dampness; like asthma comes to people, making them cough and sweat and struggle for breath. Or perhaps from eating dry and dusty hay for too many winters in the prison of a narrow stall. Perhaps from old age too. Perhaps from all of them. I don’t know. Someone told my little brother David who is ten that dampening the hay would help, and last winter from early January when Scott began to cough really bad, David would take a dipper of water and sprinkle it on the hay after we’d put it in the manger. Then David would say the coughing was much better and I would say so too.

  “He’s not a two-year-old,” says my mother shortly and begins to put on her coat before going out to feed her chickens. “He’s old and useless and we’re not running a rest home for retired horses. I am alone here with six children and I have plenty to do.”

  Long ago when my father was a coal-hauler and before he was married he would sometimes become drunk, perhaps because of his loneliness, and during a short February day and a long February night he had drunk and talked and slept inside the bootlegger’s oblivious to the frozen world without until in the next morning’s dehydrated despair he had staggered to the door and seen both horse and sleigh where he had left them and where there was no reason for them to be. The coal was glowing black on the sleigh beneath the fine powdered snow that seems to come even when it is coldest, seeming more to form like dew than fall like rain, and the horse was standing like a grey ghostly form in the early morning’s darkness. His own black coat was covered with the hoar frost that had formed of yesterday’s sweat, and tiny icicles hung from his nose.

  My father could not believe that the horse had waited for him throughout the night of bitter cold, untied and unnecessary, shifting his feet on the squeaking snow, and flickering his muscles beneath the frozen harness. Before that night he had never been waited for by any living thing and he had buried his face in the hoar-frost mane and stood there quietly for a long, long time, his face in the heavy black hair and the ice beading on his cheeks.

  He has told us this story many times even though it bores my mother. When he tells it David sits on his lap and says that he would have waited too, no matter how long and no matter how cold. My mother says she hopes David would have more sense.

  “Well, I have called MacRae and he is to come for him today,” my mother says as she puts on her coat and prepares to feed her chickens. “I wanted to get it over with while you were still here. The next thing I know you’ll be gone and we’ll be stuck with him for another winter. Grab the pail, James,” she says to me, “come and help me feed the chickens. At least there’s some point in feeding them.”

  “Just a minute,” he says, “just a goddamn minute.” He turns quickly from the window and I see his hands turn into fists and his knuckles white and cold. My mother points to the younger children and shakes her head. He is temporarily stymied because she has so often told him he must not swear before them and while he hesitates we take our pails and escape.

  As we go to where the chickens are kept, the ocean waves are even higher, and the wind has risen so that we have to use our bodies to shield the pails that we carry. If we do not their contents will be scooped out and scattered wildly to the skies. It is beginning to rain and the drops are so driven by the fierceness of the wind that they ping against the galvanized sides of the pails and sting and then burn upon our cheeks.

  Inside the chicken-house it is warm and acrid as the chickens press around us. They are really not chickens any more but full-grown capons which my mother has been raising all summer and will soon sell on the Christmas market. Each spring she gets day-old chicks and we feed them ground-up hardboiled eggs and chick-starter. Later we put them into outside pens and then in the fall into this house where they are fattened. They are Light Sussex which is the breed my mother favours because they are hardy and good weight-producers. They are very, very white now with red combs and black and gold glittering eyes and with a ring of startling black at the base of their white, shining necks. It is as if a white fluid had been poured over their heads and cascaded down their necks to where it suddenly and magically changed to black after exposure to the air. The opposite in colour but the same in lustre. Like piano keys.

  My mother moves about them with ease and they are accustomed to her and jostle about her as she fills their troughs with mash and the warm water we have brought. Sometimes I like them and sometimes I do not. The worst part seems to be that it doesn’t really matter. Before Christmas they will all be killed and dressed and then in the spring there will be another group and they will always look and act and end in the same way. It is hard to really like what you are planning to kill and almost as hard to feel dislike, and when there are many instead of one they begin to seem almost as the blueberries and strawberries we pick in summer. Just a whole lot of them to be alive in their way for a little while and then to be picked and eaten, except it seems the berries would be there anyway but the capons we are responsible for and encourage them to eat a great deal, and try our best to make them warm and healthy and strong so that we may kill them in the end. My father is always uncomfortable around them and avoids them as much as possible. My friend Henry Van Dyken says that my father feels that way because he is Scottish, and that Scotsmen are never any good at raising poultry or flowers because they think such tasks are for women and that they make a man ashamed. Henry’s father is very good at raising both.

  As we move about the closeness of the chicken-house the door bangs open and David is almost blown in upon us by the force of the wind and the rain. “There’s a man with a big truck that’s got an old bull on it,” he says, “he just went in the house.”

  When we enter the kitchen MacRae is standing beside the table, just inside the door. My father is still at the window, although now with his back to it. It does not seem that they have said anything.

  MacRae, the drover, is in his fifties. He is short and heavy-set with a red face and a cigar in the corner of his mouth. His eyes are small and bloodshot. He wears Wellington boots with his trousers tucked inside them, a broad western-style belt, and a brown suede jacket over a flannel shirt which is open at the neck exposing his reddish chest-hair. He carries a heavy stock whip in his hand and taps it against the side of his boot. Because of his short walk in the wind-driven rain his clothes are wet and now in the warmth of the kitchen they give off a steamy, strong odour that mingles uncomfortably with that of his cigar. An odour that comes of his jostling and shoving the countless frightened animals that have been carried on the back of his truck, an odour of manure and sweat and fear.

  “I hear you’ve got an old knacker,” he says now around the corner of his cigar, “might get rid of him for mink-feed if I’m lucky. The price is twenty dollars.”

  My father says nothing, but his eyes which seem the grey of the ocean behind him remind me of a time when the log which Scott was hauling seemed to ricochet wildly off some half-submerged obstacle, catching the man’s legs beneath its onrushing force and dragging and grinding him beneath it until it smashed into a protrud
ing stump, almost uprooting it and knocking Scott back upon his haunches. And his eyes then in their greyness had reflected fear and pain and almost a mute wonder at finding himself so painfully trapped by what seemed all too familiar.

  And it seemed now that we had, all of us, conspired against him, his wife and six children and the cigar-smoking MacRae, and that we had almost brought him to bay with his back against the ocean-scarred window so pounded by the driving rain and with all of us ringed before him. But still he says nothing although I think his mind is racing down all the possible avenues of argument, and rejecting all because he knows the devastating truth that awaits him at the end of each: “There is no need of postponing it; the truck is here and there will never be a better opportunity; you will soon be gone; he will never be any younger; the price will never be any higher; he may die this winter and we will get nothing at all; we are not running a rest home for retired horses; I am alone here with six children and I have more than enough to do; the money for his feed could be spent on your children; don’t your children mean more to you than a horse; it is unfair to go and leave us here with him to care for.”

  Then with a nod he moves from the window and starts toward the door. “You’re not …” begins David, but he is immediately silenced by his mother. “Be quiet,” she says, “go and finish feeding the chickens,” and then, as if she cannot help it, “at least there is some point in feeding them.” Almost before my father stops, I know she is sorry about the last part. That she fears that she has reached for too much and perhaps even now has lost all she had before. It is like when you attempt to climb one of the almost vertical sea-washed cliffs, edging upward slowly and groping with blue-tipped fingers from one tiny crevice to the next and then seeing the tantalizing twig which you cannot resist seizing, although even as you do, you know it can be grounded in nothing for there is no vegetation there nor soil to support it and the twig is but a reject tossed up there by the sea, and even then you are tensing yourself for the painful, bruising slide that must inevitably follow. But this time for my mother, it does not. He only stops and looks at her for a moment before forcing open the door and going out into the wind. David does not move.