Island by Alistair MacLeod

side we change trains. A blond young man is hanging from a slowly chugging train with one hand and drinking from a bottle which he holds in the other. I think it is a very fine idea and ask my father to buy me some pop. He says he will later but is strangely embarrassed. As we cross the tracks to our train, the blond young man begins to sing: “Thereonce was an Indian maid.” It is not the nice version but the dirty one which I and my friends have learned from the bigger boys in the sixth grade. I have somehow never before thought of grown-ups singing it. My parents are now walking very fast, practically dragging me by the hand over the troublesome tracks. They are both very red-faced and we all pretend we do not hear the voice that is receding in the distance.
    When we are seated on the new train I see that my mother is very angry. “Ten years,” she snaps at my father, “ten years I’ve raised this child in the city of Montreal and he has never seen an adult drink liquor out of a bottle, nor heard that kind of language. We have not been here five minutes and that is the first thing he sees and hears.” She is on the verge of tears.
    “Take it easy, Mary,” says my father soothingly. “He doesn’t understand. It’s all right.”
    “It’s not all right,” says my mother passionately. “It’s not all right at all. It’s dirty and filthy and I must have been out of my mind to agree to this trip. I wish we were going back tomorrow.”
    The train starts to move and before long we are rattling along the shore. There are fishermen in little boats who wave good-naturedly at the train and I wave back. Later there are the black gashes of coal mines which look like scabs upon the greenness of the hills and the blueness of the ocean and I wonder if these are the mines in which my relatives work.
    This train goes much slower than the last one and seems to stop every five minutes. Some of the people around us are talking in a language that I know is Gaelic although I do not understand it, others are sprawled out in their seats, some ofthem drowsing with their feet stuck out in the aisle. At the far end of the aisle two empty bottles roll endlessly back and forth, clinking against themselves and the steel-bottomed seats. The coach creaks and sways.
    The station is small and brown. There is a wooden platform in front of it illuminated by lights which shine down from two tall poles and are bombarded by squads of suicidal moths and June bugs. Beneath the lights there are little clusters of darkly clad men who talk and chew tobacco, and some ragged boys about my own age who lean against battered bicycles waiting for the bundles of newspapers that thud on the platform before their feet.
    Two tall men detach themselves from one of the groups and approach us. I know they are both my uncles although I have seen only the younger one before. He lived at our house during part of the year that was the first grade, and used to wrestle with me on the floor and play the violin records when no one was in. Then one day he was gone forever, to survive only in my mother’s neutral “It was the year your brother was here,” or the more pointed “It was the year your drunken brother was here.”
    Now both men are very polite. They shake hands with my father and say “Hello, Angie” and then, taking off their caps, “How do you do” to my mother. Then each of them lifts me up in the air. The younger one asks me if I remember him and I say “Yes” and he laughs and puts me down. They carry our suitcases to a taxi and then we all bounce along a very rough street and up a hill, bump, bump, and stop before a large dark house which we enter.
    In the kitchen of the house there are a great many people sitting around a big coal-burning stove even though it issummer. They all get up when we come in and shake hands and the women put their arms around my mother. Then I am introduced to the grandparents I have never seen. My grandmother is very