Island by Alistair MacLeod Page B

sorry, Ma, she didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” says my father.
    “I know. She finds it very different from what she’s used to. And we are older and don’t bounce back the way we once did. He is seventy-six now and the mine is hard on him and he feels he must work harder than ever to do his share. He works with different ones of the boys and he tells me that sometimes he thinks they are carrying him just because he is their father. He never felt that way with you or Alex but of course you were all much younger then. Still, he always somehow felt that because those years between high school and college were so good that you would both come back to him some day.”
    “But Ma, it can’t be that way. I was twenty then and Alex nineteen and he was only in his early fifties and we both wanted to go to college so we could be something else. And we paid himback the money he loaned us and he seemed to want us to go to school then.”
    “He did not know what it was then. Nor I. And when you gave him back the money it was as if that was not what he’d had in mind at all. And what is the something you two became? A lawyer whom we never see and a doctor who committed suicide when he was twenty-seven. Lost to us the both of you. More lost than Andrew who is buried under tons of rock two miles beneath the sea and who never saw a college door.”
    “Well, he should have,” says my father bitterly, “so should they all instead of being exploited and burrowing beneath the sea or becoming alcoholics that cannot even do that.”
    “I have my alcoholic,” says my grandmother now standing very tall, “who was turned out of my Montreal lawyer’s home.”
    “But I couldn’t do anything with him, Ma, and it’s different there. You just can’t be that way, and – and – oh hell, I don’t know. If I were by myself he could have stayed forever.”
    “I know,” says my grandmother now very softly, putting her hand upon his shoulder, “it’s not you. But it seems that we can only stay forever if we stay right here. As we have stayed to the seventh generation. Because in the end that is all there is – just staying. I have lost three children at birth but I’ve raised eight sons. I have one a lawyer and one a doctor who committed suicide, one who died in coal beneath the sea and one who is a drunkard and four who still work the coal like their father and those four are all that I have that stand by me. It is these four that carry their father now that he needs it, and it is these four that carry the drunkard, that dug two days for Andrew’sbody and that have given me thirty grandchildren in my old age.”
    “I know, Ma,” says my father, “I know that and I appreciate it all, everything. It is just that, well somehow we just can’t live in a clan system any more. We have to see beyond ourselves and our own families. We have to live in the twentieth century.”
    “Twentieth century?” says my grandmother spreading her big hands across her checkered apron. “What is the twentieth century to me if I cannot have my own?”
    It is morning now and I awake to the argument of the English sparrows outside my window and the fingers of the sun upon the floor. My parents are in my room discussing my clothes. “He really doesn’t need them,” says my father patiently. “But, Angus, I don’t want him to look like a little savage,” replies my mother as she lays out my newly pressed pants and shirt at the foot of the bed.
    Downstairs I learn that my grandfather has already gone to work, and as I solemnly eat my breakfast like a little old man beyond my years, I listen to the violin music on the radio and watch my grandmother as she spreads butter on the top of the baking loaves and pokes the coals of her fire with a fierce enthusiasm that sends clouds of smoke billowing up to spread themselves against the yellowed paint upon her ceiling.
    Then the little boys come in and stand shyly against the wall. There are seven of them