The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair MacLeod Page A

I’ve wanted to, but it’s different in Montreal you know.”
    “Yes I guess so. I just never figured it would be like this. It seems so far away and we get old so quickly and a man always feels a certain way about his oldest son. I guess in some ways it is a good thing that we do not all go to school. I could never see myself being owned by my woman’s family.”
    “Please don’t start that already,” says my father a little angrily. “I am not owned by anybody and you know it. I am a lawyer and I am in partnership with another lawyer who just happens to be my father-in-law. That’s all.”
    “Yes, that’s all,” says my grandfather and gives me another sip from his glass. “Well, to change the subject, is this the only one you have after being married eleven years?”
    My father is now red-faced like he was when we heard the young man singing. He says heatedly: “You know you’re not changing the subject at all. I know what you’re getting at. I know what you mean.”
    “Do you?” asks my grandfather quietly. “I thought perhaps that was different in Montreal too.”
    The two women come downstairs just as I am having another sip from the glass. “Oh Angus what can you be thinking of?” screams my mother rushing protectively toward me.
    “Mary, please!” says my father almost desperately, “there’s nothing wrong.”
    My grandfather gets up very rapidly, sets me on the chair he has just vacated, drains the controversial glass, rinses it in the sink and says, “Well, time for the working class to be in bed. Good-night all.” He goes up the stairs walking very heavily and we can hear his boots as he thumps them on the floor.
    “I’ll put him to bed, Mary,” says my father noddingtoward me. “I know where he sleeps. Why don’t you go to bed now? You’re tired.”
    “Yes, all right,” says my mother very gently. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. Good-night.” She kisses me and also my grandmother and her footsteps fade quietly up the stairs.
    “I’m 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 him back 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 nowstanding 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