The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair MacLeod Page B

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’s body 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 anymore. 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 alittle 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 and they are all between six and ten. “These are your cousins,” says my grandmother to me and to them she says, “this is Alex from Montreal. He is come to visit with us and you are to be nice to him because he is one of our own.”
    Then I and my cousins go outside because it is what we are supposed to do and we ask one another what grades we are in and I say I dislike my teacher and they mostly say they like theirs which is a possibility I have never considered before. And then we talk about hockey and I try to remember the times I have been to the Forum in Montreal and what I think about Richard.
    And then we go down through the town which is black and smoky and has no nice streets nor flashing lights like Montreal, and when I dawdle behind I suddenly find myself confronted by two older boys who say: “Hey, where’d y’get them sissy clothes?” I do not know what I am supposed to do until my cousins come back and surround me like the covered wagons around the women and children of the cowboy shows, when the Indians attack.
    “This is our cousin,” say the oldest two simultaneously and I think they are very fine and brave for they too are probably a little bit ashamed of me and I wonder if I would do the same for them. I have never before thought that perhaps I have been lonely all of my short life and I wish that I had brothers of my own – even sisters perhaps.
    My almost-attackers wait awhile scuffing their shoes on the ashy sidewalk and then they separate and allow us to pass like a little band of cavalry going through the mountains.
    We continue down through the town and fartherbeyond to the seashore where the fishermen are mending their gear and pumping the little boats in which they allow us to play. Then we skip rocks on the surface of the sea and I skip one six times and then stop because I know I have made an impression and doubt if I am capable of an encore.
    And then we climb up a high, high hill that