No Great Mischief Read Online Free PDF

hosts, where we would inevitably be quizzed by their parents or grandparents. “What’s your name?” “What’s your father’s name?” “What’s your mother’s father’s name?” And almost without fail, in the case of myself and my cousins, there would come a knowing look across the face of our questioners and they would say, in response to our answer, “Ah, you are the
clann Chalum Ruaidh
,” as if that somehow explained everything. They would pronounce
clann
in the Gaelic way so that it sounded like “kwown.” “Ah, you are the
clann Chalum Ruaidh,”
meaning “Ah, you are the children (or the family) of the red Calum.” We would nod and accept this judgment, as the ice and snow dripped off our shin pads to form puddles on the linoleum floors. And later, when we were out of the house and thinking ourselves more
    sophisticated than we were, we would laugh and sometimes imitate the people and their identification. “What is your father’s father’s father’s father’s name?” we would ask one another, carving our initials in the snow with our hockey sticks, and then answering our own questions, “Ah, now I know, you are the
clann Chalum Ruaidh,”
and we would laugh and flick snow at one another with the blades of our sticks.
    There are a few physical characteristics of the
clann Chalum Ruaidh
which seem to have been passed on and, in some cases, almost to have been intensified. One seems a predisposition to have twins, most of whom are fraternal rather than identical. And another has to do with what is sometimes called “colouring.” Most of the people are fair-skinned, but within families some of the individuals have bright red hair while that of their brothers and sisters is a deep, intense and shining black. When my twin sister was seventeen, she decided for reasons of girlish vanity to dye her hair with a silver-blondish streak which rose from her forehead and swept in undulating waves through the heavy blackness of her own natural hair. Later, tiring of the effect, she attempted to dye the streak back to black, but could find no dye that would make it as black as it was before. I see her now, sometimes, in memory, sitting in her slip before her mirror and biting her lip in frustration close to tears, looking like those heroines of the Scottish ballads with “milk white skin and hair as black as the raven’s wing” and wishing to be someone else. My grandmother had little sympathy for her plight, saying with straightforward firmness, “It is good enough for you, for tampering with the hair God gave you.”
    It was months before her hair grew to its own blackness again, and then almost simultaneously and ironically the first fewstrands of premature whiteness began to appear as they so often do, coming to the dark-haired at a very early age.
    Many of the red-haired people also had eyes that were so dark as to be beyond brown and almost in the region of a glowing black. Such individuals would manifest themselves as strikingly unfamiliar to some, and as eerily familiar to others. When one of my sons was born in southwestern Ontario, the hospital staff said, “Either his hair will turn dark or his eyes will turn blue. Most red-haired people have blue eyes. No one looks
like that.”
There seemed little reason for me to say anything, given the circumstances of my own physical presence.
    And once, years after my sister had married the petroleum engineer she met at the University of Alberta, her eleven-year-old son was pushing his bicycle up the incline of Calgary’s Sarcee Trail on a sunny summer afternoon. He was met, he said, by a car filled with men and bearing a banner which said “B.C. or Bust” strung across its grille. It passed him and then stopped in a slew of roadside gravel, and then, grinding into reverse, roared backwards towards him where he stood half frightened and clutching his handlebars. “What’s your name?” said one of the men, rolling down his window. “Pankovich,”