No Great Mischief Read Online Free PDF Page B

he answered. And then one of the men in the back seat (“the one with the beer in his lap,” he said) leaned forward and asked, “What was your mother’s last name?” “MacDonald,” he answered. “See,” said the man to the car in general, “I told you.” And then another of the men reached into his pocket and passed him a fifty-dollar bill. “What’s this for?” asked my nephew named Pankovich. “It is,” said the man, “for the way you look. Tell your mother it is from
clann Chalum Ruaidh.”
    And then the car bearing “B.C. or Bust” moved into the flow of the summer highway, heading for the rolling foothills and the distant shimmering mountains.
    “Mom,” said my nephew on arriving home, “What’s kwown calum rooah?”
    “Why?” she asked, startled. “Where did you hear that?” And he told her his story and she, some of hers.
    “I remember it so clearly,” my sister said to me later. “I was fixing my hair because we were going out to dinner that evening. It just struck me so suddenly that I started to cry, and I asked him what licence plates were on the car, but he said he hadn’t noticed. I would have liked to have found out who they were, and to have thanked them somehow – not for the money, of course, nor for him, but somehow for myself.” She extended her hands in front of her and then moved them sideways as if she were smoothing an imaginary tablecloth hung in air.

Both my twin sister and I were raised by our paternal grandparents and both of them were “of the
Calum Ruadh,”
which meant that they were cousins. So was our maternal grandfather, although we did not know him quite as well nor for as long; and in the manner of the more unknown, he seems now more intriguing. He was what was called “a come by chance,” which meant that he was illegitimateand had been fathered by one of the
Calum Ruadh
men who went to work in the woods near Bangor, Maine, but never returned. Apparently my grandfather’s parents planned to marry in the spring when the husband-to-be would return with the money to begin their married lives; and his bride-to-be had given herself to him in that fall – in the manner that young girls give themselves to equally young soldiers before they depart for war – hoping they will come back, but uncertain and fearful as well. He must have been fathered in late October or early November because his birthday was August 3, and one has even now a haunting sympathy for them all. For the girl who discovers in the depth of winter she is pregnant by a man she cannot reach. And for the man who died, crushed beneath the load of logs on the skidway, perhaps without realizing he had set a life in motion, which would in turn result in even such a life as mine.
    Apparently he was killed in January, although word did not filter out for some time, as it was a great distance and the season was winter and there were no telephones and postal service was uncertain and most of the people involved were still unilingually Gaelic-speaking. He was buried there, in winter, in the woods of Maine, and in the spring a cousin brought back his boots and his few possessions in a bundle. He had not been working long enough to earn anything substantial, and what he had put aside for his wedding was needed for his burial. As I said, one has a haunting sympathy for them all, for him and for the girl waiting in the depth of winter for a dead man who might free her of her shame. And for her also later in the hot summer months before the birth, poor and desperate and ashamed, with unknown expectations for her coming fatherless child.
    Perhaps because of the circumstances of his conception, my maternal grandfather was an exceedingly careful man. He became an exceptional carpenter, finding great satisfaction in the exactitude of a craft where everything would turn out perfectly if you took the time to calculate it so. He did not marry until he was middle aged and had already designed and built his