One

THE SHADOW OF a promontory lay forward on the sea like that of a giant resting on his elbows with the back of his neck to the late afternoon sun. Facing the sun over the water was a second-quarter moon, white in the cobalt mass of the sky.

Two small figures sat in a cove under the promontory, a woman and an eight-year-old boy. The red smock of the mother, the white shirt and green pants of the boy–the pants secured by cloth braces with large white buttons–were bright between the cliff and the giant’s shadow on the sea. The tide was moving into the cove and now the water was breaking not many yards from the boy’s feet. The whole place was awash with sound as the cliff caught and magnified the noise of the wind and water, echoed the screams of sea birds and reverberated with the occasional thunder of a big wave. Feeling the air rushing cold out of the sunshine into the shadow, suddenly conscious of the rise of the whole sea, the boy turned to his mother.

“The tide’s coming in, isn’t it?” He was proud of his knowledge. For a few moments he watched to see if the next wave would obliterate the mark of the one before. “What makes it change like that?”

She pointed to the white wafer of the moon. “There is what does it.”

He looked at her with bright surprise. “The moon? How?”

“It pulls the water up the shore and then lets it go back again.”

“Mummy, that’s just another of your stories.” His eyes were twinkling.

“No, it isn’t. I read it in a book. All the stars in the sky pull on each other all the time. In every direction at once. The earth is pulling on them, too. That’s what we’re on–the earth. And when the moon comes around on our side of the earth it pulls and pulls and the whole sea is lifted up against the land and that’s what the tide is.”

He looked up at the moon and again at the water, and as she watched his face she wondered what he was thinking about. She was pleased because she had been able to answer such important questions so well. He watched the moon for a long time and then turned back to his play. It was no ordinary child’s castle he had built in the sand, she thought. It was like the picture of the castle he had seen in the book she was reading to him. There were four walls with towers on the corners, a courtyard within and a drawbridge over a moat. The drawbridge was a chip of driftwood which he had just finished inserting.

But the boy’s attention wandered while she watched him. The sea and the sky were too big and he was getting sleepy. He turned his head as a gull flew out from the overhang of the cliff and then he looked far, far up the beetling rock to the flecks of white where birds rested in crevices of the rock.

Mollie MacNeil looked too young to have an eight-year-old son. Her body was slim and her pale skin made her seem fragile, just as the eagerness of her smile showed how vulnerable she was. She had a Celtic delicacy of skin with a rose flush over her cheekbones, and as she leaned back with her chin tilted towards the sky her face seemed even more fragile than her body. It was the younger-than-normal face of a woman who has lived for years with a child and for a child.

Without warning, a strident steam whistle blasted the air. There was nothing in sight which could send forth such a sound, but the scream of the whistle shot up into the sky and filled it. Birds flew crying out of their nests in the cliff as the noise hung wailing in the air, but neither the boy nor his mother moved. They knew the whistle came from the colliery half a mile inland and they heard it with only part of their senses. It had always marked hours in their lives.

When the sound died away she rose with apparent reluctance and pulled down her rumpled skirt. “There is the end of the day shift, so you know how late it is.”

He watched her wrap a heel of bread in a piece of newspaper before putting it into a basket, along with a partly used jar of molasses and the empty bottle in which she had brought milk. Her dark hair and lovely eyes were reflected in his as she smiled.

“Think how good it will be when we get home this time! Did I tell you what we have for supper tonight?”

His face broke into a delighted smile. “Pork pie!”

“One whole one for you and another for me. I got them at the store only this morning so they’ll be lovely and fresh.” The wind riffled her hair and she pushed it back out of her eyes. “Come now, Alan. It is always longer going home.”

“Will we stop at the spring in the woods?”

“Today there is no time for that. The spring is behind the doctor’s house and that is on the other side of where we live.”

“But you said it was the best water in the world.”

“So it is, but we will save it for another day.”

He turned to look back at the sea, trying to understand what his mother meant when she had told him about the moon. Then he saw something which had not been there before. It was a schooner emerging from behind a bluff of land; close-hauled on the starboard tack, it was standing out to sea against the humping waves.

“Look!” he said. “There is a really big ship. Where is she going?”

“She would be bound for Newfoundland, probably.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a great big island out there.”

“I can’t see it.”

“Of course you can’t. It is too far away for you to see it.”

“Could Father see it if he was here?”

“Not even your father could see that far.”

“Mummy?” The boy’s face was grave as he forgot about the ship. “Where is Father now?”

She set her basket down on the sand and the smile left the corners of her mouth. “But I have told you, Alan–I have told you over and over again.” The smile reappeared to encourage him. “See if you can remember all by yourself.”

“Father has gone out into the world,” he said, as if repeating a lesson.

She clapped her hands. “Now tell me the other thing. Why has he gone out into the world?”

“He has gone away to do things for us. And when he comes back everything will be good. We will go into the store and get whatever we want and people will be proud of us and we will live in a fine house and be different.”

She bent and caught him, pretending she found him too heavy to move, and the child laughed and leaned back against her until she gave a jerk and swung him to his feet. A long rush of water slid up the beach, splashed against the sand house and washed part of it away. Another ground swell followed and both of them scampered into the recesses of the cove as they saw a sudden hump of water arch out of the sea, lurch forward into the shadow of the giant’s shoulders, its crest whipped by the breeze so that it came at them like dark horses with streaming white manes. It burst on the sand, thundered within itself and hissed after the footsteps of the woman and boy, and when it ebbed the sand house had disappeared. Nothing was left but a cold mound trickling with water, and on the edge of it, white and glistening, was an empty conch shell that had not been there before.

The boy darted back while his mother turned towards the path running slantwise up the side of the cliff, her basket swinging from her hand. As he followed her he slipped the shell into the pocket of his shirt.

At the top of the cliff they paused, breathless, and looked back over the sea. Its blue was deeper than the blue of the sky and the black hull and white sails of the schooner were tiny on its surface. Waves three miles long swelled in from far out and burst in lines of slow, lazy foam down the length of the coast. The woman and the boy stood watching until the distance made their eyes ache and then they turned inland. A few sheep, their shadows spindle-legged on the common where they pastured at the cliff’s edge, looked up and baaed at them. They walked over the treeless pasture, climbed a stile and descended on the other side to a rough path which led them homeward through a low growth of brush and brambles.

Before them to the right stood the colliery. Black and monstrous it bulged against the western sky, a huge mountain of coal with the bankhead seemingly on top of it, a trestle beside the coal bank supporting a square-boilered locomotive with a short train of cradle cars behind it. From this distance the train looked like a column of black ants that had crawled up the stalk of a gigantic plant and died there.

This was the visible colliery. Without framing their thoughts, both Mollie MacNeil and her son knew that what they saw behind the wire fence was merely the product of the last two weeks of work. A hundred fathoms beneath the ground they were walking on ran the seam. Galleries like the tentacles of an octopus branched out beneath the floor of the sea itself, and it was in these galleries that the men of the families in their neighborhood went down each day and came up again. They also knew that theirs was only one of some fifteen collieries which circled the town of Broughton. They felt lucky because theirs was so close to the sea.

Mollie and her son skirted the colliery fence, its enclosed area quiet as a church since the men had quit work, and finally they reached the main road which came from Broughton and then, after passing the colliery fence, made a right-angled turn and ran down a steep slope to a bridge over a bubbling brook. Between the bridge and the colliery, for a distance of two hundred and fifty yards, crowded so close together they looked like a single downward-slanting building with a single downward-slanting roof, were the houses of the miners’ row.

Mollie looked at Alan and smiled. “There now,” she said. “We’re almost home.”

Somewhere in the row was a door which they called their own, but nothing distinguished it from the doors to right or left of it. Each house was a square with a triangle set on its top. There were two doors side by side in the front of each one and on either side of the doors were single windows behind which lurked small parlors. The houses were divided in two by a common wall between the doors, behind each parlor at the back of the buildings was a kitchen, and upstairs under sharply sloping roofs were the bedrooms. The houses had all been painted the same fierce shade of iron-oxide red when they were built by the coal company; two families shared each sloping roof; all of them used a rickety board sidewalk which ran between the low doorsteps and the road. Between the sidewalk and the road was a deep ditch overgrown with thistle, burdock and coarse grass, and down the center of the road, making a right-angled turn at the corner by the colliery, ran the tracks of the tramline which bound the collieries to their heart in Broughton.

Tonight as Mollie and Alan passed the tram stop and went their way down the board sidewalk there was activity along the whole row. Before each house, beside each low doorstep, a washtub had been set on a stool. In front of each tub a miner just back from the pit crouched, stripped to the waist, while his wife, working hard with both arms, scrubbed the coal dust off his face, neck, back, shoulders and arms. Mollie and Alan passed them one by one and Mollie exchanged greetings with some of the wives. There was a loud splashing of water and a grunting and spitting from the men as the two figures went by, but the boy saw no adventure in the scene. It had been this same way every night of his life when the weather was warm.

In the kitchen that evening, after they had finished their supper, Alan took the sea shell from his pocket and held it against his ear.

“Mummy, listen!”

He handed her the shell and she also held it against her ear. “All shells sound like that,” she said. “They remember the sea.”

“How can they remember? They’re not alive.”

Her face lightened as she thought of an answer. “It was in the book we read with the birds and snakes and fish. It said that the first things that ever lived were in the sea. Are you listening, Alan? That means the shell is so old the noise in it is the oldest sound in the world.”

She was pleased because he seemed to be satisfied and for a moment she watched him as he listened to the shell. Then she looked at the alarm clock on the shelf over the table and told him it was late and past his bedtime. He got up and went upstairs slowly, knowing that because it was Saturday night his mother would be going out. Under the sharp slant of the roof he took off his shirt and hung it on a nail. Then he took off his pants and finally his shoes and stockings. He laid his shoes side by side on the floor by the head of his cot and carefully pressed down the creases in his pants before he laid them on a wooden chair. He turned the socks inside out and laid them on the back of the chair and finally took a flannelette nightgown from under his pillow and put it on. The shell went under the pillow where the nightgown had been, he scrambled into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin and lay on his back.

“Mummy,” he called. “I’m here.”

A moment later he heard the stairs creak and then she came in and looked quickly to see how well he had disposed of his clothes.

“Now,” she said, and smiled at him as she sat on the edge of his cot. “You’re all ready for sleep.”

“No. I’m not sleepy.”

“But that is the time you grow, and think how strong you must grow if your father is going to be pleased when he comes home.”

Alan’s voice was muffled. “Does Father remember me?”

“Of course he does.”

“Donald’s father doesn’t have to remember him. He comes home every night.”

She slipped off the edge of the cot and sat down on the floor beside him, to make her serious face on a level with his. “Look at me, Alan.”

He turned on his side to face her.

“Now, don’t ever, ever forget. You have one of the most special fathers of anybody you’ve ever heard of. He is not like Donald’s father, coming home every night with the pit dust all over his face so you can’t tell who he is.”

The boy began to smile.

“Archie MacNeil,” she said the name proudly. “It is something to be the son of the bravest man in Cape Breton.” She stood up and looked down at him. “But you must do your part and grow strong so he will be pleased when he comes home. It is hard for a boy not to have his father with him every night. It is hard for me, too. But think how much he misses us. Your father is so special that he had to go out into the world to do his work.”

She touched his lids with her finger tips, but he was still unsatisfied. “Don’t go yet, Mummy,” he said.

She sat down on the side of the bed again.

“Mr. Camire doesn’t come home with the pit on his face.”

“Mr. Camire is different, too. He is a Frenchman from France, and he had a fine education.”

“But he just lives in Mrs. MacPherson’s house beyond the bridge.”

“I know. But that’s because he is a stranger here and he has to learn English better. I’ve told you all about it, Alan. Mr. Camire was a sailor and his ship was wrecked not far from here. You remember how excited everybody was when she went on the rocks.”

The boy frowned. “I sort of do.” He began to pleat a fold in her skirt. “Do you like Mr. Camire, Mummy?”

“He’s a very nice man. He’s kind as kind can be. Don’t you like him, too?”

“If he’s kind, I do.” He smiled up at her. “If you like him, I like him too. I like everybody you like, Mummy.”

She got to her feet. “Now then–it’s time for you to sleep.”

“Mummy?”

“Alan, I’ve got to go.” But she laughed at him.

“Dr. Ainslie doesn’t have the pit on his face. Is Father like Dr. Ainslie? I wish I could remember him, too.”

She hesitated before she answered. As she walked to the door she said, “No, your father would not be like Dr. Ainslie at all.”

“Is he stronger?”

“Oh, yes. He is much stronger.”

“Is he better than Dr. Ainslie?”

“The questions you’re asking me tonight!” She made a face of mock despair. “He is just different, Alan. Lots of men are different. Dr. Ainslie is a surgeon and he is a very fine, clever man. Some day perhaps you will be a doctor yourself. That would be wonderful, for he is the best doctor in town. Think of it! He studied so hard he went away to be a doctor in the United States and then he came home to help us here.”

“Mr. Camire says Dr. Ainslie has a bad temper.”

“Oh, he means nothing by that. Mr. Camire hardly even knows him.”

“Mr. Camire doesn’t like anybody but you.”

“That is just his way. He is a Frenchman from France and he is lonely here without his friends. Now then, close your eyes and drop right off to sleep. And when I’m gone Mrs. MacDonald will look in, just to make sure you are safe and sound.”