Free The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair MacLeod Page B

would like to buy an outboard motor for the small reconditioned skiff he now uses to visit his traps. At present he has only oars.
    “John here has the makings of a good fisherman,” says the old man. “He’s up at five most every morning when Iam putting on the fire. He and the dog are already out along the shore and back before I’ve made tea.”
    “When I was in Toronto,” says John, “no one was ever up before seven. I would make my own tea and wait. It was wonderful sad. There were gulls there though, flying over Toronto harbour. We went to see them on two Sundays.”
    After the supper we move the chairs back from the table. The woman clears away the dishes and the old man turns on the radio. First he listens to the weather forecast and then turns to short wave where he picks up the conversations from the offshore fishing boats. They are conversations of catches and winds and tides and of the women left behind on the rocky shores. John appears with his mouth organ, standing at a respectful distance. The old man notices him, nods, and shuts off the radio. Rising, he goes upstairs, the sound of his feet echoing down to us. Returning he carries an old and battered accordion. “My fingers have so much rheumatism,” he says, “that I find it hard to play anymore.”
    Seated, he slips his arms through the straps and begins the squeezing accordion motions. His wife takes off her apron and stands behind him with one hand upon his shoulder. For a moment they take on the essence of the once young people in the photograph. They begin to sing:
    Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court your men
They’re like the stars on a summer’s morning
First they’ll appear and then they’re gone.
    I wish I were a tiny sparrow
And I had wings and I could fly
I’d fly away to my own true lover
And all he’d ask I would deny.
    Alas I’m not a tiny sparrow
I have not wings nor can fly
And on this earth in grief and sorrow
I am bound until I die.
    John sits on one of the home-made chairs playing his mouth organ. He seems as all mouth-organ players the world over: his right foot tapping out the measures and his small shoulders now round and hunched above the cupped hand instrument.
    “Come now and sing with us, John,” says the old man.
    Obediently he takes the mouth organ from his mouth and shakes the moisture drops upon his sleeve. All three of them begin to sing, spanning easily the half century of time that touches their extremes. The old and the young singing now their songs of loss in different comprehensions. Stranded here, alien of my middle generation, I tap my leather foot self-consciously upon the linoleum. The words sweep up and swirl about my head. Fog does not touch like snow yet it is more heavy and more dense. Oh moisture comes in many forms!
    All alone as I strayed by the banks of the river
Watching the moonbeams at evening of day
All alone as I wandered I spied a young stranger
Weeping and wailing with many a sigh.
    Weeping for one who is now lying lonely
Weeping for one who no mortal can save
As the foaming dark waters flow silently past him
Onward they flow over young Jenny’s grave.
    Oh Jenny my darling come tarry here with me
Don’t leave me alone, love, distracted in pain
For as death is the dagger that plied us usunder
Wide is the gulf, love, between you and I.
    After the singing stops we all sit rather uncomfortably for a moment. The mood seeming to hang heavily upon our shoulders. Then with my single exception all come suddenly to action. John gets up and takes his battered school books to the kitchen table. The dog jumps up on achair beside him and watches solemnly in a supervisory manner. The woman takes some navy yarn the colour of her husband’s jersey and begins to knit. She is making another jersey and is working on the sleeve. The old man rises and beckons me to follow him into the tiny parlour. The stuffed furniture is old and worn. There is a tiny wood-burning heater in the