Free No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod

looking at the pasts of other people to understand the fine points of their lives. It is difficult to know the exact shadings of dates which were never written down and to know the intricacies of events which we have not lived through ourselves but only viewed from the distances of time and space. I think of this at times amidst the soft brown decor of my office where we never, ever raise our voices and where the gentle music attempts to soothe and dispel fear. And where the well-to-do sit with folded hands in attitudes of patient trust. Hoping that I might make them more beautiful than they were before. “Trying to improve on God,” as Grandma once sniffed.
    “This will not hurt at all,” I say softly, showing them the diagrams and the X-rays, the “before” and the hopeful “afters”,tracing the fine lines of their jaws in pictures, discussing overbites and protrusions, looking at the present and to the future in terms of “what might be.”
    I think of how little I know or knew of my three brothers the spring that I and my sister were three and when they were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen and our brother Colin was no more. Sealed forever in the perfection of the Eaton’s parka tied by our mother’s hands or behind the still, small necktie, which on his final appearance she did not touch at all.
    I think of my brothers’ lives only as I viewed them later. Going as the
gille beag ruadh
to visit them in the summer or sometimes in the winter. Travelling at first in sleighs or wagons behind their horses and later in the old cars they were always buying or trading or working upon. Marvelling at the lives they seemed to be living, which were so different from mine or from my sister’s. And I do not know whether the specific memories come from the time when I was eight or ten or twelve or the years before or after, or how they stand out from the general ones which seem to pervade a longer length of time.
    For a long time in the house where my brothers lived, there was neither plumbing nor electricity, and heat came from two stoves filled with wood they hauled with their horses from the shore. Some of the wood was driftwood and so filled with the “dried” salt water that it hissed and sputtered and gave off small explosions within the stove. Some of it was the near-useless black spruce they cut themselves with their bucksaws and crosscut saws from the stands where it grew so near the sea. Some of the trees had been exposed to the wind from the ocean for so long that particles of sand had become embedded within theirtrunks, into the very centre of their being, it seemed. And when the saw passed through them in the early darkness of the fall and winter evenings, streaks of blue and orange flame shot from them like the temporary streamers of a light show, flaring forth from the deep wood’s heart. Steel on sand, unseen in wood. “It is there in the daytime too,” said my brothers of the fire from the trees, “only you can’t see it then. It makes it hard to keep an edge on the saws.”
    In the winter evenings my brothers would sit around their kitchen table bathed in the orange glow of their kerosene lamp, their gestures becoming exaggerated shadows thrown upon the walls, almost like friezes or the cave paintings of primitive men. Sometimes they would listen to their large box-like radio or play cards – “45’s” or “Auction,” either among themselves or with various friends and relatives, many of them of the
clann Chalum Ruaidh
, who came to pass the time of the long winter evenings. When they spoke it was often in Gaelic, which remained the language of the kitchen and the country for almost a generation after it became somewhat unfashionable in the living rooms of the town. In the time following their return to the old
Calum Ruadh
house and land, my brothers spoke Gaelic more and more, as if somehow by returning to the old land they had returned to the old language of that land as well. It being still