Free No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod Page A

the language of the place in which they worked.
    Sometimes they would take the lids off the kitchen stove to provide more light and then the actual flames would flicker and flare in constantly changing patterns of orange and red and black, constantly changing patterns of colour and shadow withinthe stove and emanating from it to the surrounding walls and the dusky overhead ceiling. Sometimes those gathered would merely watch the fire and its shadows, but at other times it seemed to move them to tell stories of real or imagined happenings from the near or distant past. And if the older singers or storytellers of the
clann Chalum Ruaidh
, the
seanaichies
, as they were called, happened to be present they would “remember” events from a Scotland which they had never seen, or see our future in the shadows of the flickering flames.
    In the winter, when my brothers went to bed, they seldom took off their clothes but often added extra old overcoats to the makeshift coverings of their beds, sometimes adding the robes and blankets which they used for their sleighs and their horses as well. In the morning the heads of the nails in the half-finished bedrooms would be white with frost, and the frost on the windowpanes would have to be scraped away with fingernails or melted by the warmth of breath before the outside world could be seen in its icy stillness. The water supply, which stood in two buckets on the table and which had been drawn from the ice-covered outside well, would be converted back to ice by the morning, and my brothers would smash the surface with hammers to get enough water for their tea. And after the fire had been lit, the buckets would be placed near the stove or even upon it, and after a while the ice on the bottom and around the sides of the bucket would thaw until it was possible to lift the inside circle of ice out of the bucket and place it, standing, in a dishpan. The circle would be of translucent crystal, like the perfect product turned out of the mould, bearing all the indentationsand contours of the bucket which had shaped it, and with small bits of grass and leaves and sometimes tiny berries frozen within its shimmering transparency. Later, as the kitchen warmed, the ice would melt and, still later, the leaves and small berries would float unceremoniously in the tepid water and be lifted out by dippers or spoons or by the blades of knives as my brothers clutched their steaming tea. They seemed to have great difficulty in keeping intact cups within their house, or perhaps they were never really there to begin with. In any case they drank their tea from cups which had no handles or from jam jars or from the tops of thermos bottles.
    I think of all this now much as I think I marvelled at it then. Marvelling, somehow, that they could live such different lives than I, while still somehow belonging to me, as I and my sister belonged to them. For at times they seemed almost more like our distant uncles than like our actual brothers. And they never paid attention to the regulations that governed our lives. Never paid attention to Canada’s Food Guide or to brushing their teeth before and after meals or to changing into clean pyjamas before going to bed. And at their house the bathroom was a bucket.
    In those early years my sister and I were given advantages which my grandparents had been unable to give their own children. There was space enough for each of us to have individual rooms, which was a luxury my grandparents’ own children had not had. And my grandmother indulged her feminine fantasies in the clothes she purchased for my sister and in the elaborate doilies and afghans and bedspreads she crocheted and knitted and quilted for her bedroom. Grateful for “the chance” which hadfreed her from slapping her washing on the rocks and grateful too for the gift of time which she had not had much of when she was raising her own children. “We have a lot to be thankful for,” she often said, “even though we