Those of you who are reading here now, but not reading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, will probably only be interested in the first couple of paragraphs after this introduction. Feel free to skip past the section that I’ve titled The Underneath, written with those who know the story-or other writers curious about the mechanical elements of storytelling-in mind. If you’d like to join for a single story or for the duration, here’s the schedule for this reading project. Regardless, I hope you’ll enjoy reading about Alistair MacLeod’s stories, even if you weren’t planning to read them yourself.

Photo by Laura Lefurgey-Smith on Unsplash

From Newfoundland, residents can look out at the “vastness of the sea” toward Ireland. That land to the east, out of sight across the water, is closer than the cities to the west, on this continent, like Toronto and like Detroit (on the other side of the border in what is now Canada, in what is now the United States).

Our narrator has driven 2,500 miles in a rented Volkswagen and has, literally, reached the end of the road. When the children fishing on the shore ask him where he’s from, their accents “broad and Irish”, he struggles to find a way to make the North American Midwest seem real for them.

He’s thirty-three years old and winded by a short walk across the rocky land; he takes in the sights like a tourist, but when he meets a man and his dog, he’s invited for supper and informed: “There are just the three of us now.”

One of those three is the boy, John, who had handed over his fishing rod to the man, earlier that afternoon, inviting him to try casting (which he did, three or four times, but awkwardly), part of that group of boys on the shore. Then there’s the old man, with his pipe and pouch of tobacco and his wife.

John had been sent to live with one of their daughters, who had left Newfoundland for the city, for the opportunities he would have there; but they missed him too much, so he came home again, and that night, the daughter and her husband were killed in an accident: “So, we be hav’n only him.”

The rum the trio drinks after supper comes from across the ocean. That’s where the important ties stretch to. Ties that have been strained for our narrator, whose connection to St. Johns is as intangible as the fog and smoke in the story.

When he leaves the next morning, he indicates that without a telephone or letters, they cannot keep in touch. “Perhaps that’s why we never told you,” they say. But somehow what they don’t say matters more.

Distance and freedom, tethering and restlessness: these themes are suspended, just beyond the grasp of readers. But we recognize that the way miles fold in on themselves, when one travels in an airplane, doesn’t adequately describe how we are—and aren’t—connected to—and apart from—places.

Photo by Laura Lefurgey-Smith on Unsplash

It feels like the colours in this story stand out in relief. Navy, green, grey: perhaps because the prose is so clear and polished, the descriptors for shade take on a peculiar importance.

At first, while reading, I thought that it was the metallic glimmers that mattered most. The way that the sun is “flashing everything in gold” when one looks across the water to Europe. The way that the light turns gold on the fishing line, the silver on the scales of the trout above the water. All in contrast with the rust-flaked anchor, out of its element, stuck on the shore.

But soon enough, the colour in the foreground is white. The colour of the gulls. Which make an appearance in several (maybe all) of the stories that precede this one in the collection. They are as stark in this landscape as elsewhere in MacLeod’s storytelling, but here the white has a particular prominence, as do the gulls—this narrator observes—because they scavenge and keep the landscape clean.

Even the government protects them. The government that, only in 1949, took the reins in Newfoundland (the last province to join the nation now called Canada). When the couple in this story was starting their family, the idea of this land being part of a nation was something new for these settlers. The idea of a faraway, that wasn’t the other side of the Atlantic, was barely conceivable.

The boys rescued a seagull from the rocks a few years ago. They’ve recently buried it, having to walk a mile from the shore to dig into Earth for a grave. Everything up ‘til there being rock. Literally, a hard life. As our narrator moves away from this place, he sees those boys in the distance, and it seems they have found another gull to tame. They’d described having searched the rocks for another and, before he departs, they’ve found one.

This is the discovery that our narrator leaves behind. And even though he doesn’t overtly cast his thoughts there, while he is travelling home, it is behind him. Even though what he describes are the details of a life shared by the salesman seated next to him on the plane. Even though he doesn’t mention that he is holding the rock that young John gave to him from the beach.

Despite that, somehow readers understand that he is holding that weight in his mind when he makes this observation: “We eat above the clouds, looking at the tips of wings.”

When he marvels at the way that certain memories stand in relief in our own minds, of places that we have left behind.

For the better part of two years, I am rereading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, from start to stop, just as I’ve done with Alice Munro’s and Mavis Gallant’s short stories previously. If you love short stories or if you would like to be a short-story lover, several of these authors’ stories are among my favourites, and would make an excellent introduction to the finest of the form. If you have other favourite story writers, please feel free to contribute those to the conversation too.