“I am speaking now of a July in the early 1970s and it is in the morning just after the sun has risen following a night of heavy rains.”

The summer schedule for these stories is more crowded, so this story would fall near July and the next later in August: their first lines resonate with the season in this hemisphere (and will warm the other hemisphere’s readers).

Calum’s story is not one that I think of as a particular favourite but, in rereading, I realize that the road ending by the coast, at his grandmother’s home, has persisted in my mind. It hums like a low chord beneath the entire collection, as though all of these homes are cliff-side.

It’s also the story from which I took the most notes previously. Maybe because it is the last in MacLeod’s first published collection The Last Salt Gift of Blood. (In Island, his two collections are combined, so it falls in the middle.) It’s possible that, on reading his debut, I realized that I hadn’t taken any notes and flagged multiple passages to capture all the themes that seemed familiar after six other stories.

The first passage I flagged was this, from near the start: “All this runs through my mind now, although it does not really occupy it. Like the vaguely heard melody of some turned-down radio station heard softly in the background.”

It reflects Calum’s detailed return (which echoes James’ leaving in “The Vastness of the Dark”, Jesse’s night away from home in “The Golden Gift of Grey”, and Alex’s journey in “The Return”). And the way that he thinks about how people have moved away from and towards the family homestead and the past, clan lore—roadways and rituals, and patterns of behaviour.

The last passage I flagged was this, from near the end: “Suddenly and unexpectedly my grandmother says, ‘I hope none of you are worrying about me. Calum has said that he is going to stay here with me and now everything will be just fine.’” Even when there are only parents and children in these stories, the clan seems to be just off the page, not always characterized but not absent either (as with Jesse’s parents’ regular returns to their Kentucky family home).

Calum is the first of the clan to arrive; they have gathered to convince the grandmother to move into a nursing home. The irony of this story—which is not a spoiler because we learn at the beginning that Calum is diseased and nearing the end of his life at the age of twenty-six—is that the family is only concerned with the grandmother’s end-of-days and has tasked Calum with the responsibility of shaping the remainder of her days when his own are numbered.

It’s also ironic that the family accepts the grandmother’s declaration without questioning whereas, in fact, Calum has no plan to stay. And, there is another irony, which creates a cyclical rhythm in the story—both satisfying and sad, too (but that would be spoilery).

Tea and biscuits, dogs and horses, lilacs and barn swallows, frozen snow and hot blood, violin melodies and headlights in the dark: in many ways, a quintessential MacLeod story.

Because mortality is at the heart of this story, it’s tempting to sketch columns for images and talk: Living and Dying. But MacLeod invites readers to follow the story of a grandson and a grandmother, while the greater heft of emotional work resides elsewhere, in a framework that is only as intricate as readers wish it to be.

The historical scene near the beginning of the story, in which the grandmother is pregnant with her seventh child and has been waiting all night for her young husband to return home through a winter’s night, is more prescient than readers expect. Emotions are fraught and openly displayed; but, even here, the details reflect the lingering effects of an accident, the undercurrent of risk and exposure that people face every day, simply going about their lives. (There’s an echo of another scene with a fallen father here, too—steer clear of this link if you’ve not read the earlier stories.)

The liquor bottle in the man’s pocket mirrors the reality of the young husband and father’s death. The accident is unexpected, emerging out of the recognizable and routine elements of his everyday existence: “Between the perfect top and the perfect bottom all was shattered and splintered and driven deeply into the frozen hip and thigh.” (Alcohol figures in some of the other stories, too, most recently “The Return”, where it seems to be at the root of the conflict between the daughter-in-law and her husband’s family.)

The image also reflects the story’s deliberate structure; it reverses this flawless-horror-flawless pattern of glass into a horror-flawless-horror pattern of story. But even if that kind of intricacy doesn’t capture your interest, the shattering and splintering is effective. As is the echo of other unseen accidents, evident in remnants now.

Over the edge of the cliffside, for instance, there’s the “twisted chassis” and the “detached body” and “yards away the steering wheel and the trunk lid” a “crumpled” door. There, the cormorants and gulls “peck with curiosity at the gleaming silver knobs and the selector buttons of the once-expensive radio.” (The same gulls that scavenge in “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood”.)

What remains of a life, readers wonder. “Now and then a stone flue stands with phallic reality amidst the rubble of the house that has fallen down around it. Only the strength of stone has survived the ravages of time and seasons.” Which resonates even more, after Calum’s observation: “I have never thought of my grandmother so much in terms of love as in terms of strength.” How do we measure strength and how does it persist in this world.

Readers wonder, what endures: what changes and what stays the same. Are we so different from these horses, each called by one of two names—one for males and one for females—all with identical white stars in their brown foreheads and a solitary white spot the size of a coin on their barrelled chests, their generations spiralling outward:

“For years they have refused to eat any hay except that grown upon this hilly farm; as if smelling and tasting within it their own urine, manure and sweat. As if they are part of some great ecological plan, converting themselves into hay and the hay in turn into their wind-dappled sun-strong selves.”

There is darkness at the end of this story, literal and figurative, but somehow I find comfort there too. Not my own, so I suppose it must be Calum’s, though I wonder—were I to read this some other day—whether the rhythm and continuity of the storytelling would be enough to outweigh the sorrow and loss in this tale.

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.