Alistair MacLeod, OC (1936 – 2014)

Alistair MacLeod - cropped 2

“I turned and he was not there.”

News of Alistair MacLeod’s death left me disoriented, the way you might feel after a sudden hard blow to the stomach. It’s how I felt when Pete Seeger died.

If the sensation is familiar, it might be because Alistair wrote about it, perfectly, in “The Boat,” a story from his collection, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood.

The narrator is a son who has abandoned his schooling to fish lobster and groundfish in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with his aging father. Together they have pushed the season far into a frigid November.

And I stood at the tiller now, on these homeward lunges, stood in the place and in the manner of my uncle, turning to look at my father and to shout over the roar of the engine and the slop of the sea to where he stood in the stern, drenched and dripping with the snow and the salt and the spray and his bushy eyebrows caked in ice. But on November twenty-first, when it seemed we might be making the final run of the season, I turned and he was not there and I knew even in that instant that he would never be again.

On November twenty-first the waves of the grey Atlantic are very high and the waters are very cold and there are no signposts on the surface of the sea. You cannot tell where you have been five minutes before and in the squalls of snow you cannot see. And it takes longer than you would believe to check a boat that has been running before a gale and turn her ever so carefully in a wide and stupid circle, with timbers creaking and straining, back into the face of the storm. And you know that it is useless and that your voice does not carry the length of the boat and that even if you knew the original spot, the relentless waves would carry such a burden perhaps a mile or so by the time you could return. And you know also, the final irony, that your father like your uncles and all the men that form your past, cannot swim a stroke.

My condolences to Anita MacLeod, their six children and eight grandchildren. I know the family slightly from occasions when I presumptuously dropped in on their hillside farmhouse at Dunvegan, Inverness Co., where music and stories and tea and Scotch warmed the welcome. What a lovely man.

Now we turn in wide and stupid circles and contemplate this irrevocable loss, for Cape Breton, for Canada, and for the world of letters.

[“The Boat” first appeared in in the Massachusetts Review in 1968. Alistair’s landmark collection of stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, is available at your library, at many independent bookstores, and online in print and Kindle formats.]

Update: Katie Beaton, another great Inverness Co. talent, points out that you can read “The Boat” online. You really should own it, though.