Usually, this is where I say that 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. Saying, skip The Underneath. But not this time. What remains the same, however, is that you’re welcome 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.

It’s become a cliché describing the focussed attention that an author lavishes on a story’s geographical setting as their having made the landscape into a character.

The Cabot Trail in Cape Breton National Park, Nova Scotia
Photo by Sharissa Johnson on Unsplash

I think about the long descriptions of hills and ravines, foliage and passageways, in books like Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series, written a hundred years ago…how, in abridgements that emerged with the series’ success, these dense passages of prose were excised.

And, yes—those passages were laid across the story like syrup drizzled on a frozen dessert (it’s been hot here) and didn’t necessarily contribute to the broader narrative—the kind of writing that I would have skimmed as a kid, rolled my eyes at as a teen.

My paperback copies of these stories, which belonged to my grandmother, were sometimes missing this drizzled description; the hardcover copies that I could pull from the reference library downtown, were sometimes a hundred pages longer, stuffed with descriptions of leaves and soil and waterways. But because I knew that landscape, all of that detail worked for me.

The beginning of Alistair MacLeod’s “In the Fall” brings this to mind because of the passages in the first few paragraphs saturated with details about the shore and the ocean. How the “waves of the grey Atlantic are sullen and almost yellow at their peaks” and strike the “smooth boulders that lie scattered as if by a careless giant at the base of the ever-resisting cliffs”.

The way that he describes the landscape, however, is not a trickle of adornment; it could not be deleted without fundamentally altering the story. And it doesn’t depend on a reader’s personal familiarity with the landscape either:  he balances the specific and the universal, and he puts his details to work.

This same water is “crystal blue” in summer, not “roiled and angry, and almost anguished”. There are two states of being, but despite that knowledge, the focus remains on the “brown dirty balls of scudding foam” and the “shreds of blackened and stringy seaweed that it has ripped and torn from its own lower regions”, like “private, unseen hair”.

This talk of the ocean’s hair precedes a scene shift, pivoting to the life of a family with six children. The thirteen-year-old boy, who is narrating, describes the way his mother looked to him when he was young, her hair “very long and very black” (even there, an extra ‘very’ to keep the rhythm of the waves against those boulders) and “pulled back severely and coiled in a bun at the base of her neck, where it is kept in place by combs of coral.”

Time-wise, the story is set on the second Sunday of November, when “already the sun seems to have vanished for the year”. Focussed on this family’s small farm “between the ocean and the coal mining town” where they lead a hard life; in the winter, there’s not enough food and, between winters, hard choices are required to brace for deprivation. Nobody’s hair hangs loose.

All of that, up there, is the underneath.

The part about the language. The way that MacLeod contains the brutal reality of the water and the land in words and phrases. Adding a word here and there to echo ancient rhythms, unstoppable cycles, inevitable returns.

But I speak of the underneath first. And very nearly speak only of the underneath.

Because I’ve pushed the story into a corner of my mind to avoid thinking about it. So that I can pretend that this story is about the water, about the on-shore off-shore connection between powerful forces.

So that I can pretend that the story is not about Scott, a horse that has been part of the family for our narrator’s entire life.

It takes me the better part of a day to reread this story. A couple of paragraphs at a time.

Then, I set it aside.

Then, I try to forget.

Return to other tasks.

I make an extra iced coffee.

A treat, some encouragement.

When I force myself to sit with it longer, I feel my eyes darting to and from the narrative, like a fly on the wrong side of a screen in summer. Their frenetic bounces away from the container I use to capture them, to take them outdoors.

I want to stay on the surface of this story. I want to be on the safe side of the screen.

Finally, I am frustrated with the seeming endlessness of this process. It’s taking so long. And I already know where this is going.

So, I force myself to sit with the rest of it. One sentence after the next. Focusing so hard that I can feel the pulse of concentration.

I tell myself to assess, to analyze. To study the way that small details reveal character, the twinning of tenderness and brutality, the unexpected appearance of a teapot, the subtle class commentary. I instruct myself to inspect the structural mechanics, to recognize the framework of a family and a marriage gradually constructed. To make note of quintessential MacLeod precision-and-compassion.

I tell myself that I will simply watch that underneath swell up. Apart from it. Just watching the yellows, the browns, and the shreds. And I tell myself that I won’t care so much this time. Because I am not even really a horse person. And I know how this story goes.

But I’ve forgotten some of the details from my previous reading (this is a story that I have only read once before today). And those are arguably the most important details. And there is an act of resistance, which I have forgotten. And there is a letting down of the hair, which I have forgotten. And there is simply so much that I have forgotten, that I no longer remember to not care. It’s just all so much.

And the water is “rolling in and smashing”. And the water’s “relentless and regular”.

Better to stay on the surface, while we can.

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.