Stories like Alistair MacLeod’s are often described as timeless, but many of them, like “Second Spring”, feel time-full.
Immediately, MacLeod situates readers in time: “It was the summer after the seventh grade that saw me truly smitten with the calf club wish.”
Then, he invites readers to fall into an expansive view, one that allows time to unfold on the farm. He escorts readers through seasonality, much of which is recognisable at least, perhaps familiar and understood, depending on one’s own life experience.
Images of promise, for instance, as the animals bear their young, move towards spring births:
“When they lay down in their expanded heaviness the ripples of movement from deep within their wombs were visible against the drum-tight skin of their extended sides. The promise of the future lay warm and heavy within their deep, dark bodies.”
Ulimately, however, what MacLeod is measuring is one character’s experience of time, encapsulated in this final sentence about that summer, which is nothing about the calf club and everything about baseball:
“I would lunge and leap and bend and fall and pivot and turn and then hope that the next one might once again be mine. in my small area of the earth it seemed that everything was under my control.”
The Underneath
That final sentence, with its dollops of verbs, contains so much: lunge and leap and bend and fall and pivot and turn and then hope. There are many action verbs, easy to visualise on the baseball field, each separated by a conjunction so that you cannot help but read it rhythmically. Only to be interrupted. By another kind of verb: hope. Set apart, further, as though introduced, by “then.”
Within this story, is another tiny story, strung together and then punctuated by hope. This February, as I read this story, it pulled roughly at my heart. After a couple of pages, I would set aside the story, wonder at my decision to have planned for this post in spring. Which is, I see, part of the point. Because what we think of as spring, as a time of burgeoning life and promise, is something true and untrue.
“New pens would be constructed and, amidst squeals of protest, there would be separations, weanings and brandings and the pulling of teeth and the flashing of knives used for the cutting of testicles, the docking of tails and the notching of ears.”
I was reminded of the part in Sarah Moss’ early novel, Night Waking, about how the farmers would place a stone in a lamb’s mouth, a stone too big to swallow, so that the newborn could not nurse from its mother during the night or into the next morning, not until the farmers had drawn her milk for their own family’s use.
“Second Spring” brought that to mind and, then, MacLeod reminded me of the transactional nature of that view. It also reminded me of the way he’s written about the wedge between the miners who worked below the surface, while the businessmen in Toronto cut their cheques.
“We would hear their indignant bleatings as the trucks took them permanently from the single environment of their one and only summer. Sounds of angered indignation tinged with the very real sound of fear. Later the cheques we had exchanged them for would come and we, in our turn, would enter a phase of rejuvenation and hopeful, though temporary, self-confidence.”
There’s that word again: “hopeful.” Paired with “rejuvenation.” These are words for the two-legged animals, the ones who cash those cheques. The “temporary” signals back to the seasonality of the story, yet, simultaneously hints at a broader kind of seasonality, gesturing towards the impermanence of these brokers. Quietly questioning whether this kind of transaction holds the kind of wonder that is truly sustaining.
This next passage, I had not remembered at all; now I wonder how I could have forgotten it. How often we observe and assess: how often we get it wrong. What we choose to forget to excuse decisions that, examined with greater clarity, we would not make.
“Another time we found an unborn calf within the womb of a young cow we had considered sterile. We had tried various matings and solutions, but she had always failed to conceive. In her fourth year of life her sterility became a luxury we could not afford. ‘We cannot take her through another winter like that,’ was the verdict. ‘She will have to be fattened and killed.’ When found within the womb of the slaughtered mother, the embryonic calf continued to move for a brief and borrowed time.”
What is sterile, what is slaughtered. What is embryonic, what is hope. Our priorities shift dramatically, over the course of a few months, and we often remain oblivious to other lives along the way.
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.
He really sounds like a great writer. He should be published by Gallmeister in France, he fits the bill.
I see only a Boreal edition from 2001 and I believe it’s his novel, titled No Great Mischief in English (La perte et le fracas). But perhaps some of the stories have been translated into French individually for use in anthologies (which is how most people in Canada probably encounter his work too.)
The French publisher L’Olivier has La perte et le fracas and Chien d’hiver. I think that Boreal is a publisher from Québec.
It’s on the Virtual TBR!
Ohhh, you’re right: thank you! It had that familiar pocketbook look, and I confused it with Livre des poches (I’ve just seen a lot of pocketbooks from both….this does not make sense to anyone else necessarily lol).
I read Naomi’s review first and then yours. It is interesting how different they are. My first thought would be to the overlaps in my and McLeod’s experience of rural childhoods; yours is to the writing. I very rarely think, why did that sequence have that effect on me? You are obviously more serious about what you write.
And when Andrew and Mel post on the stories I feel the same way…I feel as though ten readers could read one of AM’s stories and each pull something different out of it. They circle around such fundamental, universal themes. When I read Naomi’s, I thought “what on Earth was I going on and on about that I didn’t even mention what happens in the story?” LOL
Three things jump out at me from your review of the story: the gruesomeness of some of the scenes, the relief of getting everything done each season only to have the worry start ramping up again soon, and the hope that you need to have to be a farmer.
One of the things that struck me when I read it was how much of the story is taken up with descriptions of the seasons and daily life of a farm. And also the humour in the plot – I laughed at what happened, which is not something I often do when reading an Alistair Macleod story.
The line between awesome and gruesome is a fine one: I think that’s probably true with a lot of nature, but something about his writing showcases this. It’s interesting that it’s very much about the rhythm, how cyclical the seasons are (and our lives are, our lineages are-perhaps-across the generations too) but also it’s stopped up, like a hitch in the chain, with the boy’s summer (and that last paragraph). I wonder, if we were to reread these more often, if we would notice more of the lighter/softer/tenderer bits. Like, the holiday story, I think you felt was sadder than I felt, but I think you found this one happier than I did (but I see all those qualities in them both, some of them just seem to touch me more than others in certain moments)?? What do you think?
Yes, I can see all those elements in both stories (and probably in most of his stories). I think because he writes about the nitty gritty of real life – life and death, winter and summer, morning and night, physical work like fishing, farming, mining where you have to get dirty, you have to do hard things, see hard things to make a living. But the reason people do them is because they want to live – they want to take care of the people they love… the death of a pig means life for a child. The sale of a horse (In the Fall) means more food on the table. Such hard, sad things also mean a better life. And I think the things that jump out at us most (and make us sad or happy or angry or all of them together) depend on where we’re coming from when we read the story. I felt like this story was mostly happy, because I remember my happiness playing in the field with the cows when I was young. For me, the happy parts outweigh the sad parts, even though that line about using crayon to mark the cow’s head almost broke my heart. (Obviously, if I had a farm with animals, I wouldn’t kill them. But they would still eventually die, and that would still be really sad.) I also think the story about the boy and the calf club lightened the story a lot, because I thought it was funny. Something LMM might have written!
I have no idea if this even comes close to addressing your question! Does it? Lol
The more I hear from you about MacLeod’s writing from you, the more I think I would like it. This sounds like a lovely story,looking back to a period in childhood, something I always enjoy reading.
The strong presence of childhood memories does make his storytelling seem very relatable, even if you’ve never set foot in Cape Breton (which I’ve not!).