At the Same Time

Kevin MacDonell

The house where I grew up faces the road that runs along the western shore of Cape Breton Island. Leaving our driveway, we could turn north or we could turn south. When I was about five, my sister and I would crouch on the floor in the back of the green Chrysler while our father drove, laying our heads against the warm carpet on either side of the thrumming transmission hump. We would go, and we would return, and as we returned, we spooled back the hills and turns we had passed before. In my unseeing I knew only one direction—forward.

One summer morning, we set out and my father turned the wheel right. That meant north. We drove an hour to the village where my mother’s family lived. On our way back home, after twists and turns and trees and clouds and whatever else was visible from the floor, I felt the car slow and make a right turn, instead of the left turn that meant our driveway. My sister and I got out. We stood before a single-storey house similar to our own, with gable ends painted blue and white siding that gleamed in the sun and dazzled my nearsighted eyes. I followed my parents inside. There was no one home. My eyes fell on blurry objects I seemed to know: a ringer washer, a row of varnished cupboards, the Last Supper over the kitchen table.

“Where are we?” I asked. If I received an answer, it made no impression. Down a hall, I stumbled on a small room which was a duplicate of my bedroom: A little bed, blue carpet, green walls, a collection of things all just like my own. As if the boy who slept there were another me.

For days, even as I took possession of the absent boy’s bed and belongings, I remained in the glow of this strange new knowledge, until a second possibility suggested itself: that my father had simply taken an inland route, so that in my unseeing, our trip was a great circle. But I have never forgotten this knowledge, as I choose to call it, the knowledge of the circle that leads us home without turning back, without once feeling we have stopped going forward.

*

Collie MacDonald was puttering around his barn when I drove into his lane. He brushed off a little three-legged stool and invited me to sit. It was a fine day in May between university terms. I was twenty, in training to become a journalist. Collie was, I remember, a stocky man in green coveralls and a cap. I did not know him, but he knew me, in a way. He knew what family I’d come out of, on my father’s side, and remembered visiting my grandparents on their farm many years before. 

I’d been hired on a student grant to interview local storytellers for a collection of Cape Breton folklore, a supplement to the weekly newspaper I worked for. All that early summer, I drove up and down the coast, visiting elderly men and women who were not yet spent of the energy or the memory or the desire to tell stories. Collie was my first visit. He sat across from me and began to speak, but tentatively, eyeing my notebook.

“This particular day fifty-some years ago, I was visiting my sister,” he said. “I was sitting with my back to the road, when something made me turn and look. A grey horse was pulling a wood sleigh there in among the trees. I didn’t know this horse, whose it was. And strangest thing, the sleigh was empty.”

“Where exactly did your sister live? Near here?” I asked, adjusting my glasses.

Collie blinked. He may have given an answer, which I don’t remember.

“It wasn’t too long after this that my sister’s two young children were frightened by two men who were carrying something heavy into their front hall,” he continued. “The men were apparitions, you see.”

“Where did the horse go with the empty sleigh?”

He couldn’t or wouldn’t say. If he had, I would have added the detail to the story. As an apprentice reporter, my concern was with facts, cause and effect, and explanations.

“It wasn’t too long after those apparitions that a man from outside the county fell in the woods and died, and his sleigh kept on going without him. I was the one who found him. He was face-down in the snow and his fur cap was there beside him. I caught up with the sleigh and took hold of the horse. That horse was coloured grey.”

“Did the men in the hall make any sound? Did they just disappear?”

My questions seemed to confuse and inhibit him. I felt a distance open between us.

“There was a doctor there, asked me if I’d allow the body to be taken to my sister’s house. Two men carried the remains into the very same hall where the children had seen the apparition.”

He gazed at me from under the brim of his cap. That was the whole story. It was a typical Scottish tale of the kind familiar to me from childhood: the bare facts of a weird episode supposedly from the teller’s personal experience.

“How did a doctor happen upon the scene in the middle of nowhere, when there were no telephones?” I persisted.

Collie waved my question off. I sensed he had grown uncertain what I wanted from him. Some long silences followed. We resorted to remarking on the fine weather. I left with just the one meagre tale.

I heard a lot of weird stories that summer. Prominent among these were tales of foresight or “double-seeing,” and forerunners—supernatural premonitions of an impending event, often a death, sometimes even a phantom of oneself. I heard about a group of women who were startled out of their wits by thunder and blinding light passing nearby, a hundred years before the advent of the trains passing in that same spot. I heard about men doffing their caps for a funeral cortège, a day in advance of the death that occasioned it. Displacements in space and time. 

My duplicate childhood bedroom—the one boy who split into two—that incident would have sat comfortably next to these. But I did not recognize this at the time, 36 years ago, when what I saw clearly through my corrective lenses was only the surface of things.

*

One early February a few years ago, I drove to Cape Breton to visit my parents. I watched my mother help Dad fall-sit into his reclining chair. Behind his back she held the waistband of his shorts so they wouldn’t slip down to his knees.

“Ugh! Second childhood,” he complained. My mother suggested he not accompany her to church; it would be too hard to push his walker in the snow. From the kitchen came a tok-tok-tok as she sorted pills into plastic containers. Then she went out, and my father and I read in a silence flecked by the two clocks, imperfectly synchronized, gradually gyring out of accord and back.

Dad closed his book on a finger and massaged his sore leg. A rumble emerged from a distance and finally the plow barreled past, blade to the road, engulfing the house in a cloud. Dad held his book to one side and leaned forward with eyes closed. When the snow settled, the trees across the way resumed their sharpness. I could not know that my father had twenty days left of life. Instead, it merely occurred to me that he’d not attended church in a while. When had this become the norm, I wondered. When are these things decided? It was like a sound with a soft beginning below detection, gradually becoming louder, entering our awareness only after it is past.

Later, snow crunched under tires and my mother came in with cold air clinging to her coat. She placed the church bulletin on the stool by his chair and opened a gold-coloured pyx and gave my father the wafer, and he blessed himself.

*

This morning, I slip out of the house before sunrise to meet the Bay of Fundy tide. I have kept daily attendance all summer, following the ebb’s lowest point as it shifts around the clock. Gulls and the wash of waves are the only sounds. The beach is unmarked and pristine, so different from the evening, when slanting light makes the foot-dented sand a landscape of peaks and valleys that carries the residual energy of a crowd. Afternoon visitors follow the solar clock; mine is tidal.

I walk the flats to the fog-hidden far end. When I return, I spool the minutes in reverse, my shadow passing over the footsteps of my recent past. My ritual is unchanging, but this beach is never the same. Today, the ranks of black seaweed are pushed way up the slope because of an unusually high tide; we are in a new moon. Given how Earth and Moon whip each other around like giddy cosmic dancers with locked arms, I’m surprised the tide is so gentle, the cataclysm that separated Moon from Earth still present in the lapping waves.

In the fog, I stumble upon creatures left for dead by the sea in its retreat: a writhing sea-worm, a moribund crab, a sculpin fish with milky eyes. The tide marks a line between life and death, which the gulls well know. Gravity is old and patient and someday she will lay me low, too, but for now she indulges me as I distort the fractal boundary of earth and sky.

My father’s last words were, “Lord, let me go.” One evening the summer after he died, I came upon a large crab, lethargic, weighed down with a load of wet sand on its broad back. I bent to flick off his burden, but he warned me away with the slow sway of a claw. The heat of life had shrunk to an ember somewhere in that little knot of meat, enough strength to turn round to the water and the horizon-tangent sun. He lowered his claws, which now resembled a man’s arms crossed, and tilted his carapace slightly upward, and with his body, defiant, seemed to say, finally, to the departing sun and the incoming water and the waiting gulls: “Take me.”

If a cataclysm from deep time truly comes to us as a gentle tide, then why not believe that the cries and songs and laughter of our dead still swash against our ears if we stay quiet and listen?

*

I take one step, then I take another. Things seem to happen this way for us: one at a time.

My sister and I watched him from the water’s edge. Our father who rarely swam arced his arms in theatrical loops and gulped air like a pantomime Olympian. He was near middle age, but younger than I am now as I walk the same beach.

Finally he emerged, got his legs under him and stood, streaming salt sea as if just coming into the world. Hair plastered, he wore a serious face. My sister squealed.

“Daddy, Daddy! You look different!” And he did. He looked like his university graduation photo, class of ’54. Serious, pensive, young. 

My sister and I laughed and danced. He stared at us little strangers, and walked away. 

“Daddy!” 

Then my sister pointed to the dazzling water and I saw, too: He was still out there. As he neared us, did he hear our yells, and remember?

One step at a time, life becomes. So it would seem. But I turn around, and I walk over my own impressions in the sand. Our father lived for many years and never again did we see him swim. 

The young man walked away, and down the beach he disappeared. He did not recognize me or my sister. We had not yet been born.

Kevin MacDonell (he/him) is a lifelong diarist living in Bedford, Nova Scotia. He explores experience and memory through personal essays and has work recent or forthcoming in Grain, Camel, the Dalhousie Review, the Malahat Review, Queen’s Quarterly, and the Globe and Mail.

Josh Jensen is a visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang (Montreal). His practice spans analogue photography, installation, and bio-based material processes—including fruit leather, natural dyeing, and sustainable methods of reuse and repair; foregrounding experimental approaches to circularity in artmaking. He often explores preservation, observation, and accumulation as pathways of memory, labour, and exchange.