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compact, perfect house within the town; and within his marriage he fathered but one perfect child, who was my mother. After the death of his wife in childbirth, he lived for a long time by himself, rising at exactly six a.m. and shaving and trimming his neat reddish moustache. His house was spotless, and within it he knew where everything was all of the time. And in the little building behind his house where he kept his shining tools it was the same. He was the kind of man you could go to with a request such as, “Do you have a screw nail that is exactly 1 ⅛ inch long?” And immediately he would go to the perfect little jar and there it would be.
    Before going to bed he would set out his breakfast dishes for the next morning; again with great precision, his plate face down and his cup inverted upon its saucer with its handle always at the same angle, and with his knife and fork and spoon each in its proper place, as if he were in a grand hotel.
    His shoes were always polished and in a shining row with their toes pointing outward beneath his neatly made bed, and his teapot was always placed on exactly the same spot upon his gleaming stove. “He is so clean, he makes you nervous,” said my other grandfather, who, while he had a great affection for him, was a very different kind of man.
    Although he had a shot of whisky when he got up and one before he went to bed, he drank very little compared to many ofthe men his age, and although he could sometimes be inveigled into going to the taverns he never remained long and did not like them. “He’s always getting up to get a cloth to mop the table,” my other grandfather would complain, “and he sits far back from the table like this” (giving an imitation of a man at a table – close but distant) “because he’s afraid someone will spill beer on his pants. And he can’t stand the washrooms with all that piss on the floor.”
    Neither did he like ribald songs nor off-colour stories in either English or Gaelic, and his face would redden at almost any sexual reference. Again, I suppose because of what he considered to be a certain ill-prepared sloppiness in his painful past. And stories about the man who rides the girl and then goes away were not, for him, particularly funny.
    When my sister and I were small children we would visit him more out of duty than affection because he was the kind of man who did not appreciate muddy boots on his always scrubbed floor, nor did he appreciate having his hammer mislaid, nor his saw left out to rust in the rain. And if he were not home and we left scrawled childish notes on his door, he would encircle all the misspelled words with his carpenter’s pencil and later on our next visit ask us to spell them correctly because he so wanted everything to be “right.”
    He was a strong taskmaster at homework, but not without his own humour. I remember one night, while staying with him, attempting to memorize history dates. “Confederation, 1867,” I chanted aloud. “Think of me,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “I was born here in 1877. I am only ten years younger than Canada, and I am not very old.” It seemed an amazing thing atthe time for he
did
seem old and so did Canada and I was not that strong at making distinctions, and did not realize what was young and what was old.
    Although he was older and “different” than my other grandparents, they had a great affection and respect for him – not only because his only daughter had married their son and they shared that resulting pain, but I suppose also because he was their cousin and part of
“clann Chalum Ruaidh,”
although none of them remembered the young man who had fathered him in another century and who died on the winter skidway in the snow near Bangor, Maine.
    “He has always stood by us,” said Grandma. “He has always been loyal to his blood. He has given us this chance.” “This chance” involved the story of how my grandparents became dwellers of the