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town rather than of the country. They had spent their early married years on the
Calum Ruadh
land, living with their in-laws for a while and then constructing their own unfinished house. They were always short of money and uncertain of their future and, apparently, even considered going to San Francisco, where Grandma’s sister, who had married Grandpa’s brother, had already gone and where they seemed to be prospering. But in the end they did not go. “The old people did not want us to go” was one explanation, but it seemed they really did not want to go themselves, although the idea persisted as fantasy, especially with Grandpa when he was in his cups. “I,” he would say, rising unsteadily but grandly from his chair and holding his glass in his hand, “could have gone to San Francisco.”
    For a number of years, as their children came, they lived the uncertain “normal” lives of their time; Grandma washing herclothes in the brook and slapping them on the rocks and tending her precious garden in its stony soil. Grandpa fishing in the waters off the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point for a while in summer, and caring for his animals and working haphazardly in the woods in winter.
    When they began to construct the new hospital in the town ten miles away, my other grandfather began to work there as a carpenter and eventually to take small contracts on certain portions of it, and when it began to rise above the ground as a sort of monument to the future sick, few people knew as much about it as did he. He realized that when it was completed it would have to be maintained, and decided to groom Grandpa for the job. “He would come at night,” Grandma would say, “with his blueprints all so neat and exact, and I would wipe away everything from the table and he would spread them out and we would study them by the kerosene lamp, and he would point out all the pipes and cables and which connected to which and he would show us how all the newfangled switches and latches worked, and then he would ask us questions, just like the teacher, and invent problems and ask how they might be solved. And sometimes he would explain things in Gaelic. Then he would have one drink of whisky and play a tune on the violin – which always seemed so strange in him, you would never think of him as playing the violin – and then he would go. He never spent the night with us. I used to think it was because we did not have an indoor bathroom and he was always so clean – ‘fastidious’ I heard him called once. Anyway it got so that
I
knew everything about the inner workings of the hospital myself.”
    When it dawned on the authorities that the new hospitalwould need a maintenance man, Grandpa was, as he said, “really ready.” There were apparently some periods of tension when it seemed he might be on the wrong side of politics, but he was so dazzling in his interview that he simply overwhelmed any such opposition and was hired for the job. “I’m all set for life now,” he apparently said, patting his new pipe wrench in his new coveralls. “To hell with San Francisco.”
    This was “the chance,” as I said, that led to my grandparents becoming dwellers of the town instead of dwellers of the country. It was, of course, but a short distance physically, and hardly any mental one at all. They lived on the outskirts of the town and they had a “yard” which consisted of almost two acres and they brought with them their chickens and their pig and their ever-present
Calum Ruadh
dogs, and for a while they even kept a cow. Their relatives visited them constantly, and because the town was also on the sea and because of the indented shoreline, they could look down along the coast and see the point of land from whence they came, and on clear nights they could see the lights glowing like earthbound stars where the distant dark horizon curved down towards the sea.
    They were tremendously happy people, grateful for “the chance,” and never seeming to