Each Man's Son by Hugh Maclennan Page B

clansmen had spent in the pits. The young ones were defiant, cocky in the way they walked, and they pulled their rough caps down over theirright ears like tam-o’-shanters. They were the ones who could be heard issuing a general challenge to a fight. The middle-aged ones were quieter, they moved slowly and talked little, seeming older than their age, and most of them were beginning to be plagued with sciatica and what they called the rheumatics. If a man had been in the pits beyond his fifty-fifth year, particularly in those mines with narrow seams, Ainslie’s eye could measure fairly accurately how many more working years that man had before him. The young ones swaggered and the middle-aged ones could feel the break coming in their leg pains and their unspoken fears, but ultimately the mines would break them all. Those who survived accidents would become like the two white-haired men Ainslie passed near the corner, sitting side by side on the curb with sticks for support between their knees, their faces ennobled by the tremendous fact of survival, grave and white under the flickering arc light.
    As the mare threaded her way through MacDonald’s Corner, the T-shaped area of macadam which was the only social center most of the miners had ever known, the place where Archie MacNeil had got his start, several of the men touched their caps to the doctor as he passed, and he answered them with nods or an occasional word. The mare turned right and began to pull up the hill that led to the hospital, pushing with her hind legs so that her rump muscles bulged and glistened with sleek high lights whenever a lamppost was passed. Halfway up the hill they met the Salvation Army band marching down, instruments glinting brassily in the lights, only the bass drum booming to keep the men in step, and twelve women in black bonnets with red ribbons clapping their hands as they followed. Ainslie scarcely noticed them, for the Army always established itself in the middle of MacDonald’s Corner on Saturday nights, timing its first hymns to coincide with the moment the first drunks staggered up from the rum shops in the lower part of the street.
    The mare reached the top of the hill where the hospital stood like a lighthouse over the whole town. Ainslie tethered the horse in the yard behind the building, picked up his bag and walked briskly through the yard and around the front to the steps. When he opened the door and smelled the familiar odors of the building he felt a sensation of pleasure that began to relax the tense muscles of his back. Here was his own world where his skill had made him a master. He saw Miss MacKay rustling starchily down the corridor to meet him. His feeling of certainty grew and he began to smile.

 
    Five
    N IGHT FELL over the island and the moonlight picked out its shape like the claws of a lobster from the surrounding dark of the sea. The claws were ringed around by a faint line of white as groundswells crumbled against the shores, washed luminously and faded out. Inland the shadows turned with slow gravity in the hills as the moon went up the sky. The rivers and the windows of lonely farmhouses gleamed as the rays of light struck them. A soft breeze carried balsam-laden air into the packed area of Broughton, where the miners’ rows looked desolate and the bankheads of the collieries loomed like monuments in a gigantic cemetery.
    The moonlight came into the window of Alan MacNeil’s bedroom, crept across the floor and reached his face. He woke to sounds on the other side of the common wall and knew that the father of the noisy family had come home. He heard Red Willie MacIsaac shouting and his wife telling him to be quiet, but Red Willie went on shouting and Alan could hear his words. He was saying he could whip any man in the collieries, he could whip any man in the world for all of that, and Alan smiled as he thought how small Red Willie would talk if he ever came face to face with his