ALL THE MEN ARE SLEEPING

Fifteen stories set in MacDonald’s apocryphal community and birthplace, Cape Breton Island.

“As kids Carmichael and his brother knew it was up north in Nova Scotia they came from, Cape Breton, referred to sometimes as down home or down east, from the taking patterns of sailing ships.” This is about as direct a reference to the place as we get in a large and emotionally potent second collection (after Eyestone, 1988): stories gathered around that single community, true, but much more interested in the subtle points of character than in blind adherence to a single place. The first, “The Flowers for Bermuda,” tells of a lobster fisherman, finding his faith, already strained by the death of his son, tested even further when he receives a postcard from a minister friend who is about to be stabbed and killed by thugs while on a trip to a supposedly better place. A mysterious man in “Green Grow the Grasses O” returns to Cape Breton to tempt two local women into reenacting a happy forgotten moment of his father’s, and to offer them some small bit of adventure in otherwise sheltered lives. Another man returns for a voyage (“Sailing”) of remembrance with his widower dad, a trip that will prove to be of ambiguous emotional purchase: “I stare into the vortex the ivy makes and imagine that black hole my father will wither into . . . . All I know, for certain, is that we are sailing.” An aging beachcomber recluse and a jilted divorcée looking for escape take solace in each other (and in some moonshine and a batch of wacky tabacky, washed ashore) when their predicaments suddenly give them a good deal in common. And in “Holy Annie,” a family recoils, in the wake of a father’s death by alcohol, into the kind of bickering that can only speak of vulnerability and a deeper love.

The real world intrudes only rudely on MacDonald’s sanctified town (Cape Breton Road, 2001): a place where love manages to thrive despite the onslaught.