Small town life sacraments

Buddhism calls “everyday sacraments”—loyalty in a marriage, the constancy of old friendships, good neighbours. That’s the real magic Macy understands.

Bill Kittredge, another Cascadia-affiliated writer, has noted that as a writer if you’re not flirting with sentimentality, you’re not in the ball park. Macy’s stories sometimes flit near that candle flame, but that doesn’t mean nostalgia for a romanticized past with the moral narrowing that can bring. Smart artists know nostalgia never goes out of fashion. It reinvents itself a step away from the age confronting it. Macy’s Vancouver Island isn’t too far off Jack Hodgins’ fabled territory. People complain, help each other out, indulge in superbly rendered platitudes during family gatherings as in “House, Waving Goodbye,” where no one’s life has turned out quite as hoped for by a widowed mom and grandmother. Even the title story itself is a bittersweet hymn to hermits and off-the-grid loners that the Courtenay-Merville area has always attracted, including a loopy old geezer that the story narrator says he’d “been carrying in my heart the past week.” There’s a glimpse here of the realizations that might come from long, solitary retreats along the Tsolum River in close company with wild critters that pad around in frozen winter without any shoes or socks on.

Harold Macy has written a previous collection of stories and a novel from his acreage in the rural community of Merville where he continues to live with his wife, Judy Racher.

Harold Macy has written a previous collection of stories and a novel from his acreage in the rural community of Merville where he continues to live with his wife, Judy Racher.

“Gelignite,” one of the collection’s best, offers insight into why an Okanagan farm–raised wife might simply drive off one day after thirty years of marriage, encounter a stranger in a Princeton pub, and venture even further. You can hear echoes of Jane Rule and Anne Cameron in her voice when she says, “How often do you get another chance?”

The bush is another country. Macy’s known it forever. “Unclipped” and “Into the Silverthrone Caldera” depict the shattering side of life when horrendous job-site accidents or catastrophic mash-ups crash like lightning, destroying everything utterly. Taut moral fables like “Donkey Shame” and “Ditch Clothes” depict paying-it-forward justice when The Other finally arrives in a strange reversal of fate reminiscent of Alice Munro at the controls.

The book’s one long-form contribution, “Overburdened,” relates a tale of Gulf Island migrant newcomers, land developers and the mechanics of sub-soil resource “harvesting.” Achieving moments of real narrative sophistication, there’s plot and a mystery that’s too BC to be purely invented, but what a fine yarn it is. Unless you’ve lived your entire life in downtown Vancouver, everyone in BC has a little bit of country in them, don’t they? That’s just enough to savour these welcome accounts from a wily storyteller who knows what it’s all about.

9781990776007