Causeway: A Passage From Innocence
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Authors: Linden McIntyre
Tags: #General, #Biography & Autobiography
A Passage from Innocence
Linden MacIntyre
for my mother, Alice Donohue MacIntyre
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village”
Telling Stories by Linden MacIntyre
GETTING LOADED
It is late Saturday morning, and my mother is at the stove fishing the doughnuts out of a dangerous pot of boiling fat. My father is quietly watching her while sipping on an instant coffee and tapping his spoon on the can of Carnation evaporated milk. The top of the can is punctured by two triangular holes, and one has a collar of yellowing acrylic scum. He puts the spoon on the table and reaches past her, plucks a new doughnut from a heaping plate, rolls it around in the sugar bowl, nibbles delicately. His thinning hair is dishevelled, his eyes watery.
“Every so often a fella needs a good blowout,” he says.
The reference is to last night, when we got loaded. Now he’s either still half in the bag or he’s getting reckless in his old age. That might be what a little bit of good luck does to a man who never had much. I’m thinking: he isn’t reading the room; he isn’t picking up the signals.
I’m in the rocking chair near the corner of the stove, maintaining a tactical silence.
There’s the rasping rattle of spitting fat. Another plate of dough balls slides into the bubbling cauldron. I imagine the quiet invocation of spells.
I light a cigarette and, when my mother disappears briefly into the pantry, quietly propose taking our hangovers to town, where
they are less likely to become a topic of conversation. The house is too warm anyway. It is November, but a fat fly is stirring on the window ledge.
The old man shrugs, drains the mug, coughs deeply, then agrees.
We’ll check out the town. Postpone the reckoning.
He winks at me.
I hadn’t seen the town for a year, not since moving the family up to Ottawa, where I have a job on Parliament Hill working for a newspaper. It was a paper I knew nobody around here ever saw because it was all business and finance. You could feel a palpable difference from before, when I was with the Halifax daily and the locals regularly followed what I wrote. It was like having a thousand editors then—every one of them with an opinion, particularly on the politics. But after I went to Ottawa in the fall of ’67, it seemed I’d moved to another planet.
The trip home had been unexpected. Mid-morning the previous day I got a call from a buddy in a minister’s office offering a free lift down. MacEachen and Chrétien had government business in Cape Breton on the weekend. There was a spare seat on the government plane, leaving early evening.
I called home in the middle of the afternoon. The old man promptly volunteered to meet me at the airport in Sydney, two hours away. It was Friday night, and all the liquor stores were open late.
Driving towards town, I couldn’t miss all the changes. The village I grew up in, Port Hastings, and the town, Port Hawkesbury, three miles away, seemed to be in a permanent state of turmoil. Mostly stuff was being torn down to make way for new roads, by the look of it. Houses gone. Roads widened, menacing even the old stores that have
been here forever, Clough’s and McGowan’s. Also the old Captain MacInnis house, where my friend Billy Malone lived for a while. Even Mr. Clough’s lovely old home. All landmarks, and all under the soulless shadow of progress.
It’s hard to believe Mr. Clough has been dead for almost a decade—since ’59. They say it was the Diefenbaker sweep of the country in ’58 that did it, just two years after the Stanfield Tories snatched power from a bereft Liberal Party in Nova Scotia. It was all too much for him—two Tory victories in quick succession. Three, actually: Diefenbaker won a minority first, in ’57. Then he practically exterminated the federal Grits in ’58. Mr. Clough was gone a year later.
Other Liberals would scoff, of course. Mr. Clough was almost eighty, for the love of God. And he had wicked ulcers, anyway. Always optimistic about the future of the place was Mr. Clough. Yes, he’d probably have given up on the whole Western world, seeing Diefenbaker in power. But that would have just made him more determined to live and work like the patriot he was to put a quick end to that anomaly of Canadian history—a Tory majority government in Ottawa.
Who knows with politics?
Just beyond the town, in another old village called Point Tupper, there was a large Swedish wood-pulp mill, and it was about to expand into newsprint. There was talk of other big projects—an oil refinery; petrochemicals; a dock for the largest supertankers in the world; a heavy-water plant that would have something to do with nuclear power. Point Tupper was doomed, but nobody except for a few of the older people there seemed to care. Port Hastings and Port Hawkesbury were the beneficiaries.
It was becoming very exciting, but the main headline was that out of all the commotion and progress, the old man had finally scored the first dependably permanent employment he’d ever had in what
he would call civilization. He was fifty years old. He was born on a mountain just out back. He grew up around here and had his own family and home here for years. But to support himself and us he’d spent most of his adult life living in wilderness camps all over the country and working as a miner, an occupation he’d begun shortly after he turned sixteen, back in what they called “the dirty thirties.”
The new job, he’d explained the night before, was not exactly what he wanted to do with his life, but it was a definite improvement over the miseries of mining camps and long days blowing up rocks in the impenetrable darkness far below the surface of the earth. A steady, well-paid job in the fresh air, it was, good enough for the time being.
“Who is it again you’re working for?” I asked.
“The Nova Scotia Water Resources Commission,” he replied grandly, half mocking the long, vague title.
But it was good work—mostly driving around in his new Volkswagen checking out pipes and pumps and valves and keeping an eye on Landry Lake, the water resource that supplied all the new industry and the expanding town.
It all sounded very boring.
What else did we talk about?
Briefly, my newspaper work, which has to do with government policy and the balance of payments, interest rates, and a lot of abstract economic indicators that seem to reveal the future to the knowledgeable. I told him a bit of inside stuff about the Cabinet ministers on the plane. Allan MacEachen, minister of immigration, is also the local MP and, just months earlier, ran against Pierre Trudeau for the party leadership. And a relative unknown, Jean Chrétien, is in Indian Affairs, but, coming from Quebec, is a stranger hereabouts.
“Just ordinary fellows,” I told my father. “Plain guys like ourselves.” We’d all had a couple of drinks together coming down on the plane.
Speaking of drinks…
“Sure,” he said.
Drinking in the car was pretty normal then, and by Kelly’s Mountain the conversation was quite animated, even if not particularly meaningful. But I could clearly remember that there was a lot of talk about being your own boss, which was a dearly held dream of his from the year naught. Much like writing The Great Canadian Novel was a dearly held dream of younger fellows in the press gallery—something you talked about when you were loaded, and rarely even then.
The truth is that driving to town that Saturday morning, neither of us could remember much of what we’d talked about at all after Kelly’s Mountain. I mostly remember the look of disappointment on my mother’s face when she saw the condition of the pair of us coming through the door. And the artificiality of the conversation that dragged on afterwards, enlivened from time to time by sarcastic remarks from himself as he’d rise suddenly and disappear in the direction of where he’d left his coat—then come back smiling, as if he was fooling everybody.
The cheer improved when she asked about the three kids back in Ottawa. They were, I could report truthfully, great, especially the baby, born in August, who had been named after the old man. Dan.
The old fellow was known far and wide as Dan Rory.
The town was always busy on a Saturday morning. By 1968 the slump that followed the completion of the Canso Causeway thirteen years before was practically forgotten. The mud and dust and machinery of progress were everywhere again. And the noise: massive trucks loaded with sour, sticky pulpwood noisily gearing down for the congestion of cars near the new shopping mall; bulldozers digging holes for new houses, schools, and streets for all the new people they were expecting to move in.
“Somebody was saying the other day that there’s going to be thirty thousand living here by 1980,” he remarked as we rounded the turn at Grant’s Pond.
I scoffed privately. I worked in Ottawa and talked regularly to people who knew the reality. The “limits of growth,” they called it. Plus, we’d heard it all before, back when they were building the causeway.
“Thirty thousand,” I echoed, trying not to sound dubious.
“Bigger than Sydney,” he said.
“Where did we hear that before?” I remarked, sour memories resurfacing.
“Ah well,” he said. Probably doing the math in his head: thirty thousand people plus the service businesses they’ll need mean maybe ten thousand new buildings and umpteen thousand board feet of lumber that will have to come from somewhere. There are few things in the world he loves more than fresh-sawn lumber.
“Ah well,” he said again. “I know what you mean.”
While my father was in the drugstore, I sat drowsing in the car and watching the weekend coming and going. Vaguely familiar people rushing this way and that. Everybody more or less shaped and dressed the same. Burly, round, rumpled men wearing hard hats and vests and muddy work boots. Women in scarves and slacks with bags of groceries, and kids nagging behind them. The scene brought on, as always, a peculiar nervousness. The fear, according to Prinsky, the Dow Jones guy in Ottawa, of getting sucked by sentiment back into your own past. Prinsky and I talked a lot about that sort of thing—our ambiguous connections with home and history.
Prinsky believes home is more or less where they let you settle down, and he doesn’t fully buy into the Celtic notion of belonging to a place—unless you’re a Zionist. We’re both mildly sympathetic to the
Zionists because we can understand where they’re coming from, or going—whichever.
I find a comforting symmetry in a lot of the attitudes of Jews and Celtic Catholics, especially when we’re talking roots and guilt. I saw my father, then, standing with a wino he’d grown up with out back, talking quietly while studying the ground. Eventually he dug something out of his pocket and passed it over in a pretend handshake. He’s exactly twice my age, I thought.
When I’m fifty, I calculated, he’ll be seventy-five. Surely by then we’ll find something meaningful to discuss. He started walking towards the car. I noted that he still had the appearance of considerable physical strength. Shoulders rounded but thick, stout biceps and forearms bulging under the shirt. Hairline receding, but only because of all the years wearing the sweaty Bakelite hard hat.
I felt a brief wave of something like affection. Then he stopped again, talking to some other vaguely familiar stranger, and the ache of tedium returned. Or maybe it was just the hangover.
Prinsky is always quoting Thomas Wolfe, the author of
You Can’t Go Home Again
—always talking about the incompatibility of differing generations. Maybe. But I saw last summer when the parents came up to Ottawa to visit and welcome the arrival of a new grandchild that it was a whole lot more complicated. That summer visit was when I realized that the generation gap wasn’t so much from a cultural incompatibility as from a basic lack of common experience. That was our fundamental problem, my father and I—
quotidian
—a new word I just love. We lack a common quotidian experience.
I know lots of old timers in the press gallery—Norman Campbell, Dick Jackson, Charlie Lynch, John Bird, Warren Baldwin. Ancients, with lives extending long before my own. Fellow travellers through a common patch of history. We never have a problem finding things to talk about.
The parents had timed the trip to coincide with the due date, near the end of August. This would make three grandkids. Ellen was first. Then Darrow came—same year as Ellen. The old man was proud as anything for having come through Montreal in one piece and then finding the place in the west end of Ottawa without asking anyone for directions. The talk came easily that night, and it was all about the new arrival and whether it would be a boy or a girl. It was anybody’s guess. I’d laid in beer and rye to treat the parents.
Day two we did some sightseeing. The House of Commons—you could walk right in. No hassle. The old fellow got a big kick out of sitting in Trudeau’s chair in the middle of the front row on the government side. We fooled around a bit, I pretending to ask the prime minister a question from the opposition benches. Himself pretending to answer. Later we all visited a friend who worked for the Liberal Party and was vacationing in a cottage in the Gatineau Hills near a lake. The cottage had previously been owned by Lester Pearson, the Liberal prime minister before Trudeau. A very fine, down-to-earth man is Mr. Pearson, my parents were informed by our host.
My mother, who is a Tory, just raised her eyebrows.
The old man looked around the modest cabin.
“Well, well,” he said.
Then things started to drag. The baby was late. Days passed, and the charms of Ottawa were soon exhausted.
We went to some of the local watering holes, but it was soon obvious he wasn’t comfortable in any of them. Too much loud music in the bars in Hull. The taverns in Ottawa were either too high class or dives with wet floors and loud regulars who made a racket dragging metal chairs from table to table. Toilets smelled like piss and Creolin, with butts and chewing gum in the urinals. Maybe it reminded him too much of the mining camps.
Wilfred Gillis from home was in town at the time. An exceptional fiddle player in the Cape Breton Celtic style who also spoke quite a bit of Gaelic, Wilfred might perk things up, I thought.
But when I knocked on Wilfred’s door, there was no reply.
“Chan’eil aig an taigh,” said the old fellow, inadvertently lapsing into his mother tongue to acknowledge the obvious fact that Wilfred wasn’t home.