Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (10 page)

My heart is beating faster as I race home with the news. I can remember another Christmas, long ago, when the talk about the Christmas COD would make you feel afraid and sad.

But it’s different now. That was the Christmas when we didn’t know where he was. We didn’t know if he had a job or not. And people with serious faces would be coming around asking where Dan Rory was, and my mother would be saying, “Believe me, I’d like to know as much as the next person.”

This Christmas he’s home. For good, at last.

Late in November the Christmas music starts, and you get the special feeling. And going for the mail becomes a big adventure.

Christmas is particularly welcome this year because everyone is talking about prosperity and the future. Everyone is talking at the store about the jobs available for miners over on Cape Porcupine, and for trucks on both sides of the strait. Building the causeway was all about drilling and blasting and hauling rocks in trucks.

I’d been hearing the talk for years, wondering: would there be work for him here, finally? When he was in Stirling, he’d come home on a Friday night. There would be no talk about the causeway. Sunday afternoon he’d go away again, as usual. Even after the first big blast in the fall of ’52. It was as if there was nothing happening here.

I’d be reading in the newspaper that comes from Sydney about thousands of miners who live in places like Glace Bay and Dominion, New Waterford and Sydney Mines, where there have been coal mines for at least a hundred years. There are more than ten thousand coal
miners working. That’s what the paper said when they were all threatening to go on strike.

“What’s a strike?”

“It’s when people who have jobs refuse to work.”

“What?”

“It’s complicated. It’s all about belonging to a union. When you belong to a union you get to have a say in how much you work and how much you get paid. And you can stop working if you don’t like what they’re giving you.”

“Does my father belong to a union?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“It’s a long story. Anyway, your father isn’t a coal miner.”

I can tell that coal miners live like ordinary people. They live in towns. They go to work and then come home. They go to church on Sundays and play at sports—boxing, ball, or hockey.

My father, who is a hard-rock miner, hardly ever gets to church and has never played a sport.

Once I asked: “Why can’t you work in a coal mine and come home every day when you are finished working?”

He told me: “A coal mine is a death trap.”

I remembered all the stories in the paper about coal miners killed in underground explosions. And I remembered that the only explosions in the hard-rock mine are the ones you make yourself to break the rock.

“You do what you have to do to make a living,” he says. “Some people will work in coal mines. More power to them.”

“What about the union?” I asked.

“What about the union?”

I know that coal is dangerous. We buy it from Port Hood and burn it
in the stove along with wood. Every so often you’ll hear a pop in the stove, and a piece of coal will snap. Sometimes you can see blue flame hissing out of a burning lump of coal.

Once a house blew up in Glace Bay, and nobody could figure why. Maybe gas leaked in from underground. They found the family just sitting there in the smoking ruins that had been their house and was now completely gone. A little girl was killed. The mother went stone blind.

Then the truth came out. The men in the house were bootleg miners, which means they earned a living digging coal illegally. They dug their own mine where the coal seam came close to the surface, not far from where they lived. To make the digging easier, they stole some dynamite from the coal company.

But the dynamite was wet and wouldn’t light, so they put it in the oven of the kitchen stove to dry and forgot to tell the women it was there.

You do what you have to do to earn a living. And yes, there are worse places than Stirling, I thought.

Last spring, just before my father took a holiday for the coronation and borrowed his brother’s car, one of our excursions was to Stirling, to see the mine where he’d been working.

After driving for what seemed like hours over dusty roads, we came to a cluster of buildings, like a small frontier village. There were little houses, and I wondered who lived in them. He pointed out a peculiar structure that stood tall above the others, and he told us it was the head frame, the entrance to the mine. Beneath it was a shaft that went straight down and, branching out from the shaft, there were tunnels he called drifts. Among the drifts there were other tunnels, and caverns called cross-cuts and raises and stopes. A long, low building nearby, he said, was the mill. This was where the rock they brought through the drifts and up the shaft would be ground into powder and the metals
extracted. You could hear a terrible racket of roaring and crashing and crushing coming from the mill.

Then he said, “Let’s take a look at the head frame.”

It was freezing cold inside the building. The floor was made of concrete. There was rusty equipment everywhere. Lying on the floor were long drills my father said were used for boring holes into the rock. Some of the holes would go in twelve feet. Others would be shorter, and they’d all be drilled in a special pattern. Then they’d load the holes with dynamite. And he explained that it was freezing in the head frame because of the damp, cold air rushing up from underground. Underground is cold and wet, he said.

“That’s how I got piles,” he says.

It’s an old joke.

“Piles of what,” I say.

“Piles of money,” he says. And we both laugh, every time.

Inside the entrance to the shaft I could see heavy greased cables moving silently. Up. Down. Stopping mysteriously. Taking off again. Gusts of sour mist billowing from the darkness. I wanted to go and look down, but he told me not to.

Then a sudden chatter of sound and a crash and the low swinging door blocking the shaft swung open, and there were bobbing lights and men with hard hats and dirty faces and wet rubber overalls jostling out of a metal box my father called the “cage.” The cage runs up and down the shaft all day, taking the men down to their working places, then back up again, transporting the dynamite and the tools they need to do their work.

The miners all seemed to be happy to be back in the daylight and the fresh air, talking loudly and laughing. And they all knew him and shouted as they passed. He seemed embarrassed. He was one of them, but standing with us seemed to create an uncomfortable distance between him and his friends. Two worlds side by side, vast differences exposed.

You feel like that sometimes, standing with your friends and a parent shows up.

And after that he took me to the mill, and when we were leaving he gave me a Maxwell House coffee can half filled with a fine grey powder for a souvenir.

“Zinc concentrate,” he said. “One of the things we find down there in all the rock.”

“What’s it for?”

“Well, now. You’ll have to ask somebody else. Anything that zinc is in.”

I sniffed the can, and the powder smelled sour and vaguely rotten, like the taste in your mouth when you have a terrible headache.

He took us to the cookhouse to eat, and the place was crowded with large, noisy men hunched over long tables, eating, arguing, drinking mugs of coffee, smoking cigarettes. And then there were the older ones, pale, grey-headed old men, sitting alone and staring into space.

“You could come home,” I said. “Work in the daylight. Over on Cape Porcupine.”

“We’ll see,” he said. “One of these days, we’ll see.”

Then, of course, I’m home again. And the house is, once again, half empty. And once again I pass the time with books and stories of sailing ships and the silent wind transporting you to far-off places. I stand in the window, trying to remember Stirling, which was unlike any place I’d ever seen. And there is a freighter paused almost motionless in the strait, as if contemplating this foreign presence suddenly blocking the way in front of it. The causeway, like the armoured back of a giant serpent, now more than halfway across. Taking over, soon to be master of the ancient waterway. I can imagine the men on the ship, studying their charts, puzzled by this new obstacle.

Then the ship is gone, except in the mind and in the dreams.
Stirling is soon forgotten, until I remember the men emerging from the cage, loud and strong and fearless, faces smeared from dust and sweat. Only the eyes are clear as the white teeth when they laughed at my father, standing there in his Sunday clothes with us, the people from his other world. I still see him embarrassed to be clean and dry and idle among the women and the kids.

Before we left Stirling, we stopped to see a friend of his. The friend’s name was Danny Shaw. We sat in the car while he and Danny Shaw walked a short distance away and stood talking beside a large truck. Then they walked around the truck, examining it carefully. My father opened a door and climbed in and sat behind the wheel for a moment. Then he got out and seemed about to climb underneath.

Then he stood up, slapping his hands together to remove the dirt.

When he returned to the car, my mother asked: “What do you think?”

“I think that’s the ticket,” he said.

Christmas is the one time of the year when money doesn’t seem to matter. Gifts and food appear as if by magic. Worries disappear.

I ran for home with news of the COD from Simpsons, the dog ahead at first but then doubling back to urge me to go faster, swinging behind me and passing me repeatedly, whirling in excitement because he knew as well as I do what Christmas means.

The COD is the conclusive sign, but the weather is always the first indicator. After Halloween the trees are bare, leaves that were red and gold and orange all through October are now congealed in soggy, rotting piles that are, on chilly mornings, covered with a furry-looking frost. Cold rains flatten the dead brown grass in ditches and in the fields. The chilly air is heavy with the smell of fermenting apples.

The week before Christmas, the dog and I will go to the woods with an axe the way we always do. Over the hill and past Jack Reynolds’s, where there used to be a stagecoach depot. Past Alex MacKinnon’s, where the railwaymen sit in their undershirts on the doorstep on the warm summer evenings. Past Mrs. Eva Forbes’s, the widow who has plum trees in her yard and a big piano that she sometimes lets my sister Danita and her friend Annie MacKinnon play on. All the way out through Big Ian MacKinnon’s back field.

We follow a track that probably was once a road, around the edge of the field, past a clearance that used to be a farm they still call LaFave’s, until we are now behind the cove where they used to quarry gypsum. I pretend that the axe is a rifle and that we are Indian scouts, defending our village from all the white explorers. I would like to get a real rifle for Christmas, but I’m probably too young. The house could use a rifle, I believe, for when he isn’t here.

There is a high waterfall that crashes over ice-encrusted rocks at the bottom. I go carefully around that obstacle, and then back on the path that leads to Happy Jack’s Lake. Red squirrels chatter and rabbits dive for cover in bushes, with the dog darting after them.

The lake is frozen. The older boys believe it was formed by a meteor from outer space and that it has no bottom. They skate there when the ice gets thick enough. I have skates, but they don’t fit me yet. They belonged to a miner who was killed in Newfoundland. My father told me I can use them just as soon as my feet are big enough to fill them. I asked him what happened to the man who owned the skates, and he says he’ll tell me some day when I’m older.

Near Happy Jack’s Lake, as usual, I’ll find the perfect tree. The dog will bark in approval as I chop it down, feeling the glow of knowing I have done the man’s work and that my mother and Grandma Donohue will rave about it.

Then we’ll open the door of the dining room to let the heat in.
And one evening, when the room is warm enough, we’ll stand the tree in a corner and decorate it.

On Christmas morning I will join my sisters in their bedroom, which is just above the dining room, and we’ll look down through the hole in the floor of their room to see what’s there, underneath the tree. It will still be dark, but we have a secret way for turning on the light that hangs on a wire in the middle of the ceiling. It was my invention, the first Christmas after we got electricity in the house: I tie a string to the chain that turns the light on, run the string down and through the rung of a chair, then back up through the hole.

Early Christmas morning we gather round the hole. I pull the string. The room is suddenly illuminated. We take turns peering down, figuring out who got what.

Then I pull the string again. The room with all its Christmas riches is lost again in darkness. We return to our beds and begin the long wait for daylight.

Once my father showed me a large photograph of a group of men in rubber working clothes and with lamps attached to the front of their hard hats. That was in Newfoundland, he said, where I was born.

The miners were standing in front of the head frame, everybody smiling and looking full of mischief.

“This,” he said, pointing to one of the men, “is the one whose skates you inherited.”

The dead man was standing beside my father with a big grin on his face and not a clue that he would soon be gone.

And now it is Christmas, and this year he won’t be coming home because he’s already here. He is our father again, no longer just a visitor from somewhere else.

My Aunt Veronica is like us. Her husband, Mickey MacNeil, had to go away for work. Mickey MacNeil is a milkman in Toronto, and obviously the people in Toronto don’t pay their milkmen very much because Mickey hardly ever comes home. My aunt is always taking on hard jobs here to support herself and her two little boys, Barry and John Blaise. She works so hard that sometimes she gets sick. She used to work for priests, cleaning their houses and cooking for them. I’ve heard her tell stories about keeping the fires going in the big Glebe house fireplaces while the priests sat around keeping warm, drinking brandy, and discussing fine points of theology.