Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (25 page)

Mrs. Lew’s husband, Lew Reynolds, built Mr. McGowan’s boat, and we watched him as it all came together over the course of nearly a year. It was like watching the unfolding of a mystery, Mr. Lew quietly going about the task, shaving and bending boards, tapping and chiselling as if he had all the time in the world—never uttering a word. Lew is hard of hearing, so, quite possibly, he wasn’t aware that we were there watching. Or maybe it’s because boat builders are like artists and, when they’re at work, they’re conscious only of the job they’re doing.

He built a beautiful boat. It looks like the smack that comes around to buy lobsters, a little cabin on front and a long, open area behind. And though Mr. McGowan is a storekeeper, he was unusually generous in letting kids aboard the new boat and taking us for rides around the strait. Sometimes he even let us fish over the side or from the stern as the boat was moving. And sometimes we’d catch mackerel or pollock.

That day the strait was full of boats. I read afterwards that there were a hundred. And, in the middle of them, this big grey giant, HMCS
Quebec,
now moving closer to the causeway. With her massive guns
pointed at the sky and sailors in their white hats and bell-bottoms lined up along the rails watching and waving as we slowly sailed around them, nobody said a word, we were so amazed.

Mr. McGowan was going to watch everything from the boat, but I had work to do, so he brought me ashore.

And sure enough, when I arrived at the canteen, the papers were there ahead of me. A massive stack of them—each one weighed a ton. I’d be able to carry only a few at a time—a minor problem on a day like this.

Then I started noticing a lot of people wandering around with the newspaper under their arms already. And they hadn’t bought any from me.

It didn’t take me long to figure things out. Not far from the canteen, a group of grown men who should have had better things to do that day were milling around a whole
truckload
of newspapers shouting, “POOOOOST RECK-ERD…COME AND GET YER POOOOST RECK-ERD…SPECIAL EDITION, ON SALE HERE…”

I felt sick, and I wanted to ask them what they thought they were doing, taking over my turf without so much as telling me in advance.

Frustrated, I went back to the canteen and just stood there, looking at the stack of giant papers and, in the background, listening to the city guys hollering as if they were back on a street corner in stinking Sydney, where everybody is too loud and pushy anyway.

And I said: “To hell with them.”

I walked away and left the papers where they were, and joined the crowd and the historic day.

It’s all a blur when I try to remember details. They say there were more than 40,000 people, and I believe it. One reporter writing in a Toronto paper afterwards said 50,000, and I can believe that too. The reason I know about the Toronto story is that everybody was saying the reporter
is actually from here—William MacEachern from Judique. And how exciting it is that one of Johnnie and Phemie MacEachern’s crowd is a famous newspaper reporter in Toronto, where people from here usually get work only in factories or digging ditches.

The sun never broke through, but nobody noticed. Neither did it rain. The roads and hilltops were packed everywhere you turned. The air was filled with a dull rumbling, and I eventually realized it was the sound of excitement. All those people talking at once—and cars and buses coming and going.

The speeches and the formal ceremony were on the mainland side. I couldn’t get near it for all the people packed on the causeway. C.D. Howe, a big Cabinet minister from Ottawa, cut a ribbon with an old claymore—a sword—and Angus L.’s widow later cut a cake with it. They said the claymore was used in the Battle of Culloden, more than two centuries ago. I don’t know a thing about the battle, but they say we’re all here because of it. I was wondering about all the blood and rust, and how they got it sharp enough for the ribbon or clean enough for the cake.

There were loads of big shots making speeches. Mr. Donald Gordon from the CNR seemed to go on all afternoon. But the only speech the people here were talking about afterwards was the one by Angus L.’s brother, Father Stanley Macdonald.

They asked Father Stanley to say a few words in Gaelic, but they gave him only a minute. After he complained, they backed down and gave him two minutes. And from what I hear, he used the whole two minutes to talk about how ignorant the people from Ottawa were, trying to limit the one speech of the day in the language of Adam and Eve to a minute or even two minutes. But how he forgave them because you had to remember that Ottawa was still a young and unsophisticated place compared to here.

Half the crowd was laughing and applauding because they understood,
and when the dignitaries on the grandstand saw this enthusiasm, they all started applauding too, because, I guess, they figured he was flattering them the way they were all flattering each other in their speeches. And that made the people in the crowd laugh even harder.

They were saying afterwards that surely Angus L. and all the other Gaelic speakers, including Adam and Eve, were up there in heaven laughing their heads off too. And that, if Mother Nature had her way, it would have rained on everything, but that Angus L. put a stop to that, even if he couldn’t arrange sunshine.

And when it was over, HMCS
Quebec
shattered the sky with a salute from her massive guns. And, suddenly, air force jets were screaming out of the clouds and roaring down the strait, causing the birds hiding on the naked flank of Cape Porcupine to scatter in a panic.

Then a pipe band struck up a lament for Angus L. Macdonald. And, when they were finished, all four hundred pipers there stepped out in their kilts and sporrans and spats and their cocky little hats, cheeks bulging and faces red. And, with chanters and drones a-howl, they walked across the Road to the Isles as if marching into battle with the whole world walking behind them.

Although I’m only twelve, I think I can say there has never been a day like this in all of Nova Scotia. Nor will there ever be again. The crowd crossed the causeway and, where it joins the road to the north, they turned left and marched all the way to Murdoch MacLean’s field in Newtown, where thousands more were waiting to begin the party.

And then it was Sunday morning, as though it had never happened. Everything was gone, except for the causeway and the expectations.

Afterwards I found out that Old John had a lot on his mind, though you’d never have noticed. Coming and going around the time of the official opening, he was like everybody else—kind of high on all the attention the place was getting from outsiders. Of course, he was part of the big project that created all the buzz, and he seemed to take an even greater pride in his camp the closer they got to the end of the job. It was only much later that I found out some of the details about the family in Hungary and how he dreamed of bringing them to Canada. And about the legacy he thought he could recover from the Communists after old Joe Stalin died and things loosened up in what the papers called the satellite countries.

Whatever his problems, Old John was unfailingly friendly, but you sensed that on some days he had to work harder to project good cheer. And it was only much later that I was able to put things together and realize that the little hints of despair behind the smiles and chatter were tied to the ups and downs in his personal life. And the significance of the fact that, though he was living here, his personal life was somewhere else and he had no control over it. That can’t be easy for anybody. When you’re a kid, it’s as if you’ve got brown stuff for brains sometimes.

It took me a long time to realize how much he had in common with my father. Living in a bunkhouse; eating in a cookhouse; family far away
and somehow cut off by politics and economics. Both foreigners, in a way. My father was born here, as were his father and grandfather. But English was also his second language, and his education wasn’t good enough for here either. He and Old John had a common dream: to live among the people who mattered most to them. And they always seemed to be frustrated in reaching that simple goal, so accessible, it seemed, to everybody else around me—Ian and Billy Malone and the Camerons, the Cloughs and McGowans and the Walkers. And yet, somehow, Old John and my father were able to keep the frustrations and the disappointments to themselves, so you never really understood what made them tick until after it was too late. As far as I know, they never met.

Looking back, I suppose the place was full of men like that—in the construction camps and on the dredge and tugboat. I’d be running into them every day as I went around delivering the paper, and they always made me feel special—talking to me as if I mattered, paying me extra for the papers, and stuffing me with food, which I found strange at the time. It was only later that I figured it wasn’t really me they were talking to or feeding. I was just a substitute for other people.

It’s peculiar how quickly we adjust to new circumstances. New people come, and it’s as though they were always here. Or they die, and soon fade from the mind. Even before the official opening, it was as if the causeway had always been there. The traffic was heavier, and you had to be more careful on the road. Angus Walker’s canteen was busier, which greatly improved Mrs. Lew’s cheer. Robert Morrison opened a new Esso station where Johnny Morrison had his forge. Mr. Clough no longer had the only gas pumps in the village, and his big round Texaco sign suddenly looked old-fashioned. But that didn’t seem to
bother him. He still had his political drag and his customers, and his store was still the centre of attention at mail time. But the new gas station suddenly became the place to hang around, at least for young guys who were keen on cars and talking dirty. Morrison’s service station became the place to go if you were looking for excitement. There was always a card game in progress. The older boys with girlfriends would be exchanging French safes, which they stored in their wallets, probably just for show so you’d think they were really doing things that only married grown-ups do. They’d never think of playing cards or dare to pass around French safes at Mr. Clough’s at the mail or any other time.

Before long, Charlie Beaton and his wife, Catherine, opened a new canteen on the north side of the gas station. Later they hired Jean Laidlaw to work there with them. Small stuff, but nobody doubted that there were big things coming in the near future.

People were optimistic, but I kept expecting the bottom to fall out of the paper business. The camps would inevitably close. The dredge and tugboat would finish up the canal work sooner or later. But it seemed that there was plenty left to do and, as the summer dissolved into autumn, I relaxed. Old John was still running the camp and saving the empty beer bottles for me, and the cook on the dredge was still throwing perfectly good pork chops at the seagulls, just to watch them fight among themselves—or to see the shock on my face.

If there was one remaining question mark, it had to do with my father’s plans. That one wasn’t so easy to defer. You knew that the trucking was just about finished, at least until they got serious about the new Trans-Canada Highway. That still seemed to be a distant prospect, with at least a long winter to endure before anything would happen here. According to the papers, the politicians in Halifax and Ottawa were still haggling over who was going to pay for it.

I’d find myself eyeballing the canvas duffel bag in the barn when I’d be out there to feed Beulah or to fetch a hod of coal or an armload of firewood. Just wondering. Or watching him for evidence of restlessness, or the slack-faced vacant look that was the usual sign of trouble. Or listening for the quiet conversations with people like Angus Jim Malcolm, or his old buddies Neil MacAskill and Harry Taylor, or John Duncan Beaton about new mining prospects in strange places, or a new shaft somewhere with Paddy Harrison. Young fellows from around the county were coming home smelling of cologne in fancy cars with fender skirts from some place called Elliot Lake, where the money was just pouring into their pockets. But the duffel bag showed no sign of disturbance as it gathered dust and cobwebs in the corner of the threshing floor where he put it after Stirling.

Then, through The Hole in the floor, I noticed that small snatches of conversation were starting to take on a particular shape. Gradually I realized it was the shape of a plan, and that the plan was a project, and the project was another sawmill. The old man was going into business—again.

I started praying again, and I reminded God that, while I hadn’t actively discussed it for a while and was once briefly distracted by the eyes and smile of a girl named Joyce, I was still committed to my end of our bargain.

It was early September and raining as I sloshed through the mud down by the canal, heading towards the machine shop where I was usually able to unload a paper or two. Even if I didn’t, I loved going there just to watch the welders. Next to the drillers, I loved watching the welders, with their ferocious torches and face-guards that made them look like spacemen. They were like heavyweight wrestlers flinging around the heavy tanks of oxygen and acetylene gas,
and fearless as they manipulated daggers of blue fire to cut through solid steel. Plus, it was always warm in the machine shop.

This day it was cool and wet outside, and I hadn’t even looked at the paper I was selling. One of the welders spied me in the doorway and said he wanted one. I handed it to him, and he told me to keep the change from the dime as he unfolded it for a quick glance.

I was putting the dime away when he exclaimed: “Well, I’ll be gad-damned.”

“What?” I asked.

And he started to laugh, and slapped his thigh with a heavy glove.

“Sonofabitch,” he said.

“What are you reading?”

“You don’t read your own paper?” he said in amazement. “Look at this.”

There it was in the middle of the front page: “Facing Gallows: Coffin Escapes…”

“Let me see,” I said.

“Good for him,” he said cheerfully, pointing at the paper.

The headline continued: “…but Recaptured.”

Then he frowned as he continued reading.

“Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“He was in the clear…then he went back.”

He read some more, shaking his head.

“He’s fu…
finished
now.”

The paper was vague on the details, but the whole place was buzzing with the news. Even my mother, who believes that people usually get what they deserve, was disappointed. She’d been saying all along that Coffin was innocent, and this was all the proof anybody needed. He was being railroaded by the
Fraingaich
in Quebec to appease the Americans. And good for him for taking matters into his own hands.
And surely anybody with common sense would realize that a guilty man wouldn’t just march back into the lion’s den the way Bill Coffin did.

My father smiled but didn’t say anything. And I had this feeling that he could see the future, and that it wasn’t good.

The paper the next day had more details. Coffin made a fake gun out of soap, then fooled five jail guards in Quebec City; escaped, flagged down a taxi, rode around for a while…then told the taxi driver who he was and that he was on the run!

What was he thinking?

The taxi driver says, Hey…just take the car, head for the Trans-Canada…keep on going. If he’d taken that advice, I bet they’d never have heard of him again. Certainly not if he’d headed this way.

Instead, he gets the taxi driver to take him to his lawyer’s place, and the lawyer persuades him that his best chance for survival is to put himself back in jail.

It was September 7, and he was scheduled to be hanged September 23. But he took the lawyer’s advice and went back to jail anyway.

Lawyers.

I had my doubts about this mill plan, but I guess when you look out the window and see a new car in the lane and a reasonably new truck parked in front of it, and the old fellow in pretty good cheer and sober all the time, you tend to get optimistic.

I had some vague memories of the last mill, but they were still kind of warm and rosy. I guess I was only about four years old then, but I remember some of it clearly. I remember the men pouring steamy mugs of tea from big pitchers and the sweet smells indoors and out. I remember how the trees whispered when the new day was starting up and the fringe of pink on the clouds between the deep green of the tree line and the empty blue of the early morning sky. And long sunny
days exploring as far as I dared on soft rutted roads that vanished into an endless forest full of bears and
bocans.
And voices in the night, men talking and laughing quietly. And sometimes louder, if there was a jug of moonshine on the go, which was when there would also be singing. Some guy chanting a few lines through his nose, and everybody else joining in at the chorus, and the feet banging out the steady rhythm, as if they were marching slowly. And the daytime roar of engines, and my father’s uncle, Dan L. MacIntyre, face grim, hand on the lever that sent the log flying back and forth past the screaming saw that was visible only when it stopped, and fresh lumber tumbling and releasing a sweet sticky perfume.

All warm memories, but surrounded by shadows and confusing feelings of something lost.

I suppose I could have remembered the whole scene back then if I’d really worked at it. But I didn’t, and I guess that’s the way bad memories are. You don’t really notice them until you absolutely have to, which you might never have to do if you’re lucky. You don’t remember the urgent conversations when an engine suddenly stopped or somebody discovered something wrong with the sweet white lumber. Or a truck, at some crucial moment, stalled on a lonely roadside with the hood up. Or your mother walking into the middle of the Gaelic moonshine singsong and everything going quiet suddenly, until you could hear only the creaking insects in the dark outdoors and the hollow sound of your own blood inside your head.

Being busy makes it easy to avoid the shadows, and I was very busy. Grade eight was tough, and every day I’d go straight from school to Mrs. Lew’s to pick up the papers. I’d make my rounds, racing against the evening. Then home and chores and supper and homework. In addition, selling papers got me interested in the news, and I discovered that the world is full of stories far more interesting than anything that ever happened here, or even in the story books I borrow. Stories in the
news never seem to end. They’re like the serials they show before the movies in Rocky Hazel’s theatre in town. Always new developments, and you’re always left hanging from one day to the next.

Some stories were special and jumped out from the page because of things I already knew. Miss Annie Christie had told me about China and the Communists who changed everything there. And so I noticed that hardly a day went by without something on the Americans and the Chinese and the United Nations and the danger of another war. I’d be thinking how unhappy poor Miss Christie must be now, with all this animosity. And, of course, I kept watching for something to happen in Hungary. Old John wouldn’t say much, but it seemed he had inside information that whatever happened would be good for everybody. Sometimes I wondered if he was really some kind of a secret agent and his job at the camp was just a false front. A lot of the older people here still think that anybody with a foreign accent is a spy. This, of course, is changing, now that there’s a steady stream of strangers through the place.

And there was the Coffin story. It was particularly interesting because I knew somebody who knew him. And there was something familiar about him. He was from Quebec, but the way they talked about him he could have been from here. A poor fellow always out on the edge of things, struggling to get ahead, but never getting the breakthrough. A fellow from the middle of nowhere with a case of perpetual bad luck.

A couple of days after he went back to jail, Coffin’s lawyer asked the court to postpone the hanging which, after all, was only days away. It seems that only one of the nine judges in the Supreme Court made the decision not to listen to his argument that he’d been railroaded by the police and lawyers and judges and politicians in Quebec. Some of the other eight were indicating they might have made a different decision. Coffin’s lawyer wanted a chance to talk to all of them.

Then I read that the hanging was postponed until October 21.
Maybe the lawyer wasn’t such an idiot after all.