Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (28 page)

Another time he’ll be imitating old Herb Moore, who is a carpenter and rolls his own cigarettes. Herb can spend half a working day rolling a cigarette, squinting and twisting his mouth, sticking his tongue out, and Neil has him down perfectly. People go crazy laughing.

This happens a lot.

Then one afternoon I saw Mrs. McGee sitting at her desk with her head down and, when she lifted it, I could see that her face was red and puffy and there were big tears running down her cheeks. And for
a terrible moment I thought I was going to cry too. A woman crying is one of the worst things, but the older kids didn’t even notice her distress. Or if they did notice, it didn’t matter.

I’m thinking: whoever comes to teach here after she’s gone is going to have her hands full. Little did I know at the time what the future had in store.

In the Big Room, the higher grades get to sit closest to the windows. Grade ten actually sits right next to them. Then there’s grade nine. I’m in grade eight, still close enough to see out. I spend a lot of time just staring at the blue, ice-free strait and the cape, which has gone completely quiet now, half listening to the drone of instruction that will become relevant to me only in the years to come, when I’m in nine and ten.

The opposite side of the strait is quiet. The big Euclids and bulldozers and draglines are gone now. The blasting is finished. The cape has a battered look where they removed the stone. But it’s dramatic, more interesting than before. It’s like a scar on someone’s face. You know there’s a good story behind it.

Soon the work on the canal will be finished. The camps will close. The workers will go away. Old John will find another job, somewhere else, continuing to dream and worry about his absent family. Port Hastings will change into something new. The seeds of prosperity have been planted.

In grade nine they’re talking about the invention of the machine gun. My ears prick up. Mrs. McGee, with a history book in hand, is explaining how the machine gun made it possible for Europeans to colonize Africa. I suddenly see the little black people, brandishing their spears and blow-pipes, running after all these big white men. And the sudden violence of the bullet-spitting machine. And their little bodies in a brown and bloody tangle on the ground.

Even Neil MacIver has a serious look on his face.

Half listening from grade eight, where the details don’t matter yet, I get this dark picture of human progress. History is really about machinery. New machines that add power to the human being. Power to travel longer distances. Power to change what is useless into something of value. Power to dominate.

Sitting nearby, the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen takes my mind away from the stammering machine gun and the writhing African bodies. She is prettier even than the girls you see in movies, including Debbie Reynolds. She is Neil’s sister Mabel.

There are other interesting girls in the room: Sylvia Reynolds, Ann Fraser, Isabel Fox. But lately I’ve become invisible to them as they carry on with the older guys, including Neil. Mabel seems different. And even though she’s older than I am, she sometimes walks with me as I deliver the papers and talks about herself and how she wants her life to be. Once she even revealed her fondest dream: that one day she will become a professional figure skater. That will be difficult because we don’t have a rink. The only decent places to skate are Happy Jack’s Lake, which is deep in the woods behind the cove, and Long Pond, which is down north, by the Ghost Beach. But this doesn’t seem to be a problem for Mabel. And there, beside the road, she suddenly demonstrated the form of a professional figure skater. Standing on one foot with a long leg stretched behind, leaning forward, arms and hands extended, graceful as a gull’s wings, her face suddenly transformed by the imaginary place she’s gone to.

And when she returned, she seemed a little bit embarrassed, so she asked me what I plan to do. I said I wasn’t sure.

And suddenly it was true. Walking along with this friendly, pretty girl telling me about her fondest dreams, I was suddenly filled with a sorrowful confusion about people and their tragic expectations. And how great it would be if dreams came true.

One day in the early spring, Mrs. McGee is interrupted by a roaring sound. It is a sound unlike any of the machinery we became accustomed to during the building of the causeway. A loud racing engine, and then the high-pitched howl of the large saw racing through a log. A momentary drop in the sound, and then the howl of the saw repeated. Over and over again.

People are squirming, confused. Mrs. McGee is trying to get their attention.

“Class…please…pay attention…”

But nobody is listening.

I know exactly what it is, and I want to say aloud: That’s the sound of a dream.

But of course I don’t. And it’s a good thing, too, because by the next day the mill was silent again.

The newspapers forgot about the causeway for a while, turning their attention to the problems of the wider world. With Grace Kelly married, Grandma Donohue was devoting most of her attention to Nasser and making dire predictions about world war three. Then we’d be back in the news. There would be a small story about the planning for the new highway that was going to slash through Cape Breton on its way to Newfoundland. Then hardly a week would pass without another worried story about the future of Mulgrave and Point Tupper and Port Hawkesbury now that the ferries were gone. Speculation about a new pulp mill had a new tone of desperation. All the talk about the causeway in the beginning had been about the wealth it would bring. It was only late in the day when somebody said, “Hang on. We have three or four hundred people who worked at getting cars and trains over to the island. A few of them will get jobs as toll collectors. What about the rest?”

Then a politician would stand up and describe the boom that will follow the causeway because the strait will magically become an ice-free
harbour. Deepest Ice Free Harbour on the Atlantic Seaboard, they say. Potentially bigger and better than Halifax. Hell, they’re saying New York and Boston will be nothing compared to our new harbour.

I look at it every day now. And every day, after the deliveries to the houses and what’s left of the camps, after I’ve visited the dredge and the tugboat, I ride my bicycle across this monument to one man’s stubborn determination. One man from a place even smaller than the village I live in, from a school even smaller than the one I go to, made this happen after fifty years of talk by lesser men. What was his secret?

But in the long run, what does all this mean?

You could tell at first that the men at the toll booth were thinking I’d be interfering with the traffic as I tried to sell my papers. It turns out that my customers hardly have to slow down to complete the transaction. They nod towards the bag, I hand a paper in, they pass back a dime and usually tell me to keep the change. But even if I have to give them the four cents back, there’s hardly any delay. I’m faster at selling my papers to the drivers than the toll collectors are at taking money from them. During the slow periods, I’d let the toll collectors read the paper for free. Then they started buying it. Now they’re friendly. They come out and talk about the news, testing me with hard questions about people like Nasser.

With the arrival of summer, the sawmill was running almost every day. The logs he cut on the mountain during the winter were now piled on skids, ready to be rolled onto the carriage and reduced to boards and planks and firewood. I’d sit on the log pile and watch my father as he stood, flecked with sawdust, lips compressed and eyes squinting, as the terrible saw howled and tore the logs apart. Back and forth the carriage went, relentless, pausing only as he made careful adjustments to ensure the precision of the cut. A small conveyor belt carried sawdust away, and the growing pile became a measure of his success.

He pulled it off, I thought. With his bare hands he put a mill in this field where there had been nothing. With his bare hands he wrestled ancient trees from the icy grip of the mountain and is now converting them to lumber which, in time, he will convert to cash. And he will have arrived then at the fulfillment of his simple dream—to live at home, the master of his own small economy.

One evening at supper he had an amusing story: while picking up the mail at Clough’s, Mrs. Billy MacLean, who is of old quality in the village—a musician and an artist and a pillar of the church—accused him of creating an eyesore in the middle of the village.

“You think,” he said. And he laughed.

“An eyesore? In the middle of this place? Think about it.”

And I did for a moment and quickly saw the humour. The place is full of abandoned buildings. Just below the mill there is an old store once run by another MacLean, and it is falling down. Mrs. Billy herself lives in a homely house that was once a store. One of the few new buildings in the place, Murdoch MacLean’s house in Newtown, is boarded up because he died before he finished it. And the old Quigley place next to us—falling down. The old abandoned coal piers, down by the railway station, are slowly collapsing into the strait. The wharf is rotten.

There are only two things here that aren’t crumbling—the new causeway, and my father’s sawmill.

The village has been falling apart for fifty years, and she thinks a new sawmill is an eyesore?

“She better get used to it,” he says. “The sawmill is just the start. There’ll be a lot of eyesores around before too long. And just in the nick of time, before everybody has to move out. Yes, sirree.”

I felt a lot better about everything. And then he announced that they were going on a vacation.
They.
Mother and father. Just the two of them. Going to Ontario.
Ontario!

A place you only dreamed about—like Boston and Florida and Europe, huge and mysterious. Going to visit Aunt Kay, who is my mother’s sister, and her husband, Angus Brown, who runs a hobby farm for a rich Toronto businessman named Brawley.

“Why can’t we all go?”

“Nope. Not this time.”

Actually, it was a vacation for us too. We stayed at our Aunt Veronica’s and went swimming every day. Her older boy, Barry, was big enough to hang around with by then, and we amused ourselves pretending we were brothers. And it felt oddly exciting. It had never occurred to me that having a brother might be a welcome relief from all the females in our lives. My father being around all the time was unusual. And even when he’s home, he’s struggling against the forces that keep trying to drag him away again. Barry’s father, Mickey, hardly ever comes home—something you don’t talk about. But, I suspect, it was an interesting experience for both of us, having each other.

Barry is more adventurous than I am, and I found myself constantly hauling him back from the brink of small disasters. Always too close to the edge of the cliff, or heading into water that was too deep, climbing into places that were forbidden, making plans for trips to places I knew we’d have a hard time getting back from before dark. But I, in contrast, tend to be too cautious. They say I take everything too seriously, so being with Barry loosened me up.

I draw the line at smoking cigarettes.

The time passed quickly, and they returned from Ontario looking younger and happier than I remembered them. They had photographs of all the places they had been. My only moment of jealousy was when I saw them in raincoats on a boat beneath Niagara Falls. But that’s okay, I thought. Some day I’ll see Niagara Falls myself. And that will only be the beginning. For them, the way they talk about it, the visit to Niagara Falls is like the end of something—an experience they don’t expect to have again.

Then things became strange. I look back now, and it’s like the sky started to grow dark with gathering clouds.

I remember the date only because I’ve gone back to double check. August 11. It was a Saturday. In the morning I noticed Old John walking along the road in the direction of Mr. Clough’s store, which was also the post office. He was moving quickly, head down, lost in thought it seemed. Whatever, he didn’t notice me.

I hadn’t seen much of him in the months previously. The camps were almost empty. A few engineers and bosses remained in the staff house, which was a separate building from the main camp. One of them was taking the paper on a daily basis, so my trips to the camp were brief. Also, because it was the summer, I’d be anxious to finish with the newspapers as quickly as possible so I could go swimming at the cove or just wander through the woods with Barry or Billy Malone or Jackie Nick.

Maybe, I thought, watching him disappear into the post office, he’s forgotten me. Maybe he’s already moved on to another place and another job—at least in his mind.

I’m sure it’s like that for people who work on construction projects or in lumber camps or hard-rock mines, which are, more or less, just projects. Temporary. You get to know people but realize that, sooner
or later, you’ll be saying goodbye and the usual words that express the hope you’ll hook up again some day, even though you know it’s unlikely. Or if it does happen, you’ll have become different people because of the experiences that occur when you’re apart and you’ll have to start from scratch, becoming friends again.

I know lots of people like that, from the camps and the dredge and the tugboat. People much older than I am who liked my company briefly because of what I am rather than who I am. Somebody who reminds them of somebody else. Plus, I’m friendly and love to talk to adults, which is probably from being the man of the house for so much of my life.

Old John was like that—one of the most interesting people I’ve met. He never told me much about himself, but that made him even more interesting. He was from an unimaginable place, infinitely mysterious and moderately tragic because of the vast distance between where he was and where he wanted to be. I suspect most of the best men in the world are like that—keeping their tender places under wraps.

That Saturday afternoon was overcast and cool for August. In fact, the whole summer had been unusual for the amount of cool, wet weather we had. It wasn’t a swimming day, so I was taking my time with the newspapers.