Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (3 page)

He was probably in his thirties when he came home, met Peigeag, and married her.

I was thinking: now it’s over. There he lies, unfamiliar with eyes closed, bloodless lips pressed together firmly as if to prevent his secrets from escaping back into the world of the curious. Bony hands clasped around the prayer beads on his chest.

Then, suddenly, one of the guests, an old neighbour from up the mountain, unsteady from drink, appeared in the room. He shuffled towards the casket. He started gesticulating and speaking to the corpse in Gaelic, wildly and with great confidence.

It was when he reached under his coat and removed a bottle of liquor and uncapped it right there and raised it to his lips that all hell suddenly broke out in the little room. Peigeag was all over the boozer, excoriating him with a shrill fluency that, even though I didn’t know the particulars of the language, made my hair stand on end. Then she grabbed the poor old fellow, frog-marched him to an outside door, and hurled him out into the snow.

Blue eyes blazing, she wheeled and marched out of the room, back to the kitchen to resume her vigil in a rocking chair that had been
strategically located close to the stove but with a sightline through a window to the outside, where she knew the drinkers were huddling.

The babble in the tavern completely drowned out the hushed conversation at our table. When the Gaelic interloper leaves, I told myself, I’ll have to ask about Grandma. How is she getting along? Maybe we’ll go out there for a visit later. But at that moment an old university pal appeared out of nowhere.

“Mac,” Dennis cried enthusiastically. “When did you come home?”

“Just last night,” I replied, thrilled to see a familiar face.

“What’s on for the rest of the day?”

“Nothing much.”

“You’ll have to come by,” said Dennis. “We got catching up to do.”

“I will,” I replied with enthusiasm.

I’d known Dennis for years and all through university. Both our mothers were schoolteachers. His mother, Dolly MacDonald, had actually been my teacher for a year, in grade seven. Both our fathers had been hard-rock miners.

Dennis had a nickname among the young fellows. The
madadh-ruadh
we called him, which means “red fox,” because he had flaming red hair and was considered by young women to be sly.

The Gaelic conversation was suddenly over. My father’s friend excused himself to go to the toilet. We watched as he walked away.

“Do you know who that is?” my father asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

There was a long silence then as we sat, each waiting for the other to comment.

Finally he smiled and mouthed: “Q-U-E-E-R.”

“I know,” I said.

He recoiled in shock. “You know?”

“Of course. Everybody knows.”

“Mhoire mhathair,” he said—“Holy Mother Mary”—as if he suddenly realized that I was a grown-up too.

The small details of that Saturday would remain clear in the mind for many years to come. They would often cause me to reflect on the perversity of existence, how the truly memorable experiences in life so often pass in what seems like humdrum banality. It’s almost as if life has no substantial meaning except in retrospect. And that’s what makes so much of life so sad—tragic even.

We went home from the tavern. We ate lightly and in silence. After the lunch I asked my father if I could borrow the Volkswagen—do a bit of visiting, if that’s okay.

“No problem,” he replied.

Dennis had obviously been to the liquor store because we were together hardly any time at all when he produced a bottle. After a couple of sips, we toured around looking up old pals from high school. The Hanley boys, Alex MacMaster, the String, whose real name was Duncan MacLellan. It being Saturday afternoon, there was no shortage of drink and talk.

Dennis was a schoolteacher, just home from Edmonton. His brother, Lewis, was a priest who taught high school in Ottawa, where I saw him frequently. Their father, a miner, had died suddenly the year before. There had been no warning. You’d never have known there was a thing wrong with him. Then one afternoon he went upstairs for a nap and never came down. We talked about that a lot—about unpredictability; about poor old Jock and all the missed opportunities.

“Dan Rory looks great, though,” Dennis said.

And I agreed.

“How old was your grandfather when he went…When was it?”

“Last year,” I said. “He was ninety-five.”

“Wow. And the old lady, your grandma. I hear she’s still going strong. And she must be, what?”

“Heading for ninety-five herself,” I replied, strangely awed and reassured by the longevity in my family.

“Poor old Jock,” Dennis said, shaking his head sadly. “He was only fifty-five. Had his birthday June 24 last year. Died in September.”

“June 24,” I said. “What a coincidence. My old man turned fifty June 23 just past.”

“Here’s to them,” said Dennis.

He uncapped the bottle and passed it over.

Later Dennis wanted to know everything about working in Ottawa, on Parliament Hill. What that must be like, especially covering something as arcane as the economy.

That conversation later went off the rails when I bogged down, after too many drinks, attempting to explain the relationship between the trade deficit, inflation, and the interest rate. I recovered some of my credibility by boasting that my guest for the Press Gallery Dinner the previous spring had been the governor of the Bank of Canada, Louis J. Rasminsky—a hell of a nice down-to-earth old mandarin who loved a drink as much as the next fella.

It was around then that I noticed the deepening chill in the air and the coppery glow behind the trees and realized that the sun was going down rapidly. It was probably time to go home. Put in a little quality time with the parents, since I was around for just the weekend, and Saturday was almost gone already.

“One more little one,” Dennis insisted.

Driving by the Troy trailer court I remembered hearing that my friend Jack, who was one of the four Hanley brothers, was living there and that he and his wife, Jessie, recently had their first kid—a boy. On an impulse I turned in. Just a quick visit with old Dag, which was what the boys used to call Jack at home.

Jessie was cooking supper, and they insisted I have a bite with them.

After supper there were drinks and long conversations.

I met the new baby, and we compared notes about the trials of parenthood. Jessie eventually went to bed.

Jack was an electrician, a line of work no less mysterious to me than Louis J. Rasminsky’s job. I couldn’t have imagined, just a couple of years earlier, sitting here like this: Jack and I, a couple of working men with wives and children. And I a reporter on Parliament Hill.

“Amazing the way things turn out,” Jack noted. And then he asked about my parents.

“Great,” I replied.

“And I hear Dan Rory is home for good.”

“He is, apparently,” I said.

Home for good, I thought—again.

There were a few more drinks, and Jack wisely suggested that I have a short nap on the chesterfield before trying to drive home.

There was an ominous blue light in the room when I realized where I was. That was followed by an instant surge of self-recrimination. There was also a powerful nausea churning deep in my guts.

Mercifully they weren’t up yet when I crept in.

Breakfast was silent. They understood, I reassured myself, about being young and having friends I hardly ever saw anymore now that I was married with three kids of my own and a job on Parliament Hill that was turning me into an old man before my time.

Sunday Mass was interminable, and I know I attracted curious stares
when I had to leave at one point to throw up outside. The wind was damp with the probability of a storm before the end of the day. I had to be in Sydney by three, to reconnect with the travelling Cabinet ministers. I’d rarely experienced such a profound, stunning sense of misery.

I did my best to make small talk on the drive to the airport. The true menace of the weather became apparent on the top of Kelly’s Mountain, where the rain thickened and turned into sleet and left treacherous ridges of slush on the pavement. The old man was driving carefully, and we discussed whether he was going to be okay on the drive back.

No problem, he assured me. He’d just take it easy. Worse comes to worst, he’d just pull over to the side. Or drop in some place. He knew people all over the island, from working underground for so long. Cape Breton is famous for coal mines, but the most renowned Cape Breton miners were the rural fellows who went off to work in hard-rock mines all over the country. All over the world, actually.

“The thing is whether that plane will take off,” he said.

“They never seem to have a problem taking off,” I said.

“Probably that’s true.”

The airport seemed empty—no sign of the politicians. One of the political assistants explained that there was a meeting going on somewhere, and it was lasting longer than they expected. I suddenly felt awkward, just standing around.

“The weather is closing in,” I said finally. “Maybe I’ll just go on board the plane, and you can get back on the road.”

“Whatever you think yourself,” he said.

We stood facing each other for a moment, each probably wondering what to do. A handshake would have been pompous; a hug was out of the question. So we just stood there.

“Well,” I said, slightly embarrassed. “Sorry about last night—getting stranded like that.”

“It was the wise thing to do,” he said. There was no evidence of reproach in the tight little smile.

“Next time,” I said. “Next time we’ll…maybe go for a little tour together. Maybe out to the mountain. Visit Grandma.”

“Sure,” he said. “Lots of time for that.”

“Say hello to her, will you?”

“Right on.”

We were just standing in the empty airport, hands in our pockets.

“Okay, then,” I said at last. “I’ll be off.”

And I turned and went out into the wind and the rain and dashed across the tarmac to the waiting plane.

I found a window seat and, after I was settled, looked towards the terminal building. He was still there, standing in the window. We waved at each other. After that I dozed off. Then, maybe twenty minutes later, I was wakened by a commotion at the front. The two Cabinet ministers and a posse of helpers were coming on board, complaining bitterly about one of the Indian chiefs who had, it seemed, given Chrétien a hard time.

MacEachen paused beside my seat. We exchanged some pleasantries about being home.

“Everybody well?”

“Everybody well,” I replied.

MacEachen returned to resume his seat near Chrétien.

The plane engine came alive, whining. I looked again towards the terminal window. My father was still standing there, hands folded in front of him. And a sudden strange image came back to me and transformed him into someone else.

The snow continued all through the night of my grandfather’s wake and, just before dawn, one of the cousins noted that the hearse would never be able to get up the mountain road. We were going to have to
take Grandpa out to the highway on the back of a truck. But, even for a truck to get through, we were going to have to clear the road in places.

So my father and John Boy and a gang of the cousins and I went off with shovels and axes to break down the worst drifts between the little house and the highway and to cut spruce boughs for extra traction in the hard places. We worked like that for a couple of hours.

Then the truck, a three ton with a flatbed on back, came struggling and groaning up through the snow, and somehow fought its way into the yard between the two houses, and then backed up close to the little house where Grandma now lived alone.

They carried the casket out and heaved it up onto the back. Then my father and I and a couple of the cousins climbed up and sat on it so it wouldn’t slide around on the slow slippery trip down to where the hearse was waiting, on the side of the Trans-Canada.

Driving out the lane, my father suddenly elbowed me and, when he had my attention, nodded back in the direction of the little house. No words were spoken.

Peigeag was standing there in the doorway, watching silently as we drove away with the old man in his casket. It was an image I’d never forget. The old woman just standing there, a black woollen shawl draped over her head and shoulders, bony old hands clasped before her, but hidden under an apron. Just the latest witness to a long, long history of departures.

The image came back to me with a particularly jarring effect that Sunday afternoon, staring at the old fellow who just kept standing there silently, hands folded in front of him in the window of the airport terminal. I had a sudden urge to leave the plane, go back inside, ask the questions. Who were those old people? Did Peigeag really have those special powers—the second sight, the power of the
buidseachd?
How
did they and this glorified ridge we grandly call MacIntyre’s Mountain escape the relentless flow of time? And who are you, born and raised there, exempted in so many ways from the progress of your century but not its pains?

Of course, by then the whine of the plane had matured into a louder, ringing roar.

I made a silent promise to myself and to my father. I was definitely going to get to the bottom of things—next time.

I leaned close to the small oval window and waved one last time. But he seemed to be distracted just at that moment, watching as two men wheeled the ramp away from the front of the aircraft.

The plane moved. And then we were gone.

We live in a village called Port Hastings. I think I understand the difference between a village and a town. People who live in towns are more important than people who live in villages. The most important people of all live in cities.

I am told our village was supposed to be a town, which is why it seems to have streets. There is a road by our house, and it is really Field Street. The hill by MacKinnons’ is Lovers’ Lane. The Green Path is really Saddler Street. And the road to my Aunt Veronica’s is Church Street.

I have heard there were a dozen stores here once upon a time and thirteen places where men could drink. Jack Reynolds’s big old barn was once a stagecoach station.

My imagination is defeated in the effort to picture how it was. There is nothing interesting now.

There is the church, but it is not on Church Street. It is on the Victoria Line, which is a gravel road that runs up through the middle of the village, past our back door, up by Archie the Piper’s, over Little Brook, and off into the woods, vanishing towards “out back.” I think it meanders all the way to the other side of Cape Breton Island, but I’ve never gone past the side road that leads up MacIntyre’s Mountain, which is thirteen miles out.

Our school is beside the church. The school has two rooms, called the Big Room and the Little Room, even though they’re both exactly the same size. The Big Room is for big kids, grade six and up. Next year I will be in the Big Room.

The village has two stores. One is large, three stories high, and sells almost everything on the first two floors. The third floor is where they keep the coffins. This store is called R.J.’s because the man who owned it years ago was R.J. MacDonald. The other store belongs to Mr. Clough, and it is also the post office.

I think the merchants always ran the village, the way priests did in Catholic communities. Field Street once ran all the way across to Church Street, and poor people from out back would use it to bypass the stores on the main road if they owed the merchants money. They’d come out the Victoria Line, cross over Field Street, then sneak down Church Street and continue on to town. The merchants solved the problem by building a shed in the middle of Field Street, just past Alex MacKinnon’s. Then they built fences, and what was once a street is now part of a hayfield. Now the poor people have to continue down the Victoria Line, or turn down Lovers’ Lane, and take the main road through the village. Now they have no choice. They have to pass the stores.

Hardly anybody remembers R.J. anymore, and his store is now run by a quiet, sober relative who is called Ronnie the Minister because his father was a clergyman. R.J.’s store was recently bought by Mr. McGowan, who, like his name, is new and modern. Mr. McGowan, I have heard them say, has big plans for the store and for the village. Ronnie the Minister is, I hear, retiring and will be replaced by a pretty woman named Isabel Grant, who lives in Long Point, ten miles to the north.

Mr. Clough, who owns the other store, seems to be as old as the village itself and thinks the merchants are still the most important people
here. Mr. Clough is a Grit. He is a very important Liberal and a Mason, which is why he has the post office and a great deal of influence over who gets jobs and contracts.

I have heard discussions when my father was away, working in a mine somewhere: Dan Rory should go see Clough.

And my mother laughing at the very idea.

But now he’s home, and I hear discussions about a time, not far in the future, when our village will become a city.

I find it difficult to imagine Port Hastings as a city. We’ve had pavement for a few years now, but the pavement ends with a bang exactly where the village ends, in front of a house they call Hughie the Slut’s. It doesn’t start again until below the Catholic Church, which is on the edge of town, Port Hawkesbury. When I ask why, the answer is always the same: politics. That tells you nothing even if you’re ten and already know from listening to them that politics determines many things, including where the snowplough stops and who gets jobs and pavement.

But this gap in the pavement, and the dust and potholes after you pass Hughie the Slut’s and the Kennedy cabins and the MacDonalds’ and the MacLeans’ and the Meisners’, past Grant’s Pond and through Embree’s Island, doesn’t even make political sense. The dirt road discriminates against everybody.

I know there is pavement on the main street in town because important people live there—the lawyer and the doctor and the policeman, bankers, ministers, and the priest whose name is Father Doyle. The stores in town seem bigger than the ones at home and have more things to sell. There are places people pay to sleep and eat—the Farquhar House and the Black and White Inn, Mac’s Lunch and the Cabot Grill. And there’s Rocky Hazel’s movie theatre. Town is also where the ferry from the mainland stops. But the pavement stops, below the Catholic Church,
at the edge of town, and doesn’t start again until Hughie the Slut’s.

Why?

Did they stop the pavement here because this man named Hughie isn’t very nice?

“Good God, no. Poor Hughie is as fine a man as ever walked the earth.”

Oh.

“Why then,” my sister wants to know, “is he Hughie the Slut?”

She’s always asking the obvious question even when she knows there’s no answer.

“You’re not supposed to say that.”

“What?” she asks.

“Slut,” I say.

“Everybody calls him that,” she insists. “Mummy. Why do they call him Hughie the Slut?”

I just look out the window of the car, annoyed at myself because I feel a tiny bit of pleasure at her audacity—using a forbidden word in an unassailable context; asking a perfectly legitimate question.

Why
is
he called Hughie the Slut?

“It’s just a name,” our mother sighs. “Didn’t you bring your coronation scrapbook?”

Meaning: next time you ask that question there will be consequences.

“But why?” she insists.

Dan Rory pipes up diplomatically: “I think it’s because he used that word, and that’s what happens.”

“Yes,” the mother says. “A bad word will stick to you, like a burdock.”

Now my sister is thinking. A troubled look darkens her face because, even though she’s only eight, she knows it’s true how real names get shoved aside by mockery and worse. She’s probably thinking of poor John Allan Laidlaw, who innocently used the word “function,” and they
were calling him Function behind his back for years afterward. And there’s John Dan Guts. And Louie the Cat. And George the Wheeler. And Squint MacCormack.

And then there’s the name they stuck on me because of something stupid I said. I don’t even want to talk about it. Spruce!

She stares out the window, thinking and thinking, twirling a strand of hair on the nape of her neck. I wait. There is more to come.

“Is a
slut
the same as a
slink?”

Dan Rory chortles, almost hitting a yawning pothole in the dirt road.

“That’s enough,” the mother says.

“Daddy says
slink
all the time,” she says gravely.

And this too is true. He’ll say: “It’s a clear slink of a day out,” or “I’m coming down with a slink of a cold.”

And I remember that people use
slut
the same way. “I’ve got a slut of a headache.”

“That’s different,” mother says.

And there are other words: I remember the barber telling the men how the Mountie came into the shop complaining about the heat last summer, and a customer said to him, “You got a prick of a job all right.” And I knew by the roar of approval in the barbershop that it was about the word
prick,
a word that always seemed to get the response that is reserved for what is forbidden.

“You got a prick of a job,” the man said to the Mountie. “But it suits you.”

I understand how people acquire strange names, but I haven’t yet got around to finding out what that one means and what makes a word like that so interesting. A prick, after all, is what happened to Grandma Donohue’s finger when she was darning a sock last winter.

“I pricked my finger,” she said with a shocked expression, then licked the tiny wound. Nobody laughed at that.

The Mountie has a prick of a job. I am curious about words, but there are not many people you can safely ask about a word like that. Now that I’m ten I could probably ask my father—if he stayed around long enough to permit that kind of familiarity. But that is by no means a sure thing.

And it occurs to me that pavement might make the difference. I recall that my father was around for a while a few years back when they paved the road through the village and north as far as Troy, and towards town, to where it ends now at Hughie’s. My father had a truck then, and he had a job hauling small grey stones they called chips, which they mixed with tar to make the pavement. There is optimistic talk now of a paved future. The knowledge conjures up a warm feeling, riding in the truck with him, and the unfamiliar smell of the fresh tar and pavement, which is a measure of progress and civility.

“When will they pave this part?” I want to know, eyes burning in the dust that is infiltrating the car.

“When they finish the
bocan
bridge,” my father says.

“The what?”

“He means the causeway,” my mother says.

We are standing in an open field overlooking the strait, just to the north of the village. There is a chilly mist that occasionally turns to drizzle and blows away like smoke. Then you can see across to the other side where the activities are taking place, although it is impossible to see exactly what is going on there. You know the premier, Angus L. Macdonald, is over there, along with a certain Mr. Chevrier from Ottawa, and that before long they will do something significant. They will push a button or pull a lever or light a match. It is not clear in my mind. It is what happens next that is important. What happens next will “change everything,” will be written down in history. But all you can see by squinting through
the occasional lapses in the fog is a marshalling of large machines that vaguely look like giant dump trucks.

I’ve read about them in the newspaper—the forty-ton Euclids that can carry as much as a railway car in a single load. Now they’re gathering around Cape Porcupine for the big job they’ve talked about for fifty years.

That is why we are not in school. Miss Morrison and Mrs. Gillis have told us that September 16, 1952, is a day we must experience to the full because it is a day that will affect our lives forever. It is a day we must remember in its smallest details, for what we will witness will be as important to our education as anything we will learn in books. September 16, a Tuesday. It is the day they start the causeway.

The rain diminishes and the fog returns, swift banks of mist that tease and torment the straggle of kids and adults in the field around me. We are standing near the old MacMillan house, once elegant but now sinister in its emptiness. A place for stealthy exploration. Ian and Jackie, Angus Neil and his sister Theresa are here. Also Brian Langley and Binky, whose real name is Vincent MacLellan. And, of course, Skipper, my dog.

We stand silently and wait. The murmur of adult conversation filters through the fog. I already know what they are saying because I have heard it at The Hole, where I gather most of my knowledge about the strange ways and mysterious interests of grown-ups. This opening was originally designed for a stovepipe, I think. It is near the chimney, and it allows the heat to filter up from the kitchen. The only heat in the house comes from the kitchen stove. The Hole is my connection to the larger, older world.

I sleep just above the kitchen, which is where all life happens in the house—from the porridge in the morning to the rosary in the evening. We live in the kitchen, which has a stove, table and chairs, rocking chair, visitor chairs beside the door, a refrigerator, and, on top of it, a
radio. There are other rooms, but the doors are always closed, especially in the winter when the other rooms are cold as the outside.

It is just as cold upstairs, and you hate to go to bed when it is winter. My mother makes up games so we’ll forget the cold. When I was smaller she walked behind me as I climbed the stairs, and she pretended that small animals were falling off my pyjamas and that she picked them up and stuck them back on, telling me to get in bed quickly to keep them warm. Of course we don’t play games like that now that I am older.

The Hole in the ceiling above the kitchen stove allows the passage of heat to my bedroom when the stove is lit. It also allows the passage of sound. Sunday nights my mother listens to
Miss Brooks
and
Amos ’n Andy.
There is another one called I
Was a Communist for the FBI,
but she turns it off. For a few magical months one winter The Hole allowed the passage of extraordinary music. A young railway station agent whose name is Buddy MacMaster boarded at our house, and on special nights he played his fiddle in the kitchen with such skill you’d almost think the sound was coming from the radio. That was when I learned the value of The Hole.

Music is rare enough. But between tunes on the fiddle or the radio, or on nights when there is no music at all, the adults talk. They talk about the village and the island and the world. Or when Troy Jack is visiting, they talk about the walking, talking dead and horses that convey messages from beyond the grave. Troy Jack is a MacDonald. Sometimes when he has a little edge on, he talks about the grey ghost-dog that follows certain MacDonalds around to tell them when misfortune is about to happen, even when they don’t want to know about it. He talks about the
bocan,
which means ghost, and the
buidseachd,
which is like witchcraft, and even the old house seems to listen quietly.

At The Hole I heard them talking about the blast that would
“change everything.” That was last September. An explosion of dynamite that would instantly knock tens of thousands of tons of rock from the stubborn brow of Cape Porcupine. September 1952: the beginning of the change; the beginning of the future. Somehow I got the impression that this change, unlike most of the change they talk about, will bring huge improvements to our lives. The new causeway will put us on the map. With the causeway we will become a city. They talk about it the way they talk about the certain benefits that will flow from “a change of government,” from getting rid of Grits in power in Halifax and Ottawa.