Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (36 page)

I pointed out that I’d worked underground in Tilt Cove when I was still seventeen, which is technically against the law, and everything was fine. The answer I got was, That’s their problem.

I pointed out that I’d been born in Newfoundland and that Newfoundlanders were supposed to be getting preference for jobs in Labrador.

The man doing the hiring studied me for a moment. “So call up Joey Smallwood and complain,” he said.

So here I am in Seven Islands and the money gone. Actually, I had enough to get a phone call to a place called Bachelor Lake in northern Quebec, where the old fellow was a shift boss at the time. It’s 1963. And he wired me enough money to get there. I went to work as an underground labourer, this time for a buck twenty-eight an hour.

Heading in the wrong direction, moneywise. But there wasn’t much of an alternative. After I was there about a month, an older fellow, a Scot named Jackson, suggested that he and I team up and head for Tillsonburg to pick tobacco. Hard work, he said. He did it every summer. But the harder you work, the more you earn. Not like this shithole. Plus, it’s nicer working in the fresh air.

I was rooming in the bunkhouse with my father. I told him about Jackson’s plan, and he lit a cigarette slowly, the way he always did when he was thinking.

“Whatever you think yourself,” he said, blowing out a match.

So I figured that was it. Tillsonburg, here I come. Fresh air, sunshine, and big bucks.

But shortly before the day, over a beer in Ikey’s store, which also served as the beer hall, not unlike Itchy’s back in Tilt Cove, he told me that he didn’t think it was such a good idea, going off to pick tobacco. We were playing cribbage at the time.

“I’m not so sure about this joker Jackson,” he said, studying his hand.

I found that shocking, because I’d never heard him critical of anybody, and of course I always figured there could be nothing bad from Scotland.

So I told him one of the reasons I wanted out was because I was having a problem with one of the other shift bosses, who seemed to have it in for me.

“Which one?”

“Charpentier,” I said.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said.

“Why doesn’t it surprise you?”

“Ah well,” he said, staring at the ash on the end of a cigarette. “It’s probably got more to do with me.”

And then: “I’ll have a little word with Charpentier.”

That was the second time that we spoke man to man. And Jackson headed off to Tillsonburg alone. From then on, all Charpentier did was scowl at me.

Another thing that made working underground so interesting was that I found university a drag. The camps were the opposite of the campus. I was attending university in Antigonish, which was fairly close to home but another world entirely. It was a huge challenge. I was never sure whether I was bored most of the time or if I was just slow at catching on. Sitting through endless classes and not hearing a word the professor was saying—as though I was deaf. Barely scraping by in the quizzes. Flat broke all the time. Walking around among all the bright young students from Upper Canada and New England with the arse out of your pants half the time. It wasn’t fun.

In the mines, you went over to the dry at the start of every shift and hauled down the basket where you stored your working clothes and, in five minutes flat, you were the same as everybody else. Rubber trousers, battery belt cinched at the waist, battery hooked on, and the lamp cable casually looped around your neck like the pros. After only a shift or two, I could smoothly attach the light to the bracket on the front of the hard hat without having to take the hat off, just like the old timers. One swift casual motion of the hand and the light was in place, as if you’d been doing it all your life. Sure, the older miners knew I wasn’t really as strong or as skilled as they were, but it didn’t matter. I was learning. Plus, I was Dan Rory MacIntyre’s Boy and, as one of them told me at Itchy’s one night the time he was out on his holiday, Dan Rory MacIntyre is the Best Goddamned Miner in Canada.

I was shocked that one of these hard, truculent outsiders would declare such a thing and that it might be true.

Maybe the sickly kid from the mountain had turned into something, after all.

But what good was that if you don’t realize it or, in the long run, you don’t care about having become good at something you do because you have to? Maybe it was there that I realized the most important goal in life is freedom. And the key to freedom is choice. And the key to choice is either birth or education. And very few of us are born free. Really.

This is kind of silly, but one of the reasons I got off on the wrong foot at university was that I went there feeling sour because of a mix-up over gender.

Here’s what happened. Early summer, 1960, I applied to St. Francis Xavier University, which is where all the Catholics from home tend to go. It was only forty miles away, but I was going to have to live there. It was a long forty miles because the Trans-Canada hadn’t yet been finished on the mainland. Forty miles of narrow, winding roads.

And I remember the day the reply came back. I was picking up the mail as usual. I was driving. We had a ’58 Chev Belaire at the time. Very nice car—cobalt blue, lots of chrome. Among the bills and papers, there was the envelope from the university. I won’t deny that I was nervous. I drove down to the new railway station, which is only about half the size of the old one they tore down after they built the causeway and changed all the tracks around. There was nobody around. I parked out back and tore open the letter.

To make a long story short: I was accepted.

I sighed a great sigh of relief. Then I read on. I had requested campus accommodations, and a room was reserved for me in a place called Immaculata Hall. I’d known university students and heard of Mockler
Dorm and Aquinas and MacDonald and MacPherson and Tompkins, but I’d never heard of this one. But, anyway, I kept on reading.

I was instructed that I was to bring clothing appropriate to a Catholic institution—dark stockings, modest dresses…

Dresses?

I went back to the top of the letter. It was addressed to Miss Linda MacIntyre.

The curse.

That night in November when we got loaded at the start of a wasted weekend, I remember trying to explain exactly what I do for a living. I was telling him about Cassidy and the royal commission report. And my friend Prinsky, who works for Dow Jones and the
Wall Street Journal,
and who was a big help when it came to figuring everything out.

I was explaining the way Cassidy and Prinsky wait around every Thursday afternoon for some obscure statistic from the Bank of Canada, talking away as if they were waiting for something important like the hockey standings. And then arguing about what it means that some number has changed by a percentage of a percentage point. Same thing with the balance of payments figures, and the unemployment rate.

I was beginning to get the hang of it, but, like somebody learning a foreign language, I wasn’t yet ready for a conversation on deeper issues. So, mostly, I’d just listen to the experts. And if I ever did have an input, they’d hear me out respectfully, but then carry on as if I wasn’t there. That was okay because I wasn’t really there anyway.

So there we were, crossing Boularderie Island and heading for the Seal Island Bridge at the foot of Kelly’s Mountain on a crisp November night, sipping on a quart of Demerara and talking as we never talked before—about Ottawa and finance and economics. A chance for me to practise my new language on somebody who knew less of it than even I did.

I was trying to explain fine points of public finance, treasury bills, and bonds—

Bonds?

I’m peering past the driver, through the smeared windshield, at that Cadillac emblem when it strikes me like a bolt of inspiration.

Bonds. That was it. I can finally relax. I remember the Cadillac connection and smile privately and turn to stare out the side window at the passing countryside. The rain is thickening to sleet.

He bought bonds. He subscribed to the latest issue of Canada Savings Bonds. But here’s what he’d never told anyone before. When the bonds matured in a few years, he’d cash them in, and he was going to buy a Cadillac.

He would be in a position, with the bonds and some savings and maybe getting a trade-in on his Volkswagen bug, to liberate the ten or twelve thousand, or whatever it might be by then, to buy the Cadillac. The basic package. Three hundred and seventy-five horses. Turbo Hydramatic transmission. But, most of all, that emblem on the hood.

Coming down the other side of Kelly’s Mountain, he confessed he’d always wanted to buy a Cadillac—the ultimate symbol of success. The declaration to everybody who ever knew him that he’d made it—that you could come down off MacIntyre’s Mountain with nothing but the rags on your back and make it in the wider world. And you didn’t have to be a banker or a Mason or kiss some politician’s ass. All it took was hard work—that and a little bit of luck.

Of course he realized he hadn’t made it. And probably wasn’t going to make it now that he was fifty years old and settled into working for someone else in a civil service job.

But, you know what? He’d given it his absolutely best shot. And that was what really mattered when all was said and done. And just that fact alone was worth a Cadillac.

It all came back to me, just in time. The happy Friday night excursion, racing down Kelly’s Mountain, veins throbbing from the rum and the companionship. Now the wind is blowing, lashing our little procession with a muddy, salty rain. The Cadillac in front is slowing down. Then the left turn-signal light flashes. The rain is getting heavier. The Cadillac comes almost to a full stop for the hairpin turn below the church, then it starts creeping up the hill. The church bell is ringing slowly.

The Cadillac comes to a gentle stop. Then there are burly men in black overcoats gathering around the rear doors, blocking my view of the emblem that looks like something on the coat of arms of some important nobleman in some important clan. Then a man with one hand flat on the top of his hat, face turned away from the slanting rain, hurries to the rear of the Cadillac, preparing to open the doors. The burly men in overcoats form two lines, like soldiers.

For all the evidence of recovered domesticity, I gather that his basic tastes didn’t change much near the end. My boyhood friend Ian MacKinnon, who now works in the liquor store, was telling me that, once or twice a week, Dan Rory would show up for his little six-pack. Usually Olands or Schooner, never Moosehead. Moosehead gives him the “seann buinneach mhor,” he’d say. That’s Gaelic, literally meaning “old shit in large quantities.” I asked my cousin John Dougald, who shares his obsession with trucks and cars, if he’d ever heard the scheme about the Cadillac. And Dougie said he never heard a thing. The only plan Dan Rory shared with him after he came home for good was the one about a dog. He always loved dogs. Swore, when our dog Skipper disappeared without a trace in 1961, he’d never have another. They just don’t live long enough. But then, after he got the new job, he was talking about getting a little dog to keep him company when he was
working. It was wicked quiet over by the lake, and the time dragged when the pumps were working well—which they were, mostly, since everything was almost new.

Ian saw him on the Tuesday afternoon at the liquor store, picking up his little six-pack of Schooner. And when he didn’t show up for supper, my mother figured he’d gone out to visit his nephew Dougie or his brother, John Dan. He’d been grieving, in his own inscrutable way, ever since Peigeag passed away, just two weeks earlier.

I was in the Parliamentary Reading Room in early March when I found out. I felt weird afterwards, finding out in a newspaper that my Grandma had died. Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre—a very common name around home. I had to look twice. I’d never thought of her as Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre. But this was Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre of MacIntyre’s Mountain. Widow of the late Dougald MacIntyre. Died February 24. Survived by…and of course my name was there among us. There must be some mistake. But there it is, in black and white, in the pages of the
Victoria-Inverness Bulletin.

She was ninety-five—same age as Dougald. No coincidence there. She was actually two years younger than he was, but out of sheer stubbornness she lived exactly as long as he did. Hung on for two extra years after the old man died to get the same amount of time in. Ninety-five years—no more, no less. She was born in 1874, though you could never be too sure with those old people. The record keeping, back when they were born, wasn’t exactly meticulous. There was never much made of birthdays. One of the only birthdays I ever heard referred to was Grandpa’s eightieth. The day he turned eighty, St. Patrick’s Day, 1952, he dropped in on John Dan’s and probably had a
dileag
or two to celebrate the occasion.
Fun at Five
was on the radio and they played a fiddle tune, and the old man just spontaneously got out in the middle of the kitchen floor and started step dancing. Everybody was cheering
him on and somebody shouted “suas e bhodag,” which is the Gaelic for “drive ’er, old man.” It’s a very common expression. You hear it all the time, especially when somebody is dancing. But he took it in the nose—being called an old man. Walked out and went home in a snit. That was the story, anyway.

Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre dead?

You think, in all improbability, that they’ve made a mistake. She was always larger than life, seemingly immune to death. Once that I know of she got seriously ill—gangrene in her foot; started spreading up her leg. Finally she went to the hospital in Inverness, where they couldn’t do anything to stop it. They sent her over to Antigonish, where doctors told her she’d have to lose the leg entirely.

When she found out what they were saying, she hit the roof.

Not a chance. She came into the world blessed with two good legs, and she was going out the same way. This was all in translation, but I think I got the gist of it.

The doctors basically told her that she was committing suicide—that without an amputation, the gangrene was going to kill her.