Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (37 page)

“Send me home,” she said. And so they did.

The first thing she did when she got back to the mountain was send for the priest—Father John Angus Rankin. Father John Angus is a whole story all by himself. He’s very serious about the supernatural. Allegedly communicates with dead people. Exorcises demons. Has the Power. Just like herself.

The two of them retired to a private place and did something. Prayed, I guess. Whatever they did, the gangrene went away, and she still had two completely functional legs the last time I saw her—at Grandpa’s wake just about two years ago. The night she threw Domhnaill-Angie Stephan out into the snow for something he said to my grandfather’s corpse.

Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre, dead? Highly unlikely. But there it is in the paper.

It was only as I was making my way back up to the press gallery hot room that it struck me as odd that nobody had bothered telling me when the old lady made her exit. Not a peep from home to tell me how or when. Very strange.

So, that evening, when I got home from work, I called, and he confirmed it. Passed away nearly ten days ago. Just went quietly—the flu or something. “The old people’s friend,” they call it around here. An easy way out when they figure it’s time. And she probably did conclude that she’d lived long enough, thank you very much, after two years’ living without the Old Man, as she called him. Sure enough, I can’t imagine that she’d have died if she didn’t want to.

“But anyway, how come nobody told me?”

Well, said he, they thought of me. But they knew how busy I am up there in Ottawa. And it was the winter, and travel is expensive and treacherous this time of year. And, after all, she was ninety-five. It wasn’t exactly unexpected.

“I’m sure she’d understand.”

But I’m not so sure. And what if she didn’t understand? What if she took my absence in the nose?

It might help explain what happened fifteen days later.

The doctor said he probably never felt a thing. He was probably dead before he hit the floor.

Old Jim Sandy, who was standing there in front of him, said afterwards that all he remembered was Dan Rory saying, “I’m going,” then turning slightly and falling down. Jim Sandy, who was loaded at the time, figured he’d just flaked out. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind that a man could fall down for reasons other than being plastered.

Jim Sandy went to bed. They figure it was only about five in the afternoon.

Ian said it was around four when Dan Rory picked up his six-pack. And he remembered seeing Jim Sandy hanging around outside the liquor store at the time. Of course the old man knew Jim Sandy from the sawmill days and just generally from growing up out back. My theory is that Jim Sandy needed a ride home, and the old fellow told him to jump in.

On Wednesdays, Cassidy and I would be getting serious about the Friday deadline—getting realistic about what we could deliver by the end of the week. Mondays we’d be gung ho, promising the moon, bringing down the government. Tuesdays we’d be trying to get the list of promised stories down to a manageable size. Wednesdays we’d be backtracking.

There was a knock on the office door, which was strange to start with. Nobody ever knocked. It was even stranger, when I opened the door, to see my friend Father Lewis MacDonald there, wearing his black suit, topped off by the Roman collar. Lewis is part of the post-Vatican-Two crowd of young priests—into T-shirts and jeans and guitars on the altar. And he’s from home, a brother of my friend Dennis. Their mother, Dolly, taught me in grade seven. Their father, Jock, was also a hard-rock miner and had died in the fall of ’67. We were close.

“Can you come outside for a minute?” Lewis asked.

He hardly ever wore the black suit. And he hardly ever came downtown. He was teaching in a Catholic high school out in the west end and rarely needed to be anywhere near the Hill.

“Hey, what brings you…”

“I have to talk to you,” he said.

“Well, come in…”

He caught the doorknob and pulled the door half shut and said to me in a quiet voice: “It’s about your father.”

“What about him?”

I thought suddenly about the perils of the mine and all the bad things that can happen to you when you’re off in the middle of nowhere.

But, hang on, I think. He isn’t in the mines anymore. He’s home for good. He’s working for the government.

“I’m afraid he’s gone,” Father Lewis said.

After the funeral and the burial, we were all sitting around the house kind of shell-shocked. All the neighbours were there. People who knew him from the lumber camps and sawmills and trucking and the mines. People coming in, the way they were for days. There was even a surprise visit from the MP, Allan MacEachen, who is federal minister of manpower and immigration—a big gesture for a Tory house. But then, of course, Dan Rory was pretty neutral when it came to politics.

“Sorry for your trouble…”

“Life is full of surprises…”

“Well, isn’t that it.”

At one point Roddie Cueball, who is really Roddie MacDonald but called Roddie Cueball because he was born bald and stayed that way—and who is also a talented pool player besides being the undertaker—took me aside and said, “Somebody has to sign this.”

He handed me a piece of paper, and I saw immediately it was the death certificate.

Cause of death: coronary thrombosis.

“How do they know?” I asked.

He shrugged. “That’s what the doctor figured.”

I signed.

There were drinks then. After the crowd thinned out, my cousin Dougie produced a forty-ouncer.

Soon somebody was talking about Grandma. Sure enough, there was no way Peigeag was going to leave Dan Rory here without herself to look after him.

Everybody laughed, because everybody knew Peigeag and the way she was.

He took it hard when she went, somebody said. Standing behind him at the old woman’s grave, they said you could see his shoulders jerk ever so slightly when they started lowering her down.

My mother was sitting quietly in the rocking chair by the stove. She seemed numb. It was the rocking chair Grandma Donohue always sat in before she died in 1964. Now my mother was sitting there, and it was a little bit disturbing.

During a quiet moment, I heard her say to nobody in particular: “I just realized that I’m a widow.”

Nobody responded.

Later, Big Ian MacKinnon, who is the local member of the county council (for the Tories), took me aside and asked if there was anything he could do.

And it occurred to me on the spot: “I wonder if you could take me out to where it happened?”

That was how Father Lewis put it. Simply, “He’s gone.”

As often happens in such circumstances, I asked a stupid question.

“Gone where?”

I now understand the phenomenon. You’re seeking refuge in absurdity, knowing that the moment you embrace reality, everything will change. Knowledge grafted to your understanding changes it forever and ever and ever. “Per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.”

“Get your coat,” Father Lewis ordered.

Numbly, I complied.

Cassidy looked up from his typewriter, suddenly confused, seeing the red-headed fellow in the priest suit.

“I have to go,” I said. I felt cold, heard my voice and it was shaky.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I have to go home,” I said. “Something has happened.”

Jim Sandy’s house is up behind Grant’s Pond, near Embree’s Island, just outside Port Hawkesbury. A little white house in the middle of the woods. It was a neighbour who discovered that there was a dead man in the house on the Wednesday. Later, my sister Rosalind went to fetch his car. But by then the little Volkswagen wouldn’t start, and when they checked, they found the battery was dead. They were figuring that Jim Sandy needed help getting into his house, and that Dan Rory left the engine running and the lights on. Eventually even a Volkswagen runs out of gas.

Jim Sandy was sitting at the kitchen table when Big Ian and I arrived. He seemed vague, and it wasn’t clear whether he was genuinely confused about what had happened, or hungover and evasive, or feeling guilty. Or a combination of everything. I let Big Ian ask the questions. Basically, what could he remember?

“Hardly anything,” he said.

Just that bit about Dan Rory saying “I’m going” or something like that.

Completely ambiguous. Meaning: I’m going home; or something a bit more ominous.

But the part about falling down? This is what I want to interject. Is it normal in this house for your visitors to collapse in front of you? Your visitors fall down on the floor and never move? And you go to bed?

But it quickly became clear to us that talking to Jim Sandy was pointless. Part of me thought I should be angry. But I couldn’t quite
work myself up to anything approaching so constructive an emotion. His time was up. If it wasn’t here, it would have been somewhere else. Looking at old Jim Sandy there at his kitchen table, I could feel only a mixture of pity and sadness. Another fellow from out back who never had much luck.

What was the curse, I wonder, inflicted on this generation? Battered from birth by poverty and war. In their time, all the politics and economics turned upside down. Men like these became mere disposables, in war and in peace—units of productivity or destruction in the service of tycoons and generals and politicians. They were born at the end of the worst war in history and were kids during the roaring decade when the world felt reborn. And then progress stopped. Gangs of Nazis and Communists set out to dominate the world. Hungarians and Poles died to win freedom from the Nazis and the Communists. Koreans and Arabs and Jews struggled—everybody was struggling for something. It was all part of the unending human impulse to rise above this hopelessness. A struggle to achieve some elemental certainty about your fate. A struggle that always seems to start somewhere in the soul and to end, for most, like this—in terminal confusion.

But was it…is it…ever any different?

Big issues to discuss with Cassidy and Prinsky when I get back to Ottawa.

Passing through Jim Sandy’s porch on the way out, I spotted a small cardboard box in the corner—a Schooner six-pack. I stopped and walked over, bent down, and picked up the little beer case. It was empty. But in the bottom of the box I saw the receipt from the liquor store. I put it in my pocket.

Later I made a note of the time and date on the damp little sales slip from the liquor store. The purchase was just before four in the afternoon, Tuesday, March 11.

As he’d have said himself: “Co dhiubh…” I’m glad someone got some pleasure out of it anyway.

And then someone was saying there was no way Peigeag would do anything to harm Dan Rory. No way she’d want to take him with her. He was always her favourite. And somebody else saying, Yes, but it’s entirely possible she discovered that things are really better Over There…over where they both are now. She’d have wanted him to be a part of that. God have mercy on the both of them.

I suppose.

Or, I’m thinking, maybe she could see the future. Maybe she suddenly became aware of what I could clearly see from Ottawa, reading the papers, talking to the young draft dodgers and deserters who are part of the urban landscape now. She knows where the world is heading. She knows about the drugs and the promiscuity. The conflict. She knows that the murders of the Kennedys and Dr. King are just the tip of the iceberg, that the world is becoming more unstable and more violent. Everything is changing. All the certainties of their culture and their faith are about to fall apart. Dan Rory wasn’t ready for it. So she took him home with her. Somewhere safe.

Maybe.

But I can’t stop thinking that it’s probably a lot simpler. Maybe if he had told me when she died, so I could have come home and paid my respects. I know she was hovering over the proceedings. Her own wake and funeral. I can see her standing in the doorway, shawl over the head, long skirts to the ground, hands hidden in the folds of a long sweater, making the list: who came to remark upon her life and on her powers…who drank what and how much of it…who stayed away and what were their excuses.

She’d have known I wasn’t there and why. Nobody told me. She wouldn’t have blamed me. Not Lindy.
M’eudail
Lindy…but, just the
same. If I’d been there, maybe she’d have left him alone. Or maybe, in her new state of wisdom, she’d have learned about the
buidseachd
and probably been disposed to cancel it.

Maybe, if I’d come home. Maybe. It’s possible. Anything is possible where she’s concerned.

Much later I asked my mother: “How did he pull it off?” How, after so many years on the outside looking in, did he finally gain admission to that exclusive club? The Fraternal Brotherhood of the Locally Employed. It had occurred to me that Inverness County finally had a Tory representative in the provincial legislature, Dr. Jim MacLean. And that Dr. MacLean’s mother was a MacIntyre whose roots were on MacIntyre’s Mountain.

“You don’t think…?”

She just stared at me.

“Never. Not in a million years.”

“You don’t think he finally broke down and went to see…?”

“If he did, he never said a word to me.”

It was, I gather, tediously straightforward. No political intrigue at all. It seems the job was posted. He applied. Got an interview. Explained his background in mining and how pumps and pipes serve as the complex vascular system that keeps a mine alive. And that he understood pumps and pipelines as well as he understood the lines on the palms of his hands. They were suitably impressed by his intelligence, experience, and poise.

As my mother said: “You’d only have to talk to the man for a few minutes to realize that he was capable of any job he put his mind to.”

And then I wondered: What about the
buidseachd?
What happened to that factor in his life?

But there’s nobody left to ask about the
buidseachd.

Father Lewis was waiting at the office door. I explained briefly to Cassidy, whose own father had died suddenly, and he got it right away. My father died.

“But can’t you spare a moment to talk about what you’re working on for Friday?” he said.