Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (6 page)

After that he went away, probably disappointed by what he found here, because he was never heard from again.

There is a story they never talk about. That once upon a time, back in the Old Country, the MacIntyres were Protestants. But after one of them married a Catholic, they were kicked off their land by the Protestant landlord because the Catholic wife, who was Irish, insisted that the kids be baptized Catholics. When they were leaving for the New World, the priest told them that the MacIntyres could only prosper there because, by going into exile, they were making a great sacrifice for the Faith.

I would have asked the mysterious visitor from the Old Country whether any of this is true, but of course that was long ago, long before my time.

They say that nothing much has happened in the village for nearly forty years. There are hardly any children, and it’s because of the wars, they say. And then there was the Depression. People were too busy fighting and coping to be having children. There was rationing in the last world war, limits on the liquor and the gasoline and food and also, I presume, on babies. So now there is me and Ian and Brian and Angus Neil and Jackie Nick. And of course the dog. Everybody else is older, from before the war, or at least before they got too busy with the war.

Mr. Clough says the whole village was once named Plaster Cove. It was official. Then they changed it to Port Hastings after an important government official whose name was Sir Hastings Doyle. That was a big mistake, he says. That was when everything went to hell. Changing the name of a place brings bad luck.

The village looks like a place with bad luck. It is now neither cove nor port. The cove is blocked from the strait by roads and railway tracks and is slowly filling up with muck. The only evidence of quarrying is the bare white rock that is visible through the trees at the back end. The coal piers have been abandoned: the larger one torn down entirely, leaving only a small projection of rock and pilings; the smaller one intact but useless, except for risky games. In summer we swim there and use the chutes for diving boards.

I understand that soon there will be even fewer kids my age. Binky’s father is being transferred to Inverness; Angus Neil’s to Sydney. Brian’s father is getting a bigger job with the Highways Department, and they will move to town. And that will leave just Ian and Jackie Nick and me. But then, I know, from listening at The Hole, that the place will grow. The causeway will be like a giant pipeline, pumping new life and new people in, removing, at last, the curse that came with the new name: Port Hastings. Maybe even making jobs for people from out back who are neither Grit nor Mason—people with secrets in their childhood.

The cars from the ferry are now coming slowly up the hill, and most of them are turning right. Mostly people from the mainland town of Mulgrave, which is where the ferry leaves from, or further down the Guysborough shore. People coming to Port Hawkesbury for the celebration of the coronation.

I went to Mulgrave once, when I was much younger. My Aunt Veronica used to be the housekeeper for the priest in Mulgrave, and I went with my mother to visit her. We went by train. From Port Hastings through the town to Point Tupper, which is where the train ferry docks. I remember the black, menacing locomotive and the metallic steam and sulphurous billowing smoke. It never seemed to
go far without stopping and backing up, and starting forward again in jerking motions—huffing and puffing. And there was something terribly precarious about riding on a train that was riding on a boat.

I also remember the chilly silence in the large Glebe house over there in Mulgrave, and staying close to my mother and my aunt because I was afraid of someone they called Alex the Devil, who, I learned later, was really the priest in a nearby parish—Father MacDonald. Father Alex the Devil.

Like Hughie the Slut, the name was beyond understanding. But it was somehow appropriate in this odd little town, which was the beginning of the rest of the world.

Mulgrave had a fish-processing plant that constantly gave off a reeking, billowing mist. My mother, even though her father was a fisherman, hates the smell of fish and held a hanky to her nose as she walked by. Mulgrave also had the asylum, a place of horror signified by the universal reluctance to talk about it, except in low, cryptic expressions that mostly avoided, if at all possible, the use of the word “asylum” or the names of the people lost inside. “The poor dizzy people,” as they were sometimes called.

“That fellow should be in Mulgrave” or “They put her in Mulgrave” were expressions that conveyed menace or despair without need for any further elaboration. When a child was acting foolishly came the threat, “You’ll end up in Mulgrave.”

I know there was an asylum in Mabou, to the north. It burned down one night, and many people died—including a close relative who is never mentioned.

You can see the Mulgrave Asylum plainly from where I’m standing near Eddie Fougere’s garage. It is a small, white building, just beyond the edge of the town, across the water at the beginning and end of everything else that is.

Now I see them coming up the hill. The two little girls each have a parent by the hand. There is Danita Mary with our mother, and Rosalind Veronica with our father. I am Linden. My second name, Joseph, is lost behind the overwhelming strangeness of the Linden. At Confirmation I added Peter, hoping it would make a difference. But it didn’t.

I have asked my mother where the name is from. She says she doesn’t know, but I don’t quite believe her. Because the name is her fault, I am reluctant to confess to her the pain it causes me. The burden of a name unmotivated by tradition or blood would be incomprehensible to her. She is Alice, a plain, sensible name that runs like a unifying thread through her entire personal history. Grandma Donohue, whose name is Mary, has a sister, Alice.

My father is Dan, a name that resonates through many generations with such frequency that all the Dans alive must have identifying modifiers. Dan L., Dan B., Dan Alex, Dan Joe, Dan Archie, Dan Rory.

“Linden is a tree,” she said.

“A
tree?”

“The lovely linden tree.”

My heart sinks. It is already bad enough that it sounds like the name of a girl.

They named me for a tree. I have also heard that there was a detective on a radio program and his name was Linden Wade, but that is a small source of consolation. I know that I cannot go through my whole life explaining that I am named after an imaginary detective on the radio any more than I can hope for comfort explaining that mine is also the name of a tree.

I have considered changing it to Joe, my second name, which is also the name of my uncle Joe Donohue, who is a powerful little Irishman with a booming foghorn voice and an accent straight from County Cork. I admire Uncle Joe, but the prospect of adopting his name is too complicated. Where do you begin? I realize it is a solution I should
have thought of before I started school. But before I started school it didn’t matter. It was only after I started school that I discovered the strangeness and the painful burden of being different. School was all Ian and Angus and Jack and Patrick and William and George.

When Phemie, my first teacher, whose name was actually Miss Euphemia MacKinnon, called my name, as if pronouncing some exotic food discovery, all the heads turned. The smirks and smiles announced the birth of cruel plans for after school—in the yard, on the road home.

Mercifully, home isn’t far from the school.

Just once, years before, I tried to change it. The result was a disaster. That it is how I ended up with a nickname as bad as Hughie the Slut or John Dan Guts. It was after one of the big MacNeil boys set himself on fire playing with matches around gasoline, and the Mountie came to investigate on a motorcycle.

I remember clearly. I was in the MacNeils’ apple tree when I heard a sudden clatter in the lane. Then I saw the motorcycle. The grand machine swept past below the tree and stopped with the front wheel practically against the MacNeils’ doorstep. The Mountie was wearing his brown tunic, the tight navy trousers with the yellow stripe, and great shining knee-high boots. He sat there astride the idling motorcycle, asking the little girls if any of the boys was around.

Their mother, Marie, came out, drying her hands on her apron. The Mountie got off the bike, and they went around the corner to talk.

Afterwards, I asked the Mountie what his name was.

He seemed surprised by my boldness. Then he smiled and held out a gloved hand. “It’s Bruce MacKinnon,” he said.

Even though I didn’t hear it right, it sounded better than my own: Spruce MacKinnon.

“I’m going to become a Mountie and change my name to Spruce,” I announced, when the motorcycle was gone and we were all watching the suddenly quiet lane.

Spruce?

The error dawned on me too late.

“Hey, Spruce,” they’d start. “Where’s your motorcycle?”

Now I have two embarrassing names—both trees: Linden; Spruce. All my mother could say was “Just don’t pay any attention to them. They’ll get over it.”

Of course they didn’t, and they never will.

My cousins on the mountain have normal names: Donald and Archie, Marybelle and Margaret, John Dougald and Johnnie. Later there will be an Annie and a Gerald. There was also a Gabriel, but nobody seemed to think there was anything unusual about it. Gabriel, after all, was a very important archangel, prominent in the Bible, in the book of Daniel. Gabriel is different, but normal. But then, on the mountain, nobody seems to find the name Linden unusual either.

In fact, my grandmother, who lives there, utters my name with a breathless reverence.

“Lindy,” she’ll say. “M’eudail a’ghaol, Lindy.”

Affectionately. And she pronounces it in a way that gives the name a kind of dignified destiny. She seems to say, just in the pronunciation: You have important things in store. “My treasure, my dear treasure,” she’s saying.

But I think, afterwards: what does Grandma MacIntyre know about anything? She can’t even speak English. She doesn’t have a clue what the name means. A tree that sounds like a girl.

The rain is steady now. From where we’re standing in MacMillan’s field, you can see across the strait—slow, antlike movement on the side of the cape. I imagine I can actually see people working there. Jackie is grumbling. What is taking them so long? Angus Neil believes they’re waiting
for the fog to lift entirely so we can all see what happens and remember it forever. It will be like a bomb going off, he said. Thousands and thousands of tons of dynamite in little caves dug into the side of the cape exploding in one gigantic blast. They call the little caves “coyote holes.”

Theresa MacKinnon wants to know why it’s called Cape Porcupine, and Binky tries to convince her that it’s shaped like one.

“When did you ever see a porcupine?” she asks.

And he is stumped because we all know there are no porcupines on Cape Breton Island. No porcupines and no skunks.

“I was over there once,” he brags. “I saw a dead one on the road.”

There are no porcupines on Cape Breton Island, according to what I have heard, because the Indians once tortured a missionary priest by locking him in a cage with a skunk and a porcupine. God’s punishment was to eliminate them from the island. And what about the Indians? They sure weren’t eliminated, though you have only to look at them and their poverty to know they got punished too.

I consider telling the story of the priest and his tormentors but decide not to, because Ian and Brian are Protestants.

My dog is sitting by my foot with his head pressed against my leg. This is his way of staying at least partly dry. Skipper is a clever dog, and I suppose if I was forced to admit it, I would have to say he is my best friend here. When we got him, they said that everybody owned him—mother, father, me, the two girls. Skipper is everybody’s dog, but he and I both know that he is mine.

He is part boxer, with a broad chest and no tail. He belonged, briefly, to my uncle Francis Donohue, and we got him because Francis planned to shoot him. The reason Francis was going to kill him was because Skipper killed a hen. My uncle said that once he started that work, he’d be more trouble than any dog was worth. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” he said.

They were having an unscheduled chicken dinner when my mother pointed out how unfair it would be to kill the dog who made the dinner possible. There was considerable discussion then about fairness and crime and justice, and they finally agreed that killing the dog who made the lovely chicken dinner possible was, perhaps, a punishment too cruel and final. Maybe the more appropriate penalty was banishment. Give the dog away to someone who has no hens. We have no hens, and so we got the dog.

My father seems to like Skipper even more than I do. Whenever he’s leaving home, you’ll see him sitting on the doorstep playing with the dog, talking to him or just sitting with his arm around him, rubbing at his neck and ears, looking and sounding as though he doesn’t want to go. And Skipper seems to be asking the question nobody asks: “Why? Why do you not live at home like everybody else?”

The dog knows when my father is about to leave and becomes very quiet. And he also seems to know exactly when he’s coming home and becomes noisy and hyperactive long before we see him. The dog will suddenly run to the top of the hill in the field below the house near Harry and Rannie’s, or right down to the main road below the church, prancing nervously, looking up and down the road. That is often how we know when my father is arriving.

If he was working close to home, he’d come for weekends when he could get a ride or if he wasn’t working Saturdays. He’d come strolling up the Victoria Line on a Friday evening with the dog running in circles around him, bumping his feet and almost knocking him down. Sometimes I’d run to meet him. Before Stirling, when he’d be far away in another province, we’d see him only at Christmas or maybe in the summer. Once he was home for part of a winter, but he couldn’t do much here because he had a cast on his body from waist to neck, like a plaster undershirt. He’d let us knock on it, pretending he was a door. When the cast came off, he went away again.