Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (7 page)

When he’s working in another province, Quebec or Newfoundland, we write letters. He writes short, funny letters, and though he doesn’t bother with things like punctuation and capital letters, the spelling is perfect and the words are exactly like his voice.

This, I guess I should admit, is my father’s secret. He never went to school. He learned to read and write from his father, Grandpa Dougald.

My mother taught him how to do arithmetic, and now he knows it well enough to be a captain in a hard-rock mine, working with engineers and geologists and bosses. My mother always says my father could have been anything in the world if he’d had a chance. He never got a chance because he never went to school, which should be a lesson for us all.

I ask why he never went to school, but nobody ever answers—except to say he wasn’t well enough. He was sick when he was a boy and nearly died, which is another secret.

I know he had a brother and a sister who died when they were children. And that there was a time when he was small when epidemics passed through here like forest fires. And that people living out back, in places like MacIntyre’s Mountain, rarely ever got to see a doctor.

But we don’t talk about things like that. Not yet, anyway.

I know all about the causeway and all that it will do because I listen at The Hole in the floor of my bedroom and read the newspapers that come in the mail. I read the
Sydney Post Record
and the
Victoria-Inverness Bulletin.
We also get the
Star Weekly
from Toronto and the
Free Press Weekly,
which is from out west. We get the
Standard,
which comes from Montreal and is folded into the
Post
on Saturdays. And also the
Casket,
which is a Catholic newspaper that has news only about religion and the church.

Binky and I had our names in the
Bulletin
once for pulling Brian Langley out of the strait after he fell off the pier. We suddenly realized,
after he kept sinking out of sight, that he couldn’t swim. All we did was pull him out and take him home, but somebody put it in the paper and spelled all our names wrong.

It is in the
Post
and the
Bulletin
that I get the news about the causeway. At The Hole I discover what it means.

First it was supposed to be a bridge. Then some engineers pointed out that a bridge wouldn’t last a single winter. I could have told them that. From my bedroom window in the winter I can see the drift ice sailing past like swift ghost ships on the racing tide. First it travels south; then, a few hours later, north—reversing constantly with the tide. At least once a winter it comes through in massive packs that carry off the ferries, shouldering them off course and shoving them all the way down into the open waters of Chedabucto Bay, where they have to wait for the tide to change and the ice to reverse direction. Anybody here could have told them what that ice would do to the pillars of a bridge, especially as the pillars would have to be hundreds of feet in length to reach the bottom of the strait.

But they were desperate for something. There is a steel plant in Sydney and big coal mines in Glace Bay and New Waterford and Sydney Mines. Crossing on ferries is a nuisance for them. Besides all the coal and steel, more than a hundred thousand passenger cars have to cross the strait each year. Now that Newfoundland is part of Canada, they’re saying there will be even more and that the Newfoundlanders are demanding better access to the country they didn’t want to join in 1949.

They say the causeway will cost twenty-two million dollars and will have a road and a railway track and a sidewalk for pedestrians.

Of course I know the biggest reason for it happening is Angus L. I know this from listening at The Hole. Angus L. is the premier of Nova Scotia and is famous all over Canada because he was a war hero in World War One and built the Royal Canadian Navy in World War Two. They say when Angus L. became the minister of the navy in
Ottawa, there were only six ships and two thousand men. In a flash he built it up to five hundred ships and ninety thousand men and women, and they helped to win the war. My uncle Francis Donohue was one of the people in Angus L.’s navy. But, most important of all, Angus L. is from here. He grew up poor like everybody else, in Dunvegan, which is near Inverness.

Angus L. is a great man, and it’s a shame that he’s a Grit, they say. He even speaks perfect Gaelic.

Here is
my
secret, something I cannot tell to my mother or Grandma Donohue or my Aunt Veronica, who are all Tories, or even to my father, who is nothing: if Angus L. can really build this causeway and make jobs for men from out back who are not Grits or Masons, who almost died from sickness and have never been to school, I will become a Grit and vote for him as soon as they let me and for as long as there are men like him in charge.

There was a time when we all lived together. When I was born, my mother and my father lived in the same little house in Newfoundland. I learned this in the attic. Access to the attic is through the ceiling in my bedroom. You could say that I learn about now and the future through a hole in my floor, but that I learn about the past through a hole in my ceiling. It was in the attic that I found a suitcase that was full of old letters and other papers.

One document in the suitcase was a small blue card, and when I brought it to the light I could see that it had my name printed on it. So I put it in my pocket.

Sitting on my bed afterwards, I examined the card and saw, written in bold black letters across the top: LANDED IMMIGRANT. Then my name and date of birth and some other information that was smudged. I seemed to have discovered something very important: I am
not who they’ve been telling me I am. I was dizzy with excitement. I am someone else and, perhaps, I even have another name.

My mother explained it to me afterwards.

She was the schoolteacher in Troy. My father was home from working somewhere in Quebec. They met and married and moved to Newfoundland, where another mine was just beginning. It was during the war, and working in the mine in Newfoundland was the same as being in the army or the navy. The mine produced a mineral called fluorspar, which they need for making aluminum, which they use for making airplanes, which were important in the war. Anybody who was even indirectly helping them build warplanes was as good as in a uniform. I was born in Newfoundland, but Newfoundland wasn’t part of Canada then. So when they brought me to Cape Breton I was, technically, an immigrant.

A DP?

Not exactly, my mother said. After Newfoundland joined the Confederation, everybody born there became Canadian—whether they wanted to or not.

But I was different anyway and went around feeling special for several days, all thanks to the blue card that said I was a landed immigrant.

My mother says we were happy then. Newfoundland was a lovely place, and the Newfoundlanders she met in St. Lawrence and Lawn and Lamaline were the kindest human beings she’s ever known. Friendly and generous, bringing things to the house, even though they were so poor themselves that when she brought some oranges over from Cape Breton once, the children didn’t know what they were. But I think she was lonely there because she kept coming home for long visits at Grandma Donohue’s, which is at the very northern tip of Cape Breton island, in a village called Bay St. Lawrence. It was also around the time that Grandpa Donohue died of cancer.

Then we moved to Port Hastings, where my father planned to start his own business and live like everybody else—in his own house with his own wife and children and his own dog. But that didn’t last for long, and eventually he was gone and we were here and I became the man of the house—until my tenth birthday.

The last of the cars have gone. The waiting vehicles facing down the hill towards the ferry have begun inching forward. I can hear the first of them boarding—thump, clump, over the ramp. On a sudden impulse I rush down the hill to meet the family and grab my father by his free hand. It is a large, strong hand with rough skin. He has his sleeves rolled up. On his right forearm there is a faint tattoo: DRMI. His initials—Dan Rory MacIntyre.

I have asked: “Why do you have your name on your arm?”

I would never, in a hundred years, tattoo my own miserable name on my arm or any other part of me.

“It’s a long story,” my father says, looking slightly uncomfortable.

What he always says when he’s being evasive.

There is a brilliant parade to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. A coal miners’ marching band from Donkin, over near Glace Bay, dressed dramatically in red and gold. The Port Hawkesbury fire brigade in crisp blue uniforms with white gloves. Brave veterans, heads high and shoulders back, medals clinking and flashing. Scores of kids from the two town schools, some in silly sailor suits and kilts. Girl Guides. We keep our position at Eddie Fougere’s garage and watch as they all straggle by, then run up the steep hill to the public school, where there are speeches and kids singing “Land of Hope and Glory,” directed by Miss Ladd, who looks like the Queen. I wave and try to catch her eye, but she doesn’t notice me in the large crowd.

Later, at the Legion Grounds, there is a picnic. It isn’t really a picnic, but that’s what they call it anyway. Every year there is a picnic that isn’t really a picnic in Judique, which is twenty miles to the north, and they have games there. Everybody talks about the tug-of-war and the dancing and the fist fights at the Judique picnic. And in Lower River Inhabitants, which is to the south, I once watched real boxers beating each other as they danced around on a small platform surrounded by ropes and a cheering crowd. I remember one of them was a MacIntyre from Glace Bay, a hard little man with blue scars on his face from going back to work in the coal mines too soon after the fighting. Later there was a famous boxer from here named Rockabye Ross, who beat a larger man from Sydney.

Every parish seems to have a picnic. Port Hawkesbury has no special attraction like the tug-of-war or boxing competitions, but this one is special anyway. There is a new Queen, and the highest mountain in the world has suddenly been humbled. The ferry, I have heard them say, will soon be “a thing of the past.” There will be a causeway, and it will be in Port Hastings, not here. I imagine that soon Port Hastings will be the town, and the town will be a village. Perhaps our village, when a town, will have a picnic of its own. But for now, Port Hawkesbury is up for celebration anyway.

At the Legion Grounds there is a crowd of casually dressed people amid a jumble of shacks and booths, the smoke and smells of cooking meat, sounds of happy voices and mechanical music. The sense of fun is dampened only by the knowledge that everything there costs money, and money is “hard to come by.” My sisters have not yet acquired an understanding of this reality and ask for everything they see.

I know that I must be selective. You can’t have everything—one of the things you learn as the man of the house. One of the reasons the man of our house is a boy is that, often, the real men have to go far away and work hard for the money necessary for survival. You must
not waste what is necessary for survival. I know there are people here who have more money than they need to survive. Mr. Clough and Mr. McGowan, who own stores. Mr. Gordon Walker, who owns a bank. The Langleys, who seem to own everything else. But that, I’m told, is “neither here nor there.” We are who we are and we have what we have. And it isn’t very much, but it’s enough. There are always people who have less, and we must be thankful.

I wander through the crowd, past the open-front stands where men and women with faces that are familiar from church self-consciously cajole the passersby to part with money.

“Step right up,” they say. “Try your luck.”

I pause. A tall boy hurls a softball towards a stack of fake milk bottles—he misses and looks silly. His second try, propelled by anger and embarrassment, is like a stone from a slingshot. The stack of bottles explodes in a clatter.

“Hey, hey,” says the man inside, laughing. “If you can do that against Petit-de-Grat this evening…” He hands the tall boy a yellow teddy bear, and he walks off proudly, teddy tucked securely under the bulging arm.

At night there will be a ball game against a team from Petit-de-Grat, which is in Isle Madame, where they all speak French, and, later, a chaperoned ball with Joe Murphy’s Orchestra.

There is a wheel that spins. People are lined up, placing money on a piece of plastic that is like a tablecloth with crowns and anchors and other symbols that are duplicated at the wheel. A woman inside the booth spins the wheel with small yelps of enthusiasm. Round and round it goes, making a ticking sound, quickly at first, then slowing down. Where it stops, nobody knoooows.

Someone shouts “Yahoo”—and gets a prize.

I move on. I hear the crack of rifle fire and head towards the sound. There I find men lined up to fire a pretend rifle that looks like a .22 at a
row of tiny mechanical birds moving along the top of a wall in a silent, resigned procession. Once hit, the metal bird flops out of sight behind the wall. I watch for a while and am tempted, but the fifty cents in my pocket suddenly feels too vulnerable. I know, when it is gone, there will be no more.

I arrive at a small cubicle, walls at least six feet high. I see in large letters on the plywood the words FISH POND. People pay money and are handed a fishing rod, flick the line over the wall, pretend to fish, then reel in prizes.

“Everybody wins!”

“How much?” I ask.

“Ten cents.”

“I’ll try.”

After a moment I am the owner of a Union Jack.

The rain is cold. We are wondering what the premier and the man from Ottawa are doing on the other side. What does it take to set off an explosion?

“I think I’ll go,” says Theresa, who is shivering. Like Jackie Nick, Theresa MacKinnon always seems to have a cold, even in the summer.

“Suit yourself,” says Angus Neil, her brother.

In school we learn there are four seasons in the year. But in Cape Breton there are only two—winter and summer. The summer usually lasts a little longer than it did this year. Sometimes it hangs on even up to Halloween. Then the winter comes in November and stays till June.