Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (13 page)

“You farted,” I accused.

“I WHAT?” she said, blue eyes blazing.

“You farted,” I said, studying my cards. “There’s just the two of us and it wasn’t me.”

I never let on about the dog.

She put her cards down and swore that never in her life had she ever, ever broken wind.

“It’s one thing I never does,” she said.

That’s the way she talks. She puts an
s
on the ends of words.

And I thought: it’s probably the truth…a discipline she picked up among the quality in Boston.

But it was a weapon I knew I would use whenever she was winning at cards. It was a sure way to destroy her confidence. From what I knew of her, it was probably the
only
way to rattle her.

My Aunt Veronica, whom we all call Ronnie for short, is also at the table for the Christmas card party. All the players are shrieking, hitting the table with their fists every time they play a good one.

During the dealing or between games they’ll talk about the causeway and about the changes it will make—big changes coming in the long run. My father will go quiet then.

We’ll see about that, he’ll say, what happens after the construction.

My Aunt Veronica knows a lot of politicians because she’s a Tory and works for them during elections. She believes that everyone will be better off after there’s a change of government. People like my father will never have to go away for work again. People like her will no longer have to scrub floors just to make a living.

People say she should be a politician herself, but she just laughs. With a little education, everybody says, she could be anything she wants. Education has nothing to do with it, she says.

Some of the worst people she has known were the most educated. And the best were the plainest.

She writes political letters to the editor at the Halifax newspaper, which publishes them regularly. It is amazing to see them, always giving politicians hell in a comical way and signed Mrs. Veronica MacNeil, Port Hastings. There’s a Liberal named Francis Campbell who lives in Inverness, and he always answers her. Reading the letters you’d think they were enemies, but they’ve come to know each
other, and she says she respects him because he’s reasonable and fair, and he’s in a wheelchair and worse off than she is. Being a Liberal, like being crippled, is a misfortune that he can’t do much about, she says.

My aunt is always telling my father to go see some Tory who she thinks can help him get a permanent job at the causeway or somewhere else near home.

My father just smiles.

The Tories!

The Tories haven’t been in power for years, in Halifax or Ottawa, and there’s no sign that is going to change any time soon.

“This is where you’re wrong,” she tells him. Mr. Stanfield has just taken over the party and he’s the one man who can beat Angus L. It will happen inevitably, and no doubt about it. The Tories are on the march. Last May they took six seats away from the Liberals in the provincial election. Next time, for sure, they’ll form the government. A Tory government in Ottawa is also inevitable.

But my father figures that nobody alive will ever beat Angus L. Macdonald, and even if they did, the Tories wouldn’t be any better. They’re all the same. Promise everything to everyone, then do exactly what they want.

“Well, we’ll just see about that,” my aunt informs him.

I think of my father’s words—eat or be eaten—but say nothing because I’m not supposed to be there.

My aunt points out that the work is already under way at the canal and the locks on this side of the strait, and that they’re going to have to rearrange the railway tracks and build a lot of new roads.

And, of course, after that, there will be the Trans-Canada Highway, which has to go to Newfoundland under the terms of Confederation. To get there, it will have to pass through here. After that, there’ll be factories and work for everybody because the causeway will turn the
Strait of Canso into one of the biggest, deepest ice-free harbours in the world.

“Lots of opportunities for work, if you know the right people.”

Time to get involved. And did we know that they’ve already burned down Mrs. Nicholson’s house down by the point? Just put a match to it, and the old place went up like kindling. And now Kate and poor Jackie are moving into the old place near Clough’s, where the Bellefontaines used to live. A sure sign the project is moving into the final phase.

“Well, well.”

They sure were pretty quiet about burning Nicholson’s.

My father says no more on the subject.

The church bell was ringing lazily as the bus slowed to make the sharp turn onto the church hill. The turn is so sharp, my father says, you almost meet yourself coming back. The bus driver is Heck MacNeil, and he struggles with the gear shift as the old bus groans and whines and creeps up to the church. St. Joseph’s looms proudly over the flashing strait. From the front steps you can clearly see across to Mulgrave and imagine people over there going into their church, St. Lawrence’s. I know about the church in Mulgrave because my Aunt Veronica was the priest’s housekeeper over there once upon a time and she told us about a mainland priest they all called Alex the Devil.

And she and my mother talked about the time Jack Donohue, her father, found a keg of rum on the shore and sold it, but he had to give the money to the church down north because the priest there said it was a sin for him to profit from his neighbour’s weakness.

Priests are funny people, she says. And she should know, having worked for them. But she never misses Mass. The church, she says, is larger and more important than any of the little people running it.

Outside, the wind from the strait and, to the southeast, Chedabucto Bay, and beyond, from the Atlantic Ocean, was chilly. Jean Larter clutched the kerchief map to her throat and hurried inside.

St. Joseph’s is vast and cluttered and full of the holy odours of varnish, candle wax, and incense. Wherever the eye settles there is something ornamental, in a sacred way, to study. Two large angels crouch prayerfully on either side of the towering altar, marble faces buried in their hands. Little Father Doyle is dwarfed by the altar, the looming angels, and the statues of Jesus and His mother as he quietly performs his rituals. He bends and kisses the altar and genuflects and raises his face and hands towards the ceiling, walking around the altar mumbling the Latin Liturgy, which I know from following in the prayer book. My favourite part is the Gospel according to St. John, where he says “et verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.” You kneel briefly in the middle of it, and then there’s the last blessing and you know the Mass is over. But it isn’t just that. It isn’t just the prospect of release from the confining ritual. There’s something deep and mysterious in that gospel: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” I believe that words are miraculous, the way they make it possible for us to know things.

Father Doyle is a friendly man, always asking questions. When we were talking once, I noticed he wasn’t much taller than I was. He wants to know what I will do when I grow up. I suspect he wants to hear me say that I’ll grow up to be like him—a priest.

I measure my growth against the height of the pew, remembering with satisfaction that once I had to stand on the kneeler to see the sanctuary. I watch the men around me standing loosely, fingertips gently touching the wood on the top of the pews in front of them, some so tall they have to lean a bit. I stretch to my full height and note that I can now comfortably rest my elbows there.

Soon I will have to decide what to do when I’m a man, leaning with my knuckles on the back of the pew.

Because most of the people in Port Hastings are Protestants and we don’t have religion in the school, most Sunday afternoons Father Doyle drives a couple of nuns from town to Art MacNamara’s house, where they teach us catechism. The nuns teach us why God made us and how we are supposed to get to know Him and love Him and serve Him. They teach us about sin and the soul, which, in the catechism book, is like a milk bottle that turns black as we commit more sins.

If you die in a state of mortal sin you go to hell. But I get the impression that you’d have to be an idiot to let that happen, because God is merciful and anxious to forgive even mortal sins for anybody who genuinely asks. It would be like starving to death when you have an open invitation to eat in a restaurant free of charge. The catch, I guess, is that you have to be a Catholic to get into the restaurant.

At Mass, Father Doyle announces catechism classes and that there will be a mission soon. The mission is a special week of prayer and sermons, and we will attend as much of it as we can. Father Doyle says the mission will be led by a priest from the Oblates, a religious order that sends missionaries all over the world. The priest coming here has been almost everywhere, including the Holy Land. I know it is in the Holy Land that the next big war might start, according to the newspapers and Grandma Donohue.

And I know that we will get to the mission because my father is home and has a truck.

Art Mac’s house, where we have catechism, is next door to the Manse, which now belongs to the retired minister Dr. Christie, who lives there with his wife and his sister Annie, who was never married.

Sometimes on Friday nights during the winter Dr. Christie will invite the younger boys from the village to go to the Manse for entertainment. I thought at first it was another, trickier kind of Protestant catechism, but because there isn’t much to do here on a Friday night
in winter, I went anyway. But there was no catechism, just games of checkers and tossing beanbags and talking.

Then there were sandwiches and sweets and tea. Mrs. Christie read to us from a large book by a French writer named Victor Hugo. One part told the story of Jean Valjean and the bishop, and you could tell he was a Catholic bishop because it all happened in France. And that didn’t seem to bother anybody.

Then one Friday night Dr. Christie introduced his sister Annie. She was a large and homely woman, and I assumed he was only being polite introducing her. Then he told us that she used to be a missionary teacher in China, and I saw her as a different person entirely. She has really been to China?

She smiled, and her face came alive, and she talked about her experiences there and how she came to love the Chinese people. She clearly meant it, sitting there speaking softly, eyes shining and old hands folded in her lap. I was shocked. This simple old lady, living on the hill next door to the MacNamaras, had been to China. She talked about teaching in a place called Honan. She showed fancy needlework and small paintings that she brought home from there, and delicate wood carvings. She had loved it there, and loved the Chinese.

So why did she leave? someone asked.

She paused for a moment and sighed. “Things change,” she said. “The world is changing. China has changed.”

I figured if somebody from here can love the Chinese people, then clearly we can love anybody. Nothing on the planet can be stranger and more mysterious than China and the Chinese, with their stern faces and strange clothing. But Dr. Christie’s sister told us about the ancient traditions of China and how the Chinese were civilized long before we were, and how young people in China respect their elders and never misbehave. How they were all polite and kind when she was there.

I wanted to ask her about the war in Korea and the stories in the comic books where the Koreans and the Chinese who were on their side were “gooks,” treacherous and merciless in killing Americans (and Canadians). Could these be the same civilized people she was talking about?

But listening to her, it was as though there was no war at all, and I didn’t have the heart to remind her. It occurred to me eventually that she didn’t think the war or the Communists mattered in the larger scheme of things, and that the war was almost over anyway. And, before long, we’ll hardly remember that we were ever at war with the wonderful Chinese people or that, if they’d had their way, they’d have killed Joe Larter, who lives next door to Johnny and Mary O’Handley, just over the road from where we were sitting.

She sighed again and, after a pause, thanked us for listening to her stories, excused herself, and left the room.

I remember going home afterward, and Jackie Nicholson talking about how boring it was and how the evening would have been better spent coasting on our sleds down the steep hill in Alex MacKinnon’s field.

But that is one of Jackie’s problems. You ask Jackie about where he’d like to go some day, and he asks back why would you want to go anywhere?

Jackie’s notion of being an adult is more of the same, except with your own money and a fast car. Then you ask him about where he’s going to get the money for the car, and he says there’s lots of time to worry about that.

“The Man who made time made lots of it,” Jackie always says—which is as close as he’ll ever come to a religious comment.

I think it really started with the stories from Dr. Christie’s sister, and the revelations about the Chinese and how clever and civilized they
really were before the Communists took over. And then Father Doyle was talking about the mission and how the Oblates go everywhere, and the one who would come to preach to us had been working in the Holy Land, trying to turn Jews and Arabs into Catholics.

And I remembered that I have cousins who are priests—two brothers, Father Murdoch and Father Jimmy, who are the sons of Grandma Donohue’s sister Alice MacLean. Father Jimmy joined the navy after he became a priest and got to the war in Korea, which, the way I see it, is also a kind of missionary work. When we visited Aunt Alice, when we were down north last summer, her house was full of postcards and souvenirs and photographs. Father Jimmy had even been to Ireland.

Aunt Alice had a newspaper clipping, and Father Jimmy was mentioned, helping the doctors on his ship with casualties from the fighting in Korea. You could almost see him, in a movie inside your head, wearing his Roman collar and a navy uniform, his sleeves rolled up, and blood all over his hands and arms from working on the wounded.