Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (14 page)

Until then I hadn’t really thought much about my future. Once I read a book about a newspaper reporter who solved a series of murders in a travelling circus, and that seemed interesting. But I could never imagine how anyone from here would ever get a job on a newspaper—unless it was working for the
Bulletin,
though I find the
Bulletin
boring.

Then I read
Two Years before the Mast.
It was a great adventure, full of hardship and excitement. Even though I realize there are no more sailing ships, there was, for a while, no doubt in my mind about what I would do when I was old enough. I would run away to sea.

Once my father asked me, half joking, “What are you going to do with yourself when we stop feeding you?”

I didn’t want to mention running away, for fear his feelings would be hurt. Like Father Doyle, he seemed to have an answer in his mind already. I think most men would like their sons to want to be like them.
So, half joking, I replied: “I’m going to follow in my father’s footsteps.” That is an expression I had read in books.

He didn’t laugh, and I knew from the look on his face that he thought I was serious. But I couldn’t tell whether he liked the idea.

“We’ll see,” he said.

It’s always difficult to know what he really thinks, and for quite some time after that it almost seemed like a half-decent idea—working as a miner. By then there was a lot of drilling and blasting going on all around the village. I’d stand and watch the men in their hard hats and rubber clothing, covered with white dust, and listen to the roaring of compressors and the jangling clash of steel boring relentlessly through rock. The sound, I realized, of change; the sound of making something happen—consummated, in the end, by the crash of an explosion and the invincible rock shattered, making way for something new. You can go anywhere to work as a miner. I even know of men from here who work in the Congo, which is in Africa. Miners are probably in China too, if the Communists allow it.

But I wasn’t sure. I remembered the cold, foul wind billowing up out of the shaft in Stirling, and men laughing and joking one day and then, too soon after, sitting alone in a cookhouse in the middle of nowhere, old hands wrapped around mugs of coffee, sad eyes examining the smoke from cigarettes. Or dead, some small stranger inheriting their skates.

Each evening for a week we attended the mission. The visiting Father was young, and he didn’t look like a priest or sound like one. He didn’t speak like Father Doyle or the nuns or even Miss Annie Christie. He smiled and laughed a lot and told of his experiences in foreign places. I kept waiting for him to tell us how he spread the Gospel messages and the Word of Jesus among the unbelievers, but he never did. I
kept waiting for Sin and Penance and the Sermon on the Mount. But when he talked, it was about the world and how all the people in it are unique as individuals and fascinating in their cultural differences. Miraculously, all are one and part of the same mysterious design—the precious creatures of an all-powerful and infinitely good God.

Listening to him was breathtaking, and, as I lay in bed afterwards, his words came back in complete sentences and paragraphs, bringing exotic images with them. One image that stood above them all was of people who owned nothing—not a thing but the rags on their bodies. People who lived in the direst material poverty, but who wanted to know the Truth about the world and about Eternity because they knew that somehow, somewhere in the Truth, they’d find Hope and Happiness. The Word was the truth and it was made of flesh, like me. And everything started to seem logical.

One evening he explained how there’s a kind of war on—a war for the hearts and souls of people, a war between the Truth and the False Promise of material progress. Godless Communism was only the most conspicuous of the problems challenging our immortal souls. The world was rotten with problems, largely caused by Greed and Violence. I think it was then that I knew: to be a missionary was to be everything—a teller of the truth; a warrior against the Communists; but, best of all, a traveller in a world of endless mysteries and fascinating conflicts. I remembered Miss Christie’s sadness and the mission Father’s anger, but only for a moment.

I couldn’t wait to tell my mother. She didn’t say anything at first—just looked at me with a serious expression on her face.

“That would be wonderful,” she said. But her eyes were full of questions.

My father was listening, studying the floor, saying nothing as usual. I tell nobody else, except my dog. We’re sitting on a stone near the
edge of the cemetery, where it overlooks the strait. The racket of the construction is now inescapable. The gigantic Euclids are clearly visible, rumbling across the face of the jagged cape in patient convoys, dumping massive chunks of granite into the rushing water. According to the
Bulletin,
the causeway is now two-thirds across. The world is that much closer.

I tell the dog: “I think I’m going to be a missionary.”

In case he doesn’t understand, I point across the water. Over there, I tell him, beyond the cape, there is a troubled, complicated world, and people are waiting for the Word. He seems to understand, and we both watch another Euclid backing carefully to the tip of the approaching causeway.

Then he places his chin on my knee, a sad expression on his face—thinking about a future that doesn’t have him in it.

Some of them have been standing here since four this afternoon, huddling against the dampness and the December chill. They are mostly adults and don’t move around much. Jackie Nick and Billy Malone and I, because we are kids, create our warmth in frantic spurts of action. Billy digs Jackie in the ribs or grabs my cap, and a chase ensues, or the dog and I will race back and forth until we are all warm and breathless from the running and laughing. The grown-ups regard our foolishness with a mixture of contempt and envy.

The causeway started under a shroud of fog and a cold drizzle in September two years ago. It now seems destined to finish in the same kind of weather, except perhaps a little colder. The drizzle is more like sleet. It is December 10, 1954. At least fifty people have gathered for the historic moment, the undoing of the strait that nature carved in the landscape incalculable centuries ago.

Among the curious, I suspect, is a newspaper reporter from Sydney. Every few feet of the causeway progress, it seems, has been noted in the papers by story or picture or both. Now it’s the moment they’ve really been building up to. There must be reporters around. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a reporter at a time like this, the eyes and ears of all the people who can’t be here—almost everybody on the planet—even for people from just a few miles away who are sick or
busy or uninterested or hostile to the idea that Cape Breton will cease to be an island in the pure sense of the word.

Oh sure, there will be the canal, but Jackie Nick points out that there will be a bridge over the canal. Billy, who isn’t even from here, argues that there will still be a crack of space at either end of the bridge because it will be a swinging bridge, so we will still, technically, be on an island. And that reminds me that I read in the paper that the big shots at something called the Canadian Board on Geographical Names have decided that Cape Breton will still be an island after the causeway, no matter what anybody says. Jackie scoffs, the way he does at any argument he’s losing.

Even though there’s a want on him, Jackie tries to sound like a grown-up. You would never mention Santa Claus anywhere near Jackie. He even argued, to the point where you felt like slugging him, that there’s no such person as Roy Rogers—until he saw him for himself on his new television set. He and his grandmother got the TV after they were moved off the point and their old house went up in smoke.

There’s a man in an overcoat and hat, and he’s carrying a large camera and a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. He looks like the pictures of newspapermen I have seen in magazines. He has curly black hair and resembles the Syrian my mother sent away from our door one night. I try to pick out the reporter. I think I know which one he is, if only because there is one large, soft-faced, bareheaded man who shivers a lot and has frequent chats with the photographer. Now and then they wander off towards the canal, where the cars are parked, and return obviously more cheerful.

We can no longer see the trucks as clearly as before, but we can hear them distinctly as they back to the edge of the causeway, now no more than thirty feet away, and unload the crashing, tumbling rock into the racing strait. The water has been moving swiftly for days now, as if in a race to escape the confines of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in
a final dash towards the freedom of the infinite Atlantic before this ancient waterway is closed forever.

We’ve been waiting for this day for months. In late August, Mr. Harry MacKenzie, one of the big shots on the causeway project, was in the newspaper saying that the most difficult part was finished.

“The last couple of hundred feet will be a piece of cake,” he said.

As if in response, almost instantly the tides ripping through became more difficult. They snatched a passing freighter and hurled her against a rock, causing significant damage. That story led to another newspaper headline announcing what we all knew already: Tide Through Narrowing Causeway Gap Now Hazardous.

But, clearly, not everybody reads the
Victoria-Inverness Bulletin.
Just ten days ago, a Norwegian freighter on its way to Prince Edward Island for a load of potatoes ran smack into the causeway, even though the strait has been officially closed to shipping for nearly a month.

This morning a little motorboat fought its way through, after three tries, to become the last vessel in history to pass through the strait the natural way. I don’t think the people on board were going anywhere in particular; they were just trying to make a name for themselves by being the last to do something—the way people try to become famous by being the first, say, to climb Mount Everest. I’m not sure I understand this hunger to be noticed, even though it seems to be fairly common. I get nervous when I’m noticed because of all the people waiting to pounce on my mistakes and failures.

I’m sure the little boat will be in all the papers tomorrow, struggling through the churning, frothy gap between here and there.

All year, just from watching, I could tell that the strait was becoming moodier, more dangerous. And, as if to assert its awesome power, the shore this spring was littered with thousands and thousands of dead billfish. You knew there was something unusual by the flocks of screeching gulls, wrangling as though there weren’t enough dead fish
to go around. And all you could see, from the tip of the point to the old pier, was the silvery harvest cast up on the rocks and gravel for no apparent reason.

Now we watch in silence as the last of the monster boulders from the cape are being hauled across in a relentless procession of grim-faced Euclids, to assert the superiority of engineers and drillers and their dynamite over Mother Nature.

Someone points into the gloom and there, writhing and leaping, we can see a school of pollock struggling through the gap. Probably the last living creatures to do so, stealing some of the glory from the little boat that made it through this morning.

I study the crowd to see if the reporter noticed, but he is engaged in a laughing conversation with his photographer.

Earlier there was a rumour that one of the well-dressed men in the tightly packed shivering group of important-looking people is the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, the Honourable Alistair Fraser. It’s hard to tell because important men all seem to look the same. They wear similar serious hats and coats and faces. They have a way of standing, feet planted solidly, because they know exactly why they’re there instead of somewhere else. Their importance travels with them and invests their destinations with a certain majesty.

Mr. Fraser, I have heard, owns Cape Porcupine, where all the rock for the causeway came from—at least ten million tons of it, they say. And now, the last few tons are tumbling into the narrowing gap between here and everywhere else.

I can imagine Mr. Fraser standing there, somewhere in the crowd, adding up the money in his head as the rocks from his ancient mountain tumble into the desperate strait.

Darkness gathers closer. I know it’s suppertime. Faint kitchen smells waft towards us from the
Shediac
and the
Shawanaga,
which are
moored nearby. The
Shediac
is a dredge, digging the approaches for the new canal. The
Shawanaga
is a tugboat that moves the dredge around.

I know I’m risking trouble standing here, missing supper, but this is a rare historic moment in a place where, until recently, there was nothing but decline and stories of before. It is Friday, and there is no school tomorrow. The only thing tomorrow morning is the usual trip to the camp with Billy for the bottles Old John will have stored away for us. And I find I’m less likely to get in trouble for things like being late for supper since my father moved back home.

One of my jobs, before he came back to stay, was to lock the kitchen door before I went to bed and to unlock it in the morning.

Most people around here never lock their doors, but most people around here have men living in the houses more or less all the time. We began locking the door when we started seeing so many strangers showing up around the village in the spring of 1953, when the causeway construction started on this side—just before my father came home and I turned ten.

First I thought it was because of the Syrian. But my mother said, “God, no. There’s no harm in the poor Syrian.”

“Why couldn’t we let him sleep in the house, then?”

“Because you can’t take chances when you’re alone,” she said. “You just don’t let strange men sleep in the house when the father is away.”

Maybe it had something to do with peddlers. The way people say the word “peddler” makes you think there’s something crooked about them—something vaguely dangerous.

My mother was trying to reassure me: there’s nothing wrong with peddlers. She told me about growing up in Bay St. Lawrence, when the Jewish peddlers would travel the countryside. People were almost always glad to see them because, back then, country people needed
most of the stuff that the peddlers brought. The peddlers brought pills and cloth and pots and pans and tons of gossip. Most of them were fun, my mother said. They’d bring news and stories from the towns and other villages and sit in the kitchen talking the night away. One of them, named Jack Yazer, was young and good-looking, and he’d be full of news from the city and around. And when the news was done he’d recite long poems, changing the verses to make serious poetry sound comical.

She’d recite what she could remember of one of Jack’s favourites, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” It was about a massacre, but Jack would make such changes as “Cannons to right of them, cannons to left of them…hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cannons…” And everybody would fall over laughing.

They always loved to see Jack Yazer in the lane.

I’d say: “Maybe the Syrian would be like him, full of news and entertainment.”

She’d say: “We can’t take that chance. The country was different back then. And the men, if they were alive, would be home most of the time. The houses were full of men. The fathers and often a grandfather or uncle. And always, it seems, lots of large strong brothers.”

I don’t have a brother, either.

The worst part before my father came home were the times when I’d hear the women in the kitchen some nights talking quietly, so I wouldn’t know exactly what they were going on about. My mother and my Aunt Veronica and Grandma Donohue at the kitchen table, talking softly about somebody’s problems. Or sometimes when I’d come upon one or two of them in the pantry and somebody would be crying.

Part of being the only man in the house, I have learned, is to try to anticipate and avoid what will make the women sad or nervous or
angry and prevent those quiet, private conversations in the pantry or, late at night, around the kitchen table.

One morning when I unlocked the door, Martin Angus was sleeping on the floor of the porch. He was curled up on an old coat that used to belong to my father but had been turned into a bed for the dog. It was a red and black plaid pattern, but the colour was, by that time, almost invisible under the dog hair.

Martin Angus MacLellan is our cousin on the MacIntyre side, but we don’t often talk about it because everybody in the county makes fun of him.

Martin Angus lives in Inverness, but mostly he wanders around the countryside like the peddlers, living off hospitality. Nobody knows quite how to describe Martin Angus. He’s tall and thin and very pale. You can tell by his eyes that there’s a serious want on him. At the same time, the way he listens to people and the way he understands even what they aren’t saying makes people a little bit nervous when he’s around. Sometimes I think that Martin Angus can read your mind.

There are a lot of people like him in the asylum in Mulgrave, but they haven’t put him there yet because he has an unusual brain and uses it to entertain people. And that’s how he takes care of himself.

Here’s how he does it: He’ll go to a political meeting, say, and listen to the speeches. Then he’ll go to visit somebody who will let him in, and he’ll repeat the speeches, word for word, for the people who weren’t there. Once he came to our place straight from the graduation at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, and he told us about all the priests and monsignors and what the bishop had to say. Then he started reciting the speech that some important person made, and he didn’t even stop when my mother left the room to fill the kettle in the pantry. The speech went on and on even when the
kettle boiled. He shut up only when she put some tea and sandwiches in front of him.

Some people say, probably because he’s related to us, that Martin Angus is witty and has a photographic memory. But when he shows up at our place my mother says, “Oh
Dhia,
look what’s coming.”

But you don’t want to provoke Martin Angus because of the sharpness of his tongue.

Once, when he was watching a step dancer he didn’t like much, somebody said, “That fellow has music in his blood.” And Martin Angus replied that the step dancer obviously had bad circulation because the music wasn’t getting to his feet.

So, this particular morning, there’s Martin Angus sleeping on the dog’s bed. The dog is curled up in the corner, shivering. And when I opened the door, the dog jumped up and looked at me as if to say: What are you going to do about this? Or, Maybe it’s time to put a lock on the outside door as well.

Martin Angus woke up too and asked what he always asks: “Is Dan Rory home?”

“No,” I said.

“And when might you be expecting him?” he asked, sitting there on my father’s old coat, scratching under his arms and looking cold.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“And is he still working over in Stirling?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Working for Mindemar Metals. That’s good work—a good place for him.”

The way he says things, it’s as though he thinks you’re lying.

I said nothing, but as Martin was going out the door, he said, “You can tell Dan Rory I was here.”

“Yes,” I said.

And as he closed the door, he said, “I’ll be back.”