Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (23 page)

I watch in astonishment as they poke heaping spoons of soft ice cream at each other’s faces, missing the mouths but plastering it over eyes and hair and clothing.

For a moment I think my father must be drunk. Loaded. But he quit. And how do I explain Angus Walker Sr., who, as far as anybody knows, never drinks?

The crowd goes hysterical, watching serious Dan Rory MacIntyre, the hard-rock miner and truck driver, and serious Angus Walker Sr., the photographer and businessman, behaving like bad boys, attacking each other with spoonfuls of ice cream in front of the entire village.

Worse than the actual embarrassing spectacle, I think, is this wanton waste of ice cream.

The rest of the concert is hazy. The singing and the fiddling. I remember a long delay and restlessness as Angus Walker Jr. took too long setting up an amplifier for an electric guitar and rigging up sticks around an electric light on the end of an extension cord to make it look like a campfire, and finally coming out in a cowboy hat singing “Hey, Hey Good Lookin’.” I remember the snickering and people shaking their
heads when, for his encore, he sang “Shake, Baby, Shake,” which I think a lot of people in the crowd consider a dirty song. The only part of the play I remember is the girl who had to act that she was falling down and doing it so convincingly that everybody thought for a moment she was hurt—and her getting up slowly.

I think the reason everybody remembered that part is because, shortly after the concert, it became obvious that she was pregnant. And people wondered about the baby and why she fell like that. And was she really acting.

That’s how it is in a village. Everybody eventually knows everything, for better or for worse.

All winter they worked at the canal and the bridge that would cross over it. By mid-April it was almost ready, the last link in the new road that, according to the papers, will be called “The Road to the Isles,” after an old Scottish song that Angus L. Macdonald liked. Finally, in April, the bridge was finished. It is the biggest bridge I’ve ever seen. It sits there by the canal, on the mainland side, waiting to be put to work.

The bridge has its own engine to swing it out of the way whenever a ship comes through, but for the first swing the engine wasn’t ready. They attached a cable to one end and a massive bulldozer dragged at it and, miraculously, the bridge started to swing out over the canal until it finally fit perfectly in place. And the new causeway was joined to the new road from the point up to the village.

And Billy Malone was right. There is a space of about two inches at either end of the new swing bridge. And so we are still an island after all—especially when the cofferdams are gone and the canal fills up with water.

There are, according to the papers, big plans for an official opening of
the causeway, and they expect to have it in the middle of August. They plan to find a hundred of the best pipers around to lead the way across, followed by fourteen other pipe bands and whoever else wants to make the historic walk.

Among the stories in the paper then, people hardly noticed that 209 railway employees received layoff notices from the CNR. As of the middle of May, they will have no jobs because the railway ferries will no longer be needed. The car ferries will also disappear, and, with them, all the jobs that people once considered permanent.

People are grumbling: if this is what the Future looks like, maybe we should have appreciated the past more.

At Mr. Clough’s store, where lots of railway people congregate, there are arguments about change and the price of progress. But there are also jokes. It seems that the Honourable Alistair Fraser, the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, is suing the federal government for five million dollars because of all the rock they took for the causeway from his mountain. And everybody finds this terribly funny.

May 20 was a very strange day—the day they started using the causeway for real. I get the impression it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. A few days before, one of the car ferries, the
John Cabot,
mysteriously burned while tied up at the dock in town. Suddenly there were traffic jams on both sides of the strait. Somebody made the decision—open the causeway, right away.

At one in the afternoon on May 20 there was a huge lineup of cars at the new toll booth on the mainland side. They started lining up early. Once again everybody wanted to be the first across the new road to the isles, even though lots of people have been across it already. Nobody seems to mind that it will now cost seventy-five cents. You can buy a book of fifty tickets for $6.25 if you have to cross frequently. And you don’t have to pay coming the other way.

Already there are jokes: it costs money to go to Cape Breton; but you can escape for nothing. Old soldiers say the army should have been like that: hard to get into and easy to get out of.

The afternoon of May 20, which was a Saturday on the long weekend, was amazing—cars just driving back and forth across the causeway. According to the paper, seven thousand cars crossed over on that weekend.

I made my first crossing on the Sunday afternoon. I was riding my bike on the road near the canal when what should I discover but a wallet. I was afraid even to open it. What if there was money in it? Or worse, what if there was money missing when the owner got it back? I had to be in a position to truthfully say I hadn’t even looked in it.

But what to do with it?

There was only one place to go—to the toll booth on the other side. The toll collectors would know what to do with it. So I pedalled across, dodging the frantic traffic as I went. And when I breathlessly reached the other side, I rapped on the window of the toll booth, and I suppose they thought I was foolish. A kid on a bicycle trying to pay a toll…to get off the island?

A stern-looking man in an officer’s cap and a blue-grey uniform that indicated significance opened the window and asked me what I wanted.

“I found this wallet,” I said, handing it to him.

He flipped it open and looked inside. It seemed to be empty.

“And what am I supposed to do with it?”

He was obviously annoyed at this intrusion on such an important day.

I had no answer. I couldn’t understand his attitude. What could be worse than somebody losing a wallet? What could be better than somebody finding it and turning it in and imagining the joy the owner would feel?

But the uniformed man was just standing there looking at me as
if I were a fool. And so I wheeled my bicycle around and headed back towards Cape Breton, leaving him with the wallet.

I was almost at the bridge when the thought entered my mind that maybe somebody had really just thrown the wallet away. People do that sometimes. My Aunt Veronica says it’s a sure cure for warts. You prick a little bit of blood from the wart with a pin, smear it on a piece of paper, put the paper in an old wallet or purse, drop it on the road, and whoever picks it up will get your warts.

It’s guaranteed to work, she says, because nobody can resist picking up anything they think might have money in it.

And I suddenly prayed that she was right. And that the important man in the toll booth would wake up on Monday morning covered in someone else’s warts.

It was clear, after the weekend, that the causeway work was almost finished, and I listened carefully for indications of what might happen next. I was particularly listening for the anxiety that is always a sure sign that he’ll be going. Now that there were hundreds of ferry workers with no jobs, it would be that much more difficult for him to stay around. I didn’t want to be caught by surprise. But there was nothing but quiet discussions about ordinary things.

Then I got a job, and I realized that the more I could do to support myself, the better off we’d all be.

The job came as a surprise. William Fox, who is a little older than I am, had a paper route for the
Post Record,
the newspaper in Sydney. One day, out of the blue, he asked me if I could take over his paper business for a few days. He had a large parcel carrier, big enough for a stack of newspapers, on the front of his bike, and he transferred it to mine. He took me around and showed me who took the paper every day, and through the camp and down to the tug, the
Shawanaga,
and the dredge,
the
Shediac,
where some people were interested in the news. And if there were papers left over, you rode across the causeway and stood at the toll booth, and tried to sell them to people who stopped to pay the toll.

After the incident with the wallet, I was a bit shy approaching the toll booth, but soon realized nobody there had a clue who I was. There was no evidence of unusual warts on any of the toll collectors, and I was relieved about that now I had to deal with them on a regular basis.

As it turned out, William Fox had pretty well decided to get out of the newspaper business and was secretly hoping I’d like it enough to take over from him—which I did.

I enjoyed going to the camp and meeting up with Old John, who walked with me from room to room as I offered the paper to people, some of whom would actually dig out the six cents to pay for it. Some would even give me a dime and tell me to keep it. Old John seemed to treat me more as an equal, now that I had business at the camp. And after I’d finish my trip through the bunkhouse and the staff quarters and the construction offices, he’d often take me over to the cookhouse and feed me.

I think I actually started to get fat, selling the papers. After eating at the camp cookhouse, I’d head for the tug and the dredge and, as it happened, the cooks on both vessels wanted the newspaper and were always trying to feed me, because they’d be cooking supper when I arrived. It was almost impossible to refuse, and I’d watch in amazement as they dragged big trays of steak or pork chops out of their fridges and threw them into the huge frying pans that sizzled in smoking pools of melted butter. At home, steak and pork chops were for special occasions, and my mother never wasted butter the way these cooks did. There was always a massive cake with icing between the layers, and deep sweet pies.

Of course, I had to eat again when I got home, because my mother or Grandma Donohue always had my supper ready, and it would be sin to waste any of it.

Besides my talks with Old John, there were always long conversations with the cooks on the tugboat and the dredge. The captain of the dredge was particularly friendly and always interested in gossip from the village. Often they got me to explain the news for them so they’d have a head start when they got around to reading the paper for themselves.

The rooms in the camps were tidy, thanks to Old John, but the boats were a little messier. The captain on the dredge, however, who had the biggest room, always kept his room immaculate. It smelled of shaving lotion and hair tonic. Best of all, he had stacks of glossy magazines with stories about crime and strange behaviour by famous people.

I’d just sit there leafing through them. And in one I found a shocking story: “What the Kiddies Don’t Know about Dale Evans!”

The headline just screamed at me. There were lots of photographs of Roy Rogers’s wife when she was younger and not wearing her usual cowgirl clothes. In these pictures, she’d be more often wearing things like a bathing suit with large feathers and her hands on her hips and her legs kicking out. My mother calls it cavorting.

There was a long story about her, plus a picture of Roy himself, with his cowboy hat, smiling. Roy is always smiling, I find. I didn’t read much of it before I started feeling sad and maybe a little bit angry, the way I do when Jackie Nicholson is sneering that Roy Rogers is just an actor and a singer and a phony who couldn’t put a bullet in the broad side of a barn door if he was standing in front of it.

I stopped reading the captain’s magazines after that.

The good thing about selling the paper was that I got interested in real news. And every day I’d be watching for surprises from Hungary.

Best of all, I was earning my own money and receiving inspirational mail from the newspaper about how many famous people, such as Walt Disney, got their start peddling papers when they were boys like me.

Then it was summer and, on a Saturday afternoon, Billy Malone and I were walking to town for a movie in Rocky Hazel’s theatre. It was a sunny day, and we weren’t having much luck hitching rides. There was a good chance that we were going to miss the beginning of the show. The cars and trucks, when they appeared, just rumbled by. The road, past the end of the pavement, was particularly dusty because construction machinery had already started preparations for paving. One of the first benefits from the causeway was paving the roads into and out of Port Hawkesbury and some of the town’s back streets.

Then, out of the dust, I saw, coming in our direction, a white car, and it seemed to be slowing down, as if to talk to us. As it got closer, I could see it was brand new. And when it stopped, I saw my father at the wheel.

“Where are you two heading?”

“Heading for the show,” I said.

I could see Billy admiring the car.

It was a brand new ’55 Chev.

“Jump in,” says he, even though he was heading in the opposite direction.

We climbed in, and he turned around in the middle of the road and headed back towards town.

“What do you think?” he asked, smiling.

“Is this ours?”

He nodded, looking somewhat pleased with himself.

I was astonished.

Clearly something good was happening somewhere in the universe.

Having a regular commitment changes the summer routines. No more lying in bed in the morning trying to figure out what to do with the sunshine and the freedom—to prowl the cool forest or flounder in the deep cove water until your skin shrivelled and your teeth chattered;
or build a raft on the shore or a shack in the woods; or ride imaginary broncos through the rolling fields out back. Now I have responsibility, and the days find their shape around the schedules of the
Post Record.

Late morning the bundle of papers would arrive at Angus Walker’s canteen, and much of the afternoon would be consumed by the business of getting rid of them. The best days were when they’d be gone without the necessity of crossing the causeway, even though I found it interesting to stand at the toll booth, watching all the travellers—cars from all over Canada and the United States. Just standing there watching, trying to imagine what their distant lives were like, would somehow absorb the dreariness of the wait. And somehow, in spite of all the dreaming, the papers would be gone and my pocket heavy with coin. I could easily clear a dollar a day, and sometimes more—which was more money than I’d ever had at my disposal in my life.