Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (27 page)

It’s run by Augustinians, mostly men from Europe, and it’s been there for years. Long before the Augustinians, back in the early 1800s, the Trappists started the monastery to serve Acadian settlers and Indians and try to convert a few dozen Protestant Negro families living in the area. It was closed for a while but has been operating again since the thirties.

I can’t think of a quieter, more peaceful place on the planet. Tree-lined lanes and ivy-covered brick buildings and barns. Cultivated fields
and indifferent animals munching and resting. A cool, sunny fall day with trees that seemed to be on fire, light shadows from curdled clouds that hung low, trees so dry that when the wind puffed on them you could hear the scratching as they rubbed against each other. People were singing somewhere, a sad holy song sung slowly in a large room. Though it was Sunday, there was a monk on a tractor hauling manure, and it had the rich rank musk of life itself. He smiled a kind of shy smile as he drove by, and I was suddenly bursting with what I guess is happiness. The day we were there, looking back through the peephole of memory, seems like the last relaxing day in my life—at least this part of it. And that’s kind of sad because it was probably one of the most hopeful days I can remember.

We got out of the car and started wandering around, and almost instantly everybody seemed adrift. The girls headed for the barn. I could see my father wandering in the direction of a pile of logs. I think the monks also had a sawmill. My mother was walking with her arms folded in the direction of the chapel.

I saw a sign that said Way of the Cross, and soon found myself following a small group of strangers. They seemed to be making the Stations, which is a series of prayers in front of small shrines representing the various stages of Christ’s journey from the Agony in the Garden to the Crucifixion.

I’d never seen the Stations outdoors before. They’re usually along the walls inside a church. There was something real about these, outdoors. After all, the real events—the Agony and the Scourging, the Carrying of the Cross and the Falling and the Crucifixion—were all outdoors, even if not in a place as holy and peaceful as this.

And I found myself quietly praying that everything would work out and that, out of all the changes and turmoil around us, there would emerge, somehow, the kind of quiet stability that I was feeling right then and there.

After the Stations, I found a little fountain that was, basically, a pipe connected to a spring. Standing there, it was so quiet that I could hear somebody telling someone else that the spring produced natural Holy Water. And that, if you drink it and say the right kind of prayer, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get what you wish for. People, she was saying, were cured right here, the same as at St. Joseph’s Oratory, Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré, and Lourdes.

I waited until they were gone. Then I took one of the little paper cups they provided in a dispenser and filled it. A fellow from the mountain can use all the help he can get. The water was clean and cold, and I just knew, somehow, that everything was going to be okay in the long run.

When I found my father later, he was talking to a monk who was dressed in working clothes like the ones the old fellow wears most weekdays—baggy work pants, plaid shirt, knee-high rubber boots. A stranger wouldn’t have known who was the monk and who was the miner. When I got close enough, I could hear that they were talking about sawmills.

This is another sign, I thought.

And, later, my mother told me that the boys I noticed wandering around in small groups actually lived there and went to a school that the monks ran in one of the buildings.

“A school?”

“Yes,” she said, “a high school.”

Then you could see the wheels turning. We studied each other long and hard. But nobody said anything. Port Hastings school goes only to grade ten. Going on after grade ten is always a big question of where. Most from here don’t bother.

Finally she said: “It’s something we can think about.”

As if she was reading my mind!

Winter set in early, around Remembrance Day. There were big snowstorms and freezing cold. The new sawmill was pretty well assembled and, by late November, my father was spending most of his time on the mountain cutting logs for his new mill. Sitting in school, I’d be waiting to hear the sound of the saw howling as it sliced slabs and plank and boards from trees older than he was. But that would have to wait. The early winter wasn’t helping. It was hard to get logs out of the woods and off the mountain with deep snow everywhere. He’d come home on Saturday complaining about the cold in the old place, and how his mother would keep the fire in the kitchen going until he was in bed. But then, because she had some premonition about house fires, she’d sit there by the stove almost all night watching the fire die down to where it became harmless.

Even then the house was like a deep-freeze.

The weather got worse in December. Just before Christmas, the married couple who looked after the lighthouse on Margaree Island disappeared after setting out from Broad Cove in their little boat. Days went by without a trace of them, though the boat was found smashed on the shore. It was as if the sea just swallowed them up and kept them. People soon stopped talking about it. Another lighthouse keeper, on St. Paul’s Island, off Cape North, was killed trying to get supplies ashore from a boat.

Hard times for lighthouse keepers, I thought, wondering what was going through the mind of Mrs. Nicholson, who’d been a lighthouse keeper for years and hardly ever spoke about it. I’d be at Nicholsons’ a lot, now that the weather was so bad, watching television with Jackie and Billy Malone—mostly wrestling and hockey games. Jackie still had one of the only television sets in the place, probably a small reward for moving off the point.

There was even a snowstorm on Christmas Day.

You always knew he was home from cutting logs on the mountain by the reaction of the dog. Skipper would be sleeping under the stove, and then he’d suddenly start scrambling out and run to the door whining. You’d be letting him out when you’d hear the sound of the truck coming down the back road, which was officially called the Victoria Line.

One night in January he caught us all by surprise, even the dog. He just walked through the door, kind of breathless and pale. All he said was that the truck had broken down out back.

Later I heard what happened. A couple of miles out, by the crossroads at the Long Stretch, the truck just quit. There was no warning. He was driving along and, just as he approached the crossroads, the engine died and wouldn’t start again.

He got out of the truck. It was snowing lightly. As he walked away, he looked back to make sure he’d turned off the headlights. That was when he saw the woman standing beside the truck staring at him. He started to walk back, but she seemed to drift away. This made him nervous, so he turned and started walking home.

He tried to forget about her, but every time he’d look back over his shoulder she’d be there, as if she was following him. And once, just as he was passing Archie the Piper’s, which is at the crest of the hill where the village begins, he looked back again and she was almost close enough to touch. He still couldn’t see her face because she had a kind of shawl over her head and was clutching it at her throat, so it covered most of her features. But he could see that she was dressed the old-fashioned way, in black wool from head to foot, the way Grandma Peigeag dresses.

He panicked then and ran the rest of the way home.

The next morning he went out to where he had left the truck, and it started right away.

Afterwards I heard a legend about a woman who once lived out back of here and who lost her children during an epidemic. They say she still wanders around on stormy nights looking for them. And some
day I want to ask my grandmother on the mountain about the children she lost to an epidemic. If that’s why she sits by the stove trying to keep her house warm for the one who managed to escape the clutches of disease. And whether she wanders around sometimes on stormy nights looking for them. And whether she really can see the future and, in particular, shadows where my father is concerned.

One morning in February I heard on the radio that Wilbert Coffin was dead. Just before the news, I’d been looking out the window and it was a brilliant sunny day. There was fresh snow, and the reflection of the sunshine almost hurt my eyes. The strait, without the drift ice, had the same sharp electric blue as the sky. It was Friday and I was feeling happy. I like Fridays so much that I usually start feeling good on Thursdays. Friday night I could stay up. Saturday started with fresh doughnuts. I felt free on Saturday, even though I still had the papers to deal with. Saturday morning the dog and I would call for Billy Malone, and we’d wander up to the camps to see Old John. If the papers came early enough, we’d still have time to go to a movie in town.

Listening to that announcement on the radio, all the joy went out of Friday. I couldn’t believe it. They killed Coffin.

I was shocked when they sentenced him to hang. But that was a long time ago—more than eighteen months. They’d postponed the execution half a dozen times. A lot of people doubted that he did it, including Angus Jim Malcolm, who is from here and who knew him as well as anybody.

“He’d steal the eyes out of you,” I heard Angus say. “But he wouldn’t kill a fly. I seen him brush them away when he could have swatted them. No. He didn’t kill anybody.”

Angus had been in the bush with Coffin the week before the Americans disappeared.

People actually seemed to get to know Coffin during the eighteen months he was in the news, and what I still can’t figure out is how anybody can get up the nerve to kill somebody after all that time to think about it. Especially when there were so many people doubting that he really did it. I can understand killing in a war when everybody is frightened and confused, or when somebody is drunk and angry. But important people with education and religion sitting down and deciding to kill somebody in cold blood sounds like something only criminals would do—whether it was killing the American hunters or killing the poor fellow they decided among themselves was guilty of the terrible deed.

I didn’t want to read about the details, but I did anyway. How he protested his innocence to the end but died like a man, climbing the steps to the rope on his own and even shaking the hands of the guards who went up with him. And how the premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, who everybody says is a dictator, refused Coffin’s one last wish to marry the woman he loved for the sake of their little boy. I never realized before that they had a kid. His name is Jimmy, and he’s only eight years old. And suddenly it just seemed worse.

My father was on the mountain that day, cutting logs, and I was glad. I was also glad that nobody in the house seemed to want to talk about it. I didn’t need to hear the words. I knew what they were thinking: that if he’d been rich or if he’d had important friends, he’d still be alive. But he was an English-speaking Protestant Quebecer from a place that didn’t matter. The dead people were well-to-do Americans, and somebody had to die to even the score—even if they were hanging the wrong man.

All I could do was say a prayer for the poor fellow, which I did, and one for his boy, Jimmy Coffin, who was going to have to go through his life with this on his mind. Always wondering: what really happened? Always asking why.

I prayed hard, but I had the strangest feeling that nobody was listening. And it occurred to me that God could have put a stop to this but didn’t. And, for the first time, I was asking myself: whose side is God on anyway?

The thing about news around our house is that, whenever there’s a story that gets us down, we know we won’t have to wait long for one to cheer us up again. Between Princess Margaret and poor Bill Coffin, 1956 was getting off to a bad start. But, suddenly, there was Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier to take your mind off all the discouragement from the Middle East and South America and the Mediterranean and Europe, not to mention Quebec.

Grandma Donohue just couldn’t get enough news about Monaco and Grace Kelly, and I suspect it wasn’t just because Grace was an Irish Catholic. It was because she was an American, and my grandmother, who had lived and worked in the United States earning two dollars a week, believes that Americans are superior to everybody else in the world. I suspect that she often regrets that she ever came back to be poor and proud in Cape Breton, so I don’t begrudge her the excitement she gets when good things happen to Americans, even though I, like my father, think it’s a lot of foolishness.

“Sounds like bullshit to me” is one of his favourite lines, and he kind of sings it, laughing at the same time.

He can actually be funny sometimes—as when my mother adds too many extras on the rosary and he’ll start banging his foot on the floor to make her stop.

And there was school to make you forget about the troubles of the world. School was tough. The year before, in grade seven, we had half a year with no teacher at all, and half with Dolly MacDonald filling in. Now we had Mrs. Annie McGee, who is a very nice lady from up
the hill, near the Piper’s place, but who either didn’t like teaching very much or who hadn’t been in a classroom for a long time.

She seemed shy, and that was a big handicap in a room where discipline had pretty well been breaking down for over a year, ever since the iron hand of Mrs. Katie Gillis disappeared.

There are several new people in school, and one in particular is a teacher’s worst nightmare. His name is Neil MacIver, and he’s one of those people who can create chaos out of nothing. The teacher can never get angry because he’s so clever about being funny. For example: you’ll be working on your math problems and suddenly hear giggling and snorting; you look up and everybody is stealing sideways glances at Neil MacIver, who is brushing long tresses of imaginary hair with an invisible hair brush. Eyes half shut, acting like he’s all alone before the mirror in his boudoir.

Watching him, you actually start to see long, golden locks billowing out from his hand. He’s like a hypnotist. He tosses his head, fluffing the luxurious invisible hair with a serious look on his face. The more you try not to laugh, the harder it gets—until somebody loses control and blows a wad out of his nose or something that’s even funnier than what Neil is up to. And then the whole place is gone. And it’s only then that poor Mrs. McGee notices, and it’s too late to do anything but laugh along with everybody else and try to persuade Neil, who hasn’t made a sound, to behave himself.