Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (29 page)

On Saturdays the papers were heavier. In July they’d changed the name of the newspaper from the
Post Record
(“Today’s News Today!”) to the
Cape Breton Post,
and they were getting rid of the weekend supplement, the
Standard,
and replacing it with a fat load of fill of their own called the
Cape Bretoner.
Saturday was a day of heavy lifting.

The paper that day, like most days that summer and fall, had another huge headline about Nasser and the fight over who will control the Suez Canal. Most people think the way Grandma Donohue feels: sure as hell there’s going to be another world war over this.

If that wasn’t enough to get you upset, there was an uproar in Cyprus because the British hanged three young “terrorists” in a jail in Nicosia,
and I’m left asking myself, What has that achieved? You’d think with a world war shaping up over the Suez Canal, the British would be too busy to be hanging young guys who just want them to go away.

Canadian politicians were making a racket because the Bank of Canada has increased its interest rate by one-quarter of a percentage point, and now it’s at an all-time record three-and-a-quarter percent, which is supposed to be almost as dangerous, in economic terms, as the row over the Suez Canal.

It’s all beyond me, and I’m just thankful that I have only to drag the paper around to the readers rather than figuring out what’s in it. I feel sorry for the men and women who have to write all that stuff down.

I actually had a lot of ground to cover on my paper route. At least a couple of miles along the main road, almost all the way to Troy. Then I’d double back and turn down towards the camp, drop the papers there, then carry on to the dredge. If I still had papers left, I’d pedal across the causeway to the toll booth.

At a certain point, remembering that afternoon, things get kind of fuzzy—like a dream, after you’ve woken up.

I’m riding down the road to the camp. The first stop is the staff house, which is where the big shots live. Off to the right of the staff house is the cookhouse, where Old John often takes me for sweets and tea and chit-chat. I wheel my bicycle towards the smaller building, which is closest to the road, and lean it against a tree.

I see Old John right away and call out. He doesn’t answer. He’s busy, as usual. In my experience there is always a cleaning job or a repair job demanding his immediate attention. You rarely ever see Old John sitting down. He’s always moving quickly. Seeing him, I often think of Grandma Donohue’s expression: “He’s moving so fast you could play checkers on his coat-tails.”

But now he isn’t moving at all. He seems to be repairing the doorstep at the front of the staff house.

He’s actually seated on the step, and he is leaning forward with his head between his knees. It’s as if he’s looking for something on the ground or underneath the steps.

“Hey, John,” I say. “What’s going on?”

No answer.

I step around him, and it is when I look down to see what he is doing that I see a rifle poking out from under him. It actually seems to be across his lap, the barrel sort of pointing up over his right forearm in my direction.

Rats, I think. He’s been shooting rats, and one got away on him and has taken refuge underneath the step. I consider stopping to watch, but I don’t like killing—not even rats.

I pause briefly inside. The bedroom doors are open, revealing narrow cots with their grey blankets tucked neatly underneath the mattresses. I inhale the soft odours of hair tonic and shaving lotion and tooth paste. No trace of the feminine. No evidence of family or other lives.

I drop a newspaper on a tidy bed, then turn and leave.

Old John hasn’t altered his position, hasn’t made a move. The sky is dark and the air heavy. A soft breeze sighs through the trees that shelter the staff house. My eye settles on the motionless rifle.

I now imagine that I stood there for a long, long time, waiting for his greeting, listening to the breeze that, experience tells me, will grow cooler and, sometime during the coming night, wring the moisture from the dark, heavy air. And I imagine the beginning of a headache that will be real tomorrow. In the memory the moment goes on and on, subtracted from all that has gone before and all that will come afterwards.

And then it is a different moment, a normal moment linked, like all the others before the moment at the staff house, to the rest of time. I am on my bicycle and I am riding down the steep hill towards the canal, and there is a vehicle making its way up the hill, but I’m not certain if it
is a car or a truck. I am aware of the low, dark sky, clouds almost touching the leaden waters of the strait. I feel the bump of the stony, unreliable road and, when the vehicle has passed, I can taste the dust it leaves behind. Up near the old cemetery that overlooks the new causeway, I hear a crow. “One crow, sorrow,” Grandma Donohue always says.

And then I am approaching the canal, now wheeling the bicycle because the ground is so rutted by trucks and heavy machinery. The heavy bag of newspapers thuds against my hip, threatening to trip me. I suddenly feel tired. I imagine that the dredge is deserted. It is, after all, a Saturday. The men have gone ashore or home. The tugboat is nowhere to be seen. There is a peculiar silence all around and, I suddenly realize, inside my head.

And then I am home, carrier bag still half full of unsold papers.

It is Saturday. On Saturday we get the
Star Weekly,
which is a glossy newspaper from Toronto and full of wonderful comics—
Dick Tracy, L’il Abner, Terry and the Pirates.
My father’s favourites are
Pogo
and
Juniper Junction.
I retire to my room with the comics, and I fall asleep.

Later, I think, an adult came by, and there was quiet conversation in the kitchen accompanied by sidelong glances in my direction. And then the adult left.

My mother was very quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“About what?” I asked.

She looked at me oddly.

Then she said: “About Old John.”

And that was all she said.

After Mass the next morning, you could see the little groups of people and imagine what they were all talking about. Old John. The Hungarian from the Gorman’s camp. Shot himself.

But what I was thinking about was Father MacLaughlin’s little sermon, just minutes before.

As usual, right after the Gospel, he went to the lectern and, instead of the usual explanation of what he’d read, he just stood there for a moment looking at us.

Father MacLaughlin hadn’t been here for long, and people mostly remarked about his housekeeper, who was unusually good-looking and, unlike most priest’s housekeepers, young. And about how you can often hardly breathe in the confessional during the Christmas and Easter seasons because of the smell of booze coming off the priest.

All of which, they always say, is understandable. “Poor Father Spotty,” which is what a lot of people call him because of his freckles, “went through hell” in the war. I guess he was an army chaplain and saw things that nobody ever likes to think about. He drinks to forget and, if he gets a little comfort from a good-looking housekeeper, more power to him.

That’s what I hear them say about Father MacLaughlin. And nobody ever criticizes him, even for the booze and the pretty housekeeper—especially not the war veterans.

On that morning, after the longest pause I can remember by a priest on the altar, he spoke quietly about a tragic incident in Port Hastings on the day before. Something at the Gorman’s camp.

I could feel my stomach tightening and pressure building behind my eyes, just as you do before you start to cry. But I couldn’t stop listening.

He talked about an unfortunate man who worked at the camps, a man from a distant country who was alone here, isolated from everything he knew and cared about. Probably lonely and, eventually, in a state of despair. And how, in this terrible state, and with nowhere left to go, he took his own life. He paused, just staring out at us, and you’d think he was somewhere else, somewhere cruel and far away.

All I could hear in the church during the pause was my own heart
beating. My throat and my entire head ached. I prayed that he was finished speaking. But he wasn’t.

Father MacLaughlin then talked about church doctrine on suicide. How suicide is supposed to be a mortal sin, a deed so terrible that it cuts us off from God’s grace and any hope of salvation.

That’s the teaching of the church, he said.

You could hear people clearing their throats then and squirming a little. We all know that two kinds of people are excluded from God’s grace and salvation when they die: unbaptized babies and people who kill themselves. Once there were other categories, like poor Paddy Murphy in Bay St. Lawrence, whom the priest put outside the cemetery because he missed his Easter Duties.

Because they are excluded from God’s grace, they are excluded from the consecrated part of the cemetery and must be buried somewhere else—anywhere outside the fence; sometimes in the ditch.

But Father MacLaughlin was saying he had a problem with this teaching by the church. You could hear the place go quiet again.

Basically, he said, to be in a state of mortal sin, you have to be aware of what you’re doing and know that it is a mortal sin and still not care.

The way he figured it, the last thing in the mind of a man so lonely and miserable that he’d rather die than live is mortal sin. A man that desperate is incapable of reasonable thought. And if you are incapable of reasonable thought, you can’t be in a state of mortal sin.

That’s how he sees it anyway.

Our infinite God, he says, is distinguished by an infinite capacity for mercy. And for that reason, this humble priest is going to give Old John Suto from the Gorman construction camp the benefit of the doubt. Old John Suto is going to get a church funeral and a Christian burial here. Tomorrow. Ten o’clock. Period.

He turned on his heel, then, with a swish of vestments, and resumed the Liturgy.

And, after a short funeral Mass on the Monday, attended by a few people from the camp, they buried Old John in a shady corner of the St. Joseph’s Parish cemetery. There he’ll remain until the day of the Final Judgment, when he and Father Spotty can both face the music side by side.

Afterwards, George Fox, one of the older boys who sometimes helps Mr. Clough at the store and post office, was saying that Old John arrived that Saturday morning to pick up a registered letter. It was obviously important, and he must have read it right away. You could tell by the look on his face that it was bad news. He just put that important-looking letter away without saying anything and headed back to the camp.

They found it later. It was from a big-city lawyer somewhere. The lawyer regretted having to tell John that the authorities in Budapest had relayed a firm and final refusal to reimburse the money they had confiscated and that it would be pointless to continue pursuing his efforts to reunite his family.

A few weeks later, Nasser and the Suez Canal were gone from the front page of the newspaper. Now the stories were from Europe. They were calling it a revolution. The headline on October 25 was huge: Hundreds Killed in Hungary.

The next day there was another even bigger headline: Fighting Rages in Budapest.

I sat for a long time on the platform in front of Angus Walker’s canteen reading. Soviet troops were in pitched battles with Hungarian students and other civilians who were being supported by parts of the Hungarian army.

It went on and on, day after day, until, inevitably, the Soviet army crushed the uprising. But not before hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the country to find new homes. Thousands came to Canada.

All I could do was shake my head and ask the pointless question: why couldn’t you have waited? And I felt something like anger mixed in with the sorrow. Surely you knew that even a disaster would leave some room for hope.

But Father MacLaughlin, of course, had already given me the answer. Despair leaves no room for reason in the human heart. And in the absence of reason, there is no place for hope.

There are three old women on the mountain, and they all have special powers. That’s what my cousins tell me. People come to them when they have problems doctors and priests can’t solve. They also have the power to make bad things happen. One of them is our grandmother, Peigeag.

Once my grandmother was helping a young woman to have a baby. The woman wasn’t married. Plus, there was something seriously wrong with the baby, and it made a mess coming out. It almost killed the mother. My grandmother was so angry she put a curse on the unknown father, even though it could have been someone she knew and cared about. That’s what my cousins told me, and there is no doubt in their minds that the man who was the father of that poor baby would suffer as much as the woman did—unless someone with equal powers took the curse off him.

The curse is called the
buidseachd.
And it always seems to be women with the power to put it on or take it off. You rarely ever hear of a man putting the
buidseachd
on somebody, or having the special power to do things.

My Aunt Veronica, for example, reads tea leaves and predicts the future—and she usually gets it right. She can get rid of warts, or cause them, and make your hair grow back if you’re losing it. If you break a dish, she knows how to put it back together again as good as new. She
can also make good things, including medicine and wine, from weeds and wild berries. But I’ve never heard of her putting a curse on anyone, though I suspect she could remove one—if you asked her to.

My cousins told me there is a
buidseachd
on my father. Here’s how it happened. Years ago, before he was married, he came home from the mines in northern Quebec for a visit. He was prosperous. He had a car and was quite pleased with himself. But he insulted one of the old ladies on the mountain because he neglected to offer her a ride in his new car to Mass one Sunday. So she put a curse on him.

She could probably have made him sick or caused him to have a car accident, but it was a more serious kind of curse. It was that, for as long as he lived, he’d never have the benefit of good luck. And as everybody around here knows, you don’t get anywhere in life without a few lucky breaks.

Knowing my father, he’d just laugh at the idea and would never go to the bother of having somebody remove the curse—even though his own mother had the power to do so. When I mention things like the
buidseachd
and
bocans,
which are spirits, he just laughs as though he doesn’t believe in any of that.

I’m not sure whether I believe in it, but it would make me nervous to know that some old lady had cast a spell on me. And if I knew another old lady who could remove it, I would go to see her and get it removed. And the bad things that have happened to my father are enough to convince me that my cousins are right. On the mountain they’re always saying: Poor Dan Rory never had any luck that wasn’t bad.

He went to work in a mine in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, where I was born, and now almost everybody he worked with there, including my godfather, Alonzo Walsh, and his brothers, are sick or dead of some mysterious disease. My father has trouble breathing sometimes
and coughs a lot, and he must worry about whatever is killing his friends in St. Lawrence. After he left St. Lawrence, he tried to start his own business, a sawmill on the mountain, and everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. And the mill disappeared. After that he was working in another mine in Newfoundland and broke his back. He buys trucks that keep breaking down and costing him more money than they earn, and eventually he’s forced to go away to the hard-rock mines again. I know he has tried to get work in the big mines of Elliot Lake and Kirkland Lake and Sudbury, where there are unions, so that men work safely and get fair wages, but they say he can’t pass the physical for those places. He has bad lungs, they say. Probably because of the sickness he had when he was a boy, or from working in St. Lawrence, or both. So he mostly goes to work in mines where there are no unions and where they don’t check as closely on your lungs as in places like Elliot Lake.

I confess that, for a while in the summer of 1956, I thought his luck was changing for the better. It occurred to me that, maybe, during the winter when he’d been living on the mountain and cutting logs, he broke down and got his mother to lift the
buidseachd.
Or maybe that would be one of the things they were doing when they’d be talking Gaelic as if I wasn’t present in the room—and she’d be doing most of the talking while he and Grandpa Dougald would just sit and stare at the floor, leaning forward a little bit with their hands folded on their knees. But I don’t think so. And it became obvious by the end of the year that the curse was still in full effect.

He sawed a lot of lumber in the spring and early summer of ’56. Then he started running out of logs. It’s hard to imagine a shortage of trees on the mountain, but they have to be a certain size and quality for lumber, and it gradually became harder to find them. Finally he made an arrangement to lease some more woodland in Troy.

There are two old bachelors there, MacDonalds, named John and Neil. Their father’s name was Rory, and he had red hair. So the bachelors are known as Neil Red Rory and John Red Rory. That summer, he even built a small camp there and hired George the Wheeler, who is a MacQuarrie, to live in the woods and cut logs. He bought a small bulldozer, which he said he’d need to haul the logs to the road. Horses, he said, are pretty well on the way out. Plus, they require too much looking after.

Meanwhile, he was sawing the last of the mountain logs and trying to get a decent price for his lumber from the big dealers in Sydney. His problem, as I eventually understood, was that he was never in a position to make advance arrangements for delivery or price because he was never sure of his log supply, and he could never anticipate breakdowns in machinery.

Still, from time to time, there would be a special day when he’d work long after dark, optimistically loading his lumber on the back of his truck to take it down to Sydney, hoping that he’d hit a day when they were desperate for it and prepared to give him a fair price.

I’d help him, and then watch in fascination when the truck was loaded as he’d walk around with his pencil and little notebook, very intense, eyes squinted, calculating the board feet on the back of the truck and how much money he’d have to get per board foot to at least break even.

On the eve of one of those trips, I asked if I could go with him to the city when he sold his lumber. He thought about it for a moment, and then he said I could.

He even told my mother that he thought it would be a good idea for me to see how the world works, whatever that meant. I figured it meant that it would be the same as school, getting to see what a city was like. And Sydney was a particularly interesting place because it had a very large steel plant and coke ovens right in the middle of it.

We were up before dawn on the morning we were to go to Sydney with the load of lumber. I remember dressing in the dark, hoping I got things on right. My mother made a big breakfast for us. I could feel the rising excitement, knowing that we were on the move long before anybody else in the village. And that we were going to the city.

Months before I’d had a letter from my friend Angus Neil MacKinnon, who moved to Sydney with his family because of the causeway and changes on the railway. He was inviting me to go and visit for a while. Stay with them in Whitney Pier, where I’d be amazed at what I saw. There were Black people there, and families with names you couldn’t pronounce. People who came from Europe years before to work at mining coal and making steel. There were homes in Whitney Pier where they spoke only in Ukrainian and Polish. The kids in Whitney Pier were tough, he said, but he had no doubt we could handle ourselves. Plus, we’d go to the Sydney Forum to see the wrestling.

We were all huge wrestling fans, and Billy Malone and Jackie Nick and I would watch faithfully on Jackie’s new TV set, practising the holds and the flips until Mrs. Nicholson lost patience and chased us all outside. I could easily handle them, because Billy was smaller and Jackie so thin.

“Jackie Nick,” you’d hear the older boys pronounce, “is so skinny you can smell the shit through him.”

We’d just look at them, thinking about what we’ll do when we’re as big and nasty as they are.

To see professional wrestlers at the Sydney Forum would be like getting to the World Series, I thought. I loved Whipper Billy Watson. I loved hating Gene Kiniski and Killer Kowalski.

I had no fear of the city, but my mother did. She decided I shouldn’t go to the Pier to visit Angus Neil. It was too rough there. Also, the thought of us at the Sydney Forum with all the rowdy wrestling fans was a bit too much.

But going to the city with my father to sell a load of lumber would be educational, she thought.

You actually smell the city before you see it. The air is full of the tang of burning coal, a gassy, dusty smell that hangs everywhere. It gives the place a seriousness you never feel in the country, where the air is bland. And I was amazed by all the traffic. You suddenly find yourself surrounded by cars and trucks in parallel lines driving straight ahead or around turns, but never getting close to bumping. Other lines of cars stream along to meet us, but they never cross the line on the middle of the road. And then there would be a traffic light, which everyone would notice simultaneously. And everyone would stop at once, as if up against some invisible barrier.

Stopping was more difficult for us, and my father would have to gear down because, he said, the brakes couldn’t be trusted with the heavy load behind.

Just before the main part of the city, we turned down a steep hill and, on the way, there was a large sign telling us that we were entering a cooperative lumberyard.

“We’ll try here,” was all my father said.

Try?

I sat in the truck alone for a long time before my father returned. He was with a man who was wearing dress pants and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. They walked out of view, but I knew they were examining the lumber on the back. Then the man in the dress pants was walking past my side of the truck, and he disappeared inside the building.

The door on the driver’s side opened, and my father climbed back inside. He didn’t speak, but his face was serious. He started the engine, and the truck groaned away, up the steep hill, back towards the street that I remembered was called King’s Road. And on into the city.

I’d never seen so many houses packed together—houses everywhere I looked. There were streets running off King’s Road, up a steep hill, and I could see nothing but big wooden houses painted in all the colours you can imagine. Across the harbour, new houses in a place called Westmount. And, off to the north, the shadowy outlines of other towns—North Sydney, Sydney Mines. Nothing but wooden houses.

You’d think the easiest thing in the world to sell to city people would be lumber. It should be like selling water in the desert.

The traffic became more intense and there were people everywhere, crossing in front of us and on the sidewalks. I saw a building with a large new sign: The Cape Breton Post. I saw small boys with new red carrier bags like mine trudging along the sidewalks, loaded down with newspapers, shouting out the name of the paper—
CAPE…BRITTEN…POST.
I thought that everybody at home would know I’d gone completely foolish if they heard me walking up the road yelling
CAPE BRITTEN POST!

I forgot about my father’s serious expression.

And then we were at another lumberyard, and there was another long wait. And another man who was wearing better clothes than my father’s came out. He walked around the truck, writing on a clipboard as they went. This time my father went inside with him. After he returned we drove around to the back of the woodyard, and my father climbed up on top of the load, undid the chains and rope that held the load in place, and started throwing pieces of lumber down.

I asked if I could help.

“No,” he said.

Afterwards we stopped at a liquor store, and he came out with a small paper bag in his hand. He uncapped a little bottle without removing it from the bag, took a long swallow, sighed, and put the bag away, under the seat.

Finally, he smiled.

“Let’s go to a restaurant,” he said.

A restaurant?

So we went to Joe’s Steak House on the Esplanade. Once, on the way to the restaurant, his frown returned.

“Highway robbery,” he said.

And that was all. I didn’t ask him what it meant because, for that brief dark moment, it was as if I wasn’t there.

There was another significant development that fall, and it was a mixed blessing. My mother started teaching school again—in the Big Room.

The year before, her friend Peggy MacIsaac, who was a teacher at the Convent School in town, became sick and had to go to the hospital, and my mother filled in for her for a month. Now she was full time—in Port Hastings, in the Big Room, where I was a captive.

It meant a bit more financial security in the house. But it also meant your mother standing over you from the time you got up in the morning until you were back in bed at night. There’s also the stigma of having your mother for the teacher—though the fact that I was the only kid in grade nine reduced that problem somewhat. And it didn’t take my mother long to establish for the whole room that there was a whole new regime in place and that things were going to be different from here on in—especially for me. If anything, I would feel what the Bible calls “the rod of correction” more than anybody. We were back to the Katie Gillis days of discipline, and “make no mistake about it.”

But I wasn’t worrying about that. I was far more concerned about the fact that, over on the far side of our hayfield, just beyond the crest of a hill and alongside the Green Path which the older people still call Saddler Street, there was only silence. The mill just sat there, seemingly abandoned. The sawdust pile, no longer fresh and sweet, was
settling down into a dense mass, changing colour as the time went by. An eyesore, as Mrs. Billy predicted.