Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (31 page)

In September, just after the start of school, he went to a place called Tilt Cove in Newfoundland. Half of Inverness County was over there by the sound of it. Inverness County is famous for its hard-rock miners. And, for my father, the best thing about Tilt Cove was that there was no union there, so he knew the physical would be a piece of cake.

My mother explained that it was a temporary arrangement. They needed good miners. He was a
great
miner. Once the place was in full production, he’d probably be made mine captain. He’d make good money quickly. Then, when we were out of the hole financially, he could pick up where he left off—whatever that meant.

I had my doubts. And then one day there was no longer any doubt. I don’t believe in the
buidseachd
and I don’t believe in omens. But sometimes there are moments that just smack you between the eyes and, for an instant, you can see where things are going.

That moment came for me at noon hour one day in the fall of ’56. We always went home for lunch because we lived so near the school. I remember that this was a rainy day and it was cold. There was a small truck with high sides parked near the barn.

“Whose truck is that?” I asked.

“Ernie MacKay,” my mother said.

“Ernie MacKay,” I repeated, with a hollow feeling where my stomach is.

“Yes,” she said.

She was slicing bread and had her face turned away. I leaned a little bit and saw that her cheeks were flushed.

“Ernie MacKay is…”

“It was Ernie MacKay who sold us the cow,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“So now he’s come and he’s been good enough to buy her back,” she said.

“But we still need the milk,” I said.

The voice was sharp this time.

“We need the money more.”

There was no more to be said. I went to my room, no longer hungry. But she called me back. The food was made. It had to be eaten. It is a sin to waste food.

I could see through the kitchen window as Ernie MacKay led Beulah towards the truck on a short rope. I imagined she was staring back at me in confusion. She stumbled on a little ramp leading up to the back of the truck.

Where are we going? I could almost hear her ask.

And, of course, I knew the answer. But she was hidden then behind the high boards around the back of the truck, and I wouldn’t have told her anyway.

When Ernie MacKay wasn’t selling young cows for their milk, he was butchering old ones for their meat.

It is almost winter. At Mr. Clough’s store, the talk is about anticipated improvement in snow removal. How much better the Tory snowplough drivers will be. How, after the election, the ploughs will be going up lanes that were never ploughed before. Nobody has to mention that the lanes are where the Tory houses are. And, to rub it in, they mention that the Liberal lanes will also still be ploughed, which is to say that the Tories are more civilized.

Mr. Clough has a sour expression, but you have to imagine it
because he turns his back towards the people who are making the comments, pretending to ignore them. He stares out the back window at the strait, probably imagining all the industry that will soon line the shores of this deep new harbour, no matter who wins the election. That would cheer him up—new industry, new people, new money for his store.

He says nothing to contradict the people who are talking about the likelihood of a new government because he, like everybody else, knows that his power will soon be diminished. He hears all the talk: that the fall of the Liberal government in Nova Scotia will just be the beginning of a big political change that will sweep across the country. The papers are full of a new Tory leader in the national party—a man named John Diefenbaker. And speculation that he will defeat the Liberal government within a year.

Diefenbaker?

“Poof,” says Mr. Clough. “Nobody named Diefenbaker will ever lead the country.”

“Wait and see,” the Tories say.

And you can almost hear everybody asking the same question—the one they dare not speak aloud: how long can old Mr. Clough expect to hang onto his post office after the federal Tories take power?

Nobody says it aloud because, secretly, they fear that Mr. Clough just might be right. That Mr. Stanfield, by some stroke of bad luck, will lose. Or that no prairie lawyer with a name like Diefenbaker will ever get to be the prime minister of Canada, a country always run by men with Anglo-Saxon, Scottish, or French names. And that being so, Mr. Clough’s political clout isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

Plus: no matter what happens, the Masons will always run things no matter who is in power in politics, and Mr. Clough is one of the biggest Masons around.

When the talk isn’t about the Tories and the Grits, it’s about the new Trans-Canada Highway and what route it will follow passing through the village.

The old MacKinnon house, where Phemie and Mary lived, is now empty and will soon be torn down or moved. It is right beside the church. Will that be next? And then the school? And our house?

There are rumours that all the houses below the road will have to go. The brown house we lived in briefly after Newfoundland, the old MacFadyen place. MacQuarries’ and Bernie Ryan’s, which used to belong to Miss Christine MacKinnon. And even Mrs. George MacLean’s, one of the biggest and grandest old houses in the village.

I’ve heard that the politicians are having trouble making up their minds about where to put the road, at least on this end. And that there are sections, further inland, where they’ve already started digging.

Not that it would make much difference for us. My father is back underground.

Then you notice the good things more easily. Angus Walker Jr. put together a country music group called the Radio Rangers, and his career as a cowboy singer seemed to be taking off. The Radio Rangers were getting a lot of airtime on
Fun at Five,
the big radio program around here. The host is called the Old Timer, but everybody knows that his real name is J. Clyde Nunn and that he represents Inverness County in the provincial legislature. People find it strange that someone who lives on the mainland would be a political representative for Inverness, but, because of the radio show, everybody considers Nunn to be from his place, no matter where he lives. Inverness is a two-member constituency, and the second member of the legislature from here is another Grit named Rod MacLean.

Tories criticize J. Clyde Nunn because he lives in Antigonish, and
Rod MacLean because, they say, he’s homely. But they keep getting elected.

And October 30, 1956, was no exception. Even though Mr. Stanfield’s Tories ended twenty-three years of Liberal government in Nova Scotia, they couldn’t crack Inverness County.

A very bad sign of things to come, my Tory women said, shaking their heads.

Then, shortly after Mr. Stanfield was sworn in as premier of the province, a big company in Sweden, called Stora Kopparberg, confirmed that it was interested in building a pulp mill in the Strait of Canso area.

And the Liberals were saying, “Ah, well. The politicians don’t have much to do with it in the long run. And better the Swedes anyway. The Americans already own too much of Nova Scotia.”

One afternoon in December I was on my way to pick up my papers at Mrs. Lew’s and strike out to the north on my bicycle. It was raining slightly and cold. As I passed Robert Morrison’s Esso station, I saw a familiar car at the gas pumps. It was the Malones.

I hadn’t been seeing much of Billy. For much of the summer he was away, back visiting relatives in Lower Woods Harbour, and when he returned he had his cousin Roger Nickerson with him, and they seemed to be busy doing things together a lot of the time. I had the paper route, which was an interruption every summer day, though I took a break for a couple of weeks—in Dingwall at my Uncle Joe’s place, hanging around with my cousin Lester Donohue. It was fun, but I kind of lost touch with my friend Billy Malone. Then, when school started, I was busy with grade nine.

And there, suddenly, was the Malones’ car at the gas pumps. Mr. Malone was standing beside it, and he was dressed up. When I
approached the car, I could see that it was so full of bags and boxes that I almost missed Billy and his sister, Phyllis, jammed into the back seat, looking very small.

Billy saw me and rolled down the window and just stared at me, without saying anything. He had a sad expression on his face.

His father was smiling and came over with his hand out. I shook it.

“Bill,” he called out. “Come here and say goodbye.” Goodbye?

“The job is finished here now,” Mr. Malone said. “We’re heading back home.”

“Home? I thought this was home.”

Mr. Malone laughed. “It feels like home,” he said. “And we’ll always come back for visits and whatnot. But home is down the south shore.”

South Shoah.

And I realized I’d forgotten that they weren’t from here, and, now that the causeway was completed, there was no reason for them to stay. I suddenly felt very small too.

Then Billy was standing there beside his tall, gaunt father, who always reminded me of those fathers in the comic books or in the movies, with his warm smile and his pipe.

“I guess I’ll be seeing you,” Billy said.

“I guess,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll write.”

“Okay,” I said. “You write first because you know the address here.”

“Okay,” he said.

But he never did.

The last I saw of him, he was looking back from the car as they headed down the new road, past the new tourist information bureau, towards the new bridge over the new canal that our fathers helped to build. And it was a strange feeling, watching them disappear over the
new causeway that everybody thought would be mostly for bringing new people here—not for sending them away.

I really didn’t expect him home for Christmas because the finances were obviously in bad shape when he left. But he came home and the cheer was strong. You’d hear them talking about how we were finally getting back on our feet, with the teaching job and the fact that he’d been making some good bonus pay at Tilt Cove.

I had a small pile of letters with windows stashed away, but when he took them his face didn’t get the heavy expression that I expected. He winked.

I got a .22 for Christmas, and at some point over the holiday we visited the mountain to check on the old folks. We took the new rifle, to try it out on some rabbits. I’d never hunted rabbits before. It was time to learn to do it properly, now that I had my own rifle.

It was the usual visit. Wall-to-wall Gaelic, with Grandma doing ninety percent of the talking.

As usual, I sat there watching and listening. Grandma looked, I realized, like photographs I’ve seen in
National Geographic
—pictures taken of people who live on remote islands in the North Atlantic; old women with long dresses and shawls, their white hair blowing in the wind.

She had clear blue eyes and a bony face, and when she spoke in her own language the opinions flew like sparks. You could easily believe she had special powers. I wondered how you’d go about persuading her to put them to work for you. I guess that, at the very least, you’d have to speak to her in Gaelic.

And then I had the strangest feeling. It is a feeling I often get on the mountain when I hear the wind struggling and sighing in the trees. And the fact that it is Christmas now makes me realize that this feeling has something to do with a Christmas long ago.

I’ve always loved going to the mountain. How my cousins there are always laughing and carrying on, and their mother never seems to notice, no matter how rowdy we get, inside or outside. And how, in summertime, you can run forever through the cool woods, your feet springing back from the rubbery moss, and the tree limbs dense as a roof above. Crashing over Rough Brook, shoes soaked and pants wet to the knees, but not concerned because they’ll dry before anybody notices. And anyway, it’s only water. John Dan’s Mae chuckling and saying, “You only have to worry about getting wet if you’re made of sugar.”

What I couldn’t explain was the dark feeling that would come over me without warning from time to time when I was there, as at this very moment. Sitting listening to them talking seriously in Gaelic, while the stove snaps and cracks and hisses.

And then it’s as if I’ve fallen asleep and am dreaming. And there’s an abandoned truck, nose buried in the bushes. A deep rut in a wood road, with a small spruce growing in the tread tracks. A sawdust pile, flattened by time and weather, slabs and trimmings interlaced with weeds, almost out of sight.

And there is a sound, as if the forest sobs. And there is no other sound. And then a chill.

I am on the mountain, but it is still the early autumn. The hills rising gently around us are blinding reds and yellows and flaming orange. The air is moist and cool and smells of earth. There is a truck, and now I can recall that my father named it Leapin’ Lena, and every time he mentions it I want to laugh. But now he’s handing the keys to Leapin’ Lena to another, older man. He had a horse for working in the woods. The horse’s name is Tony. My grandfather is standing near the gate at the end of the hill below his house, and he is holding Tony by the bridle.

Behind them the mill is silent. There is a tangled pile of long, thin spears of wood that they call edgings. There is a small mountain of slabs,
which can be used for firewood. A sawdust pile, in which my cousins and I would leap and roll and become hopelessly covered in the itching, scratching particles of wood, looms over the silent circular saw.

I see my father climb into a car with other men. The car drives away. The older man walks to the front of Leapin’ Lena and starts the engine with a crank. My grandfather speaks to Tony, who tosses his head, then turns, and they walk off up the hill towards the house.

This is what they call the past. I struggle back, into the present. Into the dingy kitchen, with the winter sulking in the hills outside. And now I strain to understand the droning Gaelic conversation. Maybe something in it will help me to see the future. The name Stanfield comes up a lot. My father is smoking a cigarette, carefully placing the ashes in the cuff of his trousers. He has one leg balanced across a knee. Grandpa Dougald is at the corner of the table picking at his fingers. He has a floppy woollen cap on his bald head.