Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (33 page)

Where was it I saw him last?

Sitting there. Working on the step. Looking underneath for something. That is what I saw.

He didn’t speak.

He was busy.

What about the rifle?

You imagine you imagined it.

Oh.

You must. And it’s suddenly so very easy with all the snow to cover up the scars and stains of yesterday.

The early winter darkness was gathering around me, the wind was groaning in the tall spruces. I looked down and, for an instant, Old John was sitting there, his bald head pale as the pristine snow. And in that instant there is no rifle, and when I speak he turns his head and smiles as if he’s glad to see me. But, still, he doesn’t answer me. He turns back to his chore.

Near the cookhouse new snow swirls, lifts, drifts off towards the trees like smoke. The place is silent, but for the moaning of wind in creaking trees. Something has been altered fundamentally, but the snow conceals the significance of change.

I walk away from the abandoned camp, knowing I will not return. There is nothing here.

“Carthago delenda est.”

My mother says, “Excuse me! Helllooo.”

A snap of fingers.

Where were we?

Yes. Machine guns in Africa.

George the Wheeler is staggering when he accosts me. I haven’t seen him since my father built the little camp in Troy and hired George the Wheeler to cut logs there.

“Your old man is a crook,” he sneers.

I can smell the yeastiness of cheap wine and, when he turns away, I see the bottle sloshing in the back pocket of his overalls.

“You can tell him that,” he says over his shoulder.

I feel an odd paralysis and know that afterwards, after this confusion falls away, I’ll feel the self-accusing anger. Why didn’t you say…? You should have…?

What?

He called my father a crook!

The impulse rises. Lash out, punish the injustice of the charge. Stand up for your father even if there’s half a chance that what the Wheeler says is true.

“You can tell him that,” he repeats as he stumbles on his way. “Nothin’ but a friggin’ crook.”

I want to say: I’ll do us both a favour; I’ll forget that this encounter ever happened.

I want to go after him…the way the Irish would.

My mother sighs. “He probably owes the Wheeler money.”

“That doesn’t make him a crook.”

“The Wheeler was probably drunk.”

“He was.”

“He’ll get his money,” she says. “When we have it, he’ll get it.”

“Which is why he’s in Tilt Cove?”

“Which is why he’s in Tilt Cove.”

In May I saw surveyors in Mrs. George’s apple orchard. The orchard is just below the house where Harry and Rannie MacDonald live, across the Victoria Line from the church. Our field and house are directly above Harry and Rannie’s. The sawmill is at the far side of the field, just up past the orchard. Nobody was quite sure what the surveyors were doing there.

Then one evening in mid-May, my mother announced that my Aunt Veronica had an interesting new boarder—all the way from South Korea. An engineer or engineering student.

“South Korea?”

“Yes. His name is Ted.”

One of the things my Aunt Veronica does to survive is take in boarders. She had Mrs. Hennessey when she was teaching in the Little Room. She had two interesting men from Quebec when they were building the causeway—Camille and Marcel. Friendly guys, with hardly any English. We’d spend ages practising each other’s language.

How do you say this? Or that? In English. In French.

Then they were gone.

Now she has a boarder from Korea. I remembered Jean Larter’s kerchief, the one Joe brought her back from the war. And I tried to remember all I had read about the war. Korea. A peninsula. Split in two. Communists on top. United Nations. Lots of Americans. Syngman Rhee. A meaningless jumble.

His name wasn’t really Ted, he explained. That was what they started calling him at Nova Scotia Tech, the university in Halifax
where engineers are trained. He had one more year to go at Tech, and then he’d be a mechanical engineer and get to wear the little iron ring on his pinkie finger.

There was nothing in the world as impressive as that ring.

“So what’s your real name?” I asked.

“Tae,” he said. “Tae Man Chong.”

But he liked Ted better. Easier to fit in being called Ted.

I figured him to be in his mid-twenties.

Then the story was going around the village that this Chinaman showed up one day at Morrison’s Esso asking if this was Port Hastings. He’d just come off the causeway on a bus. Alistair MacDougall was working there.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re in Port Hastings.”

“What’s the population of Port Hastings?” the Chinaman asks.

“A hundred and fifteen,” says Alistair.

“Well, now it’s a hundred and sixteen,” says the Chinaman.

“Korean,” I say.

“What?”

“He’s from Korea.”

“No shit!”

And that was Ted. Number one hundred and sixteen. You could actually imagine that he planned to stay.

I never thought of people of other races being handsome, although my mother always says that women in Japan are the most beautiful in the world. Like little dolls, she says. But I find people of the Orient or Africa just too exotic to be described by words we use to evaluate other people like ourselves. Handsome or homely—what do these words really mean?

After I got used to his appearance, it crossed my mind that I’d like to be exactly like Ted. He was taller than I was, slim, but with wide
shoulders. He had a broad, open face. His skin was darker and his almond eyes twinkled. And he had a smile that lit up the room. He liked nothing more than laughing, and he always seemed to be finding things to laugh about in our village. The thing that I quickly learned about Ted was that he wasn’t different at all. He wasn’t exotic. Everybody here was different. Everybody here was exotic. After I figured that out, it was fun to be around him. He made you feel interesting.

I also learned that nothing would bug him more than being mistaken for someone who is Chinese. Even I understood that much. After all, it was the Chinese Communists who were responsible for the mess in his country. I never told him that, when he first arrived, a lot of people here thought he came from China. Or that Miss Annie Christie loves the Chinese people.

Korea, I learned, is near Japan. And that Japan occupied Korea before World War II and that Ted attended Japanese school when he was a boy in Seoul, Korea. He remembered the terrible days when atomic bombs blew two Japanese cities apart. His father took him to Japan after the war just to see Hiroshima, one of the cities the atomic bomb destroyed. It was terrible, he said.

“But Japan was the enemy,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s how it is in war. There has to be an enemy. But there’s no war now, and if there ever is another, we’ll all be friends.”

“Okay. So what was it like in a Japanese school?”

The best part of attending Japanese school, he explained, was learning how to speak Japanese fluently, and also learning judo. Judo was on the curriculum.

“No kidding. Judo on the curriculum?”

He swore that it was true. And to prove he knew judo, he flipped me over his hip and dropped me gently onto the grass in front of my aunt’s house.

I was amazed at how smoothly and how quickly he did it.

“Will you teach me that?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “We have all summer.”

All summer. Strange how it sounds like such a long time when you say it and it’s still spring and you’ve just turned fourteen.

You don’t think that Billy Malone was here for three years. And Marcel and Camille from Quebec were here for a whole winter. Your father was around for the entire time they spent building the causeway. And Old John—he’ll be here forever, but, still, he’s gone just the same. They’re all gone. And it was like a blink of an eye, the time you knew them. And now they’re gone, maybe never to be seen again.

We have all summer, says Ted. And he’s also going to teach me Japanese.

First word.
Arigato.

“What’s that?”

“Thank you.”

“Arigato!”

“You’re welcome.”

He was going to teach me judo and Japanese. What could I do in exchange?

“Take me fishing,” he said. “And introduce me to girls.” He was serious. He even bought a second-hand car.

At first it was the judo I found important. I suppose I had realized for a long time that the world is full of perils, and most of them are in the form of people. Everywhere, it seems, people are preying on each other until the weaker ones are driven away or driven to some act of desperation. Once upon a time you never really paid attention. There was the odd whack on the nose or minor bullying by bigger guys like Angus L. Cameron. But the nose gets better and the bigger guys get mellower or move away. You slip back into a safe stupidity.

But gradually the picture changes, and you realize that the most important thing in life is to be able to take care of yourself. It’s another form of freedom.

It was purely coincidence, but shortly before Ted showed up, I’d sent away for a book on jiu-jitsu. I’d never heard of it before, but it seemed to be something I should know when I saw it advertised on the back of a comic book. And in spite of my mother’s warning that products advertised on the backs of comics are a whole lot less than they seem, this book was actually pretty good.

Ted didn’t think very much of it, though. Put the book away, he advised.

Then he offered to teach me a little bit of judo—just enough to stay out of trouble. That’s what it’s all about, he said. Staying out of trouble or, if that becomes impossible, getting out of a scrape with minimal fuss. Disabling the enemy, preferably without doing too much harm. Hurting people, he figured, just makes them more dangerous.

It made a lot of sense and, as the weather got warmer and the ground drier, we’d practise on the grass in my aunt’s yard. Ted gently disabled me by knocking me down or locking my arms behind me—simple, effortless stuff that never hurt.

“But what if you want to hurt someone?” I asked him once. “What if you have to hurt him?”

“You’ll have only one chance,” he said. “So you have to strike where there can be no quick recovery.”

“His balls,” I said.

“Oh no,” he said, laughing. “You miss his balls, you’re dead. And everybody has an instinct to protect his balls.”

“What then, if not the balls?” I asked.

He looked at me very seriously for a moment.

Then he said: “The eyes.”

“Show me,” I said.

“No,” he replied.

My father loved going fishing, but he rarely ever caught anything, so I hardly ever went fishing with him. He liked going to lakes and brooks in the woods. I preferred the strait or the cove, where you always caught something, even if it was only a useless perch. Sometimes you’d catch the ugliest creature in the world, a sculpin. Even a hungry cat won’t eat a sculpin, they’re so ugly. So you catch them and rub their stomach with a stick and, for some reason, they fill up with air like a football. Then you throw them back and watch them drift away, struggling to get back under the water where they belong.

But mostly you try to catch what you can eat—mackerel or smelt.

Ted was interested in trout, which meant I had to take him places where I knew my father fished. We’d end up walking for miles through the woods, only to come home empty handed. Just like me, he gradually lost interest in fishing.

Then my aunt had to go to the hospital. I’m not sure why. She announced one day that she was going to St. Joseph’s in Glace Bay, and that she’d be gone for a while. And that meant Ted had to find another place to live, at least temporarily.

Sylvia Reynolds’s mother, Anita, took in tourists overnight but agreed to take a boarder for a week or two, so Ted moved in there. I guess it’s safe to say he developed another interest. Sylvia was almost seventeen.

One Friday evening when my aunt was in the hospital, Ted announced that we should go to visit her. Saturday morning, he said, he and I and my aunt’s boys, Barry and Blaise, were going to Glace Bay to see
her. Glace Bay is even farther away than Sydney, and you have to pass through Sydney to get there.

“Better still,” he said. He wanted to see Sydney.

That was the thing about Ted. He wanted to see everything. He wanted to feel everything and eat everything. He wanted to go everywhere in the world. And he kept telling me about the parts of it he’d already seen. And the part he mostly wanted to see and experience was America.

“The States?”

“Yes,” he said. “New York.”

We’d go to the movies in town, and he’d sit in a trance, his eyes wide and this little smile on his face, watching the Americans with their cocktails and their cars and their cities and their wars. His excitement was catching.

He was in love, he said, with an American movie star. Jean Simmons.

“Who?”

“Jean Simmons.”

“I never heard of Jean Simmons.”

“You never heard of Jean Simmons? The most beautiful woman in the world?”

“Sorry.”

On the way to Glace Bay, he took me and my two cousins, who saw even less of their father than I saw of mine, to a restaurant and insisted that we order something more interesting than the hot chicken sandwich.

“Like what?”

“How about Italian spaghetti?”

“What’s it like?”

“Delicious.”

And it was.

And, afterwards, we visited my Aunt Veronica, who looked pale and uncomfortable in the sickly smelling room, with nuns peeking in the door to examine the exotic strangers, and the smell of city on the breezes that were pushing starchy curtains up against us where we stood around the bed.

Something about the hospital made my stomach feel queasy. Or maybe it was the spaghetti. In any case, we weren’t allowed to visit very long. The nuns eventually came in and shooed us out. And we were soon back in Ted’s car, driving around like tourists and taking pictures of Glace Bay and Sydney. And then, when it was dark, Barry and Blaise fell asleep in the back seat, and he told me about the world as we drove the twisting road back home.