Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (35 page)

One evening he asked me straight out: “How old are you anyway?”

“Fourteen,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, as if, somehow, I’d let him down.

I asked him what was wrong with being fourteen.

He just laughed and punched my shoulder. “Nothing,” he said.

But later he told me that he’d heard from someone that people in the village were making comments about an older guy like him hanging around with a kid like me—which was why he was curious about my age.

“You seem older,” he said.

And then I realized what was probably on his mind: our trip to New York. And the fact that I might be too young to go on that kind of an adventure. At least I’d be too young to help him with the driving.

So I tried to reassure him. “Sometimes you can get a driver’s licence when you’re fifteen,” I said. “I guess I’ll just have to start learning how to drive right away.”

“Sure,” he said.

But down deep I knew that the trip to New York City and the sukiyaki had become significantly less probable.

And then one day in the late summer I saw him working in the village. First I didn’t recognize him in the boots and hard hat and working clothes. Then he took the hat off and wiped his forehead. He seemed totally absorbed in his work.

He was, in fact, just below the church, and he was peering through a transit. I followed his sightline until I noticed the two men holding up a pole in the far corner of Mrs. George’s orchard. Following on past where they were standing, I realized that I was looking at my father’s sawmill.

Sylvia turned seventeen, and her mother put on a surprise birthday party. It was for people who she went to school with. Ted wasn’t there. We played music and danced around in sock feet and ate sandwiches and sweets and drank soft drinks. I kept secretly looking at Sylvia and wondering if she was half as serious about Ted as he was about her.

You just couldn’t tell.

The party got mentioned in the village notes in the
Victoria-Inverness Bulletin.
How her mother put on the party, and who-all showed up—the usual crowd. Ian and Jackie and Neil, etc. And “the misses” Mabel MacIver, Isabel Fox, and Linda MacIntyre…

I’d have been humiliated, except that, by the time the story came out in the
Bulletin,
almost everyone was gone. Sylvia and Isabel and Mabel and Ann Fraser to the boarding school in Mabou. Neil MacIver to the academy in Port Hood. Ted back to Halifax for his final year at Nova Scotia Tech.

One day after school I heard a knock at the door at home, and when I went to check on who was there, I saw a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase in his hand.

I called my mother. She went out and, after a few words with the stranger, shut the door behind her.

They talked for a while, and then she opened the door to come back in, but, for just a moment, the conversation continued. I heard just phrases. “A sorry situation” was one phrase she used. Another was “a person’s livelihood.”

The man didn’t look very happy and was actually trying to apologize as she closed the door on him.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“They’re going to expropriate part of our field.”

“Expropriate?”

“They’re going to take it for the road.”

“What part?”

“The part that has the sawmill on it.”

So that was it. And it made sense. All you had to do was stand at the top of the causeway and look straight ahead, following the line the road
was taking. The church was safe, but the mill was in the way. Likewise, before too long, all the houses below the road. Even the old Phemie MacKinnon place, which they’ve moved once already. And, I suppose, if you look farther ahead, you’ll see a lot more disappearing. Roads have a way of ploughing through places that lie between important destinations. And that’s possibly all this place will ever be—a minor location on a road to a destination. And if that turns out to be the case? You could see a situation where big new roads become like serpents, consuming a place entirely.

I had a hollow feeling thinking how my father would react to the road going through his sawmill. Somehow I knew that this would be the end of something important for him. This mill had been his last shot at becoming his own boss, living in his own place more or less on his own terms. This expropriation would cut the legs from under him. There would never be another sawmill.

I thought of Carthage. And then—I have to admit it—I felt something like relief.

Grade ten was incredibly tedious, partly because the work I was doing was, by then, so familiar to me—the result of having been five years sitting in the same room with the grade ten courses droning around me. There were two of us in the grade—I and a new girl named Louise Embree. I had one advantage over Louise, who had just moved to the village. All her education up till then had been in a little one-room schoolhouse in the country. But it was no piece of cake. I don’t think that girl ever slept. Nothing on her mind but books, which, I thought, was a waste, seeing how womanly she was becoming.

Around the school, the air was heavy with the tang of burning evergreens and loud with the roar of machinery as they tore up the
orchard and our field and the Green Path and MacKinnons’ and Jack Reynolds’s and even the big back field where we once made hay for Big Ian MacKinnon.

My parents managed to find a buyer for the sawmill, and one day I saw a truck leaving the field loaded down with all the various parts I’d watched my father so painstakingly assemble.

My mother was watching too, through the kitchen window. She did not look unhappy.

And wisely, I thought: What’s past is past. No point looking back. It’s over and done with now.

Time to look ahead.

You couldn’t tell from the cryptic letters what the hard-rock miner thought.

Ted came back briefly in 1958. He was finished at Tech. He was an engineer, proud of the little iron ring on his pinkie finger. He was hearty with me, pumping my hand, remarking on my growth—which I realize people do when they still see you as a kid. No talk of travel, which was just as well since I had a summer job. I was being paid practically nothing, but it was enough for basic independence.

I had started learning how to drive, but he saw no special significance in that development. Just a bit more enthusiasm over how I was growing up at last.

Not a word, I noticed, about New York City.

He was greeted like a homecoming member of the family by my mother and my aunt and by Sylvia’s mother. But it was Sylvia he was here to see. You just knew it. He couldn’t wait to talk to her alone. And after they had been together in private for a while, he seemed disappointed. Down, even.

He left shortly after that, promising to return.

Sylvia told me afterwards that he wanted her to go away with him. Far away—all the way to Korea. Meet his folks.

I couldn’t imagine someone saying no to an offer like that. But she said no.

“I’m only seventeen,” she said. “Plus, I belong here.”

About a month later I had a postcard from Tokyo. And nothing more.

By then I had decisions to make. I was facing a whole new phase of schooling. There is no high school in the village. I had to go somewhere—town? a new county high school twenty miles away in Judique? the monastery?

What about the monastery? I was attempting to recapture the feeling of that sunlit day when we went there as a family and each wandered off into his own private place. But I kept seeing my father standing there with the monk, talking about logs and sawing and the optimistic look on his face. And I realized I wouldn’t want to be remembering that scene every time I turned around when I was going through high school.

I knew what my mother thought, so I didn’t bother raising it with her. My father tried to raise the subject when he’d been home the previous Christmas.

“What are your plans for next year?”

I didn’t answer right away. Here, I thought, is a chance to test the water.

“Maybe I’ll quit school for a while.”

I’ve noticed that people never say they’re going to quit school for good. It’s always quitting “for a while.” Taking a break. To put aside a little money. Or just to clear your head, or maybe grow up a little bit before going on with life. Here I was suggesting bailing out even before high school. “Maybe I’ll follow my father’s footsteps,” I said.

He laughed briefly, then started rolling a cigarette.

“I see,” he said. “Is that it?”

“Or maybe I’ll take a trade. Carpentry or something.”

“Uh huh. This is possible.”

Then my mother came into the kitchen, and we changed the subject.

But it was a discussion I couldn’t avoid indefinitely. And when it finally came up again, the issue was whether I was still interested in the monastery. She’d heard of a kid my age from town who was going. What did I think?

I had, by then, seriously mixed feelings.

“And by the way,” she said, “we haven’t heard much about the vocation to the priesthood lately.”

“I’m still thinking about it,” I said, suddenly surprised by a feeling of emptiness.

“You are?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to be looking right through my eyes and into the secret closets in my brain.

“You know,” she said finally, “nothing would make a mother happier than to see one of her own ordained.”

Another pause.

“Tell me again what you had in mind.”

“I want to be a missionary,” I said. “I want to go off into the world and help people.”

“Yes,” she said. “You’re very interested in the world, aren’t you?”

“Very,” I said, aware that I was sounding more enthusiastic.

“But you should know,” she said, “that there are much easier ways of seeing the world than as a missionary priest. It isn’t an easy life. And it would be a big mistake to go into it for the wrong reasons.”

“I suppose.”

“Think it over carefully,” she said. “Whatever you decide, the important thing is to make your choices for the right reasons.”

And it was as if a weight was lifted off my shoulders.

That evening I walked along the old route I used to follow searching for the cow, up by the old MacMillan place. Just walking, lost in thought. I was almost past the now abandoned Gorman camp before I realized. The windows were dark, mirroring the fading light. I’d heard that the buildings were going to be removed—hauled away or demolished. Already people were inquiring whether parts could be recycled into housing. I pulled the collar of my jacket higher around my neck and walked on. For a moment I tried to grasp a dark elusive thought, but it had slipped away. Or maybe it was just the shadow of a thought.

The dog was with me. We communicated in a way we hadn’t for a long, long time. Not since before Old John and noticing the changes in the girls and making friends with Ted had I felt so close to what I now realized was the one constant in my life. The one friend who never asked for anything or expected anything more than basic kindness. The one friend who never went away. My dog.

On the way back, we turned in by the old cemetery that overlooks the strait, and I saw a little platform jutting above the high embankment overlooking the approach road to the causeway. It was a “Look Off,” according to a sign. I sat on a bench. The dog sat by my foot, his head resting against my knee. Port Hawkesbury was a slight bulge in the distance, more or less looking as it always had. I imagined the small white ferry boats plying the choppy water, back and forth, day after day, year after year, until time blurred into a single image printed in a common memory. And just beyond, the old train ferry, smoke stacks billowing. No more. And I tried to imagine how all those people in their graves, just behind me and over on the point where the lighthouse used to be, would feel seeing what I could now see—the causeway to
the other world. And how privileged I was to have seen it happen. At least one large dream fulfilled. And suddenly I realized just how rare that was—to be a witness to success when so much seems to be the product of our failures.

And, at least in that passing instant, everything was clear to me. One day I, too, will lie blindly in a grave, missing all the drama and excitement that flutters from the folds of time. But now I was here. Who knows why or for how long? Only knowing that being here, with time passing through my senses, was a gift I could not waste—no matter what.

And, briefly, I grieved for Old John Suto, in a grave just beyond a town he never heard of before he came here. And for my transient father working deep in the darkness of the cold, hard rock of the planet in a province and a place he never heard of when he was a boy dreaming unlimited dreams on a green and sunny mountain.

We just sat there in the descending evening, the dog and I, watching the cars coming and going and the big green bridge squatting over the canal, just waiting for the signal to move and make way to let another ship, another traveller from the wide, chaotic world, come through. The strait was clear.

The dog yawned, stuck his nose under my hand, then wriggled his head so my hand was resting on the soft fur between his ears. Then he stood and looked as if to say: Let’s go home; it’s suppertime.

And I realized we’d reached the end of something. The causeway, finally, has been done. Today and yesterday are done. There is just tomorrow. And then another, and another…tomorrows flowing endlessly towards an ocean called the future. And, in my mind at least, the future will be anything I want to make it.

And we went home together.

Certain things happen, and it’s like they’re happening to someone else. And if you reflect for a moment, you might realize these are the moments that become big memories—these are moments without end. My wife says to me: “Of course you’ll have to go home for this.” And, unaccountably, I reply, “But we’re broke.” And she looks at me in disbelief.

“Broke,” says she. “Nobody is that broke.”

And then I remembered the envelope from the bank that I’d set aside carelessly, figuring it was just another gimmick. A little plastic card with my name on it and, in capital letters across the top: CHARGEX. The literature said it was a credit card. I could use it to buy things. Pay later.

“I could use that new credit card,” I said, half to myself.

“Of course,” she said. “That’s what those things are for—emergencies.”

Of course I had to go home. He was gone. Again. For good.

Checking in at the airport in Ottawa, I noticed that the man in front of me was Mr. G.I. Smith, the premier of Nova Scotia. We all call him Ike. When he had his boarding pass, he turned slightly to leave, but he noticed me standing there and smiled. We shook hands. He’s shorter than I am, a small pale man with a sad expression.

“I suppose we’re heading in the same direction,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“A little winter holiday?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “A death in the family.”

He studied me gravely for a moment, an expression of sympathy on his face. I knew it was sincere. People from the small provinces are like that. We’re all related by something—blood, familiarity, or need.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

“Yes. Thank you.” He shook my hand again.

“Someone close?”

“My father,” I said.

“Oh my,” said Premier Smith. “Oh dear.”

And his grip on my hand tightened.

It happens at the oddest times. A stirring in the memory, just below the threshold of consciousness. Not quite tangible, but the voice of the subconscious is saying you’d better pay attention—this could be important. You might wake up in the middle of the night and hear the rain pounding, and right out of nowhere a phantom thought pops into your head. You’re wide awake then. Did I leave the car windows open? Maybe you’re in a hotel, and you’d have to get dressed and go all the way outside to check. And probably find, when you got there, that you didn’t. And then be so annoyed that you can’t get to sleep anymore anyway. And then you’re stranded in a completely pointless mental exercise that turns into an agitated reflection on reflection—like standing between two mirrors. Infinite frustration.

I wept once. I was in the shower, with the water pouring over me, and I
realized that, mingled in with the water streaming down my face, there were gushing tears. But I quickly stopped when I became conscious of the weeping and felt that my self-consciousness somehow cheapened the sorrow, made it false. Grief, considered, loses its integrity, I think. I could be wrong. But that’s how I felt at the time. There was something phony about standing in the shower weeping—something theatrical.

The other time I nearly wept was when my mother was telling me how he became fond of shopping after he’d been living at home for a while.

“Shopping?”

“Yes,” she said.

She’d arrive home from teaching school in town, and there would be groceries on the cupboard. The first time it happened, she couldn’t imagine where they came from. It didn’t occur to her that he’d just spontaneously go into McGowan’s or the new shopping centre in town and buy groceries. He hadn’t done that since they were first married and living in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland.

Of course, when she thought about it, it was like being newly married all over again after he got the new job with the Nova Scotia Water Resources Commission and was living at home all the time. Lots of men who spend a lot of time living exclusively among other men have a hard time with domesticity. But not him. He seemed to enjoy it—buying the groceries. He even quit smoking.

We laughed briefly at the irony. So much for quitting smoking.

It was talking about him enjoying shopping that caused the second sudden welling up. But I crimped it.

Driving to town, it was raining. Back at the house they’d all been talking about the wet winter. It was March, but not a trace of snow. Apparently it’s been like this since January. Much the same in Ottawa, I was able
to report. And then everybody was interested in Ottawa, but I found it difficult to talk about Ottawa. The city and the Parliament Buildings and the newspaper offices and everything I did there suddenly seemed unreal. Come to think of it, nothing was real anymore. It was like the day Old John Suto shot himself. It didn’t happen, but it happened. It’s as if you acquire something that’s too big for the house, and it’s stuck in the doorway. Eventually you stop struggling to take it inside. You just drift off into something else.

That’s when the Cadillac popped into my head—something about a Cadillac suddenly seemed relevant. More than relevant actually.
Urgent.
Understanding something about a Cadillac might be the key to understanding everything about what was going on around me—maybe release me from this heaviness, open up those entrances that suddenly seemed too small.

It was probably the emblem on the back of the Cadillac in front of us that did it to me. What about the Cadillac emblem? I’m leaning forward, peering past the lazy, sweeping windshield wiper that leaves a filmy smear behind every pass. What is it about the Cadillac emblem? I sit back, close my eyes, do what I do back at the office when I’m having a hard time recovering some obscure piece of information. Focus.

The one thing I know is that it has something to do with the night we got loaded at the beginning of that wasted weekend. When was it? November? Just four months ago. Wow—only four months.

So I work back through what I can remember. He picked me up at the airport on the Friday night. Great cheer over the new job. All the good stuff he never had before—benefits and job security. And living at home. And how it was almost a self-assigning job, as we say in the newspaper business. It’s your performance that’s accountable, not the physical location of your flesh.

How rare it was, that conversation, even though, as I recall it, there was so much nonsense. The thing about the Cadillac must have
fallen into that category. But I probably wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention because it was the fact of the conversation itself that was so significant. You see, I don’t think we ever had many conversations—father and son, looking each other in the eye and talking turkey. How things really are, and the whole point of it being that if things aren’t really as copacetic as they seem to be, then two grown-up men with a special bond between them can certainly combine their strengths and work things out. That is what those types of conversations are about, I think.

I remember, when I got back, telling Michael Cassidy, the guy I work with who is extremely bright and a fabulous writer, how we got loaded and talked our heads off for the entire evening and part of the next day. And Cassidy saying what a great experience that must have been. Like me, he hardly got to know his dad, who, in addition to being very active politically and therefore preoccupied with universal matters, died when he was quite young.

“Harry Cassidy, you must have heard of him.”

“Afraid not.”

“One of the founders of the CCF.”

“Oh, right. Himself and Wordsworth and…”

“Woodsworth.”

“Right, right.”

The Cadillac emblem is distinctive, like the coat of arms of some high-ranking nobleman in an important medieval family. Designed to impress, perhaps even to intimidate.

There was only one Cadillac around these parts when I was growing up, and it belonged to Gordon Walker. If I’m not mistaken, he got a new one almost every year, but it always looked exactly like the one he had the year before. I might be wrong about that, but I think I’m correct. Mr. Walker owned a bank. He’d be in the paper from time
to time, and they’d always point that out. The only individual in the whole country to own his own bank.

What would that be like?

I know a little bit about banking now because, when I started at the job I’m in and confessed to Cassidy that I didn’t have a clue about any aspect of the world of finance and economics—which was what we’re supposed to be reporting on from the nation’s capital—he told me the quickest way to learn would be to read the report of the Royal Commission on Banking and Finance.

And I tried.

Maybe Gordon Walker’s name came up, and that’s why I thought of a Cadillac.

This is the trouble after you’ve grown older and found some common ground on which to meet your parents as equals—or as equal as they can ever be considering the peculiar circumstances of how you became associated in the first place. By the time you’re old enough to command their serious attention as another adult, you’re living away from them, and the only opportunities that arise for a meeting of minds are ceremonial—birth, marriage, death. Or they’re so rare that you don’t want to risk the quality of the time available by venturing into unknown areas of substance. Hence, getting loaded, either to keep things light or to lubricate the sticky places. The problem is that sometimes you can’t remember afterwards. You can’t separate the substance from the lubrication.

And then, much later, you’ll see something that triggers a memory that’s inaccessible. And it makes you crazy.

What about the damned Cadillac?

I know we talked a lot, that night in November, and that was rare. There are people who say that’s understandable. Your father is an itinerant—which means, rarely home. People like that are always visitors,
and just how meaningful can a conversation ever be when it’s with a casual visitor?

But no, I say. Sure, he was a visitor a lot of the time. But there were long stretches when he’d be around, as when they were building the causeway.

Sure, and what would he be doing during those long stretches when he wasn’t a visitor?

He’d be working.

See?

We actually lived together, as men. Two summers in the same mining camps. But never talked.

When I went to university, I needed work for tuition money. First he got me on in Tilt Cove, in Newfoundland. Buck thirty an hour for underground labour—powder monkey for the miners in the drifts and raises and stopes and, when there was nothing else, down in the bottom of the shaft mucking out the sump or smashing large rocks on the grizzly with a sledgehammer.

We actually shared a room for a month or so before he moved over to the staff house. He was a boss. But he resisted living among the other bosses. He was always happier among the men in the bunkhouse. But then I moved in, and I guess he wanted me to have the room to myself. So he went over to the staff house.

Actually, it isn’t true to say we never talked. It was in Tilt Cove that we had one of two real “father and son” sit-down serious chats that I can remember. Neither of us had a drink on board. He was all dressed up and ready to go out on vacation for a week or two. Going home. Anything I might need when he was coming back?

“Bring back the mail,” I said, half joking.

It was after my sophomore year, and I was waiting for my marks at the time.

I figured that was going to be the extent of the conversation.

He seemed to be searching for words, and that was odd. Even though English was his second language, he was a really great talker. Lovely flow of language—and never a swear word I would hear.

“I want you to be careful,” he instructed.

Right away I think he’s talking about Itchy’s little saloon up above the commissary, where a lot of the younger guys spent all their evenings and most of their money. I figure he suspects I’ll be up there like a shot the minute his back is turned. And, actually, he isn’t all that far off the mark.

But he said: “Just keep in mind that, as far as you’re concerned, this is temporary.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that, and, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t so sure it was going to be so temporary. There was something I actually liked about working underground—something about the isolation and the unnatural surroundings. Just going down the shaft and putting in your day and coming back up in one piece gave me a feeling of accomplishment.

And I discovered that I loved blowing things up and had a natural comfort level around explosives. Before my first day was finished, I was like all the old timers, sitting on a powder box smoking cigarettes.

“I had actually considered…if the marks are as bad as I expect…”

“Nope,” he said. “This is temporary. You’re only passing through. You’ve got better things in store. Don’t risk them in a place like this.”

“Which means?”

Long pause then. And he was fishing out the package of Export Plain, trying not to look at me.

“Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel right,” he said at last.

“Okay.”

“Somebody asks you to do something you’re not sure about…don’t do it.”

Amazing, I thought. Here’s a boss telling you that if another boss asks you to do something dangerous or foolish, you’re supposed to tell him where to go.

I could have sworn that the hazel eyeballs kind of watered up, but they were quickly lost behind the cloud of smoke. Then he stood and grabbed the little travel bag he calls his grip.

“As Martin Angus says, ‘I’ll be back.’”

We both laughed then at the family reference to the weird cousin with the extraordinary brain and nothing else going for him.

“All brains and no common sense,” they like to say about Martin Angus.

It was after he came back from the holiday that he moved into the staff house.

Then there was the next summer.

I was stranded in Seven Islands—
Sept Isles,
as we say in Ottawa—when I ran out of money trying to find a job for the summer. Got the job all right, working on a railway project, but when they found out I was just nineteen, they told me to hit the road. You had to be twenty-one—something about being bonded.

I wanted to say: I’m not into bondage yet, but I was too busy panicking.