When we approach Grand Falls, I raise my eyebrows in a question. “We will go through Plaster Rock,” he says. “It will be shorter and there’ll be no traffic. I’ll drive through that section of the trees.”
“Do you have a driver’s licence?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I let it lapse a long time ago. I had no need for it.”
He drives steadily and surely. There is no traffic. The signs warn us to be aware of moose. “This is a good road,” he says. “I wonder when they paved it. It used to be just gravelled. It was that way the time we came from Timmins. With the compressor and the kitten.”
We pass Renous, home of the penitentiary. We pass through all the small communities with their disused schools and abandoned halls. We come to Rogersville.
“This place always struck me,” he says. “The graveyard is so big and the community so small. More people in the graveyard than in the village. When we worked in the shafts there were never any graveyards. People never lived in those places long enough to die.”
“Although some of them did,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Some of them died. Died in different ways. Here, you drive for a while.”
We approach Moncton. After Sackville we cross the border into Nova Scotia. There is no piper on hand to welcome us, as is the case in summer. There are only wisps of blowing snow.
It is dark when we pass through Antigonish and the wind tries mightily to lift our car. The road signs warn us of blowing snow. The storm has increased. When we come to the base of the Havre Boucher hill, he says, “I’ll drive now. I’m more experienced on hills and in snow than you are.”
We begin the long ascent. It is a two-mile climb. There are no other vehicles on the road. The car slides and bucks, but he holds it to its course. The red light comes on to indicate that the engine is overheated. We make it to the top and begin the short descent. The mountain from which the Canso Causeway was built looms ahead of us and to our right.
“Do you know that song?” he says. “ ‘Causeway Crossing’ by Albert MacDonald?”
“Yes. I know it.”
“Good song,” he says.
The flashing lights of a police cruiser appear before us. The police officer waves us to the side.
“Where are you going?” he asks. “It’s not often that we see an Ontario car around here at this time of year.”
“To Cape Breton,” we answer. “We’re trying to get across.”
“You can’t get across,” he says. “The waves are washing right over the road. The causeway’s closed.”
He speaks with an accent that is not local to the region.
“What are your names?” he asks.
“We’re MacDonalds,” we say.
“MacDonalds?” he says. “Are you the guys who make the hamburgers?”
“No,” says Calum, “we’re not the guys who make the hamburgers.”
The snow increases and the wind blows so that the officer has to hold on to his hat. He runs for the safety of his cruiser.
Calum starts the car.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“We’re going across,” he says. “That’s what we came for.”
As we approach the entrance to the causeway we can see the waves breaking. There is a shroud of mist in the air and dirty balls of brown foam fly before us. “This end is the worst,” says Calum. He takes the car to where he can assess the situation. The waves are coming from the left, breaking and then receding. When they break, the roadway is invisible, buried under foaming depths of water.
Calum begins to count the waves.
“After the third big wave,” he says, “there will be a lull and then we’ll go. If the motor gets too wet the car will quit. The third time is the charm.” Above the roar of the gale he says, “Here we go!”
The car springs forward. The red engine light is on, the engine is roaring, and the water comes in at the bottom of the doors. The windshield wipers are thick with ice and stop dead. He rolls down the window and sticks his head out into the gale to see where he is going on the invisible road. We are hit by one wave and then another. The car rocks with the force of the blows. The causeway is littered with pieces of pulpwood and dead fish. He weaves around the obstacles. The wheels touch the other side.
“Here,” he says, “you can do the driving now. We’re almost home.”
We exchange places. Away from the pounding of the waves it is relatively serene. We can see the lights of some of the houses. I
begin to drive along the coast. He settles into the passenger seat. The road we travel now is not directly in the path of the storm. Gradually the windshield thaws and the red engine light goes off.
Grandpa used to say that when he was a young man he would get an erection as soon as his feet hit Cape Breton. That was in the time, he said, when men had buttons on the front of their trousers. We, his middle-aged grandchildren, do not manifest any such signs of hopeful enthusiasm. But we are nonetheless here.
Tomorrow when the day breaks we will see what is now invisible around us. It will not all be pretty. Near the open water the bald eagles will pounce with mighty talons upon the white-coated baby seals. They will scream in different voices as they rise above the blood-stained ice. “You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet,” Grandma used to say. “No one said life was going to be a bed of roses.”
I recognize all the familiar landmarks, although it is dark and there are mountains of snow. Here is the place where Grandpa threw the top of his whisky bottle out the window the day we were returning from my graduation. The day the red-haired Alexander MacDonald was killed, although we did not know it then. The day his mother bought him the shirt.
I turn to Calum and he is still, though his eyes are wide open, looking at the road ahead. Once we sang to the pilot whales on a summer’s day. Perhaps we lured the huge whale in beyond his safe depth. And he died, disembowelled by the sharp rocks he could not see. Later his body moved inland, but his great heart remained behind.
By the glow of the dashboard lights I can see the thin scar on Calum’s lower lip beginning to whiten. This is the man whose
tooth was pulled by a horse. This is the man who, in his youthful despair, went looking for a rainbow, while others thought he was just wasting gas.
The car crests a high hill and in the distance, across the white expanse of the ice, I can see the regulated blinking of the now-automated light. It is still miles away. Yet it sends forth its message from the island’s highest point. A light of warning or, perhaps, encouragement.
I turn to Calum once again. I reach for his cooling hand which lies on the seat beside him. I touch the Celtic ring. This is the man who carried me on his shoulders when I was three. Carried me across the ice from the island, but could never carry me back again.
Out on the island the neglected fresh-water well pours forth its gift of sweetness into the whitened darkness of the night.
Ferry the dead.
Fois do t’anam
. Peace to his soul.
‘All of us are better when we’re loved.’
I would like to acknowledge the spiritual assistance that came my way during the completion of this novel. I would like to express my appreciation to Hawthornden Castle International Retreat For Writers, Lasswade, Scotland, for providing me a place “to be at peace in decent ease.”
My thanks to Doug Gibson for his caring persistence, and to Ed Ducharme for his help and concern.
A.M.
Cape Breton,
August 1999
Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936 and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a cliff-top cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work.
During the winter months Dr. MacLeod is a Professor of English at the University of Windsor, Ontario. His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier, the University of New Brunswick and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph.D. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Indiana. Working alongside W.O. Mitchell, he was an inspiring teacher to generations of writers at the Banff Centre.
He is such a careful and painstaking writer that his reputation in literary circles around the world is based on only fourteen short stories, collected in two books:
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
, published in 1976, and
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun
, which appeared in 1986.
As a result of the admiration excited by these books, Alistair MacLeod has given lectures and readings from his work in many cities in Canada and around the world. He and his wife Anita have six children: they live in Windsor.