Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (12 page)

I know that, long ago, the first of our MacIntyres came from the Hebrides, but when I ask my father about it, he just smiles. To him, I believe, Scotland is just another foreign country. I wonder why. My mother says she’d kill to see the world, especially Old Ireland, where the Donohues came from. She says our people came from Cork. My father couldn’t care less about faraway places. Maybe when you’re away most of the time, it’s hard to think of anywhere but home.

More mountains, now away from the sea, but my mother is explaining how the first European, meaning people like us, to set eyes on these hills and valleys was a man sent out by England whose name was John Cabot. I know from the history books that he was actually an Italian, but he worked for England and landed in Cape North, which is just before you get to Grandma Donohue’s, and he claimed the whole territory for the English King.

Past Cape North and Sugar Loaf, the road proceeds into a narrow valley, and then, on the right, just below, there’s a farm belonging to the Buchanans before the dangerous bend in the road they call Buck’s Turn. My mother always mentions all the people who were killed there.

By now we are sitting up alertly, peering past the adults, waiting for the magical moment when the little valley ends. Sprawled before us, we see the flat expanse of church and hall, graveyard and houses in St. Margaret’s Village and, just beyond it, Bay St. Lawrence, where Grandma Donohue lives.

My mother sighs at the sight. The ocean in the distance, the tidy fields, and the sudden mountain rising like a wall to block the wild Atlantic winds that rush across the Cabot Strait from Newfoundland. All exactly as she remembers it.

My grandmother lives alone on the lap of the mountain. She is
standing in front of her house when we arrive, wiping her hands on her apron and smiling broadly. She doesn’t get many visitors.

Like the houses on MacIntyre’s Mountain, the old place in Bay St. Lawrence has no electricity or indoor plumbing. But it is more like the houses I’m familiar with, bright and clean, with large pictures hanging on the walls of people wearing strange clothing and uncomfortable expressions—and everybody speaking at once in English.

Like my grandfather on the mountain, Grandma Donohue spent part of her younger years working in the United States. But while Grandpa MacIntyre carried a gun and never mentions his time in the States, she talks about it all the time—about working in Boston for a fancy woman named Mrs. Wing, who paid her two dollars a week to look after the household. Then going to work for a seamstress and getting a raise of fifty cents a week, which was a lot of money back then, especially if you were a girl from the northern tip of Cape Breton Island with nothing to offer Boston but your wit and stamina.

In return, Boston gave my grandmother enough sophistication to last the rest of her life—even though she married poor Jack Donohue, a simple fisherman who worked like a slave until he died of cancer, and she spent her life living in a house with none of the conveniences of Boston.

Shortly after we arrive, my Uncle Francis and his new wife, Annie Mae, stroll up from the little house he built on Grandma Donohue’s property, closer to the road. Francis was in the navy during the war, but now he works in a gypsum quarry in Dingwall, which is fifteen miles from Bay St. Lawrence. He is the youngest in the family, and boyish in the way he carries on. Uncle Joe will eventually come by, with his booming voice and Irish accent, which makes my father smile. And the bottle from Inverness will appear, and everything will get even louder.

Joe drives an oil truck for the Irvings. The men all talk about their work.

They talk about the causeway and the difference it will make, and how Uncle Francis is thinking of moving up to the strait for work because there’s talk of closing down the quarry in Dingwall. I decide to climb the mountain that rises directly behind my grandmother’s house and is even higher than Cape Porcupine.

It is a steep climb, through low bushes and coarse grass and thistles. It has, for several visits, become a ritual for me—climbing Grandma’s mountain, a few steps farther every time. Each visit I get a little closer to the top, but I feel a strange anxiety as I rise above the village where my mother was born and spent her childhood—getting too far away from what I know, too close to the unknown. But I push on, knowing that when I reach the top I’ll finally be able to see off over the Atlantic to Newfoundland, where I was born, and beyond it, to Scotland and Ireland, where all my people came from.

Below me sprawls the land in alternating patches, all in shades of green, cloud shadows moving slowly, changing green to darker shades of green, and gold to brown, mauve to black. Small boats bob in a sheltered pond. I stop and imagine the lives of my mother and her brothers and sisters, watching each other grow. People aging are the only changing feature in a vast unyielding landscape. And I remember my own village where nothing today is as it was yesterday—where it’s getting hard to notice people for all the noise and mud.

From the mountainside I can see the cemetery where they buried my grandfather, Jack Donohue, who was, they always say, a saint for putting up with the cancer and the many emphatic certainties Grandma Donohue brought back from Boston—certainties about the superiority of America, the Conservative Party of Canada, and the Holy Catholic Church.

I think of this ghost-grandfather I never knew as I study the small boats below me nodding on the little pond. He was a fisherman, and I try to imagine Jack and his boys, Joe and Francis, venturing cautiously beyond the narrow entry to the pond and out into the writhing sea, looking for their livelihood. And I wonder about this vast concept—livelihood—and how men and women dedicate their lives to it. Lives spent struggling to live, while simultaneously struggling to believe there’s a Better Life awaiting after this one.

Across the road from the cemetery where my grandfather has been buried for longer than I have been alive, the Catholic Church looms over the surrounding farms, like a benign sentry watching over a vulnerable community.

Once when my mother and Veronica and their older sister, Catherine, were girls, Grandma Donohue got sick and went to bed and didn’t recover for, I think, two years. Nobody talks about what was wrong with her; just how it affected everybody.

The older girls, Veronica and Catherine, had to give up school to run the house. And after two years, it was too late for going back. They were women then. There was no more time for childhood or books. Learning now would come from Experience, which, in many ways, they now insist, is the only reliable source of education.

They had to go to work, but the only work available for two uneducated women from down north was looking after priests. And so, after a couple of years as Grandma’s housekeepers, they both became priests’ housekeepers—an honourable job, their mother thought. Looking after quality people in a quality place was the highlight of her life. And there was no quality like a priest, or better places than the church.

My mother got to stay in school because she was the youngest of the girls—too young for looking after priests.

School has become a bit more interesting. I have moved on to the Big Room—grade six. No more endless days sitting in a desk that was too small, listening to Miss Norma Morrison trying to teach the younger children how to spell.

When I learned to spell, everything was different. It was my first year of school. There was only one room then, from primary to grade ten, and one teacher for us all. There was a stove in the middle of the room and, all around it, piles of rubber boots and overshoes that became so hot they’d almost catch on fire as the day progressed. The room was full of the smells of feet and hair and burning rubber mixed with chalk and Dustbane, which is something they use to sweep the floors and makes you want to sneeze. Sometimes, for mischief, an older boy would throw a wad of gum onto the stovetop, where it would bubble and burn and fill the room with smoke that smelled like poison, while the teacher tried to persuade the culprit to confess.

“You’ll be a better person for it,” she’d assure, slowing tapping a yardstick against the palm of her hand as she prowled around the classroom.

The only sound in the room would be the crackling of the fire and the sizzle of the burning gum.

What is now the Big Room was the only room when I started school. There was obviously a second classroom, from the time when the village had more people, but it had been boarded up for years. Then, anticipating all the activity with the causeway, the authorities cleaned up the abandoned room for the junior grades and now it’s called the Little Room. They eventually installed a furnace and indoor toilets. They tore out the wall and cloakrooms that separated the two rooms and replaced them with a new wall that was built in sections. The new wall can be taken down, so the two rooms become one large hall
for concerts, dances, and other public events. The removable wall sections are then placed on blocks to become an elevated stage for speeches or performances.

The first year I went to school, Miss Euphemia MacKinnon taught us how to spell the old-fashioned way—memorizing. She spoke in a loud, careful, nasal tone that was patient, but dangerous at the same time. Enunciating the letters in the words as she walked back and forth, she held the yardstick in her hand and hid a homemade strap of braided wire in her drawer for backup. She was large for a woman, and very pale, and she seemed to have a long, thick pigtail coiled up and pinned to the back of her head. She wore long dresses and low boots, which made a slow marching sound on the wooden floor. From time to time she’d test us in a spelling bee.

I learned quickly how to read and how to spell just about everything, which was why I managed to get to grade three without grade two. I even learned to spell Euphemia, and that may have helped. Later, after they opened up the Little Room and I moved there, I’d listen in despair as Miss Norma Morrison struggled to teach my sister and the others how to spell simple words by drawing boxes around them.

You have to
visualize
the words, she’d tell them. Just as the word has a sound, it also has a shape. My younger sister, Rosalind, who is just learning how to spell, will be lucky if she even learns to spell her own name.

My last year in the Little Room was pure misery, starting with an incident just before Halloween. Mr. Sinclair, who lives alone in a filthy house next door to Angus Walker’s, barged into the schoolroom that year, accusing us of setting off firecrackers on his doorstep at noon hour. Nobody knows who Mr. Sinclair is or where he came from. He is almost a hermit, though you see him shuffling along the road towards Mr. Clough’s about once a week. People avoid him because he’s cranky and never washes. They say the explosions across the strait are making Mr. Sinclair worse.

That noon hour he said there were explosions on his doorstep that almost caused a fire. He headed straight for the school. He just walked in huffing and puffing and making accusations. Then he spotted me.

“That devil there,” he shouted. “He’s the ring leader!”

Devil? Ringleader? The words stunned me. And though I wasn’t anywhere near his miserable little house, nobody listened to me.

“You’ll remain after school,” Miss Morrison said coldly.

Part way through the afternoon I had to go to the toilet, which was still outside behind the school. When I raised my hand, Donald Cameron, who sits near the window and whose father, Finlay, is the railway station agent, signalled me a warning.

“Don’t go out,” he whispered. “Sinclair called the Mounties, and they’re waiting to grab you when you go outside.”

Eventually I pissed my pants, and when Miss Morrison asked me why I had my head down on the desk, I told her I was sick. She told me to go home. There can be no punishment worse than to piss your pants when you are ten.

When I went outside, there were no Mounties. I could see Donald Cameron waving and grinning at me from the pencil sharpener, which is screwed onto the window ledge.

That night Miss Morrison came to the house, and I listened at The Hole as they discussed the Sinclair Situation. My mother said I couldn’t have been at Sinclair’s because I was home at noon hour having dinner.

Miss Morrison often comes to visit, because my mother is a school-teacher too. After they were finished talking about me, they talked about my sister’s problems with learning how to spell. My mother said she never in her entire life heard of such a foolish way to learn to spell as
visualizing,
drawing boxes around words.

Miss Morrison agreed, but said that’s how they’re supposed to do things these days. And they continued about how school is changing and everything is getting worse.

All that is ancient history now. I am in the Big Room, and it is almost Christmas. It is when we forget school and the weather for a while. There is always a concert, and some of us have parts. We take down the wall and turn the school into a hall, and the wall becomes a stage. The COD parcel somehow comes home and vanishes into one of the cold, closed rooms in the back end of the house, where nobody ever goes in wintertime. Grandma Donohue, who comes to live with us when the winter drives her out of Bay St. Lawrence, is remarking on what a change it is to have Dan Rory home.

They sit around the kitchen table playing cards and having drinks. Christmas is one time of year when there are lots of drinks for everybody, and nobody seems to mind. When my father came home at other times and had his drinks, you knew my mother wasn’t pleased about it. But at Christmas even Grandma Donohue has a little glass near her elbow and remarks that the drinks are flying straight to her head. She laughs as if it’s the best feeling in the world.

Grandma Donohue can be strict, but she taught me how to play all the games of cards she knows. And when we’re playing, I can even get away with teasing her. Once when I was losing badly, I noticed that the kitchen had filled with a foul odour. The dog was sleeping by the stove. I saw him smile and realized he was farting silently. So I blamed Grandma, just to distract her from her game.