Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (15 page)

When I told my mother, she just rolled her eyes.

Martin Angus always says that: “I’ll be back.”

When I was little, and my father was around for a while one summer, there were also the fiddle players. They’d appear out of nowhere and just move in for days, eating and drinking and playing the fiddles in the evenings. Their whole lives seemed to be like that, going from house to house. In the winter they’d move in for months with someone who had a kid who wanted to become a fiddler himself. There’s also a piper named Sandy Boyd who lives like that: wandering around playing and teaching music, getting paid in hospitality.

My father learned to play the fiddle, but stopped after he got married.

“The fiddle is a lovely thing,” my mother says. “But it’s bad for attracting boozers.”

Billy Malone is new, though he moved to the village more than a year ago. He comes from the far end of the province, a place called Lower Woods Harbour, which he says is even smaller than Port Hastings. Mr. Malone is a crane operator, and when he came to work here he brought the whole family: Mrs. Malone, whose name is Zella; Billy and his sister, Phyllis.

Billy’s real name is Willis, which is also his father’s name, and there was snickering in school when he and his sister were introduced. I guess that was when I decided he would be my friend. People giggling at names—Willis and Phyllis, as if that’s funny.

He is younger than I am and younger than Jackie Nick, who also became his friend because they live close together. Jackie moved into the old Bellefontaine place, across the road from Mr. Clough’s store, after they burned down his old house on Nicholson’s Point to begin
working on the new canal. Billy’s family came here in the fall of ’53 and moved into the Captain MacInnis place, where Brian Langley used to live, next door to Mr. Clough’s. Brian moved to town when his father got a better job.

Little Ian MacKinnon was saying there wasn’t much point in getting to know Billy because he wasn’t going to be around for long. Then the Malones built a new place, a bungalow on the other side of the road from the Captain’s, practically next door to Jackie’s new old home, and moved in there. To me that means they’re here for good, anticipating lots of work for crane operators even after the causeway and canal are finished. It’s hard for me to imagine that a father who goes places for work would take the whole family and build a new house if he wasn’t going to stay.

And that is a good thing, because Billy Malone has become my best friend, and his sister is one of my sister’s best friends.

This is what I expect from the new causeway: new friends who bring their different personalities and experiences from other places.

To pass the time while waiting for the gap to close, we’ve explored what’s left of Jackie Nicholson’s old lighthouse, which is nothing now but ashes and a few charred pieces of lumber. There is no longer any trace of where the house was or the old outbuildings. There is the beginning of a large trench, which will one day be the canal. The concrete walls are now about a third of the way along to where the first “cell” is to be located. I understand that the cell is where there will be large gates that open and close and control the current so that ships and boats don’t swirl around as they try to get through.

Since the spring, my father has been hauling gravel for the concrete they’re using for the canal. I read in the paper that they’re going to need a hundred thousand yards, which really means a lot more than it sounds.

I try to imagine the ships I used to see moving slowly in the distance as they passed through the unblocked strait. Soon I’ll see them up close, halted in the canal, with the land pressed close on either side, waiting to get through the narrow passage so they can continue towards the gulf—or back towards the ocean. I’ll actually be able to read the names of the ships and the distant places they come from. I’ll see their flags and get to see the people on board.

The flank of the hill leading up to Newtown, where Angus Neil and Theresa MacKinnon used to live, is patchy white from recent snow. But where the canal is being built there is only mud and carved black rock. The air is full of the smell of diesel fumes and the sour aftertaste of blasting smoke.

It is strangely quiet now, the way it always gets at suppertime when day is ending and the night is moving in. But I know it’s different from the quiet of before, when there was nobody here but Jackie and his grandmother. The only sound would be, on foggy nights, the sad call of Mrs. Nicholson’s foghorn and the nervous response of invisible ships somewhere in the darkness. The quiet now is that of an army of construction men and their machines relaxing briefly on this side, watching the frantic action on the other side in this battle against nature.

I want to ask Jackie Nicholson how he feels, coming here and seeing all the change. How does he feel about the lighthouse that gave his grandmother work for years and years and now lies in a pile of charred timber and powdery ash? But I know he’d just look at me with his puzzled expression. He seems happy in the new house, and especially since they got the new TV.

According to the
Bulletin,
they turned off the big beam at the top of the lighthouse for the last time on November 17. After they burned the lighthouse down, Mr. Jim Spray, who lives in town, was in the paper
saying that it was the first time in 150 years that the point was dark. He doesn’t seem too happy about it.

According to Mr. Clough, the point won’t be dark for long. Where the lighthouse stood for a century and a half will, in fact, soon become a part of the causeway, and there will be more lights than anyone can imagine, starting in the village itself and illuminating the strait from one side to the other along the brave new road. Huge power lines will be draped across the strait from towers so tall they’ll need flashing lights on top to keep the airplanes from running into them. And everybody will have TV.

Right now, though, Jackie and his grandmother have one of the only television sets in the village. Murdoch MacFarlane, who has a son in the priesthood and a daughter Mary working for the Power Commission, got the first. Then McGowan. Then Mrs. Nicholson got theirs, which Billy and I are allowed to watch when Jackie Nick is in the mood. Jackie is strange like that. Some days he’s your best friend. Then there are days when his face is pale and scowling and his hair damp and hanging over his forehead and you avoid him. One night he and I went to a card game in the school and played as partners after I loaned him twenty-five cents so he could get in.

When I asked him, next day, to pay the quarter back, he said, “Whistle for it.”

He’s even ignorant to his grandmother when she tries to stop him from eating cookies or shovelling heaping spoons of icing sugar into his glass of milk. He’ll speak sharply to her. Mrs. Nicholson just shakes her head and sighs and lets him do whatever he wants. If I spoke like that to Grandma Donohue, I’d be dead—instantly.

Everything, it seems, begins with mud. Men and large machines manoeuvre in fields that were, until recently, abandoned, shoving grass
and underbrush aside. The growling voices of the chainsaws rise and fall in the woods, the air thick with spicy smoke from brushfires. It is hard to sit at a desk inside a classroom, knowing that everything outside is being transformed.

There are even changes in the small routines of school. On Fridays we have the Junior Red Cross meeting and assign jobs, such as handing out the cod liver oil capsules and checking for dirty fingernails and head lice. One of the best jobs is fetching water, which gets you extra time outside, if only briefly, every morning. There is no running water in the school, so we have to carry water in pails to fill the water coolers. We used to go to Miss Phemie MacKinnon’s just below the church, but the old MacKinnon place is empty now, and someone drowned a cat in the well. The house and well will soon be gone to make way for a new road, which will be part of the highway that stretches across the country from one ocean to the other.

Now we go farther away from the school, through the pasture that is beside the school and into the woods, to a little spring where the water is cold and clean.

But now I see them burning brush near that spring, and I’m not sure where we’ll go for water next. I wonder what it would be like in a school with running water.

Below Mr. Clough’s store they are relocating the railroad, and soon the long, slow turns before and just beyond the railway station will be a straight line, a new passageway hacked through the rocks all the way from Sam Fox’s Hill to the end of the new causeway at the point. There will even be a miniature causeway to carry trains over the water at the entrance to the cove. There’s talk about moving the railway station. Survey crews appear shouting and measuring and driving enigmatic stakes into the ground in unlikely places. Clusters of men in hard hats and work boots stand in groups around men who wear shoes and overcoats and carry briefcases
and long rolls of paper and turn up suddenly in pastures, unintelligible intelligence flowing among them. And across the water, the hulking cape suddenly shudders and shatters. And the causeway inches closer. Mud-spattered cars and trucks line the road between the stores. People say they’re even going to tear down the church and the school and all the houses near the road, including ours. Old people are feeling anxious.

My mother laughs. “Don’t pay any attention to the wild stories. They’ll never touch that church.”

It’s been more than a hundred years since they started grumbling about the difficulty of getting on and off the island. I often want to ask why anyone would want to live on an island if they were so worried about getting off it.

Back in the eighteen hundreds they were asking the government for help getting people and animals across the strait by boat. Politicians and merchants started talking about a bridge, but most ordinary people couldn’t imagine such a thing. The strait is deep and fast and wide. Then, somehow, they suspended a huge cable from a tower on top of the cape to a high pole here for the telegraph service. After that anything seemed possible for a while. But the cable eventually sagged until it was catching in the masts of sailing ships, and the pessimists were all saying: “See? A bridge? Not a chance.”

Then they put the cable under the water, and the businessmen and politicians and all the optimists were saying “Progress can’t be stopped” and “It’s only a matter of time” before somebody with courage and drag and imagination finds a way to build the crossing.

Then there was a long period of time with no talk. People travelled back and forth as best they could, figuring the telegraph cable was the last word in progress. And eventually there was a modern ferry service for cars and even trains. That seemed to keep the people satisfied for a long time.

It was only after World War Two, after Angus L. Macdonald returned from Ottawa where he ran the navy during the war, that the talk started again. There was agitation from people who ran the coal mines on the other side of the island and the steel plant in Sydney—and from Newfoundlanders. Angus L. made it his business to get the government in Ottawa interested in a bridge. They probably figured they owed him, for being a war hero and everything else that he’s achieved, and in 1949 they made a decision to build one. A bridge?

People were making jokes about the
bocan
bridge. The word
bocan
means ghost.

Then they changed their minds again. They finally realized that the strait was too deep and the tides too strong. And in the winter the drift ice that made so many problems for the ferries would tear a bridge apart.

“Typical,” the Tories said. “More broken Grit promises.”

You’d think that Angus L. would have known, without being told by engineers, how, in winter, slabs of ice the size of small ships sail through, sometimes jamming up, grinding and buckling, and piling up on the shore and turning the strait into an icefield, but never still or stable enough to walk across. Even I knew that spanning the strait would take something stronger than the relentless moving ice, something more durable than wood or steel or even concrete.

Something like rock—but not just any rock.

And when they finally announced a permanent crossing to be made from rock from Mr. Fraser’s mountain, there was silence even from the Tories. There is something indisputable about words like rock and causeway. There is a sensible simplicity about the notion of carving chunks of granite from the face of old Cape Porcupine to build a road across the rushing water. News of a causeway finally had the credibility that was lacking in all the previous speculation and political promises. It seemed so natural and so obvious, you had to wonder why nobody
had thought of it long ago. In time, I suspect, the causeway will be just another part of the natural landscape—a natural offspring of the cape.

The cluster of important-looking men parts for a moment, and someone is having a serious conversation with an older gentleman in an important-looking hat. This is obviously the lieutenant governor. He is listening carefully and staring at the ground, deep in thought.

The other day there was a rumour in the paper that they paid Mr. Fraser only $5,500 for the ten million tons of rock they’ve used, and that they appointed him lieutenant governor to keep him quiet. But he’s going to sue them anyway and, from what I hear at home, he can’t possibly lose. He’s a lawyer. Even ordinary people think he’s been screwed.

I thought for a while last year, before the mission, that when I grow up I would become a lawyer. I got the idea listening at The Hole and hearing my mother telling my Aunt Veronica that she was going to have to get one to help with her problems.

“That’s all there is to it,” she said. “You need a good lawyer.”

It was another evening when there was quiet talking and sniffling at the table, and I gradually realized that the lawyer was necessary because my aunt has no water on her property and is in a dispute with a well driller she hired to dig a well. His name is Wendelblo, and he isn’t from around here. He’s one of the new people, which probably explains a lot.