Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (19 page)

Of course, there are also people who are warning of larger consequences from “mankind tampering with nature.” And there has also been some concern that, in the next war, the causeway will be a target because of its strategic importance for the steel and coal industries on the other side of Cape Breton. But some people are saying there can never be another big war like the two world wars in the first half of this century. A war now would mean the end of the world because of the hydrogen bombs they’re building.

I’m not so sure. Every day the papers are full of stories about Americans and Russians and Chinese threatening each other over one thing or another. Old John is sure there will be another great war in Europe. And I know from the papers that the Americans killed Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg for something that would have helped the Russians win it.

My father says people are essentially nutty and, as a result, anything is possible. He says that Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg thought that, by spying, they could help
prevent
a war.

“So why were they electrocuted?”

He just looked at me for a while. “To make small boys ask questions.”

Which is another one of the answers he often gives.

My mother says we have to pray for peace and that this is a good reason for saying the rosary every evening.

My father goes along with the rosary, but when my mother starts
adding new stuff, the way she does for peace, you can hear him tapping his foot on the floor, which is his signal that enough is enough.

Grandma Donohue doesn’t seem to be half as worried about the Russians and the Chinese as she is about this guy named Nasser. But she agrees: prayer is the only answer.

It’s good to have your father home, even if you worry about broken axles and drive shafts and the tired look he gets sweating and swearing underneath the truck—which seems to be always looking for new ways to trip him up. And about how, when things really get difficult, he’ll come home late with fishy eyes and a goofy grin and a lot of silly talk that makes my mother angry. And then the house will grow cold and, when they’re alone, you know things are being said. Afterwards he’ll quietly go outside and sit on the doorstep or in the truck, and maybe fall asleep like that.

Friends from the mining days will often drop by when they’re on their way home from somewhere or leaving for another job. They’ll talk quietly about distant places, and he’ll be interested in new shafts that are being sunk and geologists’ reports about how rich some base-metal discovery is going to be in some place nobody ever heard of before. And about people they all know flocking off to the new bonanza in Elliot Lake or Blind River or Arizona. Even I get excited and wonder what it would be like to leave your troubles behind and go off to something entirely new in a place that doesn’t really matter because you’re going to be there only temporarily anyway.

After they leave, you’ll see him sitting at the table with an instant coffee and a cigarette, and sometimes he’ll have a pencil and he’ll be adding things up on the back of an envelope. Then he’ll sigh and put it away.

One of his visitors, in the spring, shortly after he came home, was Angus MacDonald from Long Point. They call him Angus Jim Malcolm, and he’s a prospector, and he actually grew up on MacIntyre’s Mountain too. I was interested in the conversation because I’ve read a lot about prospectors in Western books and the comics.

Angus Jim Malcolm was talking about a murder, so I couldn’t help but listen in.

A friend of his in Quebec had just been charged with murdering some Americans and was going on trial for his life.

I felt a terrible thrill at those words—“on trial for his life.” And I was thinking about those same words as they were used before the Rosenbergs were electrocuted in Sing Sing for being spies.

I’ll always remember who Angus Jim Malcolm was talking about because he had an interesting name—Bill Coffin.

Angus was saying what a nice guy he was, but that he was a terrible thief.

The reason he was blamed for murdering some hunters was because he was caught with stuff that belonged to them. He kept saying they gave it to him, but nobody believes him.

“He’d steal the eyes out of you, but he wouldn’t kill a fly,” said Angus Jim Malcolm.

And the men in the kitchen all agreed that Coffin was innocent, but that he was in deep trouble because he was an Englishman in Quebec and because the dead people were Americans.

When the visitor was gone, I asked my father if Angus Jim Malcolm’s friend Coffin was going to be electrocuted, and my father said no, we don’t do that here.

“What do we do here?”

“We hang them.”

For all his troubles, my father is happier at home. You can tell he loves
to sit there at his end of the table, eating his
sgadan
(salt herring) and blue potatoes or his corned beef and cabbage like a starved man. Or lying on the kitchen lounge listening to
Fun at Five
or the fiddle music and making a dark worn spot on the wall where he leans his head. And playing cribbage with my mother in the evenings, going to bed for a nap on Sunday afternoons, and, when it rains, going out and sitting in the truck just to listen to the rain rattling on the roof. He says he loves the sound and that it makes him sleepy, because, when he was a boy on the mountain, there was no ceiling in the bedroom where he and John Dan slept and they’d be listening to the rain and the hail and they’d think how lucky they were to be under a roof and not like the poor people who didn’t even have places to live.

“Being poor is having neither pot to piss in nor window to throw it out through,” they say.

We both love the sound of the wind in the big poplar trees that seem to surround our house—constantly rustling and sighing as you slide off into the magical world of sleep where anything is possible.

All July we were following the Coffin trial in Quebec because we knew somebody who knew him. Every day the paper would have a story, and every day Coffin looked worse. They were even trying to get his common-law wife to testify against him because, according to the lawyers who opposed him, a common-law wife doesn’t matter the way a real wife does. Everybody knows real wives aren’t supposed to testify against their husbands.

Coffin’s lawyers were trying to force the other side to tell them who else they had as witnesses against him. The judge thought that would set “a dangerous precedent.” Everything was complicated by the fact that they had to use both English and French because some witnesses couldn’t speak one or the other language. Coffin could speak only English and, because of that, my mother said, he’s as good as hanged already.

My father said we had to wait to hear his side of the story. That the real truth would come out then and, English or French, in the end they wouldn’t hang an innocent man.

Then, in early August, when it was his turn, Coffin’s lawyer got up and announced he wasn’t calling any witnesses at all. Not one. Not even Coffin.

It was hard to believe, until I remembered what they were saying about lawyers when my aunt had her water problem.

It took only twenty-eight minutes for the jury to announce that Coffin was guilty. The judge sentenced him to hang on November 26, 1954.

It is December 10 and he is still alive. My mother says they’re just prolonging the agony.

My father seems sad because of the Coffin trial. I think he knows a lot of men like Coffin. People who, other people say, “are their own worst enemies.” People whose lives never quite get started in a direction that might lead them anywhere better than where they started out. Men who are basically good and funny and loyal to their friends, but who never manage to get ahead of where they were yesterday. They start each day a little bit behind where they want to be, then, eventually, out of desperation, they do something really dumb to get a little bit of control over their life.

I think he’s had a lot of time to compare himself to guys like Coffin and to figure out what makes him different. Even though he came from the middle of nowhere with nothing, compared to Coffin, he’s done okay. He has a family and a home, even though he hasn’t been able to spend a lot of time with them. He was brought up strictly: no stealing or crooked work, no matter how tough things get. Faith, too—even though he doesn’t show it and taps his foot when the rosary gets too long, and sometimes he gets a strange expression when poor
Father Doyle is rambling on about God’s Infinite Mercy and Justice, etc. Even then, you can tell, he has the Faith, and that makes one of the differences between him and Coffin.

And now he has hope. Now there’s a chance he will finally get ahead of yesterday. Maybe even get a head start on tomorrow. And it’s all because there was a Gaelic-speaking politician from here named Angus L. and a granite mountain five hundred feet high at the narrowest part of the Strait of Canso. And because, within minutes, there will be a causeway.

At eight o’clock there is a roar as another forty tons of rock tumbles from the edge of the causeway and splashes into the water—and sits there. The gap is closed. I see a small group of men race over the edge of the point, into what, a day ago, was a swirling, deadly torrent of angry water. There are five of them. They leap onto a boulder, one behind the other, on their way into the history books. Among them I recognize a neighbour. It is Joe Larter from up the hill, via Korea. Just behind him, Lennie MacDonald, whose father, Mickey Johnnie Sandy, drives the snowplough. And Mr. Wendelblo, the well driller. They scramble through the darkness until I can barely see them now, half crawling up through the rubble on the other side like children, racing to be first.

It glimmers in the pale moonlight.

And you can see it any night—

provided you have second sight—

the
bocan
bridge of Canso.

Two things always tell you that you’re in trouble—arms folded across the chest and a certain intensity in the eyes that you know can penetrate skin, bone, brain, and your innermost thoughts when the Irish is up. When the arms are folded and the blue eyes are illuminated by her secret power, you know the war is over before it starts. Defence, denial, resistance, flight—all the normal things commended by your loathsome guilt—are futile. The naked brain, advised I suppose by something ancient in the soul, screams out, “Surrender! Now! It can only get worse.”

And so, when, after a long and disabling silence, she announces that she knows I have started smoking, it takes only a split second for me to confess.

Actually, I nod my head. The voice is choked off by a sudden loss of confidence in my knowledge of the language. Then the words trickle out.

“Yes. I was smoking.”

“Where?”

“In the woods. Back of the cove.”

“You and who else?”

Who else? Here I sense a small margin of room for manoeuvre. How many must I bring down with me? Billy? Ralph and Donnie (new guys, brought in by the causeway)? Jackie Nick? Donald Cameron (who once caused me to piss my pants)?

“Donald Cameron.”

“Donald Cameron?”

“Yes.”

“Smoking cigarettes with Donald Cameron.”

“Yes.”

“And you know what the Camerons are like?”

“Yes.”

“You remember what Angus L. Cameron did to you?”

“Yes.”

“I’m extremely disappointed in you.”

I cringe. A beating from Miss Euphemia MacKinnon’s braided wire wouldn’t sting as much. “I’m disappointed in you.” Words of total condemnation when directed at, until recently, the man of the house—the member of the family with the undefined, unspoken, but nevertheless burdensome responsibility to make things easier. At the very least obliged to avoid making things harder in a house where the father is away a lot.

And the reference to Angus L. Cameron is staggering.

Here’s what happened. It was after the construction started down below Billy Malone’s, where they were moving the railroad. It was early spring, and a spell of snow and rain and heavy machinery had turned the workplace into a sea of soupy mud. The mire was at least eight inches deep.

Angus L.’s father is Finlay Cameron, the railway station agent. Billy and I bumped into Angus L. near the station. He called me Spruce or
Linda or something, and so I said something saucy back. That’s how I am. Sometimes I just can’t keep my big mouth shut. The chase was on—he after me, through the mud as fast as I could run.

Angus L. is at least five years older than I am, and we have a history. Once when I said something saucy back to him, he caught me, and, while Walter MacKinnon, who is the same age as he is, held me down, he shoved a bun of horse manure into my mouth. Luckily it was old, dried-out horse manure, so it didn’t kill me. I kept that incident to myself.

Another time he was pounding me, and my Aunt Veronica came along. He ran, but she chased him. She finally caught him at Mr. Clough’s and gave him one on the jaw and asked how he liked it. His father called the Mounties, and they came to see my aunt but didn’t do anything when they heard the whole story.

The day he went after me in the mud wasn’t something I could easily conceal. He caught me. Then, gripping me by the back of the neck and the back of my pants, he picked me up and sluiced me through the muck face first. Even Billy laughed—at least for a second, until he realized how much trouble I was in.

But then I discovered I wasn’t in trouble after all. I was a victim. That makes all the difference in the world. Once when I taunted Binky MacLellan and he slugged me, I went running home for sympathy, my nose pouring blood. My mother checked it out and told me that is what happens when you shoot off at people bigger than you are.

“Damned good enough for you,” says she. “Remember this.”

But when my mother found out that it was Angus L. and how I really didn’t deserve this assault because he started it, she put her coat on and marched down to the railway station and confronted his father, Finlay. This is what happens when their Irish is up. Some people might wait until the father comes home. Not her. She’ll go after
anybody. Even somebody as important as the station agent, even if it isn’t going to do her any good. Her sister is the same way. My Aunt Veronica will go after anybody, no matter how important. And their brothers, even Uncle Joe who isn’t much taller than I am—I’ve heard stories about him and Uncle Francis at the dances down north, and going after people twice their size even if they didn’t have a prayer of winning.

My mother barged into the station and gave Finlay Cameron hell. Billy Malone went right to the door and heard it all, and reported back afterwards with his eyes like saucers.

The truth, of course, is that Finlay Cameron did what he always does—denies that any of his kids could ever do anything wrong. After all, they’re Camerons, and the Camerons have always been heroes. The
L
in Angus L. stands for “Lochiel,” who was one of the most heroic Highlanders in history. And it was scandalous that people went around blaming a good boy like Angus L. for everything. And didn’t poor Angus L. almost die once when he and Chum Chiavari were fooling around with a shotgun and it went off and the slug passed through his guts, making a hole the size of your fist?

But according to Billy, my mother stood her ground and got the last word in, which Billy couldn’t remember exactly.

And now here I stand: correctly accused of smoking cigarettes in the woods with Donald Cameron, who is Finlay’s son and the younger brother of the notorious Angus L. And she’s understandably Disappointed in Me, which is the worst thing in the world that could happen. Worse than the Communist takeover of Russia and Hungary and China and half of Korea. Worse than if we’d set the woods on fire the way some kids, smoking and fooling around with matches, burned down the old dance hall and almost took Clough’s store and the Reynoldses’ house with it.

My moral victory over Angus L. Cameron is erased.

“Where, pray tell, did the cigarettes come from?”

“Donald got them.” (The truth.)

“And where did Donald get them?”

“He put them on his father’s bill at Clough’s.”

I imagine a twinkle in the eyes. Everybody has a bill at Mr. Clough’s.

“He what?”

“He went to Clough’s and bought a pack of Sweet Caporal, a loaf of bread, and a jar of sandwich spread and told Clough to charge them to his father’s bill-book. And then we went out in the woods and made a campfire and then made sandwiches and ate them. And smoked most of the cigarettes.”

“And Clough didn’t ask who the cigarettes were for?”

“He did.”

“And?”

“Donald said they were for Eileen.”

Eileen is their older sister, and she smokes. And when we were in the woods smoking, we were laughing at how cool Donald was when he told Clough the smokes were for Eileen. Laughing and laughing and smoking, and Donald glowing in all the attention.

“Ask me,” he orders. “Pretend you’re old Clough and ask me: ‘Eileen who?’”

“Eileen who?” I obey, trying to sound like Mr. Clough but laughing and choking on sandwiches and smoke.

Donald puts on his cocky face and says:
“I-lean
over, you kiss my arse.”

And, of course, that has everybody on the ground choking and gasping at the courage and the wit of Donald Cameron, who, anybody could tell, was from a long line of Highland heroes and who would
have said it right to Mr. Clough’s face—if only he’d been asked who Eileen was.

“I don’t ever want to hear of you smoking again,” she said.

And I swore to it.

“Don’t you think we have enough to worry about around here without you going around with the Camerons and behaving like a ruffian?”

In my guilty misery, I make my way to the old cemetery that overlooks the new causeway. Even the dog seems ashamed of me and walks behind me at a distance. He probably just respects my sorrow, but in my contaminated imagination I assume rejection. My mouth is sour from its bitterness.

Below the cemetery there is the new road, from the canal to the village. It is still jagged with blasted rock, still acrid from the chemistry of explosion. Large road-building machines roar below me. The giant Euclids still move about the face of Cape Porcupine, now hauling even larger stones out onto the causeway to be dumped along its flanks to provide armour against the relentless tides. You realize, watching this activity, that, from Nature’s point of view, the causeway is just another inconvenience—as with all human installations. Nature will now intensify the effort to remove it—imperceptible erosion, the sudden battery of winter storms, the grinding drift of ice. It might take forever, but Nature has forever to complete her project. Nothing made by man can be forever.

The silent headstones around me briefly note the transience of all human enterprise. Each grave occupied by what was once a person real as me, buffeted outside by Nature, torn inside by something called emotion—forces that are as unmanageable as they are unpredictable because they are responses to the unexpected.

Over there, just beyond the trench that is becoming a canal, is that
other cemetery—probably the first cemetery around here, now carefully excluded from the destruction of what was. Only a few weathered tombstones are left. One reads “Douce Elizabeth Balhache, departed this life July 1793.” Aged six. Daughter of Douce Hulbert Balhache, native of Jersey. I wonder: what must that be like, losing your only kid? Of course, they say Mrs. Balhache was tough. She got over the loss—even got over it after her husband disappeared at sea. She personally took over their family business, a two-thousand-acre farm, a weaving business. She even ran the quarry at Plaster Cove.

What is it about women? I wonder. Where do they get that…whatever they have?

The engineers and drillers, blasters and truckers, all seem to tiptoe around the final resting place of young Douce Elizabeth—and Christina Skinner, and James Skinner. People long forgotten, except for a few words on stones that are slowly being erased by the grimy wind. Even the name Balhache is strange here now, though once it was important. Old maps designate the location of the lighthouse as Balhache Point, but we know it now as Nicholson’s Point because of Jackie and his grandmother. And now they are gone too. Soon there will be no name at all, no point. The causeway—that’s what it is now, part of a road. A road, the adults say, to bring people home. A road, I know, that will one day carry me away. And on this day of shame, nothing in the future can be soon enough.

My father says that the causeway will last longer than we will. I am reassured.

My father isn’t like the women in the family. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t have any Irish. He doesn’t talk much. He is “easy going.” They say my father could be a dangerous man if he ever got rattled. Fortunately, he
doesn’t—at least not very often. And I know my smoking would never rattle him, which is why she didn’t bother telling him.

Some mothers around here terrorize their kids by threatening to report them to their fathers. My mother never does that. It wouldn’t do her any good.

I have seen him angry only twice and, both times, I was the cause. But the consequences were pretty mild, at least for me. The first time I was teasing the dog by putting my face close to his and growling. Suddenly, the dog bit me. Chomp. One fang punctured just under my eye, another made a little hole at the corner of my mouth. My father heard the racket and went to a tree and cut off a small branch. I tried to tell him it was my fault, but he said it didn’t matter. Once a dog starts biting people, that will be the end of him. He has to learn early. And he caught Skipper by the scruff of the neck and whipped him. The dog kept spinning around and yelping and looking at my father with the saddest expression I ever saw, except for the one on my father’s face.

Afterwards, the dog crept away and hid behind the barn. My father went in the other direction and sat silently on the doorstep for a long time. Later, the dog crawled up to him, and they were friends again.

The other time was more serious. It was after I got my first bicycle, and I drove in front of a car.

I almost made it all the way across the road before I heard the screech of rubber on pavement. The car clipped my back wheel and sent me and the bike flying into the ditch. I didn’t even fall off because the bike somehow landed upright, with me sitting on it looking stupid. I heard someone shout my name, loud and angrily. And when I looked, my father was running down the Green Path, which used to be called Saddler Street. Running! The man who never walked faster than a saunter, who couldn’t even ride a bicycle, who almost fell off mine when he tried it once. Running towards me like a sprinter and shouting
my name, which I rarely ever heard him say because he always called me “boy” or “bub.”

For a moment I thought I was about to be murdered, but then he seemed to notice I was alive and realized it wouldn’t make much sense to kill me now. And he seemed to know the driver of the car, who was just sitting there with an amused expression, leaning out his window, looking at me as he slowly lit a cigarette.

My father went to the car, and they were talking about how stunned young fellas are most of the time. And then they were both lecturing me about how we couldn’t play on the roads anymore now that there is a causeway, and with the Trans-Canada Highway coming through.

Those were the only two times, though I’m sure he could get as wild as anybody else. And I even heard a story once about how he flattened somebody with one punch when the guy attacked him for no good reason. But, if we were alike, he’d have hated that as much as I do when I get into fights. The way I see it, nobody wins a fight.

Once when I was waiting for the train at the station in town after a movie, I saw two men fighting. They both seemed drunk and weren’t doing much harm. But I felt a terrible dread because, I suppose, drunk men fighting out behind the railway station can do a lot of damage if they want to—even kill somebody.