Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (34 page)

Next year, he said, maybe we would go together to see New York—the most interesting place in the world.

“Sure,” I said.

“We’ll drive there,” he promised.

And we would eat Japanese food, which is the most delicious food anywhere.

Had I ever heard of sukiyaki?

“No.”

“Oh, wow. Wait until you eat sukiyaki. Yum yum.”

“How long will it take to drive to New York?” I asked.

“Oh, days and days. But you’ll be helping with the driving.”

“But I don’t drive.”

“Oh, but you’ll learn by then,” he said.

And I suddenly realized with a sinking heart: he doesn’t even know how old I am. He doesn’t realize that I’m just fourteen. I won’t even be able to get a driver’s licence for two more years. And where will Ted be by then?

Sylvia was probably the first girl I ever knew, apart from my sisters and Annie MacKinnon—Ian’s sister. Sylvia was almost three years older than I was, so you’d notice her and pay attention. Even though she was a lot older, she always seemed to treat me as if I mattered, and I guess that made her special. Plus, she was pretty, and she’d started looking grown-up ahead of most of them.

It didn’t surprise me that Ted liked Sylvia. She’s very direct, without being forward, and likes to make you laugh. And it didn’t surprise me that she liked him. He was good-looking and funny, and he always wanted to be going somewhere interesting and had a car. Cars are important here because everything is far away.

I’d drop by to see him when he was boarding at her place while my aunt was in the hospital, and they’d be carrying on and laughing. And soon Sylvia was going on drives with us, to movies or the beach. And afterwards, instead of saying good night and going right in, we sat out in Ted’s car and talked and joked. Sylvia and I explained everything about the place to Ted, and there seemed to be no end to his curiosity.

Sometimes he told us about home, but never much. It was as though he didn’t think where he was from was half as interesting as where he was at any given time—the exact opposite of most people here. No matter where you are, when you’re from here, you just can’t stop talking about home or longing to be there.

I got the impression that Ted’s family was important and that his father was influential. I never really understood why it was important to see a disaster like Hiroshima. Only once, very briefly, he talked about it and what the atomic bomb did to all the people there.

And we were all quiet for a while, waiting for more of the story. But he wouldn’t talk about it anymore, and I knew we shouldn’t ask.

Ted usually loved to talk about everything. But as the summer advanced, I noticed that he enjoyed talking about Sylvia more than anything.

Near the end of June, he asked me if I’d go on a double date with him and Sylvia.

I wanted to tell him I’d never been on a date. The word made me uneasy. It was like driving—something I looked forward to, some day, when I was ready.

But, remembering his expectations based on assuming I was more grown up than I really am, I didn’t want to disappoint him again.

“A date,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“A double date. Two couples.”

“Couples? Where to?”

“The prom.”

The prom was in town—a dance for people leaving high school and moving on to jobs or higher education. Going to a prom wouldn’t have ever crossed my mind even if I was graduating.

“I don’t think—”

“Come on,” he said. “It will be fun.”

“And who will you be taking,” I asked, as if I didn’t know.

Sylvia lined me up with Alice McGowan, who, like Sylvia, was graduating from grade ten. Alice is the daughter of Mr. McGowan, the storekeeper. Mercifully Alice, even though she is older, was as green as I was, and we mostly spent the night watching Ted and Sylvia dancing up a storm.

One day he asked me if I knew how to get to Lake Horton.

“Of course I do.”

“I hear there’s trout in Lake Horton.”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s go fishing in Lake Horton.”

It’s a couple of miles out back, and he wanted to walk. That’s the
other thing about Ted. He was always wanting to walk places, which I found peculiar for someone with a car. Ted was always talking about exercise and staying in shape and being healthy. Apparently walking is good for you.

“Okay. We’ll walk.”

It seemed to take forever and, after all the effort, we didn’t even get a bite. I think it was on the way back that I noticed stakes driven in the ground along the side of the dirt road.

“I did that,” he announced.

I remembered. He’s working as a surveyor. Working on the new Trans-Canada.

“How long…” I asked. “How long before you’re in the village?”

“It won’t be long,” he said.

We just walked on then in silence for a change.

Our biggest expedition was around the Cabot Trail. It’s at the very north end of the island, a gravel road that crosses at least five different mountains and, in places, hovers dangerously over the sea. He heard about it in Halifax. And when he heard that we had a grandmother living almost on the trail, he wouldn’t stop talking about it until my Aunt Veronica told him he should go and take me and Barry, and we could all stay at Grandma’s.

Driving there, I was trying to imagine Grandma Donohue’s reaction to her first Korean, and I guess I was surprised that she didn’t seem to notice he was at all different from all the other people she knows. She was on the front verandah waving when we drove up her lane, glad as anything to see us. We were hardly out of the car before you could smell the cooking, and it was as though Ted had grown up there in Bay St. Lawrence, the smile that came over his face at Grandma’s welcome and the aroma in her kitchen. Grandma Donohue is a wicked cook.

Of course she doesn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, and that was pretty fascinating for Ted, who, I was convinced, came from a pretty fancy upbringing back in his own country. It wasn’t that he looked down on us for being poor. He just seemed genuinely interested in the fact that an old lady could live alone in a clean, tidy old house without being connected to any of the power lines and water-lines and pavement that people nowadays seem to think are necessary for survival.

And I was thinking: wait until I take him to the mountain; wait until he meets my other grandmother, if he thinks this is old fashioned.

He kept asking questions about the winter, and how much snow they get. And Grandma pointed out that she doesn’t spend the winters down there anymore because she moves to Port Hastings to help out at our place now that my mother is teaching school. The fact is that she’s been coming up for winters for years now, well before my mother went back to teaching. But Grandma is proud. She wouldn’t want anybody thinking that a bit of snow would leave her helpless. Or that she stays at our place in the winter without being useful to the house. If anyone has any doubt about how proud she is, watch her at Mass sometime, standing through even the longest Gospels when other older folk are giving up and sitting down. Grandma makes a point of sitting near the front, and she’ll stand and sit and kneel with the best of them—even standing through the entire Passion, which takes the priest forever to get through, on Palm Sunday. She’ll stand there in her black coat, with her trim black hat on top of her head, straight as a soldier. That’s what Grandma Donohue is like.

And after supper, when she lit the lamps, she explained to us how, when she was young, they had only candles for light, and how making candles out of tallow was one of the skills she learned when she was still a little girl. And that got her into the real old times—people
struggling to keep food on the table day by day. And Ted sitting there, taking it all in as if he was at a movie.

Shortly after dark, we all went to bed. I had the lounge in the kitchen, underneath her clock, which has to be the loudest clock on earth. Or it just sounds that way because of the unusual silence in a house that doesn’t have electricity running through wires or water running through pipes. The clock is like one of those piledrivers they used building the canal—pock, pock, pock—with nothing but pitch-black silence in between the pocks. Anyway, I couldn’t get to sleep, so went out and sat on the verandah step for a while. It was just as noisy there, with the sound of crickets and other nighttime creatures squeaking and squawking in the darkness. Every now and then a dog or the rattle of a distant car. Then the black silence again, and underneath the darkness, like a thick blanket, the deep, deep rumble of the ocean rolling against the rocky shore half a mile away.

Eventually I got sleepy.

The next day, after breakfast, we toured around, and Ted loved looking at the sea. I explained that the next stop to the east of where we stood was Newfoundland, and after that, Ireland, where the Donohues all came from long ago. And he wanted to know how they got here, and I had to tell him I don’t know for sure. It was because they were so poor they had to leave the Old Country, and, while they were still poor over here, at least they didn’t have people persecuting them just because they were Irish.

He didn’t think Grandma Donohue sounded Irish, and I had to admit I wasn’t sure what she was. Her name, before she was a Donohue, was Capstick, and they came up from the States after the American Revolution. And Grandma Donohue was very partial to the States and worked there once when she was a girl. And she loves to talk about it. Something else they had in common, my grandmother and Ted—their affection for America.

Coming home in the evening, he noticed a contraption on the top of Money Point Mountain, and I told him I thought it was a radar base.

That got his interest, and he wasn’t going to rest until we went up to look at it. So we drove up, but you couldn’t get very close because of the high fences and the warnings about what would happen if you trespassed. So we had to head back, and Ted decided it would be boring to go back on the same road and we should find another way to go down the mountain. I said I thought the road looped around and connected to another road that goes down and comes out near Grandma’s.

“Great,” he said.

And sure enough, the road soon crested the top of the mountain, and you could see the countryside sprawled out below, all the little farms and the tall white church in the distance. And the ocean glittering, with the sun dropping towards the western horizon.

I guess we were hypnotized by the breathtaking view and didn’t notice that the road had turned into something that resembled a plunging river bed. And it was suddenly so steep that the three of us were leaning back as far as possible to keep from falling forward. You couldn’t stop and you couldn’t turn and you couldn’t back up.

Ted went very quiet. It’s hard to imagine, but he actually got pale. And when you could smell smoke from the rubber on the brake shoes burning, little beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.

I actually started praying—silently, of course—which I’m inclined to do when things get tense. And they got increasingly tense as we slid down the mountainside, the wheels actually locked at times. Ted now chewed on his upper lip. For a while it seemed that the car would tumble end over end, and we’d all be in the ocean.

Once he looked in my direction and laughed. But it wasn’t the laugh of someone having fun. It was the short hysterical cackle of someone who seems to have just realized that we are going to die.

But of course we didn’t. The road became a road again, and Ted could take his foot off the brake. And we could all breathe again.

Barry said “Wow” and actually admitted that, for once in his life, he’d been scared.

Ted laughed and said scared was an understatement.

Grandma Donohue was horrified when she heard that we’d driven down the back road over Money Point Mountain. Nobody has used that road for years, she said. And there has never been a car on it before.

She was almost cross, looking at Ted as if he was out of his mind. And I could tell that he felt guilty for risking all our lives, even though he’d had no idea what we were getting into when we were getting into it. Which, I guess, is how a lot troubles happen.

I got the impression after our adventure that he was growing distant. Maybe he was embarrassed by our close call on Money Point Mountain, or maybe just bored by my company. I was always asking questions, plaguing him with trying to learn Japanese and judo almost overnight—things that, I know, take years to learn. But I was in a hurry because, somehow, I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. He’d seemed happy giving me lists of words to learn and carefully writing down a simple version of the Japanese alphabet. He was less enthusiastic about the judo but could be persuaded to show me a trick from time to time.

I knew he was supposed to be studying to write an important exam when he got back to Halifax, but he could never seem to get motivated. Then one evening he announced that he was expecting a visitor, if we didn’t mind.

He was back at my aunt’s place then, and she asked who the visitor was.

“My girlfriend,” he announced. “Dr. Kim.”

“Dr. Kim?”

“From New York City.”

My aunt said Dr. Kim was welcome and that she could have her own room. My aunt would sleep on the cot.

Now, suddenly, when I’d go over to my aunt’s in the evenings for a visit, he’d be gone or up in his room lying on the bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling—like someone in a mood.

Dr. Kim was as pretty as one of those Japanese dolls my mother was talking about. A very nice woman, always smiling and interested. You’d think Ted would be drooling over her, but he was just being his usual friendly self.

And then she went back to New York, and he didn’t talk about her—which I found strange.

One evening as I was walking along the road, I saw his car pulling away from Sylvia’s and heading off towards town. And I realized that the moods and the absences didn’t have anything to do with me or Dr. Kim at all.

I felt relief knowing that I hadn’t offended him or bored him. But I also felt something else that I now can identify as jealousy. After thinking about it for a while, I recognized the feeling as a natural frustration at being so much younger than all the people I wanted to be close to. It was, it seemed, the story of my life—almost everybody was too young or too old. With Billy Malone gone, there was hardly anybody close to my age except Ian MacKinnon and Jackie Nicholson.