by Anne Emery
Lament for Bonnie
A MYSTERY
ANNE EMERY
Contents
MacDonald Family Tree
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
MacDonald Family Tree
* Sharon divorced Collie, married Andy Campbell. Andy has daughter Nancy.
In Cape Breton, surnames and given names recur frequently, as do nicknames. In the pages ahead, you may see familiar names. “Hey, I know a fella by that name.” In order to represent a setting accurately, it is essential to give the characters authentic local names. All characters are fictional and do not represent any real people, living or dead. The village of Kinlochiel is fictional. Some bars and other establishments are real, some fictional.
Chapter I
Monty Collins
Why was that eyesore still standing? I stood on the hill in Glace Bay and gazed down at the shoreline, at the derelict concrete buildings that used to be part of the town’s massive heavy water plant. This was where they used to make D2O. Deuterium oxide. I had always found the place spooky, found the whole idea of heavy water spooky.
It is used as a moderator in nuclear reactions, allowing a sustained and controlled chain reaction using ordinary instead of enriched uranium. It’s cheaper that way. In ordinary water, there are two hydrogen atoms each with a single proton. In heavy water, the hydrogen atoms have a neutron in them as well. Put a heavy-water ice cube in your drink and it will sink to the bottom of your glass. It’s not radioactive. As far as I know, the stuff is mildly toxic. One way or the other, I had no intention of keeping a bottle of it in the fridge for hot summer days.
The plant was yet another example of a failed enterprise in industrial Cape Breton, a big, monumentally expensive scheme to produce heavy water in Glace Bay and in Point Tupper and ship it out of the province of Nova Scotia to Canada’s nuclear power plants. But it was plagued by problems from the beginning; corrosion ate away at the infrastructure, and it cost a fortune to repair. It was mothballed less than twenty years after it opened. The cooling towers had been removed when the plant was shut down years ago, but, in addition to all the concrete, I knew there was still an enormous system of pipes rusting under the ground. The plant once employed hundreds of people. There was a lot of money in this town back in the day, with the plant and the mines, and the money was spent locally. Now all those jobs were gone. I could almost see the line of workers walking out of the place for the last time, two by two, despondent. The next image I had was of those same workers, two by two, climbing the steps of an Air Canada jet, all of them heading to Ontario, to the west, to anywhere that offered work, even if it was thousands of miles from home and family.
But I wasn’t there on the first Friday afternoon of my holiday to mourn the hemorrhage of jobs from industrial Cape Breton. I was there to pay a very painful visit to Collie MacDonald, ex-husband of Sharon MacDonald, who was a first cousin to my wife, Maura. Collie and Sharon and their kids used to live up here at the end of Drew Street, in sight of the plant. Not anymore.
The house used to be a nice, well-kept bungalow like others on the street. Now the grey shingles were rotted in places and darkened by soot. Planters that were once filled to overflowing with vibrant flowers displayed nothing but desiccated weeds. Two wrecks of cars took up half the driveway. A child’s swing set in the backyard was rusty and covered with grime. I wondered what the neighbours in this otherwise well-maintained neighbourhood thought of the unsightly premises Collie’s home had become. I went up to the side door, the only one the family had ever used, knocked and walked in. The place was never locked.
I steeled myself for the visit. It hadn’t always been like this.
Normie Collins
I had thought the worst thing about our trip to Cape Breton would be that I couldn’t play the fiddle right. I just switched to the fiddle because the kids on my street in Halifax laughed at me the day I came home with bagpipes. One big guy said, “What’s the difference between bagpipes and an onion? People cry when they chop up an onion.” Mum said I shouldn’t let stuff like that bother me and I should stand up for myself, and she’s probably right, but I ended up changing to the fiddle anyway. I told the other kids it’s a violin. Which it is, but I play it as a fiddle. And this summer I was in Cape Breton to learn how to play. You wouldn’t believe all the good music they have there. All kinds of family bands: the Rankins, the Barra MacNeils, and Natalie MacMaster and her uncle, Buddy, who are fiddlers. All kinds of people teach fiddle music. My teacher was Mrs. Beaton in a little village called Kinlochiel. So I got to stay out in the country near the village at my great-grandmother Morag’s house on Skye Road. What a beautiful name for a road, eh? Mum told me it was named after the Isle of Skye in Scotland, where old Morag came from when she was a little girl way back in time. Being at her place was almost like being on a farm because there was a barn outside the house. It’s too bad there were no horses. What is the point of being out in the country and having a barn if you don’t have horses? But I didn’t say that to her. And she had cool old bicycles in the barn left over from all the kids all through the years, so I used a bike whenever I had to go someplace, like to my music lesson.
I hadn’t expected anything bad to happen on the trip. I love going to see my grandma and granddad and great-grandma and cousins in Cape Breton. If you look at a map, you’ll see that our province is shaped like a lobster out in the middle of the sea. Cape Breton is the island at the end of it, and it looks like a claw! And there are lobsters in the ocean all around us. Anyway, the worst thing about our visit to Cape Breton wasn’t me breaking a string on my fiddle right at the start of my lesson at Mrs. Beaton’s house. There were way worse things than my fiddling.
“Tragic Bonnie.” That will be the name of my story when I write it in school. Tragic Bonnie MacDonald is a girl, twelve years old, who went missing in Cape Breton. Foul play was suspected. That was two weeks before I arrived. She is my second cousin, a year older than me. Her dad and her mum were both named MacDonald. There are so many MacDonalds in Nova Scotia that one MacDonald will end up marrying another one.
I could tell that Mum and Dad didn’t want me to know about Bonnie going missing. They had a big debate between themselves about whether we should even stick with the plan to go to Cape Breton at all. That’s the way they are; they don’t want me to hear about really bad stuff happening because it will give me nightmares and make me afraid to go around by myself in the world. But they couldn’t stop me knowing about this because they had planned for three weeks of holidays and decided we should go to Cape Breton as we planned to do, and I would be seeing our aunts and uncles and cousins, and Bonnie wouldn’t be there. And everybody would be upset and terrified and talking about it. So they did tell me, and it kept going around in my mind and it gave me a really sick feeling in my stomach because I love Bonnie, and I was afraid that something awful might have happened to her. But I tried not to let Mum and Dad catch me crying or they might have left me home with my big brother or a babysitter, or even cancelled the trip.
Everybody’s scared of Great-grandma Morag. That’s a scary name, but that’s not why. It’s because she has really piercing black eyes and because she has the sight. People say, “Old Morag Drummond is a taibhsear.” She has premonitions; she sees things other people say aren’t even there. And th
at’s what started things off on my visit to Cape Breton.
The first day we got there, the Friday of the long weekend in the middle of the summer, we were in Glace Bay. We were at Grandma Catherine and Granddad Alec’s place. Grandma Catherine is Morag’s daughter, and the mother of my mum, Maura MacNeil. My mother’s mum, ha ha. I wonder if she tells Mum to look both ways before crossing the street and to wear clean socks every day! They talk a lot on the phone when we’re home in Halifax, so maybe she does. Usually there would be a kitchen party going on with this many relatives together, even if nobody had planned it. All the MacDonalds and Drummonds and MacNeils are musical. I guess that’s where I get it, even though I’m not very good. My dad plays music, too. He’s in a blues band in Halifax. And Father Burke was spending some time in Cape Breton, too, because he was planning to visit some priests there, and he was really keen on hearing all the music again; he loved it last time he was there with us. So anyway, normally everybody would be playing fiddles and tin whistles and guitars, and the drum you hold in your hands, which is called a bodhrán. The name of it sounds something like “bow-ron.” These family musicians are so good that they have their own band, Clan Donnie, and they play all over Cape Breton and Canada and even the United States. But that’s not all. They were on television, and got invited to Scotland and played over there! Which is cool because that is where all the families came from in the first place, and the music is Scottish, so it was like going home when the band got invited there. In normal times everybody would play music at home with friends and family. And people would sing, and some would step dance on the kitchen floor. But not this time, because of the tragedy. Bonnie and I have the same great-grandmother, and that’s Morag. Morag lives near Kinlochiel, but likes to visit Catherine in Glace Bay.
We were all sitting around in the kitchen just after supper, all these relatives and my mum and dad and my little brother, Dominic, who is three and is the cutest little kid in the world. I have a big brother, too, Tommy Douglas, but he couldn’t be there because of his summer job at Oland’s Brewery — where they make the beer! — in Halifax. Anyway, we were all drinking tea and eating oatcakes made by Grandma Catherine. They were so good! I couldn’t believe somebody could make something like that in their own kitchen; nothing like that has ever been made in my house. People were talking about all kinds of things, but what they were thinking about was Bonnie. Where was she? Did she run away? Or did something really awful happen to her? Nobody was saying it, but they were thinking it.
Then another one of Mum’s cousins arrived. Robbie. His real name is Robert the Bruce MacDonald. He is one of the members of the band. The band is made up of four people who are brothers and sisters, Sharon, Kirsty, Robbie, and Ian, plus Sharon’s husband, Andy. And Bonnie, who is Sharon’s daughter.
Robbie was on his way to play at some kind of bagpiping festival, and he was “in full regalia.” He had his kilt on and had a sgian dubh stuck in the top of his right sock. That’s a knife. It sounds something like “skee-an doo.” And he had a sporran on, too, which is like a little purse except men wear it, and it’s made of leather and hangs down in the front of the kilt. Somebody asked him if he was “regimental.” At first I didn’t know what they meant, but then somebody else pretended to pick up the back of his kilt and look under it, and Robbie said, “Not regimental yet. Got my Stanfields on. But the night is young.” What I think is that if you’re regimental, it means you’re bare naked underneath the kilt!
Robbie stopped in to chat with the bunch of us before going to the festival. He had his pipes with him in the kitchen. I kept looking at them, and he asked me if I played. I didn’t want to say I had started to learn them and gave them up because the other kids made fun of me, but he must have caught on there was something wrong because he asked me again, and then I ended up spilling the whole story.
And he said, “Pay no mind to any mon who would speak like that about the pipes, Normie Ruadh.” They call me that sometimes. It means Red Normie, so you can guess what colour my hair is. Ruadh sounds something like “Roo-uh.” There were all kinds of redheads around there and no other Normies — God knows! — so I didn’t know why I would get a nickname. But I liked it. It sure was better than the nickname I had back home in Halifax: Klumpenkopf! That’s what my brother Tommy Douglas calls me because my curls get all clumped up when I sleep on them.
So. Robbie was talking about the pipes. “No piper should ever be afraid of anyone else and should never be treated with scorn. Because the pipes have been used to call soldiers to battle and to terrorize the enemy. The sound of the pipes had the Sasannachs —” he meant the English “— so frightened that they declared the pipes a weapon of war and they banned people from playing them in Scotland. You could be whipped and even killed for playing the pipes.”
That all goes back to the bad old days in Scotland. I know some of this history because sometimes the people in Mum’s family get wound up about it, even after all these years. There was the famous Battle of Culloden where the Highlanders, my own ancestors, fought the English king’s army because they wanted to replace that king with their favourite son, Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Highlanders lost the fight. And even though we had not been whooping it up at Grandma Catherine’s place, with music and partying, we ended up singing a song about that battle. The song is called “Sound the Pibroch.” A pibroch is a piece of music that you play on the pipes.
And see a small devoted band
By dark Loch Shiel have ta’en their stand,
And proudly vow wi’ heart and hand
To fight for Royal Charlie!
Tha tighinn fodham, fodham, fodham
Tha tighinn fodham, fodham, fodham
Tha tighinn fodham, fodham, fodham
To rise and follow Charlie!
If you don’t have the Gaelic, you’d never believe that this part of the song sounds like “hash-een foe-um, foe-um, foe-um.” But it does.
There is a lot of lively music for the pipes, but they can be sad, too. And that’s what Robbie did in Grandma’s kitchen. He played a piece he had made up, “Lament for Bonnie.” He said he would go and play it all over the Cape Breton Highlands so Bonnie would hear it and know she was loved and missed by us all, and we wanted her to come back. The pipes are really good for making mournful music. They can sound like someone crying. It was a slow and very sad song, and everybody had tears in their eyes.
I think it was the lonely, beautiful music that set my great-grandma Morag off. Grandma Catherine and Granddad Alec have a room off the kitchen, just for sitting in and reading. That’s where Morag was. She looked so sad over there in her chair that I left my spot in the kitchen and went and sat on the floor by her feet. She had her usual outfit on, a long black skirt and black sweater, with a white collar peeking out from it, and black beads that are called jet beads. Her white hair was back in a knot, and she had those really intense black eyes. They didn’t seem to be looking at anything in the room with us.
She said something, but I couldn’t understand her because it was in Gaelic. I didn’t want to admit I didn’t get it. I was learning the language from books and tapes and cousins, but not fast enough. Morag caught on and repeated it ’sa Bheurla. In English.
“I said nothing good would ever come of it, her marrying him.”
“Who, Greatgran?”
“That Campbell.”
She said “Campbell” the way someone else would say “the devil in hell!” And she looked as if she was seeing the devil’s own face.
“You mean Andy Campbell, that Sharon shouldn’t have got married to him?”
“Aye.”
“But he’s really nice, and his music is great!” I said that, and then was afraid I’d get in trouble for arguing with my great-grandmother; you’re not supposed to be saucy to old people.
But she didn’t growl at me or give me a dirty look. She had somebody else in her sights, and it was A
ndy Campbell. And I was glad it wasn’t me that she had her eyes fixed on.
“A MacDonald does not marry a Campbell.”
She said it as if it was a law being handed down by Moses. Or to Moses, however it was with the tablets. But that couldn’t be right. Campbells must be marrying MacDonalds all the time, because there are so many people with those names in Nova Scotia.
But I didn’t dare argue again, so I just asked her why.
“There’s bad blood between Campbell and MacDonald, and that blood should never be mixed.”
“Glencoe was three hundred years ago, Morag.” Robbie said. He had come over to join us. He perched himself on the edge of a chair and leaned towards the old lady.
Morag turned her eyes on him and gave him the kind of look you’d give to somebody who was loony or not too smart. Then she said, “People don’t change.”
“Well, Andy Campbell has spent many a night under a MacDonald roof, mine included, and never once did he turn on his hosts and massacre them.”
Later on, I looked in a book Morag had about Glencoe so I’d know what they were talking about. Turns out it really was a massacre. It happened in Scotland way back in the winter of 1692. A bunch of soldiers working for King William of England arrived in Glencoe. They had it in for the MacDonald clan; they wanted to get rid of them and scare the other clans. And they were commanded by a fellow named Robert Campbell. The MacDonalds invited them into their home and gave them shelter, food, and drink (booze). It was a tradition in the Scottish Highlands to offer hospitality to visitors, the same way it is in the Highlands of Cape Breton. Campbell and his men stayed in the MacDonald house for a week and a half. Then Campbell received orders from King William to kill all the MacDonalds. And that’s what he and his soldiers did. It was considered even worse than ordinary murder because it was “murder under trust.”
