Blood in the Water

by Silver Donald Cameron

  At 6:00 everyone is called back into the courtroom. The jury is back, but not to deliver a verdict. They need more time. Joking that the lawyers are tired, Chief Justice Kennedy declares that the working day is over. He will bring the jury back in tomorrow at 9:30. However, he says, if all twelve jurors arrive early and find themselves in the jury room together, they can continue deliberating. But all twelve must be present. And with a little joke about the lawyers billing for triple overtime, he adjourns the trial overnight. We all file out into the early winter darkness. It’s Friday evening, and the jurors aren’t going home tonight.

  * * *

  —

  Emerging from the Justice Centre parking lot, I turn down Kennedy Street for a steep little half-block to Granville Street, Port Hawkesbury’s one-time main drag, which runs along the edge of the harbour. I’ve been immersed in law almost to the point of claustrophobia, and I’m enjoying the dark, chilly outdoors. Looking across the street at the cold ocean water, with the lights of the mainland town of Mulgrave visible on the opposite shore, I find myself reflecting on the nature of islands and of boundaries. Most jurisdictional boundaries are arbitrary lines on a map. But some boundaries have a deeper authenticity. Nova Scotia, for instance, is almost surrounded by the ocean, tethered to North America by only the narrow Isthmus of Chignecto. And Cape Breton is separated from the rest of Nova Scotia not by a cartographer’s pen but by the Strait of Canso, the water I’m looking at right now. Until 1955 the only way to reach Cape Breton was to cross the strait by ferry.

  Port Hawkesbury today presents itself as an undistinguished mill town of 3200 souls, but it boasts a harbour capable of handling the largest ships in the world—an unexpected side effect of having replaced the ferry with a causeway. Starting in 1952, contractors dumped ten million tonnes of rock from nearby Cape Porcupine into the water, creating the Canso Causeway and completely blocking the strait but for a short ship canal.

  The project was propelled by the passion of a Cape Breton politician named Angus L. Macdonald, a towering figure in Nova Scotia history who served as premier from 1933 until his death in 1954, with an interlude in Ottawa from 1940 to 1945 as Canada’s wartime minister of the navy. As one source puts it, he “converted his longing for the island into a fervid Scottish trope, which he used shamelessly throughout his public career in order to wrap himself in a Celtic mystique.” In truth, he wrapped the whole province in Celtic mist and moonglow.

  Before his untimely death—he was only sixty-three—Angus L. had opined that the causeway’s opening ceremonies should feature one hundred pipers playing “The Road to the Isles.” And so, when it opened a year later, on August 13, 1955, a massive crowd marched across the Canso Causeway led by ninety-nine pipers playing “The Road to the Isles.” (One cross-grained piper refused to play.) They came to a halt in front of a makeshift stage on which was seated a party of politicians and bureaucrats from the capital cities of Halifax and Ottawa. Cape Breton contains some of the last strongholds of the Gaelic language in America—it even has a Gaelic College—and so when Reverend Stanley Macdonald, Angus L.’s older brother, began to address the crowd, he spoke in Gaelic, a splendid language for denunciation, sarcasm, and excoriation. Father Macdonald, a Catholic priest, reamed out the platform party as a pack of fools and knaves and ignoramuses who had made the program too short for a proper Gaelic ceremony. The crowd roared with laughter. The dignitaries laughed heartily too, unaware that they were the butt of the joke.

  Gaelic can be a great convenience. Within the last thirty years, a Gaelic-speaking cabinet minister in Halifax received a delegation from his Cape Breton constituency. “I don’t know what to do about the issue that concerns you,” said the minister in Gaelic as his aides and officials stood by smiling. “Let us help you,” the visitors responded, speaking in Gaelic as well and going on to tell him what they thought he should do. “Good,” said the minister, when they finished. “That’s what we’ll do.” They shook hands. The bureaucrats, assuming this had been a quaint exchange of pleasantries, moved to the nearby table.

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary,” said the minister in English. “It’s all decided. The meeting’s over.”

  And—to use the Cape Breton phrase—that’s as true as I’m standing here. I heard the story from someone who was there.

  Cape Breton’s 132,000 people speak four languages: English, French, Gaelic, and Mi’kmaw. The European settlements occupy the coasts of the island, while the Mi’kmaw communities stand on the shores of the glorious inland sea called the Bras d’Or Lake, which occupies the whole centre of Cape Breton Island. (Wikipedia notes that “Canadian author and yachtsman Silver Donald Cameron describes Bras d’Or Lake as ‘A basin ringed by indigo hills laced with marble. Islands within a sea inside an island.’ ”)

  And everywhere there is music, always the preferred art of a multilingual community. The bedrock of the Cape Breton musical tradition is Scottish fiddling—strathspeys, reels, hornpipes, and slow airs—flavoured and shaped by Irish and French influences and often performed by brilliant Mi’kmaw players. One great Mi’kmaw fiddler, Lee Cremo, once told me of winning a fiddle competition somewhere in the southern U.S., where the prize was a banjo. He had never played a banjo in his life, but that evening he won the banjo competition. What?

  “Nothing says a banjo got to be tuned like a banjo,” he said, shrugging. “So I tuned it like a fiddle, and then I knew where everything was. Played a lotta fiddle tunes, and they never heard nothing like it.”

  The causeway completely transformed Port Hawkesbury, a process recorded in Linden MacIntyre’s fine memoir, Causeway. The town had been a sleepy little place, but when the tides no longer poured through the narrow gut, the strait was transformed into a superport. And so, in the 1960s and 70s, Port Hawkesbury boomed. Heavy industries sprang up: a pulp mill, a power plant, an oil refinery, a heavy-water plant to serve the nuclear industry, a gypsum-shipping facility, and a wallboard plant, for starters. The town acted as a magnet for the hungry, the adventurous, and the avaricious, and soon became the economic backbone of the whole region; half of Isle Madame, it seemed, had jobs in the new industries. The town’s boosters—who were numerous, and buoyant with self-confidence—predicted that Port Hawkesbury would rival Halifax in size by the end of the century. But by that time big industry was in decline and most of the industries had either shrunk drastically or closed entirely.

  * * *

  —

  Port Hawkesbury gave me my name. I arrived in the area in 1971, having left a university teaching job in order to set up shop as a self-employed freelance writer. A dumb career move, agreed, but it gave me a life I wouldn’t have wanted to miss. I bought a little house and settled in to earn a living writing feature articles for national magazines and doing commentaries and reports for CBC radio and TV.

  One day in 1975 I got a call from the CBC asking me to look into an amusing local story. The Town of Port Hawkesbury had recently created a light industrial park, put in roads, and sold property to various businesses, including a Ford dealership. Only after the dealership was built did the town discover a rather important oversight: it didn’t own the land. It had built the park on property belonging to the United Church and intended for a future expansion of its cemetery.

  I called the mayor of Port Hawkesbury, a tavern-keeper named Billy Joe MacLean. I had never met him.

  “Mayor MacLean, it’s Donald Cameron calling—” I began.

  “How the hell are you, you old fart?” cried the mayor.

  “Well, um, fine,” I said, somewhat taken aback. “I’m calling about the light industrial park…” After a few more sentences, the mayor interrupted me.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, what Donald Cameron is this?”

  “I’m a writer, I live in D’Escousse—”

  “Oh Christ, I thought you were my buddy Don Cameron that owns the A&W drive-in here in Port Hawkesbury. I’m sorry
. Now listen, how in hell did you get hold of this story…?”

  That’s enough, I thought. That’s it. I’d been mistaken for a variety of other Donald Camerons—a CBC vice-president, a senator from Alberta, a Nova Scotia politician who ultimately became premier. Shared names are a particularly common problem in Cape Breton, where a limited range of surnames and a strong sense of family continuity ensures that the little MacDonald boy will probably be named John, joining a horde of other John MacDonalds across the island. And the little Cameron boy will be Donald.

  But Cape Breton also has solutions. One solution is patronymics, incorporating the name of a father or mother. If John’s father was Hughie, the boy becomes John Hughie, whose son might be Danny John Hughie. This can produce some odd results. One of Cape Breton’s most famous fiddlers was Bessie Archie Dan, and the last resident of the vanished community of Creignish Rear was Angus Little Rory. One day I was driving near Port Hawkesbury with the great Celtic musician John Allan Cameron—not to be mistaken for John Donald Cameron, then the proprietor of the music store in Port Hawkesbury, also a fine Celtic musician, who was John Allan’s brother. John Allan and I weren’t related, but we called each other “soul brothers.” Suddenly John Allan stopped and pointed up the hill.

  “Know the name of the man who lives in that house?” he demanded. I did not.

  “John Angus John Archie Jim Sandy MacDonald,” he said. Five ancestors in a row, lined up to identify this unique John MacDonald.

  The other solution is a nickname. If one John has a farm on the shore and another lives on the hilltop, they become Johnny Up and Johnny Down. Or a name can spring from a particular characteristic or skill: Duncan the Nose, Dan the Dancer. A man born with one arm shorter than the other becomes John the Clock. A man with hemorrhoids is Archie Itchy Arse. The Acadians do the same: Pierre la Moustache, Cigarette, Soupbone, Ronnie Lobster, Raymond à Margaret à Fred Zephire.

  When I spoke to Billy Joe MacLean, I was thirty-five. I had black eyebrows, a thick black moustache, and prematurely white hair. Over a snort of rum, I told the musician Tom Gallant about my conversation with Billy Joe and my continuing frustrations with my name. Tom considered my problem, narrowed his eyes, struck a chord on his guitar, and said, “The white hair. The eyebrows. The moustache. Silver Donald Cameron.”

  Yes, by God! And so it has been ever since.

  * * *

  —

  Billy Joe’s subsequent career landed him in the history books. He served as mayor from 1974 to 1981, at which point he announced that he’d be seeking the Progressive Conservative nomination for the provincial riding of Inverness South. I was at a local garage soon afterwards when the boys were discussing “Billy Joe comin’ out for politics.” After half an hour of careful political analysis, the proprietor summed up the findings.

  “Billy Joe’ll do a good job,” he said. “He’s that crooked, when he dies we’re going to have to screw him into the ground, but he’ll do a good job.”

  Billy Joe was duly elected, and Premier John Buchanan promptly named him minister of tourism (which Billy Joe understood), culture (which he did not), and fitness. He did a good job. He turned up at gallery openings and recitals full of questions and observations, making a concerted effort to understand this mysterious sector for which he was now responsible. I was then executive director of Centre Bras d’Or, a fledgling Cape Breton arts centre that approached his office looking for $10,000 to help us mount an international performing arts festival on rather short notice. In an ensuing meeting, I later heard, the cabinet decided to turn down the request; the timing was too short, the money wasn’t in the budget, and so on.

  But Billy Joe was a dedicated Cape Bretoner, and minister of culture, and he would have none of it. He shouted and roared and hammered on the table with his fist. This was a fine proposal, put forward by a group of eminently responsible citizens, including major businessmen, tourism operators, artists, and the president of the university. What they were proposing was a great idea that would do wonders for both tourism and culture in Cape Breton. The cabinet caved, and we got the grant—and the festival was a huge success, repeated every summer for many years. Ultimately it became the ancestor of today’s Celtic Colours International Festival, which annually hosts dozens of concerts, dances, and other events all across Cape Breton for a week in mid-October. That’s the time to visit the island, when the hillsides are ablaze with autumn colour and the air is full of music.

  So Billy Joe did a good job. In April 1986, however, he abruptly resigned his cabinet post, and later that same day was charged with fraud and forgery in connection with $21,000 of irregularities in his expense account. In October he pleaded guilty to four counts of “uttering forged documents”—not forging the documents himself, but using documents forged by others.

  What followed was worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan. Despite heavy pressure from the government and the media, Billy Joe refused to resign his seat in the legislature. The province was transfixed by what one commentator described as “the insouciance of MacLean.” Jokes proliferated. The comedian known as General John Cabot Trail (of the Cape Breton Liberation Army) remarked that the weather had been so cold in Port Hawkesbury “that Billy Joe was going around with his hands in his own pockets.”

  Billy Joe’s intransigence ultimately forced Buchanan to recall the legislature for a one-day session specifically to pass legislation created to unseat him. With Buchanan weeping openly in his seat, the House authorized the expulsion of an MLA convicted of an offence punishable by more than five years in jail, and also barred such a member from being nominated or elected for a five-year period after conviction.

  Naturally, Billy Joe appealed. The Supreme Court upheld his expulsion, but ruled that barring him from running again infringed his constitutional rights. The Conservatives dumped him, so he ran as an independent in the by-election held to replace him—and won his seat back. I still have a souvenir of that campaign: a black corduroy baseball cap with the golden embossed motto “Billy Joe Country.”

  Billy Joe lost the seat in the 1988 general election, but in 1994 he ran again for mayor of Port Hawkesbury, and won. On Saturday, November 29, 2014, while I was driving back to the courthouse after a good night’s sleep, just as Chief Justice Kennedy had suggested, Billy Joe MacLean was still in office. By the time he retired, in 2016, he had spent fifty years in public life.

  * * *

  —

  So now I’m back in Courtroom 3, attending to another day of deliberations. The jury has returned, not with a verdict but with a written question to the court—the public hasn’t heard what it is—and Justice Kennedy tells them he’ll discuss the matter with counsel in their absence and then bring them back to deliver his answer. The jury dutifully files out again.

  Justice Kennedy reads their question. “The jury as a whole requests a re-explanation/review of the charge of second degree murder. Please also explain direct and indirect cause once again, as well as party to an offence.” He tells the lawyers that he will restate what he said yesterday and try to be as clear as he can, but that he is not going to deviate from the charge. Shane Russell has no difficulty with this. Luke Craggs thinks it may be helpful to remind the jury that the common thread through each of these is the Crown’s burden of proof.

  The jury returns. It takes Justice Kennedy most of an hour to review the matters that concerned them. But the heart of the issue is by now familiar. To convict James Landry, the Crown must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, each of the five elements of second degree murder, starting with the identity of the accused, the time and place of the events, and the commission of an unlawful act by the accused. The prosecution must also prove that the unlawful act caused the death of the victim or significantly contributed to his death, and that the accused intended to cause that death.

  What were the unlawful acts here? Shooting at Phillip and wounding him, and then gaffing him, dragging him thr
ough the water, tying him to an anchor, and dropping him in the sea.

  “There’s no question, I would suggest to you, about the fact that there were unlawful acts here,” Justice Kennedy says. “The question becomes the cause of death and the intent.”

  At 10:25 the jury returns to its deliberations and the crowd to its vigil in the lobby.

  Noon: let’s grab a sandwich.

  One o’clock.

  Two o’clock.

  Three o’clock.

  John Langley pops into the lobby. After a distinguished career as a lawyer—he’s a Queen’s Counsel—John now spends much of his time cruising the world on Cunard ships, lecturing about the line and its founder, Sir Samuel Cunard (1787–1865). But he’s still a lawyer, and he’s intensely interested in this case.

  “No verdict yet?” he asks.

  “Nothing yet, no.”

  “The verdict will be manslaughter,” says John. “I’ve seen a dozen of these things and I know exactly what’s going on in that jury room. They’re saying ‘Yeah, it’s murder—but the son of a bitch deserved it. Call it manslaughter.’ ”

  The jury returns at 4:00.

  The verdict is manslaughter.

  12

  MIDNIGHT SLIDER

  ISLAND VOICES

  “Midnight Slider was the name of his boat, but it’s a pretty fair name for Phillip, too. He was always out there somewhere, sliding around in the middle of the night—in the woods, on the water, you never knew where. He kept threatening people that he’d burn them out, he’d kill them—and how could you know that he wouldn’t? Maybe one night he would.”