The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  So Chester is one thing to them and another to the townies in the corner, sticking to themselves, a bit overwhelmed, maybe a touch resentful of the invading preppy hordes with their designer labels and this band they’ve never seen before, in their bar, playing a tune by someone called Hootie and the Blowfish. I lurch in their direction to hear what they think. And it is precisely then that I meet the two biggest bores in all of the South Shore of Nova Scotia.

  “You want to know about Chester Race Week, this here’s your man,” says the blonde woman, whom I would put at about university age, clinging fiercely to the arm of the older guy. His face has a funny saggy quality, which could be from age, booze or indifference. Listening to this pair go on about his skill behind the tiller was just too much. I lie about having to get a refill, do a little broken-field running through the crowd of strutting drunks, and slip out the exit.

  It’s around twelve-thirty when I make one last visit to the yacht club on the way home. Inside, a lanky blond-haired sailor, no doubt half-crazed from too much sun and rum, steps up to the drum set and begins banging along with the band to something by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Finding his rhythm, he gets this goofy little smile as his friends cheer him on and I watch through the smoke. It is, even by the standards of the day, a nice moment.

  Turning a corner outside, I run into Ben Heisler, walking on stiff legs but still going strong, off to God knows where. A white MG convertible drives by like a ghost. In the dark, waves lap the shore and the inky water planes to Europe. Somewhere in the distance there is laughter.

  A couple of days later I’m back in Chester, this time with a friend. Once a left-winger for the Edmonton Oilers, Brian McKenzie now sells real estate. He used to keep his powerboat anchored in a nearby cove until the recession caught up to him. So he knows exactly what to do when we wheel up to the wharf in Chester and see a hundred or so people waiting to make the 45-minute one-dollar ferry ride to Big Tancook Island. When we pull into the Oak Island marina a few minutes later a shirtless, tanned guy with a truly monumental gut waves a greeting. Before a half-hour is passed we’re aboard a fully loaded powerboat cutting into the bay.

  Our captain looks mangled and bent; horrible, horrible. He must have groaned in agony when he rolled over in his bunk this morning, searched vainly for a drop of moisture in what was once his mouth and felt the mule kick the inside of his cranium. It was still, no doubt, a little blurry. Barry—which is what we’ll call him for now—would have been suffering through the please-God-I’ll-never-do-it-again part of his hangover when he remembered that the previous night ended a couple of wharfs away with a woman throwing a drink in his face and him weaving back to his own boat for a screaming match with the wife who, by now, was back home in Halifax. Still, it is noon and with each passing minute the night mercifully fades further into history. Helps that he is steaming away from the marina under a sunny sky at a nice fifteen-knot clip, dressed in cutoffs and a tank top, a family-sized rum-and-Coke in hand, Alan Jackson’s nasal twang blaring from the loudspeaker. He even manages a weak smile when he turns to peer red-eyed from behind his sunglasses at us, the intruders in his bout of self-flagellation.

  I have never been on Big Tancook, but retain a vivid image of it anyway, pieced together from stories I’d heard. They make sauerkraut and build wonderful schooners, the fame of both having spread far beyond the area. They forge a hard but good living as farmers and fishermen. They are known to be an insular bunch, speaking a dialogue that is indecipherable, even by South Shore standards. After my day aboard Third Wave I became obsessed with the idea of the island out there a few miles from all this wealth. By the time we drop anchor the ferry has just docked and the main road, which arcs along the island’s main anchorage and continues up a hill, swarms with people. We step into the slipstream and follow the crowd past the small wharfs and launchways, the remnants of the old fish houses, the ruins of the underground cabbage cellars, the tables on the front lawns piled with the quilts and baked goods.

  Chester Race Week may be one thing, Tancook’s annual Herring Chokers Picnic, the highlight of their summer, most definitely another. The old-time country band is just finishing a set of hurting music at the recreation centre at the top of the hill. I recognize the leader—Sherman “Little Buddy” Hirtle, short, round and sixtyish, resplendent in his red shirt, string tie and white cowboy hat. As we approach he lays down his guitar and ambles towards the white hall, where awaits heaping bowls of fish chowder, biscuits, kraut, plates of herring and potatoes, tables full of homemade pies, cakes, squares and cookies and pots of tea and coffee. The crowd outside sits on benches, lawnchairs and the grass. My eyes are drawn to the cars parked near the hall, held together with string, duct tape and chicken wire, missing doors, with rusted-out skeletons for frames. I half-expect some leather-encased Mad Max reject to climb from the rubble and fire up his chainsaw. Most lack licence plates, which is no surprise, since you don’t need insurance or even mainland registration to drive on Tancook. One plate dates back to 1976 and comes from Newfoundland.

  I have been on Tancook for only forty minutes but already I recognize the genre: an outlying island of unfashionable and out-of-step people, best appreciated for their dramatic art of self-preservation. I jot down a few notes. Brian appears with a woman in tow who asks if I want to meet one of the last sauerkraut makers on the island. A few minutes later I’m sandwiched between Percy and Evelyn in their half-ton. Already, I’m confused.

  “Before you start I said last year I was never going to have any more interviews any more in my life,” says the husband in a slightly accusatory tone. “What happened there was a fellow I talked to him and he published something I never said, some hurtful things. He said that I was supposed to say that all of the other factories, their kraut tasted like straw. I wouldn’t say anything like that about anybody. So I said I’m finished with interviews.”

  “I felt really upset about it, you know what I mean,” says Evelyn. “We’re just little. We just do this as a hobby. We’re not that big, you know.”

  Hoping to cool the old guy down, I ask Percy who showed him how to make sauerkraut.

  “Who? From the time I could walk and talk, my father and grandfather. My father and grandfather planted cabbage through the years and it just felt natural to grow it. This was the way people made a living. It was part of their lives and their livelihood. When I grew up it was fishing and farming. I fished entirely for a living from the time I was fourteen until I was forty-nine, then I went to work on that ferry. I’m seventy-seven now. I worked there until I was sixty-five. These last twelve years we plant cabbage and make sauerkraut.”

  His weather-ravaged face relaxes a bit as he tells me the old way of making kraut. How they sow the cabbage seeds, then transplant, fertilize and spray them until they grow to fifteen to twenty-five pounds. How they ferment them for twelve days in salt water. And how they finally pack them in open pails—ten, twenty and thirty gallons large—before sale. “It’s something special, like the Lunenburg sausage, passed down from generation to generation,” he explains. “But now only Arthur Stevens and myself do it. We’re the last of the Tancook kraut makers.”

  As I thank them and take my leave, the music is starting up again. From halfway up the hill I turn back for a last look at what they see: the hang-dog cars, the once-thriving farmland overgrown with briers, the population of a thousand now shrunk to a few hundred, the working-aged men who’d be on welfare if not for UI. Onshore, if you’ve got the name and the money, maybe you can buy home. Here maybe even that is not enough. Evelyn’s words echo: “This is a little island and a way of life. This is where I was born. It is home; we think it is special.”

  Being over-dressed happens rarely to someone who wears what I do—someone who, if the occasion really demands, will upgrade from casual to dress jeans. But here I am, luminous in my chinos and linen jacket in the midst of this sea of topsiders, golf shirts and Bermuda shorts. There are many social gaucheries, of course. But
short of admitting to membership in the United Aryan Brotherhood, over-dressing is up there. Truth is, wear a Grateful Dead T-shirt or one of those Rasta tea-cosy hats to a Chester cocktail party and people will probably think you’re somebody’s software genius son, or a movie producer scouting for a spot to stand in for Martha’s Vineyard in their new Hollywood romantic comedy. Wear a sportscoat to Tim Moore’s open house on the last day of Chester Race Week, on the other hand …

  “Lose the jacket and you’ll be fine,” whispers a sympathetic woman I know slightly, today sporting jeans and a faded denim shirt instead of the power suit and pumps she wears back in Halifax. We’re nursing beers on Moore’s huge back lawn, standing as far as possible from the huge fat-spitting barbecue. Her boyfriend, a yacht outfitter who crewed on Third Wave, tells me how their bad luck ended when I stepped off the boat; overall, they’re second on the week, and they had a great crew party at Binky’s house, which culminated at midnight with the bunch of them driving golf balls from his lawn onto the fairways of the Chester course next door.

  Moore’s party really marks the end of Race Week and, in a way, the end of summer in the village. Soon the beautiful people will be gone and Chester will return to its normal, everyday self. Right now, though, cars clog the lane leading to the house; a gaggle of kids frolic in the pool; most of the adults stand out back drinking wine and beer, trying to fit their mouths around monster hamburgers while they ooh and aah at the thirty or forty boats tacking out of the bay, directly in front of them. It all seems so perfect, the sharply coloured sails billowing in the wind, the sun, the ocean, the healthy-looking, happy people taking their leisure. I sink down in a chair on the sweeping verandah, next to a balding guy with a grey beard, sunglasses and a blinding shirt hanging over his shorts. Jose Valverde Alcalde moved from his native Spain to Canada in 1964 to teach art at the University of Calgary. Now he lives half the year near Barcelona and the rest of the time in Chester, where he fuses hot Spanish colours with images of the South Shore in his brilliantly coloured paintings. We chat for a minute. Then he excuses himself. “I have to take some pictures of the boats,” he explains. I watch him walk away, his shirt floating like a spinnaker in the breeze.

  “Who’s that?” a former Mulroney cabinet minister who’s been summering in Chester since he was a child asks no one in particular.

  “A painter,” a white-haired swell standing nearby replies. “Jose Alcado.”

  “Alcado. Alcado. What kind of a name is that?”

  “Spanish, I think.”

  “Sounds like Dildo to me,” spits the ex-politician, now back to practising law, before bursting into loud, humourless laughter.

  I get back into my beater and make my way down the hill away from the Peninsula.

  PART FOUR

  Being There

  A few homesick men, walking an alien street;

  A few women remembering misty stars

  And the long grumbling sigh of the bay at night.

  Charles Bruce

  Twelve

  In Blood Is Meaning

  HIGHWAY 4 BETWEEN SYDNEY AND GLACE BAY IS WHERE I HAVE MY VISION. It hits quick and hard—an image in my mind’s eye of a cloudless day, a serene green cemetery and a four-year-old watching his father wiping away a single rivulet of tear. It has enough power to make me pull a sudden U-turn and head back, the car rumbling and groaning as the speedometer crosses 120 km/h. The woman minding the office at Forest Haven Memorial Gardens takes a few minutes to search the files, then hands me a map of the cemetery. I take my time walking across the well-tended grass so closely cut that it resembles a golf green. I pick my way through the rows of gravestones until I reach lot number 108 B. The markers are identical—polished bronze, each with a carving of an open Bible near the top. Only enough room to say that Clarence Demont (he never capitalized the m) died on September 14, 1959, at age sixty-six and Mabel, his wife, was seventy-eight when she died on September 6, 1975.

  I already knew that. What is noteworthy is that I had been here just once before, thirty-six years ago. Furthermore, I never knew the name of the place where my grandparents lay buried. All I had was a nagging, vague memory, which hadn’t flashed through my mind in years until a few minutes ago. A true Daphne du Maurier moment. I feel a grand gesture of some kind is in order, but I cannot, for the life of me, think of the right one. All I can say is it feels wholly natural to stand staring at the ground, hands sunk deep in my pockets, nostrils twitching from summer pollen, my feet rooted to the soil and the vanished generations.

  I don’t normally let this sort of thing preoccupy me. Like everyone in the late twentieth century, I know that self-determination is the Zeitgeist of the moment. We all make our story up as we go along. We all live on our wits, not our past. But you can’t escape it either, no matter how hard you try. It is what bolts you to the earth. Particularly if you are suspicious of the Christian belief in heaven and hell and have no confidence whatsoever that a saviour was ever in sight. In blood can be found meaning—like all Nova Scotians, I firmly believe that. When you come from here, where roots run so deeply, it is easy to take that for granted. Then something will drive it home—that you are still just a small root from a great tree descending deep into the black, coal-laden soil.

  It happened to me at a funeral for an ancient great-aunt, Eva Mount, a smart, lively woman I remembered for her Sunday dinners and organ playing as much as for her spirit and sharpness of mind. There I sat thinking how much the scene resembled some forty-year-old film footage I’ve seen, in which many of the same people sat in a church in Sydney Mines watching the nervous overheated couple who became my parents take their wedding vows.

  Clarence Demont, my grandfather, was a newspaper printer and church hall janitor in his working days. He was a fidgety man, with a bald head, long, downward-sloping nose and gentle eyes. But his double-breasted suit hid the remnants of a body that could once out-sprint racehorses, pin barn-storming wrestling champions and run down any flyball in the outfield. He could have gone to the Olympics, been the Donovan Bailey of his day. But, family legend has it, his boss in the composing room at the Glace Bay Gazette couldn’t promise him his job when he returned. And since a job was nothing to sneeze at in Depression-era Cape Breton he stayed in Glace Bay. No one found him a resentful man: shy in public, Clarie “Flash” Demont was a live wire in private, a Baptist with a high-pitched laugh who danced with a loosey-goosey up-and-down movement of the arms as he expelled air through pursed lips to some far-away rhythm only he heard.

  I was just a toddler when he died so I have not a single actual memory of him—just stories from my father. And a few mementoes: an aged, leather-bound copy of Wild Wales: The People’s Language & Scenery by George Borrow, on the title page of which is written: “ 1st place 100 yards dash won by Clarence Demont, July 31/19 Knox Church Sunday School Picnic.” I also have a black-and-white photo of when he was in his prime, wearing shorts, an athletic top and sprinter’s spikes, legs and arms flexed ready to propel him forward to some unseen finish line.

  Across the aisle in 1955 my mother’s father sat, straight-backed, sober looking, smelling of pipe tobacco and English tweed. John Briers was a kid when his father left the coal fields of Yorkshire and crossed the Atlantic to work the collieries of Cape Breton. Like all good sons he followed his father underground, working a coal face that ran miles out under the water. When war broke out he enlisted in Montreal and saw action at Vimy Ridge. British to the core, he was not one to dwell on the horrors he experienced overseas. When World War Two began he enlisted again. Back in Cape Breton, he spent his days in the darkness of the mines, eventually rising to the level of inspector. But after a day on the job, a big English-style dinner and a nap, he headed for the parlour, where he rosined up the bow for his violin or played the piano, saxophone or clarinet into the night. Long decades later old women still shivered with pleasure at the memory of his alto sax floating across the water at dances at the Sydney Mines Yacht Club.

  I own
his saxophone now, or at least a refurbished version, which Lisa presented me on my thirtieth birthday. It is a made by the legendary C.G. Conn Ltd. of Elkhart, Ind. One of my sax teachers told me he thought it was a Chu Berry model (named after the American saxophone player Leon “Chu” Berry), which meant it was probably made in the late 1920s. I have been playing it, on and off and poorly, for at least a decade now. I am acutely aware that the inlay in the keys—where I fumble to place my fingers—has been worn down over time by my grandfather’s hands. Few days go by during which I do not think about how I now struggle to force lungfuls of air down the same valves he breathed into for so long. The instrument sits in my office in a battered black case a few feet away from a photocopy of a brief notice in the Toronto Star. It says: “Clarie Demont, 66, once the fastest Canadian to run 100 yards, died in Glace Bay, N.S., yesterday. His mark of 9.6 seconds in the 100-yard was set in 1913.”

  And thus am I reminded every day of my closeness to the past and the vast gulf separating me from my predecessors. I spend most of my day talking to people on the telephone. I make notes, then type ’em up. Cringe to think what my grandparents would make of a grown man spending his working life in such a manner. The life I have lived as a journalist, and that my cousins now live as doctors, lawyers, nurses, consultants, businesspeople, lab technicians, contractors, sports trainers, would have been unimaginable to my ancestors who lie in graveyards of such hamlets as Sydney Mines, Chester Basin and Windsor. For that matter, how high an opinion would Eva Mount—who died at the age of ninety-six—daughter of the late Angus and Catherine (Flynn) MacKeigan, have of such sedate people? The minister at her funeral told stories I’d heard many times before, but they now sounded fresh and exciting. About her days as secretary to J.B. McLaughlin, the fiery Scottish union leader who landed in Cape Breton just as the coal fields and steel plants were opening, when buying everything at the company store was a way of life and police rode down strikers in the streets of industrial Cape Breton. J.B., the people’s hero, was reviled by the big capitalists and their toadies in government. When he was jailed on a trumped-up charge of seditious libel, it was Eva MacKeigan who delivered his food, along with news of the labour wars, to the Glace Bay jail, then smuggled out his speeches to be printed in local newspapers like the one where my grandfather Flash Demont worked.