“What are you making now?” he blurted that night in Gander. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Forty-eight hundred,” I said, half boastfully.
“You’re almost there,” he announced. “Five thou’ is the magic number. Once you’re making fi’ thou’ a year, you can stop sweating the small stuff, worrying about spending a buck here or there.”
It never occurred to me, that night in Gander, to ask how much he got for blowing up those rocks in the clammy darkness of whatever shithole he was working in at the time. How much he was being paid for putting on damp, filthy clothes and a heavy hard hat and risking his life every day by the dim illumination of a glorified flashlight stuck on the front of his head.
Maybe I didn’t ask because it was clear from the reaction to my own salary that the hard-rock miner was earning less than a junior pencil pusher working on a second-rate newspaper. That would have been hard to acknowledge.
Talk wasn’t the old man’s strong suit at the best of times. But sitting out in that Ottawa backyard on a Sunday night in August 1968, he was quieter than usual. There was something different in the air, and it smelled a little bit like defeat.
They got away on the Monday morning.
Afterwards it occurred to me that maybe the sombre mood had something to do with an underground rockslide in Bathurst, New Brunswick, the previous autumn. He got off with a broken foot that time, but perhaps it was a message about mortality.
The baby arrived Wednesday afternoon.
It was obvious right away that the man who met me at the airport that Friday night in Sydney had been reborn. The new job, I figured. Finally, steady employment and living at home. Pump maintenance for the Nova Scotia Water Resources Commission seemed to be therapeutic.
“The hair of the dog.”
The first words out of his mouth when he climbs back into the Volkswagen. Check out the tavern, to see who’s there.
It was just after midday then. The tavern was a small, white building with green plastic plants in a large picture window on the south end of Granville Street. It was doing a booming trade. Truck drivers and construction workers and an assortment of townsmen grabbing a quick one before going home to the noon dinner.
The first went down smoothly and restored a semblance of relaxation. What to talk about? Political issues, very much on my mind, were out of the question. The old man loathed politics and considered politicians liars and opportunists. You couldn’t talk much about the newspaper business because it was clear he couldn’t see much point in that line of work. We’d actually worked together in the mines for a couple of summers, when I was struggling through university, but the experience didn’t leave much to be discussed.
“Do you ever see…” and there would be half a dozen names from our common mining experience. Invariably he hadn’t seen any of them for a long time—miners being like that, basically nomads. We didn’t have much common experience at home to talk about because his presence there, from my point of view, had been mostly a series of visits.
It became obvious that the broken foot a year earlier had been a turning point—the point at which he’d decided to pack it in.
“How’s the health otherwise?” I asked, after he explained the foot.
“Perfect,” he said.
“Really?”
He later revealed that they’d made him take a complete physical before he left Bathurst. They commented on what you’d expect: wear and tear in the lungs; scar tissue and a trace of silicosis from breathing crap all those years. But there was also good news.
“They were telling me I’ve got the heart of a teenager. That’s the main thing. Right? The old ticker.”
He was stabbing himself in the chest with a thick forefinger that was calloused and stained to the knuckle.
He came home for good then and, by a rare stroke of good fortune, found himself working for the government.
Amazing luck.
I took out a package of cigarettes and offered one.
“Plus, I’ve quit that work,” he said, leaning back in his chair defensively.
“I’m taking this up instead,” he said, pulling a pipe from his coat pocket.
“Oh,” I said, lighting my cigarette, trying to blow the smoke away from him. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“Ah well,” he said, eyeing the cigarette with a sad expression. “Not used to it yet. The damn pipe is a lot of work for the little bit of pleasure it gives.”
In a quick memory flash I saw him back in Tilt Cove, Newfoundland, where we worked together for a summer. He was sitting in the cookhouse, one elbow on the cluttered table, cigarette going and a look of temporary joy wreathing his face with the smoke as he stirred evaporated milk into a cup of acrid coffee.
“It smells nice,” I said, trying to be kind. “I love the smell of a pipe.”
“But it tastes like shit if you aren’t cleaning it all the time.”
And then, a stirring in the memory.
“I think Mr. Malone smoked a pipe,” I said.
“Who?”
“Mr. Malone. Billy’s father.”
“Ah, Billy Malone,” he said, smiling. “You and Billy were quite the pair, back when they were building the causeway. Do you ever hear from Billy?”
“No,” I said.
“Funny about those times,” he said. “Building the causeway.”
The second round appeared before us and, while we were competing to pay for it, I felt a sudden pang of ecstasy. The beer? The cigarette? Or maybe just the talking.
“There,” he said, as the waiter walked away. “Where were we just then?”
I was about to take us back to the causeway when a low voice from out of nowhere said, “Hello, Dan Rory.” And another old acquaintance from out back was reaching for the empty chair at the table.
I recognized him, and the feeling of goodwill evaporated instantly for a number of reasons you wouldn’t have wanted to get into with your father.
The new arrival studied me suspiciously as he sat down.
“This your boy?”
“That’s it,” he said, winking.
And the interloper instantly turned a shoulder towards me, lowered his voice, and launched into Gaelic.
The Gaelic. It was like a deep, dark forest that the old man disappeared into whenever he seemed to be around people he’d grown up with, people with whom he was comfortable. I’m suddenly remembering the long afternoon visits with his parents, out on the mountain. Dougald and Peggy, or Peigeag, as the old people knew her. A woman who could have lived comfortably in any age but the present. And I could suddenly see her as she was the last time—standing in the door of the little house on the mountain, hands tucked under an apron, a dark shawl around her skinny shoulders as my father and I drove away on the back of a truck that snowy morning.
Guilt intruded then. I must go to see her today, I thought.
That last visit to the mountain had been another of those rare moments that fell somewhere just short of intimacy with the old man—when Dougald died the year before, in 1967.
It was in April, but there had been a heavy snowfall that prevented people from driving up to his wake—a very peculiar scene that I later described in detail to Prinsky over martinis in the Press Club.
“Man, you gotta write that down,” Prinsky had said, eyes wide.
“What do you mean?” I’d asked, half laughing.
And Prinsky just leaned back grinning and rolling his eyes.
“Man, you just don’t get it. That’s what I love about you. You’re talking about another world. You have to write that down.” And he just shook his head. Prinsky grew up in Montreal.
Over time I came to see what Prinsky meant. The scene on the mountain was bizarre and spiritual and completely alien to anyone who didn’t have a feel for the nineteenth century and the whole Gaelic thing. And it all came back, sitting there listening to my father and his weird old pal talking in their secret language.
Here’s what
I told Prinsky. I was still living in Halifax and word of my grandfather’s death had come as a shock. Dougald was at least ninety-five, but he’d shown no signs of frailty. He shovelled snow, split wood, walked long distances. He and Peigeag had lived near the top of the mountain in an old house without electricity or running water until they were in their late eighties. Only reluctantly did they move down a couple of miles to a little house next door to their oldest son, John Dan, who was also known as John Boy. After the first winter there, talk of moving back up the mountain gradually faded out.
Dougald died without ado on a menacing day in April of the centennial year of Canada’s Confederation, just a few years shy of his own centennial.
It had been snowing heavily by the time I arrived from Halifax and picked up my father, who had also been summoned home from somewhere—Bathurst, I think. We drove out the Trans-Canada Highway, which was still relatively new. The snowploughs had been busy on the main road, but it was immediately obvious that the mountain road was blocked. So we walked together from near the old Lamey place on the highway to the little house where the wake was being held. It was hard going, snow up to our knees and still falling silently. The scene was magical, but it was probably the exertion that limited conversation to the occasional monosyllable.
The snow, luminous on the broad backs of the older pine and spruce trees and deepening on the ground, seemed to magnify the shadows and the silence. My father was breathing hard when we finally arrived at the large clearing where my uncle and grandmother lived.
There were no vehicles, but both houses were packed with people from all over the district. Many of the mourners weren’t much younger than the deceased. There was hardly a word of English to be heard, but that was to be expected in that time and place. The dead man was laid out in a small back room in the little house. Periodically, people would crowd around the casket to say decades of the rosary, then drift back to the kitchen or to the larger house next door, where there seemed to be an endless supply of tea and biscuits and sweets. You could hear voices in the darkness outside, behind the houses and near the barn, or in the vicinity of the lurking snowcapped woods, where men would retire for stealthy swallows from hidden bottles.
I was aching to join them, but, oddly, my father insisted that we avoid the drinkers that night. It occurred to me only later that it was probably out of fear of how Grandma would react. Peigeag, as they’d say quietly behind her back, was death on booze and had a vicious tongue when roused. She spoke hardly any English at all, so I was unfamiliar with the particulars of her wrath. But anyone who felt the sting of it even once never wanted to repeat the experience.
There were also those who maintained quite seriously that Peigeag had “special powers.” I’ve heard she removed a cancerous growth on her face once by applying a peculiar poultice that contained, among other things, cobwebs. People with problems would, in the old days before doctors, come to her for mysterious cures. She could heal obscure ailments. Someone with, say, a tiny piece of wood or metal in his eye would come to her for help. She’d check the eye, then rinse her mouth with water—and spit out whatever had been causing the pain. People swear they saw her do it. Conversely, it was widely held that she could cause afflictions if provoked.
It was getting on towards midnight, and I was standing alone in the little room contemplating the still form of my grandfather, reflecting on the terrible serenity of death. Dougald was a gentle soul, already ancient in my first memory of him. Smiling and chuckling at the slightest pleasure, he seemed to exist in perpetual deference to his more assertive wife. He called her the Old Woman even in her presence.
It was remarked that he’d grown up hard. Lost his mother as a child. Handed off while still a boy to a bachelor uncle on the mainland, where he worked like a slave but at least learned to read and write. Fled while still young into raw frontier places in the United States. There he worked hard and carried a pistol, which he still kept somewhere in their little house on the mountain.
He was probably in his thirties when he came home, met Peigeag, and married her.
I was thinking: now it’s over. There he lies, unfamiliar with eyes closed, bloodless lips pressed together firmly as if to prevent his secrets from escaping back into the world of the curious. Bony hands clasped around the prayer beads on his chest.
Then, suddenly, one of the guests, an old neighbour from up the mountain, unsteady from drink, appeared in the room. He shuffled towards the casket. He started gesticulating and speaking to the corpse in Gaelic, wildly and with great confidence.
It was when he reached under his coat and removed a bottle of liquor and uncapped it right there and raised it to his lips that all hell suddenly broke out in the little room. Peigeag was all over the boozer, excoriating him with a shrill fluency that, even though I didn’t know the particulars of the language, made my hair stand on end. Then she grabbed the poor old fellow, frog-marched him to an outside door, and hurled him out into the snow.
Blue eyes blazing, she wheeled and marched out of the room, back to the kitchen to resume her vigil in a rocking chair that had been strategically located close to the stove but with a sightline through a window to the outside, where she knew the drinkers were huddling.
The babble in the tavern completely drowned out the hushed conversation at our table. When the Gaelic interloper leaves, I told myself, I’ll have to ask about Grandma. How is she getting along? Maybe we’ll go out there for a visit later. But at that moment an old university pal appeared out of nowhere.
“Mac,” Dennis cried enthusiastically. “When did you come home?”
“Just last night,” I replied, thrilled to see a familiar face.
“What’s on for the rest of the day?”
“Nothing much.”
“You’ll have to come by,” said Dennis. “We got catching up to do.”
“I will,” I replied with enthusiasm.
I’d known Dennis for years and all through university. Both our mothers were schoolteachers. His mother, Dolly MacDonald, had actually been my teacher for a year, in grade seven. Both our fathers had been hard-rock miners.
Dennis had a nickname among the young fellows. The madadh-ruadh we called him, which means “red fox,” because he had flaming red hair and was considered by young women to be sly.
The Gaelic conversation was suddenly over. My father’s friend excused himself to go to the toilet. We watched as he walked away.
“Do you know who that is?” my father asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
There was a long silence then as we sat, each waiting for the other to comment.
Finally he smiled and mouthed: “Q-U-E-E-R.”
“I know,” I said.
He recoiled in shock. “You know?”
“Of course. Everybody knows.”
“Mhoire mhathair,” he said—“Holy Mother Mary”—as if he suddenly realized that I was a grown-up too.
The small details of that Saturday would remain clear in the mind for many years to come. They would often cause me to reflect on the perversity of existence, how the truly memorable experiences in life so often pass in what seems like humdrum banality. It’s almost as if life has no substantial meaning except in retrospect. And that’s what makes so much of life so sad—tragic even.
We went home from the tavern. We ate lightly and in silence. After the lunch I asked my father if I could borrow the Volkswagen—do a bit of visiting, if that’s okay.
“No problem,” he replied.
Dennis had obviously been to the liquor store because we were together hardly any time at all when he produced a bottle. After a couple of sips, we toured around looking up old pals from high school. The Hanley boys, Alex MacMaster, the String, whose real name was Duncan MacLellan. It being Saturday afternoon, there was no shortage of drink and talk.
Dennis was a schoolteacher, just home from Edmonton. His brother, Lewis, was a priest who taught high school in Ottawa, where I saw him frequently. Their father,
a miner, had died suddenly the year before. There had been no warning. You’d never have known there was a thing wrong with him. Then one afternoon he went upstairs for a nap and never came down. We talked about that a lot—about unpredictability; about poor old Jock and all the missed opportunities.
“Dan Rory looks great, though,” Dennis said.
And I agreed.
“How old was your grandfather when he went…When was it?”
“Last year,” I said. “He was ninety-five.”
“Wow. And the old lady, your grandma. I hear she’s still going strong. And she must be, what?”
“Heading for ninety-five herself,” I replied, strangely awed and reassured by the longevity in my family.
“Poor old Jock,” Dennis said, shaking his head sadly. “He was only fifty-five. Had his birthday June 24 last year. Died in September.”
“June 24,” I said. “What a coincidence. My old man turned fifty June 23 just past.”
“Here’s to them,” said Dennis.
He uncapped the bottle and passed it over.
Later Dennis wanted to know everything about working in Ottawa, on Parliament Hill. What that must be like, especially covering something as arcane as the economy.
That conversation later went off the rails when I bogged down, after too many drinks, attempting to explain the relationship between the trade deficit, inflation, and the interest rate. I recovered some of my credibility by boasting that my guest for the Press Gallery Dinner the previous spring had been the governor of the Bank of Canada, Louis J. Rasminsky—a hell of a nice down-to-earth old mandarin who loved a drink as much as the next fella.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 2
