Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  I’ve read about them in the newspaper—the forty-ton Euclids that can carry as much as a railway car in a single load. Now they’re gathering around Cape Porcupine for the big job they’ve talked about for fifty years.

  That is why we are not in school. Miss Morrison and Mrs. Gillis have told us that September 16, 1952, is a day we must experience to the full because it is a day that will affect our lives forever. It is a day we must remember in its smallest details, for what we will witness will be as important to our education as anything we will learn in books. September 16, a Tuesday. It is the day they start the causeway.

  The rain diminishes and the fog returns, swift banks of mist that tease and torment the straggle of kids and adults in the field around me. We are standing near the old MacMillan house, once elegant but now sinister in its emptiness. A place for stealthy exploration. Ian and Jackie, Angus Neil and his sister Theresa are here. Also Brian Langley and Binky, whose real name is Vincent MacLellan. And, of course, Skipper, my dog.

  We stand silently and wait. The murmur of adult conversation filters through the fog. I already know what they are saying because I have heard it at The Hole, where I gather most of my knowledge about the strange ways and mysterious interests of grown-ups. This opening was originally designed for a stovepipe, I think. It is near the chimney, and it allows the heat to filter up from the kitchen. The only heat in the house comes from the kitchen stove. The Hole is my connection to the larger, older world.

  I sleep just above the kitchen, which is where all life happens in the house—from the porridge in the morning to the rosary in the evening. We live in the kitchen, which has a stove, table and chairs, rocking chair, visitor chairs beside the door, a refrigerator, and, on top of it, a radio. There are other rooms, but the doors are always closed, especially in the winter when the other rooms are cold as the outside.

  It is just as cold upstairs, and you hate to go to bed when it is winter. My mother makes up games so we’ll forget the cold. When I was smaller she walked behind me as I climbed the stairs, and she pretended that small animals were falling off my pyjamas and that she picked them up and stuck them back on, telling me to get in bed quickly to keep them warm. Of course we don’t play games like that now that I am older.

  The Hole in the ceiling above the kitchen stove allows the passage of heat to my bedroom when the stove is lit. It also allows the passage of sound. Sunday nights my mother listens to Miss Brooks and Amos ’n Andy. There is another one called I Was a Communist for the FBI, but she turns it off. For a few magical months one winter The Hole allowed the passage of extraordinary music. A young railway station agent whose name is Buddy MacMaster boarded at our house, and on special nights he played his fiddle in the kitchen with such skill you’d almost think the sound was coming from the radio. That was when I learned the value of The Hole.

  Music is rare enough. But between tunes on the fiddle or the radio, or on nights when there is no music at all, the adults talk. They talk about the village and the island and the world. Or when Troy Jack is visiting, they talk about the walking, talking dead and horses that convey messages from beyond the grave. Troy Jack is a MacDonald. Sometimes when he has a little edge on, he talks about the grey ghost-dog that follows certain MacDonalds around to tell them when misfortune is about to happen, even when they don’t want to know about it. He talks about the bocan, which means ghost, and the buidseachd, which is like witchcraft, and even the old house seems to listen quietly.

  At The Hole I heard them talking about the blast that would “change everything.” That was last September. An explosion of dynamite that would instantly knock tens of thousands of tons of rock from the stubborn brow of Cape Porcupine. September 1952: the beginning of the change; the beginning of the future. Somehow I got the impression that this change, unlike most of the change they talk about, will bring huge improvements to our lives. The new causeway will put us on the map. With the causeway we will become a city. They talk about it the way they talk about the certain benefits that will flow from “a change of government,” from getting rid of Grits in power in Halifax and Ottawa.

  Grits, I’ve learned, are Liberals. Men like Angus L. and Mr. Chevrier, who will start the building of the causeway, which will change everything for the better.

  Change is always for the better, and change always comes from away, inevitably announced by important people like Angus L. and Mr. Chevrier.

  Afterwards, when the kitchen has fallen silent but for the crack of embers dying slowly in the stove, I try to imagine the improvements I would like to see. But there is only one.

  I was only nine then, in September, when it all started. I turned ten last Friday, the 29th of May. This year the birthday feeling is lasting longer because it is close to the day we get a new Queen, Elizabeth the Second. Her father was George the Sixth, who seemed like a nice enough man. The papers have been full of news about the royal family for weeks. And on this day there are jet planes waiting at an airport in England to race across the Atlantic with the first pictures of the coronation. There will even be pictures on television, but there is no television in Port Hastings yet. That’s something else I know will come with all the changes, but for now we’ll huddle over newspapers, reading every word, examining every photograph.

  Even though this day is a Tuesday, it is a public holiday. That means no school and general good cheer among the older people. There is a picnic in town, which is where we are all going, and although they have a picnic in town every year, this one is special. There’s the coronation, and my father is home with a car, and a British team has just climbed to the top of the highest mountain in the world.

  This last item was also in the newspaper, and I read the story very carefully while everybody else admired the coloured photograph of the new Queen Elizabeth that came free in the paper that day. They were talking about how they were going to take the picture down to Angus Walker’s photography studio and get it framed for the wall in the living room. The picture of the Queen was, for them, the best thing about the paper, but I was deep into the story about the British team climbing to the top of Mount Everest. More than 29,000 feet, it said. That high up the winds howl relentlessly, and the cold is deadly, and the air has hardly any oxygen. At the very place on the planet where you have to be strongest, nature strips your strength away.

  I tried to figure it out. Twenty-nine thousand feet is more than five miles. That would be more than from Port Hastings to town. More like from home to Point Tupper, which is on the other side of town.

  Mount Everest, I calculate with a pencil, is about sixty times higher than Cape Porcupine, which is what I can see from our house in Port Hastings. Cape Porcupine, on the other side of the Strait of Canso, on the mainland. A high tree-covered mass where, each day, I watch from the schoolyard as giant machines dig out the rock for the new causeway that will join our island, which is called Cape Breton, to the mainland, which is called Nova Scotia.

  The teacher points out that Cape Breton is already part of Nova Scotia and, more important, Canada and the British Empire. But we never really felt a part of it before. Now we will, after the causeway.

  It is already a stump projecting from the other side, like a truncated limb.

  I can’t imagine the causeway as a reality, but the word alone creates a shiver. The way thinking of Christmas does in October when it is close enough to be real.

  “Will you be able to see past Cape Porcupine when they fill in the strait for the causeway?” somebody asked.

  The teacher, Miss Morrison, just laughed.

  “No. There’s more than enough there for a dozen causeways. You’ll hardly notice a difference in the cape at all.”

  That was mildly disappointing, because it would have been nice to think of seeing past Cape Porcupine for a change, into the rest of the world.

  Maybe, I think to myself, you’d even be able to see Mount Everest in the distance.

  My father laughed.

  “It’s a possibility,�
�� he said, reaching for the paper.

  “How high is MacIntyre’s Mountain?” I asked.

  The narrow little dirt road through the pine and spruce and juniper and birch felt like a lot more than five miles, especially in the winter when, more often than not, you had to walk most of it.

  But my father wasn’t listening.

  “Well, that’s something,” he said, about the British team and Mount Everest.

  “A little gift to the new Queen,” my mother added.

  “Old Clough was telling George Fox that one of the LaFaves is with those people who were climbing Everest,” my father says.

  “The LaFaves? Who used to live here? On Mount Everest?”

  My mother obviously didn’t believe it.

  “That’s what he said. One of Jack LaFave’s boys.”

  “That Clough,” she said.

  But that’s the kind of a day it is. Men standing on the top of Everest, the British flag raised. A pretty woman on the throne of the British Empire. The whole world, embodied in the stump of a new causeway, reaching towards us. A day when you can believe anything.

  In the group around me, I have known Ian MacKinnon the longest. We are nearly the same age. He will be ten next June, almost a month after me. He has the same birthday as my father, who is not here. My father works in Stirling, which is a hard-rock mine in a remote part of Richmond County. Ian’s father is a railway engineer, which means that he drives the train that travels daily the fifty-five miles from Point Tupper to Inverness. It is called the Judique Flyer, which is a joke because travelling by train is barely faster than walking.

  Because Ian’s father, whose name is Alexander, works on the railroad, he can live at home. Because he works close enough to home to live there all the time, he never gets so lonely that he has to quit his job to see his family. Because he always has a job, they have a telephone at Ian’s house and a bathroom with an indoor toilet. They have a furnace that heats the entire house, so all the rooms are open all year round. They always have a car.

  Every evening we stand on the back verandah of MacKinnons’ house and wait for Alex MacKinnon’s train to leave the railway station, which is straight down below their house, near the shore of the strait. As the train leaves the station and passes through an open space, it becomes visible from the verandah. We wave frantically, and Alex MacKinnon blows the whistle just for us. Sometimes it is a long mournful howl; sometimes a bar of happy hoots. When the whistle blows, you can see a blast of steam beside the billowing smokestack, and the locomotive huffs and puffs and strains to get away with its long burden of freight and passenger cars.

  We leap up and down, waving to be seen. Ian and his sister, Annie, and his little brother, Roy, who fell off the verandah one day and broke his leg. And me. I jump up and down waving with the rest of them as if I am a MacKinnon whose father works for the Canadian National Railway.

  On warm summer evenings, Alex MacKinnon and other railwaymen, whose names are Howie and LV and Laidlaw, sit on the front step in their undershirts, drinking beer and talking quietly.

  Alex MacKinnon’s brother, whose name is Ian and who is known as Big Ian, also works for the railway, even though he owns a farm right here in the village. Big Ian never drinks beer, so you don’t see him on the doorstep in his undershirt. Working on the railroad seems to be a job that runs in the MacKinnon family. Even their grandfather was a railwayman who drove a train.

  Angus Neil and Theresa are also MacKinnons, and their father, Allan Joe, works on the railroad too. And Binky’s father is on the railroad. Brian Langley’s father works for the Department of Highways, which is just as good. Jackie Nicholson has neither father nor mother, as far as we know, but lives with his grandmother Kate, who is the keeper of the lighthouse below us on Nicholson’s Point. I know that the causeway is bad news for Jackie and Mrs. Nicholson because, after it is finished, they won’t need the lighthouse anymore. And the causeway will eventually land exactly where their house now sits. We don’t talk about what will happen then.

  Jackie Nicholson and I have this in common: absent fathers and some confusion about the nature of the improvements that will come with the causeway. It is not something that we talk about. People say that Jackie Nick is “slow.”

  I think I understand why my father isn’t on the railway or with the Department of Highways, but the reasons seem to change with each discussion. Sometimes I believe it is because he is not a Mason. Sometimes it is because he is not a Grit. But mostly, I believe, it is because he is from out back. It is because he is from MacIntyre’s Mountain and has an embarrassing secret.

  The causeway, I understand, will change all that. Being a Mason or a Grit or from the mountain isn’t going to matter anymore. Not after September 16, 1952. Certainly not after Coronation Day, when the causeway is already at the point where only a few people are still calling it the bocan bridge.

  On Coronation Day, the town is nothing but Union Jacks and flags of Canada. The flag of Canada is a little Union Jack in the corner of a red field that also contains a symbol called a coat of arms. There are strings with plastic pennants of every imaginable colour strung above the streets and across the fronts of buildings. Everybody is out, just wandering slowly or driving around. The pennants snap and rustle in the wind, which is chilly for June. But there is bright sunshine and beaming hospitality in all the faces.

  My father is home. Usually I am the only man in the house. There is my mother and, in the wintertime, her mother, whose name is Mary Donohue and who is extremely old. I have two sisters who are younger than I am. Danita is two years younger. Rosalind is the youngest and everybody’s favourite. She has dimples and a mop of blonde ringlets. She is known to grown-ups as the Pup.

  As we pass below the Catholic Church and feel the thump of the resumption of the pavement, Danita notices the car ferry from the mainland approaching where the dock is, just up ahead. She wants to watch it unload the cars. It is a proposal that almost everybody finds interesting.

  So my father parks the car at Eddie Fougere’s garage, and they start walking down.

  The car is a 1946 Mercury. It is black. I would rather have stayed inside letting the mysterious scents, collected in all the places it has been, fire the imagination. I would prefer to snuggle down into the deep, soft, cloth upholstery that is warmed by the strong late-spring sun and dream about owning a car of my own—or at least my father owning one. The car belongs to my father’s brother, John Dan, who is working underground in the mine in Stirling, where my father worked until just recently.

  John Dan is also talking about coming home to look for work on the causeway.

  My mother and father and sisters are walking slowly down the hill to the ferry. I hang back and nobody notices. I’ve seen the ferry arrival many times. I’ve been coming to town on my own for years. Before First Holy Communion and Confirmation, I came to town alone for special instruction at the Convent School. On Saturday afternoons I often come to town alone for the movies. I will find my way to town on foot if I can’t get a ride. Sometimes a bus will stop and pick me up. The driver winks and smiles, shows me where to sit. I know the bus costs money for most people, but this bus is special. Kids get on for free.

  Coming home I ride the train, which is also free because the conductor is too busy between town and Port Hastings to go around collecting fares. I recently had my first real fight, not far from the movie theatre. Boys from town tried to hold me back and make me miss the train. But I beat them off. Desperation made me strong, or maybe the example of the movie heroes.

  From dawn to dark, it seems, I am on the move when I’m not imprisoned in the school. There’s the town, the woods, the shores of the strait, and the mysterious recesses of Plaster Cove, which used to be a quarry and was the reason for the village in the first place. And now the roar of construction, punctuated by frequent explosions, as the village gets ready for the brilliant future.

  As the causeway inches towards Nicholson’s Point, teams of diggers and dri
llers have begun to hack away at the back of the point to create a long canal that will one day allow ships to continue to traverse the strait, on their way from the Atlantic Ocean up into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the heart of Canada.

  Because I am the man of the house when my father is away, I have always had freedom of movement here. I had freedom to explore wherever my legs and curiosity, raft and rowboat, would lead me. On Sundays, when there were no trains, and before all the new construction, older boys would sometimes steal the pump-car from the railway shack. We’d travel the rails, pumping up and down at either end of a long handle that works like a see-saw. The summit of liberation—pumping slowly up and down, the little trolley car skimming over the rails silently, heading northward where we wouldn’t be noticed by the railwaymen. Rumbling along the Ghost Beach, with the strait on the left and Long Pond on the right, dark and calm. Riding along with the breeze on my face, feeling like an outlaw.

  I have been the man of the house, it seems, for most of my ten years. Last September I was certain that this was about to change. The causeway was begun. My father would come home. Now, on Coronation Day, he’s here. But I’m not sure that he’ll stay.

  Recently I drew a map with every house and building in Port Hastings, south to north from Pleasant Hill to Mill Hill, a distance of about four miles. I want to remember it as it was before the causeway. I counted sixty-six buildings in that space, but many are abandoned. The old Quigley house, which is next to ours; MacMillan’s, near where we are standing now; Malcolm the Butcher’s, up the hill from Nicholson’s Point, near Angus Neil’s; Captain Skinner’s; the old dance hall; MacLean’s old store; the forge. There’s even an abandoned place that looks new, just north of here. Murdoch MacLean’s new house, never lived in, now boarded up.