Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  Once I broke into Quigleys’. I went in through a broken window, and it was dark inside. There was still furniture. It was as if the people were away and might come back at any moment. I moved quietly as if there were people sleeping there. In a kitchen cupboard there were papers—letters and bills and postcards mostly. But there was also a telegram. A telegram, I know, always brings bad news, but I looked at it anyway. This one was old. My hand was shaking as I read it. “We regret to inform you…” And, sure enough, it was about somebody killed in the war. I put it back carefully, wiped my hands, fearful that part of the sorrow there rubbed off—or perhaps bad luck.

  The most interesting of the empty buildings is the forge. I can remember when the old blacksmith, Johnny Morrison, worked there. People from out back would bring their horses to him. He’d pick up the horse’s hooves, one at a time, holding them in his leather apron, examining. The horse would just stand there, patiently, occasionally looking down watching the blacksmith’s back, as if to ask how long he planned to keep him standing on three legs. Sometimes Johnny Morrison would pull out a jackknife and dig at the hoof, but the horse didn’t seem to feel it. I’ve watched him pound nails into a horse’s hoof when he’s putting new shoes on, and then use a sharpened bar that is like a chisel to trim the edges of the hoof. Occasionally the horse would grunt and shiver.

  Johnny Morrison was the first dead man I ever saw. I went to his funeral in the Protestant Church, which is next to the school and just below our house. I saw the crowd and just walked in and sat in the back. At the end of the service everybody got up, walked to the front, and then around past his coffin. I could see the lid was up and wondered what he looked like dead. I could see the men dropping little sprigs of spruce on top of him. He was very white and very still. His mustache, which always seemed to be all brown and yellow in the forge, now seemed to be pure white like his eyebrows and his face. The little sprigs were all over his chest, and there was also a white apron folded there.

  My mother told me afterwards that the apron and the sprigs of spruce were there because Johnny Morrison was a Mason.

  I asked her what they meant, but she said it was a secret—one of many secrets that only Masons knew.

  I have since seen other dead people: Howard Oliver, Bill Forbes, John Archie MacDougall, and Dan Fraser. Also an old priest who was laid out in robes like a pope in the aisle of the church, with the lid of the coffin propped open.

  The forge closed when the blacksmith died, and they said it never would reopen. They say blacksmiths and their forges are obsolete, as the ferry to the mainland soon will be—which means nobody needs them anymore. I still see horses on the road, clopping past, wheels crunching the gravel, or pulling sleds in winter, with the kids all running behind trying to hitch rides. But the horses too will soon be gone, like the forge and Johnny Morrison and the ferries. That’s what I hear listening at The Hole in the kitchen ceiling.

  There’s talk now that a man from away, who is also named Morrison, might turn the blacksmith shop into a service station for cars. It is the perfect location, they say, the first place people will visit coming off the causeway. There will be gas pumps out front and, where Johnny Morrison kept his fire, there will be a pit for working under cars. Robert Morrison will make a fortune.

  Most of the buildings in the village seem old, like the forge and Quigleys’, and there are old people living in most of them. Dr. Christie, who is not a doctor, but a minister. Mrs. Forbes and Mrs. Annie Oliver, who are widows. Archie the Piper, who is cranky. Danny Black Dan, a bachelor we are supposed to avoid, even though he seems to like us. Danny MacIntosh, another bachelor, who was in both wars. Mr. Sinclair, a hermit who stinks of kerosene and never speaks. Harry and Rannie, two middle-aged brothers, who are not right in the head and are constantly tormented by older boys.

  Harry and Rannie have one of the few new houses here because my parents bought their old one, which is where we live.

  Their father was a tailor, and there are still special ironing boards in the attic. In our dining room, behind the door, are little boxes built into the wall where the tailor kept his business papers. One of the tailor’s boys, John Willie, carved his initials on the kitchen wall: JWMD. The tailor is dead now and his family grown up and moved away, except for Harry and Rannie, who can’t go anywhere because they’re simple.

  Their little house isn’t far from ours. I see them every day, walking with their strange lurching motion and, from the distance, they look like twins, dressed identically in overalls and floppy tweed caps. They seem to be in charge of the church and, when they aren’t around the church, they’re out behind their own place sawing wood. They act as if they own the church, and you see them there every day, making sure that everything is as it should be. Then they wander through the village, gathering boards and beams from the old abandoned buildings that have started falling down.

  I’ve been inside their house, and it is always warm, with a fire going even in the summer. There are two windows in their kitchen, one on the north side and one on the south. And every evening they sit by the windows with their caps on, rocking, and staring out, making sure that nobody goes near the church and that none of the older boys sneak up to throw things at their house.

  I’ve been warned never to tease them because there’s no harm in them at all. Not like Danny Black Dan, whom we’re supposed always to keep an eye on, or some of the war veterans who become dangerous when they drink.

  Because I never tease them, Harry and Rannie come to the house from time to time with bags of hard candy. They stand politely at the door of the house they grew up in, caps in hand, smiling and making barking noises that nobody seems to understand. And when they’re gone, my mother takes the candy and puts it somewhere.

  From where I stand, beside Fougere’s garage, I can hear, above the snapping of the coronation flags, the rising protest of the ferry engine as it is forced suddenly to reverse. Boats don’t have brakes, like cars. They stop, sluggishly, by reversing direction. Stopping always brings angry sounds of protest from the engine and a rush of water boiling around the bottom of the boat. No matter how hard they try to avoid it, there is always a gentle bump against the stout wood pilings. The cars and trucks wobble at the impact. Then the clank and thump of the ramp falling, and the ferry boat is joined to land.

  Car and truck engines roar to life. The vehicles begin the slow evacuation, the slow procession up the hill, turning, at the top, to left and right, seemingly at random. Heading off, deeper into town, towards the Sydney Road, or away from it on the pavement that will end abruptly below the church.

  People outside the town will note their progress by the clouds of dust. Other drivers meeting them in their groups of three or four or five will mark the sudden rush of traffic with an exclamation of the obvious: “The ferry boat is in!”

  I am now ten—since last Friday. I know this already. And I know from what I’ve heard that everything will change with the new causeway. Words I hear a lot now: change and causeway. Words rich with promises of pavement and possibilities.

  “What will happen to the ferry after there’s a causeway?”

  “There’ll be something else,” mother says.

  And I know that this is true.

  A new causeway is coming. A British team has achieved what no human has ever done before, somewhere far away, conquering a frozen mountain that is more than five miles high. There is a new Queen in England—an aesthetic improvement over the ugly old kings and queens who scowl from the pages of the history books, faces hardened by the bloody business of managing a world made up of primitive and stubborn cultures in places where food grows wild and the perpetual sun cultivates laziness and indifference to progress. A Queen for change, down to earth and brand new.

  I have acquired a confused ambivalence about the Queen. Her picture is everywhere. The picture of her father, George, looking slightly mystified by all his fame, still hangs in school, beside the Union Jack, which is also the flag of Canada, a
nd the massive map of the British Empire, upon which the sun never sets. But George will soon be gone, replaced by the new colour photograph that came free with the newspaper. This new photograph will grace living-room walls all over the Commonwealth. I am still becoming accustomed to changing His Majesty to Her Majesty, the “King” to “Queen” in the “God Save Our Gracious…” song. Miss Ladd, who looks a little like the new Queen and who came from town to train a rhythm band for a small parade to mark the coronation, assured us it was okay to get it wrong—but only for a while.

  And then we all sang “God save our gracious Queen / Long live our noble Queen,” and marched through the village, banging small drums and knocking blocks of wood together, clashing cymbals and clinking triangles. Marching and marching as far as McGowan’s and then back to the school.

  Mr. Clough stood beaming in the doorway of his store, which is also the post office, hands deep in his pockets, fondling his money.

  Grandma Donohue, who says she has some English blood in her, lives alone down north but moves to Port Hastings every winter for the electricity and running water. All winter long she’s been reading and talking constantly about the royal family and following all the minor details of the coronation preparations with enthusiasm. She has, for quite some time now, stopped speaking of the cruelty of the British to the Irish, and to Irish Catholics in particular. There has been an armistice of sorts—a general amnesty for the royal family. No recent references to the hardships of the pioneers, suffered because of starvation and evictions by agents of the monarchy. Only about the prettiness of the new Queen, how handsome her husband, and how cute her children. How brave the whole lot of them, standing out on balconies while the bombs fell around them in the war.

  Notwithstanding their spotty history, this detail impresses me. Their bravery and, in particular, the warm prettiness of the Queen. Someday I would like to have a wife who looks like that.

  I wonder what my father thinks about the monarchy and the coronation. My mother and her sister Veronica and their mother, Grandma Donohue, are full of opinions and comments on all subjects. My father, in contrast, will read the newspaper carefully or listen intently to programs on the radio but say nothing.

  He’ll say “Well, well,” perhaps, shaking his head sadly.

  Opinions, it seems, are for women. Or maybe he’s afraid of having opinions because of his secret. I prefer to think that he’s just quieter than all the gabby women who surround us.

  I know that the Irish side of the family are here because of some great calamity in the Old Country and that the Protestant English are to blame. And that all, or mostly all, is now forgiven because everyone is better off, no thanks to those responsible for the persecution and the starvation. We are better off thanks to hard work and the Grace of God. This I know from all the talk and the opinions of my mother and my aunt and my grandmother during their long winters talking and playing cards.

  But whatever my father thinks of this or any other matter remains a mystery. We are Scottish on my father’s side, and it seems to me that people who are Scottish don’t have half as many opinions as people who are Irish. Or maybe they’re just more careful about expressing them. Or maybe it’s that men have to be more careful than women.

  My father is away most winters. And even when he communicates at any length, he speaks in Gaelic to people who come from the mountain or other places out back. It was the only language my people knew when my grandfather’s great-grandfather brought his family from Scotland. My sisters and I don’t understand Gaelic because our mother doesn’t know it, and we have spent most of our lives with her while our father was away at work.

  Mother knows Gaelic expressions, such as droighneach (trash) or fad air ais (backward), which she will use with obvious disapproval when discussing certain people, many of whom live out back. And she will use words like ton, which means arse, and buinneach, which means shit, because slang is okay in Gaelic, even for us. But she will grow uneasy when people from out back show up in the kitchen looking for Dan Rory and start speaking exclusively to him in quiet waves of impenetrable Gaelic.

  My father has never encouraged an interest in learning Gaelic. “It will get you nowhere,” he says, as if Nowhere is a real place that is the opposite of Somewhere. Sometimes I think the real reason is that it is a private place for him—a private, secret hiding place.

  I will sometimes say to my father, “Ciamar a tha thu,” which sounds like “Kimmera-how” and means “How are you?”

  But, instead of replying “Gle mhath,” which sounds like “Clay-vah” and means “Very well,” he will just smile and answer “Clay pipe”—which means “Leave me alone.”

  I’ve noticed that Gaelic conversations are always conducted in a soft monotone that would be difficult to follow, even if I could understand the words—like flies buzzing on a warm, sleepy afternoon. And that my father changes noticeably when he speaks Gaelic—that he relaxes and that his face takes on a faraway expression, eyes squinted, the corners of his mouth turned down. Inevitably, before I have time to catch the rhythm and the meaning of it, they take their conversation outside and it continues near the well or behind the corner of the house.

  There is no obvious reason why anybody would have wanted to locate a town on our particular hill. But Mr. Clough told me that it was because of the cove, which is just to the south, below my Aunt Veronica’s. Now the cove is just a place to swim in the summer and fish smelt when they run in dense packs in the late fall. But Mr. Clough explained that it was once called Plaster Cove because there is gypsum behind it and there used to be a quarry there. Ships would sail right into the cove, load up with the gypsum, and sail away.

  Later, there were large piers and shipping wharves on the shore of the strait, down below Mr. Clough’s store and just across from the railway station. Coal trains from Inverness would be unloaded there. Boats from everywhere would come and take it all away.

  My blood races with excitement at the images. Boats and people from afar. Change and possibility sailing in on every boat. New people with new voices and stories from away. Barrooms clamouring, and a dozen stores packed with prosperous people shopping. The roads busy with commerce, and fields and woods loud with children. There is even a story that a MacIntyre from the Old Country arrived on a boat once, trying to find the people who had left.

  After that he went away, probably disappointed by what he found here, because he was never heard from again.

  There is a story they never talk about. That once upon a time, back in the Old Country, the MacIntyres were Protestants. But after one of them married a Catholic, they were kicked off their land by the Protestant landlord because the Catholic wife, who was Irish, insisted that the kids be baptized Catholics. When they were leaving for the New World, the priest told them that the MacIntyres could only prosper there because, by going into exile, they were making a great sacrifice for the Faith.

  I would have asked the mysterious visitor from the Old Country whether any of this is true, but of course that was long ago, long before my time.

  They say that nothing much has happened in the village for nearly forty years. There are hardly any children, and it’s because of the wars, they say. And then there was the Depression. People were too busy fighting and coping to be having children. There was rationing in the last world war, limits on the liquor and the gasoline and food and also, I presume, on babies. So now there is me and Ian and Brian and Angus Neil and Jackie Nick. And of course the dog. Everybody else is older, from before the war, or at least before they got too busy with the war.

  Mr. Clough says the whole village was once named Plaster Cove. It was official. Then they changed it to Port Hastings after an important government official whose name was Sir Hastings Doyle. That was a big mistake, he says. That was when everything went to hell. Changing the name of a place brings bad luck.

  The village looks like a place with bad luck. It is now neither cove nor port. The cove is blocked from the strait by roads an
d railway tracks and is slowly filling up with muck. The only evidence of quarrying is the bare white rock that is visible through the trees at the back end. The coal piers have been abandoned: the larger one torn down entirely, leaving only a small projection of rock and pilings; the smaller one intact but useless, except for risky games. In summer we swim there and use the chutes for diving boards.

  I understand that soon there will be even fewer kids my age. Binky’s father is being transferred to Inverness; Angus Neil’s to Sydney. Brian’s father is getting a bigger job with the Highways Department, and they will move to town. And that will leave just Ian and Jackie Nick and me. But then, I know, from listening at The Hole, that the place will grow. The causeway will be like a giant pipeline, pumping new life and new people in, removing, at last, the curse that came with the new name: Port Hastings. Maybe even making jobs for people from out back who are neither Grit nor Mason—people with secrets in their childhood.

  The cars from the ferry are now coming slowly up the hill, and most of them are turning right. Mostly people from the mainland town of Mulgrave, which is where the ferry leaves from, or further down the Guysborough shore. People coming to Port Hawkesbury for the celebration of the coronation.

  I went to Mulgrave once, when I was much younger. My Aunt Veronica used to be the housekeeper for the priest in Mulgrave, and I went with my mother to visit her. We went by train. From Port Hastings through the town to Point Tupper, which is where the train ferry docks. I remember the black, menacing locomotive and the metallic steam and sulphurous billowing smoke. It never seemed to go far without stopping and backing up, and starting forward again in jerking motions—huffing and puffing. And there was something terribly precarious about riding on a train that was riding on a boat.