Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  The miners were standing in front of the head frame, everybody smiling and looking full of mischief.

  “This,” he said, pointing to one of the men, “is the one whose skates you inherited.”

  The dead man was standing beside my father with a big grin on his face and not a clue that he would soon be gone.

  And now it is Christmas, and this year he won’t be coming home because he’s already here. He is our father again, no longer just a visitor from somewhere else.

  My Aunt Veronica is like us. Her husband, Mickey MacNeil, had to go away for work. Mickey MacNeil is a milkman in Toronto, and obviously the people in Toronto don’t pay their milkmen very much because Mickey hardly ever comes home. My aunt is always taking on hard jobs here to support herself and her two little boys, Barry and John Blaise. She works so hard that sometimes she gets sick. She used to work for priests, cleaning their houses and cooking for them. I’ve heard her tell stories about keeping the fires going in the big Glebe house fireplaces while the priests sat around keeping warm, drinking brandy, and discussing fine points of theology.

  When she married Mickey, she thought she’d escaped all that. But now he’s in Toronto delivering milk, and she survives here by scrubbing floors and pinching pennies. Some mornings when we go to school, the hardwood floors are gleaming and the room smells fresh because my aunt spent the night on her hands and knees there with a bucket and a scrubbing brush.

  In my private moments, I have to admit that I’m not looking forward to this business called “making a living.”

  Everybody on the bus to Mass knows everybody else, but hardly anybody speaks. It’s like being inside the church already—people studying their prayer books or their empty hands. I finished my investigation of Jean Larter’s kerchief. Now that I knew about Korea, I turned my attention back to the land around me. To the right of the bus the strait was dancing and the sunlight was flashing and Mulgrave had become clearly visible, with the little white asylum standing out among the darker colours of the town. There is a man from Inverness in the asylum because he was hit on the head once by a baseball and never recovered. They say he was a great baseball player and had a brilliant future and that maybe, one day, he’d get paid for playing ball.

  But instead, when he was playing the outfield in Inverness one day, he lost sight of a high fly ball because of the sun, and it changed everything. I can imagine him standing there with his hand shading his eyes, trying to see the plummeting baseball. Then everything goes black. And now he’s over there, standing at a window, large and pale, staring at the water, wondering what he’s doing there and when they’re going to let him out.

  I think of him at his window, looking towards Cape Breton, while I stand at mine at home, watching the new confusion in the strait. Two people dreaming about what they don’t quite understand.

  The Strait of Canso and Cape Porcupine are like the border of a strange land. Everything important seems to happen over there, across the strait and far away, beyond the hulking cape. Only the Victoria-Inverness Bulletin has stories from here, and they are almost all about people visiting other people. Or about the wonderful sermons by the Reverend Clark MacDonald, who is the minister for St. David’s United Church in Port Hastings. They don’t report what he said, just that it was wonderful—which makes it all the more mysterious. It’s all part of the secret lives of Protestants.

  The village is located on the side of a hill, and the strait is really all there is to look at. Behind us, beyond Archie the Piper’s on the Victoria Line, is out back. You can’t really see the town. My first act each morning is to look out the window of my bedroom towards the strait, and, after years doing it, I am able to guess what the weather will be like all day just by the colour of the water. A sharp blue in the winter means a bitter coldness. Northbound spittle from a grey churning reveals the stinging southeast wind, bearer of long spells of dreariness. If it is raining, I know by the mood and colour of the strait how long the rain will last. And on the best days of all, summer mornings when it is still and black, I know it will be hot all day and that the woods huddling around the village will hum with the business of nature. The spruce and pine and juniper will offer a sweet cool sanctuary, and, by early afternoon, when the rising heat stirs a light breeze, poplars and birch, beech and maple will rustle contentedly. The graveyard, up the hill, past the Piper’s, will be lush with juicy raspberries. And I know that the day will end with deep orange flames consuming the horizon, promising the same again tomorrow. A gentle breeze will stir the massive silver poplars outside my bedroom window, and the whispering will start again. Wind and trees exchanging secrets in the darkness, as I drift away from here on waves of dreams.

  Some days I sit on the shore and look across the water and think I will never know the world beyond except in books. And there are days when I think I’m lucky to be so removed from all the misery of the world beyond the strait. I think of Korea and Germany and Russia, Africa and China, and that maybe it isn’t such a bad thing to have the cape and the strait over there, keeping the angry, hungry, tragic world I read about away from us. But then I think of the man in the asylum, going nowhere. And I think of Joe Larter in the war in Korea, and Danny MacIntosh and John MacDougall and the secrets they brought back and the mysterious knowledge in their eyes. I want to know the secrets of the world. I want to know what they have seen, even if it’s bad.

  And then I realize, again, the world is coming here.

  Listening at the post office, everything is about before, when ships and trains and strangers were everywhere and when, the way they tell it, the world included Port Hastings. And people here felt part of the world, if only for the world’s great wars.

  I want to ask the older people: What was wrong with you? I want to say to Mr. Clough: You have connections, don’t you? Why did you let progress stop? How could you just let everything petrify and turn into history?

  But I already know the answer. Bad luck—decisions made by people far away.

  He’ll stand quietly for a while thinking, gazing through the rear window, behind his special chair beside the stove, studying the railway station and the strait, which are down below his store, hands deep in his pockets, eyes scrunched, remembering the giant piers and the ships from everywhere, and coal trains rolling slowly in from Inverness.

  And the eye will turn to the growing scar on the face of the mountain on the other side. There is now a great, open expanse of bare rock, and people moving buglike on the side of what appears to be a cliff. Each day the trucks dumping rock into the rushing strait seem a little larger as the causeway inches closer. There are explosions closer to us now, and a constant roar as the drillers begin preparing to blast out the great trench that will sever Nicholson’s Point for a canal. Survey crews are everywhere, planning new roads and railway lines.

  And everybody is thinking the same thought—more decisions made by people far away, creating something called a Future.

  A new year begins. 1954. There is nothing now but talk about the causeway.

  Since September 1952 there have been many blasts. It has become part of the local atmosphere. The ground will shake, the cape will gush another mighty torrent of rock and mud and smoke. You watch in awe, half expecting that when the smoke has cleared it will all be gone, leaving a vast and unobstructed view of all the world beyond. But it’s still there, hardly diminished at all.

  Now you can see the huge trucks backing carefully to the end of the advancing limb and dumping the massive rocks that roll, or are pushed by bulldozers, into the swift-moving waters of the strait. You can see the water turning brown, as it snatches at the rocks.

  It’ll be across in no time flat, claims Mr. Clough. But my father says they’re at the easy part now. Wait until they get farther out, where, he’s heard, the water is hundreds of feet deep. With the currents strong as they are, the rocks they dump out near the middle will be in Point Tupper before they hit the bottom. My father speaks with the authority of one who knows
all about the behaviour of rocks.

  After school, sometimes, I go down to the point, and Jackie Nick and I stand by his grandmother’s lighthouse and watch what’s going on over on the other side. Where they dig the rock is a long way off, but I’ve seen the pictures in the paper of men in hard hats and rubber working clothes drilling there—men who look exactly like my father and the miners around him in the photograph.

  The lighthouse has been here forever. Nicholson’s Point is like a granite fist, held out threateningly, ready to punch a hole in the boat that comes too close. Just a few feet out, the water whirls and foams, and any boat caught in the turmoil will quickly disappear down one of the swirling frothy funnels.

  In late summer, crowds gather here to watch herds of giant black fish passing by, a silent procession surfacing in an endless flow of arching bodies that seems, after you watch them for a while, to be a single organism. It’s like one gigantic snakelike fish rippling down the thrashing strait, heading back to the ocean after a slight diversion around our island in search of food.

  Near where Jackie Nick and I are standing are the graves of strangers who fell into the whirlpools just off Nicholson’s Point or who got sick and died and were dropped off here for burial on the land. One of the tombstones is dated 1793—a little girl named Douce Elizabeth Balhache. A little mystery.

  I try to imagine what it was like back then, when people vanished into childhood or the sea, never to be seen again. We’re clearly better off today and luckier than in all those places where things don’t seem to have changed much.

  The place is full of stories about pirates and battle ships and immigrant strangers sailing up and down the strait looking for places to build new homes. Near Mulgrave there’s a dent in the shore called Pirate’s Harbour. And the pirates weren’t all on the other side. One of the Fox boys, who are all older than we are, says there is buried treasure over here too, somewhere near the Ghost Beach, which is just north of Nicholson’s Point.

  Jackie and I talk about what we would do if we ever found the treasure.

  I tell him I would use the money to go away, and he responds, “Go away where?” and I say “Everywhere.” I want to see the world. Jackie retorts that there’s enough of the world for him right around us—and, in any case, the world will soon be coming to us whether we like it or not.

  He would use the money to buy a fast car and a new house for his grandmother and himself.

  “What about the old house?” I ask.

  And he tells me they’re going to burn it down—the first thing they’ll do when the causeway is across, he says.

  “They’ll put a match to it,” he insists.

  “They wouldn’t.”

  “Oh yes,” he says. “And before they’re done they’ll be burning down half the village.”

  Of course we all know that Jackie Nick is always making things up just to get attention. But I also know from my experience with change that every time there’s something new, something old will disappear.

  And then one Friday night he came home driving a truck. It was the truck we saw at Danny Shaw’s. He had his bag of mining gear in the back.

  For a celebration, I suppose, he traded with his brother on the mountain. John Dan got the truck, and we took the car again. Temporarily, of course. They announced that we were going on a trip down north, to where my mother comes from. She grew up in another village called Bay St. Lawrence, which is beyond the mountains and the National Park and the Cabot Trail, and it takes almost all day to get there. Nothing ever seems to change in Bay St. Lawrence.

  Going to Bay St. Lawrence, there are long stretches of pavement where the ride goes quickly, with the car windows open and the summer breezes on your face sweet with the musk of lupines and wild roses and clover and the dark evergreens hovering beside the road.

  By Creignish you know you’re on a journey, when you leave the narrow strait behind, and the water beside the highway broadens out into a great flashing bay, and the mainland dissolves into hazy distant shadows until, finally, by Port Hood, it disappears entirely. In Inverness, where there is a liquor store, we stop to buy a bottle because Grandma Donohue will expect a little treat when we arrive. We already told her in a letter we were coming for a visit.

  Then we stop in Chéticamp, and it is like a foreign country where everyone speaks French. There is a fish plant there, and it always smells like dinnertime on Fridays, and flocks of squawking seagulls swoop and squabble on the rooftops. The harbour is full of fishing boats of all shapes and sizes. Chéticamp has the biggest church I’ve ever seen, and my father tells us that his father, Dougald, painted the steeple once, long, long ago.

  Just beyond Chéticamp, the pavement ends again. The northern mountains loom, and, just as we hit the first potholes on the rippled washboard road, my father always says, “Hang onto your hats…”

  Crossing the mountains, everything slows down. The car creeps up and around the endless winding hills, my father constantly working clutch and gear shift, wrestling the wheel to avoid the larger rocks and ruts and the oncoming cars that suddenly burst out of clouds of dust. In places, your heart leaps when you look downward into nothingness just beyond the shoulder of the road, blue sea sprawling to infinity, motionless but for the gold and white spangles dancing in the distance. Cars are pulled to the side where small streams cross the road, and men with tin cans pour water into steaming radiators.

  My father watches the temperature gauge nervously as every turn in the steep road reveals yet more hills to climb.

  “Feel your ears pop yet?” he asks, to create a distraction.

  At the top of French Mountain, we stop to let the car cool down. My mother points into the distance and describes the fire that swept through these hills a few years back, destroying vast tracts of forest, driving animals and humans from their homes. “And now look at it,” she says. “Nature regenerating. New life building on the ashes of the old.”

  And I am looking around the little circle of ourselves, a family regenerating.

  Just beyond the village of Pleasant Bay, we stop to eat our sandwiches at the Lone Sheiling. My sisters and I wander away from our parents, into the cool, green stillness of the trees, the moss damp and soft beneath our feet. We are slow and quiet in the unfamiliar place.

  The tiny stone building with the straw roof is supposed to resemble the houses people lived in before they left the Old Country long ago. I stood there in the cold little hut, imagining a large family living in a single room like this one, a fire smoldering on the floor, smoke eventually escaping through a hole in the roof. Maybe eviction and exile weren’t such a bad thing after all.

  There is a poem on a metal plaque, and I know it off by heart.

  From the lone sheiling of the misty islands, mountains divide us and the waste of seas yet still the blood is strong and the heart is highland and we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

  I know that, long ago, the first of our MacIntyres came from the Hebrides, but when I ask my father about it, he just smiles. To him, I believe, Scotland is just another foreign country. I wonder why. My mother says she’d kill to see the world, especially Old Ireland, where the Donohues came from. She says our people came from Cork. My father couldn’t care less about faraway places. Maybe when you’re away most of the time, it’s hard to think of anywhere but home.

  More mountains, now away from the sea, but my mother is explaining how the first European, meaning people like us, to set eyes on these hills and valleys was a man sent out by England whose name was John Cabot. I know from the history books that he was actually an Italian, but he worked for England and landed in Cape North, which is just before you get to Grandma Donohue’s, and he claimed the whole territory for the English King.

  Past Cape North and Sugar Loaf, the road proceeds into a narrow valley, and then, on the right, just below, there’s a farm belonging to the Buchanans before the dangerous bend in the road they call Buck’s Turn. My mother always mentions all the people who were killed
there.

  By now we are sitting up alertly, peering past the adults, waiting for the magical moment when the little valley ends. Sprawled before us, we see the flat expanse of church and hall, graveyard and houses in St. Margaret’s Village and, just beyond it, Bay St. Lawrence, where Grandma Donohue lives.

  My mother sighs at the sight. The ocean in the distance, the tidy fields, and the sudden mountain rising like a wall to block the wild Atlantic winds that rush across the Cabot Strait from Newfoundland. All exactly as she remembers it.

  My grandmother lives alone on the lap of the mountain. She is standing in front of her house when we arrive, wiping her hands on her apron and smiling broadly. She doesn’t get many visitors.

  Like the houses on MacIntyre’s Mountain, the old place in Bay St. Lawrence has no electricity or indoor plumbing. But it is more like the houses I’m familiar with, bright and clean, with large pictures hanging on the walls of people wearing strange clothing and uncomfortable expressions—and everybody speaking at once in English.

  Like my grandfather on the mountain, Grandma Donohue spent part of her younger years working in the United States. But while Grandpa MacIntyre carried a gun and never mentions his time in the States, she talks about it all the time—about working in Boston for a fancy woman named Mrs. Wing, who paid her two dollars a week to look after the household. Then going to work for a seamstress and getting a raise of fifty cents a week, which was a lot of money back then, especially if you were a girl from the northern tip of Cape Breton Island with nothing to offer Boston but your wit and stamina.