Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  Father Doyle is a friendly man, always asking questions. When we were talking once, I noticed he wasn’t much taller than I was. He wants to know what I will do when I grow up. I suspect he wants to hear me say that I’ll grow up to be like him—a priest.

  I measure my growth against the height of the pew, remembering with satisfaction that once I had to stand on the kneeler to see the sanctuary. I watch the men around me standing loosely, fingertips gently touching the wood on the top of the pews in front of them, some so tall they have to lean a bit. I stretch to my full height and note that I can now comfortably rest my elbows there.

  Soon I will have to decide what to do when I’m a man, leaning with my knuckles on the back of the pew.

  Because most of the people in Port Hastings are Protestants and we don’t have religion in the school, most Sunday afternoons Father Doyle drives a couple of nuns from town to Art MacNamara’s house, where they teach us catechism. The nuns teach us why God made us and how we are supposed to get to know Him and love Him and serve Him. They teach us about sin and the soul, which, in the catechism book, is like a milk bottle that turns black as we commit more sins.

  If you die in a state of mortal sin you go to hell. But I get the impression that you’d have to be an idiot to let that happen, because God is merciful and anxious to forgive even mortal sins for anybody who genuinely asks. It would be like starving to death when you have an open invitation to eat in a restaurant free of charge. The catch, I guess, is that you have to be a Catholic to get into the restaurant.

  At Mass, Father Doyle announces catechism classes and that there will be a mission soon. The mission is a special week of prayer and sermons, and we will attend as much of it as we can. Father Doyle says the mission will be led by a priest from the Oblates, a religious order that sends missionaries all over the world. The priest coming here has been almost everywhere, including the Holy Land. I know it is in the Holy Land that the next big war might start, according to the newspapers and Grandma Donohue.

  And I know that we will get to the mission because my father is home and has a truck.

  Art Mac’s house, where we have catechism, is next door to the Manse, which now belongs to the retired minister Dr. Christie, who lives there with his wife and his sister Annie, who was never married.

  Sometimes on Friday nights during the winter Dr. Christie will invite the younger boys from the village to go to the Manse for entertainment. I thought at first it was another, trickier kind of Protestant catechism, but because there isn’t much to do here on a Friday night in winter, I went anyway. But there was no catechism, just games of checkers and tossing beanbags and talking.

  Then there were sandwiches and sweets and tea. Mrs. Christie read to us from a large book by a French writer named Victor Hugo. One part told the story of Jean Valjean and the bishop, and you could tell he was a Catholic bishop because it all happened in France. And that didn’t seem to bother anybody.

  Then one Friday night Dr. Christie introduced his sister Annie. She was a large and homely woman, and I assumed he was only being polite introducing her. Then he told us that she used to be a missionary teacher in China, and I saw her as a different person entirely. She has really been to China?

  She smiled, and her face came alive, and she talked about her experiences there and how she came to love the Chinese people. She clearly meant it, sitting there speaking softly, eyes shining and old hands folded in her lap. I was shocked. This simple old lady, living on the hill next door to the MacNamaras, had been to China. She talked about teaching in a place called Honan. She showed fancy needlework and small paintings that she brought home from there, and delicate wood carvings. She had loved it there, and loved the Chinese.

  So why did she leave? someone asked.

  She paused for a moment and sighed. “Things change,” she said. “The world is changing. China has changed.”

  I figured if somebody from here can love the Chinese people, then clearly we can love anybody. Nothing on the planet can be stranger and more mysterious than China and the Chinese, with their stern faces and strange clothing. But Dr. Christie’s sister told us about the ancient traditions of China and how the Chinese were civilized long before we were, and how young people in China respect their elders and never misbehave. How they were all polite and kind when she was there.

  I wanted to ask her about the war in Korea and the stories in the comic books where the Koreans and the Chinese who were on their side were “gooks,” treacherous and merciless in killing Americans (and Canadians). Could these be the same civilized people she was talking about?

  But listening to her, it was as though there was no war at all, and I didn’t have the heart to remind her. It occurred to me eventually that she didn’t think the war or the Communists mattered in the larger scheme of things, and that the war was almost over anyway. And, before long, we’ll hardly remember that we were ever at war with the wonderful Chinese people or that, if they’d had their way, they’d have killed Joe Larter, who lives next door to Johnny and Mary O’Handley, just over the road from where we were sitting.

  She sighed again and, after a pause, thanked us for listening to her stories, excused herself, and left the room.

  I remember going home afterward, and Jackie Nicholson talking about how boring it was and how the evening would have been better spent coasting on our sleds down the steep hill in Alex MacKinnon’s field.

  But that is one of Jackie’s problems. You ask Jackie about where he’d like to go some day, and he asks back why would you want to go anywhere?

  Jackie’s notion of being an adult is more of the same, except with your own money and a fast car. Then you ask him about where he’s going to get the money for the car, and he says there’s lots of time to worry about that.

  “The Man who made time made lots of it,” Jackie always says—which is as close as he’ll ever come to a religious comment.

  I think it really started with the stories from Dr. Christie’s sister, and the revelations about the Chinese and how clever and civilized they really were before the Communists took over. And then Father Doyle was talking about the mission and how the Oblates go everywhere, and the one who would come to preach to us had been working in the Holy Land, trying to turn Jews and Arabs into Catholics.

  And I remembered that I have cousins who are priests—two brothers, Father Murdoch and Father Jimmy, who are the sons of Grandma Donohue’s sister Alice MacLean. Father Jimmy joined the navy after he became a priest and got to the war in Korea, which, the way I see it, is also a kind of missionary work. When we visited Aunt Alice, when we were down north last summer, her house was full of postcards and souvenirs and photographs. Father Jimmy had even been to Ireland.

  Aunt Alice had a newspaper clipping, and Father Jimmy was mentioned, helping the doctors on his ship with casualties from the fighting in Korea. You could almost see him, in a movie inside your head, wearing his Roman collar and a navy uniform, his sleeves rolled up, and blood all over his hands and arms from working on the wounded.

  Until then I hadn’t really thought much about my future. Once I read a book about a newspaper reporter who solved a series of murders in a travelling circus, and that seemed interesting. But I could never imagine how anyone from here would ever get a job on a newspaper—unless it was working for the Bulletin, though I find the Bulletin boring.

  Then I read Two Years before the Mast. It was a great adventure, full of hardship and excitement. Even though I realize there are no more sailing ships, there was, for a while, no doubt in my mind about what I would do when I was old enough. I would run away to sea.

  Once my father asked me, half joking, “What are you going to do with yourself when we stop feeding you?”

  I didn’t want to mention running away, for fear his feelings would be hurt. Like Father Doyle, he seemed to have an answer in his mind already. I think most men would like their sons to want to be like them. So, half joking, I replied: “I’m going to follow in my father�
��s footsteps.” That is an expression I had read in books.

  He didn’t laugh, and I knew from the look on his face that he thought I was serious. But I couldn’t tell whether he liked the idea.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  It’s always difficult to know what he really thinks, and for quite some time after that it almost seemed like a half-decent idea—working as a miner. By then there was a lot of drilling and blasting going on all around the village. I’d stand and watch the men in their hard hats and rubber clothing, covered with white dust, and listen to the roaring of compressors and the jangling clash of steel boring relentlessly through rock. The sound, I realized, of change; the sound of making something happen—consummated, in the end, by the crash of an explosion and the invincible rock shattered, making way for something new. You can go anywhere to work as a miner. I even know of men from here who work in the Congo, which is in Africa. Miners are probably in China too, if the Communists allow it.

  But I wasn’t sure. I remembered the cold, foul wind billowing up out of the shaft in Stirling, and men laughing and joking one day and then, too soon after, sitting alone in a cookhouse in the middle of nowhere, old hands wrapped around mugs of coffee, sad eyes examining the smoke from cigarettes. Or dead, some small stranger inheriting their skates.

  Each evening for a week we attended the mission. The visiting Father was young, and he didn’t look like a priest or sound like one. He didn’t speak like Father Doyle or the nuns or even Miss Annie Christie. He smiled and laughed a lot and told of his experiences in foreign places. I kept waiting for him to tell us how he spread the Gospel messages and the Word of Jesus among the unbelievers, but he never did. I kept waiting for Sin and Penance and the Sermon on the Mount. But when he talked, it was about the world and how all the people in it are unique as individuals and fascinating in their cultural differences. Miraculously, all are one and part of the same mysterious design—the precious creatures of an all-powerful and infinitely good God.

  Listening to him was breathtaking, and, as I lay in bed afterwards, his words came back in complete sentences and paragraphs, bringing exotic images with them. One image that stood above them all was of people who owned nothing—not a thing but the rags on their bodies. People who lived in the direst material poverty, but who wanted to know the Truth about the world and about Eternity because they knew that somehow, somewhere in the Truth, they’d find Hope and Happiness. The Word was the truth and it was made of flesh, like me. And everything started to seem logical.

  One evening he explained how there’s a kind of war on—a war for the hearts and souls of people, a war between the Truth and the False Promise of material progress. Godless Communism was only the most conspicuous of the problems challenging our immortal souls. The world was rotten with problems, largely caused by Greed and Violence. I think it was then that I knew: to be a missionary was to be everything—a teller of the truth; a warrior against the Communists; but, best of all, a traveller in a world of endless mysteries and fascinating conflicts. I remembered Miss Christie’s sadness and the mission Father’s anger, but only for a moment.

  I couldn’t wait to tell my mother. She didn’t say anything at first—just looked at me with a serious expression on her face.

  “That would be wonderful,” she said. But her eyes were full of questions.

  My father was listening, studying the floor, saying nothing as usual. I tell nobody else, except my dog. We’re sitting on a stone near the edge of the cemetery, where it overlooks the strait. The racket of the construction is now inescapable. The gigantic Euclids are clearly visible, rumbling across the face of the jagged cape in patient convoys, dumping massive chunks of granite into the rushing water. According to the Bulletin, the causeway is now two-thirds across. The world is that much closer.

  I tell the dog: “I think I’m going to be a missionary.”

  In case he doesn’t understand, I point across the water. Over there, I tell him, beyond the cape, there is a troubled, complicated world, and people are waiting for the Word. He seems to understand, and we both watch another Euclid backing carefully to the tip of the approaching causeway.

  Then he places his chin on my knee, a sad expression on his face—thinking about a future that doesn’t have him in it.

  4

  HOME FOR GOOD—AGAIN

  Some of them have been standing here since four this afternoon, huddling against the dampness and the December chill. They are mostly adults and don’t move around much. Jackie Nick and Billy Malone and I, because we are kids, create our warmth in frantic spurts of action. Billy digs Jackie in the ribs or grabs my cap, and a chase ensues, or the dog and I will race back and forth until we are all warm and breathless from the running and laughing. The grown-ups regard our foolishness with a mixture of contempt and envy.

  The causeway started under a shroud of fog and a cold drizzle in September two years ago. It now seems destined to finish in the same kind of weather, except perhaps a little colder. The drizzle is more like sleet. It is December 10, 1954. At least fifty people have gathered for the historic moment, the undoing of the strait that nature carved in the landscape incalculable centuries ago.

  Among the curious, I suspect, is a newspaper reporter from Sydney. Every few feet of the causeway progress, it seems, has been noted in the papers by story or picture or both. Now it’s the moment they’ve really been building up to. There must be reporters around. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a reporter at a time like this, the eyes and ears of all the people who can’t be here—almost everybody on the planet—even for people from just a few miles away who are sick or busy or uninterested or hostile to the idea that Cape Breton will cease to be an island in the pure sense of the word.

  Oh sure, there will be the canal, but Jackie Nick points out that there will be a bridge over the canal. Billy, who isn’t even from here, argues that there will still be a crack of space at either end of the bridge because it will be a swinging bridge, so we will still, technically, be on an island. And that reminds me that I read in the paper that the big shots at something called the Canadian Board on Geographical Names have decided that Cape Breton will still be an island after the causeway, no matter what anybody says. Jackie scoffs, the way he does at any argument he’s losing.

  Even though there’s a want on him, Jackie tries to sound like a grown-up. You would never mention Santa Claus anywhere near Jackie. He even argued, to the point where you felt like slugging him, that there’s no such person as Roy Rogers—until he saw him for himself on his new television set. He and his grandmother got the TV after they were moved off the point and their old house went up in smoke.

  There’s a man in an overcoat and hat, and he’s carrying a large camera and a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. He looks like the pictures of newspapermen I have seen in magazines. He has curly black hair and resembles the Syrian my mother sent away from our door one night. I try to pick out the reporter. I think I know which one he is, if only because there is one large, soft-faced, bareheaded man who shivers a lot and has frequent chats with the photographer. Now and then they wander off towards the canal, where the cars are parked, and return obviously more cheerful.

  We can no longer see the trucks as clearly as before, but we can hear them distinctly as they back to the edge of the causeway, now no more than thirty feet away, and unload the crashing, tumbling rock into the racing strait. The water has been moving swiftly for days now, as if in a race to escape the confines of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in a final dash towards the freedom of the infinite Atlantic before this ancient waterway is closed forever.

  We’ve been waiting for this day for months. In late August, Mr. Harry MacKenzie, one of the big shots on the causeway project, was in the newspaper saying that the most difficult part was finished.

  “The last couple of hundred feet will be a piece of cake,” he said.

  As if in response, almost instantly the tides ripping through became more difficult. They snatched
a passing freighter and hurled her against a rock, causing significant damage. That story led to another newspaper headline announcing what we all knew already: Tide Through Narrowing Causeway Gap Now Hazardous.

  But, clearly, not everybody reads the Victoria-Inverness Bulletin. Just ten days ago, a Norwegian freighter on its way to Prince Edward Island for a load of potatoes ran smack into the causeway, even though the strait has been officially closed to shipping for nearly a month.

  This morning a little motorboat fought its way through, after three tries, to become the last vessel in history to pass through the strait the natural way. I don’t think the people on board were going anywhere in particular; they were just trying to make a name for themselves by being the last to do something—the way people try to become famous by being the first, say, to climb Mount Everest. I’m not sure I understand this hunger to be noticed, even though it seems to be fairly common. I get nervous when I’m noticed because of all the people waiting to pounce on my mistakes and failures.

  I’m sure the little boat will be in all the papers tomorrow, struggling through the churning, frothy gap between here and there.

  All year, just from watching, I could tell that the strait was becoming moodier, more dangerous. And, as if to assert its awesome power, the shore this spring was littered with thousands and thousands of dead billfish. You knew there was something unusual by the flocks of screeching gulls, wrangling as though there weren’t enough dead fish to go around. And all you could see, from the tip of the point to the old pier, was the silvery harvest cast up on the rocks and gravel for no apparent reason.