The man who was hit just slumped to the ground and stayed there on his knees, as if he was praying.
I could see blood coming out of the corner of his mouth and snot running out of his nose. And then another terrible sound—him whimpering like the dog. And then sobbing and trying to talk. Something about being a returned man, which I know is somebody who was in the war.
It was the sound of him crying, I think. And about him being a returned man. And the blood and the snot. I could feel my knees wobbling and, to keep from falling down, I started running and didn’t stop until I had to throw up.
I have never seen my father frightened. And I have never seen him cry.
I’m not as bothered when I see women going after people with their Irish up. Women usually don’t try to kill people—just humiliate—and as bad as that might be, you get over it.
Suddenly my father was home for good, but we didn’t make much of a fuss about it. For one thing, he’d been home for good before. For another, his coming home wasn’t always a hundred percent good thing.
I remember other times, and my sisters, who are little girls, going, “Daddy’s coming home, Daddy’s coming home,” hopping around and squealing the way little girls do when they’re excited. And I, waiting to see exactly what would happen when and if he did show up. And more often than not, a car with an Ontario licence, or Quebec or Manitoba, stopping in the lane that ran by the house. And men inside talking, just sitting there in the car, with me wondering why he wasn’t getting out.
And then, finally, he’d clamber out, and they’d fetch the canvas duffel bag from the trunk and the little suitcase he called his grip. And he’d straighten up and come into the house with short, careful steps and a tight little smile on his face. My mother would be sizing him up while the little girls grabbed at his legs, and he’d look at me and ask how the old place was, and then I’d join the girls and grab him around the waist.
They’d be asking what he brought and he’d say “Nothing,” but later you knew he’d have something, and he’d eventually dig it out of the grip and, if he’d passed through Toronto or Montreal, it would be special.
Once he brought me a Toronto Maple Leafs ring, even though I know he wasn’t interested in hockey. I wasn’t very interested in hockey either, and I lost the ring the day after I got it. But it was exciting to get it and to have it, even for a little while.
It seems he was always coming home for good, especially the time he came home hurt and wearing a cast from his belly to his neck. He’d have plans and projects, but you knew there were no jobs because he didn’t have any schooling. And so he’d buy a truck. But, unless there was a big job like paving a road, there was never enough work for the truck because he didn’t have any politics. Then you’d see him around the house a lot—just sitting at the kitchen table, drinking instant coffee and smoking cigarettes and staring into space. And, sooner or later, he’d always have to go away again.
So it was, even after we moved home from Newfoundland, where I and my sister Danita, who is the older of the two girls, were born. The war was over, and he was finished in the fluorspar mine and determined to start fresh back where he came from. He’d get some trucks and start up a sawmill on MacIntyre’s Mountain. We’d live in the village, happily ever after. This was the plan.
I wasn’t very old—two or three. But I still remember things from that time. My Uncle Francis getting out of a taxi on a rainy day wearing a sailor’s uniform and dragging a big duffel bag like the one my father has for his mining gear. And bringing gifts for me: a toy penguin and a shot glass. And I remember them all giggling about the shot glass, and hiding it because Father Gallivan arrived suddenly for a visit. And an old brown house with electric lights. And my mother one evening catching a snake just as he started swallowing a toad. And though she’s terrified of snakes, she went after that one and beat it to death with a stick. And, afterwards, this snow-white toad came crawling out of the dead snake and hopped away to start life all over again, just like us. And my father being at the mountain a lot, trying to make a go of it. And us moving into the old tailor’s place and not having electricity anymore. And noticing for the first time how the grown-ups change and forget you’re there when they’re talking quietly about money and mortgages and Mr. Walker, who is the banker in town. And the way they were talking, you couldn’t be sure whether Mr. Walker was helping us or trying to put us in the poorhouse.
And my father disappearing sometimes, then showing up with fish eyes and his tight little smile and the strange sour smell. And I’d realize that this was probably the look and smell of his anger and his sadness.
This time would be different, I suspected. At the peak of the canal project, there was enough work to keep the truck running day and night, and he hired somebody to drive it when he was too tired to drive it anymore himself.
That seemed to be when a lot of the trouble started. People he hired to drive the truck didn’t treat it as carefully as he did. Soon there were problems. Some of the problems were small, like having to clean spit off the door because one of his drivers chewed tobacco and wasn’t very good at spitting, and the wind was always blowing the juice back against the truck. Other problems were more serious—broken axles and drive shafts and hoists, and flat tires.
My mother would shake her head. Tobacco spit on the truck door! The handwriting is on the wall, she’d say. But he was optimistic. Once he got his one truck sorted out with a good driver, he’d buy another. And my mother warning that you can’t rely on anybody but yourself. And if he bought a second truck, sure, they’d be lining up to ruin that one too.
Once there was a rumour that Mr. Clough was interested in selling his store and retiring, and my father, maybe joking, said he should try to scrounge some money so he could buy it and become a storekeeper.
And my mother saying that would be Just Great—him the storekeeper, and feeding half of out back and never getting paid for it.
To be successful in business, she’d say, you have to be hard-nosed. You have to have a head for business, which means looking people in the eye and demanding that they pay their bills on time. And when they don’t, you have to be tough, the way the old-time merchants were—even if it meant taking somebody’s property away from them because of their debts, which used to happen all the time around here. It was how a lot of the poor people ended up in Newfoundland, evicted from farms over here by merchants. But that was how certain people became successful and wealthy. And, in the long run, success and wealth weren’t worth turning into something like that, squeezing money out of poor farmers and fishermen. At the same time, you wouldn’t want to turn into a sheep, being fleeced by everybody who knew you.
She’d say: “Don’t think that Mr. Clough or Mr. Walker became successful by being nice to people.”
He’d just look at the floor, thinking about what she said, knowing in his heart that she was usually right about people.
What finally convinced me that this time was different was when he went on the wagon.
My father isn’t a big drinker. I know some big drinkers around here. You can always tell by the smell off them. There’s the sweet smell of wine, and the stale smell of sweaty clothes and the outdoors, where they often sleep. The drinkers wander around a lot on foot because they don’t own cars, and their houses are rarely places where they want to be for long. There’s a family of Frasers like that, living out back but walking to town several times a week to scrounge money and buy wine. and his boys. I heard in school that they’re distant relatives of the famous explorer, Simon Fraser, and they’re the way they are because Angus lost his wife, who was the boys’ mother, and they never got over it. You see them walking together out the Victoria Line, then towards town, quiet and shy. Once Billy Malone and I came upon them sitting in the rain, out back of Mr. McGowan’s store, eating raw baloney and drinking wine from a bottle.
My father says there’s no harm in them at all, except for what they’re doing to themselves.
; But there are others who wait until they get drunk to go after people they have grudges against, or just to work off their frustrations. I can hear them, and even see them sometimes, when there are dances in the school. I’ll stand in my dark room at the open window, listening to the music. Then, suddenly, I’ll hear them shouting and see the crowd gathering to watch, some people in the crowd urging them to go at it or go home. And one night I saw a grown man taking his shirt off to fight and looking completely foolish because it was summer and he was wearing long combination woollen underwear, and the crowd started laughing and the fight went out of him because of the mockery. He finally just walked away into the dark without the shirt.
My father never gets angry when he drinks. Sometimes he gets full of big ideas, and my mother just sits in the rocking chair listening and nodding her head. The big ideas usually involve trucks and sawmills. Sometimes he gets silly, and she gets angry. Sometimes he gets sad and stays away from home. Then he comes back, looking sorry for himself, and once, when he brought home pork chops as a peace offering, she threw them at him.
I think he went on the wagon after that.
I don’t know much about liquor because I don’t see it around very often. And mostly when I do, people are having a good time—as when my uncle Joe Donohue shows up with a bottle and, usually, some priest in tow. Or the Capstick cousins from down north. My mother and her sister Veronica will talk and sing and dance and carry on with them like teenagers. Or when my mother and father decide to have a treat, and they buy some beer and lobsters. And once, when my mother wasn’t feeling well and was losing weight, the doctor ordered her to drink stout, which is a kind of beer. And people would make jokes about catching whatever wonderful ailment requires drinking beer for the cure.
Then there are nights when you hear the dogs barking and a ruckus up the hill where people are drinking. There are two bachelor brothers up there living with the family of the third brother, and most of the time they’re completely normal and quiet. Then they get drinking and fighting and terrorizing the house.
One night there was a knock at our door, and it was the sober brother coming down to ask my father if he’d be good enough to go up to the house with him and help take a gun away from his brothers, who seemed determined to murder each other. One of them had grabbed a rifle, but the other had the bullets, and they were wrecking the house fighting to get control of both.
My father just put his coat on and, as he went out, he told me to go down and ask Angus Walker, who had the nearest phone, to call the Mounties—and I did. But Angus came back from the phone looking grim and said the Mounties refused to come. They knew the gentlemen in question and weren’t interested in their disputes.
This, of course, is a common problem: I’ve heard it said it’s dangerous to get in between fighting brothers, or a husband and wife, because of the strong possibility that they’ll forget their dispute and turn on yourself. Mounties obviously know these things, and it was my job to report back to the scene of the action.
My father and the peaceful brother were waiting for the cops, watching the fighting brothers through a window, and seemed surprised when I arrived.
I kept it brief because I was out of breath.
“They won’t come.”
So my father and the sober brother just looked at each other for a moment, then marched into the house. And through the window I could see each of them go after a drunken brother and, before long, they came out with the rifle and the bullets. And, suddenly, everything inside the house was quiet.
Another night I heard a racket up the hill at a different house, where Mary and Johnny O’Handley live. You’d hear the stories. Mary and Johnny didn’t get along very well. Johnny is kind of handicapped by a neck problem, which causes his head to be tilted to one side all the time. There’s a man like that down north, and they call him “Ten to Six.” They say that when old Johnny gets thirsty he’ll go out to the well with the dipper, take his drink, and then pour what’s left in the dipper back down the well. If Mary wants a drink, she can go out and get it herself. It’s what they say, anyway.
The problem is that Mary also drinks liquor and spends most of what she earns scrubbing floors for people in town on wine and chewing tobacco. You know Mary chews by the small lump in her cheek and the brown stain at the corner of her mouth. They say that, as she scrubs, she spits her tobacco juice into the scrubbing pail, and that is her secret formula for making floors look clean and shiny.
The night of the racket at O’Handleys’ you couldn’t tell whether it was a fight or a party, but the next morning I knew there was something wrong when I saw the priest’s car backing out of their lane.
It was the curate, Father O’Brien, who was filling in for Father Doyle, who had died on New Year’s Day.
It had rained during the night and, for a day in February, it was mild. But the rain left the hill a solid sheet of ice. I was at the woodpile and, when Father O’Brien was coming down the hill, I saw his car suddenly begin to slide sideways and slowly drift into the ditch in front of the school.
He climbed out and looked around and, I guess, spotted the truck at our place. So he came up and asked my father if he could pull him out of the ditch. My father agreed and got the truck going and put a chain on the priest’s car. Then he got a bucket of ashes from the ash pile beside the barn and spread it on the ice and got the priest’s car out without much trouble. When he came back to the house, he said that Father O’Brien had informed him that poor Mary O’Handley had passed away just that morning.
“Died sitting at her table,” he said, “with the breakfast in front of her.” Isn’t that the way life is? they were saying. We never know from one minute to the next.
Poor Mary, sitting at the table, all dressed for the day, with the breakfast in front of her, little knowing as she was preparing it that she’d never live to eat it.
Of course, it wasn’t long before the gossip started. And they’d stop talking about Mary when there were kids around. But I could hear it, even if I didn’t quite understand or ever get to the bottom of it. About a party and something happening to Mary, and people dressing her up in her good clothes and propping her up at the table and putting the breakfast in front of her to make everything look natural.
Anybody I asked about it would just look at me angrily and wonder where on earth I was hearing foolishness like that. So I stopped asking, but they continued to whisper about poor Mary. And I kept watching to see the Mountie’s car going up the hill and turning into O’Handleys’ lane. But they never came. And soon Mary was forgotten, like Douce Elizabeth Balhache and all the others who pass through here briefly.
From up by the camps now, when we’re collecting the bottles Old John saves for us, the causeway looks as though it has always been there. There is something quite natural about it, probably because the rock matches the craggy face of the cape from which it came. Early in January we saw a train creeping out over the causeway, and it was an amazing sight—like someone walking on water. It was moving carefully, puffing and shunting, the wheels squealing on the new rails. Old John said they were using the train to haul out more rails and ties and gravel, so they could finish the job and get the trains moving regularly from the mainland to Cape Breton. Big pressure, he said, because of the steel and coal that had to keep moving.
There’s a chain across the entrance to the new causeway to keep the cars off, but somebody cut it so they could drive out and be first to take a car across, even though Mr. Harry MacKenzie had already done that, claiming the fame for being first in the middle of December, just after they dumped the last load of rock. He even got his name in the paper for it.
But by the end of January, you’d see the occasional car creeping over. January 22 there was a little convoy—all twenty-five members of the Inverness County Council. They stopped at one point and got out to take pictures—a strange group of important men on an important mission. They were going over to inspect the asylum in Mulgrave, where, it seems,
most of the people are originally from Inverness County. According to the paper, this was “the first official group to cross the now famous structure.”
The officials made serious comments. There was nothing in the paper about the reaction of the poor people in the place they were going to inspect.
The paper is saying that the causeway will be officially open for everybody by April, but Old John doesn’t think so. Maybe by the end of the summer, he says.
Old John, whose real name is John Suto, is tall and thin and bald and he never seems to sit down. Even when we’re there talking, he stands as if he’s ready to disappear at any moment. Sometimes I ask him about where he came from, but he doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.
Mr. Malone, who also works for the Gorman construction company, says there’s a big story hidden in Old John’s past, and that just makes him interesting along with being nice. I figure the story has to do with where he comes from, and maybe the war and what happened afterwards.
Hungary, he says, is a sad place because there is no freedom—which, I understand, is because of the Communists, who even put a Catholic cardinal in prison. He seems angry when he talks about Communists. Then some days he seems happier. And one Saturday morning, when we arrived, he was sitting in his tidy little room in the bunkhouse reading a letter. He was so absorbed in the letter that we had to knock on the door, even though it was already open. He looked up, confused. Then you could see how happy he was. He said we should watch the papers because things were happening back home, and soon there would be big surprises.
Hungarians have been fighting outsiders for a long, long time, he said, nodding his head.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 18
