Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  And there was the Coffin story. It was particularly interesting because I knew somebody who knew him. And there was something familiar about him. He was from Quebec, but the way they talked about him he could have been from here. A poor fellow always out on the edge of things, struggling to get ahead, but never getting the breakthrough. A fellow from the middle of nowhere with a case of perpetual bad luck.

  A couple of days after he went back to jail, Coffin’s lawyer asked the court to postpone the hanging which, after all, was only days away. It seems that only one of the nine judges in the Supreme Court made the decision not to listen to his argument that he’d been railroaded by the police and lawyers and judges and politicians in Quebec. Some of the other eight were indicating they might have made a different decision. Coffin’s lawyer wanted a chance to talk to all of them.

  Then I read that the hanging was postponed until October 21.

  Maybe the lawyer wasn’t such an idiot after all.

  Reading the paper every day made me realize, probably for the first time, that everything that happens, no matter where, seems to affect everybody on the planet. I suppose I should have known that just from the war veterans Danny MacIntosh, John MacDougall, and Joe Larter, who got sent off to places they probably never heard of for reasons I’m sure they never really understood. I always thought they went to the wars because they needed the work or, perhaps, because they wanted a real adventure in some exotic place. Now I was coming to see things a bit differently. Wars are about people trying to crush weaker people for selfish reasons. And once they start, nobody knows where they might finish up—which is why people, even from the middle of nowhere, have to stand up and get involved. The way things were looking in about ten different places on the planet, it was a ninety-nine percent certainty that my turn was coming in the not too distant future. Of course I’d be a chaplain—a chaplain who shoots people if necessary.

  And so, every day, I’d be trying to catch up on developments in China or Argentina or Gaza or Cyprus among the latest revelations about Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds and Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend, who was a war hero and a divorcee and wanted to marry Margaret. I gather that being a war hero was a good thing, but that being a divorcee was a problem for everybody in England. One story would comment on how happy the princess looked. The next one would report that she was looking sad.

  Eventually Eddie and Debbie got married. Margaret and Peter didn’t.

  Figuring out China and Argentina and Gaza and Cyprus was easier than figuring out why there was so much commotion about the movie stars and Princess Margaret, who is very pretty and seems nice, even when she’s sad. I eventually gave up on Hollywood and royalty. I suppose, looking back, stories about adult romance had left a sour taste in my mouth ever since the scandalous magazine article about Dale Evans.

  It’s a good thing that priests don’t have to worry about any of that foolishness.

  Two things happened in the middle of October. First, Coffin’s execution was postponed again because the government in Ottawa decided to take a second look at the case. That was good news, and I couldn’t help thinking he was as good as in the clear. Second, the government in Halifax announced that an American company was planning to build a $35 million pulp mill somewhere in “the Canso Strait area.”

  The new mill would create five hundred new jobs.

  Surely, I thought, even a fellow from out back who had absolutely no schooling would get one of them—that we’d all be spared another experience with a sawmill.

  It was about this time that I noticed a pile of what looked like pulpwood in the field alongside the Green Path.

  He’s started cutting pulpwood, I thought, in anticipation of the new mill they were talking about in the newspapers. But, on closer examination, I noticed that the sticks of wood were longer than pulpwood and sharpened on one end like fence posts. This was mysterious. The field already had a perfectly good fence around it; Beulah could no longer go wandering the way she did before all the construction.

  The causeway was completed, but the village was still a mess of broken rock and mud. They were still working on new roads and the rerouted railway line. They seemed to be building large piers at either end of the new canal, which was why the dredge and tugboat were still around and why there were still men living in the camps.

  The fence posts were a mystery until I discovered my father with his shirt off one chilly autumn afternoon driving them into the ground with a heavy sledgehammer.

  I had just come back from delivering the papers, and my mother told me to find him and tell him that supper was almost ready. It was already almost dark. He didn’t see me at first, as he stood there on a wooden box swinging the heavy maul. I heard him grunt every time it whacked the top of the post. When he stopped to catch his breath, I asked him what the posts were for.

  He seemed almost pleased to answer—the way you are when you have a hard problem on your mind and suddenly get a chance to think out loud. He was talking to me, but I might as well have been the man in the moon.

  He had his serious face on and, with his hand outstretched, explained that the posts were the first step in building his new sawmill.

  He had it all in his head. He’d set the posts in the ground in two parallel lines and brace them so they’d be absolutely solid, like a miniature railway trestle. In fact, he’d then build a track on beams that ran along the top of the posts. A carriage, a little bit like a railway flat car, would travel back and forth on the track. The carriage would transport the log, secured by hooked clamps, back and forth past a large circular saw. When the log was adjusted precisely on the carriage, the saw would slice off whatever size lumber you wanted. Everything would be hooked together by cables and belts and pulleys, so all the power you needed was coming from one big engine.

  He explained how you’d make four initial passes by the saw, each one taking off a slab of bark and wood, until the log had four smooth flat sides. Then you’d carve it into boards or planks. Everything had to be perfectly level, he said, because people need all those boards and planks to be cut exactly according to “specifications.” In other words, he said, you can’t have a two-by-four that’s two-and-a-sixteenth-by-four-and-an-eighth, or a bunch of boards that are all different shapes and sizes.

  I pointed out that the boards in the walls of our house and the old places on the mountain seemed to be all different sizes. And that the planks and beams in the barn seemed to have been carved with an axe.

  He laughed. Things have changed, he assured me.

  Then he walked down to where he had a stake driven in the ground and said the trimmer would be down there. The trimmer was a little saw that would square off the ends of the lumber and, when it wasn’t doing that, cut up all those slabs into stove lengths for firewood.

  “Who would run the trimmer?” I wanted to know.

  “We’ll think of somebody,” he replied.

  I was prepared to help, but I had school and my papers to deliver. In any case, I got the impression that this project was so particular there wouldn’t have been much I could contribute to it even if I had the time. So, when I had nothing else to do, I’d just sit there on the cold ground watching, occasionally making a quick run down to McGowan’s store for nails or screws. Or home for a pail of water when he was thirsty.

  Watching him work there with his shirt off and his white skin glistening in the wintry air, it was like he was alone in the world. It seemed odd. Men rarely work alone, I’d discovered, from all the activity connected with the causeway. They were always in groups of two or three, and often more, helping each other, gabbing endlessly, making jokes, and always—you knew in the back of your head—struggling to impress one another. He was different that way.

  When I’d ask why he didn’t have people helping him, he’d reply that good help costs money and that everybody who wanted work already had a job at the construction or away in Ontario.

  And, anyway, there are certain jobs yo
u have to do yourself, he said.

  Sometimes it’s easier just to do it than explain it.

  I don’t think I could ever forget the sight of this solitary, ghostly man racing against the gloom, pounding long posts into the ground deep enough to avoid distortion by frost or instability from the rolling carriage and the heavy logs. Now and then he’d pause and take a drink from the pail or quietly roll a cigarette and light it and stare through the smoke at the sawmill that only he could see.

  During those pauses, we’d both notice the cars on the now busy road through the village. Before the causeway, you’d automatically look and, nine times out of ten, recognize whoever was driving by. It was different now. Almost all the cars carried strangers.

  Things are changing, he’d say. And maybe then he’d give me a wink and ask what I was thinking.

  And somewhere in the back of my mind I’d be remembering another mill and another time. And I’d try to think of something encouraging. But all I could think of were questions, and I already knew there are no answers for questions about what hasn’t happened yet.

  Having a car changed little things. It made surprises possible. They’d say, out of the blue: “Let’s splurge on a show.” And we’d go to town to see a movie—sometimes even on a school night. Going to Mass was much easier. Before, when he’d be away, it would be on the church bus. When he’d be home, it would be on the back of a large truck, which was great when the weather was fine but miserable when it was cold or wet. Now we had a new car, and we’d drive up to the church feeling just as fine as all the town people.

  Sundays would be for visits. Out to the mountain or people in Troy or Long Point or Glencoe. Usually somebody with a connection to the past or to mining or when my mother was a young teacher around here.

  Teachers, when she started out, hardly got paid at all. Maybe three hundred dollars for the year—and then only if the people in the school district could scrape together the money to pay her. The government paid nothing. The teacher would survive by getting free room and board, but it would usually mean moving around a lot from house to house. People didn’t have much to offer.

  My mother seemed to have made a lot of good friends like that, and we’d visit some of them on Sundays. MacMasters down in Long Point or Jack and Annie Catherine MacDonald in Troy, who were brother and sister. MacMasters’ place was fun because John D. had a store and kept foxes for a while, and because there were kids there who were older but friendly. And, in Troy, Jack, who was always called Troy Jack, would have beer bottles. And their mother reminded me of Peigeag on the mountain, even though she was twice the size of my grandmother. She’d be dressed in black and carrying on in Gaelic with my father.

  My mother told me that they tried teaching her to speak Gaelic when she lived with them, but that she learned only things that she couldn’t repeat.

  But she told me about one particular night when they saw an old neighbour coming to visit. Jack said to my mother, “Here’s a chance to try out your Gaelic.” I suppose she should have realized what was coming.

  He handed her a rolled-up newspaper and said: “When he comes in the door, you give him the newspaper and say ‘Bheil do thon salach a’nochd?’”

  She assumed that it meant something like “Have you read today’s newspaper?”

  She found out only later, when the old visitor almost died and the others practically strangled laughing, that it meant, “Is your arse dirty tonight?”

  She never seemed to mind them talking Gaelic there, and I noticed there was none of the tension you’d feel when people from out back came to the house and spoke quietly in Gaelic while studying the floor. My mother was actually living with Annie and Jack and their mother when she met my father. She was the teacher in the little Troy school, and one of the things they’d do to raise money for the school was put on dances. I think they met at one of those dances.

  It’s hard to imagine your parents meeting for the first time at a dance or how they might have acted with each other then. Getting married seems to be like two people passing through a door into another personality. Sometimes I think I understand when I hear them laugh at some private joke or when they’re playing cards. The house is never so comfortable as when they’re sitting quietly at the kitchen table playing cribbage, their cups of tea and cigarettes alongside, teasing about bad plays or bragging about good ones. But mostly they’re talking quietly about important things and, sometimes, not talking at all. That, to me, is marriage. I can’t imagine their first encounter in the little school in Troy, when they had nothing in common to talk about. I’ve never seen them dance.

  I know it’s wrong, but you always think of them as they are now, older and serious and often worried. But I’ve seen photographs of when they were young and laughing all the time. There’s one of my father in Montreal, and you’d swear he was a city man, walking down a busy street with his friend Archie Dan MacMaster and a young woman I don’t know—all of them looking like they’re in a movie. My father is wearing a fancy overcoat and a big hat with a floppy brim. Archie Dan, who is now the barber in town, is wearing an overcoat and little glasses that make him look like a professor. And they’re just hard-rock miners, out of the north country for a little holiday.

  Then there’s a photograph of my father and Annie Catherine standing together on the running board of a big old car, and I know that it was his, something he brought home from Quebec where he was working at the time and earning good money.

  I look at that picture and think of how successful and complete everything seems to be. He’s all dressed up with a fancy car, and Annie Catherine in her apron, her hair hauled back in a bun, looking like the country girl who is embarrassed by all the attention from this good-looking successful man from away. If you could read his mind, I’m sure it would be saying: I’m Somebody; I’ve got it made now; I took a chance…I left the mountain and went away; I got a job and worked hard; prosperity is close at hand…just a matter of working longer and harder; I’ve arrived.

  It’s like he’s thinking: all things are possible, no matter who you are or where you’re from. It’s like he still believes all those things they tell you when you’re a kid. Get up early. Wash your face and comb your hair. Work hard. Respect others. Say your prayers and obey the laws of heaven and earth. Sooner or later you’ll have it made.

  He hasn’t yet learned about the one thing you can’t control.

  Luck.

  There’s a monastery on the mainland. I’ve heard about it many times. Older people would go there for retreats, which are weekends of prayer and silence. Before the causeway it was a difficult trip: to town, on the ferry, and then a long drive over the cape and along the twisty road to Antigonish. Now, with the causeway, it’s simple—especially if you have your own car. One Sunday afternoon that fall they announced we were going over to see the monastery.

  It’s run by Augustinians, mostly men from Europe, and it’s been there for years. Long before the Augustinians, back in the early 1800s, the Trappists started the monastery to serve Acadian settlers and Indians and try to convert a few dozen Protestant Negro families living in the area. It was closed for a while but has been operating again since the thirties.

  I can’t think of a quieter, more peaceful place on the planet. Tree-lined lanes and ivy-covered brick buildings and barns. Cultivated fields and indifferent animals munching and resting. A cool, sunny fall day with trees that seemed to be on fire, light shadows from curdled clouds that hung low, trees so dry that when the wind puffed on them you could hear the scratching as they rubbed against each other. People were singing somewhere, a sad holy song sung slowly in a large room. Though it was Sunday, there was a monk on a tractor hauling manure, and it had the rich rank musk of life itself. He smiled a kind of shy smile as he drove by, and I was suddenly bursting with what I guess is happiness. The day we were there, looking back through the peephole of memory, seems like the last relaxing day in my life—at least this part of it. And that’s kind of sad becau
se it was probably one of the most hopeful days I can remember.

  We got out of the car and started wandering around, and almost instantly everybody seemed adrift. The girls headed for the barn. I could see my father wandering in the direction of a pile of logs. I think the monks also had a sawmill. My mother was walking with her arms folded in the direction of the chapel.

  I saw a sign that said Way of the Cross, and soon found myself following a small group of strangers. They seemed to be making the Stations, which is a series of prayers in front of small shrines representing the various stages of Christ’s journey from the Agony in the Garden to the Crucifixion.

  I’d never seen the Stations outdoors before. They’re usually along the walls inside a church. There was something real about these, outdoors. After all, the real events—the Agony and the Scourging, the Carrying of the Cross and the Falling and the Crucifixion—were all outdoors, even if not in a place as holy and peaceful as this.

  And I found myself quietly praying that everything would work out and that, out of all the changes and turmoil around us, there would emerge, somehow, the kind of quiet stability that I was feeling right then and there.

  After the Stations, I found a little fountain that was, basically, a pipe connected to a spring. Standing there, it was so quiet that I could hear somebody telling someone else that the spring produced natural Holy Water. And that, if you drink it and say the right kind of prayer, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get what you wish for. People, she was saying, were cured right here, the same as at St. Joseph’s Oratory, Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré, and Lourdes.

  I waited until they were gone. Then I took one of the little paper cups they provided in a dispenser and filled it. A fellow from the mountain can use all the help he can get. The water was clean and cold, and I just knew, somehow, that everything was going to be okay in the long run.