“Okay. So what was it like in a Japanese school?”
The best part of attending Japanese school, he explained, was learning how to speak Japanese fluently, and also learning judo. Judo was on the curriculum.
“No kidding. Judo on the curriculum?”
He swore that it was true. And to prove he knew judo, he flipped me over his hip and dropped me gently onto the grass in front of my aunt’s house.
I was amazed at how smoothly and how quickly he did it.
“Will you teach me that?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “We have all summer.”
All summer. Strange how it sounds like such a long time when you say it and it’s still spring and you’ve just turned fourteen.
You don’t think that Billy Malone was here for three years. And Marcel and Camille from Quebec were here for a whole winter. Your father was around for the entire time they spent building the causeway. And Old John—he’ll be here forever, but, still, he’s gone just the same. They’re all gone. And it was like a blink of an eye, the time you knew them. And now they’re gone, maybe never to be seen again.
We have all summer, says Ted. And he’s also going to teach me Japanese.
First word. Arigato.
“What’s that?”
“Thank you.”
“Arigato!”
“You’re welcome.”
He was going to teach me judo and Japanese. What could I do in exchange?
“Take me fishing,” he said. “And introduce me to girls.” He was serious. He even bought a second-hand car.
At first it was the judo I found important. I suppose I had realized for a long time that the world is full of perils, and most of them are in the form of people. Everywhere, it seems, people are preying on each other until the weaker ones are driven away or driven to some act of desperation. Once upon a time you never really paid attention. There was the odd whack on the nose or minor bullying by bigger guys like Angus L. Cameron. But the nose gets better and the bigger guys get mellower or move away. You slip back into a safe stupidity.
But gradually the picture changes, and you realize that the most important thing in life is to be able to take care of yourself. It’s another form of freedom.
It was purely coincidence, but shortly before Ted showed up, I’d sent away for a book on jiu-jitsu. I’d never heard of it before, but it seemed to be something I should know when I saw it advertised on the back of a comic book. And in spite of my mother’s warning that products advertised on the backs of comics are a whole lot less than they seem, this book was actually pretty good.
Ted didn’t think very much of it, though. Put the book away, he advised.
Then he offered to teach me a little bit of judo—just enough to stay out of trouble. That’s what it’s all about, he said. Staying out of trouble or, if that becomes impossible, getting out of a scrape with minimal fuss. Disabling the enemy, preferably without doing too much harm. Hurting people, he figured, just makes them more dangerous.
It made a lot of sense and, as the weather got warmer and the ground drier, we’d practise on the grass in my aunt’s yard. Ted gently disabled me by knocking me down or locking my arms behind me—simple, effortless stuff that never hurt.
“But what if you want to hurt someone?” I asked him once. “What if you have to hurt him?”
“You’ll have only one chance,” he said. “So you have to strike where there can be no quick recovery.”
“His balls,” I said.
“Oh no,” he said, laughing. “You miss his balls, you’re dead. And everybody has an instinct to protect his balls.”
“What then, if not the balls?” I asked.
He looked at me very seriously for a moment.
Then he said: “The eyes.”
“Show me,” I said.
“No,” he replied.
My father loved going fishing, but he rarely ever caught anything, so I hardly ever went fishing with him. He liked going to lakes and brooks in the woods. I preferred the strait or the cove, where you always caught something, even if it was only a useless perch. Sometimes you’d catch the ugliest creature in the world, a sculpin. Even a hungry cat won’t eat a sculpin, they’re so ugly. So you catch them and rub their stomach with a stick and, for some reason, they fill up with air like a football. Then you throw them back and watch them drift away, struggling to get back under the water where they belong.
But mostly you try to catch what you can eat—mackerel or smelt.
Ted was interested in trout, which meant I had to take him places where I knew my father fished. We’d end up walking for miles through the woods, only to come home empty handed. Just like me, he gradually lost interest in fishing.
Then my aunt had to go to the hospital. I’m not sure why. She announced one day that she was going to St. Joseph’s in Glace Bay, and that she’d be gone for a while. And that meant Ted had to find another place to live, at least temporarily.
Sylvia Reynolds’s mother, Anita, took in tourists overnight but agreed to take a boarder for a week or two, so Ted moved in there. I guess it’s safe to say he developed another interest. Sylvia was almost seventeen.
One Friday evening when my aunt was in the hospital, Ted announced that we should go to visit her. Saturday morning, he said, he and I and my aunt’s boys, Barry and Blaise, were going to Glace Bay to see her. Glace Bay is even farther away than Sydney, and you have to pass through Sydney to get there.
“Better still,” he said. He wanted to see Sydney.
That was the thing about Ted. He wanted to see everything. He wanted to feel everything and eat everything. He wanted to go everywhere in the world. And he kept telling me about the parts of it he’d already seen. And the part he mostly wanted to see and experience was America.
“The States?”
“Yes,” he said. “New York.”
We’d go to the movies in town, and he’d sit in a trance, his eyes wide and this little smile on his face, watching the Americans with their cocktails and their cars and their cities and their wars. His excitement was catching.
He was in love, he said, with an American movie star. Jean Simmons.
“Who?”
“Jean Simmons.”
“I never heard of Jean Simmons.”
“You never heard of Jean Simmons? The most beautiful woman in the world?”
“Sorry.”
On the way to Glace Bay, he took me and my two cousins, who saw even less of their father than I saw of mine, to a restaurant and insisted that we order something more interesting than the hot chicken sandwich.
“Like what?”
“How about Italian spaghetti?”
“What’s it like?”
“Delicious.”
And it was.
And, afterwards, we visited my Aunt Veronica, who looked pale and uncomfortable in the sickly smelling room, with nuns peeking in the door to examine the exotic strangers, and the smell of city on the breezes that were pushing starchy curtains up against us where we stood around the bed.
Something about the hospital made my stomach feel queasy. Or maybe it was the spaghetti. In any case, we weren’t allowed to visit very long. The nuns eventually came in and shooed us out. And we were soon back in Ted’s car, driving around like tourists and taking pictures of Glace Bay and Sydney. And then, when it was dark, Barry and Blaise fell asleep in the back seat, and he told me about the world as we drove the twisting road back home.
Next year, he said, maybe we would go together to see New York—the most interesting place in the world.
“Sure,” I said.
“We’ll drive there,” he promised.
And we would eat Japanese food, which is the most delicious food anywhere.
Had I ever heard of sukiyaki?
“No.”
“Oh, wow. Wait until you eat sukiyaki. Yum yum.”
“How long will it take to drive to New York?” I asked.
“Oh, days and days. But yo
u’ll be helping with the driving.”
“But I don’t drive.”
“Oh, but you’ll learn by then,” he said.
And I suddenly realized with a sinking heart: he doesn’t even know how old I am. He doesn’t realize that I’m just fourteen. I won’t even be able to get a driver’s licence for two more years. And where will Ted be by then?
Sylvia was probably the first girl I ever knew, apart from my sisters and Annie MacKinnon—Ian’s sister. Sylvia was almost three years older than I was, so you’d notice her and pay attention. Even though she was a lot older, she always seemed to treat me as if I mattered, and I guess that made her special. Plus, she was pretty, and she’d started looking grown-up ahead of most of them.
It didn’t surprise me that Ted liked Sylvia. She’s very direct, without being forward, and likes to make you laugh. And it didn’t surprise me that she liked him. He was good-looking and funny, and he always wanted to be going somewhere interesting and had a car. Cars are important here because everything is far away.
I’d drop by to see him when he was boarding at her place while my aunt was in the hospital, and they’d be carrying on and laughing. And soon Sylvia was going on drives with us, to movies or the beach. And afterwards, instead of saying good night and going right in, we sat out in Ted’s car and talked and joked. Sylvia and I explained everything about the place to Ted, and there seemed to be no end to his curiosity.
Sometimes he told us about home, but never much. It was as though he didn’t think where he was from was half as interesting as where he was at any given time—the exact opposite of most people here. No matter where you are, when you’re from here, you just can’t stop talking about home or longing to be there.
I got the impression that Ted’s family was important and that his father was influential. I never really understood why it was important to see a disaster like Hiroshima. Only once, very briefly, he talked about it and what the atomic bomb did to all the people there.
And we were all quiet for a while, waiting for more of the story. But he wouldn’t talk about it anymore, and I knew we shouldn’t ask.
Ted usually loved to talk about everything. But as the summer advanced, I noticed that he enjoyed talking about Sylvia more than anything.
Near the end of June, he asked me if I’d go on a double date with him and Sylvia.
I wanted to tell him I’d never been on a date. The word made me uneasy. It was like driving—something I looked forward to, some day, when I was ready.
But, remembering his expectations based on assuming I was more grown up than I really am, I didn’t want to disappoint him again.
“A date,” I said, trying to sound casual.
“A double date. Two couples.”
“Couples? Where to?”
“The prom.”
The prom was in town—a dance for people leaving high school and moving on to jobs or higher education. Going to a prom wouldn’t have ever crossed my mind even if I was graduating.
“I don’t think—”
“Come on,” he said. “It will be fun.”
“And who will you be taking,” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
Sylvia lined me up with Alice McGowan, who, like Sylvia, was graduating from grade ten. Alice is the daughter of Mr. McGowan, the storekeeper. Mercifully Alice, even though she is older, was as green as I was, and we mostly spent the night watching Ted and Sylvia dancing up a storm.
One day he asked me if I knew how to get to Lake Horton.
“Of course I do.”
“I hear there’s trout in Lake Horton.”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s go fishing in Lake Horton.”
It’s a couple of miles out back, and he wanted to walk. That’s the other thing about Ted. He was always wanting to walk places, which I found peculiar for someone with a car. Ted was always talking about exercise and staying in shape and being healthy. Apparently walking is good for you.
“Okay. We’ll walk.”
It seemed to take forever and, after all the effort, we didn’t even get a bite. I think it was on the way back that I noticed stakes driven in the ground along the side of the dirt road.
“I did that,” he announced.
I remembered. He’s working as a surveyor. Working on the new Trans-Canada.
“How long…” I asked. “How long before you’re in the village?”
“It won’t be long,” he said.
We just walked on then in silence for a change.
Our biggest expedition was around the Cabot Trail. It’s at the very north end of the island, a gravel road that crosses at least five different mountains and, in places, hovers dangerously over the sea. He heard about it in Halifax. And when he heard that we had a grandmother living almost on the trail, he wouldn’t stop talking about it until my Aunt Veronica told him he should go and take me and Barry, and we could all stay at Grandma’s.
Driving there, I was trying to imagine Grandma Donohue’s reaction to her first Korean, and I guess I was surprised that she didn’t seem to notice he was at all different from all the other people she knows. She was on the front verandah waving when we drove up her lane, glad as anything to see us. We were hardly out of the car before you could smell the cooking, and it was as though Ted had grown up there in Bay St. Lawrence, the smile that came over his face at Grandma’s welcome and the aroma in her kitchen. Grandma Donohue is a wicked cook.
Of course she doesn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, and that was pretty fascinating for Ted, who, I was convinced, came from a pretty fancy upbringing back in his own country. It wasn’t that he looked down on us for being poor. He just seemed genuinely interested in the fact that an old lady could live alone in a clean, tidy old house without being connected to any of the power lines and water-lines and pavement that people nowadays seem to think are necessary for survival.
And I was thinking: wait until I take him to the mountain; wait until he meets my other grandmother, if he thinks this is old fashioned.
He kept asking questions about the winter, and how much snow they get. And Grandma pointed out that she doesn’t spend the winters down there anymore because she moves to Port Hastings to help out at our place now that my mother is teaching school. The fact is that she’s been coming up for winters for years now, well before my mother went back to teaching. But Grandma is proud. She wouldn’t want anybody thinking that a bit of snow would leave her helpless. Or that she stays at our place in the winter without being useful to the house. If anyone has any doubt about how proud she is, watch her at Mass sometime, standing through even the longest Gospels when other older folk are giving up and sitting down. Grandma makes a point of sitting near the front, and she’ll stand and sit and kneel with the best of them—even standing through the entire Passion, which takes the priest forever to get through, on Palm Sunday. She’ll stand there in her black coat, with her trim black hat on top of her head, straight as a soldier. That’s what Grandma Donohue is like.
And after supper, when she lit the lamps, she explained to us how, when she was young, they had only candles for light, and how making candles out of tallow was one of the skills she learned when she was still a little girl. And that got her into the real old times—people struggling to keep food on the table day by day. And Ted sitting there, taking it all in as if he was at a movie.
Shortly after dark, we all went to bed. I had the lounge in the kitchen, underneath her clock, which has to be the loudest clock on earth. Or it just sounds that way because of the unusual silence in a house that doesn’t have electricity running through wires or water running through pipes. The clock is like one of those piledrivers they used building the canal—pock, pock, pock—with nothing but pitch-black silence in between the pocks. Anyway, I couldn’t get to sleep, so went out and sat on the verandah step for a while. It was just as noisy there, with the sound of crickets and other nighttime creatures squeaking and squawking in the darkness. Every now and then a dog or the rattle o
f a distant car. Then the black silence again, and underneath the darkness, like a thick blanket, the deep, deep rumble of the ocean rolling against the rocky shore half a mile away.
Eventually I got sleepy.
The next day, after breakfast, we toured around, and Ted loved looking at the sea. I explained that the next stop to the east of where we stood was Newfoundland, and after that, Ireland, where the Donohues all came from long ago. And he wanted to know how they got here, and I had to tell him I don’t know for sure. It was because they were so poor they had to leave the Old Country, and, while they were still poor over here, at least they didn’t have people persecuting them just because they were Irish.
He didn’t think Grandma Donohue sounded Irish, and I had to admit I wasn’t sure what she was. Her name, before she was a Donohue, was Capstick, and they came up from the States after the American Revolution. And Grandma Donohue was very partial to the States and worked there once when she was a girl. And she loves to talk about it. Something else they had in common, my grandmother and Ted—their affection for America.
Coming home in the evening, he noticed a contraption on the top of Money Point Mountain, and I told him I thought it was a radar base.
That got his interest, and he wasn’t going to rest until we went up to look at it. So we drove up, but you couldn’t get very close because of the high fences and the warnings about what would happen if you trespassed. So we had to head back, and Ted decided it would be boring to go back on the same road and we should find another way to go down the mountain. I said I thought the road looped around and connected to another road that goes down and comes out near Grandma’s.
“Great,” he said.
And sure enough, the road soon crested the top of the mountain, and you could see the countryside sprawled out below, all the little farms and the tall white church in the distance. And the ocean glittering, with the sun dropping towards the western horizon.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 30
