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Certain things happen, and it’s like they’re happening to someone else. And if you reflect for a moment, you might realize these are the moments that become big memories—these are moments without end. My wife says to me: “Of course you’ll have to go home for this.” And, unaccountably, I reply, “But we’re broke.” And she looks at me in disbelief.
“Broke,” says she. “Nobody is that broke.”
And then I remembered the envelope from the bank that I’d set aside carelessly, figuring it was just another gimmick. A little plastic card with my name on it and, in capital letters across the top: CHARGEX. The literature said it was a credit card. I could use it to buy things. Pay later.
“I could use that new credit card,” I said, half to myself.
“Of course,” she said. “That’s what those things are for—emergencies.”
Of course I had to go home. He was gone. Again. For good.
Checking in at the airport in Ottawa, I noticed that the man in front of me was Mr. G.I. Smith, the premier of Nova Scotia. We all call him Ike. When he had his boarding pass, he turned slightly to leave, but he noticed me standing there and smiled. We shook hands. He’s shorter than I am, a small pale man with a sad expression.
“I suppose we’re heading in the same direction,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“A little winter holiday?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “A death in the family.”
He studied me gravely for a moment, an expression of sympathy on his face. I knew it was sincere. People from the small provinces are like that. We’re all related by something—blood, familiarity, or need.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
“Yes. Thank you.” He shook my hand again.
“Someone close?”
“My father,” I said.
“Oh my,” said Premier Smith. “Oh dear.”
And his grip on my hand tightened.
It happens at the oddest times. A stirring in the memory, just below the threshold of consciousness. Not quite tangible, but the voice of the subconscious is saying you’d better pay attention—this could be important. You might wake up in the middle of the night and hear the rain pounding, and right out of nowhere a phantom thought pops into your head. You’re wide awake then. Did I leave the car windows open? Maybe you’re in a hotel, and you’d have to get dressed and go all the way outside to check. And probably find, when you got there, that you didn’t. And then be so annoyed that you can’t get to sleep anymore anyway. And then you’re stranded in a completely pointless mental exercise that turns into an agitated reflection on reflection—like standing between two mirrors. Infinite frustration.
I wept once. I was in the shower, with the water pouring over me, and I realized that, mingled in with the water streaming down my face, there were gushing tears. But I quickly stopped when I became conscious of the weeping and felt that my self-consciousness somehow cheapened the sorrow, made it false. Grief, considered, loses its integrity, I think. I could be wrong. But that’s how I felt at the time. There was something phony about standing in the shower weeping—something theatrical.
The other time I nearly wept was when my mother was telling me how he became fond of shopping after he’d been living at home for a while.
“Shopping?”
“Yes,” she said.
She’d arrive home from teaching school in town, and there would be groceries on the cupboard. The first time it happened, she couldn’t imagine where they came from. It didn’t occur to her that he’d just spontaneously go into McGowan’s or the new shopping centre in town and buy groceries. He hadn’t done that since they were first married and living in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland.
Of course, when she thought about it, it was like being newly married all over again after he got the new job with the Nova Scotia Water Resources Commission and was living at home all the time. Lots of men who spend a lot of time living exclusively among other men have a hard time with domesticity. But not him. He seemed to enjoy it—buying the groceries. He even quit smoking.
We laughed briefly at the irony. So much for quitting smoking.
It was talking about him enjoying shopping that caused the second sudden welling up. But I crimped it.
Driving to town, it was raining. Back at the house they’d all been talking about the wet winter. It was March, but not a trace of snow. Apparently it’s been like this since January. Much the same in Ottawa, I was able to report. And then everybody was interested in Ottawa, but I found it difficult to talk about Ottawa. The city and the Parliament Buildings and the newspaper offices and everything I did there suddenly seemed unreal. Come to think of it, nothing was real anymore. It was like the day Old John Suto shot himself. It didn’t happen, but it happened. It’s as if you acquire something that’s too big for the house, and it’s stuck in the doorway. Eventually you stop struggling to take it inside. You just drift off into something else.
That’s when the Cadillac popped into my head—something about a Cadillac suddenly seemed relevant. More than relevant actually. Urgent. Understanding something about a Cadillac might be the key to understanding everything about what was going on around me—maybe release me from this heaviness, open up those entrances that suddenly seemed too small.
It was probably the emblem on the back of the Cadillac in front of us that did it to me. What about the Cadillac emblem? I’m leaning forward, peering past the lazy, sweeping windshield wiper that leaves a filmy smear behind every pass. What is it about the Cadillac emblem? I sit back, close my eyes, do what I do back at the office when I’m having a hard time recovering some obscure piece of information. Focus.
The one thing I know is that it has something to do with the night we got loaded at the beginning of that wasted weekend. When was it? November? Just four months ago. Wow—only four months.
So I work back through what I can remember. He picked me up at the airport on the Friday night. Great cheer over the new job. All the good stuff he never had before—benefits and job security. And living at home. And how it was almost a self-assigning job, as we say in the newspaper business. It’s your performance that’s accountable, not the physical location of your flesh.
How rare it was, that conversation, even though, as I recall it, there was so much nonsense. The thing about the Cadillac must have fallen into that category. But I probably wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention because it was the fact of the conversation itself that was so significant. You see, I don’t think we ever had many conversations—father and son, looking each other in the eye and talking turkey. How things really are, and the whole point of it being that if things aren’t really as copacetic as they seem to be, then two grown-up men with a special bond between them can certainly combine their strengths and work things out. That is what those types of conversations are about, I think.
I remember, when I got back, telling Michael Cassidy, the guy I work with who is extremely bright and a fabulous writer, how we got loaded and talked our heads off for the entire evening and part of the next day. And Cassidy saying what a great experience that must have been. Like me, he hardly got to know his dad, who, in addition to being very active politically and therefore preoccupied with universal matters, died when he was quite young.
“Harry Cassidy, you must have heard of him.”
“Afraid not.”
“One of the founders of the CCF.”
“Oh, right. Himself and Wordsworth and…”
“Woodsworth.”
“Right, right.”
The Cadillac emblem is distinctive, like the coat of arms of some high-ranking nobleman in an important medieval family. Designed to impress, perhaps even to intimidate.
There was only one Cadillac around these parts when I was growing up, and it belonged to Gordon Walker. If I’m not mistaken, he got a new one almost every year, but it always looked exactly like the one he had the year before. I might be wrong about that, but I think I’m correct. Mr. Walk
er owned a bank. He’d be in the paper from time to time, and they’d always point that out. The only individual in the whole country to own his own bank.
What would that be like?
I know a little bit about banking now because, when I started at the job I’m in and confessed to Cassidy that I didn’t have a clue about any aspect of the world of finance and economics—which was what we’re supposed to be reporting on from the nation’s capital—he told me the quickest way to learn would be to read the report of the Royal Commission on Banking and Finance.
And I tried.
Maybe Gordon Walker’s name came up, and that’s why I thought of a Cadillac.
This is the trouble after you’ve grown older and found some common ground on which to meet your parents as equals—or as equal as they can ever be considering the peculiar circumstances of how you became associated in the first place. By the time you’re old enough to command their serious attention as another adult, you’re living away from them, and the only opportunities that arise for a meeting of minds are ceremonial—birth, marriage, death. Or they’re so rare that you don’t want to risk the quality of the time available by venturing into unknown areas of substance. Hence, getting loaded, either to keep things light or to lubricate the sticky places. The problem is that sometimes you can’t remember afterwards. You can’t separate the substance from the lubrication.
And then, much later, you’ll see something that triggers a memory that’s inaccessible. And it makes you crazy.
What about the damned Cadillac?
I know we talked a lot, that night in November, and that was rare. There are people who say that’s understandable. Your father is an itinerant—which means, rarely home. People like that are always visitors, and just how meaningful can a conversation ever be when it’s with a casual visitor?
But no, I say. Sure, he was a visitor a lot of the time. But there were long stretches when he’d be around, as when they were building the causeway.
Sure, and what would he be doing during those long stretches when he wasn’t a visitor?
He’d be working.
See?
We actually lived together, as men. Two summers in the same mining camps. But never talked.
When I went to university, I needed work for tuition money. First he got me on in Tilt Cove, in Newfoundland. Buck thirty an hour for underground labour—powder monkey for the miners in the drifts and raises and stopes and, when there was nothing else, down in the bottom of the shaft mucking out the sump or smashing large rocks on the grizzly with a sledgehammer.
We actually shared a room for a month or so before he moved over to the staff house. He was a boss. But he resisted living among the other bosses. He was always happier among the men in the bunkhouse. But then I moved in, and I guess he wanted me to have the room to myself. So he went over to the staff house.
Actually, it isn’t true to say we never talked. It was in Tilt Cove that we had one of two real “father and son” sit-down serious chats that I can remember. Neither of us had a drink on board. He was all dressed up and ready to go out on vacation for a week or two. Going home. Anything I might need when he was coming back?
“Bring back the mail,” I said, half joking.
It was after my sophomore year, and I was waiting for my marks at the time.
I figured that was going to be the extent of the conversation.
He seemed to be searching for words, and that was odd. Even though English was his second language, he was a really great talker. Lovely flow of language—and never a swear word I would hear.
“I want you to be careful,” he instructed.
Right away I think he’s talking about Itchy’s little saloon up above the commissary, where a lot of the younger guys spent all their evenings and most of their money. I figure he suspects I’ll be up there like a shot the minute his back is turned. And, actually, he isn’t all that far off the mark.
But he said: “Just keep in mind that, as far as you’re concerned, this is temporary.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that, and, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t so sure it was going to be so temporary. There was something I actually liked about working underground—something about the isolation and the unnatural surroundings. Just going down the shaft and putting in your day and coming back up in one piece gave me a feeling of accomplishment.
And I discovered that I loved blowing things up and had a natural comfort level around explosives. Before my first day was finished, I was like all the old timers, sitting on a powder box smoking cigarettes.
“I had actually considered…if the marks are as bad as I expect…”
“Nope,” he said. “This is temporary. You’re only passing through. You’ve got better things in store. Don’t risk them in a place like this.”
“Which means?”
Long pause then. And he was fishing out the package of Export Plain, trying not to look at me.
“Don’t do anything that doesn’t feel right,” he said at last.
“Okay.”
“Somebody asks you to do something you’re not sure about…don’t do it.”
Amazing, I thought. Here’s a boss telling you that if another boss asks you to do something dangerous or foolish, you’re supposed to tell him where to go.
I could have sworn that the hazel eyeballs kind of watered up, but they were quickly lost behind the cloud of smoke. Then he stood and grabbed the little travel bag he calls his grip.
“As Martin Angus says, ‘I’ll be back.’”
We both laughed then at the family reference to the weird cousin with the extraordinary brain and nothing else going for him.
“All brains and no common sense,” they like to say about Martin Angus.
It was after he came back from the holiday that he moved into the staff house.
Then there was the next summer.
I was stranded in Seven Islands—Sept Isles, as we say in Ottawa—when I ran out of money trying to find a job for the summer. Got the job all right, working on a railway project, but when they found out I was just nineteen, they told me to hit the road. You had to be twenty-one—something about being bonded.
I wanted to say: I’m not into bondage yet, but I was too busy panicking.
I pointed out that I’d worked underground in Tilt Cove when I was still seventeen, which is technically against the law, and everything was fine. The answer I got was, That’s their problem.
I pointed out that I’d been born in Newfoundland and that Newfoundlanders were supposed to be getting preference for jobs in Labrador.
The man doing the hiring studied me for a moment. “So call up Joey Smallwood and complain,” he said.
So here I am in Seven Islands and the money gone. Actually, I had enough to get a phone call to a place called Bachelor Lake in northern Quebec, where the old fellow was a shift boss at the time. It’s 1963. And he wired me enough money to get there. I went to work as an underground labourer, this time for a buck twenty-eight an hour.
Heading in the wrong direction, moneywise. But there wasn’t much of an alternative. After I was there about a month, an older fellow, a Scot named Jackson, suggested that he and I team up and head for Tillsonburg to pick tobacco. Hard work, he said. He did it every summer. But the harder you work, the more you earn. Not like this shithole. Plus, it’s nicer working in the fresh air.
I was rooming in the bunkhouse with my father. I told him about Jackson’s plan, and he lit a cigarette slowly, the way he always did when he was thinking.
“Whatever you think yourself,” he said, blowing out a match.
So I figured that was it. Tillsonburg, here I come. Fresh air, sunshine, and big bucks.
But shortly before the day, over a beer in Ikey’s store, which also served as the beer hall, not unlike Itchy’s back in Tilt Cove, he told me that he didn’t think it was such a good idea, going off to pick tobacco. We were playing cribbage at the time.
“I’m not so sure about this joker Jacks
on,” he said, studying his hand.
I found that shocking, because I’d never heard him critical of anybody, and of course I always figured there could be nothing bad from Scotland.
So I told him one of the reasons I wanted out was because I was having a problem with one of the other shift bosses, who seemed to have it in for me.
“Which one?”
“Charpentier,” I said.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said.
“Why doesn’t it surprise you?”
“Ah well,” he said, staring at the ash on the end of a cigarette. “It’s probably got more to do with me.”
And then: “I’ll have a little word with Charpentier.”
That was the second time that we spoke man to man. And Jackson headed off to Tillsonburg alone. From then on, all Charpentier did was scowl at me.
Another thing that made working underground so interesting was that I found university a drag. The camps were the opposite of the campus. I was attending university in Antigonish, which was fairly close to home but another world entirely. It was a huge challenge. I was never sure whether I was bored most of the time or if I was just slow at catching on. Sitting through endless classes and not hearing a word the professor was saying—as though I was deaf. Barely scraping by in the quizzes. Flat broke all the time. Walking around among all the bright young students from Upper Canada and New England with the arse out of your pants half the time. It wasn’t fun.
In the mines, you went over to the dry at the start of every shift and hauled down the basket where you stored your working clothes and, in five minutes flat, you were the same as everybody else. Rubber trousers, battery belt cinched at the waist, battery hooked on, and the lamp cable casually looped around your neck like the pros. After only a shift or two, I could smoothly attach the light to the bracket on the front of the hard hat without having to take the hat off, just like the old timers. One swift casual motion of the hand and the light was in place, as if you’d been doing it all your life. Sure, the older miners knew I wasn’t really as strong or as skilled as they were, but it didn’t matter. I was learning. Plus, I was Dan Rory MacIntyre’s Boy and, as one of them told me at Itchy’s one night the time he was out on his holiday, Dan Rory MacIntyre is the Best Goddamned Miner in Canada.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 32
