by Anne Emery
Brennan had been in Glace Bay on an earlier visit with us back in the days of my separation from Maura; he did not see much of the town on that occasion. So Maura took us on a little tour, pointing out to Brennan various neighbourhoods that were known by numbers, and the pits — coal mines — with which they were associated. “We’re heading into Number Two” and “Now we’re in Number Eleven.” As we drove around the town, she identified streets that were Catholic and streets that were Protestant.
When we were on Commercial Street, she pointed out the Savoy Theatre. “That’s where Clan Donnie is supposed to perform on the fourteenth of this month. That’s less than two weeks away, and the plans are still up in the air as you can imagine. The other bands are, apparently, going ahead, but whether Sharon and Andy and Robbie and Ian can get up there and perform, well . . .”
Her voice came to a halt, and after a moment she cleared her throat and identified the next sight on the tour, making an obvious effort at normalcy. “There’s Saint Paul’s, where we sat on the fence.”
“Fence?” Brennan asked. “Are you speaking literally or metaphorically? Were you troubled by indecision about some arcane point of theology?”
“No, b’y. We used to sit on the low stone wall they had along the churchyard. We called it the fence. It’s where we all hung out as teens. The kids from Central and Morrison schools, the Protestants, sat down at that end, and the Saint Anne’s and Saint Mike’s kids, the Catholics, at this end.”
“What? Are we in Belfast now?” Brennan asked.
“No. We were all sociable with one another. No major sectarian tensions; everybody mixed fairly well. Many of us had our first drink at the fence. Kids who got the car for the night cruised by here. This was where the action was.”
She made a couple more turns and pointed out the Sons of Israel Synagogue and then said, “All right, I’m sure you two are anxious to move from the sacred to the profane, so I’ll dump you at Iggie’s Tavern.”
“Bayview first. We’re going to start there.”
“Start getting liquored up.”
No reply was necessary, or advisable.
So we got out and waved her on her way and met up with the members of Functus in the bar of the Bayview Hotel. We drank there for a while, then moved on to Iggie’s Tavern, where we drank some more and also got a bite to eat. We were all half in the bag by the time of the downbeat. But that was our usual modus operandi, so nothing to be concerned about. The place was packed. I would be in my accustomed role doing vocals, blowing the harp, and occasionally playing guitar. We opened with a slew of tributes: the first was a cry-to-heaven harmonica solo for Bonnie. Next was a tribute to Matt Minglewood’s tribute to the blues in Nova Scotia, “Long Way From Texas,” and then we did my own personal favourite, “You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had.” The crowd was with us, and we were in top form. We did a couple more instrumentals for Bonnie.
Just before our first break Charlie Trenholm, our drummer, embarked on a little unbluesy drum solo, to wild applause from the drinkers in the bar. Then we heard, “Hey, Charlie, if you need to get hooked up tonight, just let us know.”
Well, that could be taken in any number of ways, but Charlie had it in hand. “Davy?”
“Yeah!”
“Jesus, man, how long has it been? You living here now?”
“Yeah, came back home to the Bay, b’y.”
Charlie went up to the front mic then and said to the crowd. “You guys all know this fella?”
Most of those assembled had an answer. “Yeah, he put me in a cast from head to toe. But I’m all right now!”
“He delivered all four of my babies!”
“Brought my old man back from near death. To Doctor Dave Carlyle!” He raised his glass, and others joined the toast.
“He cured me of the clap! Girls, I’m so clean now you could —”
“In your dreams, Boyd!”
“Yeah, okay,” said Charlie. “So you all know Doc Carlyle. Well, let me tell you a little story about Dave. When he was in med school at Dal, way back when, he was a buddy of the three guys I was rooming with on Robie Street. I was at law school, and those guys were medical students. And they were way ahead of their class, let me tell you. Everybody in this room knows what it’s like to be hungover, right?” There were choruses of “oh, yeah,” “tell me about it,” “you don’t know from hungover,” et cetera.
“So what do you guys and girls do for a cure?”
There were shouts of “tomato juice,” “soda crackers,” “keep drinking.”
“You guys don’t have a clue. All these years you’ve been suffering unnecessarily through the cold, brutal morning after.”
“Too right,” Burke agreed, with a lifetime of brutal mornings behind him.
“That’s because you poor schmucks didn’t live with a bunch of med students. What they did, with the able assistance of Davy here, was, when I was sick and in agony the day after the night before, they hooked me up to an IV drip! Had a needle going right into my arm from a tube that was attached to a bag of fluid hanging there. I have no idea what they were dripping into me, but it was magic, boys!”
All heads swivelled to Doctor Carlyle, all eyes were wide, all wondering how they themselves could get on the program.
“If it wasn’t for Doc Davy and his eminent colleagues, I would not be standing before you today, the picture of health and the poster boy for handling my liquor. Paging Doctor Davy! Sir, I salute you!”
Everyone saluted the good doctor, and that called for one more tune before our break. We did “Good Morning Blues,” and we were all smiles as our drinks were refreshed, our fluids replenished.
I was all smiles myself until I peered out into the smoke-filled room and saw her. The severely cut straight bangs; the dark hair, almost blue-black now. The last time I had seen her it was a chestnut brown. Sabrina Fay-Waddams was a frequent flyer at our gigs. In Halifax. What was she doing here in Glace Bay? There was no point in pretending I hadn’t seen her; she had seen me seeing her. Now she got up from her seat and manoeuvred her way past a group of people around Davy Carlyle.
“Monty!”
“Hello, Sabrina.”
She put out her hand and grasped my left arm. “Monty, I’m so sorry about Bonnie.”
“Yes, it’s terrible.”
“If there’s anything I can do . . .”
What on earth did she suppose she could do?
“Since I’m here anyway . . .” That must be it. She’s here. “I’m doing my chapter on Celtic music now. Remember I told you?”
I made a noncommittal noise in response. This would be the book she said she was writing on the music of Nova Scotia. She had been labouring away at it for as long as I had known her, a couple of years now at least. To hear her tell it, she was in negotiations with a couple of publishers but wanted to get a few more chapters down before she made her move. Her chapter on the blues was another of her works in progress.
“So, will you be doing ‘Chains and Things’ tonight, Monty?” She beamed a bright smile at me. The B.B. King song about not being able to break free from the chains that bind us.
“Well, we don’t have it on the list. And we’ve got a lot of requests lined up.”
“You didn’t have ‘Good Morning Blues’ on the list either, I bet. But you played it for that doctor.”
“True.”
“Well, it’s up to you, of course, what songs you do. What songs you feel comfortable with.”
“The blues ain’t comfort, Sabrina, and comfort ain’t the blues.”
Her eyes twinkled at me. “Oh, Monty, I love your sense of humour. I see your band mates are waiting for you.”
“Right. Well, enjoy the show.”
“I always do, Monty. You know that.”
She turned and went back to her table, and I joined my fel
low Functi and we launched into “Moanin’ the Blues.” Then it was “The Thrill Is Gone,” which is one of our standards. A few couples got up and lurched between the tables in a facsimile of a slow dance. I saw Sabrina smiling at me. I resolutely put her out of my mind for the rest of the show.
The next morning, it was time to talk to Collie MacDonald. I appeared on his doorstep and was invited inside. I got right to the point. “I want to ask you about something I heard, Collie. I heard you were spotted out on the land where Master Campbell wants to make her fortune.”
He gave me a wary look. “Sure, I’ve been out on that land. I’m helping clear it for development.”
“You were seen with Bonnie out there, is the way I heard it.”
“Heard it from who?”
“That doesn’t matter, Collie. If you were out there with Bonnie shortly before she disappeared, you’ll want to be able to explain that.”
“I have to explain being with my own daughter?”
“Under present circumstances, yes, you do.”
He gave a pissed-off sigh and headed into the kitchen, pulled two Keiths from the fridge, cracked them both open, and handed one to me. I took it and waited. He directed me to sit at the table, so we both sat down and took sips of our beer.
“There’s a stream on the land,” Collie said. “I was out there doing some preliminary excavations for Master Campbell. She asked if I could help her out.” Help her out by doing a lot of heavy lifting with no payment in sight, I assumed. “She wanted to have some idea of the quality of the land she’d bought. Wanted to know how best to lay the place out. See if there was anything underneath there that would undermine the foundations. I told her I’d have a gander at it. I rented an excavator from Ziad Nesrallah and spent a few minutes having some laughs with Ziad and then headed out to the land. I was kind of looking forward to it. I enjoy that sort of work. So I got out there, did a bit of digging. Everything seemed all right. Master’s gonna need a lot of landscaping done. It’s as rocky as hell. Anyway there’s a stream running through the property, so I had a look at that. And I noticed the kind of black sand that sometimes indicates gold. Magnetite, hematite found in the oxides that . . . Well, anyway, black sand like that can be a sign that there is gold present. They mined gold here in Cape Breton years ago. Well-known fact. Over at Stirling in Richmond County, over at Coxheath, and a lot closer to here at Middle River. So it’s not as crazy as it sounds, but I sure as hell did not want anybody hearing about it. If there was no gold, I’d look like a gomick. And if there was, well, I’d like to get at it myself if I could.”
With or without giving notice to Master Campbell? Well, it might be the only compensation he’d ever get for his work.
“So I was out there at night. If somebody spotted me, the last thing in the world I would worry about was that somebody thought I was out there — doing what? Burying my own little girl, for fuck’s sake? That’s a lot wackier than me out there all looped up panning for gold. But,” he said, then looked away. He cleared his throat and spoke again. “But Bonnie was out there with me. One night. I couldn’t take the chance of being seen there in the daytime. Bonnie was the only one I told. I made her promise not to laugh.” He started to tear up, and he slashed his arm across his eyes.
“I said to her, ‘Promise you won’t laugh and I’ll tell you something. Could be something big, could be a dud. Most likely a dud. But out on that property I showed you, the big place I’ve been excavating . . .’
“And she did laugh, Bonnie did. ‘You’ve found Bigfoot, Daddy, and you’re just waiting for the TV deal.’ So I had to laugh, too, and then I said, ‘Yeah, it’s almost as crazy as that. I saw some black sand, which can be a sign that there’s gold.’
“‘In them thar hills,’ she finished off.
“‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’
“And then she said, ‘Have another beer, Dad.’ But she wasn’t being nasty. We were both being foolish by this time, joking about it and carrying on. She picked up a scribbler she always keeps, and a pen, and looked up at me with a little smirk on her face. I knew what she was getting at. She’s forever writing funny little stories and poems, and I got the message this time: I was going to be the butt of her next comic tale. But then she slapped the notebook shut and got up and demanded that I take her out there, ‘under the cover of night, so Scrooge McDuck doesn’t see us and swipe the gold out from under our noses.’ Anyway, I took her out there one night, two nights before she disappeared, and we walked out to the stream. We had a flashlight, and she said we’d better not turn it on or people would think it’s the bocan, a ghost. But she turned it on and held it up in front of her forehead and looked down and said, ‘Coal! Coal!’ like the old prospectors hollering ‘Gold!’ in the movies. ‘Daddy, I think you’re on to something here. Cape Breton could become . . . a coal-mining centre and make a fortune, and you’ll be in on the ground floor! I’m so proud of you, Daddy!’ And she threw her arms around me and I said, ‘Go on with ya. Showing disrespect for your old man,’ and I gave her a little shove, a playful shove, and she fell down. If somebody saw us, that’s what he was seeing.”
It sounded like just the sort of goofy fun that could happen in a loving relationship between a father and a daughter. I hoped to God that’s what it was.
The first thing I did after saying goodbye to Collie was drive out to the stretch of land that Master Campbell hoped to convert into Bretonwood Vistas, a development I could picture all too clearly. Monstrously oversized houses with garishly mismatched architectural features and double garages, promoted as “executive homes” for people with way more money than taste. It wasn’t the best day for a jaunt in the country. It was warm but rainy, and the wind blew up in sudden gusts, blasting the rain across my windshield and making me momentarily blind behind the wheel. But I kept on. I knew I had the right place when I saw the big yellow power shovel sitting out in the middle of the field. I parked at the side of the road and got out of the car, wishing I’d had the sense to bring a rain jacket. But never mind; I set out across Master Campbell’s field of dreams. Master was right about one thing: there really was a vista, a view of the water. The land terminated in a cliff edge, a sheer dizzying drop of at least thirty feet. I had a vision of Master’s new property owners toppling over, one by one, and plunging to their deaths in the deep water or on the jagged rocks below. But the land itself needed work, even before anybody reached the cliff. The terrain was rocky and uneven. There would be a hell of a lot of work to transfigure this landscape into Bretonwood Vistas. I saw that, yes, there was a stream as reported by Collie, which would be a nice feature, but which would also add to the engineering costs of digging and shoring up the basements for the houses.
I walked along the edge of the stream, looking for a sign that someone had been “prospecting” there. But, if Collie and Bonnie had been out there panning for gold, three weeks had passed since then. We’d had some hard rains. There was no sign of black sand now, or anything else that could corroborate Collie’s story. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true; it just meant there was no physical evidence to back it up.
And Collie wasn’t the only man spotted on that stretch of land. Master Campbell said Collie had put a scare into Andy one time on the property. What had Andy Campbell been doing there? I called and arranged to meet him at the Dirk in Kinlochiel. When we were seated with glasses of draft in front of us, I said, “Andy, I have to ask you something.”
“Go ahead. I’m getting used to it. I don’t even want to think about the questions people are asking about me and not to my face.” He drew out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I shook my head, and he lit one for himself. He took a long drag and blew the smoke out above our heads.
“There’s no doubt that people have been talking up a storm,” I said, “but I heard something about you being out on that land —”
“The land my ex-wife wants to turn into an ‘executive living’ des
tination, whatever that is. Who are all these executives, I wonder. Are they a bunch of tycoons who are setting up a slew of new businesses and creating jobs for the fellows laid off from all the heavy industry we had here? If so, it’s news to me. I suspect Marsha’s planning on a bunch of houses that will look even worse than that pile she talked me into building after we got married. One benefit of the divorce is that I never have to come home ever again to reddish-purple vinyl-clad garages with a house stuck in the middle with fake Palladian windows and a dormer all out of proportion to the roof and . . . well, maybe you’ve seen it. I dread the day she starts building on that new development. But I can understand why she wants it on high ground, after what happened with her first scheme.”
“Oh? What was that?”
“Somebody unloaded a tract of land on her. Outside Donkin. First place she builds starts sinking into the ground.”
“Subsidence.”
“Yeah. Bootleg pit.”
There are bootleg mines all over the coal-rich areas of Cape Breton, or at least there used to be. If you owned property, you didn’t own the mineral rights. The coal companies did. But people would dig shafts on their property and help themselves to the coal that’s lying there underneath, rather than buy it from the companies. People used to sell the coal from their bootleg pits. The ashes came in handy, too, for getting traction on the ice when driving in the winter.
“She bought it without checking into it?”