Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  After that, Brennan and I decided to go out “on tour.” He had expressed an interest in seeing New Waterford, named as it was after the city of Waterford in the country of his birth.

  “Will the MacNeil be joining us?” he asked, with a nod to Maura.

  The MacNeil graciously agreed to come along if someone would mind the two young children. “Mum,” she said to Catherine, “can I leave these two little hooligans with you for a while?” She pointed to Normie and Dominic, who were doing air traffic control and paying scant attention to their elders.

  “Oh, I think I can handle them, dear. If I survived you and your sisters and brothers, I can take care of these two little angels.”

  “Good, because these two larger hooligans need supervision.” This time it was me and Brennan at the end of her pointer finger. “It pains me to say it, but they cannot be left to their own devices. Not when they have care and control of a motor vehicle, and there are drinking establishments along the route. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this.”

  “Go ahead then, my dear. Lead, kindly light.”

  “Thank you, Mother.” She thought for a moment and then said, “We should call Sharon. Get her out of the house for a little jaunt.”

  “No, she’s at Ginny’s today, and Morag is with them. A little gathering of the three generations. I’m sure Ginny and Morag are doing their best to boost Sharon’s spirits, for all the good it will do.”

  “Okay. We’ll leave them to it. All right, boys, let’s hit the road. I may as well take the wheel now, because I’ll end up being the designated driver anyway.”

  “I take issue with that,” I said to her.

  “Take issue with this,” she said but did not display any particular finger or body part, so I concluded we might not be in her doomsday book yet.

  “We won’t be legless with drink,” Brennan assured her, “just because we might spot a refreshment stand here and there along the way.”

  “Good. Don’t be legless. Don’t be useless. You never know if you might be called upon to have a clear head.”

  With that established, we took a drive out along the edge of the continent on a perfect sunny summer’s day. By unspoken agreement, it seemed, we all avoided talking about Bonnie’s disappearance. We were determined to enjoy a day out on the road. There was just enough of a breeze to create whitecaps on the water. Maura drove us to the World War Two naval fortifications and observation tower on the shore at New Victoria. Then we were in New Waterford, which is a coastal town with streets laid out pretty much on a grid. Like Glace Bay, this had been a “company town,” built around coal mining, and several of the streets were named after coal company officials. Dominating the skyline were the two white and black steeples of Mount Carmel church. Boats rocked in the waves along the piers as we drove by.

  Maura asked Brennan whether he’d like to stop for awhile in the town and he said, “I’ve a thirst on me,” so we headed for Tom’s bar, where Brennan and I each ordered a beer, and Maura a ginger ale.

  A man sitting alone at the next table nodded to us and said, “Powerful day.”

  “It certainly is,” I agreed.

  His name was Gerry Dan Murphy and he appeared to be in his fifties. Following our introductions, he said he had a brother and an uncle who were priests and a sister who was a nun. Father Burke asked him to pass along his blessings to them, and he asked Murphy a bit about the town. Murphy told us about his family and other Irish immigrants to this part of Cape Breton, about New Waterford’s history as a mining town, and about the miners’ struggles in the 1920s with the British Empire Steel Corporation, which owned the mines.

  “What’s this I’m hearing now?” asked Brennan. “The Irish left Ireland, which had been occupied by the British since the twelfth century, and they came here and they were still under the boot of the Brits?”

  “Yeah, BESCO. They even had their own police, who ended up shooting one of our miners, William Davis, during the strike of 1925.”

  “Sounds like a rough time in history.”

  “It was. Be sure to go over and take a look at the monument the town put up. We have a holiday in Davis’s name every year in June.”

  “Biggest day on my father’s calendar,” Maura said. “He always made sure we observed Davis Day.”

  “Oh, was your dad in the mines?”

  “And a major shit-disturber in the union. Alec MacNeil.”

  “Alec the Trot! I’ve met your dad. Say hello to him for me.”

  “I will.”

  Then Murphy returned to his own family’s history. “But before all those hard-fought strikes in the twenties, my mother’s father and her uncle were killed in the mine explosion here in 1917.” The family had rallied, though, and turned to fishing, and they now had several boats to their name. Murphy speculated about taking one of them across the Atlantic from New Waterford to old Waterford, then said, “I guess I shouldn’t say ‘old.’ I should say ‘the original Waterford,’” and Brennan assured him that “old” was a fitting word for the Irish city, which had been founded by the Vikings in the year 914 AD.

  “I’m a history buff,” said Murphy. “I would definitely like to see that. I’ll rig up one of our boats and head out. It’s just on the opposite shore of the Atlantic after all. She’s a fishing boat, so I won’t go hungry. I’ll load ’er up with beer and push off and away I go.”

  “No reason you shouldn’t,” said Brennan. “The Vikings made it to Newfoundland a thousand years ago, and some say Saint Brendan the Navigator got there from Ireland a few centuries before that. Gives us the opportunity to sit on barstools —”

  “As if you’ve had to wait for an opportunity to sit on a barstool and pour vats of beer down your throat,” Maura put in.

  “I resent that slander on my throat, which has been duly blessed with holy candles on Saint Blaise’s day. And I equally regret your denigration of beer. Are you not familiar with the prayer of Saint Brigid of Kildare? She was born in Ireland back in 451, Anno Domini, so that should have given you loads of time to familiarize yourself with her work.”

  “I’m sure it will come back to me when I hear it proclaimed from your blessed throat, Father.”

  “Brigid opened her prayer with this immortal line: ‘I’d like to give a lake of beer to God.’”

  “She did not!”

  “She did. And she performed a miracle whereby she turned bath water into beer.”

  “Well, you people certainly have your bases covered here and in the beyond, don’t you?”

  “Never doubt it. Now, as I was saying, Gerry, before I was so crassly interrupted by this teetotalling heathen, we can recount the sixth-century voyage of Saint Brendan as we sit on our barstools and claim that our people ‘discovered’ North America. Or, more accurately, were the first Europeans to drop in on the native populations here.” The four of us spent some time weighing the pros and cons of that claim, and then Maura, Brennan, and I wished Murphy well and left the bar.

  Before leaving town, we stopped to have a look at the “Standing the Gaff” monument commemorating the miners’ strike of 1925. The mine owner had declared that the miners would never be able to “stand the gaff,” wouldn’t be able to stand the pain and the pressure. The company would wait the miners out, starve them out, and they’d come back begging at the table. Well, the men stood the gaff. And William Davis is still a hallowed name in the mining communities of Cape Breton.

  We hit the road again, and Maura asked Brennan whether he would like to see Sydney. He said yes, so we drove into the city. She directed his attention to the steel mill. “Now, don’t go wading in the tar ponds while you’re here, Brennan. It’s all toxic sludge, which will dirty your shoes and make you sick to boot.” Not much chance of the fastidious priest exploring that area of the city. “At least the coke ovens aren’t sending up clouds of sulfurous smoke over the city anym
ore. Would have been a good backdrop for a fire and brimstone sermon, Father.”

  “What a shame, in a beautiful place like this.”

  “The price to be paid for jobs.”

  We turned from the industrial part of the city to the downtown and residential areas, and we admired the gorgeous view along the harbour and the great old wooden houses that lined the streets. I was feeling a bit peckish by this time. “Are you hungry, Brennan?”

  “I’ve a mouth on me.”

  “What would you like?”

  “Red meat.”

  “We know just the place,” said Maura.

  There was a line to get into the Bonnie Prince, but there always was, and it would be worth the wait. When we were shown to our table a few minutes later, our waitress was a young girl who looked like an older version of our daughter, Normie, without any of her shyness, so we gabbed with her, and she talked Brennan into ordering the sixteen-ounce T-bone steak. Not to be outdone, I demanded sixteen ounces of flesh as well, and we each ordered a beer. Maura ordered salmon and a glass of lemonade. Brennan was interested in the Bonnie Prince theme and the references to Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald, who had helped Charlie escape after the Jacobites’ defeat at Culloden. “He was disguised as somebody named Burke, as I remember the story, Brennan.”

  “Good man. Burkes are welcome everywhere, and why would they not be?”

  “Why not indeed? So tell me again why your old man hasn’t felt able to return to Ireland four decades after leaving the country?”

  He made a gun shape with his right hand and pointed it at my left kneecap. An indication of the welcome that awaited Declan Burke if he showed his face in Ireland, or of my own fate if I didn’t shut up about it?

  “A topic best left for another day, perhaps? Very well, back to Charlie. He lost the battle but he was reputed to be quite the swordsman, in the other sense of the word.”

  “Bit of a ladies’ man, was he?”

  “Apparently so. Fond of a dram as well, was Charlie.”

  “The Scottish heroes are no stranger to the bottle, I see, MacNeil. What do you have to say about that?”

  “Tòn air deigh dhut!”

  “Should I even ask what that means? It sounds a bit like something in Irish that I’m sure none of us in polite society would want to hear.”

  “Sure we would. May your arse fall on the ice!”

  “Sir,” Brennan said to me, “is there nothing you can do to put manners on this woman?”

  “If the past is any indication, the answer is not a thing.”

  We turned our attention to our meals then. I remembered hearing that Constable Dougald MacDougald and his wife had had a family party of some kind here, and there were so many people at the tables that two of MacDougald’s nieces got up to help the wait staff and ended up getting hired in the place. One of the girls was still here. So I wasn’t at all surprised to see a Mountie walk in, though it was Pierre Maguire, not Dougald. He was in even plainer clothes than usual, jeans and a Université de Moncton sweatshirt, so he must have been off duty. He could hardly be working undercover in a place where everybody recognized him. I knew the Mounties liked to congregate in places a bit out of the way of their superiors and their clientele; this was the polar opposite of that. As far as I knew, everybody in Sydney came here. But it was a restaurant, not just a drinking hole, so I figured they could relax in here and not raise any eyebrows or generate any gossip.

  “Pierre!” I greeted him, and invited him to join us.

  “Salut les gars,” he greeted us and sat down.

  The topic of conversation at the next table was the summer hockey camp their sons were attending, which was the same one Sharon’s son, Jockie, was in. Andy and Sharon had left the party early the night Bonnie disappeared so the boy could get a good sleep for hockey the next morning.

  “Hockey?” Brennan exclaimed. “In the summer?”

  “What? No hockey in the summer where you come from?”

  “You’ll have to forgive him, Pierre. He hasn’t had our advantages. I doubt they even had winter hockey where he started out. In Dublin. He probably caught a game or two after his family immigrated to New York.”

  “We are a hockey nation, Father Burke. We are so busy playing hockey all winter that we have to wait till summer to brush up on our hockey skills.”

  “Ah.”

  “Monty here will have to get you out on the ice.”

  “Funny you should say that, Pierre,” Maura told him. “We were just talking about ice. And falling on it.”

  “All part of the game. I grew up in Moncton, New Brunswick, and I played hockey with a priest there. Peter McKee, a good hockey player and a damn good priest, too. He’s at Saint Augustine’s now. Been there for years. He was one of the guys that started up the Flying Fathers. Ever hear of them?”

  Brennan thought for a minute and then the light came on. “Yes. A team made up of priests who play hockey to raise money for charities.”

  “Oui, c’est ça. They help the poor, the sick, the blind, and all kinds of people in need. And they play a fine game of hockey. One of the other priests who founded the team played with the Leafs before entering the seminary. He was with them when they won the Stanley Cup in the late 1940s. No surprise that there’s a religious connection with hockey, especially with the Montreal Canadiens. Their jerseys are known as La Sainte-Flanelle, after all. My mother used to say the rosary for Montreal when the Canadiens were in a tight spot in the playoffs!”

  “And her prayers were answered, I have no doubt,” said Father Burke.

  “Bien sûr! Look at the stats.”

  We continued to talk sports for a while, until we were interrupted by somebody calling “Pierre!” and we turned to see Dougald MacDougald coming in through the crowd lined up waiting for a seat. “There’s something you have to see. I was just out —” That’s when he got close enough to see me and Maura and Brennan at the table with Pierre. Dougald shot a quick glance in my direction, and I caught it. Pierre caught the next glance, evidently a signal to him to get up and follow Dougald outside where they could speak privately. Pierre nodded to us and left to join his fellow Mountie. Dougald must have started briefing his partner right away because, before they even cleared the building, we heard Pierre exclaim, “Tabarnak!” The rest of us were left to speculate.

  “It could be anything,” Brennan said.

  “True.”

  Maura didn’t say a word.

  We continued with our meal in silence, all of us aware that Constable Dougald MacDougald was out of uniform and working with Sergeant Pierre Maguire on only one case, as far as we were aware, the disappearance of Bonnie MacDonald.

  Not five minutes later, the Mounties were back, resolution written all over their faces. They had made a decision. They sat down at the table, and Dougald leaned towards Maura. “We have found something — something strange — and we’d like to see whether it makes any sense or rings any bells for you.”

  Maura had her glass in hand, about to finish off her lemonade; she put it down and gave the Mounties her full attention.

  Dougald asked the waitress to bring him a cup of coffee, and then he filled us in. “We received a call from Lee Kaulbeck. You know who I mean. The paramedic, goes out with Nancy Campbell. The ambulance service got a call to go out to the old Lewis place on the outskirts of Kinlochiel. Lewis is dead, and nobody lives there now. The caller said somebody had fallen through a trap door and was hurt. This guy on the phone couldn’t get the man out. Or at least that was the story. So dispatch gave Kaulbeck the directions, and he headed to the scene. There’s a gardening shed out in the back of the property.”

  “Yes?” I said. What I meant was, what is in the shed?

  “When Kaulbeck got there with the ambulance, there was nobody injured. Nobody there at all. Turns out Lewis had a cellar dug beneath
the shed, with a big trap door over it, and there’s a still under there for making moonshine. Bootlegging operation.”

  “Illegal,” I said, “but not unusual here in Cape Breton.”

  “No. Anyway, Kaulbeck got the trap door open and climbed down into the cellar to have a look around and make sure there wasn’t somebody lying there hurt. Or dead. But, again, nobody there.”

  “And then?”

  “He found a little tableau set up in there. Whoever called this in wanted somebody — maybe wanted us — to see it.”

  “So why not call us in the first place?” Pierre asked. “Why the story about the guy being injured?”

  “Lee had no idea. Maybe the caller was afraid we’d recognize his voice, or somebody at the detachment would.”

  “Callers won’t be able to bypass us once they set up the nine-one-one system here, when all emergency calls will go through the one number.”

  “And all the crank calls, too. That’s right. But anyway, this guy knew that if one of the ambulance drivers saw this, he’d bring us in.”

  “And the girl at dispatch for the ambulance had no idea who the caller was?”

  “No.”

  Maura had maintained a tense silence, but I interrupted them. Couldn’t help it. “What was in there?”

  That’s when Dougald produced the photographs. Four-by-sixes, in colour. He shoved our plates, cups, and glasses out of the way and spread the pictures out on the table. There was a quick intake of breath but no other sound from Maura as she took in the scene. There, in the old bootlegger’s cellar, in front of a moonshine still made of copper, were two teddy bears seated at a child’s wooden table. There was a little china teapot, and a cup and saucer in front of each of the bears. The china was emblazoned with the green, gold, grey, and black Cape Breton tartan. I remember being told that grey was for the steel, black for the coal. But this was something of a danse macabre, because one of the close-ups showed a bear dressed in a kid-size Clan Donnie T-shirt, a tartan kilt — I was willing to bet it was a MacDonald tartan — and a bright blue scarf loosely tied around its neck. It had on a pair of doll-size dancing shoes, and someone had fashioned a mop of black curly hair, presumably taken from a doll. There was not a shadow of a doubt that this was meant to be Bonnie Clan Donnie MacDonald.