The Last Best Place

by John Demont

  My friend was puzzled by the encounter. But I take the fisherman’s point: life can be hard in Nova Scotia. Who can endure if defeat or demoralization creep in? Nova Scotians fully realize that luck is for other people and that they have to make their own breaks. Sometimes they even do. Otherwise they shake their fists at the gods and at the rest of the world. They yell and curse, brood, dance, fornicate and fight. Because what else is life for?

  Nova Scotia is a place where the full scope of humanity seems to fit onto one small stage. And if there is such a thing as the Nova Scotian identity, its soul lies in the sum total of values that exist distinctly in its multitude of people and places. Cape Bretoners, my people, might as well be from another planet as the mainland. Yet even within that small island there’s a mind-boggling diversity, the gentle-spirited folk on the gorgeous west coast being as different from the hard-bitten stoics of the industrialized southeast as is humanly possible. Back on the mainland, one minute you’re listening to an Acadian shopkeeper ramble on animatedly in French, few miles down the road it’s the skirl of the bagpipes and an unblinking stare from some craggy Hebredian face. Hour later you’re in some old Loyalist homestead staring at one of those wall hangings embroidered with There’ll always be an England/England shall be free/If England means as much to you/as England means to me. Or you’re down on the moody eastern shore, one of the more depressed spots in the province, with its undercurrent of violence that manifests in anything from race riots to random shootings. Then, before your head has a chance to stop spinning, you’re in Lunenburg County, still populated by the descendants of the original Protestant farmers from France, Switzerland and southwestern Germany.

  There’s room for everyone. Reminds me of what Mark Twain said at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.” We are all different and we are all connected. I didn’t always understand that. But now as I plunged back into my old life I finally did. Identity is landscape, history and mythology. It is roots and genes. It is a lot of different things, like a Cajun gumbo. The recipe is essentially the same; what changes are a few of the ingredients, the proportions, the spices. It may taste a little different every time, but it’s still unmistakably gumbo. It could be nothing else.

  Universal truths are, of course, hard to come by. Nevertheless, there are things you should know right from the start about Nova Scotians. Not all of them, of course. The newcomers are adding new flavours to the mix, changing it as the province changes them. But I cannot speak for those people. For now I want to talk about the ones who have been here longer. My people, about whom a few broad statements are possible.

  Despite the inordinately large number of scholars, scientists and big thinkers risen from their midst, Nova Scotians retain a loud contempt for anything that smells intellectual. Because of circumstances, they tend to defer to authority by bowing and scraping to politicians in Ottawa, to the rich, the church, the big corporations headquartered elsewhere. A habit that has gotten them nowhere and is broken only, it seems, by intemperate action, whether long, unwinnable labour strikes or massive protest votes that only alienate the government in Ottawa.

  They look at the world through flinty eyes. Which is fortunate, perhaps, since it prevents them from falling too often prey to shysters, con artists, religious saviours, economic miracle workers and other cheats who gravitate to desperate places. (They leave that to the bureaucrats, so willing to shovel taxpayers’ money at sad, doomed heavy water plants that make no heavy water, gold mines that find no gold, oil fields that yield not one barrel of crude.)

  They have a penchant for intrigue and scheming—which explains why they rule the world of business, the media, the armed forces and the church once unchained from this small pond. No wonder partisan politics is such a sport, religion and pastime, and Nova Scotians make the wiliest politicians in the land. The world is just different down here, a place where until recently a payoff to the governing party ensured not only that you would get a liquor licence to open a bar but also that any competitor who wanted to open a watering hole nearby would not. There are brand-new roads that go nowhere and gleaming wharfs in villages where no one fishes. If a visitor from some far-away place asks about the incongruity of such a thing the answer usually comes back, “That’s just Nova Scotia politics,” and somehow they understand.

  They are violent and clannish, which makes for good soldiers but bad enemies. Nova Scotians have always been a rowdy, rough lot, a band of hockey-rink brawlers, after-the-dance scrappers, sucker punchers, rock throwers. It is no exaggeration to say that more great boxers have come out of industrial Cape Breton and the North End of Halifax than the rest of the country combined. It is also no exaggeration to say that while there is probably more life on a Saturday night within a square block of New Waterford than in ten miles of Toronto there are probably more dislocated knuckles and flattened septums too. They make them tough here. As an example I offer up a guy I used to see at the Y who owed some money to some bikers from Montreal. They took him to the Angus L. MacDonald bridge, held him over the side and threatened to drop him off unless he paid up. Normally this ploy worked. But our man said something to the effect of “drop away.” The bikers looked at each other in puzzlement, stood him up. Then shot him in the knee.

  That is not an untypical story. Nova Scotians are no more crime-prone per capita than other Canadians, making them in a global sense next to saints. But who can match the strange, lurid nature, the pulp fiction quality to stories glimpsed on the local evening news and heard in everyday conversation? Opening up a newspaper around here is like cracking a Jim Thompson novel: page one might include a story about the former premier charged with a raft of sexual assaults. The court briefs on page 5 might include the details of a case involving a former crown prosecutor—who was engaged to a woman, even while he was married to someone else who lived a few blocks away from his fiancée in the same subdivision—now being charged with embezzlement. Buried on the same page might be the latest on the war in Moser River: a poisonous little town on the eastern shore where a gang of white trash had been terrorizing the local folk. On another page might be a short story noting that a man had been found guilty of an elaborate hoax to fake his own death by pretending he had been hauled into the ocean by a wave from the much-photographed and visited rocks of Peggy’s Cove. I kid you not.

  They like their faith in big doses, their heroes doomed and larger than life. They play card games called Tarabish, drink gallons of boiled tea, smoke cartons of cigarettes and down any sort of alcohol they can raise to their lips. Not much has really changed in that regard. “There are 1,000 houses in the town,” a Halifax settler wrote home to Britain in the 1750s. “We have upwards of 100 licensed [drinking] houses and perhaps as many without licence, so the business of one half the town is to sell rum and the other half to drink it.”

  Nova Scotians think the kitchen is the only place for a party. They call everyone Buddy, label anybody who doesn’t tuck a napkin into their shirt “big feelin’,” call anything that they liked “some good” and anywhere that is not Nova Scotia “away.” They have a dark sense of humour, stemming from the fact that catastrophes are what is funny, and if Nova Scotians see more humour than other people, it is perhaps because more things go wrong here than anywhere else.

  They tend to treat money with little respect—the quintessential example being the legendary Halifax rummy who spent most of the million he won in the lottery during a vicious month-long drinking binge before giving the rest to his buddies and charity. Conversely they can be cheap, even the rich ones—of which there are a surprising number. Partly that’s just an almost pathological desire not to appear showy. Which is why a visitor would have no sense that behind the facade of those big understated houses in old South End Halifax are interiors that drip shipping and brewing wealth, that the great houses looming on the hill in Yarmouth are still furnished with tre
asures brought back from the Orient during the days of the windjammers, that in bank accounts in small towns throughout the province low-key fortunes still moulder. Roy Jodrey, the sharpy from the Annapolis Valley, may have made millions investing in apples and pulp and paper. But he liked to fly economy to stay one of the boys. Once some friends got him a ticket in business class so he could sit with them. “He planted his fatness in his roomy seat,” his biographer Harry Bruce wrote, “glowered at the cabin’s luxury, squirmed guiltily and grumbled to no one, ‘The people of Hantsport will know about this before I even get home.’ ”

  When it comes to sex they are a surreptitious, darkly randy lot. I have a friend who in his early twenties was carrying on an affair with an acquaintance’s aunt. Once, in the middle of the night he climbed an elm tree in the hope of getting into the second-floor bedroom of the house she shared with her nephew and his family. Now my friend once separated his shoulder playing hockey and periodically it pops out of place, sometimes at the worst moments—like when he is thirty feet up a tree at 3 a.m. It’s damn painful too. Which, I suppose, was a good thing in this case, because a neighbour heard his agonized moans and called the fire department, who dispatched a hook-and-ladder truck. They detreed my friend as his lover and her family watched from the window in sleepy-eyed disbelief.

  Thus it has always been. Why else would the name Ada mean so much to generations of Halifax males? True, Ada McCallum may have been no Doll Tearsheet, the madam who operated in Halifax during the early 1940s, wore a fur coat and smart dresses, patronized the best shops and restaurants and set her girls up in snug flats and apartments or in secluded cottages well outside the city. She might not even have had quite the clout of Doll’s successor, Germaine, the Paris-born boss at 51 Hollis St., which was directly across from the back door of Government House, the Lieutenant Governor’s residence. (According to legend, a respectable South End burgher once died in the arms of one of her girls. Germaine made a couple of discreet phone calls and some of his friends showed up and carted the body to the steps of the respected Halifax Club. The press dutifully reported that he’d collapsed and died entering his beloved haunt.) Even so, Ada, who once had as a boyfriend an editorial executive at the newspaper where I worked, lived out her final years in the company of an eccentric gentleman of leisure from Iceland who claimed to be a graduate of the London School of Economics and a one-time concert pianist. When she died in 1986 at the age of seventy-eight—leaving the operation to some of her kids—the newspapers celebrated her career, remembering her as a “beautiful, socially accomplished woman” who, after becoming a madam, still hobnobbed with unsuspecting admirals, generals and South End snobs.

  These are my people. They all are. Because we are all connected in bigger or smaller ways. A frightening thought sometimes, in a tavern or mall somewhere or staring down from the visitors’ gallery at the provincial legislature during Question Period. But what do they see when I pass by, still giddy about having moved back home? A man wearing a goofy expectant look. Nodding at people he has never met before. As if to long-lost friends.

  Five

  Are Ye One of the

  Biscuit-Foot MacKinnons?

  I DO NOT HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF DIRECTION. LET ME START AGAIN: I HAVE A poor sense of direction. Okay, let’s be frank—I get lost a lot. So often that it is never a surprise, so often that I have taken to building into itineraries a certain amount of time spent travelling in the wrong direction. Even in the most familiar places I routinely let my mind wander and forget where I’m going. Exciting, in a way: when I jump into a car I really could end up anywhere. Left, right, it’s all the same to me because it’s as though I’m seeing everything for the very first time. Sometimes I magically arrive where I’m supposed to be going, blissfully unaware of how I got there. That’s as close as I get to being certain of the existence of a higher power.

  No matter how many times I’ve been there, I always fail to take the right turn to Antigonish, which given the dearth of other possible exits is a singularly bad piece of driving. The result: I hit town an hour after the 10,000-metre foot race, just as the pipe band championships are getting under way down at the Antigonish Highland Games at Columbus Field. I pull into the parking lot at Piper’s Pub, the town’s liveliest watering hole, where John Pellerin, the amiable bartender/fiddler, helps me find the last motel room in town. A lovely, carefree day. Outside everyone is taking their time walking under the sun, which has finally slipped through the clouds.

  I am here because Antigonish, as the local promotional literature likes to say, “is the centre of the province’s Highland Heart.” A nice phrase, and it even has the virtue of being true. While I’m talking to Pellerin someone named Donald MacDonald walks up. It is a name you run across in these parts. Just out of curiosity I pick up the phone book on the bar and open it under Antigonish (the town being too small to warrant its own directory). There I find seventeen Donald MacDonalds, one Donnie MacDonald and two Donna MacDonalds. I also run my thumb down an even dozen John Chisholms and eleven John Macleans. No wonder people in Antigonish County, neighbouring Pictou County and Scottish-flavoured Cape Breton Island are so dependent on nicknames to keep everyone straight. In the run of a couple of hours I’ve already run across Andrew “G’day” MacDonald, “Lucky” John C. MacDonald, Billy Collie Billy MacDonald, who is most definitely not to be confused with Collie Hughie MacDonald, and Ronnie “D.D.” MacDonald, whose immediate family is known as “The D.D.s”.

  The layers of names often conjure up the ghosts of ancestors. John Angus Andrew Hughie MacIsaac—I create this name at random, although I have no doubt that such a person exists somewhere in Nova Scotia—could have had a father named Angus, a great-grandfather named Andrew and a great-great-grandfather named Hughie. Sometimes, the nicknames refer to a physical feature, an occupation or where a family lives. Other times, they refer to some piece of family history. I remember a conversation with Richard MacKinnon, who teaches at the University College of Cape Breton, in Sydney, and is an expert on Celtic nicknames. To prove a point he told me about a great-uncle living in Glace Bay who tried to steal a barrel of biscuits from the mine company store during the bloody labour riots of the 1930s and ended up breaking a toe when he dropped the barrel on his foot. MacKinnon had pretty much forgotten about the whole sorry episode until he gave a lecture on Highland names at the University of New Brunswick, in Fredericton. Once finished he asked for questions. A shaky hand went up in the back of the room. “Excuse me, Mr. MacKinnon,” said an ancient, quavery voice, “but are ye one of the Biscuit-Foot MacKinnons?”

  Of course, I am not the first person to discover that Nova Scotians are more or less a tribe. If, say, a person named MacIsaac came down from Toronto to a wedding they wouldn’t make it to the bar and back before somebody would be wondering aloud whether they were related to the MacIsaacs of Judique. Someone would know Merle from his newspapering days. Someone else went to father Dunc MacIsaac’s parish. Someone would have kids who were taught by Al. Someone else would have gone to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish (everyone here just calls it St. F.X.) with one of the other seven kids in the immediate family. And so the conversation would go floating on like a jazz solo until someone finally changed the subject. Tribe, you see, matters here. It is at the root of the great events and the small dramas. I recall a stag party thrown for a guy marrying a woman from a family I knew. It began convivially enough but ended with the father of the bride and his half-dozen sons and brothers standing back to back swinging it out with the groom and his father, brothers and uncles. A couple of days later they were casting dark glances from opposite sides of the church as the couple said their wedding vows. And now they are family, even if just by marriage—which means that while the bad blood may forever linger between the two clans, God help anyone from outside dim enough to take a swing at a member of either house at some distant stag.

  Blind, unquestioning loyalty definitely has a downside—“I was just doing my duty” bei
ng the last words every war criminal utters before the hangman opens the trapdoor. But it is good to know that no matter how bad it gets, there are always those who will have you. Home, as someone somewhere once said, is the one place where you can go and not be turned away. I say amen to that. It warms my heart to know that if I were on the run with the bloodhounds coming a mile back, there is always my tribe, with its boundaries and rivalries that extend beyond simple blood ties. This tribal sense of loyalty cuts many different ways. Protestants versus Catholics, Pictou versus New Glasgow, islanders versus mainlanders. You see it in fist fights after hockey games and in the way a stepdancer from Margaree will watch a guy from a few miles away move adroitly around the floor and sniff dismissively, “Oh, he’s from Inverness,” as if that explained everything.

  Sometimes we even forget our local rivalries and it is just us versus everyone else. American writer Dorothy Duncan couldn’t quite figure out the nationality of a man she met on a steamship from England bound for Halifax. “I’m a Nova Scotian,” allowed Hugh MacLennan, the Halifax novelist who four years later became her husband. In Bluenose: A Portrait of Nova Scotia she wrote: “He hadn’t said a ‘Canadian’ and he obviously didn’t think of himself as a Canadian. What could Nova Scotia be like, that its people gave this name to themselves with such pride in their voices that one felt they were convinced of a superiority palpable to the rest of the world?”