by John Demont
This powerful loyalty touches everything. But nothing more than politics, Nova Scotia-style. This is high comedy and low cunning, payoffs and paving jobs, conspiracy and collusion. An old-time whiff of the rum bottle, a timeless hint of Tammany Hall. No different, I guess, from how things were a couple of centuries ago, after London ordered Gov. Charles Lawrence to create a legislative assembly for Nova Scotia. I sometimes imagine how politics was played back then: the partisan county sheriffs who let only voters supporting their candidates cast ballots, the “houses of entertainment” where thousands of pounds were spent plying voters with beds, food and booze, the merchants who jostled for power by forcing their debtors to vote for them, the local heavyweights who simply got together and selected candidates with the understanding that they would be uncontested on election day. “Where elections were fiercely contested, however,” historian Brian Cuthbertson wrote in his learned and amusing book Johnny Bluenose at the Polls: Epic Nova Scotian Election Battles 1758–1848, “there could be much fraudulent voting, drunkenness, epic battles to gain possession of the passageways leading up to the hustings, intimidation of voters, and great expense to candidates.”
The party in power made no difference. So ingrained was patronage that even Joseph Howe, the champion of responsible government, lobbied for political appointments. When Edgar Rhodes, a Tory, stepped into the premier’s office in 1925, he faced a pile of nearly two thousand unanswered letters and telegrams from people looking for work. Some of them read like this: “I am writing you to see if there is any possible chance of your giving me some kind of permanent position this year. There are seven Tory votes in my family, and we have always been good Tories, not people who have turned their coats at every election like some of our Tories in this town whenever they wanted a job. And it is pretty hard on a young fellow to be supporting a government that can’t do anything for him.” Or this: “I am a poor widow of ninety years of age. I am writing to ask you if you would be kind enough to send me a nice little check to last me through the long, cold winter. I have supported your government in the past.” Or the one that came from Dartmouth nearly a year after the election: “As this is 5 June, 1926, I’ve written your government asking for work and got no satisfaction. This is the last letter I intend writing. Now there are six voters in my home. We all worked and voted for the Conservatives at the last election … but I didn’t work for thanks. I want something for my husband, and if I don’t hear of anything from you by the end of next week, I intend to work and vote for some other party that will give us work.”
I do not want you to think badly of us. Animals, after all, look at each other a little funny when the water hole starts to dry up. Politics has always been more than a hobby in a place where prosperity, even survival, means allying yourself with the party in power. In Nova Scotia politics makes jobs magically materialize then disappear into thin air. It makes landlords rich and highways appear where only dirt roads once existed. It ruins careers and spawns men who seem stranger and larger than life. And of course it creates theatre—great, great theatre. I left Nova Scotia during the John Buchanan years. From afar I read about MLAs going to jail over expense account fraud, scandals involving mechanized toilet seats, a Halifax building known as the Green Toad and the premier’s own blossoming financial problems, which were so extreme that at one point he was living off his credit cards. Buchanan—who once while on the campaign trail declared that “elections should not be fought on issues”—barked like a dog in the historic legislature to silence opposition critics. Then an obscure deputy minister who felt he was the reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas—seriously!—sat down at a routine committee meeting and accused Buchanan of accepting kickbacks and directing government contracts to friends and political allies. The RCMP investigated and cleared Buchanan of any wrongdoing. But he was gone by that point anyway, rescued by a Senate appointment from Mulroney like one of the last out from the American embassy in Saigon.
As an interim replacement the Tories chose dairy farmer Roger Bacon, the Yogi Berra of Nova Scotia politics. He was prone to calling life a “three-way street,” summing up the problem of unemployment by noting, “If those people weren’t unemployed, they’d be working today,” and standing before a national TV audience after Buchanan’s surprise resignation and saying “we was all shocked.” A sane man, he didn’t even run for the party leadership. For rebirth the Tories turned to Donald Cameron, a humourless dairy farmer from near Pictou who claimed he would do away with political patronage, then a couple of years later ended up taking, of all things, a Mulroney patronage position as Canada’s trade representative in New England.
Which brings us to the here-and-now. In today’s Halifax Chronicle-Herald I read about the latest on the $200-million originally slated to improve a stretch of highway not far from New Glasgow, which federal public works minister Dave Dingwall and provincial transport minister Richie Mann have shifted to build some new roads in their own Cape Breton ridings. Then I saw the latest installment in the saga of the patronage-swilling grassroots provincial Grits, who are so despondent that Premier John Savage hasn’t handed over the usual paving jobs that they’re trying to run him out of office. As I put down the paper I was sure that right then somewhere in the province a political IOU was being called, a palm was being greased, a handful of men—and they are always men—were sitting in a quiet room, cigar smoke curling towards the ceiling, forever plotting.
I’m into it now—the part of the province that makes Nova Scotia truly and forever New Scotland. Nova Scotia, as I’ve already stressed, is full of countless life forms. But, up here, along the Northumberland Strait, a kilt is still de rigueur and the pipes assault the senses in stores, malls, schools, just walking down the street. Here the story of the Hector, which arrived in 1773 with the first shipload of 180 Scots, carries the same resonance as the saga of the Mayflower does in Massachusetts. The destitute pioneers arrived, expecting a land of cleared farms. What they got was a spot with such impenetrable forest that when John MacLean, the most renowned Scottish bard to come to North America, settled at the tiny hamlet of Barney’s River in 1819 he called it “a place contrary to nature.” In his “Song of America: the Gloomy Forest” he poured out the sorrow and bitter disillusionment he felt at having succumbed to the “tempters” of emigration and their “fables” of life in Nova Scotia. Elsewhere he wrote:
I’m not surprised that I’m sorrowful
As my habitation is behind the mountains
In the middle of the wilderness at Barney’s River
Without a thing better than bare potatoes,
Before I make a clearing and raise a crop there
I must uproot the savage forest
With the strength of my arms; I will be exhausted
And in a short while an invalid before my children grow up.
Lord, talk about despair. And the feeling lingers. One hot muggy afternoon I sat with Elmer MacKay in a Tim Horton’s in the coarse little steel town of New Glasgow. Formerly a federal cabinet minister, he is now a lawyer and runs the family lumber business nearby. He’s a well-read, thoughtful guy who sprinkles his chat with quotes from Machiavelli to Casey Stengel. A good person to have a cup of coffee with and discuss the Scottish Highlanders—his own people—who arrived in the late 1700s after the break-up of the clan system. “Highlanders measure wealth not by how much money they have, but by how many people will follow them,” he intones quietly. “They tend to be melancholy, because deep down a lot of people did not want to leave Scotland. A lot of what is called Scottish pride is that they do not forget. They have long memories. They remember.”
By the time I saunter down to the field in Antigonish they are all here. Or at least they will be before the night is out. Even the people cutting hay in the fields stop everything when the Highland Games begin, because in Antigonish County only two things are really sacred: the Catholic church and their ancestral Scottish homeland. Which makes it entirely fitting that after spending a few m
inutes down at the field watching some young pipers and drummers going through their paces, I find myself at one of those long church-basement tables in the beer tent listening to a couple of MacDonalds chattering about the church and its troubles. The usual stuff: a bunch of priests being charged for taking liberties with choirboys; the latest foibles of former father Brian MacDonald, who now lives crosstown with his wife, the former Mrs. Conrad Black; the editorial policies of the most magnificently named of all Canadian newspapers, the Antigonish Casket, an organ of the local diocese. Everywhere are tartans—Beaton, Gillis, Cameron, Chisholm, MacDonald, Macdougall, MacEachern, MacInnis, MacIsaac, MacLean, MacLellan, MacLeod, MacNeil, MacGillvary. I dodge the dancing kids, step around the old men with the Hiberian visages, leaning on their thick canes, and make my way to the bar for another round. When I return, the MacDonalds—not the D.D.s—invite me back for dinner.
Afterwards the man of the house drives me to the outdoor military tattoo, which for many people is the highlight of the whole event. Lots of gunfire, drumrolls and the peal of bagpipes, which always reminds me of small animals being pounded with mallets. Little girls highland fling upon a wooden stage; great bearded kilted men stride across the grass under the star-filled sky. At a stop sign after the show ends I ask a car full of people for directions. They say get in and drive me through the St. F.X. campus right up to the Student Union Building. Inside a Celtic rock band named Rawlins Cross is in full flight.
They’ve got two speeds—fast and faster. The effect is a sound so loud that it almost sucks the air right out of your lungs. Ian McKinnon, the leader and bagpipe player, once told me about a tour they made of outport Newfoundland. “Now you have to know that we don’t play ‘I’se the B’y,’ ” he patiently explained to the owners of the clubs, Legions and restaurants who booked them. Which was fine until they landed in some hiccup of a place on the Great Northern Peninsula where they opened with a couple of their signature tunes, which fuse rock rhythms with traditional Celtic instruments. A few minutes into the performance a huge fisherman lurched towards the stage, slammed down a hand that McKinnon remembers as twice the size of his own and said through clenched teeth, “Play something I can fuckin’ dance to, will ya?” A test of artistic commitment. The boys from Rawlins Cross looked at him, they looked at each other. Then in perfect unison they sang: “I’se the b’y that builds the boat/I’se the b’y that sails ’er/I’se the b’y who catches the fish/and takes her home to Lizer.”
Me, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. A woman who reminds me of someone I haven’t seen in twenty years dances for a moment in a blue light and then is swallowed by the protoplasmic crowd. The effect is eerie, a momentary crack in time. Like if I scanned the room I’d see me as I looked in ‘78, perhaps doing the Lowdown, probably wearing army fatigues, hightop Adidas, a checked shirt with the tails out. I might have been with the girl I was dating at the time. For a moment I considered ordering a rye-and-ginger—the drink of the moment circa 1978—to really set the time machine in motion. Then thought about the dangers of adding whisky to a pathetic nostalgia for lost youth. Instead, I order a Keith’s and let the sound pour over me.
By twelve-thirty Piper’s is wired. I fight my way to the bar next to a Newsworld producer and his Antigonish-born wife who are down from Halifax for the party. “Dennis Hopper,” she says.
“Huh?”
“That’s who you remind me of. Dennis Hopper.”
“She’s right,” her husband tunes in. “She has this knack for picking out celebrity lookalikes. It’s amazing. You really do look like Dennis Hopper.”
“He’s thirty years older than I am,” I protest, not welcoming the comparison.
She shrugs, gets this half-apologetic “I hate to tell you this” smile on her face and says emphatically, “You look like Dennis Hopper.”
I slink away, casting dark glances over my shoulder. Then forget about it. Where I am could be Saturday night on the Isle of Skye. Except in the Outer Hebrides there probably wouldn’t be as many kilts and as many slurred Gaelic greetings of “Clamar a tha thu?” (How are you?) and “Slalnte” (Health). From the front of the room the lead singer of the house band booms out the last note of “Barret’s Privateers,” then slides into “Northwest Passage.” The dance floor is jammed—boomers, grungers, stepdancing old-timers, all lost to the moment. There’s a primeval feel to the whole thing, as if I’ve wandered into some primitive ritual viewed by outsiders on pain of death.
About then I recognize another Chisholm, this one a television reporter from Halifax wearing a kilt, pipe band jacket and a Tilley Endurables hat, a souvenir from the Gulf War. In tow is his baby-faced brother-in-law—a new millionaire after inheriting a family fishplant—and a tall guy with a huge head named Cameron, who I gather is some sort of legendary local brawler. Past 1 a.m. now, which means time to refuel. We hop the four-foot chainlink fence in the Piper’s parking lot. Chisholm catches a foot near the top and hits the concrete with a splat, but bounces up instantly, like a light heavyweight pretending the knockdown was just a slip.
My notes start to get a little sketchy here. All I know is that we wolfed something down at the sub shop, then headed for the door, Chisholm gimping around like an amputee by now. We cab it to a house party across town. A young crowd, mostly standing around in the kitchen drinking and listening to the band from Piper’s, which had magically materialized here. Minutes later I’m in the back of a half-ton, getting a lift to my motel. When I tilt my head back I can watch the inky sky, white pinpricks and the tops of the big elms almost meeting overhead.
My next conscious thought comes when I open my right eye and see the alarm clock blink 8:30. Which means that after watching The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension on the late show I had something like four whole hours of sleep. I lurch over to the window, open the drapes and shrink from the light like Peter Cushing in The Horror of Dracula. It could have been worse. The room is as spare, clean and white as a top-line hospital ward. The windows are open and the wind waving the long valley grass outside keeps the room cool and fresh.
Pay the bill. Down to the field, where the highlight of the competition, the ancient Scottish heavy events, are under way. Men with arms the size of my waist—including one Billy Morse, all six feet and 350 pounds of him, appropriately enough from nearby Giant’s Lake—grunt, yell, then send heavenward big rocks, telephone poles and a nasty-looking thing called the ancient hammer. A behemoth named Harry MacDonald—who, I note from my program, is six-one and 320 pounds and hails from London, Ont.—seems to be grabbing most of the hardware.
A few yards away I notice the Newsworld producer and his wife cowering behind dark glasses, leaning on each other for support. I sneak up from behind, startle them with a lively “Howareyathismorning,” then feel immediately better watching them shake their heads in despair. I buy a big order of fish and chips and eat it leaning on a tree stump that is probably four feet in diameter. I feel full of pep now, spirits so buoyant that even an American tourist a few feet away droning on about his bypass surgery doesn’t spoil it.
It is what people in these parts call a big day—a day when you feel kinship with the world and just about everyone in it, including by God the couple from Halifax now in the grip of their awful hangover. On days like this it’s hard not to feel the sense of communal loyalty that comes from believing we’re all in it together. The principle is unconditional; it applies in good times and in bad. That, I suppose, is the true test of this concept of tribe. If I had any doubt of this it disappeared the moment I left Antigonish. Around here they remember when everything was here, when the place brimmed with confidence, when their farmers were the most productive wheat growers in the province and when their industries—shipbuilding, steel, coal—were the envy of the rest of Nova Scotia.
The scrappy towns and hamlets of Pictou County exist in a knot tied so tightly together that it is impossible to tell where New Glasgow and Stellarton end and Trenton and Westville begin.
It’s in my mind, I concede, but Plymouth will always be different. Maybe it has always looked as it does today, its streets lined with the tiny semidetached boxes built by the mine companies, and the unemployed miners and pensioners shuffling down the sidewalks. Everyone has been to spots like this: working places where you can’t help being reminded that someone else always calls the shots. Here, most of all they remember the day a fireball shot through the Westray coal mine on the outskirts of town, leaving twenty-six local men entombed in the pit. I was in town that day, watching the weeping family members stagger to their cars after learning there was no hope. Four years later I stood by a memorial as some of the same men and women embraced and wept under a powder-blue sky, so different from the wet, grey day when the explosion took away their sons, brothers, husbands and uncles. It was as if time had stood still for them: the bodies of eleven of the men remained buried underground and the answers about who ultimately was to blame for the disaster were no closer.
Again it was just weary, eternally sad people, clinging together in their pain. They looked timeless, as if centuries ago they could have stood in a far-away land, huddled arm-in-arm with the same anguish on their brows. Then, as now, the tribe was the best hope for survival. At the very least it provided a fire to warm themselves against the terrors awaiting in the dark.
Six
Shine
DAWN CANNOT BE FAR OFF NOW. IT HAS TO BE NEAR. I HAVE TO KEEP thinking that morning will eventually break here in the woods atop a far mountain in darkest Nova Scotia. All my best instincts told me to be wary of the liquid, clear as nitro, in the plastic two-litre pop bottle. I had been warned about the blind and halt stumbling through institutions across the province after a night spent guzzling this swill. But that is the root of its terrible power. One glass, actually just a finger mixed with a tumbler full of Coke, and I’m carrying on a perfectly lucid conversation. Next thing I know there’s this roar of awful accordion music all around me, I’m peering through the cigarette smoke at what looks like a huge dog—a golden Lab who I have to admit can really step out—waltzing on its hind legs with this dangerous-looking character. And a voice, frighteningly like my own, screams “Yessssss, how we love to polka, we all love to polka!”