I also remember the chilly silence in the large Glebe house over there in Mulgrave, and staying close to my mother and my aunt because I was afraid of someone they called Alex the Devil, who, I learned later, was really the priest in a nearby parish—Father MacDonald. Father Alex the Devil.
Like Hughie the Slut, the name was beyond understanding. But it was somehow appropriate in this odd little town, which was the beginning of the rest of the world.
Mulgrave had a fish-processing plant that constantly gave off a reeking, billowing mist. My mother, even though her father was a fisherman, hates the smell of fish and held a hanky to her nose as she walked by. Mulgrave also had the asylum, a place of horror signified by the universal reluctance to talk about it, except in low, cryptic expressions that mostly avoided, if at all possible, the use of the word “asylum” or the names of the people lost inside. “The poor dizzy people,” as they were sometimes called.
“That fellow should be in Mulgrave” or “They put her in Mulgrave” were expressions that conveyed menace or despair without need for any further elaboration. When a child was acting foolishly came the threat, “You’ll end up in Mulgrave.”
I know there was an asylum in Mabou, to the north. It burned down one night, and many people died—including a close relative who is never mentioned.
You can see the Mulgrave Asylum plainly from where I’m standing near Eddie Fougere’s garage. It is a small, white building, just beyond the edge of the town, across the water at the beginning and end of everything else that is.
Now I see them coming up the hill. The two little girls each have a parent by the hand. There is Danita Mary with our mother, and Rosalind Veronica with our father. I am Linden. My second name, Joseph, is lost behind the overwhelming strangeness of the Linden. At Confirmation I added Peter, hoping it would make a difference. But it didn’t.
I have asked my mother where the name is from. She says she doesn’t know, but I don’t quite believe her. Because the name is her fault, I am reluctant to confess to her the pain it causes me. The burden of a name unmotivated by tradition or blood would be incomprehensible to her. She is Alice, a plain, sensible name that runs like a unifying thread through her entire personal history. Grandma Donohue, whose name is Mary, has a sister, Alice.
My father is Dan, a name that resonates through many generations with such frequency that all the Dans alive must have identifying modifiers. Dan L., Dan B., Dan Alex, Dan Joe, Dan Archie, Dan Rory.
“Linden is a tree,” she said.
“A tree?”
“The lovely linden tree.”
My heart sinks. It is already bad enough that it sounds like the name of a girl.
They named me for a tree. I have also heard that there was a detective on a radio program and his name was Linden Wade, but that is a small source of consolation. I know that I cannot go through my whole life explaining that I am named after an imaginary detective on the radio any more than I can hope for comfort explaining that mine is also the name of a tree.
I have considered changing it to Joe, my second name, which is also the name of my uncle Joe Donohue, who is a powerful little Irishman with a booming foghorn voice and an accent straight from County Cork. I admire Uncle Joe, but the prospect of adopting his name is too complicated. Where do you begin? I realize it is a solution I should have thought of before I started school. But before I started school it didn’t matter. It was only after I started school that I discovered the strangeness and the painful burden of being different. School was all Ian and Angus and Jack and Patrick and William and George.
When Phemie, my first teacher, whose name was actually Miss Euphemia MacKinnon, called my name, as if pronouncing some exotic food discovery, all the heads turned. The smirks and smiles announced the birth of cruel plans for after school—in the yard, on the road home.
Mercifully, home isn’t far from the school.
Just once, years before, I tried to change it. The result was a disaster. That it is how I ended up with a nickname as bad as Hughie the Slut or John Dan Guts. It was after one of the big MacNeil boys set himself on fire playing with matches around gasoline, and the Mountie came to investigate on a motorcycle.
I remember clearly. I was in the MacNeils’ apple tree when I heard a sudden clatter in the lane. Then I saw the motorcycle. The grand machine swept past below the tree and stopped with the front wheel practically against the MacNeils’ doorstep. The Mountie was wearing his brown tunic, the tight navy trousers with the yellow stripe, and great shining knee-high boots. He sat there astride the idling motorcycle, asking the little girls if any of the boys was around.
Their mother, Marie, came out, drying her hands on her apron. The Mountie got off the bike, and they went around the corner to talk.
Afterwards, I asked the Mountie what his name was.
He seemed surprised by my boldness. Then he smiled and held out a gloved hand. “It’s Bruce MacKinnon,” he said.
Even though I didn’t hear it right, it sounded better than my own: Spruce MacKinnon.
“I’m going to become a Mountie and change my name to Spruce,” I announced, when the motorcycle was gone and we were all watching the suddenly quiet lane.
Spruce?
The error dawned on me too late.
“Hey, Spruce,” they’d start. “Where’s your motorcycle?”
Now I have two embarrassing names—both trees: Linden; Spruce. All my mother could say was “Just don’t pay any attention to them. They’ll get over it.”
Of course they didn’t, and they never will.
My cousins on the mountain have normal names: Donald and Archie, Marybelle and Margaret, John Dougald and Johnnie. Later there will be an Annie and a Gerald. There was also a Gabriel, but nobody seemed to think there was anything unusual about it. Gabriel, after all, was a very important archangel, prominent in the Bible, in the book of Daniel. Gabriel is different, but normal. But then, on the mountain, nobody seems to find the name Linden unusual either.
In fact, my grandmother, who lives there, utters my name with a breathless reverence.
“Lindy,” she’ll say. “M’eudail a’ghaol, Lindy.”
Affectionately. And she pronounces it in a way that gives the name a kind of dignified destiny. She seems to say, just in the pronunciation: You have important things in store. “My treasure, my dear treasure,” she’s saying.
But I think, afterwards: what does Grandma MacIntyre know about anything? She can’t even speak English. She doesn’t have a clue what the name means. A tree that sounds like a girl.
The rain is steady now. From where we’re standing in MacMillan’s field, you can see across the strait—slow, antlike movement on the side of the cape. I imagine I can actually see people working there. Jackie is grumbling. What is taking them so long? Angus Neil believes they’re waiting for the fog to lift entirely so we can all see what happens and remember it forever. It will be like a bomb going off, he said. Thousands and thousands of tons of dynamite in little caves dug into the side of the cape exploding in one gigantic blast. They call the little caves “coyote holes.”
Theresa MacKinnon wants to know why it’s called Cape Porcupine, and Binky tries to convince her that it’s shaped like one.
“When did you ever see a porcupine?” she asks.
And he is stumped because we all know there are no porcupines on Cape Breton Island. No porcupines and no skunks.
“I was over there once,” he brags. “I saw a dead one on the road.”
There are no porcupines on Cape Breton Island, according to what I have heard, because the Indians once tortured a missionary priest by locking him in a cage with a skunk and a porcupine. God’s punishment was to eliminate them from the island. And what about the Indians? They sure weren’t eliminated, though you have only to look at them and their poverty to know they got punished too.
I consider telling the story of the priest and his tormentors but decide not to, because Ian and Brian are Protestants.
&
nbsp; My dog is sitting by my foot with his head pressed against my leg. This is his way of staying at least partly dry. Skipper is a clever dog, and I suppose if I was forced to admit it, I would have to say he is my best friend here. When we got him, they said that everybody owned him—mother, father, me, the two girls. Skipper is everybody’s dog, but he and I both know that he is mine.
He is part boxer, with a broad chest and no tail. He belonged, briefly, to my uncle Francis Donohue, and we got him because Francis planned to shoot him. The reason Francis was going to kill him was because Skipper killed a hen. My uncle said that once he started that work, he’d be more trouble than any dog was worth. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” he said.
They were having an unscheduled chicken dinner when my mother pointed out how unfair it would be to kill the dog who made the dinner possible. There was considerable discussion then about fairness and crime and justice, and they finally agreed that killing the dog who made the lovely chicken dinner possible was, perhaps, a punishment too cruel and final. Maybe the more appropriate penalty was banishment. Give the dog away to someone who has no hens. We have no hens, and so we got the dog.
My father seems to like Skipper even more than I do. Whenever he’s leaving home, you’ll see him sitting on the doorstep playing with the dog, talking to him or just sitting with his arm around him, rubbing at his neck and ears, looking and sounding as though he doesn’t want to go. And Skipper seems to be asking the question nobody asks: “Why? Why do you not live at home like everybody else?”
The dog knows when my father is about to leave and becomes very quiet. And he also seems to know exactly when he’s coming home and becomes noisy and hyperactive long before we see him. The dog will suddenly run to the top of the hill in the field below the house near Harry and Rannie’s, or right down to the main road below the church, prancing nervously, looking up and down the road. That is often how we know when my father is arriving.
If he was working close to home, he’d come for weekends when he could get a ride or if he wasn’t working Saturdays. He’d come strolling up the Victoria Line on a Friday evening with the dog running in circles around him, bumping his feet and almost knocking him down. Sometimes I’d run to meet him. Before Stirling, when he’d be far away in another province, we’d see him only at Christmas or maybe in the summer. Once he was home for part of a winter, but he couldn’t do much here because he had a cast on his body from waist to neck, like a plaster undershirt. He’d let us knock on it, pretending he was a door. When the cast came off, he went away again.
When he’s working in another province, Quebec or Newfoundland, we write letters. He writes short, funny letters, and though he doesn’t bother with things like punctuation and capital letters, the spelling is perfect and the words are exactly like his voice.
This, I guess I should admit, is my father’s secret. He never went to school. He learned to read and write from his father, Grandpa Dougald.
My mother taught him how to do arithmetic, and now he knows it well enough to be a captain in a hard-rock mine, working with engineers and geologists and bosses. My mother always says my father could have been anything in the world if he’d had a chance. He never got a chance because he never went to school, which should be a lesson for us all.
I ask why he never went to school, but nobody ever answers—except to say he wasn’t well enough. He was sick when he was a boy and nearly died, which is another secret.
I know he had a brother and a sister who died when they were children. And that there was a time when he was small when epidemics passed through here like forest fires. And that people living out back, in places like MacIntyre’s Mountain, rarely ever got to see a doctor.
But we don’t talk about things like that. Not yet, anyway.
I know all about the causeway and all that it will do because I listen at The Hole in the floor of my bedroom and read the newspapers that come in the mail. I read the Sydney Post Record and the Victoria-Inverness Bulletin. We also get the Star Weekly from Toronto and the Free Press Weekly, which is from out west. We get the Standard, which comes from Montreal and is folded into the Post on Saturdays. And also the Casket, which is a Catholic newspaper that has news only about religion and the church.
Binky and I had our names in the Bulletin once for pulling Brian Langley out of the strait after he fell off the pier. We suddenly realized, after he kept sinking out of sight, that he couldn’t swim. All we did was pull him out and take him home, but somebody put it in the paper and spelled all our names wrong.
It is in the Post and the Bulletin that I get the news about the causeway. At The Hole I discover what it means.
First it was supposed to be a bridge. Then some engineers pointed out that a bridge wouldn’t last a single winter. I could have told them that. From my bedroom window in the winter I can see the drift ice sailing past like swift ghost ships on the racing tide. First it travels south; then, a few hours later, north—reversing constantly with the tide. At least once a winter it comes through in massive packs that carry off the ferries, shouldering them off course and shoving them all the way down into the open waters of Chedabucto Bay, where they have to wait for the tide to change and the ice to reverse direction. Anybody here could have told them what that ice would do to the pillars of a bridge, especially as the pillars would have to be hundreds of feet in length to reach the bottom of the strait.
But they were desperate for something. There is a steel plant in Sydney and big coal mines in Glace Bay and New Waterford and Sydney Mines. Crossing on ferries is a nuisance for them. Besides all the coal and steel, more than a hundred thousand passenger cars have to cross the strait each year. Now that Newfoundland is part of Canada, they’re saying there will be even more and that the Newfoundlanders are demanding better access to the country they didn’t want to join in 1949.
They say the causeway will cost twenty-two million dollars and will have a road and a railway track and a sidewalk for pedestrians.
Of course I know the biggest reason for it happening is Angus L. I know this from listening at The Hole. Angus L. is the premier of Nova Scotia and is famous all over Canada because he was a war hero in World War One and built the Royal Canadian Navy in World War Two. They say when Angus L. became the minister of the navy in Ottawa, there were only six ships and two thousand men. In a flash he built it up to five hundred ships and ninety thousand men and women, and they helped to win the war. My uncle Francis Donohue was one of the people in Angus L.’s navy. But, most important of all, Angus L. is from here. He grew up poor like everybody else, in Dunvegan, which is near Inverness.
Angus L. is a great man, and it’s a shame that he’s a Grit, they say. He even speaks perfect Gaelic.
Here is my secret, something I cannot tell to my mother or Grandma Donohue or my Aunt Veronica, who are all Tories, or even to my father, who is nothing: if Angus L. can really build this causeway and make jobs for men from out back who are not Grits or Masons, who almost died from sickness and have never been to school, I will become a Grit and vote for him as soon as they let me and for as long as there are men like him in charge.
There was a time when we all lived together. When I was born, my mother and my father lived in the same little house in Newfoundland. I learned this in the attic. Access to the attic is through the ceiling in my bedroom. You could say that I learn about now and the future through a hole in my floor, but that I learn about the past through a hole in my ceiling. It was in the attic that I found a suitcase that was full of old letters and other papers.
One document in the suitcase was a small blue card, and when I brought it to the light I could see that it had my name printed on it. So I put it in my pocket.
Sitting on my bed afterwards, I examined the card and saw, written in bold black letters across the top: LANDED IMMIGRANT. Then my name and date of birth and some other information that was smudged. I seemed to have discovered something very important: I am not who they’ve been telling me I a
m. I was dizzy with excitement. I am someone else and, perhaps, I even have another name.
My mother explained it to me afterwards.
She was the schoolteacher in Troy. My father was home from working somewhere in Quebec. They met and married and moved to Newfoundland, where another mine was just beginning. It was during the war, and working in the mine in Newfoundland was the same as being in the army or the navy. The mine produced a mineral called fluorspar, which they need for making aluminum, which they use for making airplanes, which were important in the war. Anybody who was even indirectly helping them build warplanes was as good as in a uniform. I was born in Newfoundland, but Newfoundland wasn’t part of Canada then. So when they brought me to Cape Breton I was, technically, an immigrant.
A DP?
Not exactly, my mother said. After Newfoundland joined the Confederation, everybody born there became Canadian—whether they wanted to or not.
But I was different anyway and went around feeling special for several days, all thanks to the blue card that said I was a landed immigrant.
My mother says we were happy then. Newfoundland was a lovely place, and the Newfoundlanders she met in St. Lawrence and Lawn and Lamaline were the kindest human beings she’s ever known. Friendly and generous, bringing things to the house, even though they were so poor themselves that when she brought some oranges over from Cape Breton once, the children didn’t know what they were. But I think she was lonely there because she kept coming home for long visits at Grandma Donohue’s, which is at the very northern tip of Cape Breton island, in a village called Bay St. Lawrence. It was also around the time that Grandpa Donohue died of cancer.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 6