Then we moved to Port Hastings, where my father planned to start his own business and live like everybody else—in his own house with his own wife and children and his own dog. But that didn’t last for long, and eventually he was gone and we were here and I became the man of the house—until my tenth birthday.
The last of the cars have gone. The waiting vehicles facing down the hill towards the ferry have begun inching forward. I can hear the first of them boarding—thump, clump, over the ramp. On a sudden impulse I rush down the hill to meet the family and grab my father by his free hand. It is a large, strong hand with rough skin. He has his sleeves rolled up. On his right forearm there is a faint tattoo: DRMI. His initials—Dan Rory MacIntyre.
I have asked: “Why do you have your name on your arm?”
I would never, in a hundred years, tattoo my own miserable name on my arm or any other part of me.
“It’s a long story,” my father says, looking slightly uncomfortable.
What he always says when he’s being evasive.
There is a brilliant parade to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. A coal miners’ marching band from Donkin, over near Glace Bay, dressed dramatically in red and gold. The Port Hawkesbury fire brigade in crisp blue uniforms with white gloves. Brave veterans, heads high and shoulders back, medals clinking and flashing. Scores of kids from the two town schools, some in silly sailor suits and kilts. Girl Guides. We keep our position at Eddie Fougere’s garage and watch as they all straggle by, then run up the steep hill to the public school, where there are speeches and kids singing “Land of Hope and Glory,” directed by Miss Ladd, who looks like the Queen. I wave and try to catch her eye, but she doesn’t notice me in the large crowd.
Later, at the Legion Grounds, there is a picnic. It isn’t really a picnic, but that’s what they call it anyway. Every year there is a picnic that isn’t really a picnic in Judique, which is twenty miles to the north, and they have games there. Everybody talks about the tug-of-war and the dancing and the fist fights at the Judique picnic. And in Lower River Inhabitants, which is to the south, I once watched real boxers beating each other as they danced around on a small platform surrounded by ropes and a cheering crowd. I remember one of them was a MacIntyre from Glace Bay, a hard little man with blue scars on his face from going back to work in the coal mines too soon after the fighting. Later there was a famous boxer from here named Rockabye Ross, who beat a larger man from Sydney.
Every parish seems to have a picnic. Port Hawkesbury has no special attraction like the tug-of-war or boxing competitions, but this one is special anyway. There is a new Queen, and the highest mountain in the world has suddenly been humbled. The ferry, I have heard them say, will soon be “a thing of the past.” There will be a causeway, and it will be in Port Hastings, not here. I imagine that soon Port Hastings will be the town, and the town will be a village. Perhaps our village, when a town, will have a picnic of its own. But for now, Port Hawkesbury is up for celebration anyway.
At the Legion Grounds there is a crowd of casually dressed people amid a jumble of shacks and booths, the smoke and smells of cooking meat, sounds of happy voices and mechanical music. The sense of fun is dampened only by the knowledge that everything there costs money, and money is “hard to come by.” My sisters have not yet acquired an understanding of this reality and ask for everything they see.
I know that I must be selective. You can’t have everything—one of the things you learn as the man of the house. One of the reasons the man of our house is a boy is that, often, the real men have to go far away and work hard for the money necessary for survival. You must not waste what is necessary for survival. I know there are people here who have more money than they need to survive. Mr. Clough and Mr. McGowan, who own stores. Mr. Gordon Walker, who owns a bank. The Langleys, who seem to own everything else. But that, I’m told, is “neither here nor there.” We are who we are and we have what we have. And it isn’t very much, but it’s enough. There are always people who have less, and we must be thankful.
I wander through the crowd, past the open-front stands where men and women with faces that are familiar from church self-consciously cajole the passersby to part with money.
“Step right up,” they say. “Try your luck.”
I pause. A tall boy hurls a softball towards a stack of fake milk bottles—he misses and looks silly. His second try, propelled by anger and embarrassment, is like a stone from a slingshot. The stack of bottles explodes in a clatter.
“Hey, hey,” says the man inside, laughing. “If you can do that against Petit-de-Grat this evening…” He hands the tall boy a yellow teddy bear, and he walks off proudly, teddy tucked securely under the bulging arm.
At night there will be a ball game against a team from Petit-de-Grat, which is in Isle Madame, where they all speak French, and, later, a chaperoned ball with Joe Murphy’s Orchestra.
There is a wheel that spins. People are lined up, placing money on a piece of plastic that is like a tablecloth with crowns and anchors and other symbols that are duplicated at the wheel. A woman inside the booth spins the wheel with small yelps of enthusiasm. Round and round it goes, making a ticking sound, quickly at first, then slowing down. Where it stops, nobody knoooows.
Someone shouts “Yahoo”—and gets a prize.
I move on. I hear the crack of rifle fire and head towards the sound. There I find men lined up to fire a pretend rifle that looks like a .22 at a row of tiny mechanical birds moving along the top of a wall in a silent, resigned procession. Once hit, the metal bird flops out of sight behind the wall. I watch for a while and am tempted, but the fifty cents in my pocket suddenly feels too vulnerable. I know, when it is gone, there will be no more.
I arrive at a small cubicle, walls at least six feet high. I see in large letters on the plywood the words FISH POND. People pay money and are handed a fishing rod, flick the line over the wall, pretend to fish, then reel in prizes.
“Everybody wins!”
“How much?” I ask.
“Ten cents.”
“I’ll try.”
After a moment I am the owner of a Union Jack.
The rain is cold. We are wondering what the premier and the man from Ottawa are doing on the other side. What does it take to set off an explosion?
“I think I’ll go,” says Theresa, who is shivering. Like Jackie Nick, Theresa MacKinnon always seems to have a cold, even in the summer.
“Suit yourself,” says Angus Neil, her brother.
In school we learn there are four seasons in the year. But in Cape Breton there are only two—winter and summer. The summer usually lasts a little longer than it did this year. Sometimes it hangs on even up to Halloween. Then the winter comes in November and stays till June.
Some winter mornings you can’t see through the window because of frost, but by holding your finger against it for a minute you can make a small hole and see outside. On days like that you have to be careful using the chamber pot because it often freezes over in the night. We don’t have a bathroom in the house.
On winter mornings my mother gets up first and lights the stove, and when the fire is rumbling and crackling to life we rush downstairs and dress quickly, huddling close to the only source of heat in the house. I’ve heard them say we will soon have a floor furnace in the back hallway, and that will help. They say we are slowly making progress. When we first moved in, after Harry and Rannie left, there was no electricity. One night my little sister Rosalind tried to blow out a kerosene lamp, but the shade exploded and almost set her and the house on fire. I think it was after that we got the power.
When there is hot water ready, we wash in a pan in the pantry sink, where there is a hand pump for cold water. Some day, I have been assured, we’ll have water from taps and a bathroom, instead of the outdoor toilet, which is attached to the barn.
We have a cow. My mother named her Beulah, another name without any apparent reason for it. Around the time we got the cow we also got a litt
le pig, which she named Oriole—also completely out of the blue. Oriole and Beulah became, like Skipper, part of the family, but when the pig grew large and fat and noisy, some men came and killed her, scraped the guts out, and hung her upside down in the barn. My mother explained that that’s what pigs are for. You feed them and fatten them, and then you eat them. Apparently they don’t mind.
Cows are different, she assured me then. Beulah is for her milk. We would never kill Beulah.
We’re supposed to be lucky because we live so close to the school and can come home to eat at noon. But I often envy the kids who stay there to eat their lunch at their desks, then run wild in and out of the schoolrooms afterward, shouting and banging on the piano and, when it’s fine, playing ball.
There are about forty kids in the school. The number varies. Kids seem to start and stop for very little reason. For a while the Fraser kids from out back were coming in a horse and wagon, dropped off by their father, Angus. But then they stopped coming. Older boys just quit. People move away.
We’re divided between the two rooms—up to grade five in one, six to ten in the other. I’m in grade five and can hardly wait until I move to the next room. I know that Mrs. Gillis can be cross, though she’s not as cross as Miss Euphemia MacKinnon, who would beat the older boys with her own strap, which someone said was made from braided telephone wire.
I spend all day in school trying to concentrate on my own work while Miss Morrison struggles with the hopeless smaller kids, trying to teach them how to read and spell. Each day is like a month of my life.
In the morning, before school, I help my mother with the cow. I shovel the manure and pitch down hay from the scaffold above the stable. My mother milks. Milking, I am told, is women’s work. Before I go to school I will fill a hod with coal in the barn and bring it in for the fire. I will also fill the woodbox.
During winter the cow lives in the barn most of the time, venturing out only to drink some water from a washtub near the well. Then she’ll happily go back, even without being told. But starting in May we’ll just let her wander off anywhere she wants to go. And she always seems to go to the same place, around here somewhere, near where the causeway will connect. I usually find her in one of the fields and pastures that nobody uses near the old MacMillan place.
I wonder what will happen now. With the causeway heading in this direction and plans for a big canal right down there, across the back of Nicholson’s Point, it is difficult to imagine that these fields will be safe for a wandering cow anymore. Not even for an intelligent cow like Beulah who manages to take care of herself all day long.
It is my job, every evening in the summer, right after supper and the rosary, to go looking for her, though she is never hard to find.
One evening last May she didn’t answer when I called, and I had to come home without her. Nobody seemed to worry. My mother just said, “Start looking again tomorrow.” But I couldn’t find her then, either.
I found her by accident on the third day. She was hiding in a little grove of trees in a difficult place behind the graveyard. I could see that she was lying down and assumed that she was hurt. The dog went in first, then came running back, bouncing with excitement.
The cow was lying there, staring at me with annoyance in her large brown eyes. Standing nearby was a tiny calf. When the dog went over to sniff at it, the calf tried to move away but staggered and fell down. The cow started struggling to her feet, and then I saw the great disgusting mess behind her. A great puddle of slime that I now know is called the afterbirth.
I had to go and get adults to help me take her home.
What will Beulah do, I wonder, when the causeway takes away her territory?
I see the family moving through the crowd at the Legion Grounds, my mother and father and sisters. Suddenly I am hungry.
“I want to buy a hot dog,” I announce.
“The money is burning a hole in your pocket,” my father teases.
My mother says: “Save your money. In a little while we’ll go to the Cabot Grill.”
A restaurant. I have never eaten in a restaurant before because my parents see no point in paying someone for food you could prepare for yourself. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” Plus, “Who knows what they do to the food out in the back kitchen?”
My father says he was getting tea at Mac’s Lunch one summer day and he could see a big raw T-bone steak on a plate inside the kitchen. It was crawling with flies. Then he saw the cook grab a dishtowel and kill all the flies on the steak with one whack of the rag. Then brush the dead flies away and toss the steak in a frying pan for some other customer.
When my father is away working, he eats in a cookhouse. When he comes home he always reports, among the most important details of his absence, that “the grub is great” or that “the bull cook wouldn’t know how to boil water if his life depended on it.”
In some places where he works, people have plotted to kill the cook—to shoot him or blow him up with dynamite.
I have heard my father and my uncle Joe Donohue talking about a lumber camp where they once worked and lived mostly on porridge and bread and molasses and got paid a dollar a day.
A dollar a day? It sounds like a lot of money when you’re down to forty cents.
I understand that money is important. My Uncle John Dan tries to live without it on the mountain. John Dan rarely goes away to work. He’s in the mine in Stirling now, but nobody expects that he’ll stay for long. John Dan, according to Grandma Donohue, “has no ambition.”
This means that John Dan and his wife, Mae, and all their kids try to live on the mountain the way the MacIntyres have lived for more than a hundred and thirty years. They plant their vegetables in the mountain’s sandy soil, which is, they say, perfect for potatoes. They grow hay and store it in the barns to feed their animals—horses for the work, cows for milk and butter. For meat, they “butcher”—which means, I understand, they kill an animal.
None of this, of course, produces money, and money has become essential for survival.
Coming home from school, I knew there was something wrong even before I found out what was happening. The first sign was the cow, Beulah, at the barn. She was standing there bawling loudly, face up close to the front door. It was still October. Normally she wouldn’t be home unless I went and got her. Normally, she’d be at the back door, the entrance to her stable.
But there she was, home early and at the wrong door. I was about to go see what her problem was when the barn door opened and there was a stranger, standing with a cigarette in one hand and a large knife in the other. There was blood on his fist and wrists and on an apron he was wearing. The cow bawled again. It wasn’t her normal indifferent moo but more like a howl. The man looked at her briefly, flicked his cigarette, and went back inside and shut the door.
I went straight through the house and up to my bedroom. I just sat there for a long time, trying to shut the sound of the cow out of my mind.
Later my mother came up.
“I thought you knew,” she said.
“No.”
“It was a boy calf.”
“So what?”
“We couldn’t keep him. What would we do with a boy calf after he grew up?”
“Sell him. Give him away.”
“We can’t afford to feed him. Besides, we need the meat. Do you have any idea what veal costs?”
And there it was again. What things cost. Cars, clothes, houses, calves. Everything is about what things cost.
“You have a soft heart,” she said after a while. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
I still feel bad for the calf. His mother, Beulah, hovered around the door of the barn for days. This, I know, is how the world works. Things die so other things will live.
When I asked my father once: “Why are you always going away?”
“We have to eat,” he said. “That’s all you have to know.”
In case I didn’t understand, he said: “We eat, or we are e
aten.”
My father would go away because there were no jobs close to home. Not for him, the man who never went to school; the man without connections. We keep a cow for milk. We sometimes raise a pig to kill for meat. If, by some mysterious process, the cow ends up with a calf, it will be either sold or killed.
I’d ask my mother: “Why can’t he stay home—like the MacKinnons and Ellis Langley and the MacLellans?”
“Some day soon,” she’d say.
“There are lots of people here who don’t have jobs. Harry and Rannie. Sinclair. Danny Black Dan. They survive.”
“But just look at them,” she’d say. “Is that how you want us to live?”
“What about the causeway?” I’d ask. “There will be lots of people working on the causeway.”
“We’ll see,” she’d say. “Remember your father in your prayers.”
My grandfather, Dougald, was a painter of houses and, from time to time, would leave the mountain to paint something and then return with money. Dougald’s father, whom they called Alasdair Chiorstaidh, was a famous carpenter and built, they say, a hundred houses. But he never had much money because there wasn’t any and, luckily, he didn’t need it.
Now you need it and, because my uncle on the mountain tries to live the way the old people did, John Dan’s house has a dilapidated look about it. It needs paint and shingles and new foundations—things that now cost money.
After he started working in the mine in Stirling, John Dan bought a car, and he has loaned it to his only surviving sibling, his brother, Dan Rory. I know he will work there for as long as he has to, and then he will go back to the mountain and live as MacIntyres have always lived.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 7