In return, Boston gave my grandmother enough sophistication to last the rest of her life—even though she married poor Jack Donohue, a simple fisherman who worked like a slave until he died of cancer, and she spent her life living in a house with none of the conveniences of Boston.
Shortly after we arrive, my Uncle Francis and his new wife, Annie Mae, stroll up from the little house he built on Grandma Donohue’s property, closer to the road. Francis was in the navy during the war, but now he works in a gypsum quarry in Dingwall, which is fifteen miles from Bay St. Lawrence. He is the youngest in the family, and boyish in the way he carries on. Uncle Joe will eventually come by, with his booming voice and Irish accent, which makes my father smile. And the bottle from Inverness will appear, and everything will get even louder.
Joe drives an oil truck for the Irvings. The men all talk about their work.
They talk about the causeway and the difference it will make, and how Uncle Francis is thinking of moving up to the strait for work because there’s talk of closing down the quarry in Dingwall. I decide to climb the mountain that rises directly behind my grandmother’s house and is even higher than Cape Porcupine.
It is a steep climb, through low bushes and coarse grass and thistles. It has, for several visits, become a ritual for me—climbing Grandma’s mountain, a few steps farther every time. Each visit I get a little closer to the top, but I feel a strange anxiety as I rise above the village where my mother was born and spent her childhood—getting too far away from what I know, too close to the unknown. But I push on, knowing that when I reach the top I’ll finally be able to see off over the Atlantic to Newfoundland, where I was born, and beyond it, to Scotland and Ireland, where all my people came from.
Below me sprawls the land in alternating patches, all in shades of green, cloud shadows moving slowly, changing green to darker shades of green, and gold to brown, mauve to black. Small boats bob in a sheltered pond. I stop and imagine the lives of my mother and her brothers and sisters, watching each other grow. People aging are the only changing feature in a vast unyielding landscape. And I remember my own village where nothing today is as it was yesterday—where it’s getting hard to notice people for all the noise and mud.
From the mountainside I can see the cemetery where they buried my grandfather, Jack Donohue, who was, they always say, a saint for putting up with the cancer and the many emphatic certainties Grandma Donohue brought back from Boston—certainties about the superiority of America, the Conservative Party of Canada, and the Holy Catholic Church.
I think of this ghost-grandfather I never knew as I study the small boats below me nodding on the little pond. He was a fisherman, and I try to imagine Jack and his boys, Joe and Francis, venturing cautiously beyond the narrow entry to the pond and out into the writhing sea, looking for their livelihood. And I wonder about this vast concept—livelihood—and how men and women dedicate their lives to it. Lives spent struggling to live, while simultaneously struggling to believe there’s a Better Life awaiting after this one.
Across the road from the cemetery where my grandfather has been buried for longer than I have been alive, the Catholic Church looms over the surrounding farms, like a benign sentry watching over a vulnerable community.
Once when my mother and Veronica and their older sister, Catherine, were girls, Grandma Donohue got sick and went to bed and didn’t recover for, I think, two years. Nobody talks about what was wrong with her; just how it affected everybody.
The older girls, Veronica and Catherine, had to give up school to run the house. And after two years, it was too late for going back. They were women then. There was no more time for childhood or books. Learning now would come from Experience, which, in many ways, they now insist, is the only reliable source of education.
They had to go to work, but the only work available for two uneducated women from down north was looking after priests. And so, after a couple of years as Grandma’s housekeepers, they both became priests’ housekeepers—an honourable job, their mother thought. Looking after quality people in a quality place was the highlight of her life. And there was no quality like a priest, or better places than the church.
My mother got to stay in school because she was the youngest of the girls—too young for looking after priests.
School has become a bit more interesting. I have moved on to the Big Room—grade six. No more endless days sitting in a desk that was too small, listening to Miss Norma Morrison trying to teach the younger children how to spell.
When I learned to spell, everything was different. It was my first year of school. There was only one room then, from primary to grade ten, and one teacher for us all. There was a stove in the middle of the room and, all around it, piles of rubber boots and overshoes that became so hot they’d almost catch on fire as the day progressed. The room was full of the smells of feet and hair and burning rubber mixed with chalk and Dustbane, which is something they use to sweep the floors and makes you want to sneeze. Sometimes, for mischief, an older boy would throw a wad of gum onto the stovetop, where it would bubble and burn and fill the room with smoke that smelled like poison, while the teacher tried to persuade the culprit to confess.
“You’ll be a better person for it,” she’d assure, slowing tapping a yardstick against the palm of her hand as she prowled around the classroom.
The only sound in the room would be the crackling of the fire and the sizzle of the burning gum.
What is now the Big Room was the only room when I started school. There was obviously a second classroom, from the time when the village had more people, but it had been boarded up for years. Then, anticipating all the activity with the causeway, the authorities cleaned up the abandoned room for the junior grades and now it’s called the Little Room. They eventually installed a furnace and indoor toilets. They tore out the wall and cloakrooms that separated the two rooms and replaced them with a new wall that was built in sections. The new wall can be taken down, so the two rooms become one large hall for concerts, dances, and other public events. The removable wall sections are then placed on blocks to become an elevated stage for speeches or performances.
The first year I went to school, Miss Euphemia MacKinnon taught us how to spell the old-fashioned way—memorizing. She spoke in a loud, careful, nasal tone that was patient, but dangerous at the same time. Enunciating the letters in the words as she walked back and forth, she held the yardstick in her hand and hid a homemade strap of braided wire in her drawer for backup. She was large for a woman, and very pale, and she seemed to have a long, thick pigtail coiled up and pinned to the back of her head. She wore long dresses and low boots, which made a slow marching sound on the wooden floor. From time to time she’d test us in a spelling bee.
I learned quickly how to read and how to spell just about everything, which was why I managed to get to grade three without grade two. I even learned to spell Euphemia, and that may have helped. Later, after they opened up the Little Room and I moved there, I’d listen in despair as Miss Norma Morrison struggled to teach my sister and the others how to spell simple words by drawing boxes around them.
You have to visualize the words, she’d tell them. Just as the word has a sound, it also has a shape. My younger sister, Rosalind, who is just learning how to spell, will be lucky if she even learns to spell her own name.
My last year in the Little Room was pure misery, starting with an incident just before Halloween. Mr. Sinclair, who lives alone in a filthy house next door to Angus Walker’s, barged into the schoolroom that year, accusing us of setting off firecrackers on his doorstep at noon hour. Nobody knows who Mr. Sinclair is or where he came from. He is almost a hermit, though you see him shuffling along the road towards Mr. Clough’s about once a week. People avoid him because he’s cranky and never washes. They say the explosions across the strait are making Mr. Sinclair worse.
That noon hour he said there were explosions on his doorstep that almost caused a fire. He headed straight for the school. He just wa
lked in huffing and puffing and making accusations. Then he spotted me.
“That devil there,” he shouted. “He’s the ring leader!”
Devil? Ringleader? The words stunned me. And though I wasn’t anywhere near his miserable little house, nobody listened to me.
“You’ll remain after school,” Miss Morrison said coldly.
Part way through the afternoon I had to go to the toilet, which was still outside behind the school. When I raised my hand, Donald Cameron, who sits near the window and whose father, Finlay, is the railway station agent, signalled me a warning.
“Don’t go out,” he whispered. “Sinclair called the Mounties, and they’re waiting to grab you when you go outside.”
Eventually I pissed my pants, and when Miss Morrison asked me why I had my head down on the desk, I told her I was sick. She told me to go home. There can be no punishment worse than to piss your pants when you are ten.
When I went outside, there were no Mounties. I could see Donald Cameron waving and grinning at me from the pencil sharpener, which is screwed onto the window ledge.
That night Miss Morrison came to the house, and I listened at The Hole as they discussed the Sinclair Situation. My mother said I couldn’t have been at Sinclair’s because I was home at noon hour having dinner.
Miss Morrison often comes to visit, because my mother is a school-teacher too. After they were finished talking about me, they talked about my sister’s problems with learning how to spell. My mother said she never in her entire life heard of such a foolish way to learn to spell as visualizing, drawing boxes around words.
Miss Morrison agreed, but said that’s how they’re supposed to do things these days. And they continued about how school is changing and everything is getting worse.
All that is ancient history now. I am in the Big Room, and it is almost Christmas. It is when we forget school and the weather for a while. There is always a concert, and some of us have parts. We take down the wall and turn the school into a hall, and the wall becomes a stage. The COD parcel somehow comes home and vanishes into one of the cold, closed rooms in the back end of the house, where nobody ever goes in wintertime. Grandma Donohue, who comes to live with us when the winter drives her out of Bay St. Lawrence, is remarking on what a change it is to have Dan Rory home.
They sit around the kitchen table playing cards and having drinks. Christmas is one time of year when there are lots of drinks for everybody, and nobody seems to mind. When my father came home at other times and had his drinks, you knew my mother wasn’t pleased about it. But at Christmas even Grandma Donohue has a little glass near her elbow and remarks that the drinks are flying straight to her head. She laughs as if it’s the best feeling in the world.
Grandma Donohue can be strict, but she taught me how to play all the games of cards she knows. And when we’re playing, I can even get away with teasing her. Once when I was losing badly, I noticed that the kitchen had filled with a foul odour. The dog was sleeping by the stove. I saw him smile and realized he was farting silently. So I blamed Grandma, just to distract her from her game.
“You farted,” I accused.
“I WHAT?” she said, blue eyes blazing.
“You farted,” I said, studying my cards. “There’s just the two of us and it wasn’t me.”
I never let on about the dog.
She put her cards down and swore that never in her life had she ever, ever broken wind.
“It’s one thing I never does,” she said.
That’s the way she talks. She puts an s on the ends of words.
And I thought: it’s probably the truth…a discipline she picked up among the quality in Boston.
But it was a weapon I knew I would use whenever she was winning at cards. It was a sure way to destroy her confidence. From what I knew of her, it was probably the only way to rattle her.
My Aunt Veronica, whom we all call Ronnie for short, is also at the table for the Christmas card party. All the players are shrieking, hitting the table with their fists every time they play a good one.
During the dealing or between games they’ll talk about the causeway and about the changes it will make—big changes coming in the long run. My father will go quiet then.
We’ll see about that, he’ll say, what happens after the construction.
My Aunt Veronica knows a lot of politicians because she’s a Tory and works for them during elections. She believes that everyone will be better off after there’s a change of government. People like my father will never have to go away for work again. People like her will no longer have to scrub floors just to make a living.
People say she should be a politician herself, but she just laughs. With a little education, everybody says, she could be anything she wants. Education has nothing to do with it, she says.
Some of the worst people she has known were the most educated. And the best were the plainest.
She writes political letters to the editor at the Halifax newspaper, which publishes them regularly. It is amazing to see them, always giving politicians hell in a comical way and signed Mrs. Veronica MacNeil, Port Hastings. There’s a Liberal named Francis Campbell who lives in Inverness, and he always answers her. Reading the letters you’d think they were enemies, but they’ve come to know each other, and she says she respects him because he’s reasonable and fair, and he’s in a wheelchair and worse off than she is. Being a Liberal, like being crippled, is a misfortune that he can’t do much about, she says.
My aunt is always telling my father to go see some Tory who she thinks can help him get a permanent job at the causeway or somewhere else near home.
My father just smiles.
The Tories!
The Tories haven’t been in power for years, in Halifax or Ottawa, and there’s no sign that is going to change any time soon.
“This is where you’re wrong,” she tells him. Mr. Stanfield has just taken over the party and he’s the one man who can beat Angus L. It will happen inevitably, and no doubt about it. The Tories are on the march. Last May they took six seats away from the Liberals in the provincial election. Next time, for sure, they’ll form the government. A Tory government in Ottawa is also inevitable.
But my father figures that nobody alive will ever beat Angus L. Macdonald, and even if they did, the Tories wouldn’t be any better. They’re all the same. Promise everything to everyone, then do exactly what they want.
“Well, we’ll just see about that,” my aunt informs him.
I think of my father’s words—eat or be eaten—but say nothing because I’m not supposed to be there.
My aunt points out that the work is already under way at the canal and the locks on this side of the strait, and that they’re going to have to rearrange the railway tracks and build a lot of new roads.
And, of course, after that, there will be the Trans-Canada Highway, which has to go to Newfoundland under the terms of Confederation. To get there, it will have to pass through here. After that, there’ll be factories and work for everybody because the causeway will turn the Strait of Canso into one of the biggest, deepest ice-free harbours in the world.
“Lots of opportunities for work, if you know the right people.”
Time to get involved. And did we know that they’ve already burned down Mrs. Nicholson’s house down by the point? Just put a match to it, and the old place went up like kindling. And now Kate and poor Jackie are moving into the old place near Clough’s, where the Bellefontaines used to live. A sure sign the project is moving into the final phase.
“Well, well.”
They sure were pretty quiet about burning Nicholson’s.
My father says no more on the subject.
The church bell was ringing lazily as the bus slowed to make the sharp turn onto the church hill. The turn is so sharp, my father says, you almost meet yourself coming back. The bus driver is Heck MacNeil, and he struggles with the gear shift as the old bus groans and whines and creeps up to the church. St. Joseph’s looms proudly ov
er the flashing strait. From the front steps you can clearly see across to Mulgrave and imagine people over there going into their church, St. Lawrence’s. I know about the church in Mulgrave because my Aunt Veronica was the priest’s housekeeper over there once upon a time and she told us about a mainland priest they all called Alex the Devil.
And she and my mother talked about the time Jack Donohue, her father, found a keg of rum on the shore and sold it, but he had to give the money to the church down north because the priest there said it was a sin for him to profit from his neighbour’s weakness.
Priests are funny people, she says. And she should know, having worked for them. But she never misses Mass. The church, she says, is larger and more important than any of the little people running it.
Outside, the wind from the strait and, to the southeast, Chedabucto Bay, and beyond, from the Atlantic Ocean, was chilly. Jean Larter clutched the kerchief map to her throat and hurried inside.
St. Joseph’s is vast and cluttered and full of the holy odours of varnish, candle wax, and incense. Wherever the eye settles there is something ornamental, in a sacred way, to study. Two large angels crouch prayerfully on either side of the towering altar, marble faces buried in their hands. Little Father Doyle is dwarfed by the altar, the looming angels, and the statues of Jesus and His mother as he quietly performs his rituals. He bends and kisses the altar and genuflects and raises his face and hands towards the ceiling, walking around the altar mumbling the Latin Liturgy, which I know from following in the prayer book. My favourite part is the Gospel according to St. John, where he says “et verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.” You kneel briefly in the middle of it, and then there’s the last blessing and you know the Mass is over. But it isn’t just that. It isn’t just the prospect of release from the confining ritual. There’s something deep and mysterious in that gospel: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” I believe that words are miraculous, the way they make it possible for us to know things.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 11