Now we watch in silence as the last of the monster boulders from the cape are being hauled across in a relentless procession of grim-faced Euclids, to assert the superiority of engineers and drillers and their dynamite over Mother Nature.
Someone points into the gloom and there, writhing and leaping, we can see a school of pollock struggling through the gap. Probably the last living creatures to do so, stealing some of the glory from the little boat that made it through this morning.
I study the crowd to see if the reporter noticed, but he is engaged in a laughing conversation with his photographer.
Earlier there was a rumour that one of the well-dressed men in the tightly packed shivering group of important-looking people is the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, the Honourable Alistair Fraser. It’s hard to tell because important men all seem to look the same. They wear similar serious hats and coats and faces. They have a way of standing, feet planted solidly, because they know exactly why they’re there instead of somewhere else. Their importance travels with them and invests their destinations with a certain majesty.
Mr. Fraser, I have heard, owns Cape Porcupine, where all the rock for the causeway came from—at least ten million tons of it, they say. And now, the last few tons are tumbling into the narrowing gap between here and everywhere else.
I can imagine Mr. Fraser standing there, somewhere in the crowd, adding up the money in his head as the rocks from his ancient mountain tumble into the desperate strait.
Darkness gathers closer. I know it’s suppertime. Faint kitchen smells waft towards us from the Shediac and the Shawanaga, which are moored nearby. The Shediac is a dredge, digging the approaches for the new canal. The Shawanaga is a tugboat that moves the dredge around.
I know I’m risking trouble standing here, missing supper, but this is a rare historic moment in a place where, until recently, there was nothing but decline and stories of before. It is Friday, and there is no school tomorrow. The only thing tomorrow morning is the usual trip to the camp with Billy for the bottles Old John will have stored away for us. And I find I’m less likely to get in trouble for things like being late for supper since my father moved back home.
One of my jobs, before he came back to stay, was to lock the kitchen door before I went to bed and to unlock it in the morning.
Most people around here never lock their doors, but most people around here have men living in the houses more or less all the time. We began locking the door when we started seeing so many strangers showing up around the village in the spring of 1953, when the causeway construction started on this side—just before my father came home and I turned ten.
First I thought it was because of the Syrian. But my mother said, “God, no. There’s no harm in the poor Syrian.”
“Why couldn’t we let him sleep in the house, then?”
“Because you can’t take chances when you’re alone,” she said. “You just don’t let strange men sleep in the house when the father is away.”
Maybe it had something to do with peddlers. The way people say the word “peddler” makes you think there’s something crooked about them—something vaguely dangerous.
My mother was trying to reassure me: there’s nothing wrong with peddlers. She told me about growing up in Bay St. Lawrence, when the Jewish peddlers would travel the countryside. People were almost always glad to see them because, back then, country people needed most of the stuff that the peddlers brought. The peddlers brought pills and cloth and pots and pans and tons of gossip. Most of them were fun, my mother said. They’d bring news and stories from the towns and other villages and sit in the kitchen talking the night away. One of them, named Jack Yazer, was young and good-looking, and he’d be full of news from the city and around. And when the news was done he’d recite long poems, changing the verses to make serious poetry sound comical.
She’d recite what she could remember of one of Jack’s favourites, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” It was about a massacre, but Jack would make such changes as “Cannons to right of them, cannons to left of them…hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cannons…” And everybody would fall over laughing.
They always loved to see Jack Yazer in the lane.
I’d say: “Maybe the Syrian would be like him, full of news and entertainment.”
She’d say: “We can’t take that chance. The country was different back then. And the men, if they were alive, would be home most of the time. The houses were full of men. The fathers and often a grandfather or uncle. And always, it seems, lots of large strong brothers.”
I don’t have a brother, either.
The worst part before my father came home were the times when I’d hear the women in the kitchen some nights talking quietly, so I wouldn’t know exactly what they were going on about. My mother and my Aunt Veronica and Grandma Donohue at the kitchen table, talking softly about somebody’s problems. Or sometimes when I’d come upon one or two of them in the pantry and somebody would be crying.
Part of being the only man in the house, I have learned, is to try to anticipate and avoid what will make the women sad or nervous or angry and prevent those quiet, private conversations in the pantry or, late at night, around the kitchen table.
One morning when I unlocked the door, Martin Angus was sleeping on the floor of the porch. He was curled up on an old coat that used to belong to my father but had been turned into a bed for the dog. It was a red and black plaid pattern, but the colour was, by that time, almost invisible under the dog hair.
Martin Angus MacLellan is our cousin on the MacIntyre side, but we don’t often talk about it because everybody in the county makes fun of him.
Martin Angus lives in Inverness, but mostly he wanders around the countryside like the peddlers, living off hospitality. Nobody knows quite how to describe Martin Angus. He’s tall and thin and very pale. You can tell by his eyes that there’s a serious want on him. At the same time, the way he listens to people and the way he understands even what they aren’t saying makes people a little bit nervous when he’s around. Sometimes I think that Martin Angus can read your mind.
There are a lot of people like him in the asylum in Mulgrave, but they haven’t put him there yet because he has an unusual brain and uses it to entertain people. And that’s how he takes care of himself.
Here’s how he does it: He’ll go to a political meeting, say, and listen to the speeches. Then he’ll go to visit somebody who will let him in, and he’ll repeat the speeches, word for word, for the people who weren’t there. Once he came to our place straight from the graduation at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, and he told us about all the priests and monsignors and what the bishop had to say. Then he started reciting the speech that some important person made, and he didn’t even stop when my mother left the room to fill the kettle in the pantry. The speech went on and on even when the kettle boiled. He shut up only when she put some tea and sandwiches in front of him.
Some people say, probably because he’s related to us, that Martin Angus is witty and has a photographic memory. But when he shows up at our place my mother says, “Oh Dhia, look what’s coming.”
But you don’t want to provoke Martin Angus because of the sharpness of his tongue.
Once, when he was watching a step dancer he didn’t like much, somebody said, “That fellow has music in his blood.” And Martin Angus replied that the step dancer obviously had bad circulation because the music wasn’t getting to his feet.
So, this particular morning, there’s Martin Angus sleeping on the dog’s bed. The dog is curled up in the corner, shivering. And when I opened the door, the dog jumped up and looked at me as if to say: What are you going to do about this? Or, Maybe it’s time to put a lock on the outside door as well.
Martin Angus woke up too and asked what he always asks: “Is Dan Rory home?”
“No,” I said.
“And when might you be expecting him?” he asked, sitting there on my father’s old coat, scratching under h
is arms and looking cold.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“And is he still working over in Stirling?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Working for Mindemar Metals. That’s good work—a good place for him.”
The way he says things, it’s as though he thinks you’re lying.
I said nothing, but as Martin was going out the door, he said, “You can tell Dan Rory I was here.”
“Yes,” I said.
And as he closed the door, he said, “I’ll be back.”
When I told my mother, she just rolled her eyes.
Martin Angus always says that: “I’ll be back.”
When I was little, and my father was around for a while one summer, there were also the fiddle players. They’d appear out of nowhere and just move in for days, eating and drinking and playing the fiddles in the evenings. Their whole lives seemed to be like that, going from house to house. In the winter they’d move in for months with someone who had a kid who wanted to become a fiddler himself. There’s also a piper named Sandy Boyd who lives like that: wandering around playing and teaching music, getting paid in hospitality.
My father learned to play the fiddle, but stopped after he got married.
“The fiddle is a lovely thing,” my mother says. “But it’s bad for attracting boozers.”
Billy Malone is new, though he moved to the village more than a year ago. He comes from the far end of the province, a place called Lower Woods Harbour, which he says is even smaller than Port Hastings. Mr. Malone is a crane operator, and when he came to work here he brought the whole family: Mrs. Malone, whose name is Zella; Billy and his sister, Phyllis.
Billy’s real name is Willis, which is also his father’s name, and there was snickering in school when he and his sister were introduced. I guess that was when I decided he would be my friend. People giggling at names—Willis and Phyllis, as if that’s funny.
He is younger than I am and younger than Jackie Nick, who also became his friend because they live close together. Jackie moved into the old Bellefontaine place, across the road from Mr. Clough’s store, after they burned down his old house on Nicholson’s Point to begin working on the new canal. Billy’s family came here in the fall of ’53 and moved into the Captain MacInnis place, where Brian Langley used to live, next door to Mr. Clough’s. Brian moved to town when his father got a better job.
Little Ian MacKinnon was saying there wasn’t much point in getting to know Billy because he wasn’t going to be around for long. Then the Malones built a new place, a bungalow on the other side of the road from the Captain’s, practically next door to Jackie’s new old home, and moved in there. To me that means they’re here for good, anticipating lots of work for crane operators even after the causeway and canal are finished. It’s hard for me to imagine that a father who goes places for work would take the whole family and build a new house if he wasn’t going to stay.
And that is a good thing, because Billy Malone has become my best friend, and his sister is one of my sister’s best friends.
This is what I expect from the new causeway: new friends who bring their different personalities and experiences from other places.
To pass the time while waiting for the gap to close, we’ve explored what’s left of Jackie Nicholson’s old lighthouse, which is nothing now but ashes and a few charred pieces of lumber. There is no longer any trace of where the house was or the old outbuildings. There is the beginning of a large trench, which will one day be the canal. The concrete walls are now about a third of the way along to where the first “cell” is to be located. I understand that the cell is where there will be large gates that open and close and control the current so that ships and boats don’t swirl around as they try to get through.
Since the spring, my father has been hauling gravel for the concrete they’re using for the canal. I read in the paper that they’re going to need a hundred thousand yards, which really means a lot more than it sounds.
I try to imagine the ships I used to see moving slowly in the distance as they passed through the unblocked strait. Soon I’ll see them up close, halted in the canal, with the land pressed close on either side, waiting to get through the narrow passage so they can continue towards the gulf—or back towards the ocean. I’ll actually be able to read the names of the ships and the distant places they come from. I’ll see their flags and get to see the people on board.
The flank of the hill leading up to Newtown, where Angus Neil and Theresa MacKinnon used to live, is patchy white from recent snow. But where the canal is being built there is only mud and carved black rock. The air is full of the smell of diesel fumes and the sour aftertaste of blasting smoke.
It is strangely quiet now, the way it always gets at suppertime when day is ending and the night is moving in. But I know it’s different from the quiet of before, when there was nobody here but Jackie and his grandmother. The only sound would be, on foggy nights, the sad call of Mrs. Nicholson’s foghorn and the nervous response of invisible ships somewhere in the darkness. The quiet now is that of an army of construction men and their machines relaxing briefly on this side, watching the frantic action on the other side in this battle against nature.
I want to ask Jackie Nicholson how he feels, coming here and seeing all the change. How does he feel about the lighthouse that gave his grandmother work for years and years and now lies in a pile of charred timber and powdery ash? But I know he’d just look at me with his puzzled expression. He seems happy in the new house, and especially since they got the new TV.
According to the Bulletin, they turned off the big beam at the top of the lighthouse for the last time on November 17. After they burned the lighthouse down, Mr. Jim Spray, who lives in town, was in the paper saying that it was the first time in 150 years that the point was dark. He doesn’t seem too happy about it.
According to Mr. Clough, the point won’t be dark for long. Where the lighthouse stood for a century and a half will, in fact, soon become a part of the causeway, and there will be more lights than anyone can imagine, starting in the village itself and illuminating the strait from one side to the other along the brave new road. Huge power lines will be draped across the strait from towers so tall they’ll need flashing lights on top to keep the airplanes from running into them. And everybody will have TV.
Right now, though, Jackie and his grandmother have one of the only television sets in the village. Murdoch MacFarlane, who has a son in the priesthood and a daughter Mary working for the Power Commission, got the first. Then McGowan. Then Mrs. Nicholson got theirs, which Billy and I are allowed to watch when Jackie Nick is in the mood. Jackie is strange like that. Some days he’s your best friend. Then there are days when his face is pale and scowling and his hair damp and hanging over his forehead and you avoid him. One night he and I went to a card game in the school and played as partners after I loaned him twenty-five cents so he could get in.
When I asked him, next day, to pay the quarter back, he said, “Whistle for it.”
He’s even ignorant to his grandmother when she tries to stop him from eating cookies or shovelling heaping spoons of icing sugar into his glass of milk. He’ll speak sharply to her. Mrs. Nicholson just shakes her head and sighs and lets him do whatever he wants. If I spoke like that to Grandma Donohue, I’d be dead—instantly.
Everything, it seems, begins with mud. Men and large machines manoeuvre in fields that were, until recently, abandoned, shoving grass and underbrush aside. The growling voices of the chainsaws rise and fall in the woods, the air thick with spicy smoke from brushfires. It is hard to sit at a desk inside a classroom, knowing that everything outside is being transformed.
There are even changes in the small routines of school. On Fridays we have the Junior Red Cross meeting and assign jobs, such as handing out the cod liver oil capsules and checking for dirty fingernails and head lice. One of the best jobs is fetching water, which gets you extra time outside, if only briefly, ev
ery morning. There is no running water in the school, so we have to carry water in pails to fill the water coolers. We used to go to Miss Phemie MacKinnon’s just below the church, but the old MacKinnon place is empty now, and someone drowned a cat in the well. The house and well will soon be gone to make way for a new road, which will be part of the highway that stretches across the country from one ocean to the other.
Now we go farther away from the school, through the pasture that is beside the school and into the woods, to a little spring where the water is cold and clean.
But now I see them burning brush near that spring, and I’m not sure where we’ll go for water next. I wonder what it would be like in a school with running water.
Below Mr. Clough’s store they are relocating the railroad, and soon the long, slow turns before and just beyond the railway station will be a straight line, a new passageway hacked through the rocks all the way from Sam Fox’s Hill to the end of the new causeway at the point. There will even be a miniature causeway to carry trains over the water at the entrance to the cove. There’s talk about moving the railway station. Survey crews appear shouting and measuring and driving enigmatic stakes into the ground in unlikely places. Clusters of men in hard hats and work boots stand in groups around men who wear shoes and overcoats and carry briefcases and long rolls of paper and turn up suddenly in pastures, unintelligible intelligence flowing among them. And across the water, the hulking cape suddenly shudders and shatters. And the causeway inches closer. Mud-spattered cars and trucks line the road between the stores. People say they’re even going to tear down the church and the school and all the houses near the road, including ours. Old people are feeling anxious.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 13