Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  So I started watching the papers closely for news from Hungary, but there was nothing but more sad news about people being persecuted.

  I suppose if we’d lived in a bigger place with a bigger school, there would have been books and people who could have told us everything we want to know about places like Hungary. I understand there are libraries and running water in the bigger schools, and sports teams and organized competitions between schools in different communities.

  We have none of that here. There is a bookshelf with some large books called The Book of Knowledge. The other shelves are empty. The only evidence that it is a school is the blackboard and the rows of desks and the smell of chalk dust and Dustbane. For the first four months of this school year we didn’t even have a teacher.

  I’m not sure how it happened, but by late summer last year people were talking about the fact that no teacher was available for the Big Room. The Little Room had Mrs. Martha Hennessey, but from grade six up we were going to have to start the new year with correspondence courses. Our lessons would come in large packages from Halifax, and we would have a supervisor in the classroom to make sure we did them and behaved.

  The supervisor, Mrs. Mary Ellen MacNamara, had an awful time. I thought it was great fun, watching the older kids carrying on, coming and going and tormenting the poor woman at the teacher’s desk. I was getting my work done at home, under the eye of my mother, who is a schoolteacher herself.

  Going to school was crazy, with nobody doing a stroke of work and just wandering around the room as if there was no adult there at all.

  By the end of January, just in time to salvage the year, we had a real teacher, Mrs. Dolly MacDonald from Judique, and the foolishness stopped—really quickly.

  We call her Dolly when we talk about her, the way we used to call Miss MacKinnon Phemie when she couldn’t hear us. Mrs. Katie Gillis was always Mrs. Gillis because she gave you the impression she could read your mind and hear everything you were saying or thinking, even when she was nowhere near you. Once someone had an apple he wanted to share but didn’t have anything to cut it. Mrs. Gillis, who is an old lady, took the apple in her hands and, with a quick twist, split it in two pieces as neatly as if she’d used a knife. Even the bigger boys were impressed.

  Even out back of the cove, where no adult ever went, you’d refer to her as Mrs. Gillis because, somehow, she always knew what you were up to.

  But Dolly was different. She was friendly and always had a kind expression on her face. You couldn’t picture Dolly splitting an apple with her bare hands. It took a lot to make her angry, but, when it happened, the whole room would go cold because of her disappointment. So everybody seemed to work hard to avoid upsetting her.

  Obviously she noticed that the school had nothing but the bare necessities—not even books on the bookshelves. Shortly after she arrived there was talk about putting on a variety concert to raise money for school supplies. School kids and adults would prepare a program of entertainment. This was something new. In the past we’d have Christmas concerts for the entertainment of our parents, but never before, as far as I know, did we have adults and kids on the same stage entertaining the public.

  There were meetings in the evenings, and soon there was a program. I didn’t have much to do with it, except for helping get the stage ready, and that suited me just fine.

  My part in the Christmas concert the last year I was in the Little Room was a poem called “A Small Boy’s Pockets”—about all the junk mothers find in a kid’s pants. As I recited each verse, I was supposed to reach into my pocket and pull something out. There was a jackknife, a marble, a rabbit’s foot, and a few other things. But to make my pockets look really full, the teacher stuffed them full of balled-up paper. The problem was that she put so much paper in my pocket that I couldn’t find the things I was supposed to find to match the verses. It was a terrible struggle, with balls of paper falling out of my pockets and causing me to lose my place, and everybody laughing because they thought my confusion was all part of the performance.

  The next day at the mail, Mr. Clough told me it was the best part of the concert and gave me two of the cookies with the spot of jam in the middle. But I knew the truth—my performance had been a disaster, and I was determined not to let it happen again.

  Studying the program for the variety concert, I was relieved not to be on it but surprised to see my father’s name, Dan R. MacIntyre. He and Angus Walker Sr. were in a “skit.” A skit, I understood, is a little performance that’s supposed to be funny. My father and Angus Walker Sr.? Funny?

  Mr. Walker is a photographer who has a studio near the causeway. He also built a small canteen, attached to the studio, where you can buy hot dogs and ice cream, cigarettes and other treats from his mother-in-law, Mrs. Lew Reynolds. It was one of the first signs of new business when they were building the causeway. Next door, where Johnny Morrison had his blacksmith shop, another Mr. Morrison started turning the old forge into an Esso service station.

  My father is funny at home or when he’s speaking Gaelic, but not like the performers in the movies or on the radio. And I never heard Angus Walker Sr. being funny at all, which is not to say that he couldn’t be comical in private. But being funny in front of everybody is another matter altogether.

  There were lots of other performances on the program though, and I soon put my father’s out of my mind. There was Angus Walker Jr., who is a talented guitar player and wants to become the next Hank Williams. There was a short play put on by adults, plus the usual fiddle playing and Gaelic singing. And Dolly was going to bring her son Lewis, who, she said, had a nice voice and would render some Scottish selections. That was how she described it—render Scottish selections. Probably “The Road to the Isles” or “Scots Wha Hae.”

  My father is reading the paper at the kitchen table. The story is about Coffin. The paper is using his formal name. Wilbert, not Bill. My father looks serious.

  “What’s happening?”

  “The Quebec courts upheld the death sentence.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yep.”

  “Does that mean they’re going to hang him?”

  “Nah. There’ll be the Supreme Court of Canada. All that Quebec stuff, about English and French and them being Americans from Pennsylvania, won’t matter there.”

  “What about the Boyd Gang guys?” I ask.

  I am dubious. Everybody in the country seemed to be cheering for the Boyd Gang and especially Edwin Alonzo Boyd, their boss. Even Grandma Donohue and my mother, who usually think crooks should get what they deserve. But in spite of all their popularity, they still hanged two of Edwin Alonzo Boyd’s gangsters.

  The Boyd Gang killed a cop, my father says. Coffin didn’t kill anybody. He’s being railroaded.

  Even when you know that things are bothering my father, he doesn’t show it. When I say something that older people think is ridiculous, they say, “You’re full of shit” or “Your hole is out.” Once, when we were talking about the causeway and I said the Communists would certainly destroy it with an atomic bomb in the next world war, Pipe Major Cameron, who was in the last world war, told me: “Your hole is out so far you can cut washers off of it.”

  The worst thing my father ever said was: “You’re full of old rope.”

  After he finishes reading about Coffin, he just shakes his head and folds the paper carefully.

  My father seems to keep most things inside his head, even when he’s with people he knows well. They sit in the kitchen, men pouring tea into saucers, their caps on their knees. When they smoke cigarettes, they carefully put the ashes in the cuff on the bottom of the trouser leg. When they’re leaving, you see them outside, carefully brushing the ashes away.

  Sometimes they sit in silence for what seems like an hour. Then there will be a short sentence. Just a few words, and they’ll remember a common experience or some common knowledge. And then there will be head shaking and sad glances or maybe a sudden brief explosion of laughter.
/>   This is how it is with friends and relatives, and I realize that the more we have in common, the less we have to say for understanding. And how difficult it must be for my father when he is away, mostly among strangers, having to talk and explain everything he wants them to know. Or maybe being silent all the time.

  The closer we got to the big concert, the more you could feel the excitement. Dolly had to work hard to keep the classroom under control. At home I would sit by The Hole at night, listening to rehearsals for the short play that the adults were preparing to put on. My mother had a part in it. I couldn’t make head or tail out of it.

  Once I asked what my father and Angus Walker were going to do, and they just told me to wait and see.

  It was going to be a big surprise for everybody.

  I’d have guessed a Gaelic song, even though I’ve never heard my father sing, and I don’t think that Angus Walker knows any Gaelic.

  Then again, maybe he’s been listening to Major Calum Iain Norman MacLeod’s Gaelic lessons on the radio.

  I haven’t heard them advance much beyond “Caite bheil bean an tighe” because my father turns the radio off right after the fiddle music program, which is before the Gaelic lessons by Major MacLeod and a girl named Seonaid.

  It doesn’t really matter because now that my father is home all the time and has a truck, I hear plenty of Gaelic all around me. People from out back drop in and, when my mother is out of the kitchen, they speak Gaelic. We often visit the mountain, and that seems to be the only language the grown-ups use out there. And it doesn’t sound a bit like the careful, slow words that Major MacLeod and Seonaid use on the radio. At the mountain, the words flow like the water in Rough Brook which runs from the big marshlands up behind my grandfather’s all the way down, emptying eventually into Inhabitants Bay.

  When we go to the mountain, it’s usually just my father and me. My mother and my sisters will say they’re busy, but I suspect they get nervous when Grandma makes tea for us because they don’t think her kitchen is clean enough—especially in the summer when the flies come and go through the open doors and windows as if they own the place. So just my father and I go, and we bring along something like a bag of potatoes or a small bottle of brandy, which Grandma swiftly hides somewhere in the closed part of the house. Even though Peigeag is death on liquor, she likes to have a little bottle of her own for medicine or special treats.

  I suggested once that we should bring a bottle of DDT for all the flies. But my father says the stickers hanging in the kitchen do the job and, anyway, there isn’t much point in DDT if you don’t have screens to spray it on.

  Grandma Peigeag always greets us at the door, babbling in a mixture of Gaelic and English. M’eudail Lindy, and running bony freckled hands that are surprisingly soft over my forehead and through my hair. Grandpa Dougald will stand back, hands in his pockets, half giggling and wearing the same old sweater that he always wears, winter and summer.

  On the mountain it is like being in a history book. There is no electricity or running water. There are no machines of any kind. They used to have a horse named Tony, but now the barn is empty and leaning over as if it will soon fall down. The walls and floors and ceilings in the house are just plain boards. The kitchen smells of burning wood and, when they stop talking, the only sound is the crackling of the stove and the wind against the windows, or the trees rustling outside or, if it’s summertime, the buzz of invisible insects. The kitchen is dimly lit, but the walls and ceiling are dingy from wood smoke.

  Once, on a winter day, just before we got there, somebody had been by and left a feed of smelt, which Grandma proposed to boil up with some of the new potatoes we brought.

  My father looked at me and smiled. He said that would be great.

  The way he looked at me he seemed to think that, like the others, I’m not too keen on Grandma Peggy’s cooking either. But I don’t mind it, and I like boiled smelt. I also knew that before we’d leave, she’d disappear briefly in the direction of where the brandy went and return with a couple of quarters and some special candy in a box that someone gave her at Christmas, but which hadn’t yet been opened.

  Nothing ever seems to change on the mountain. Everything is as it must have been a hundred years ago, except that there are fewer people now. I listen to the Gaelic conversations that flutter and flow around me—about the weather and the woods and the people they know. Grandma seems to speak English with her teeth. From what I can see, she has only three or four teeth, and you hear them clicking and sucking as she struggles with the foreign English words. The strain of the unfamiliar language makes her seem older and unsteady and a little simple. But when she speaks the Gaelic, smooth words flow easily from somewhere in the back of her throat, clear and confident, and my father and grandfather mostly sit and listen, nodding in agreement. Her voice deepens and she becomes younger somehow, eyes flashing and face changing every moment, hands flying. In Gaelic she has the authority of a teacher or a priest, and you understand why so many people are afraid of her.

  They’ll say: Peigeag has a wicked tongue in her head if you ever cross her, and if you’re not careful she can invoke the buidseachd—even against her own.

  But I don’t worry about her because I also heard them say that Dan Rory is her favourite, being the youngest and because he almost died like the other two. She keeps a careful eye on him because she believes another old woman on the mountain once put a wish on him for something he did that displeased her. My cousins on the mountain tell me they have heard the talk: old Mary Ann put a wish on Dan Rory, that no matter how hard he worked at trying to succeed, he’d never know anything but bad luck.

  They’re usually smiling when they say it. But sometimes I feel a chill.

  My grandparents live on a bare little hill that was once surrounded by open fields. I think, when I was four, I lived there for a while—but not in their house. I remember a lumber camp that my father built just after the war, just across the road and not far from an old abandoned house they call Big Mary’s Place. Big Mary once lived over there with her husband, who was called “Domhnail am biast,” which means Donald the Worm, because he was so tall and thin. But they were both long gone by then.

  Further up the mountain, you can still see open spaces where there were farms belonging to two MacIntyres known as Big Norman and Little Norman. And the place where Angus Jim Malcolm, who was a friend of Wilbert Coffin, grew up. None of the farms have been there for years. Most of the people, I think, are either dead or in town or in Boston.

  Just down below us there is the Dan B. MacIntyre place, and that is near where my grandfather and his brothers and sisters were all born. We are known as the Alasdair Chiorstaidhs, because that was the name of my grandfather’s father and it means “Alexander who is the son of Christy.” Usually people with names from history are called after the father, but my great-grandfather’s father, whose name was Donald and who was born in Scotland, died when they were still kids, so they were raised and identified by their mother, Christy, who was a MacDonald. My grandfather is Dughail Alasdair Chiorstaidh. Dougald the son of Alexander the son of Christy. My father is Dan Rory Dougald.

  My strange name doesn’t require a sloinneadh, but I know that I am still a Chiorstaidh no matter what they call me. And that I’m a mountain MacIntyre.

  Old Christy was, they say, like Grandma MacIntyre, a “powerful woman.” She raised her kids alone after her husband’s death, and then raised the children of her son, Alasdair Chiorstaidh, after his wife died and left him helpless. She raised my grandfather on the mountain, at least until he was big enough to go away.

  I sometimes think of that priest in Scotland, telling them at the time of their eviction that their faith would lead them to prosperity. And that he should have seen them in the years beyond the sea. An cuan siar, they kept on calling it, even after they got here. It means the “Western Sea,” even though it was now east of us. He should have seen them sitting in their dark, smoky kitchens, worrying about the w
eather and sickness up on MacIntyre’s Mountain, or after the August Gale in the 1800s when all their houses and barns blew down. Or today, trying to make a living like a slave, breaking up rock deep in the belly of the earth, the only light available from a little lamp attached to their hard hats. After all those years, still struggling to settle down somewhere with the people they care about—exiled still.

  And when we’re walking down the mountain, I’ll ask again: “How old were you when you went away?”

  He’ll think for a moment, then say: “Well. Not much older than yourself.”

  “Tell me again about going away?”

  “Well,” he’ll say. “Going away is special, the first time. I bought a new suit for it. I paid fifteen dollars, and that was a lot of money then. I went to the railway station in Hastings and bought a ticket, but after the suit I only had enough money to get as far as Montreal.”

  On this day we are walking down the mountain because the snow was too deep to get the truck all the way up. It is a rare day because he seems to be in a mood for talking. The sun is sharp, and there are only a few puffy clouds in the blue sky. I can imagine him being sixteen and coming down the mountain in his new suit, with a few dollars in his pockets and big dreams in his head. Going away for good.

  By now in the story it’s as if I am not here with him. It’s just himself, going away again for the first and last time.

  “So I spent all my money on the train ticket to Montreal.”

  He laughs softly at the skinny boy with the new suit and the big ideas walking down the mountain road.

  “The trouble is I was going to Senneterre. Do you know how far Senneterre is from Montreal?”

  “No.”

  “Hundreds and hundreds of miles.”