“So how did you get there?”
“In Montreal I found the train that was going north, and I snuck onto a car that was right behind the coal tender.”
He shakes his head.
“Imagine what I looked like getting off that train? Black as…”
He stops and laughs.
“And after all that, they weren’t hiring at the mine. So I had to sleep in the woods for about a week, living off what I could pilfer from gardens.”
“Why didn’t you ask somebody to let you stay in their house?”
“They aren’t very friendly up there,” he says. “Nope.”
I considered telling him about the Syrian and Martin Angus in the porch at home, but decided not to.
“Not even a glass of water,” he said. “They’ll put the dog on you when they see you in the lane.”
“Really?”
“Don’t ever get stranded in Senneterre,” he said.
“But you got a job?”
“Yup. Got a job hand muckin’ and layin’ track.”
“What’s hand muckin’?”
“Pick and shovel,” he said. “But that didn’t last long. Before long I was driving drifts and into the real work.”
I didn’t bother asking about drifts and real work because I didn’t want to interrupt this rare moment when he was talking without seeming to notice. And because the sky was an unusually deep blue, and the snow was blinding in its purity. And though it was freezing cold outside, the walking wrapped you in a fine second skin of warmth and your blood sang.
He just talked and talked, and, near John Dan’s, I decided to ask: “What happened there, up on the mountain, when you were small? Why did your little brother and sister die?”
“Ah well,” he said. “That’s a long, long story.”
That was what he always said when he was through talking.
At John Dan’s, Mae made more tea and asked me questions about school while my father and his brother talked softly in their secret language.
The plans for the big variety concert were just about complete, and again I am reminded that a school isn’t just for kids—at least a village school. Our school is as much for the grown-ups as it is for those of us required to go there every day to learn math and English and history. I realize that the school has a whole nighttime life and that this is when the school really becomes the village. And that if there were no school here, the place would be like the mountain—a place where nothing happens except in the memory or the imagination.
You realize that the concerts and card games, dances and public meetings are like what happens at the kitchen table at home. People with memory in common get together for a single purpose—eating or praying or doing business or having fun—and it brings out surprising qualities in every individual. The big concert in April was like that in more ways than one.
I understand because I live close to the school and get to see all that happens there. From my room, I can hear the dances and see the people coming and going in the darkness or when they’re near the dim light over the doors. The first time I ever saw a movie was in the school. Somebody came with suitcases, hung a sheet, took things out of the suitcases, turned out the lights, and suddenly the bedsheet was alive with pictures. In the movie, somebody murdered a robber by the name of Jesse James.
Sometimes I go to meetings in the school to hear politicians and their promises and to watch the adults get all excited, even though they don’t believe a word they hear. I go to the card games when I can afford to, ever since Grandma Donohue taught me to play almost as well as she can. Even the dog comes to the card games, and everybody tries to get him to sit by their table because they think he brings good luck. Recently I won a chicken.
A few days before the concert, Dolly asked the boys to start taking down the partitions between the two rooms. You stood on chairs and removed some strips of wood at the top. Then some strips of wood on the floor. Very carefully, with everybody helping, the walls are lowered to the floor. Suddenly you see all the children in the Little Room sitting wide-eyed, and when the walls are lowered they laugh hysterically at the sight of the Big Room, and Mrs. Hennessey is hopelessly trying to keep them quiet.
Dolly is looking at them, smiling.
All the grade nine and ten desks, near the big windows that overlook the strait, are moved to the centre of the room, and we stack the partitions on sawhorses near the windows and they become a stage, and the excitement in the Little Room suddenly flows into the Big Room like warm water.
The decorating starts. Stuart Kennedy, who works on the railroad and is good at drawing, sketches the Future on large sheets of paper. Then he assembles the parts into one giant scene that covers the windows and forms a backdrop for the stage. Stuart Kennedy’s future is all city skyscrapers and highways, wrapped around the new causeway.
His vision of the future, I realize, is shaped by expectations of prosperity and all the activity it brings. And, for a moment, I wonder if it is really possible that the future could happen here, and not, as in the past, everywhere else.
In my imagination, the future is a little bit like Riverdale in the Archie comics—full of interesting and attractive people, where even the silly ones, like Jughead, are popular and funny, and big shots like Reggie learn their lesson, which is that being rich and swanky doesn’t count as much as character. And Archie has character. Maybe Port Hastings will be like Riverdale, with its interesting high school and pretty girls and a soda fountain where the teenagers gather to carry on and flirt and eat mountainous banana splits whenever they want to—a place you never have to leave.
The concert was a big success and raised over a hundred dollars for the school. Afterwards they were saying that the highlight was my father and Angus Walker Sr.
Here’s what they saw.
The curtain opens and they are sitting on opposite sides of a card table, facing each other. Between them there is a large bowl and two spoons. The bowl is filled with soft ice cream, and they begin to feed it to each other with the spoons. The catch is that they are blindfolded.
I watch in astonishment as they poke heaping spoons of soft ice cream at each other’s faces, missing the mouths but plastering it over eyes and hair and clothing.
For a moment I think my father must be drunk. Loaded. But he quit. And how do I explain Angus Walker Sr., who, as far as anybody knows, never drinks?
The crowd goes hysterical, watching serious Dan Rory MacIntyre, the hard-rock miner and truck driver, and serious Angus Walker Sr., the photographer and businessman, behaving like bad boys, attacking each other with spoonfuls of ice cream in front of the entire village.
Worse than the actual embarrassing spectacle, I think, is this wanton waste of ice cream.
The rest of the concert is hazy. The singing and the fiddling. I remember a long delay and restlessness as Angus Walker Jr. took too long setting up an amplifier for an electric guitar and rigging up sticks around an electric light on the end of an extension cord to make it look like a campfire, and finally coming out in a cowboy hat singing “Hey, Hey Good Lookin’.” I remember the snickering and people shaking their heads when, for his encore, he sang “Shake, Baby, Shake,” which I think a lot of people in the crowd consider a dirty song. The only part of the play I remember is the girl who had to act that she was falling down and doing it so convincingly that everybody thought for a moment she was hurt—and her getting up slowly.
I think the reason everybody remembered that part is because, shortly after the concert, it became obvious that she was pregnant. And people wondered about the baby and why she fell like that. And was she really acting.
That’s how it is in a village. Everybody eventually knows everything, for better or for worse.
All winter they worked at the canal and the bridge that would cross over it. By mid-April it was almost ready, the last link in the new road that, according to the papers, will be called “The Road to the Isles,” after an old Scottish song that Angus L. Ma
cdonald liked. Finally, in April, the bridge was finished. It is the biggest bridge I’ve ever seen. It sits there by the canal, on the mainland side, waiting to be put to work.
The bridge has its own engine to swing it out of the way whenever a ship comes through, but for the first swing the engine wasn’t ready. They attached a cable to one end and a massive bulldozer dragged at it and, miraculously, the bridge started to swing out over the canal until it finally fit perfectly in place. And the new causeway was joined to the new road from the point up to the village.
And Billy Malone was right. There is a space of about two inches at either end of the new swing bridge. And so we are still an island after all—especially when the cofferdams are gone and the canal fills up with water.
There are, according to the papers, big plans for an official opening of the causeway, and they expect to have it in the middle of August. They plan to find a hundred of the best pipers around to lead the way across, followed by fourteen other pipe bands and whoever else wants to make the historic walk.
Among the stories in the paper then, people hardly noticed that 209 railway employees received layoff notices from the CNR. As of the middle of May, they will have no jobs because the railway ferries will no longer be needed. The car ferries will also disappear, and, with them, all the jobs that people once considered permanent.
People are grumbling: if this is what the Future looks like, maybe we should have appreciated the past more.
At Mr. Clough’s store, where lots of railway people congregate, there are arguments about change and the price of progress. But there are also jokes. It seems that the Honourable Alistair Fraser, the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, is suing the federal government for five million dollars because of all the rock they took for the causeway from his mountain. And everybody finds this terribly funny.
May 20 was a very strange day—the day they started using the causeway for real. I get the impression it was a spur-of-the-moment decision. A few days before, one of the car ferries, the John Cabot, mysteriously burned while tied up at the dock in town. Suddenly there were traffic jams on both sides of the strait. Somebody made the decision—open the causeway, right away.
At one in the afternoon on May 20 there was a huge lineup of cars at the new toll booth on the mainland side. They started lining up early. Once again everybody wanted to be the first across the new road to the isles, even though lots of people have been across it already. Nobody seems to mind that it will now cost seventy-five cents. You can buy a book of fifty tickets for $6.25 if you have to cross frequently. And you don’t have to pay coming the other way.
Already there are jokes: it costs money to go to Cape Breton; but you can escape for nothing. Old soldiers say the army should have been like that: hard to get into and easy to get out of.
The afternoon of May 20, which was a Saturday on the long weekend, was amazing—cars just driving back and forth across the causeway. According to the paper, seven thousand cars crossed over on that weekend.
I made my first crossing on the Sunday afternoon. I was riding my bike on the road near the canal when what should I discover but a wallet. I was afraid even to open it. What if there was money in it? Or worse, what if there was money missing when the owner got it back? I had to be in a position to truthfully say I hadn’t even looked in it.
But what to do with it?
There was only one place to go—to the toll booth on the other side. The toll collectors would know what to do with it. So I pedalled across, dodging the frantic traffic as I went. And when I breathlessly reached the other side, I rapped on the window of the toll booth, and I suppose they thought I was foolish. A kid on a bicycle trying to pay a toll…to get off the island?
A stern-looking man in an officer’s cap and a blue-grey uniform that indicated significance opened the window and asked me what I wanted.
“I found this wallet,” I said, handing it to him.
He flipped it open and looked inside. It seemed to be empty.
“And what am I supposed to do with it?”
He was obviously annoyed at this intrusion on such an important day.
I had no answer. I couldn’t understand his attitude. What could be worse than somebody losing a wallet? What could be better than somebody finding it and turning it in and imagining the joy the owner would feel?
But the uniformed man was just standing there looking at me as if I were a fool. And so I wheeled my bicycle around and headed back towards Cape Breton, leaving him with the wallet.
I was almost at the bridge when the thought entered my mind that maybe somebody had really just thrown the wallet away. People do that sometimes. My Aunt Veronica says it’s a sure cure for warts. You prick a little bit of blood from the wart with a pin, smear it on a piece of paper, put the paper in an old wallet or purse, drop it on the road, and whoever picks it up will get your warts.
It’s guaranteed to work, she says, because nobody can resist picking up anything they think might have money in it.
And I suddenly prayed that she was right. And that the important man in the toll booth would wake up on Monday morning covered in someone else’s warts.
It was clear, after the weekend, that the causeway work was almost finished, and I listened carefully for indications of what might happen next. I was particularly listening for the anxiety that is always a sure sign that he’ll be going. Now that there were hundreds of ferry workers with no jobs, it would be that much more difficult for him to stay around. I didn’t want to be caught by surprise. But there was nothing but quiet discussions about ordinary things.
Then I got a job, and I realized that the more I could do to support myself, the better off we’d all be.
The job came as a surprise. William Fox, who is a little older than I am, had a paper route for the Post Record, the newspaper in Sydney. One day, out of the blue, he asked me if I could take over his paper business for a few days. He had a large parcel carrier, big enough for a stack of newspapers, on the front of his bike, and he transferred it to mine. He took me around and showed me who took the paper every day, and through the camp and down to the tug, the Shawanaga, and the dredge, the Shediac, where some people were interested in the news. And if there were papers left over, you rode across the causeway and stood at the toll booth, and tried to sell them to people who stopped to pay the toll.
After the incident with the wallet, I was a bit shy approaching the toll booth, but soon realized nobody there had a clue who I was. There was no evidence of unusual warts on any of the toll collectors, and I was relieved about that now I had to deal with them on a regular basis.
As it turned out, William Fox had pretty well decided to get out of the newspaper business and was secretly hoping I’d like it enough to take over from him—which I did.
I enjoyed going to the camp and meeting up with Old John, who walked with me from room to room as I offered the paper to people, some of whom would actually dig out the six cents to pay for it. Some would even give me a dime and tell me to keep it. Old John seemed to treat me more as an equal, now that I had business at the camp. And after I’d finish my trip through the bunkhouse and the staff quarters and the construction offices, he’d often take me over to the cookhouse and feed me.
I think I actually started to get fat, selling the papers. After eating at the camp cookhouse, I’d head for the tug and the dredge and, as it happened, the cooks on both vessels wanted the newspaper and were always trying to feed me, because they’d be cooking supper when I arrived. It was almost impossible to refuse, and I’d watch in amazement as they dragged big trays of steak or pork chops out of their fridges and threw them into the huge frying pans that sizzled in smoking pools of melted butter. At home, steak and pork chops were for special occasions, and my mother never wasted butter the way these cooks did. There was always a massive cake with icing between the layers, and deep sweet pies.
Of course, I had to eat again when I got home, because my mother or Grandma Donohue always had my
supper ready, and it would be sin to waste any of it.
Besides my talks with Old John, there were always long conversations with the cooks on the tugboat and the dredge. The captain of the dredge was particularly friendly and always interested in gossip from the village. Often they got me to explain the news for them so they’d have a head start when they got around to reading the paper for themselves.
The rooms in the camps were tidy, thanks to Old John, but the boats were a little messier. The captain on the dredge, however, who had the biggest room, always kept his room immaculate. It smelled of shaving lotion and hair tonic. Best of all, he had stacks of glossy magazines with stories about crime and strange behaviour by famous people.
I’d just sit there leafing through them. And in one I found a shocking story: “What the Kiddies Don’t Know about Dale Evans!”
The headline just screamed at me. There were lots of photographs of Roy Rogers’s wife when she was younger and not wearing her usual cowgirl clothes. In these pictures, she’d be more often wearing things like a bathing suit with large feathers and her hands on her hips and her legs kicking out. My mother calls it cavorting.
There was a long story about her, plus a picture of Roy himself, with his cowboy hat, smiling. Roy is always smiling, I find. I didn’t read much of it before I started feeling sad and maybe a little bit angry, the way I do when Jackie Nicholson is sneering that Roy Rogers is just an actor and a singer and a phony who couldn’t put a bullet in the broad side of a barn door if he was standing in front of it.
I stopped reading the captain’s magazines after that.
The good thing about selling the paper was that I got interested in real news. And every day I’d be watching for surprises from Hungary.
Best of all, I was earning my own money and receiving inspirational mail from the newspaper about how many famous people, such as Walt Disney, got their start peddling papers when they were boys like me.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 20