Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  When I found my father later, he was talking to a monk who was dressed in working clothes like the ones the old fellow wears most weekdays—baggy work pants, plaid shirt, knee-high rubber boots. A stranger wouldn’t have known who was the monk and who was the miner. When I got close enough, I could hear that they were talking about sawmills.

  This is another sign, I thought.

  And, later, my mother told me that the boys I noticed wandering around in small groups actually lived there and went to a school that the monks ran in one of the buildings.

  “A school?”

  “Yes,” she said, “a high school.”

  Then you could see the wheels turning. We studied each other long and hard. But nobody said anything. Port Hastings school goes only to grade ten. Going on after grade ten is always a big question of where. Most from here don’t bother.

  Finally she said: “It’s something we can think about.”

  As if she was reading my mind!

  Winter set in early, around Remembrance Day. There were big snowstorms and freezing cold. The new sawmill was pretty well assembled and, by late November, my father was spending most of his time on the mountain cutting logs for his new mill. Sitting in school, I’d be waiting to hear the sound of the saw howling as it sliced slabs and plank and boards from trees older than he was. But that would have to wait. The early winter wasn’t helping. It was hard to get logs out of the woods and off the mountain with deep snow everywhere. He’d come home on Saturday complaining about the cold in the old place, and how his mother would keep the fire in the kitchen going until he was in bed. But then, because she had some premonition about house fires, she’d sit there by the stove almost all night watching the fire die down to where it became harmless.

  Even then the house was like a deep-freeze.

  The weather got worse in December. Just before Christmas, the married couple who looked after the lighthouse on Margaree Island disappeared after setting out from Broad Cove in their little boat. Days went by without a trace of them, though the boat was found smashed on the shore. It was as if the sea just swallowed them up and kept them. People soon stopped talking about it. Another lighthouse keeper, on St. Paul’s Island, off Cape North, was killed trying to get supplies ashore from a boat.

  Hard times for lighthouse keepers, I thought, wondering what was going through the mind of Mrs. Nicholson, who’d been a lighthouse keeper for years and hardly ever spoke about it. I’d be at Nicholsons’ a lot, now that the weather was so bad, watching television with Jackie and Billy Malone—mostly wrestling and hockey games. Jackie still had one of the only television sets in the place, probably a small reward for moving off the point.

  There was even a snowstorm on Christmas Day.

  You always knew he was home from cutting logs on the mountain by the reaction of the dog. Skipper would be sleeping under the stove, and then he’d suddenly start scrambling out and run to the door whining. You’d be letting him out when you’d hear the sound of the truck coming down the back road, which was officially called the Victoria Line.

  One night in January he caught us all by surprise, even the dog. He just walked through the door, kind of breathless and pale. All he said was that the truck had broken down out back.

  Later I heard what happened. A couple of miles out, by the crossroads at the Long Stretch, the truck just quit. There was no warning. He was driving along and, just as he approached the crossroads, the engine died and wouldn’t start again.

  He got out of the truck. It was snowing lightly. As he walked away, he looked back to make sure he’d turned off the headlights. That was when he saw the woman standing beside the truck staring at him. He started to walk back, but she seemed to drift away. This made him nervous, so he turned and started walking home.

  He tried to forget about her, but every time he’d look back over his shoulder she’d be there, as if she was following him. And once, just as he was passing Archie the Piper’s, which is at the crest of the hill where the village begins, he looked back again and she was almost close enough to touch. He still couldn’t see her face because she had a kind of shawl over her head and was clutching it at her throat, so it covered most of her features. But he could see that she was dressed the old-fashioned way, in black wool from head to foot, the way Grandma Peigeag dresses.

  He panicked then and ran the rest of the way home.

  The next morning he went out to where he had left the truck, and it started right away.

  Afterwards I heard a legend about a woman who once lived out back of here and who lost her children during an epidemic. They say she still wanders around on stormy nights looking for them. And some day I want to ask my grandmother on the mountain about the children she lost to an epidemic. If that’s why she sits by the stove trying to keep her house warm for the one who managed to escape the clutches of disease. And whether she wanders around sometimes on stormy nights looking for them. And whether she really can see the future and, in particular, shadows where my father is concerned.

  One morning in February I heard on the radio that Wilbert Coffin was dead. Just before the news, I’d been looking out the window and it was a brilliant sunny day. There was fresh snow, and the reflection of the sunshine almost hurt my eyes. The strait, without the drift ice, had the same sharp electric blue as the sky. It was Friday and I was feeling happy. I like Fridays so much that I usually start feeling good on Thursdays. Friday night I could stay up. Saturday started with fresh doughnuts. I felt free on Saturday, even though I still had the papers to deal with. Saturday morning the dog and I would call for Billy Malone, and we’d wander up to the camps to see Old John. If the papers came early enough, we’d still have time to go to a movie in town.

  Listening to that announcement on the radio, all the joy went out of Friday. I couldn’t believe it. They killed Coffin.

  I was shocked when they sentenced him to hang. But that was a long time ago—more than eighteen months. They’d postponed the execution half a dozen times. A lot of people doubted that he did it, including Angus Jim Malcolm, who is from here and who knew him as well as anybody.

  “He’d steal the eyes out of you,” I heard Angus say. “But he wouldn’t kill a fly. I seen him brush them away when he could have swatted them. No. He didn’t kill anybody.”

  Angus had been in the bush with Coffin the week before the Americans disappeared.

  People actually seemed to get to know Coffin during the eighteen months he was in the news, and what I still can’t figure out is how anybody can get up the nerve to kill somebody after all that time to think about it. Especially when there were so many people doubting that he really did it. I can understand killing in a war when everybody is frightened and confused, or when somebody is drunk and angry. But important people with education and religion sitting down and deciding to kill somebody in cold blood sounds like something only criminals would do—whether it was killing the American hunters or killing the poor fellow they decided among themselves was guilty of the terrible deed.

  I didn’t want to read about the details, but I did anyway. How he protested his innocence to the end but died like a man, climbing the steps to the rope on his own and even shaking the hands of the guards who went up with him. And how the premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, who everybody says is a dictator, refused Coffin’s one last wish to marry the woman he loved for the sake of their little boy. I never realized before that they had a kid. His name is Jimmy, and he’s only eight years old. And suddenly it just seemed worse.

  My father was on the mountain that day, cutting logs, and I was glad. I was also glad that nobody in the house seemed to want to talk about it. I didn’t need to hear the words. I knew what they were thinking: that if he’d been rich or if he’d had important friends, he’d still be alive. But he was an English-speaking Protestant Quebecer from a place that didn’t matter. The dead people were well-to-do Americans, and somebody had to die to even the score—even if they were hanging the wrong man.

 
; All I could do was say a prayer for the poor fellow, which I did, and one for his boy, Jimmy Coffin, who was going to have to go through his life with this on his mind. Always wondering: what really happened? Always asking why.

  I prayed hard, but I had the strangest feeling that nobody was listening. And it occurred to me that God could have put a stop to this but didn’t. And, for the first time, I was asking myself: whose side is God on anyway?

  The thing about news around our house is that, whenever there’s a story that gets us down, we know we won’t have to wait long for one to cheer us up again. Between Princess Margaret and poor Bill Coffin, 1956 was getting off to a bad start. But, suddenly, there was Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier to take your mind off all the discouragement from the Middle East and South America and the Mediterranean and Europe, not to mention Quebec.

  Grandma Donohue just couldn’t get enough news about Monaco and Grace Kelly, and I suspect it wasn’t just because Grace was an Irish Catholic. It was because she was an American, and my grandmother, who had lived and worked in the United States earning two dollars a week, believes that Americans are superior to everybody else in the world. I suspect that she often regrets that she ever came back to be poor and proud in Cape Breton, so I don’t begrudge her the excitement she gets when good things happen to Americans, even though I, like my father, think it’s a lot of foolishness.

  “Sounds like bullshit to me” is one of his favourite lines, and he kind of sings it, laughing at the same time.

  He can actually be funny sometimes—as when my mother adds too many extras on the rosary and he’ll start banging his foot on the floor to make her stop.

  And there was school to make you forget about the troubles of the world. School was tough. The year before, in grade seven, we had half a year with no teacher at all, and half with Dolly MacDonald filling in. Now we had Mrs. Annie McGee, who is a very nice lady from up the hill, near the Piper’s place, but who either didn’t like teaching very much or who hadn’t been in a classroom for a long time.

  She seemed shy, and that was a big handicap in a room where discipline had pretty well been breaking down for over a year, ever since the iron hand of Mrs. Katie Gillis disappeared.

  There are several new people in school, and one in particular is a teacher’s worst nightmare. His name is Neil MacIver, and he’s one of those people who can create chaos out of nothing. The teacher can never get angry because he’s so clever about being funny. For example: you’ll be working on your math problems and suddenly hear giggling and snorting; you look up and everybody is stealing sideways glances at Neil MacIver, who is brushing long tresses of imaginary hair with an invisible hair brush. Eyes half shut, acting like he’s all alone before the mirror in his boudoir.

  Watching him, you actually start to see long, golden locks billowing out from his hand. He’s like a hypnotist. He tosses his head, fluffing the luxurious invisible hair with a serious look on his face. The more you try not to laugh, the harder it gets—until somebody loses control and blows a wad out of his nose or something that’s even funnier than what Neil is up to. And then the whole place is gone. And it’s only then that poor Mrs. McGee notices, and it’s too late to do anything but laugh along with everybody else and try to persuade Neil, who hasn’t made a sound, to behave himself.

  Another time he’ll be imitating old Herb Moore, who is a carpenter and rolls his own cigarettes. Herb can spend half a working day rolling a cigarette, squinting and twisting his mouth, sticking his tongue out, and Neil has him down perfectly. People go crazy laughing.

  This happens a lot.

  Then one afternoon I saw Mrs. McGee sitting at her desk with her head down and, when she lifted it, I could see that her face was red and puffy and there were big tears running down her cheeks. And for a terrible moment I thought I was going to cry too. A woman crying is one of the worst things, but the older kids didn’t even notice her distress. Or if they did notice, it didn’t matter.

  I’m thinking: whoever comes to teach here after she’s gone is going to have her hands full. Little did I know at the time what the future had in store.

  In the Big Room, the higher grades get to sit closest to the windows. Grade ten actually sits right next to them. Then there’s grade nine. I’m in grade eight, still close enough to see out. I spend a lot of time just staring at the blue, ice-free strait and the cape, which has gone completely quiet now, half listening to the drone of instruction that will become relevant to me only in the years to come, when I’m in nine and ten.

  The opposite side of the strait is quiet. The big Euclids and bulldozers and draglines are gone now. The blasting is finished. The cape has a battered look where they removed the stone. But it’s dramatic, more interesting than before. It’s like a scar on someone’s face. You know there’s a good story behind it.

  Soon the work on the canal will be finished. The camps will close. The workers will go away. Old John will find another job, somewhere else, continuing to dream and worry about his absent family. Port Hastings will change into something new. The seeds of prosperity have been planted.

  In grade nine they’re talking about the invention of the machine gun. My ears prick up. Mrs. McGee, with a history book in hand, is explaining how the machine gun made it possible for Europeans to colonize Africa. I suddenly see the little black people, brandishing their spears and blow-pipes, running after all these big white men. And the sudden violence of the bullet-spitting machine. And their little bodies in a brown and bloody tangle on the ground.

  Even Neil MacIver has a serious look on his face.

  Half listening from grade eight, where the details don’t matter yet, I get this dark picture of human progress. History is really about machinery. New machines that add power to the human being. Power to travel longer distances. Power to change what is useless into something of value. Power to dominate.

  Sitting nearby, the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen takes my mind away from the stammering machine gun and the writhing African bodies. She is prettier even than the girls you see in movies, including Debbie Reynolds. She is Neil’s sister Mabel.

  There are other interesting girls in the room: Sylvia Reynolds, Ann Fraser, Isabel Fox. But lately I’ve become invisible to them as they carry on with the older guys, including Neil. Mabel seems different. And even though she’s older than I am, she sometimes walks with me as I deliver the papers and talks about herself and how she wants her life to be. Once she even revealed her fondest dream: that one day she will become a professional figure skater. That will be difficult because we don’t have a rink. The only decent places to skate are Happy Jack’s Lake, which is deep in the woods behind the cove, and Long Pond, which is down north, by the Ghost Beach. But this doesn’t seem to be a problem for Mabel. And there, beside the road, she suddenly demonstrated the form of a professional figure skater. Standing on one foot with a long leg stretched behind, leaning forward, arms and hands extended, graceful as a gull’s wings, her face suddenly transformed by the imaginary place she’s gone to.

  And when she returned, she seemed a little bit embarrassed, so she asked me what I plan to do. I said I wasn’t sure.

  And suddenly it was true. Walking along with this friendly, pretty girl telling me about her fondest dreams, I was suddenly filled with a sorrowful confusion about people and their tragic expectations. And how great it would be if dreams came true.

  One day in the early spring, Mrs. McGee is interrupted by a roaring sound. It is a sound unlike any of the machinery we became accustomed to during the building of the causeway. A loud racing engine, and then the high-pitched howl of the large saw racing through a log. A momentary drop in the sound, and then the howl of the saw repeated. Over and over again.

  People are squirming, confused. Mrs. McGee is trying to get their attention.

  “Class…please…pay attention…”

  But nobody is listening.

  I know exactly what it is, and I want to say aloud: That’s the sound of a dream. />
  But of course I don’t. And it’s a good thing, too, because by the next day the mill was silent again.

  The newspapers forgot about the causeway for a while, turning their attention to the problems of the wider world. With Grace Kelly married, Grandma Donohue was devoting most of her attention to Nasser and making dire predictions about world war three. Then we’d be back in the news. There would be a small story about the planning for the new highway that was going to slash through Cape Breton on its way to Newfoundland. Then hardly a week would pass without another worried story about the future of Mulgrave and Point Tupper and Port Hawkesbury now that the ferries were gone. Speculation about a new pulp mill had a new tone of desperation. All the talk about the causeway in the beginning had been about the wealth it would bring. It was only late in the day when somebody said, “Hang on. We have three or four hundred people who worked at getting cars and trains over to the island. A few of them will get jobs as toll collectors. What about the rest?”

  Then a politician would stand up and describe the boom that will follow the causeway because the strait will magically become an ice-free harbour. Deepest Ice Free Harbour on the Atlantic Seaboard, they say. Potentially bigger and better than Halifax. Hell, they’re saying New York and Boston will be nothing compared to our new harbour.

  I look at it every day now. And every day, after the deliveries to the houses and what’s left of the camps, after I’ve visited the dredge and the tugboat, I ride my bicycle across this monument to one man’s stubborn determination. One man from a place even smaller than the village I live in, from a school even smaller than the one I go to, made this happen after fifty years of talk by lesser men. What was his secret?

  But in the long run, what does all this mean?