You could tell at first that the men at the toll booth were thinking I’d be interfering with the traffic as I tried to sell my papers. It turns out that my customers hardly have to slow down to complete the transaction. They nod towards the bag, I hand a paper in, they pass back a dime and usually tell me to keep the change. But even if I have to give them the four cents back, there’s hardly any delay. I’m faster at selling my papers to the drivers than the toll collectors are at taking money from them. During the slow periods, I’d let the toll collectors read the paper for free. Then they started buying it. Now they’re friendly. They come out and talk about the news, testing me with hard questions about people like Nasser.
With the arrival of summer, the sawmill was running almost every day. The logs he cut on the mountain during the winter were now piled on skids, ready to be rolled onto the carriage and reduced to boards and planks and firewood. I’d sit on the log pile and watch my father as he stood, flecked with sawdust, lips compressed and eyes squinting, as the terrible saw howled and tore the logs apart. Back and forth the carriage went, relentless, pausing only as he made careful adjustments to ensure the precision of the cut. A small conveyor belt carried sawdust away, and the growing pile became a measure of his success.
He pulled it off, I thought. With his bare hands he put a mill in this field where there had been nothing. With his bare hands he wrestled ancient trees from the icy grip of the mountain and is now converting them to lumber which, in time, he will convert to cash. And he will have arrived then at the fulfillment of his simple dream—to live at home, the master of his own small economy.
One evening at supper he had an amusing story: while picking up the mail at Clough’s, Mrs. Billy MacLean, who is of old quality in the village—a musician and an artist and a pillar of the church—accused him of creating an eyesore in the middle of the village.
“You think,” he said. And he laughed.
“An eyesore? In the middle of this place? Think about it.”
And I did for a moment and quickly saw the humour. The place is full of abandoned buildings. Just below the mill there is an old store once run by another MacLean, and it is falling down. Mrs. Billy herself lives in a homely house that was once a store. One of the few new buildings in the place, Murdoch MacLean’s house in Newtown, is boarded up because he died before he finished it. And the old Quigley place next to us—falling down. The old abandoned coal piers, down by the railway station, are slowly collapsing into the strait. The wharf is rotten.
There are only two things here that aren’t crumbling—the new causeway, and my father’s sawmill.
The village has been falling apart for fifty years, and she thinks a new sawmill is an eyesore?
“She better get used to it,” he says. “The sawmill is just the start. There’ll be a lot of eyesores around before too long. And just in the nick of time, before everybody has to move out. Yes, sirree.”
I felt a lot better about everything. And then he announced that they were going on a vacation. They. Mother and father. Just the two of them. Going to Ontario. Ontario!
A place you only dreamed about—like Boston and Florida and Europe, huge and mysterious. Going to visit Aunt Kay, who is my mother’s sister, and her husband, Angus Brown, who runs a hobby farm for a rich Toronto businessman named Brawley.
“Why can’t we all go?”
“Nope. Not this time.”
Actually, it was a vacation for us too. We stayed at our Aunt Veronica’s and went swimming every day. Her older boy, Barry, was big enough to hang around with by then, and we amused ourselves pretending we were brothers. And it felt oddly exciting. It had never occurred to me that having a brother might be a welcome relief from all the females in our lives. My father being around all the time was unusual. And even when he’s home, he’s struggling against the forces that keep trying to drag him away again. Barry’s father, Mickey, hardly ever comes home—something you don’t talk about. But, I suspect, it was an interesting experience for both of us, having each other.
Barry is more adventurous than I am, and I found myself constantly hauling him back from the brink of small disasters. Always too close to the edge of the cliff, or heading into water that was too deep, climbing into places that were forbidden, making plans for trips to places I knew we’d have a hard time getting back from before dark. But I, in contrast, tend to be too cautious. They say I take everything too seriously, so being with Barry loosened me up.
I draw the line at smoking cigarettes.
The time passed quickly, and they returned from Ontario looking younger and happier than I remembered them. They had photographs of all the places they had been. My only moment of jealousy was when I saw them in raincoats on a boat beneath Niagara Falls. But that’s okay, I thought. Some day I’ll see Niagara Falls myself. And that will only be the beginning. For them, the way they talk about it, the visit to Niagara Falls is like the end of something—an experience they don’t expect to have again.
Then things became strange. I look back now, and it’s like the sky started to grow dark with gathering clouds.
I remember the date only because I’ve gone back to double check. August 11. It was a Saturday. In the morning I noticed Old John walking along the road in the direction of Mr. Clough’s store, which was also the post office. He was moving quickly, head down, lost in thought it seemed. Whatever, he didn’t notice me.
I hadn’t seen much of him in the months previously. The camps were almost empty. A few engineers and bosses remained in the staff house, which was a separate building from the main camp. One of them was taking the paper on a daily basis, so my trips to the camp were brief. Also, because it was the summer, I’d be anxious to finish with the newspapers as quickly as possible so I could go swimming at the cove or just wander through the woods with Barry or Billy Malone or Jackie Nick.
Maybe, I thought, watching him disappear into the post office, he’s forgotten me. Maybe he’s already moved on to another place and another job—at least in his mind.
I’m sure it’s like that for people who work on construction projects or in lumber camps or hard-rock mines, which are, more or less, just projects. Temporary. You get to know people but realize that, sooner or later, you’ll be saying goodbye and the usual words that express the hope you’ll hook up again some day, even though you know it’s unlikely. Or if it does happen, you’ll have become different people because of the experiences that occur when you’re apart and you’ll have to start from scratch, becoming friends again.
I know lots of people like that, from the camps and the dredge and the tugboat. People much older than I am who liked my company briefly because of what I am rather than who I am. Somebody who reminds them of somebody else. Plus, I’m friendly and love to talk to adults, which is probably from being the man of the house for so much of my life.
Old John was like that—one of the most interesting people I’ve met. He never told me much about himself, but that made him even more interesting. He was from an unimaginable place, infinitely mysterious and moderately tragic because of the vast distance between where he was and where he wanted to be. I suspect most of the best men in the world are like that—keeping their tender places under wraps.
That Saturday afternoon was overcast and cool for August. In fact, the whole summer had been unusual for the amount of cool, wet weather we had. It wasn’t a swimming day, so I was taking my time with the newspapers.
On Saturdays the papers were heavier. In July they’d changed the name of the newspaper from the Post Record (“Today’s News Today!”) to the Cape Breton Post, and they were getting rid of the weekend supplement, the Standard, and replacing it with a fat load of fill of their own called the Cape Bretoner. Saturday was a day of heavy lifting.
The paper that day, like most days that summer and fall, had another huge headline about Nasser and the fight over who will control the Suez Canal. Most people think the way Grandma Donohue feels: sure as hell there’s going to be another world
war over this.
If that wasn’t enough to get you upset, there was an uproar in Cyprus because the British hanged three young “terrorists” in a jail in Nicosia, and I’m left asking myself, What has that achieved? You’d think with a world war shaping up over the Suez Canal, the British would be too busy to be hanging young guys who just want them to go away.
Canadian politicians were making a racket because the Bank of Canada has increased its interest rate by one-quarter of a percentage point, and now it’s at an all-time record three-and-a-quarter percent, which is supposed to be almost as dangerous, in economic terms, as the row over the Suez Canal.
It’s all beyond me, and I’m just thankful that I have only to drag the paper around to the readers rather than figuring out what’s in it. I feel sorry for the men and women who have to write all that stuff down.
I actually had a lot of ground to cover on my paper route. At least a couple of miles along the main road, almost all the way to Troy. Then I’d double back and turn down towards the camp, drop the papers there, then carry on to the dredge. If I still had papers left, I’d pedal across the causeway to the toll booth.
At a certain point, remembering that afternoon, things get kind of fuzzy—like a dream, after you’ve woken up.
I’m riding down the road to the camp. The first stop is the staff house, which is where the big shots live. Off to the right of the staff house is the cookhouse, where Old John often takes me for sweets and tea and chit-chat. I wheel my bicycle towards the smaller building, which is closest to the road, and lean it against a tree.
I see Old John right away and call out. He doesn’t answer. He’s busy, as usual. In my experience there is always a cleaning job or a repair job demanding his immediate attention. You rarely ever see Old John sitting down. He’s always moving quickly. Seeing him, I often think of Grandma Donohue’s expression: “He’s moving so fast you could play checkers on his coat-tails.”
But now he isn’t moving at all. He seems to be repairing the doorstep at the front of the staff house.
He’s actually seated on the step, and he is leaning forward with his head between his knees. It’s as if he’s looking for something on the ground or underneath the steps.
“Hey, John,” I say. “What’s going on?”
No answer.
I step around him, and it is when I look down to see what he is doing that I see a rifle poking out from under him. It actually seems to be across his lap, the barrel sort of pointing up over his right forearm in my direction.
Rats, I think. He’s been shooting rats, and one got away on him and has taken refuge underneath the step. I consider stopping to watch, but I don’t like killing—not even rats.
I pause briefly inside. The bedroom doors are open, revealing narrow cots with their grey blankets tucked neatly underneath the mattresses. I inhale the soft odours of hair tonic and shaving lotion and tooth paste. No trace of the feminine. No evidence of family or other lives.
I drop a newspaper on a tidy bed, then turn and leave.
Old John hasn’t altered his position, hasn’t made a move. The sky is dark and the air heavy. A soft breeze sighs through the trees that shelter the staff house. My eye settles on the motionless rifle.
I now imagine that I stood there for a long, long time, waiting for his greeting, listening to the breeze that, experience tells me, will grow cooler and, sometime during the coming night, wring the moisture from the dark, heavy air. And I imagine the beginning of a headache that will be real tomorrow. In the memory the moment goes on and on, subtracted from all that has gone before and all that will come afterwards.
And then it is a different moment, a normal moment linked, like all the others before the moment at the staff house, to the rest of time. I am on my bicycle and I am riding down the steep hill towards the canal, and there is a vehicle making its way up the hill, but I’m not certain if it is a car or a truck. I am aware of the low, dark sky, clouds almost touching the leaden waters of the strait. I feel the bump of the stony, unreliable road and, when the vehicle has passed, I can taste the dust it leaves behind. Up near the old cemetery that overlooks the new causeway, I hear a crow. “One crow, sorrow,” Grandma Donohue always says.
And then I am approaching the canal, now wheeling the bicycle because the ground is so rutted by trucks and heavy machinery. The heavy bag of newspapers thuds against my hip, threatening to trip me. I suddenly feel tired. I imagine that the dredge is deserted. It is, after all, a Saturday. The men have gone ashore or home. The tugboat is nowhere to be seen. There is a peculiar silence all around and, I suddenly realize, inside my head.
And then I am home, carrier bag still half full of unsold papers.
It is Saturday. On Saturday we get the Star Weekly, which is a glossy newspaper from Toronto and full of wonderful comics—Dick Tracy, L’il Abner, Terry and the Pirates. My father’s favourites are Pogo and Juniper Junction. I retire to my room with the comics, and I fall asleep.
Later, I think, an adult came by, and there was quiet conversation in the kitchen accompanied by sidelong glances in my direction. And then the adult left.
My mother was very quiet.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“About what?” I asked.
She looked at me oddly.
Then she said: “About Old John.”
And that was all she said.
After Mass the next morning, you could see the little groups of people and imagine what they were all talking about. Old John. The Hungarian from the Gorman’s camp. Shot himself.
But what I was thinking about was Father MacLaughlin’s little sermon, just minutes before.
As usual, right after the Gospel, he went to the lectern and, instead of the usual explanation of what he’d read, he just stood there for a moment looking at us.
Father MacLaughlin hadn’t been here for long, and people mostly remarked about his housekeeper, who was unusually good-looking and, unlike most priest’s housekeepers, young. And about how you can often hardly breathe in the confessional during the Christmas and Easter seasons because of the smell of booze coming off the priest.
All of which, they always say, is understandable. “Poor Father Spotty,” which is what a lot of people call him because of his freckles, “went through hell” in the war. I guess he was an army chaplain and saw things that nobody ever likes to think about. He drinks to forget and, if he gets a little comfort from a good-looking housekeeper, more power to him.
That’s what I hear them say about Father MacLaughlin. And nobody ever criticizes him, even for the booze and the pretty housekeeper—especially not the war veterans.
On that morning, after the longest pause I can remember by a priest on the altar, he spoke quietly about a tragic incident in Port Hastings on the day before. Something at the Gorman’s camp.
I could feel my stomach tightening and pressure building behind my eyes, just as you do before you start to cry. But I couldn’t stop listening.
He talked about an unfortunate man who worked at the camps, a man from a distant country who was alone here, isolated from everything he knew and cared about. Probably lonely and, eventually, in a state of despair. And how, in this terrible state, and with nowhere left to go, he took his own life. He paused, just staring out at us, and you’d think he was somewhere else, somewhere cruel and far away.
All I could hear in the church during the pause was my own heart beating. My throat and my entire head ached. I prayed that he was finished speaking. But he wasn’t.
Father MacLaughlin then talked about church doctrine on suicide. How suicide is supposed to be a mortal sin, a deed so terrible that it cuts us off from God’s grace and any hope of salvation.
That’s the teaching of the church, he said.
You could hear people clearing their throats then and squirming a little. We all know that two kinds of people are excluded from God’s grace and salvation when they die: unbaptized babies and people who kill themselves. Once there were other
categories, like poor Paddy Murphy in Bay St. Lawrence, whom the priest put outside the cemetery because he missed his Easter Duties.
Because they are excluded from God’s grace, they are excluded from the consecrated part of the cemetery and must be buried somewhere else—anywhere outside the fence; sometimes in the ditch.
But Father MacLaughlin was saying he had a problem with this teaching by the church. You could hear the place go quiet again.
Basically, he said, to be in a state of mortal sin, you have to be aware of what you’re doing and know that it is a mortal sin and still not care.
The way he figured it, the last thing in the mind of a man so lonely and miserable that he’d rather die than live is mortal sin. A man that desperate is incapable of reasonable thought. And if you are incapable of reasonable thought, you can’t be in a state of mortal sin.
That’s how he sees it anyway.
Our infinite God, he says, is distinguished by an infinite capacity for mercy. And for that reason, this humble priest is going to give Old John Suto from the Gorman construction camp the benefit of the doubt. Old John Suto is going to get a church funeral and a Christian burial here. Tomorrow. Ten o’clock. Period.
He turned on his heel, then, with a swish of vestments, and resumed the Liturgy.
And, after a short funeral Mass on the Monday, attended by a few people from the camp, they buried Old John in a shady corner of the St. Joseph’s Parish cemetery. There he’ll remain until the day of the Final Judgment, when he and Father Spotty can both face the music side by side.
Afterwards, George Fox, one of the older boys who sometimes helps Mr. Clough at the store and post office, was saying that Old John arrived that Saturday morning to pick up a registered letter. It was obviously important, and he must have read it right away. You could tell by the look on his face that it was bad news. He just put that important-looking letter away without saying anything and headed back to the camp.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 25