They found it later. It was from a big-city lawyer somewhere. The lawyer regretted having to tell John that the authorities in Budapest had relayed a firm and final refusal to reimburse the money they had confiscated and that it would be pointless to continue pursuing his efforts to reunite his family.
A few weeks later, Nasser and the Suez Canal were gone from the front page of the newspaper. Now the stories were from Europe. They were calling it a revolution. The headline on October 25 was huge: Hundreds Killed in Hungary.
The next day there was another even bigger headline: Fighting Rages in Budapest.
I sat for a long time on the platform in front of Angus Walker’s canteen reading. Soviet troops were in pitched battles with Hungarian students and other civilians who were being supported by parts of the Hungarian army.
It went on and on, day after day, until, inevitably, the Soviet army crushed the uprising. But not before hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the country to find new homes. Thousands came to Canada.
All I could do was shake my head and ask the pointless question: why couldn’t you have waited? And I felt something like anger mixed in with the sorrow. Surely you knew that even a disaster would leave some room for hope.
But Father MacLaughlin, of course, had already given me the answer. Despair leaves no room for reason in the human heart. And in the absence of reason, there is no place for hope.
7
BUIDSEACHD
There are three old women on the mountain, and they all have special powers. That’s what my cousins tell me. People come to them when they have problems doctors and priests can’t solve. They also have the power to make bad things happen. One of them is our grandmother, Peigeag.
Once my grandmother was helping a young woman to have a baby. The woman wasn’t married. Plus, there was something seriously wrong with the baby, and it made a mess coming out. It almost killed the mother. My grandmother was so angry she put a curse on the unknown father, even though it could have been someone she knew and cared about. That’s what my cousins told me, and there is no doubt in their minds that the man who was the father of that poor baby would suffer as much as the woman did—unless someone with equal powers took the curse off him.
The curse is called the buidseachd. And it always seems to be women with the power to put it on or take it off. You rarely ever hear of a man putting the buidseachd on somebody, or having the special power to do things.
My Aunt Veronica, for example, reads tea leaves and predicts the future—and she usually gets it right. She can get rid of warts, or cause them, and make your hair grow back if you’re losing it. If you break a dish, she knows how to put it back together again as good as new. She can also make good things, including medicine and wine, from weeds and wild berries. But I’ve never heard of her putting a curse on anyone, though I suspect she could remove one—if you asked her to.
My cousins told me there is a buidseachd on my father. Here’s how it happened. Years ago, before he was married, he came home from the mines in northern Quebec for a visit. He was prosperous. He had a car and was quite pleased with himself. But he insulted one of the old ladies on the mountain because he neglected to offer her a ride in his new car to Mass one Sunday. So she put a curse on him.
She could probably have made him sick or caused him to have a car accident, but it was a more serious kind of curse. It was that, for as long as he lived, he’d never have the benefit of good luck. And as everybody around here knows, you don’t get anywhere in life without a few lucky breaks.
Knowing my father, he’d just laugh at the idea and would never go to the bother of having somebody remove the curse—even though his own mother had the power to do so. When I mention things like the buidseachd and bocans, which are spirits, he just laughs as though he doesn’t believe in any of that.
I’m not sure whether I believe in it, but it would make me nervous to know that some old lady had cast a spell on me. And if I knew another old lady who could remove it, I would go to see her and get it removed. And the bad things that have happened to my father are enough to convince me that my cousins are right. On the mountain they’re always saying: Poor Dan Rory never had any luck that wasn’t bad.
He went to work in a mine in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, where I was born, and now almost everybody he worked with there, including my godfather, Alonzo Walsh, and his brothers, are sick or dead of some mysterious disease. My father has trouble breathing sometimes and coughs a lot, and he must worry about whatever is killing his friends in St. Lawrence. After he left St. Lawrence, he tried to start his own business, a sawmill on the mountain, and everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. And the mill disappeared. After that he was working in another mine in Newfoundland and broke his back. He buys trucks that keep breaking down and costing him more money than they earn, and eventually he’s forced to go away to the hard-rock mines again. I know he has tried to get work in the big mines of Elliot Lake and Kirkland Lake and Sudbury, where there are unions, so that men work safely and get fair wages, but they say he can’t pass the physical for those places. He has bad lungs, they say. Probably because of the sickness he had when he was a boy, or from working in St. Lawrence, or both. So he mostly goes to work in mines where there are no unions and where they don’t check as closely on your lungs as in places like Elliot Lake.
I confess that, for a while in the summer of 1956, I thought his luck was changing for the better. It occurred to me that, maybe, during the winter when he’d been living on the mountain and cutting logs, he broke down and got his mother to lift the buidseachd. Or maybe that would be one of the things they were doing when they’d be talking Gaelic as if I wasn’t present in the room—and she’d be doing most of the talking while he and Grandpa Dougald would just sit and stare at the floor, leaning forward a little bit with their hands folded on their knees. But I don’t think so. And it became obvious by the end of the year that the curse was still in full effect.
He sawed a lot of lumber in the spring and early summer of ’56. Then he started running out of logs. It’s hard to imagine a shortage of trees on the mountain, but they have to be a certain size and quality for lumber, and it gradually became harder to find them. Finally he made an arrangement to lease some more woodland in Troy.
There are two old bachelors there, MacDonalds, named John and Neil. Their father’s name was Rory, and he had red hair. So the bachelors are known as Neil Red Rory and John Red Rory. That summer, he even built a small camp there and hired George the Wheeler, who is a MacQuarrie, to live in the woods and cut logs. He bought a small bulldozer, which he said he’d need to haul the logs to the road. Horses, he said, are pretty well on the way out. Plus, they require too much looking after.
Meanwhile, he was sawing the last of the mountain logs and trying to get a decent price for his lumber from the big dealers in Sydney. His problem, as I eventually understood, was that he was never in a position to make advance arrangements for delivery or price because he was never sure of his log supply, and he could never anticipate breakdowns in machinery.
Still, from time to time, there would be a special day when he’d work long after dark, optimistically loading his lumber on the back of his truck to take it down to Sydney, hoping that he’d hit a day when they were desperate for it and prepared to give him a fair price.
I’d help him, and then watch in fascination when the truck was loaded as he’d walk around with his pencil and little notebook, very intense, eyes squinted, calculating the board feet on the back of the truck and how much money he’d have to get per board foot to at least break even.
On the eve of one of those trips, I asked if I could go with him to the city when he sold his lumber. He thought about it for a moment, and then he said I could.
He even told my mother that he thought it would be a good idea for me to see how the world works, whatever that meant. I figured it meant that it would be the same as school, getting to see what a city was like. And Sydney was a particular
ly interesting place because it had a very large steel plant and coke ovens right in the middle of it.
We were up before dawn on the morning we were to go to Sydney with the load of lumber. I remember dressing in the dark, hoping I got things on right. My mother made a big breakfast for us. I could feel the rising excitement, knowing that we were on the move long before anybody else in the village. And that we were going to the city.
Months before I’d had a letter from my friend Angus Neil MacKinnon, who moved to Sydney with his family because of the causeway and changes on the railway. He was inviting me to go and visit for a while. Stay with them in Whitney Pier, where I’d be amazed at what I saw. There were Black people there, and families with names you couldn’t pronounce. People who came from Europe years before to work at mining coal and making steel. There were homes in Whitney Pier where they spoke only in Ukrainian and Polish. The kids in Whitney Pier were tough, he said, but he had no doubt we could handle ourselves. Plus, we’d go to the Sydney Forum to see the wrestling.
We were all huge wrestling fans, and Billy Malone and Jackie Nick and I would watch faithfully on Jackie’s new TV set, practising the holds and the flips until Mrs. Nicholson lost patience and chased us all outside. I could easily handle them, because Billy was smaller and Jackie so thin.
“Jackie Nick,” you’d hear the older boys pronounce, “is so skinny you can smell the shit through him.”
We’d just look at them, thinking about what we’ll do when we’re as big and nasty as they are.
To see professional wrestlers at the Sydney Forum would be like getting to the World Series, I thought. I loved Whipper Billy Watson. I loved hating Gene Kiniski and Killer Kowalski.
I had no fear of the city, but my mother did. She decided I shouldn’t go to the Pier to visit Angus Neil. It was too rough there. Also, the thought of us at the Sydney Forum with all the rowdy wrestling fans was a bit too much.
But going to the city with my father to sell a load of lumber would be educational, she thought.
You actually smell the city before you see it. The air is full of the tang of burning coal, a gassy, dusty smell that hangs everywhere. It gives the place a seriousness you never feel in the country, where the air is bland. And I was amazed by all the traffic. You suddenly find yourself surrounded by cars and trucks in parallel lines driving straight ahead or around turns, but never getting close to bumping. Other lines of cars stream along to meet us, but they never cross the line on the middle of the road. And then there would be a traffic light, which everyone would notice simultaneously. And everyone would stop at once, as if up against some invisible barrier.
Stopping was more difficult for us, and my father would have to gear down because, he said, the brakes couldn’t be trusted with the heavy load behind.
Just before the main part of the city, we turned down a steep hill and, on the way, there was a large sign telling us that we were entering a cooperative lumberyard.
“We’ll try here,” was all my father said.
Try?
I sat in the truck alone for a long time before my father returned. He was with a man who was wearing dress pants and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. They walked out of view, but I knew they were examining the lumber on the back. Then the man in the dress pants was walking past my side of the truck, and he disappeared inside the building.
The door on the driver’s side opened, and my father climbed back inside. He didn’t speak, but his face was serious. He started the engine, and the truck groaned away, up the steep hill, back towards the street that I remembered was called King’s Road. And on into the city.
I’d never seen so many houses packed together—houses everywhere I looked. There were streets running off King’s Road, up a steep hill, and I could see nothing but big wooden houses painted in all the colours you can imagine. Across the harbour, new houses in a place called Westmount. And, off to the north, the shadowy outlines of other towns—North Sydney, Sydney Mines. Nothing but wooden houses.
You’d think the easiest thing in the world to sell to city people would be lumber. It should be like selling water in the desert.
The traffic became more intense and there were people everywhere, crossing in front of us and on the sidewalks. I saw a building with a large new sign: The Cape Breton Post. I saw small boys with new red carrier bags like mine trudging along the sidewalks, loaded down with newspapers, shouting out the name of the paper—CAPE…BRITTEN…POST. I thought that everybody at home would know I’d gone completely foolish if they heard me walking up the road yelling CAPE BRITTEN POST!
I forgot about my father’s serious expression.
And then we were at another lumberyard, and there was another long wait. And another man who was wearing better clothes than my father’s came out. He walked around the truck, writing on a clipboard as they went. This time my father went inside with him. After he returned we drove around to the back of the woodyard, and my father climbed up on top of the load, undid the chains and rope that held the load in place, and started throwing pieces of lumber down.
I asked if I could help.
“No,” he said.
Afterwards we stopped at a liquor store, and he came out with a small paper bag in his hand. He uncapped a little bottle without removing it from the bag, took a long swallow, sighed, and put the bag away, under the seat.
Finally, he smiled.
“Let’s go to a restaurant,” he said.
A restaurant?
So we went to Joe’s Steak House on the Esplanade. Once, on the way to the restaurant, his frown returned.
“Highway robbery,” he said.
And that was all. I didn’t ask him what it meant because, for that brief dark moment, it was as if I wasn’t there.
There was another significant development that fall, and it was a mixed blessing. My mother started teaching school again—in the Big Room.
The year before, her friend Peggy MacIsaac, who was a teacher at the Convent School in town, became sick and had to go to the hospital, and my mother filled in for her for a month. Now she was full time—in Port Hastings, in the Big Room, where I was a captive.
It meant a bit more financial security in the house. But it also meant your mother standing over you from the time you got up in the morning until you were back in bed at night. There’s also the stigma of having your mother for the teacher—though the fact that I was the only kid in grade nine reduced that problem somewhat. And it didn’t take my mother long to establish for the whole room that there was a whole new regime in place and that things were going to be different from here on in—especially for me. If anything, I would feel what the Bible calls “the rod of correction” more than anybody. We were back to the Katie Gillis days of discipline, and “make no mistake about it.”
But I wasn’t worrying about that. I was far more concerned about the fact that, over on the far side of our hayfield, just beyond the crest of a hill and alongside the Green Path which the older people still call Saddler Street, there was only silence. The mill just sat there, seemingly abandoned. The sawdust pile, no longer fresh and sweet, was settling down into a dense mass, changing colour as the time went by. An eyesore, as Mrs. Billy predicted.
For a while, my father used his truck to haul topsoil for landscapers who were trying to cover up the scars of the construction at the end of the causeway, especially around the new tourist information bureau. The little bulldozer he bought for the lumber camp in Troy was getting rusty, over beside the barn.
Whatever hope there was for him, and the hundreds of former ferry workers thrown out of jobs by the causeway, had been dashed earlier in the year by a story in the Halifax newspaper. The American company that had been considering building a pulp mill in the area had decided against it.
The politicians were still optimistic. The new mayor of Port Hawkesbury, Mr. Gillis, was saying that prosperity was inevitable. New industry would come, he said, if for no other reason than that the hydrogen bomb was forcing b
ig industrialists to decentralize their operations, moving factories away from vulnerable places in the midwestern United States and central Canada to remoter places like the Strait of Canso.
People just rolled their eyes.
We had to be patient, he said. But Mayor O’Neill from Mulgrave, where, the older boys were saying, “things are flatter than piss on a platter,” was beginning to lose patience with politicians in Halifax and Ottawa. His comments were becoming more critical, perhaps because he’s Irish. My father isn’t Irish, but he seemed to be more on the wavelength of Mayor O’Neill than Mayor Gillis.
But then he’d sing his little ditty, “Sounds like bullshit…to me”—which was to say, “I don’t really have any faith in any of them.”
And even when my mother would be tacking on extra prayers at the end of the rosary just to nudge along the prospects for some of what the politicians are calling “industrial development,” you’d still hear him tapping his foot on the floor.
“Just move along” is what the tapping foot would be saying.
Then one morning when I was in the barn to feed the cow, I noticed that the canvas duffel bag in which he kept the mining gear was no longer where I’d been seeing it since the summer of 1953.
All fall there was great excitement in our house—at least among the women. There were unmistakable signs that there would be a provincial election at any time. And this time there was little doubt: the Tories were going to win.
The Grits had, for reasons best known to themselves, picked Dr. Henry Hicks, who was a university professor, to lead their party. Dr. Hicks, everybody said, was extremely intelligent. He had been a Rhodes Scholar at the famous university in Oxford, England. But he didn’t look like a politician. He looked more like a banker. He wasn’t very tall, and he lacked the military elegance of Angus L. He had squinty eyes and bad hair and an unpleasant little mustache. He used fancy words, and his voice had a pompous edge on it.
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 26