Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  But still, it was a visually interesting process, watching the flat places and sharp angles filling out and turning round. Noting the care they took to conceal parts of themselves that nobody ever used to notice. Chests and legs and rear-ends, mostly, but in their new awareness of these parts, also choosing at unexpected times to reveal them to the unsuspecting. Accidentally, of course.

  For all their newfound powers and casual arrogance, the girls in the grade ahead of me were becoming more pleasant to stare at with every passing week. And, to be truthful, I didn’t really mind their condescension. They seemed to find me amusing—an occasionally entertaining younger brother, which was good enough for me at the time. Plus, I had the impression that they secretly enjoyed being stared at—that, down deep, they were still just show-offs, the only changes being in what they were showing off.

  This time he showed up for the holidays just before Christmas. He arrived home with young John MacMaster from Long Point, and my mother didn’t seem to mind that he had what she calls “a little Brannigan” on. Very cheerful all through the visit.

  For Christmas I gave him the usual flat-fifty of Players, even though I think smoking is probably a bad idea for someone with questionable lungs. In fact, I read in a recent paper that a French-Vietnamese doctor has proven beyond any doubt that one of the ingredients in cigarettes causes cancer. The good news, according to this doctor’s findings, is that the cancer-causing ingredient can be filtered out. So I figure that a flat-fifty full of filtered cigarettes will be a healthy improvement over the unfiltered smokes he rolls for himself.

  Predictably, he was gone right after New Year. But, to my surprise, he was home again in February. The Port Hastings notes in the Bulletin reported that “D. R. MacIntyre is home on business from Newfoundland, where he is currently employed.”

  That was different. Business? What business? There was really only one, and it was sitting idle, almost invisible under the heavy snowdrifts. Perhaps the sawmill could be resuscitated after all.

  “So what brings you home?”

  “Time off for good behaviour!”

  Always the clever answer that tells you nothing.

  He was around for about a week, and there were many quiet conversations in the kitchen and some business trips to town. I went with him to Troy one snowy day to visit Neil Red Rory, from whom he’d leased some lumber land. The conversation was intense, but with the Gaelic and a lot of long silences, I was lost most of the time.

  Then he went away again.

  I asked my mother what was going on. All she said was that there wasn’t quite as much lumber in Neil Red Rory’s woods as they’d expected.

  Suddenly I remembered all the stories about the buidseachd.

  Tilt Cove, from what he had to say, is about as far off the beaten track as anyone would want to get. You can’t drive there. Most of the time you take a boat, but in winter, when the northeast coast of Newfoundland is packed with ice, you fly there in a small ski plane and land on a frozen pond. And this particular winter, 1956–57, was the worst in recorded history—nothing but snow and gales and Arctic temperatures. It was one time, he said, when it’s a relief to be working underground.

  Just getting to the cookhouse was a battle some days. A couple of the Inverness County miners in Tilt Cove took a dog team to visit friends in Shoe Cove, one of the small communities along the coast from there. My father, in particular, was alarmed at their bravado because it reminded him of the winter in St. Lawrence when two of his miner friends, both originally from here in Inverness County, volunteered to walk to Lamaline for the Christmas liquor. A storm blew up when they were on their way back. They got lost and froze to death.

  “It was one of those guys who owned the skates you inherited,” he told me.

  “Really?”

  The winter here was almost as bad and, after one storm, I actually borrowed snowshoes to get the papers around. It created a lot of comment among the customers. One of them, Lennie MacDonald, said I should get my picture in the paper for my dedication, getting the paper around in spite of the weather.

  The ice on Long Pond was about a foot thick and smooth as glass, and on still, cold nights the older guys would set fire to rubber tires they scavenged from behind Morrison’s Esso station. The pungent black smoke shot straight into the windless sky, blotting out entire galaxies of stars, and the flames hurled shadowy light for a hundred feet in all directions.

  You could skate on Long Pond, it seemed, forever, but you knew the danger lurking beyond the probing firelight, near the shore where the ice was fissured from the rising of the tides, or in the channel where the water was so swift it never really froze. Away from the blazing fire you’d hear the startling sound of the shifting ice, like gunshots, and the rattle of the northern lights shuddering beyond the starry bulge of the horizon. You’d feel the chilly solitude of the universe, then turn away. Too vast. Too much like the future. The beckoning bonfire would lead you back.

  And once, as I approached out of the gloom, I could see a lone shadow floating on the perimeter of the light, swooping and twirling, graceful as the ghost for which the nearby beach is named. Then tiptoed prancing movements, and the ghost would vanish into darkness but just as suddenly return, hands and arms extended, elegant as wings, floating soundless as a moth towards the flames on waves of music only she could hear.

  I didn’t have to see the face to know it was Mabel MacIver and that, in this moment, she was nurturing the dream she had shared with me during one of our long, serious walks. I watched her in silence, fighting the chill in my feet and the desperate infatuation in my heart.

  And then she was floating in my direction.

  “I bet you didn’t know I could do that,” she said gaily.

  I just shook my head, imagining that there was nobody on the pond but us. Imagining that I was three or four or five years older. And that I had a car, something like Angus Walker’s Monarch, with the chrome wheel stuck on the back and the fender skirts and the whip aerial. And that, after the skating, we’d go somewhere warm, like the comic-book places where teenagers gather to have sundaes and floats and all sorts of exotic concoctions, and flirt with the beautiful Veronicas and Bettys. Because of the cold, we’d probably have cocoa—

  Then the rowdy sound of voices and the scrape of blades on ice, and a gang raced towards the bonfire, calling for a game of whiplash. And she pranced off in the direction of the voices, urging all of them to look at her and her figure-skating style.

  “Watch me,” she cried, rising on one toe and spinning with her elbows held just so.

  And everybody was suddenly silent, imagining the day when we’d be paying cash to watch Mabel skating at the Ice Capades.

  Now the spell was gone, replaced by the sad, lingering thought that those who dream intensely will, inevitably, disappear. Dreams are what drag us all away. We come back successful, or exhausted strangers.

  And I wanted something more, something I could hang onto after we were carried off in different directions. But I knew the most that anyone can take away from anywhere is memory.

  The talk at Mr. Clough’s in April was that, finally, something was happening with the Trans-Canada Highway. Bids had been requested, according to the newspapers, for seventeen miles of new road from Glendale to the intersection of Number 4 and the Victoria Line in Port Hastings. For reasons I don’t quite understand, it seemed the work would begin out back and proceed in this direction for some distance before they started breaking ground here.

  The big question still was where, exactly, the road would go as it passed through the middle of the village. Everybody seemed to understand why the precise routing of the road had to be kept vague. There were quiet references to sharp operators who buy up property they know will be required for public purposes, and then hire smart lawyers to force the government to pay more than it’s worth.

  These are the kinds of people who, according to my mother, become successful in business. People with the instincts to jum
p ahead of others to get the lion’s share of what’s available ahead of everybody else. People you wouldn’t even want to know, let alone become. The government was playing its cards close to its vest so far as the land required in Port Hastings village was concerned.

  I’d get the occasional note from my father, sometimes with a deuce or a fiver folded inside. His letters were chatty and funny, and his news was usually about the weather and the food. I’d be waiting for some inquiries about the new road, or some clue to signal when he’d be coming home to take advantage of this new phase in the transformation of the place. But there was nothing to indicate that he had any interest in the road-building project, even though he still had a truck parked beside the barn.

  From the window of the Big Room, I study the winter causeway and the cape, sharp angles and jagged surfaces smoothed by the furrowed waves of drifted snow, and I try to imagine the place before all this change began. How long ago? Less than sixty months? Strange how memory so quickly empties itself of images that contradict the present moment. It is already difficult to remember details of the strait before the digging and the blasting; I struggle to recall particulars of the constant roar, the incessant bang of piledrivers, and the terrifying ground-heaving explosions that collapsed ten million tons of granite from the ancient mountain. I search the memory. Did the Malones really live here for three years? And Old John. Did he? Really? Just last summer?

  A line from my mother’s precious Latin book surfaces in my mind: “Carthago delenda est.”

  At least that’s the way it seems sometimes. Rome must erase Carthage. The future must erase the past. I have to admit it—the old village is becoming unrecognizable.

  Maybe it’s the nature of the winter. Winter creates a sense of uniformity in time and space. Winter returns the landscape to the originality of other winters. New features vanish under nature’s timeless garment. And for a while we are comforted by familiarity, the sense of continuity. Snow covering up the damage men do in their surroundings, covering the stains of violence in the shifting gravel and the frozen ground below it.

  The last time I stood in front of the staff house at the camp, there were snowdrifts covering the ground and roofs and evergreens, rounding corners, collapsing limbs of trees down upon the lower limbs. In past winters, the walkways around the camp and cookhouse and staff house would be shovelled, the doorsteps neatly swept. Old John would be furiously attacking the snow, heavy coat hanging open, heavy woollen cap with untied earlugs hanging down. Now, I thought, the snow has reclaimed the place, and there is no longer any trace of John.

  Where was it I saw him last?

  Sitting there. Working on the step. Looking underneath for something. That is what I saw.

  He didn’t speak.

  He was busy.

  What about the rifle?

  You imagine you imagined it.

  Oh.

  You must. And it’s suddenly so very easy with all the snow to cover up the scars and stains of yesterday.

  The early winter darkness was gathering around me, the wind was groaning in the tall spruces. I looked down and, for an instant, Old John was sitting there, his bald head pale as the pristine snow. And in that instant there is no rifle, and when I speak he turns his head and smiles as if he’s glad to see me. But, still, he doesn’t answer me. He turns back to his chore.

  Near the cookhouse new snow swirls, lifts, drifts off towards the trees like smoke. The place is silent, but for the moaning of wind in creaking trees. Something has been altered fundamentally, but the snow conceals the significance of change.

  I walk away from the abandoned camp, knowing I will not return. There is nothing here.

  “Carthago delenda est.”

  My mother says, “Excuse me! Helllooo.”

  A snap of fingers.

  Where were we?

  Yes. Machine guns in Africa.

  George the Wheeler is staggering when he accosts me. I haven’t seen him since my father built the little camp in Troy and hired George the Wheeler to cut logs there.

  “Your old man is a crook,” he sneers.

  I can smell the yeastiness of cheap wine and, when he turns away, I see the bottle sloshing in the back pocket of his overalls.

  “You can tell him that,” he says over his shoulder.

  I feel an odd paralysis and know that afterwards, after this confusion falls away, I’ll feel the self-accusing anger. Why didn’t you say…? You should have…?

  What?

  He called my father a crook!

  The impulse rises. Lash out, punish the injustice of the charge. Stand up for your father even if there’s half a chance that what the Wheeler says is true.

  “You can tell him that,” he repeats as he stumbles on his way. “Nothin’ but a friggin’ crook.”

  I want to say: I’ll do us both a favour; I’ll forget that this encounter ever happened.

  I want to go after him…the way the Irish would.

  My mother sighs. “He probably owes the Wheeler money.”

  “That doesn’t make him a crook.”

  “The Wheeler was probably drunk.”

  “He was.”

  “He’ll get his money,” she says. “When we have it, he’ll get it.”

  “Which is why he’s in Tilt Cove?”

  “Which is why he’s in Tilt Cove.”

  In May I saw surveyors in Mrs. George’s apple orchard. The orchard is just below the house where Harry and Rannie MacDonald live, across the Victoria Line from the church. Our field and house are directly above Harry and Rannie’s. The sawmill is at the far side of the field, just up past the orchard. Nobody was quite sure what the surveyors were doing there.

  Then one evening in mid-May, my mother announced that my Aunt Veronica had an interesting new boarder—all the way from South Korea. An engineer or engineering student.

  “South Korea?”

  “Yes. His name is Ted.”

  One of the things my Aunt Veronica does to survive is take in boarders. She had Mrs. Hennessey when she was teaching in the Little Room. She had two interesting men from Quebec when they were building the causeway—Camille and Marcel. Friendly guys, with hardly any English. We’d spend ages practising each other’s language.

  How do you say this? Or that? In English. In French.

  Then they were gone.

  Now she has a boarder from Korea. I remembered Jean Larter’s kerchief, the one Joe brought her back from the war. And I tried to remember all I had read about the war. Korea. A peninsula. Split in two. Communists on top. United Nations. Lots of Americans. Syngman Rhee. A meaningless jumble.

  His name wasn’t really Ted, he explained. That was what they started calling him at Nova Scotia Tech, the university in Halifax where engineers are trained. He had one more year to go at Tech, and then he’d be a mechanical engineer and get to wear the little iron ring on his pinkie finger.

  There was nothing in the world as impressive as that ring.

  “So what’s your real name?” I asked.

  “Tae,” he said. “Tae Man Chong.”

  But he liked Ted better. Easier to fit in being called Ted.

  I figured him to be in his mid-twenties.

  Then the story was going around the village that this Chinaman showed up one day at Morrison’s Esso asking if this was Port Hastings. He’d just come off the causeway on a bus. Alistair MacDougall was working there.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re in Port Hastings.”

  “What’s the population of Port Hastings?” the Chinaman asks.

  “A hundred and fifteen,” says Alistair.

  “Well, now it’s a hundred and sixteen,” says the Chinaman.

  “Korean,” I say.

  “What?”

  “He’s from Korea.”

  “No shit!”

  And that was Ted. Number one hundred and sixteen. You could actually imagine that he planned to stay.

  I never thought of people of other races being handsome, although my
mother always says that women in Japan are the most beautiful in the world. Like little dolls, she says. But I find people of the Orient or Africa just too exotic to be described by words we use to evaluate other people like ourselves. Handsome or homely—what do these words really mean?

  After I got used to his appearance, it crossed my mind that I’d like to be exactly like Ted. He was taller than I was, slim, but with wide shoulders. He had a broad, open face. His skin was darker and his almond eyes twinkled. And he had a smile that lit up the room. He liked nothing more than laughing, and he always seemed to be finding things to laugh about in our village. The thing that I quickly learned about Ted was that he wasn’t different at all. He wasn’t exotic. Everybody here was different. Everybody here was exotic. After I figured that out, it was fun to be around him. He made you feel interesting.

  I also learned that nothing would bug him more than being mistaken for someone who is Chinese. Even I understood that much. After all, it was the Chinese Communists who were responsible for the mess in his country. I never told him that, when he first arrived, a lot of people here thought he came from China. Or that Miss Annie Christie loves the Chinese people.

  Korea, I learned, is near Japan. And that Japan occupied Korea before World War II and that Ted attended Japanese school when he was a boy in Seoul, Korea. He remembered the terrible days when atomic bombs blew two Japanese cities apart. His father took him to Japan after the war just to see Hiroshima, one of the cities the atomic bomb destroyed. It was terrible, he said.

  “But Japan was the enemy,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s how it is in war. There has to be an enemy. But there’s no war now, and if there ever is another, we’ll all be friends.”