I guess we were hypnotized by the breathtaking view and didn’t notice that the road had turned into something that resembled a plunging river bed. And it was suddenly so steep that the three of us were leaning back as far as possible to keep from falling forward. You couldn’t stop and you couldn’t turn and you couldn’t back up.
Ted went very quiet. It’s hard to imagine, but he actually got pale. And when you could smell smoke from the rubber on the brake shoes burning, little beads of sweat popped out on his forehead.
I actually started praying—silently, of course—which I’m inclined to do when things get tense. And they got increasingly tense as we slid down the mountainside, the wheels actually locked at times. Ted now chewed on his upper lip. For a while it seemed that the car would tumble end over end, and we’d all be in the ocean.
Once he looked in my direction and laughed. But it wasn’t the laugh of someone having fun. It was the short hysterical cackle of someone who seems to have just realized that we are going to die.
But of course we didn’t. The road became a road again, and Ted could take his foot off the brake. And we could all breathe again.
Barry said “Wow” and actually admitted that, for once in his life, he’d been scared.
Ted laughed and said scared was an understatement.
Grandma Donohue was horrified when she heard that we’d driven down the back road over Money Point Mountain. Nobody has used that road for years, she said. And there has never been a car on it before.
She was almost cross, looking at Ted as if he was out of his mind. And I could tell that he felt guilty for risking all our lives, even though he’d had no idea what we were getting into when we were getting into it. Which, I guess, is how a lot troubles happen.
I got the impression after our adventure that he was growing distant. Maybe he was embarrassed by our close call on Money Point Mountain, or maybe just bored by my company. I was always asking questions, plaguing him with trying to learn Japanese and judo almost overnight—things that, I know, take years to learn. But I was in a hurry because, somehow, I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. He’d seemed happy giving me lists of words to learn and carefully writing down a simple version of the Japanese alphabet. He was less enthusiastic about the judo but could be persuaded to show me a trick from time to time.
I knew he was supposed to be studying to write an important exam when he got back to Halifax, but he could never seem to get motivated. Then one evening he announced that he was expecting a visitor, if we didn’t mind.
He was back at my aunt’s place then, and she asked who the visitor was.
“My girlfriend,” he announced. “Dr. Kim.”
“Dr. Kim?”
“From New York City.”
My aunt said Dr. Kim was welcome and that she could have her own room. My aunt would sleep on the cot.
Now, suddenly, when I’d go over to my aunt’s in the evenings for a visit, he’d be gone or up in his room lying on the bed, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling—like someone in a mood.
Dr. Kim was as pretty as one of those Japanese dolls my mother was talking about. A very nice woman, always smiling and interested. You’d think Ted would be drooling over her, but he was just being his usual friendly self.
And then she went back to New York, and he didn’t talk about her—which I found strange.
One evening as I was walking along the road, I saw his car pulling away from Sylvia’s and heading off towards town. And I realized that the moods and the absences didn’t have anything to do with me or Dr. Kim at all.
I felt relief knowing that I hadn’t offended him or bored him. But I also felt something else that I now can identify as jealousy. After thinking about it for a while, I recognized the feeling as a natural frustration at being so much younger than all the people I wanted to be close to. It was, it seemed, the story of my life—almost everybody was too young or too old. With Billy Malone gone, there was hardly anybody close to my age except Ian MacKinnon and Jackie Nicholson.
One evening he asked me straight out: “How old are you anyway?”
“Fourteen,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, as if, somehow, I’d let him down.
I asked him what was wrong with being fourteen.
He just laughed and punched my shoulder. “Nothing,” he said.
But later he told me that he’d heard from someone that people in the village were making comments about an older guy like him hanging around with a kid like me—which was why he was curious about my age.
“You seem older,” he said.
And then I realized what was probably on his mind: our trip to New York. And the fact that I might be too young to go on that kind of an adventure. At least I’d be too young to help him with the driving.
So I tried to reassure him. “Sometimes you can get a driver’s licence when you’re fifteen,” I said. “I guess I’ll just have to start learning how to drive right away.”
“Sure,” he said.
But down deep I knew that the trip to New York City and the sukiyaki had become significantly less probable.
And then one day in the late summer I saw him working in the village. First I didn’t recognize him in the boots and hard hat and working clothes. Then he took the hat off and wiped his forehead. He seemed totally absorbed in his work.
He was, in fact, just below the church, and he was peering through a transit. I followed his sightline until I noticed the two men holding up a pole in the far corner of Mrs. George’s orchard. Following on past where they were standing, I realized that I was looking at my father’s sawmill.
Sylvia turned seventeen, and her mother put on a surprise birthday party. It was for people who she went to school with. Ted wasn’t there. We played music and danced around in sock feet and ate sandwiches and sweets and drank soft drinks. I kept secretly looking at Sylvia and wondering if she was half as serious about Ted as he was about her.
You just couldn’t tell.
The party got mentioned in the village notes in the Victoria-Inverness Bulletin. How her mother put on the party, and who-all showed up—the usual crowd. Ian and Jackie and Neil, etc. And “the misses” Mabel MacIver, Isabel Fox, and Linda MacIntyre…
I’d have been humiliated, except that, by the time the story came out in the Bulletin, almost everyone was gone. Sylvia and Isabel and Mabel and Ann Fraser to the boarding school in Mabou. Neil MacIver to the academy in Port Hood. Ted back to Halifax for his final year at Nova Scotia Tech.
One day after school I heard a knock at the door at home, and when I went to check on who was there, I saw a man in a suit, carrying a briefcase in his hand.
I called my mother. She went out and, after a few words with the stranger, shut the door behind her.
They talked for a while, and then she opened the door to come back in, but, for just a moment, the conversation continued. I heard just phrases. “A sorry situation” was one phrase she used. Another was “a person’s livelihood.”
The man didn’t look very happy and was actually trying to apologize as she closed the door on him.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“They’re going to expropriate part of our field.”
“Expropriate?”
“They’re going to take it for the road.”
“What part?”
“The part that has the sawmill on it.”
So that was it. And it made sense. All you had to do was stand at the top of the causeway and look straight ahead, following the line the road was taking. The church was safe, but the mill was in the way. Likewise, before too long, all the houses below the road. Even the old Phemie MacKinnon place, which they’ve moved once already. And, I suppose, if you look farther ahead, you’ll see a lot more disappearing. Roads have a way of ploughing through places that lie between important destinations. And that’s possibly all this place will ever be—a minor location on a road to a destination. And if that turns out to be the case? You could see
a situation where big new roads become like serpents, consuming a place entirely.
I had a hollow feeling thinking how my father would react to the road going through his sawmill. Somehow I knew that this would be the end of something important for him. This mill had been his last shot at becoming his own boss, living in his own place more or less on his own terms. This expropriation would cut the legs from under him. There would never be another sawmill.
I thought of Carthage. And then—I have to admit it—I felt something like relief.
Grade ten was incredibly tedious, partly because the work I was doing was, by then, so familiar to me—the result of having been five years sitting in the same room with the grade ten courses droning around me. There were two of us in the grade—I and a new girl named Louise Embree. I had one advantage over Louise, who had just moved to the village. All her education up till then had been in a little one-room schoolhouse in the country. But it was no piece of cake. I don’t think that girl ever slept. Nothing on her mind but books, which, I thought, was a waste, seeing how womanly she was becoming.
Around the school, the air was heavy with the tang of burning evergreens and loud with the roar of machinery as they tore up the orchard and our field and the Green Path and MacKinnons’ and Jack Reynolds’s and even the big back field where we once made hay for Big Ian MacKinnon.
My parents managed to find a buyer for the sawmill, and one day I saw a truck leaving the field loaded down with all the various parts I’d watched my father so painstakingly assemble.
My mother was watching too, through the kitchen window. She did not look unhappy.
And wisely, I thought: What’s past is past. No point looking back. It’s over and done with now.
Time to look ahead.
You couldn’t tell from the cryptic letters what the hard-rock miner thought.
Ted came back briefly in 1958. He was finished at Tech. He was an engineer, proud of the little iron ring on his pinkie finger. He was hearty with me, pumping my hand, remarking on my growth—which I realize people do when they still see you as a kid. No talk of travel, which was just as well since I had a summer job. I was being paid practically nothing, but it was enough for basic independence.
I had started learning how to drive, but he saw no special significance in that development. Just a bit more enthusiasm over how I was growing up at last.
Not a word, I noticed, about New York City.
He was greeted like a homecoming member of the family by my mother and my aunt and by Sylvia’s mother. But it was Sylvia he was here to see. You just knew it. He couldn’t wait to talk to her alone. And after they had been together in private for a while, he seemed disappointed. Down, even.
He left shortly after that, promising to return.
Sylvia told me afterwards that he wanted her to go away with him. Far away—all the way to Korea. Meet his folks.
I couldn’t imagine someone saying no to an offer like that. But she said no.
“I’m only seventeen,” she said. “Plus, I belong here.”
About a month later I had a postcard from Tokyo. And nothing more.
By then I had decisions to make. I was facing a whole new phase of schooling. There is no high school in the village. I had to go somewhere—town? a new county high school twenty miles away in Judique? the monastery?
What about the monastery? I was attempting to recapture the feeling of that sunlit day when we went there as a family and each wandered off into his own private place. But I kept seeing my father standing there with the monk, talking about logs and sawing and the optimistic look on his face. And I realized I wouldn’t want to be remembering that scene every time I turned around when I was going through high school.
I knew what my mother thought, so I didn’t bother raising it with her. My father tried to raise the subject when he’d been home the previous Christmas.
“What are your plans for next year?”
I didn’t answer right away. Here, I thought, is a chance to test the water.
“Maybe I’ll quit school for a while.”
I’ve noticed that people never say they’re going to quit school for good. It’s always quitting “for a while.” Taking a break. To put aside a little money. Or just to clear your head, or maybe grow up a little bit before going on with life. Here I was suggesting bailing out even before high school. “Maybe I’ll follow my father’s footsteps,” I said.
He laughed briefly, then started rolling a cigarette.
“I see,” he said. “Is that it?”
“Or maybe I’ll take a trade. Carpentry or something.”
“Uh huh. This is possible.”
Then my mother came into the kitchen, and we changed the subject.
But it was a discussion I couldn’t avoid indefinitely. And when it finally came up again, the issue was whether I was still interested in the monastery. She’d heard of a kid my age from town who was going. What did I think?
I had, by then, seriously mixed feelings.
“And by the way,” she said, “we haven’t heard much about the vocation to the priesthood lately.”
“I’m still thinking about it,” I said, suddenly surprised by a feeling of emptiness.
“You are?”
“Yes.”
She seemed to be looking right through my eyes and into the secret closets in my brain.
“You know,” she said finally, “nothing would make a mother happier than to see one of her own ordained.”
Another pause.
“Tell me again what you had in mind.”
“I want to be a missionary,” I said. “I want to go off into the world and help people.”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re very interested in the world, aren’t you?”
“Very,” I said, aware that I was sounding more enthusiastic.
“But you should know,” she said, “that there are much easier ways of seeing the world than as a missionary priest. It isn’t an easy life. And it would be a big mistake to go into it for the wrong reasons.”
“I suppose.”
“Think it over carefully,” she said. “Whatever you decide, the important thing is to make your choices for the right reasons.”
And it was as if a weight was lifted off my shoulders.
That evening I walked along the old route I used to follow searching for the cow, up by the old MacMillan place. Just walking, lost in thought. I was almost past the now abandoned Gorman camp before I realized. The windows were dark, mirroring the fading light. I’d heard that the buildings were going to be removed—hauled away or demolished. Already people were inquiring whether parts could be recycled into housing. I pulled the collar of my jacket higher around my neck and walked on. For a moment I tried to grasp a dark elusive thought, but it had slipped away. Or maybe it was just the shadow of a thought.
The dog was with me. We communicated in a way we hadn’t for a long, long time. Not since before Old John and noticing the changes in the girls and making friends with Ted had I felt so close to what I now realized was the one constant in my life. The one friend who never asked for anything or expected anything more than basic kindness. The one friend who never went away. My dog.
On the way back, we turned in by the old cemetery that overlooks the strait, and I saw a little platform jutting above the high embankment overlooking the approach road to the causeway. It was a “Look Off,” according to a sign. I sat on a bench. The dog sat by my foot, his head resting against my knee. Port Hawkesbury was a slight bulge in the distance, more or less looking as it always had. I imagined the small white ferry boats plying the choppy water, back and forth, day after day, year after year, until time blurred into a single image printed in a common memory. And just beyond, the old train ferry, smoke stacks billowing. No more. And I tried to imagine how all those people in their graves, just behind me and over on the point where the lighthouse used to be, would feel seeing what I could now see—the causeway to the other world. And how privileged I was to
have seen it happen. At least one large dream fulfilled. And suddenly I realized just how rare that was—to be a witness to success when so much seems to be the product of our failures.
And, at least in that passing instant, everything was clear to me. One day I, too, will lie blindly in a grave, missing all the drama and excitement that flutters from the folds of time. But now I was here. Who knows why or for how long? Only knowing that being here, with time passing through my senses, was a gift I could not waste—no matter what.
And, briefly, I grieved for Old John Suto, in a grave just beyond a town he never heard of before he came here. And for my transient father working deep in the darkness of the cold, hard rock of the planet in a province and a place he never heard of when he was a boy dreaming unlimited dreams on a green and sunny mountain.
We just sat there in the descending evening, the dog and I, watching the cars coming and going and the big green bridge squatting over the canal, just waiting for the signal to move and make way to let another ship, another traveller from the wide, chaotic world, come through. The strait was clear.
The dog yawned, stuck his nose under my hand, then wriggled his head so my hand was resting on the soft fur between his ears. Then he stood and looked as if to say: Let’s go home; it’s suppertime.
And I realized we’d reached the end of something. The causeway, finally, has been done. Today and yesterday are done. There is just tomorrow. And then another, and another…tomorrows flowing endlessly towards an ocean called the future. And, in my mind at least, the future will be anything I want to make it.
And we went home together.
IN THE SPRING OF ‘69
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Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 31