I was shocked that one of these hard, truculent outsiders would declare such a thing and that it might be true.
Maybe the sickly kid from the mountain had turned into something, after all.
But what good was that if you don’t realize it or, in the long run, you don’t care about having become good at something you do because you have to? Maybe it was there that I realized the most important goal in life is freedom. And the key to freedom is choice. And the key to choice is either birth or education. And very few of us are born free. Really.
This is kind of silly, but one of the reasons I got off on the wrong foot at university was that I went there feeling sour because of a mix-up over gender.
Here’s what happened. Early summer, 1960, I applied to St. Francis Xavier University, which is where all the Catholics from home tend to go. It was only forty miles away, but I was going to have to live there. It was a long forty miles because the Trans-Canada hadn’t yet been finished on the mainland. Forty miles of narrow, winding roads.
And I remember the day the reply came back. I was picking up the mail as usual. I was driving. We had a ’58 Chev Belaire at the time. Very nice car—cobalt blue, lots of chrome. Among the bills and papers, there was the envelope from the university. I won’t deny that I was nervous. I drove down to the new railway station, which is only about half the size of the old one they tore down after they built the causeway and changed all the tracks around. There was nobody around. I parked out back and tore open the letter.
To make a long story short: I was accepted.
I sighed a great sigh of relief. Then I read on. I had requested campus accommodations, and a room was reserved for me in a place called Immaculata Hall. I’d known university students and heard of Mockler Dorm and Aquinas and MacDonald and MacPherson and Tompkins, but I’d never heard of this one. But, anyway, I kept on reading.
I was instructed that I was to bring clothing appropriate to a Catholic institution—dark stockings, modest dresses…
Dresses?
I went back to the top of the letter. It was addressed to Miss Linda MacIntyre.
The curse.
That night in November when we got loaded at the start of a wasted weekend, I remember trying to explain exactly what I do for a living. I was telling him about Cassidy and the royal commission report. And my friend Prinsky, who works for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, and who was a big help when it came to figuring everything out.
I was explaining the way Cassidy and Prinsky wait around every Thursday afternoon for some obscure statistic from the Bank of Canada, talking away as if they were waiting for something important like the hockey standings. And then arguing about what it means that some number has changed by a percentage of a percentage point. Same thing with the balance of payments figures, and the unemployment rate.
I was beginning to get the hang of it, but, like somebody learning a foreign language, I wasn’t yet ready for a conversation on deeper issues. So, mostly, I’d just listen to the experts. And if I ever did have an input, they’d hear me out respectfully, but then carry on as if I wasn’t there. That was okay because I wasn’t really there anyway.
So there we were, crossing Boularderie Island and heading for the Seal Island Bridge at the foot of Kelly’s Mountain on a crisp November night, sipping on a quart of Demerara and talking as we never talked before—about Ottawa and finance and economics. A chance for me to practise my new language on somebody who knew less of it than even I did.
I was trying to explain fine points of public finance, treasury bills, and bonds—
Bonds?
I’m peering past the driver, through the smeared windshield, at that Cadillac emblem when it strikes me like a bolt of inspiration.
Bonds. That was it. I can finally relax. I remember the Cadillac connection and smile privately and turn to stare out the side window at the passing countryside. The rain is thickening to sleet.
He bought bonds. He subscribed to the latest issue of Canada Savings Bonds. But here’s what he’d never told anyone before. When the bonds matured in a few years, he’d cash them in, and he was going to buy a Cadillac.
He would be in a position, with the bonds and some savings and maybe getting a trade-in on his Volkswagen bug, to liberate the ten or twelve thousand, or whatever it might be by then, to buy the Cadillac. The basic package. Three hundred and seventy-five horses. Turbo Hydramatic transmission. But, most of all, that emblem on the hood.
Coming down the other side of Kelly’s Mountain, he confessed he’d always wanted to buy a Cadillac—the ultimate symbol of success. The declaration to everybody who ever knew him that he’d made it—that you could come down off MacIntyre’s Mountain with nothing but the rags on your back and make it in the wider world. And you didn’t have to be a banker or a Mason or kiss some politician’s ass. All it took was hard work—that and a little bit of luck.
Of course he realized he hadn’t made it. And probably wasn’t going to make it now that he was fifty years old and settled into working for someone else in a civil service job.
But, you know what? He’d given it his absolutely best shot. And that was what really mattered when all was said and done. And just that fact alone was worth a Cadillac.
It all came back to me, just in time. The happy Friday night excursion, racing down Kelly’s Mountain, veins throbbing from the rum and the companionship. Now the wind is blowing, lashing our little procession with a muddy, salty rain. The Cadillac in front is slowing down. Then the left turn-signal light flashes. The rain is getting heavier. The Cadillac comes almost to a full stop for the hairpin turn below the church, then it starts creeping up the hill. The church bell is ringing slowly.
The Cadillac comes to a gentle stop. Then there are burly men in black overcoats gathering around the rear doors, blocking my view of the emblem that looks like something on the coat of arms of some important nobleman in some important clan. Then a man with one hand flat on the top of his hat, face turned away from the slanting rain, hurries to the rear of the Cadillac, preparing to open the doors. The burly men in overcoats form two lines, like soldiers.
For all the evidence of recovered domesticity, I gather that his basic tastes didn’t change much near the end. My boyhood friend Ian MacKinnon, who now works in the liquor store, was telling me that, once or twice a week, Dan Rory would show up for his little six-pack. Usually Olands or Schooner, never Moosehead. Moosehead gives him the “seann buinneach mhor,” he’d say. That’s Gaelic, literally meaning “old shit in large quantities.” I asked my cousin John Dougald, who shares his obsession with trucks and cars, if he’d ever heard the scheme about the Cadillac. And Dougie said he never heard a thing. The only plan Dan Rory shared with him after he came home for good was the one about a dog. He always loved dogs. Swore, when our dog Skipper disappeared without a trace in 1961, he’d never have another. They just don’t live long enough. But then, after he got the new job, he was talking about getting a little dog to keep him company when he was working. It was wicked quiet over by the lake, and the time dragged when the pumps were working well—which they were, mostly, since everything was almost new.
Ian saw him on the Tuesday afternoon at the liquor store, picking up his little six-pack of Schooner. And when he didn’t show up for supper, my mother figured he’d gone out to visit his nephew Dougie or his brother, John Dan. He’d been grieving, in his own inscrutable way, ever since Peigeag passed away, just two weeks earlier.
I was in the Parliamentary Reading Room in early March when I found out. I felt weird afterwards, finding out in a newspaper that my Grandma had died. Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre—a very common name around home. I had to look twice. I’d never thought of her as Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre. But this was Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre of MacIntyre’s Mountain. Widow of the late Dougald MacIntyre. Died February 24. Survived by…and of course my name was there among us. There must be some mistake. But there it is, in black and white, in the pages of the Victoria-Inverness Bulletin.
She was ninety-five—same age as Dougald. No coincidence there. She was actually two years younger than he was, but out of sheer stubbornness she lived exactly as long as he did. Hung on for two extra years after the old man died to get the same amount of time in. Ninety-five years—no more, no less. She was born in 1874, though you could never be too sure with those old people. The record keeping, back when they were born, wasn’t exactly meticulous. There was never much made of birthdays. One of the only birthdays I ever heard referred to was Grandpa’s eightieth. The day he turned eighty, St. Patrick’s Day, 1952, he dropped in on John Dan’s and probably had a dileag or two to celebrate the occasion. Fun at Five was on the radio and they played a fiddle tune, and the old man just spontaneously got out in the middle of the kitchen floor and started step dancing. Everybody was cheering him on and somebody shouted “suas e bhodag,” which is the Gaelic for “drive ’er, old man.” It’s a very common expression. You hear it all the time, especially when somebody is dancing. But he took it in the nose—being called an old man. Walked out and went home in a snit. That was the story, anyway.
Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre dead?
You think, in all improbability, that they’ve made a mistake. She was always larger than life, seemingly immune to death. Once that I know of she got seriously ill—gangrene in her foot; started spreading up her leg. Finally she went to the hospital in Inverness, where they couldn’t do anything to stop it. They sent her over to Antigonish, where doctors told her she’d have to lose the leg entirely.
When she found out what they were saying, she hit the roof.
Not a chance. She came into the world blessed with two good legs, and she was going out the same way. This was all in translation, but I think I got the gist of it.
The doctors basically told her that she was committing suicide—that without an amputation, the gangrene was going to kill her.
“Send me home,” she said. And so they did.
The first thing she did when she got back to the mountain was send for the priest—Father John Angus Rankin. Father John Angus is a whole story all by himself. He’s very serious about the supernatural. Allegedly communicates with dead people. Exorcises demons. Has the Power. Just like herself.
The two of them retired to a private place and did something. Prayed, I guess. Whatever they did, the gangrene went away, and she still had two completely functional legs the last time I saw her—at Grandpa’s wake just about two years ago. The night she threw Domhnaill-Angie Stephan out into the snow for something he said to my grandfather’s corpse.
Mrs. Margaret MacIntyre, dead? Highly unlikely. But there it is in the paper.
It was only as I was making my way back up to the press gallery hot room that it struck me as odd that nobody had bothered telling me when the old lady made her exit. Not a peep from home to tell me how or when. Very strange.
So, that evening, when I got home from work, I called, and he confirmed it. Passed away nearly ten days ago. Just went quietly—the flu or something. “The old people’s friend,” they call it around here. An easy way out when they figure it’s time. And she probably did conclude that she’d lived long enough, thank you very much, after two years’ living without the Old Man, as she called him. Sure enough, I can’t imagine that she’d have died if she didn’t want to.
“But anyway, how come nobody told me?”
Well, said he, they thought of me. But they knew how busy I am up there in Ottawa. And it was the winter, and travel is expensive and treacherous this time of year. And, after all, she was ninety-five. It wasn’t exactly unexpected.
“I’m sure she’d understand.”
But I’m not so sure. And what if she didn’t understand? What if she took my absence in the nose?
It might help explain what happened fifteen days later.
The doctor said he probably never felt a thing. He was probably dead before he hit the floor.
Old Jim Sandy, who was standing there in front of him, said afterwards that all he remembered was Dan Rory saying, “I’m going,” then turning slightly and falling down. Jim Sandy, who was loaded at the time, figured he’d just flaked out. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind that a man could fall down for reasons other than being plastered.
Jim Sandy went to bed. They figure it was only about five in the afternoon.
Ian said it was around four when Dan Rory picked up his six-pack. And he remembered seeing Jim Sandy hanging around outside the liquor store at the time. Of course the old man knew Jim Sandy from the sawmill days and just generally from growing up out back. My theory is that Jim Sandy needed a ride home, and the old fellow told him to jump in.
On Wednesdays, Cassidy and I would be getting serious about the Friday deadline—getting realistic about what we could deliver by the end of the week. Mondays we’d be gung ho, promising the moon, bringing down the government. Tuesdays we’d be trying to get the list of promised stories down to a manageable size. Wednesdays we’d be backtracking.
There was a knock on the office door, which was strange to start with. Nobody ever knocked. It was even stranger, when I opened the door, to see my friend Father Lewis MacDonald there, wearing his black suit, topped off by the Roman collar. Lewis is part of the post-Vatican-Two crowd of young priests—into T-shirts and jeans and guitars on the altar. And he’s from home, a brother of my friend Dennis. Their mother, Dolly, taught me in grade seven. Their father, Jock, was also a hard-rock miner and had died in the fall of ’67. We were close.
“Can you come outside for a minute?” Lewis asked.
He hardly ever wore the black suit. And he hardly ever came downtown. He was teaching in a Catholic high school out in the west end and rarely needed to be anywhere near the Hill.
“Hey, what brings you…”
“I have to talk to you,” he said.
“Well, come in…”
He caught the doorknob and pulled the door half shut and said to me in a quiet voice: “It’s about your father.”
“What about him?”
I thought suddenly about the perils of the mine and all the bad things that can happen to you when you’re off in the middle of nowhere.
But, hang on, I think. He isn’t in the mines anymore. He’s home for good. He’s working for the government.
“I’m afraid he’s gone,” Father Lewis said.
After the funeral and the burial, we were all sitting around the house kind of shell-shocked. All the neighbours were there. People who knew him from the lumber camps and sawmills and trucking and the mines. People coming in, the way they were for days. There was even a surprise visit from the MP, Allan MacEachen, who is federal minister of manpower and immigration—a big gesture for a Tory house. But then, of course, Dan Rory was pretty neutral when it came to politics.
“Sorry for your trouble…”
“Life is full of surprises…”
“Well, isn’t that it.”
At one point Roddie Cueball, who is really Roddie MacDonald but called Roddie Cueball because he was born bald and stayed that way—and who is also a talented pool player besides being the undertaker—took me aside and said, “Somebody has to sign this.”
He handed me a piece of paper, and I saw immediately it was the death certificate.
Cause of death: coronary thrombosis.
“How do they know?” I asked.
He shrugged. “That’s what the doctor figured.”
I signed.
There were drinks then. After the crowd thinned out, my cousin Dougie produced a forty-ouncer.
Soon somebody was talking about Grandma. Sure enough, there was no way Peigeag was going to leave Dan Rory here without herself to look after him.
Everybody laughed, because everybody knew Peigeag and the way she was.
He took it hard when she went, somebody said. Standing behind him at the old woman’s grave, they said you could see his shoulders jerk ever so slightly when they started lowering her down.
My mother was sitting qui
etly in the rocking chair by the stove. She seemed numb. It was the rocking chair Grandma Donohue always sat in before she died in 1964. Now my mother was sitting there, and it was a little bit disturbing.
During a quiet moment, I heard her say to nobody in particular: “I just realized that I’m a widow.”
Nobody responded.
Later, Big Ian MacKinnon, who is the local member of the county council (for the Tories), took me aside and asked if there was anything he could do.
And it occurred to me on the spot: “I wonder if you could take me out to where it happened?”
That was how Father Lewis put it. Simply, “He’s gone.”
As often happens in such circumstances, I asked a stupid question.
“Gone where?”
I now understand the phenomenon. You’re seeking refuge in absurdity, knowing that the moment you embrace reality, everything will change. Knowledge grafted to your understanding changes it forever and ever and ever. “Per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.”
“Get your coat,” Father Lewis ordered.
Numbly, I complied.
Cassidy looked up from his typewriter, suddenly confused, seeing the red-headed fellow in the priest suit.
“I have to go,” I said. I felt cold, heard my voice and it was shaky.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I have to go home,” I said. “Something has happened.”
Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Page 33