Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  Jim Sandy’s house is up behind Grant’s Pond, near Embree’s Island, just outside Port Hawkesbury. A little white house in the middle of the woods. It was a neighbour who discovered that there was a dead man in the house on the Wednesday. Later, my sister Rosalind went to fetch his car. But by then the little Volkswagen wouldn’t start, and when they checked, they found the battery was dead. They were figuring that Jim Sandy needed help getting into his house, and that Dan Rory left the engine running and the lights on. Eventually even a Volkswagen runs out of gas.

  Jim Sandy was sitting at the kitchen table when Big Ian and I arrived. He seemed vague, and it wasn’t clear whether he was genuinely confused about what had happened, or hungover and evasive, or feeling guilty. Or a combination of everything. I let Big Ian ask the questions. Basically, what could he remember?

  “Hardly anything,” he said.

  Just that bit about Dan Rory saying “I’m going” or something like that.

  Completely ambiguous. Meaning: I’m going home; or something a bit more ominous.

  But the part about falling down? This is what I want to interject. Is it normal in this house for your visitors to collapse in front of you? Your visitors fall down on the floor and never move? And you go to bed?

  But it quickly became clear to us that talking to Jim Sandy was pointless. Part of me thought I should be angry. But I couldn’t quite work myself up to anything approaching so constructive an emotion. His time was up. If it wasn’t here, it would have been somewhere else. Looking at old Jim Sandy there at his kitchen table, I could feel only a mixture of pity and sadness. Another fellow from out back who never had much luck.

  What was the curse, I wonder, inflicted on this generation? Battered from birth by poverty and war. In their time, all the politics and economics turned upside down. Men like these became mere disposables, in war and in peace—units of productivity or destruction in the service of tycoons and generals and politicians. They were born at the end of the worst war in history and were kids during the roaring decade when the world felt reborn. And then progress stopped. Gangs of Nazis and Communists set out to dominate the world. Hungarians and Poles died to win freedom from the Nazis and the Communists. Koreans and Arabs and Jews struggled—everybody was struggling for something. It was all part of the unending human impulse to rise above this hopelessness. A struggle to achieve some elemental certainty about your fate. A struggle that always seems to start somewhere in the soul and to end, for most, like this—in terminal confusion.

  But was it…is it…ever any different?

  Big issues to discuss with Cassidy and Prinsky when I get back to Ottawa.

  Passing through Jim Sandy’s porch on the way out, I spotted a small cardboard box in the corner—a Schooner six-pack. I stopped and walked over, bent down, and picked up the little beer case. It was empty. But in the bottom of the box I saw the receipt from the liquor store. I put it in my pocket.

  Later I made a note of the time and date on the damp little sales slip from the liquor store. The purchase was just before four in the afternoon, Tuesday, March 11.

  As he’d have said himself: “Co dhiubh…” I’m glad someone got some pleasure out of it anyway.

  And then someone was saying there was no way Peigeag would do anything to harm Dan Rory. No way she’d want to take him with her. He was always her favourite. And somebody else saying, Yes, but it’s entirely possible she discovered that things are really better Over There…over where they both are now. She’d have wanted him to be a part of that. God have mercy on the both of them.

  I suppose.

  Or, I’m thinking, maybe she could see the future. Maybe she suddenly became aware of what I could clearly see from Ottawa, reading the papers, talking to the young draft dodgers and deserters who are part of the urban landscape now. She knows where the world is heading. She knows about the drugs and the promiscuity. The conflict. She knows that the murders of the Kennedys and Dr. King are just the tip of the iceberg, that the world is becoming more unstable and more violent. Everything is changing. All the certainties of their culture and their faith are about to fall apart. Dan Rory wasn’t ready for it. So she took him home with her. Somewhere safe.

  Maybe.

  But I can’t stop thinking that it’s probably a lot simpler. Maybe if he had told me when she died, so I could have come home and paid my respects. I know she was hovering over the proceedings. Her own wake and funeral. I can see her standing in the doorway, shawl over the head, long skirts to the ground, hands hidden in the folds of a long sweater, making the list: who came to remark upon her life and on her powers…who drank what and how much of it…who stayed away and what were their excuses.

  She’d have known I wasn’t there and why. Nobody told me. She wouldn’t have blamed me. Not Lindy. M’eudail Lindy…but, just the same. If I’d been there, maybe she’d have left him alone. Or maybe, in her new state of wisdom, she’d have learned about the buidseachd and probably been disposed to cancel it.

  Maybe, if I’d come home. Maybe. It’s possible. Anything is possible where she’s concerned.

  Much later I asked my mother: “How did he pull it off?” How, after so many years on the outside looking in, did he finally gain admission to that exclusive club? The Fraternal Brotherhood of the Locally Employed. It had occurred to me that Inverness County finally had a Tory representative in the provincial legislature, Dr. Jim MacLean. And that Dr. MacLean’s mother was a MacIntyre whose roots were on MacIntyre’s Mountain.

  “You don’t think…?”

  She just stared at me.

  “Never. Not in a million years.”

  “You don’t think he finally broke down and went to see…?”

  “If he did, he never said a word to me.”

  It was, I gather, tediously straightforward. No political intrigue at all. It seems the job was posted. He applied. Got an interview. Explained his background in mining and how pumps and pipes serve as the complex vascular system that keeps a mine alive. And that he understood pumps and pipelines as well as he understood the lines on the palms of his hands. They were suitably impressed by his intelligence, experience, and poise.

  As my mother said: “You’d only have to talk to the man for a few minutes to realize that he was capable of any job he put his mind to.”

  And then I wondered: What about the buidseachd? What happened to that factor in his life?

  But there’s nobody left to ask about the buidseachd.

  Father Lewis was waiting at the office door. I explained briefly to Cassidy, whose own father had died suddenly, and he got it right away. My father died.

  “But can’t you spare a moment to talk about what you’re working on for Friday?” he said.

  “No,” I replied.

  We were on the street when I remembered that Father Lewis had also lost his father suddenly and at an early age—just a year and a half ago. Jock was never sick. He went upstairs one day after lunch to take a nap. Shortly after that, Dolly, his wife, heard a thump. And, when she went to check, poor Jock was lying there on the floor.

  There was a cold drizzle falling. Wellington Street was thick with cars. Important people were making their way home after another day running the country.

  “I was just thinking about Jock,” I said. “How he went. I remember us talking about it afterwards, just after you moved up here.”

  Lewis asked me where I was parked.

  “Up behind the West Block,” I said.

  We crossed the street in front of the National Press Building and climbed a short flight of stairs with black wrought-iron railings. The dark Parliament Buildings loomed like gargoyles.

  “Give me the keys,” he said.

  I dug them out and handed them over.

  Near the car I stopped him, my friend the priest.

  “I don’t recognize anything,” I said.

  “Just lead the way,” he said. “I think that’s you over there.”

  He was pointing towards my Beaumont.r />
  “No,” I said. “I mean I don’t recognize any of the feelings. What am I supposed to feel? What did you feel like, last fall, when they told you about Jock?”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. We’re going to get you home.”

  And I think the rain was coming down harder then. I think that it had suddenly become colder. And that we were in Ottawa on a Wednesday afternoon in March. And I think it was at that moment I realized, with a terrible finality, that Dan Rory MacIntyre was home where he belonged. A home where nothing ever changes. Back with his mother, the eternal Peigeag, for good.

  And suddenly it hit me, on that rainy afternoon in Ottawa. The major difference between us was, despite the buidseachd, that he was luckier than I am.

  He always knew where he was going, even when he didn’t have a clue how he might get there. Home—where Father Lewis says he’s taking me now. But here’s my problem—I’m not sure where home is anymore.

  EPILOGUE

  Late in 1969, seven months after my father’s sudden death, I gave up my job as Ottawa-based correspondent for the Financial Times of Canada and moved back to Cape Breton. I worked there for six years as resident correspondent for the Chronicle Herald, a daily newspaper based in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  In those years I immersed myself in the life of the island. In my journalism, I reported aggressively on the industrial forces that were shaping and reshaping the life and culture of the place. I became active in a movement to restore and rehabilitate the Gaelic language, and I worked hard to achieve familiarity, if not fluency, in the language that was the key to unlocking so many mysteries in my personal history and communal past. I studied that history intensively; explored the long, rich memories of my elders; sought out and attempted to revive long-lost ties with distant relatives on the Hebridean island of South Uist.

  I finally left Cape Breton again in 1976, somehow more secure in my identity. In 1980 I moved to Toronto, where I have now lived for more than twenty-five years.

  In those later years I travelled widely in the world, carrying with me a profound curiosity about how we are altered by transient forces that, while appearing to be random and inevitable, are the consequences of ambition—another word for dreams. People dream, then seek the means—the wealth, the might, the political consensus—to make their dreams reality. When they succeed, we call it progress.

  I’ve learned how much of human history depends on the sanity of dreamers. And how much of reality is the product of delusions. And how progress doesn’t always mean improvement.

  Each year I return to Cape Breton. Each year, it seems, the visits grow longer. But each year I leave again.

  For many years I’d leave still wondering, as I wondered on that rainy afternoon in Ottawa in 1969: Where is home? Here? Where I’m going now? Where I get my mail?

  Each visit to Cape Breton brings a common set of questions from my friends who never left there: When did you come home? How long will you be home this time? Doesn’t if feel great to be home again?

  When I return to where I live and where I work, it seems I’ve gone away. Again.

  I’ve spent years struggling to understand this phenomenon of identity—understanding who you are by knowing where you’re from.

  I think I’ve come to terms at last with my dilemma. There is no answer because, essentially, there is no question. Where is home? Mere words, an admission of confusion from deep in the memory. When did you come home? It isn’t meant to be a question, but, basically, a statement of who they think I am. And I am comfortable with that.

  The confusion of that sad, cold day in March 1969 eventually lifted. I have come to understand the insight best explored by the French ascetic and philosopher Simone Weil in her reflection on “The Need for Roots.” “Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”

  I take all that to mean that roots are what we learn from everything around us, wherever we happen to be at any given moment. And that home is not so much a place as what we know, a concept that becomes our compass.

  POSTSCRIPT

  In the late sixties and early seventies, the economic boom, long predicted for the Strait of Canso, materialized with an expansion of the pulp and paper mill built by a Swedish multinational in the early sixties and by the construction of a new oil refinery, a heavy-water plant, and a supertanker docking terminal. The refinery and the heavy-water plant have since closed. Current expectations are that a long-awaited economic transformation will flow from the processing of natural gas from recent discoveries off the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia.

  Cape Porcupine has become one of Canada’s largest stone and gravel quarries, producing, by the late nineties, two million metric tonnes of material annually for shipment throughout North America and the Caribbean. The quarry is owned and operated by a subsidiary of Martin Marietta Materials, the second-largest producer of industrial aggregates in the United States. Since the construction of the causeway, which required ten million tons of rock, Cape Porcupine has produced enough stone for several more causeways. The cape, today, looks battered, weary, depleted.

  Optimistic predictions that Port Hawkesbury would become a city have not yet happened. The population of the town has, however, doubled, to about five thousand. The village of Port Hastings is now a bedroom community for several hundred people, most of whom are employed in jobs that have been created since construction of the causeway in Port Hawkesbury and Point Tupper. One of the few recognizable parts of the old village today is St. David’s United Church. All traces of the old coal piers and wharf facilities are gone. The stores owned by Mr. Clough and Mr. McGowan are gone, as are the school, the railway station, Mr. Clough’s house, and the house I grew up in. The houses the MacIvers and Sylvia Reynolds lived in are gone, as are all the buildings on the water side of the road leading through the old part of the village. The house Mr. Malone built for his family, and the house Jackie Nicholson and his grandmother moved to in the village, are both vacant. Proposed changes in traffic flow at the various highway intersections in the village will mean further demolitions.

  The railroad through Port Hastings and the bridge across the Canso Canal are now privately owned by Railamerica Inc., a U.S.-based company with close to fifty short-haul rail services in Canada and the United States. The rail line once used by the Judique Flyer—the train driven by Ian MacKinnon’s father and grandfather—has been abandoned and is now a recreation trail for hikers and all-terrain vehicles.

  Jackie Nicholson died in an automobile accident in 1973 at the age of thirty-one. The historic lighthouse in which his grandmother laboured for many years, and which was destroyed during the causeway construction, has been replaced by a replica near the site of the original.

  Ian MacKinnon—a lifelong teetotaller—retired after a long career with the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission. He is a stalwart in his church and chief of the community’s volunteer fire department.

  Tae Man Chong, after a brief stay in his homeland, South Korea, returned to Canada in the late fifties, changed his name to Tae Di Yong, and established his own highly successful engineering business. He is now living, and still working, in a community north of Toronto.

  In August 2005, on the initiative of the Port Hastings Historical Society, the last resting place of John Suto, which had never been identified by a permanent grave marker, was relocated and restored. A new headstone records that he was a native of Hungary, that he worked at the Gorman camp during construction of the causeway, that he died on August 11, 1956, and was buried on August 13. At a small dedication service on August 8, 2005, the present parish priest, Father Bill Crispo, recalled and commended the brave and compassionate response to John Suto’s suicide by the late Father Michael “Spotty” MacLaughlin. John Suto and my father, whose lives were, oddly, symmetrical, are buried in the same cemetery.

  Alice Donohu
e MacIntyre, who is my mother, and her sister, Veronica MacNeil, continue to reside independently in their own homes, with their political opinions and Hibernian sensibilities undiminished by time. They philosophically recall the days before the causeway when, it seems, all things were possible by strength of will and sinew.

  There are now three MacIntyre households on MacIntyre’s Mountain.

  The last Gaelic speaker on MacIntyre’s Mountain died in 2004.

  On the headstone marking my grandparents’ graves, there is a Gaelic inscription: “An Cuid de Pháras dhaibh.”

  It means: “May they have their share of Paradise.”

  P.S.

  Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  Author Biography

  LINDEN MACINTYRE was born on May 29, 1943, in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. His father, Dan R. MacIntyre, a hardrock miner, and his mother, Alice Donohue MacIntyre, a schoolteacher, were both natives of Cape Breton (MacIntyre’s Mountain and Bay St. Lawrence, respectively).

  MacIntyre grew up in Port Hastings, Inverness County, Nova Scotia, where he attended local and county schools in the villages of Port Hastings and Judique. He earned a B.A. in 1964 from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish after four years of studies there and at Saint Mary’s University and University of King’s College in Halifax.

  From 1964 to 1967, he worked as a reporter for The Halifax Herald Limited, publishers of The Chronicle Herald and The Mail-Star. He spent most of that time as a parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa. Between 1967 and 1970, he was a reporter for the The Financial Times of Canada, also on Parliament Hill.

  In 1970, he returned to Cape Breton following the sudden death of his father. He worked there as a correspondent for The Chronicle Herald, covering northeast Nova Scotia and provincial political affairs until he joined CBC Television in 1976. Based in Halifax, he worked for the CBC for three seasons, hosting a regional current affairs program called The MacIntyre File. In 1979, on behalf of his program and the CBC, MacIntyre successfully initiated a legal action to clarify public access rights to documentation regarding police search warrants. The case, MacIntyre v. the Attorney General of Nova Scotia, was eventually heard by the Supreme Court of Canada and resulted in a landmark decision affirming press freedom and the principle of transparency in the courts.