Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (22 page)

When we go to the mountain, it’s usually just my father and me. My mother and my sisters will say they’re busy, but I suspect they get nervous when Grandma makes tea for us because they don’t think her kitchen is clean enough—especially in the summer when the flies come and go through the open doors and windows as if they own the place. So just my father and I go, and we bring along something like a bag of potatoes or a small bottle of brandy, which Grandma swiftly hides somewhere in the closed part of the house. Even though Peigeag is death on liquor, she likes to have a little bottle of her own for medicine or special treats.

I suggested once that we should bring a bottle of DDT for all the flies. But my father says the stickers hanging in the kitchen do the job and, anyway, there isn’t much point in DDT if you don’t have screens to spray it on.

Grandma Peigeag always greets us at the door, babbling in a mixture of Gaelic and English.
M’eudail
Lindy, and running bony freckled hands that are surprisingly soft over my forehead and through my hair.
Grandpa Dougald will stand back, hands in his pockets, half giggling and wearing the same old sweater that he always wears, winter and summer.

On the mountain it is like being in a history book. There is no electricity or running water. There are no machines of any kind. They used to have a horse named Tony, but now the barn is empty and leaning over as if it will soon fall down. The walls and floors and ceilings in the house are just plain boards. The kitchen smells of burning wood and, when they stop talking, the only sound is the crackling of the stove and the wind against the windows, or the trees rustling outside or, if it’s summertime, the buzz of invisible insects. The kitchen is dimly lit, but the walls and ceiling are dingy from wood smoke.

Once, on a winter day, just before we got there, somebody had been by and left a feed of smelt, which Grandma proposed to boil up with some of the new potatoes we brought.

My father looked at me and smiled. He said that would be great.

The way he looked at me he seemed to think that, like the others, I’m not too keen on Grandma Peggy’s cooking either. But I don’t mind it, and I like boiled smelt. I also knew that before we’d leave, she’d disappear briefly in the direction of where the brandy went and return with a couple of quarters and some special candy in a box that someone gave her at Christmas, but which hadn’t yet been opened.

Nothing ever seems to change on the mountain. Everything is as it must have been a hundred years ago, except that there are fewer people now. I listen to the Gaelic conversations that flutter and flow around me—about the weather and the woods and the people they know. Grandma seems to speak English with her teeth. From what I can see, she has only three or four teeth, and you hear them clicking and sucking as she struggles with the foreign English words. The strain of the unfamiliar language makes her seem older and unsteady
and a little simple. But when she speaks the Gaelic, smooth words flow easily from somewhere in the back of her throat, clear and confident, and my father and grandfather mostly sit and listen, nodding in agreement. Her voice deepens and she becomes younger somehow, eyes flashing and face changing every moment, hands flying. In Gaelic she has the authority of a teacher or a priest, and you understand why so many people are afraid of her.

They’ll say: Peigeag has a wicked tongue in her head if you ever cross her, and if you’re not careful she can invoke the
buidseachd
—even against her own.

But I don’t worry about her because I also heard them say that Dan Rory is her favourite, being the youngest and because he almost died like the other two. She keeps a careful eye on him because she believes another old woman on the mountain once put a wish on him for something he did that displeased her. My cousins on the mountain tell me they have heard the talk: old Mary Ann put a wish on Dan Rory, that no matter how hard he worked at trying to succeed, he’d never know anything but bad luck.

They’re usually smiling when they say it. But sometimes I feel a chill.

My grandparents live on a bare little hill that was once surrounded by open fields. I think, when I was four, I lived there for a while—but not in their house. I remember a lumber camp that my father built just after the war, just across the road and not far from an old abandoned house they call Big Mary’s Place. Big Mary once lived over there with her husband, who was called “Domhnail am biast,” which means Donald the Worm, because he was so tall and thin. But they were both long gone by then.

Further up the mountain, you can still see open spaces where there were farms belonging to two MacIntyres known as Big Norman
and Little Norman. And the place where Angus Jim Malcolm, who was a friend of Wilbert Coffin, grew up. None of the farms have been there for years. Most of the people, I think, are either dead or in town or in Boston.

Just down below us there is the Dan B. MacIntyre place, and that is near where my grandfather and his brothers and sisters were all born. We are known as the Alasdair Chiorstaidhs, because that was the name of my grandfather’s father and it means “Alexander who is the son of Christy.” Usually people with names from history are called after the father, but my great-grandfather’s father, whose name was Donald and who was born in Scotland, died when they were still kids, so they were raised and identified by their mother, Christy, who was a MacDonald. My grandfather is Dughail Alasdair Chiorstaidh. Dougald the son of Alexander the son of Christy. My father is Dan Rory Dougald.

My strange name doesn’t require a
sloinneadh,
but I know that I am still a Chiorstaidh no matter what they call me. And that I’m a mountain MacIntyre.

Old Christy was, they say, like Grandma MacIntyre, a “powerful woman.” She raised her kids alone after her husband’s death, and then raised the children of her son, Alasdair Chiorstaidh, after his wife died and left him helpless. She raised my grandfather on the mountain, at least until he was big enough to go away.

I sometimes think of that priest in Scotland, telling them at the time of their eviction that their faith would lead them to prosperity. And that he should have seen them in the years beyond the sea.
An cuan siar,
they kept on calling it, even after they got here. It means the “Western Sea,” even though it was now east of us. He should have seen them sitting in their dark, smoky kitchens, worrying about the weather and sickness up on MacIntyre’s Mountain, or after the August Gale in the 1800s when all their houses and barns blew down. Or today, trying to
make a living like a slave, breaking up rock deep in the belly of the earth, the only light available from a little lamp attached to their hard hats. After all those years, still struggling to settle down somewhere with the people they care about—exiled still.

And when we’re walking down the mountain, I’ll ask again: “How old were you when you went away?”

He’ll think for a moment, then say: “Well. Not much older than yourself.”

“Tell me again about going away?”

“Well,” he’ll say. “Going away is special, the first time. I bought a new suit for it. I paid fifteen dollars, and that was a lot of money then. I went to the railway station in Hastings and bought a ticket, but after the suit I only had enough money to get as far as Montreal.”

On this day we are walking down the mountain because the snow was too deep to get the truck all the way up. It is a rare day because he seems to be in a mood for talking. The sun is sharp, and there are only a few puffy clouds in the blue sky. I can imagine him being sixteen and coming down the mountain in his new suit, with a few dollars in his pockets and big dreams in his head. Going away for good.

By now in the story it’s as if I am not here with him. It’s just himself, going away again for the first and last time.

“So I spent all my money on the train ticket to Montreal.”

He laughs softly at the skinny boy with the new suit and the big ideas walking down the mountain road.

“The trouble is I was going to Senneterre. Do you know how far Senneterre is from Montreal?”

“No.”

“Hundreds and hundreds of miles.”

“So how did you get there?”

“In Montreal I found the train that was going north, and I snuck onto a car that was right behind the coal tender.”

He shakes his head.

“Imagine what I looked like getting off that train? Black as…”

He stops and laughs.

“And after all that, they weren’t hiring at the mine. So I had to sleep in the woods for about a week, living off what I could pilfer from gardens.”

“Why didn’t you ask somebody to let you stay in their house?”

“They aren’t very friendly up there,” he says. “Nope.”

I considered telling him about the Syrian and Martin Angus in the porch at home, but decided not to.

“Not even a glass of water,” he said. “They’ll put the dog on you when they see you in the lane.”

“Really?”

“Don’t ever get stranded in Senneterre,” he said.

“But you got a job?”

“Yup. Got a job hand muckin’ and layin’ track.”

“What’s hand muckin’?”

“Pick and shovel,” he said. “But that didn’t last long. Before long I was driving drifts and into the real work.”

I didn’t bother asking about drifts and real work because I didn’t want to interrupt this rare moment when he was talking without seeming to notice. And because the sky was an unusually deep blue, and the snow was blinding in its purity. And though it was freezing cold outside, the walking wrapped you in a fine second skin of warmth and your blood sang.

He just talked and talked, and, near John Dan’s, I decided to ask: “What happened there, up on the mountain, when you were small? Why did your little brother and sister die?”

“Ah well,” he said. “That’s a long, long story.”

That was what he always said when he was through talking.

At John Dan’s, Mae made more tea and asked me questions about
school while my father and his brother talked softly in their secret language.

The plans for the big variety concert were just about complete, and again I am reminded that a school isn’t just for kids—at least a village school. Our school is as much for the grown-ups as it is for those of us required to go there every day to learn math and English and history. I realize that the school has a whole nighttime life and that this is when the school really becomes the village. And that if there were no school here, the place would be like the mountain—a place where nothing happens except in the memory or the imagination.

You realize that the concerts and card games, dances and public meetings are like what happens at the kitchen table at home. People with memory in common get together for a single purpose—eating or praying or doing business or having fun—and it brings out surprising qualities in every individual. The big concert in April was like that in more ways than one.

I understand because I live close to the school and get to see all that happens there. From my room, I can hear the dances and see the people coming and going in the darkness or when they’re near the dim light over the doors. The first time I ever saw a movie was in the school. Somebody came with suitcases, hung a sheet, took things out of the suitcases, turned out the lights, and suddenly the bedsheet was alive with pictures. In the movie, somebody murdered a robber by the name of Jesse James.

Sometimes I go to meetings in the school to hear politicians and their promises and to watch the adults get all excited, even though they don’t believe a word they hear. I go to the card games when I can afford to, ever since Grandma Donohue taught me to play almost as well as she can. Even the dog comes to the card games, and everybody
tries to get him to sit by their table because they think he brings good luck. Recently I won a chicken.

A few days before the concert, Dolly asked the boys to start taking down the partitions between the two rooms. You stood on chairs and removed some strips of wood at the top. Then some strips of wood on the floor. Very carefully, with everybody helping, the walls are lowered to the floor. Suddenly you see all the children in the Little Room sitting wide-eyed, and when the walls are lowered they laugh hysterically at the sight of the Big Room, and Mrs. Hennessey is hopelessly trying to keep them quiet.

Dolly is looking at them, smiling.

All the grade nine and ten desks, near the big windows that overlook the strait, are moved to the centre of the room, and we stack the partitions on sawhorses near the windows and they become a stage, and the excitement in the Little Room suddenly flows into the Big Room like warm water.

The decorating starts. Stuart Kennedy, who works on the railroad and is good at drawing, sketches the Future on large sheets of paper. Then he assembles the parts into one giant scene that covers the windows and forms a backdrop for the stage. Stuart Kennedy’s future is all city skyscrapers and highways, wrapped around the new causeway.

His vision of the future, I realize, is shaped by expectations of prosperity and all the activity it brings. And, for a moment, I wonder if it is really possible that the future could happen here, and not, as in the past, everywhere else.

In my imagination, the future is a little bit like Riverdale in the Archie comics—full of interesting and attractive people, where even the silly ones, like Jughead, are popular and funny, and big shots like Reggie learn their lesson, which is that being rich and swanky doesn’t count as much as character. And Archie has character. Maybe Port Hastings will be like Riverdale, with its interesting high school and
pretty girls and a soda fountain where the teenagers gather to carry on and flirt and eat mountainous banana splits whenever they want to—a place you never have to leave.

The concert was a big success and raised over a hundred dollars for the school. Afterwards they were saying that the highlight was my father and Angus Walker Sr.

Here’s what they saw.

The curtain opens and they are sitting on opposite sides of a card table, facing each other. Between them there is a large bowl and two spoons. The bowl is filled with soft ice cream, and they begin to feed it to each other with the spoons. The catch is that they are blindfolded.