Causeway: A Passage From Innocence (32 page)

I stand. Nobody notices. I walk out to the porch, where I can still smell the faint sour smells of milk from the time when they kept a cream separator there. Old coats and caps are hanging on nails driven into the wooden walls. I pick up my new .22, which is leaning in a corner, and walk outside, admiring the smooth shining wooden stock and dull black barrel.

Near the barn I pause. A crow squawks, lifting off from a corner of the barn roof. “One crow, sorrow,” my mother always says. Just like her mother.

The past returns. It is another Christmas. There is snow. It is my mother’s birthday, but she is unhappy. She has been unhappy for some time now. I first noticed the sadness on a morning before the snow when I found her in the yard in a housecoat watching the sunrise, holding a fist with a clenched handkerchief to her face.

When I asked her what was wrong, she said, “Nothing.”

But though I was only, maybe, four, I remembered. Leapin’ Lena driving off, and Grandpa Dougald leading Tony to the barn. And me, lost and invisible in the sadness of the adults. And my father saying nothing, just getting into a car with the other men. And then they drove away.

“You go back inside,” my mother says. “I’ll only be another minute. We’ll make some porridge.”

And we did.

That night her friends came by—William and Anita, Elsie, Roberta, Laidlaw—and they had a small flask. There was music on the radio, and they turned it up. A person had to celebrate a birthday, no matter what.

It was also Christmas. A week before, I’d seen the notice from the post office. There was a large Christmas parcel at the railway station—a large catalogue order. There is always a large catalogue order just before Christmas—COD—which means cash on delivery. And sometime, shortly after the cash is delivered to the station master, the order comes home. The door to the living room is locked, but you can see through the keyhole that there is an unopened package inside. And you know that although all the good things of Christmas come from God and Santa Claus, sometimes They use the post office and the CNR and Eaton’s or Simpsons to make the good things happen.

But that year when I peeked through the keyhole a week after the notice came, the parcel wasn’t there.

Now it is her birthday, which falls ten days before Christmas. The happy music plays. The voices become louder and merrier. I hear the rare sound of laughter. Then there is a crash, the sound of breaking glass, then silence, followed by the murmur of regretful voices. No sounds of anger.

I peer down from The Hole near the chimney, which passes through
my room. Someone is apologizing for breaking something. My mother, happy now, is saying, “It really doesn’t matter…honestly.”

But you can tell the party is over. They are in their coats, gathered at the door. But one hangs back. The man named Laidlaw hovers near the table.

Then he leaves too, and when he is gone I see the twenty-dollar bill he left behind.

The next day I got the mail at Mr. Clough’s. There must have been a hundred Christmas cards. My mother was flipping through them anxiously, and then there was an envelope that was not a Christmas card.

“Thank God,” she said, laughing.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The baby bonus,” she said.

Now there was the baby bonus and the twenty-dollar bill. And when I checked the keyhole two days later, there was the parcel in the corner of the locked parlour.

We had our Christmas. We had a tree and got to Mass. There were gifts and there was turkey. But there was something missing. Somehow I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask when or if my father would be home.

And then it was the New Year, and there was still no mention of the missing man.

New Year’s Eve we coasted on new sleighs until dark over by MacKinnons’. And when she came to take us home, she was trying to be cheerful. But the falling darkness seemed to be soaking into her expression.

I asked what was wrong, and she said New Year’s always made her sad. Another measure of time gone. No way of knowing what the next chunk of time will be like. Getting older and no further ahead. Nothing you have to be concerned about when you’re a child, she said, and yanked my arm, trying to start a game.

“Where’s Daddy,” my sister asked.

“We don’t know,” she said.

I examine the .22. It tells me that I am growing up, soon to be a man with choices. I think briefly of Old John and the choice he made. The choice to die. I feel a brief shudder. Nothing can be that bad. Nothing can be worse than the Christmas when he wasn’t with us. And he hasn’t missed one since.

I was by the edge of the trees, then, crouched to see beneath the bushes where the white of the rabbit’s winter coat would show up against the dusty brown of the underbrush. I didn’t hear my father come up behind me.

“What about over there,” he said quietly.

I looked. He was pointing off to my left and, just at the edge of the woods, where the snow tapered to a shard of ice, I saw the rabbit crouching.

I turned, cocked, and took aim. Fired. The rabbit turned his head and looked at me indifferently. Then he hopped a few yards into the bushes and stopped again. I flipped the bolt and thumbed another bullet into the firing chamber, cocked, took aim, and fired again. This time the rabbit didn’t move.

“Let me see those bullets,” my father said.

He examined one, then reached for the rifle, loaded it, cocked, and fired. The bullet snipped a small twig from a bush beside the rabbit’s head. This time he vanished in a blurry bound.

My father was examining the rifle barrel.

“Ah. There’s our problem,” he said.

What?

“The sights,” he said. “They aren’t lined up.”

Later, when I told my mother, she just smiled.

I asked about the smile—insisted there was something wrong with the new rifle. I, inexperienced, might miss a rabbit. My father never would.

“Unless he wanted to,” she said.

It was different after he went back. Somehow you knew you’d see him again before too long. But you also knew that, from now on, he would be a visitor. That would be okay. Not perfect, but better than nothing.

His appearances always seemed to catch you by surprise. I suppose my mother knew when to expect him, but she’d usually keep the information to herself. The places he invariably found work weren’t exactly easy to get away from, so, at best, she’d be guessing if she said when he’d be coming home. But you always had a rough idea where he was and that, whenever the opportunity presented itself, he’d be home for as long as he could possibly extend the visit. The only time we had any real doubt about where he was or when he’d surface was after the first sawmill on the mountain.

Christmas and New Year got by that year with no word from him. Now that I’m older, I can see his point. He’d have left a lot of unsolved financial problems behind and probably figured it was best if the folks back home could truthfully tell people we had no idea where he was.

That time we got by on the goodwill of our neighbours and the line of credit at Mr. Clough’s. And, sure enough, he reappeared eventually. He’d been working like a dog in some remote part of Ontario, a hard-rock mine in a place with a name like Pickled Crow—something like that. Somewhere altogether off the map. But he’d been making good money there and was almost ready to start paying off some debts. And how is everybody anyway?

I don’t even want to try to guess what the answer might have been.
This time, after what I call the causeway mill, there was no dramatic disappearing act. This time he just went away in the normal fashion. Packed his gear, hugs all around (including the dog), a bit of jokey advice about looking after things since I’m the man. Et cetera.

Then they loaded the duffel bag and a suitcase into the back of the car and headed for the railway station in town. I watched them drive away, wondering how long it would be this time.

It was all for the best, my mother said when she returned alone. We were in dire straits again financially. But it wouldn’t take him long to clean the slate now that he’d have a steady income and with her teaching school full time.

With the cow gone, the chores were reduced. And now that the work on the canal was coming to an end, the paper business was hardly worth the effort I was putting into it.

I was in grade nine and finding the schoolwork pretty easy, having been eavesdropping on the course content since I was in grade six. My mother was impressed by my ready knowledge of the role of the machine gun in the conquest of Africa. But I was no longer paying as much attention to the subjects in the grade ahead of me. Too much emphasis on algebra and geometry, and an awful English grammar course that involved a book called
Using Our Language.
I’d sit there daydreaming about the possibility of skipping grade ten altogether. Or maybe actually going to boarding school at the monastery.

That, I presumed, would be determined by the availability of money—assuming you had to pay to go to school over there—and there was no guarantee that we’d be out of the hole by then.

There was another factor distracting me from academic matters. I was noticing subtle changes in people I’d known forever but never took very seriously—girls such as Sylvia and Ann and Isabel and Mabel. Suddenly they were not so much girls as some new species, taking on the appearance and shape and mannerisms of women, without actually
turning into adults like your mother or grandmother. Not entirely a desirable development, I realized, because of the cruelty that seems to come so naturally to adolescent females when dealing with men and boys they see as being insignificant.

I knew and accepted that I, just by virtue of my age and lack of a car or driver’s licence, was about as insignificant as you could get.

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 jump 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.