Causeway: A Passage From Innocence by Linden McIntyre Read Free Book Online

toilet. They have a furnace that heats the entire house, so all the rooms are open all year round. They always have a car.
    Every evening we stand on the back verandah of MacKinnons’ house and wait for Alex MacKinnon’s train to leave the railway station, which is straight down below their house, near the shore of the strait. As the train leaves the station and passes through an open space, it becomes visible from the verandah. We wave frantically, and Alex MacKinnon blows the whistle just for us. Sometimes it is a long mournful howl; sometimes a bar of happy hoots. When the whistle blows, you can see a blast of steam beside the billowing smokestack,and the locomotive huffs and puffs and strains to get away with its long burden of freight and passenger cars.
    We leap up and down, waving to be seen. Ian and his sister, Annie, and his little brother, Roy, who fell off the verandah one day and broke his leg. And me. I jump up and down waving with the rest of them as if I am a MacKinnon whose father works for the Canadian National Railway.
    On warm summer evenings, Alex MacKinnon and other railwaymen, whose names are Howie and LV and Laidlaw, sit on the front step in their undershirts, drinking beer and talking quietly.
    Alex MacKinnon’s brother, whose name is Ian and who is known as Big Ian, also works for the railway, even though he owns a farm right here in the village. Big Ian never drinks beer, so you don’t see him on the doorstep in his undershirt. Working on the railroad seems to be a job that runs in the MacKinnon family. Even their grandfather was a railwayman who drove a train.
    Angus Neil and Theresa are also MacKinnons, and their father, Allan Joe, works on the railroad too. And Binky’s father is on the railroad. Brian Langley’s father works for the Department of Highways, which is just as good. Jackie Nicholson has neither father nor mother, as far as we know, but lives with his grandmother Kate, who is the keeper of the lighthouse below us on Nicholson’s Point. I know that the causeway is bad news for Jackie and Mrs. Nicholson because, after it is finished, they won’t need the lighthouse anymore. And the causeway will eventually land exactly where their house now sits. We don’t talk about what will happen then.
    Jackie Nicholson and I have this in common: absent fathers and some confusion about the nature of the improvements that will come with the causeway. It is not something that we talk about. People say that Jackie Nick is “slow.”
    I think I understand why my father isn’t on the railway or with the Department of Highways, but the reasons seem to change with each discussion. Sometimes I believe it is because he is not a Mason. Sometimes it is because he is not a Grit. But mostly, I believe, it is because he is from out back. It is because he is from MacIntyre’s Mountain and has an embarrassing secret.
    The causeway, I understand, will change all that. Being a Mason or a Grit or from the mountain isn’t going to matter anymore. Not after September 16, 1952. Certainly not after Coronation Day, when the causeway is already at the point where only a few people are still calling it the bocan bridge.
    On Coronation Day, the town is nothing but Union Jacks and flags of Canada. The flag of Canada is a little Union Jack in the corner of a red field that also contains a symbol called a coat of arms. There are strings with plastic pennants of every imaginable colour strung above the streets and across the fronts of buildings. Everybody is out, just wandering slowly or driving around. The pennants snap and rustle in the wind, which is chilly for June. But there is bright sunshine and beaming hospitality in all the faces.
    My father is home. Usually I am the only man in the house. There is my mother and, in the wintertime, her mother, whose name is Mary Donohue and who is extremely old. I have two sisters who are younger than I am. Danita is two years younger. Rosalind is the youngest and