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

everybody’s favourite. She has dimples and a mop of blonde ringlets. She is known to grown-ups as the Pup.
    As we pass below the Catholic Church and feel the thump of the resumption of the pavement, Danita notices the car ferry from the mainland approaching where the dock is, just up ahead. She wants to watch it unload the cars. It is a proposal that almost everybody finds interesting.
    So my father parks the car at Eddie Fougere’s garage, and they start walking down.
    The car is a 1946 Mercury. It is black. I would rather have stayed inside letting the mysterious scents, collected in all the places it has been, fire the imagination. I would prefer to snuggle down into the deep, soft, cloth upholstery that is warmed by the strong late-spring sun and dream about owning a car of my own—or at least my father owning one. The car belongs to my father’s brother, John Dan, who is working underground in the mine in Stirling, where my father worked until just recently.
    John Dan is also talking about coming home to look for work on the causeway.
    My mother and father and sisters are walking slowly down the hill to the ferry. I hang back and nobody notices. I’ve seen the ferry arrival many times. I’ve been coming to town on my own for years. Before First Holy Communion and Confirmation, I came to town alone for special instruction at the Convent School. On Saturday afternoons I often come to town alone for the movies. I will find my way to town on foot if I can’t get a ride. Sometimes a bus will stop and pick me up. The driver winks and smiles, shows me where to sit. I know the bus costs money for most people, but this bus is special. Kids get on for free.
    Coming home I ride the train, which is also free because the conductor is too busy between town and Port Hastings to go around collecting fares. I recently had my first real fight, not far from the movie theatre. Boys from town tried to hold me back and make me miss the train. But I beat them off. Desperation made me strong, or maybe the example of the movie heroes.
    From dawn to dark, it seems, I am on the move when I’m not imprisoned in the school. There’s the town, the woods, the shores ofthe strait, and the mysterious recesses of Plaster Cove, which used to be a quarry and was the reason for the village in the first place. And now the roar of construction, punctuated by frequent explosions, as the village gets ready for the brilliant future.
    As the causeway inches towards Nicholson’s Point, teams of diggers and drillers have begun to hack away at the back of the point to create a long canal that will one day allow ships to continue to traverse the strait, on their way from the Atlantic Ocean up into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the heart of Canada.
    Because I am the man of the house when my father is away, I have always had freedom of movement here. I had freedom to explore wherever my legs and curiosity, raft and rowboat, would lead me. On Sundays, when there were no trains, and before all the new construction, older boys would sometimes steal the pump-car from the railway shack. We’d travel the rails, pumping up and down at either end of a long handle that works like a see-saw. The summit of liberation—pumping slowly up and down, the little trolley car skimming over the rails silently, heading northward where we wouldn’t be noticed by the railwaymen. Rumbling along the Ghost Beach, with the strait on the left and Long Pond on the right, dark and calm. Riding along with the breeze on my face, feeling like an outlaw.
    I have been the man of the house, it seems, for most of my ten years. Last September I was certain that this was about to change. The causeway was begun. My father would come home. Now, on Coronation Day, he’s here. But I’m not sure that he’ll stay.
    Recently I drew a map with every house and building in Port Hastings, south to north from Pleasant Hill to Mill Hill, a distance of about four miles. I want to remember it as it was