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

before the causeway. I counted sixty-six buildings in that space, but many are abandoned. The oldQuigley house, which is next to ours; MacMillan’s, near where we are standing now; Malcolm the Butcher’s, up the hill from Nicholson’s Point, near Angus Neil’s; Captain Skinner’s; the old dance hall; MacLean’s old store; the forge. There’s even an abandoned place that looks new, just north of here. Murdoch MacLean’s new house, never lived in, now boarded up.
    Once I broke into Quigleys’. I went in through a broken window, and it was dark inside. There was still furniture. It was as if the people were away and might come back at any moment. I moved quietly as if there were people sleeping there. In a kitchen cupboard there were papers—letters and bills and postcards mostly. But there was also a telegram. A telegram, I know, always brings bad news, but I looked at it anyway. This one was old. My hand was shaking as I read it. “We regret to inform you…” And, sure enough, it was about somebody killed in the war. I put it back carefully, wiped my hands, fearful that part of the sorrow there rubbed off—or perhaps bad luck.
    The most interesting of the empty buildings is the forge. I can remember when the old blacksmith, Johnny Morrison, worked there. People from out back would bring their horses to him. He’d pick up the horse’s hooves, one at a time, holding them in his leather apron, examining. The horse would just stand there, patiently, occasionally looking down watching the blacksmith’s back, as if to ask how long he planned to keep him standing on three legs. Sometimes Johnny Morrison would pull out a jackknife and dig at the hoof, but the horse didn’t seem to feel it. I’ve watched him pound nails into a horse’s hoof when he’s putting new shoes on, and then use a sharpened bar that is like a chisel to trim the edges of the hoof. Occasionally the horse would grunt and shiver.
    Johnny Morrison was the first dead man I ever saw. I went to his funeral in the Protestant Church, which is next to the school and just below our house. I saw the crowd and just walked in and sat inthe back. At the end of the service everybody got up, walked to the front, and then around past his coffin. I could see the lid was up and wondered what he looked like dead. I could see the men dropping little sprigs of spruce on top of him. He was very white and very still. His mustache, which always seemed to be all brown and yellow in the forge, now seemed to be pure white like his eyebrows and his face. The little sprigs were all over his chest, and there was also a white apron folded there.
    My mother told me afterwards that the apron and the sprigs of spruce were there because Johnny Morrison was a Mason.
    I asked her what they meant, but she said it was a secret—one of many secrets that only Masons knew.
    I have since seen other dead people: Howard Oliver, Bill Forbes, John Archie MacDougall, and Dan Fraser. Also an old priest who was laid out in robes like a pope in the aisle of the church, with the lid of the coffin propped open.
    The forge closed when the blacksmith died, and they said it never would reopen. They say blacksmiths and their forges are obsolete, as the ferry to the mainland soon will be—which means nobody needs them anymore. I still see horses on the road, clopping past, wheels crunching the gravel, or pulling sleds in winter, with the kids all running behind trying to hitch rides. But the horses too will soon be gone, like the forge and Johnny Morrison and the ferries. That’s what I hear listening at The Hole in the kitchen ceiling.
    There’s talk now that a man from away, who is also named Morrison, might turn the blacksmith shop into a service station for cars. It is the perfect location, they say, the first place people will visit coming off the causeway. There will be gas pumps out front and, where Johnny Morrison kept his fire, there will be a pit for working under cars. Robert Morrison