Eastern Passage by Farley Mowat Read Free Book Online Page A

feet deep, and I was sweating in this hole one day when a visitor came calling. A potato farmer from a long lineage of potato farmers, he was one of those whose land had become so impoverished it would no longer feed him and his family so he was now moonlighting as Albion Township’s tax assessor. A scarecrow with a vacant stare, he did not introduce himself but silently regarded me and my excavation long enough to make me feel uneasy. Then he spat a gob of tobacco juice into the pit and in measured tones barely above the level of a whisper, told me, “Cain’t dig no grave on private property. ’Tain’t allowed. Them as is gone has got to go into the churchyard.”
    I was amused at what I took to be a sally of local wit. I was less amused when, some months later, I got my first tax bill. It was for a sum about three times higher than that for any comparative property in Albion. The last laugh was surely his.
    When the digging was finished, I became a mason. To assist me in providing concrete footings for the cellar walls, the fireplace, and the foundation pillars, Lulu metamorphosed into a combined sand, gravel,and cement truck. Her rated carrying capacity was only 500 pounds, but she fetched much heavier loads of pit-run gravel from a farmer’s field three miles away, small mountains of bagged cement from Bolton, and 45-gallon drums (two at a time) of water scooped with a pail from a small stream running beneath a nearby concession road.
    I had no motor-driven mixer so I cobbled a mixing trough from ancient planks taken from an abandoned barn. The machinery was me, a shovel, and a hoe. I carried the resultant slurry to where it was needed in a wheelbarrow or in twin buckets slung from a neck yoke.
    One torrid July morning the unusual sound of a car climbing our hill gave me an excuse to take a break. I returned to camp half-naked, sweat-soaked and filmed with cement dust, to find Frances in animated conversation with a dark-haired youngish woman sporting the insignia of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (the WRNS) in which Fran had served during the war.
    Both seemed perturbed in my presence. In a low voice, Fran identified the stranger as having once been her Commanding Officer, but offered no explanation as to why this officer had tracked down a lowly “ranker” such as Fran had been.
    The visitor was distinctly ill at ease, and when I suggested she might like to take potluck lunch with us, she hurriedly declined.
    I had to leave them at that point for I had a mix of concrete on the go. When I returned to camp an hour later, the visitor was gone. Frances was sobbing in the tent and would not come out or talk to me.
    She remained withdrawn and unreachable for several days. Then one evening she drove into Palgrave, where there was a public telephone. When she returned, she announced that she had decided to return to her parents and stay with them while taking a summer course toward the degree she had abandoned when we got married. I was gob-smacked, as Newfoundlanders say. I felt guilty now at having cut short her university career, although atthe time I had assumed
she
wanted to escape from the university as much as I did.
    Next day I drove her to the city and left her at her parents’ home. We parted amicably, though almost as strangers. Neither of us could, or would, scale the wall that had so suddenly risen between us.
    We saw very little of one another during much of the rest of the summer, although I did make three or four visits to the Thornhill home and on one occasion Fran’s parents brought her to our building site for a brief and uncomfortable visit. It was not a success. All four of us seemed enmeshed in a conspiracy of silence. Looking back on that summer now, I view the entire sorry contretemps as scenes from a confusing silent movie bereft even of explanatory subtitles. And so it must remain.
    That summer was viciously hot. One August day the heat became so intolerable I abandoned my labours