The Last Best Place (7 page)

“Well you know the docta he left all his money to charity you know,” she said, cocking an eyebrow. “But you know he was a funny one. All he left me was that old Volkswagen of his. I was very angry about the whole thing. Very angry.”

I can imagine, said the visitor.

“Now you know things are funny. All along he told me that he wanted his ashes sprinkled on this loch back tha in Scotland. So his day did come.”

She walks her guest towards the mantelpiece where an urn stands. Pauses, then gives a conspiratorial wink and says, “Thaas the bastard—I’ve got him now.”

It is no wonder we are the way we are. By the standards of the land my family’s stories are nothing exceptional, not by a long shot. But my personal mythology includes mine cave-ins, race riots, the carnage of Vimy Ridge and strike breakers riding down innocent people in the
streets. It includes murderers and heroes, wondrous athletes and monumental drunks, geniuses and idiots, the pious and the profane.

Then there are the words. They matter, for they are the way we deliver the myths and stories of our world into day-to-day life. Language marks Nova Scotia, a modern-day Tower of Babel where a traveller will hear Gaelic, French, English and German within a couple of hours. When all those dissonant sounds mix together the result can be truly startling—weird words that carry a world of meaning in the slightest inflection and volumes of social history in a single phrase.

Lewis Poteet, an English professor from Montreal who summered on the South Shore, was so fascinated with the jumble of words and phrases there that he began to collect and study them. Eventually he published a South Shore phrase book, which makes a great read. If, for instance, you drive around Mahone Bay you may hear someone called a
semiquibber
(idiot) or
flutterbug
(easily excitable). You may hear someone refer to
gurry
(waste from cleaning fish) or a
lambkiller
(a severe, sudden March storm). You may hear somebody talk about
moger
(wretched),
forelaying
(expecting), being
swonked
(exhausted) or
iglish
(grouchy). When people from the
real
South Shore get wound up they might blurt
holy snappin’ assholes, gookemole, holy old twist, kroppy doppy, hold your pickle
or
by the rattly-eyed Jesus
. An older man might call a younger one
old son
and a young, green hired hand might be called
nubbins
. If they think a fuss is being made over something unimportant they might call it
a fart in a windstorm
. If they doubt
what you are saying their response might be
I’ll tow that one alongside for a bit before I bring it aboard
. An unattractive person might be called
homely as a stump fence
, a drunk is all
snapped up
, someone with a big butt is
three axehandles across the ass
. And the warning
Don’t stick out your bruddle at me, you’ll be mootsen someplace else
means you’re in deep shit.

Words still matter around here. This is a society where the keepers of the stories—the tribal elders—are still revered. One morning, I made an appointment to see Joe Casey, the MLA from Digby, a prosperous fishing village in the Bay of Fundy, who seems happy to talk to a visitor even if he has no idea what I wanted. His office is in a hideous little strip mall on the way into town. Casey, who is seventy-seven, turns out to be a jolly, gentlemanly Bay of Fundy Mark Twain. He wears a navy blazer and one of those Zorba the Greek fishing captain’s hats and sits at a desk amidst the memorabilia from his varied career, the stories rolling off his lips like pearls. Quite a résumé: six times elected to the Nova Scotia legislature, World War Two naval officer, fisherman, fishplant operator, steamship pilot, raconteur. No great statesman, as a politician his contribution could be best summed up by a bill he tabled:

MISTER JOSEPH CASEY: Mr. Speaker, I hereby give notice that on a future day I shall move the adoption of the following resolution:

He can talk: one minute he’s talking about such locals as Zippy Moses, Ernie Balser, an old couple named Torchy and Drindy and places named Bummer’s Crossing. Then without a pause he’s moved on to Jimmy Cagney and Arthur Kennedy, who used to vacation in the area, his long speech before the Indian parliament, manoeuvring oil tankers through dangerous waters and impenetrable fog and pulling drowned friends out of the Bay.

“One night the telephone rang by my bed,” he told me. “I picked it up and a man asked, ‘Can I walk an elephant up Digby wharf?’ Thinking he was playing a trick I replied, ‘You have a wrong number. You had better call Noah,’ and then hung up.

“A few minutes later the phone rang again and the caller asked if I were the harbour pilot or not. When I replied that I was, he said that he needed to bring a circus to Digby by ship and legitimately needed the information about the elephant. The ship on her way to Digby had docked in Yarmouth. While off-loading the animals, the ship had caught on fire. The Yarmouth fire department sprayed so much water into the ship that she rolled over. There were elephants, tigers, monkeys and other circus animals all over town. One of the elephants managed to wander well into the countryside.

“Early next morning an elderly lady looked out of her pantry window and saw an elephant in her garden. She immediately called the RCMP and said, ‘Officer, there is the strangest animal in my garden that I have ever seen and you will never believe what he is doing. He is reaching down with his tail and tearing up my cabbages by the roots and guess what he’s doing with them!’ ”

He has so many tales you want to hear them all and remember them all. This province buzzes with voices that, once heard, linger. Ron Caplan could not let them go. He was a gangly, long-haired book designer deeply unhappy with his life in Pittsburgh when he arrived in Cape Breton in 1970. The local culture fascinated him—the Celts, the Acadians, the Mi’kmaqs, the Jamaicans who arrived to work the Sydney coke ovens, the Italian miners. He took a run at a magazine of oral culture and history, published from his home in Wreck Cove, population sixty. According to the first issue, Caplan’s baby would be “devoted to the history, natural history and future of Cape Breton Island.”

One day I scanned a bunch of back copies at a library in Halifax. Here’s Willy Petrie, the diviner, talking about what happens when he’s gripping a forked stick and it nears water: “I can’t hold it. I can brace my two feet, I can’t hold it at all. It’ll twist, keep on twisting, I can’t stop it. Keep on turning on the end. You just put the prongs across your hands this way. And if it’s gonna go it’ll go down, you can’t hold it. It don’t have to move my hand, and it’ll twist turn right in my hand. If I’ve got one anyways big or something, jeez, if I tried to hold it it’d tear me to pieces, the strain on me, the terrible strain on me in trying to hold it.”

I liked Marguerite Gallant, ninety, of Chéticamp reminiscing about being thirteen days on the hospital critical list when someone named Leo came to visit and her saying to him: “After I’m dead I will follow you to the Point. And you will see my soul on pebbles, on grains of sand, on little pieces of straw—any place you look. I will be in front of you in fifty different shapes.”

I was particularly taken with Bob Fitzgerald, who ran the telephone exchange in Dingwall, considering some of those who lie buried in the soil of Cape Breton: “They were tremendous people. We don’t have anything like them. And God bless your soul, I have nothing but respect for them, yes—the most profound respect for them. Every one of them. There’s no more left like them and no more to come like them. All you need do sometimes, if you have a little imagination, is roam through the countryside and let your imagination run wild. And you’ll travel some of the old farms in this country and you’ll stop and look at some of the great rock piles
here and there—and how many, when they look at them, how many stop and think of all the sweat and toil and tears it took to put that rock pile there? How many think of it? Very, very few. But if you drive along by one of those old farms some time, and you see one of those old rock piles, just get out and walk over to it and see the thoughts that will go through your mind—and picture the old slaves that dragged those rocks and stones from all around, the land that’s cleared, and piled them there. We don’t have no more people to work like that today. Somebody’ll say we got wise. No, we got foolish. They were the wise people. They had to be.”

I
T WAS FALL WHEN
I
MOVED BACK TO
N
OVA
S
COTIA
. D
AYLIGHT
S
AVINGS
T
IME
, and the long evenings were over. When sundown came you felt the first shudder of winter out there somewhere on the horizon. I was joyfully overwrought, a newly released prisoner running down the street without even feeling the pavement under my feet. Every building, patch of grass, shadow flickered with meaning. Memories snapped by like pictures on a deck of cards. Strangers met my exultant eyes, seemed to smile then look away. These are my people! my heart cried.

I knew I was being foolish. I knew that since I recognized no one, no one must recognize me. But I simply could not rein myself in. My spirit soared as I stumbled down the sidewalk. Any minute a couple of white-jacketed attendants were going to slap a straight-jacket on me and drive siren screaming to the mental hospital across the harbour. I didn’t care. It was fall, my favourite time. I felt eighteen again, like I had just emerged from the shower on a Friday night after a basketball game and my friends were waiting at the Midtown Tavern.

There is no such thing as an identity crisis in Nova Scotia; that is
maybe the hardest thing for newcomers to understand. While the rest of the country may whinge about the nature of being Canadian, we know who we are, bad as that might be. Not only that, we celebrate ourselves; we revel in our distinctiveness even as the gulf of difference between us and the rest of the country, the continent, the world narrows. The demographic tidal bore into the province may bring cash, jobs and strange new people, but this place holds on to its essence. Its identity. Its character. Even people who live here tend to forget how different we really are. I certainly did, wistful as my memories of Nova Scotia were while I was one of the temporary displaced living away. Very least, I should have remembered our wedding night, a week before we left for Alberta, bound down the eastern shore to an inn called Camelot in a cab owned by a company that probably made as much bootlegging rum as getting people from A to B. Our pilot: a wiry little guy with a Junior B league haircut who begged us to stop for a suspicious-looking delivery inside the Halifax city limits. He tore ass once we hit the highway. Somewhere beside the moonlit ocean he asked would we mind stopping while he said hello to an old girlfriend. A bit much to ask a couple on their honeymoon, but we laughed and said what the hell.