The Long Stretch (24 page)

WE ARE
standing in an open field overlooking the strait, just to the north of the village. There is a chilly mist that occasionally turns to drizzle and blows away like smoke. Then you can see across to the other side where the activities are taking place, although it is impossible to see exactly what is going on there. You know the premier, Angus L. Macdonald, is over there, along with a certain Mr. Chevrier from Ottawa, and that before long they will do something important. They will push a button or pull a lever or light a match. It is not clear in my mind. It is what happens next that is important. What happens next will “change everything,” will be written down in history. But all you can see by squinting through the occasional lapses in the fog is a marshalling of large machines that vaguely look like giant dump trucks.

I’ve read about them in the newspaper—the forty-ton Euclids that can carry as much as a railway car in a single load. Now they’re gathering around Cape Porcupine for the big job they’ve talked about for fifty years.

That is why we are not in school. Miss Morrison and Mrs. Gillis have told us that September 16, 1952, is a day we must experience to the full because it is a day that will affect our lives forever. It is a day we must remember in its smallest details, for what we will witness will be as important to our education as anything we will learn in books. September 16, a Tuesday. It is the day they start the causeway…

We stand silently and wait. The murmur of adult conversation filters through the fog. I already know what they are saying because I have heard it at the Hole, where I gather most of my knowledge about the strange ways and mysterious interests of grown-ups. This opening was originally designed for a stovepipe, I think. It is near the chimney, and it allows the heat to filter up from the kitchen. The only heat in the house comes from the kitchen stove. The Hole is my connection to the larger, older world…

At the Hole I heard them talking about the blast that would “change everything.” That was last September. An explosion of dynamite that would instantly knock tens of thousands of tons of rock from the stubborn brow of Cape Porcupine. September, 1952, the beginning of the change; the beginning of the future.

THERE WAS
nothing but the sound of cars and people talking when I awoke on August 13. When I looked out the window, they were everywhere. I suspect the conversations were all about where to park. The roads were lined with cars. They packed the yard in front of the school and the church, and they lined the back roads up as far as you could see. People wandering around looking for the best places from which to see the big event. The strait seemed to be filling up with boats. Down near Mulgrave, HMCS
Quebec,
a navy cruiser, crouched in the misty morning, a dark grey ghost.

When they weren’t talking about where to park, the other conversation was about the weather. The skies were gloomy. People studied the clouds, looking for the hopeful glow of sun behind the murky billows.

Then they’d shrug. Rain or no rain it’ll be a great day, anyway—a day to talk about for the rest of your life. The day that Canada joined Cape Breton. Ha, ha.

By mid-morning you could see the big buses manoeuvring past all the cars and pedestrians that packed the roads—yellow school buses and brownish army buses and big blue and white Acadian Lines buses. People in Highland dress pouring out of them. And then you’d hear the skirl of pipes. Men and boys and girls walking slowly by themselves, facing away from everybody, tuning up. The air filled with the brave, doomed cries of history.

I suddenly remember business—the
Post Record.
I’d been told there would be a special edition of the paper, and it would cost more. And, this being a Saturday, my share of the price was larger than on weekdays. I’d make a killing—more than enough for the rides and games at the carnival down in Newtown. And best of all, with all these people and because it was a special day, the papers would be gone in a flash.

I had time to spare and so, when I bumped into Mr. McGowan and he invited me to go out on his boat to see all the vessels in the strait, I said Thanks and Sure.

Mrs. Lew’s husband, Lew Reynolds, built Mr. McGowan’s boat and we watched him as it all came together over the course of nearly a year. It was like watching the unfolding
of a mystery, Mr. Lew quietly going about the task, shaving and bending boards, tapping and chiselling as if he had all the time in the world—never uttering a word. Lew is hard of hearing, so, quite possibly, he wasn’t aware that we were there watching. Or maybe it’s because boat builders are like artists and, when they’re at work, they’re conscious only of the job they’re doing.

He built a beautiful boat. It looks like the smack that comes around to buy lobsters, a little cabin on front and a long, open area behind. And though Mr. McGowan is a store-keeper, he was unusually generous in letting kids aboard the new boat and taking us for rides around the strait. Sometimes he even let us fish over the side or from the stern as the boat was moving. And sometimes we’d catch mackerel or pollock.

That day the strait was full of boats. I read afterwards that there were a hundred. And in the middle of them, this big grey giant, HMCS
Quebec
now moving closer to the causeway. With her massive guns pointed at the sky and sailors in their white hats and bell-bottoms lined up along the rails watching and waving as we slowly sailed around them, nobody said a word, we were so amazed.

Mr. McGowan was going to watch everything from the boat, but I had work to do, so he brought me ashore.

And sure enough, when I arrived at the canteen, the papers were there ahead of me. A massive stack of them—each one weighed a ton. I’d be able to carry only a few at a time—a minor problem on a day like this.

Then I started noticing a lot of people wandering around with the newspaper under their arms already. And they hadn’t bought any from me.

It didn’t take me long to figure things out. Not far from the canteen, a group of grown men who should have had better things to do that day were milling around a whole truck-load of newspapers shouting POOOOOST RECK-ERD…COME AND GET YER POOOOST RECK-ERD…SPECIAL EDITION, ON SALE HERE…

I felt sick, and I wanted to ask them what they thought they were doing, taking over my turf without so much as telling me in advance.

Frustrated, I went back to the canteen and just stood there, looking at the stack of giant papers and, in the background, listening to the city guys hollering as if they were back on a street corner in stinking Sydney, where everybody is too loud and pushy anyway.

And I said: “To Hell with them.”

I walked away and left the papers where they were and joined the crowd and the historic day.

It’s all a blur when I try to remember details. They say there were more than 40,000 people and I believe it. One reporter writing in a Toronto paper afterwards said 50,000, and I can believe that too. The reason I know about the Toronto story is that everybody was saying the reporter is actually from here—William MacEachern from Judique. And how exciting it is that one of Johnnie and Phemie MacEachern’s crowd is a famous newspaper reporter in Toronto, where people from
here usually get work only in factories or digging ditches.

The sun never broke through, but nobody noticed. Neither did it rain. The roads and hilltops were packed everywhere you turned. The air was filled with a dull rumbling, and I eventually realized it was the sound of excitement. All those people talking at once—and cars and buses coming and going.

The speeches and the formal ceremony were on the mainland side. I couldn’t get near it for all the people packed on the causeway. CD. Howe, a big Cabinet minister from Ottawa, cut a ribbon with an old claymore—a sword, and Angus L.’s widow later cut a cake with it. They said the claymore was used in the Battle of Culloden more than two centuries ago. I don’t know a thing about the battle, but they say we’re all here because of it. I was wondering about all the blood and rust, and how they got it sharp enough for the ribbon or clean enough for the cake.

There were loads of big shots making speeches. Mr. Donald Gordon from the CNR seemed to go on all afternoon. But the only speech the people here were talking about afterwards was the one by Angus L.’s brother, Father Stanley Macdonald.

They asked Father Stanley to say a few words in Gaelic, but they gave him only a minute. After he complained, they backed down and gave him two minutes. And from what I hear, he used the whole two minutes to talk about how ignorant the people from Ottawa were, trying to limit the one speech of the day in the language of Adam and Eve to a
minute or even two minutes. But how he for-gave them because you had to remember that Ottawa was still a young and unsophisticated place compared to here.

Half the crowd was laughing and applauding because they understood, and when the dignitaries on the grandstand saw this enthusiasm, they all started applauding too, because, I guess, they figured he was flattering them the way they were all flattering each other in their speeches. And that made the people in the crowd laugh even harder.

They were saying afterwards that surely Angus L. and all the other Gaelic speakers, including Adam and Eve, were up there in heaven laughing their heads off too. And that, if Mother Nature had her way, it would have rained on everything, but that Angus L. put a stop to that, even if he couldn’t arrange sunshine.

And when it was over, HMCS
Quebec
shattered the sky with a salute from her massive guns. And, suddenly, air force jets were screaming out of the clouds and roaring down the strait, causing the birds hiding on the naked flank of Cape Porcupine to scatter in a panic.

Then a pipe band struck up a lament for Angus L. Macdonald. And, when they were finished, all four hundred pipers there stepped out in their kilts and sporrans and spats and their cocky little hats, cheeks bulging and faces red. And, with chanters and drones a-howl, they walked across the road to the isles as if marching into battle with the whole world walking behind them.

Although I’m only twelve, I think I can say there has never been a day like this in all
of Nova Scotia. Nor will there ever be again. The crowd crossed the causeway and, where it joins the road to the north, they turned left and marched all the way to Murdoch MacLean’s field in Newtown, where thousands more were waiting to begin the party.

And then it was Sunday morning, as though it had never happened. Everything was gone, except for the causeway and the expectations.

HARPER
PERENNIAL

The Long Stretch

© 1999 by Linden MacIntyre.

P.S. Section © 2006 by Linden MacIntyre.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

First published in hardcover by Stoddart Publishing Co. Ltd: 1999

This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2006

www.harpercollins.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

MacIntyre, Linden

The long stretch : a novel / Linden MacIntyre.

First published: Toronto : Stoddart, 1999.

EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40131-9

I. Title.

PS
8575.1655
L
66 2006
C
813’.54
C
2005-905577-4

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