The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  So my father was the son of Neil and Catherine (MacNeil) Currie, who came from somewhere in rural Cape Breton. Knowledge of the history of our ancestors is remarkably skimpy. They settled in Centreville, soon to be nicknamed and known as Rabbit Town, not a town at all but a small village on the outskirts of a slightly larger village, Reserve Mines, and he became a coal miner in No. 10 Colliery. She became the manager of a house, and, except for the haymaking and butchering, of a subsistence farm with a horse and machinery for cutting and raking, plus a barn for storing hay and housing the horse and cow. The little farm, likely a clone of the farmland they left behind, also boasted of a third fairly substantial building, what we would call a shed and they called the Little House, a name derived from the Gaelic, tigh beag, to store equipment for separating milk and cream, making butter and curds. And a smaller shed for storing coal and a smaller one still, an outhouse, a toilet.

  I don’t know if they had any savings. How they managed to buy land, afford animals and farm equipment, and build a large house to house a large family is one of the many secrets of family history. We know the MacNeils came from the Isle of Barra and the Curries from South Uist, the Highland islands of Gaelic language and culture. They probably were Gaelic speakers, but I don’t remember hearing a word of Gaelic nor was I aware of our Gaelic heritage until I was well into adulthood. There must have been plenty of Gaelic speakers among the MacDonald, Currie, MacDougal, MacNeil, and other Mac clans, but like the Acadians from rural Cape Breton, the Italians from rural Italy, and the various other European immigrants who came to Cape Breton to work in the coal mines of Glace Bay and the steel plant of Sydney, all the languages they landed with, as well as the rural culture, pretty well disappeared in one generation, muffled at first and finally reduced to fragments by the machinery of Industrial Cape Breton. The dangerous work of coal mining required a common language; British colonization forced that language to be English.

  My father could not speak Gaelic, nor understand it, nor could my mother, although her parents and other relatives could; she remembered listening to them when she was a child when they came from their rural homes to visit in Glace Bay. And my father must have heard some of the language; both my mother and father recognized Gaelic words that lingered in the English language long after Gaelic went out of use in the industrial centres of Cape Breton. And my father, who I never heard swearing in English, after a few drinks took to swearing in Gaelic: for example, Iosa Criosd, mispronounced but close enough.

  My father had five sisters and four brothers, a fairly typical houseful in a Catholic family at the time. Four of the sisters escaped the exigencies of life in a mining/subsistence farming community, one to a marriage in another town, two to Boston, one to a convent, and one, Margaret, the youngest, stayed home but finished high school and secretarial school and got a job in Glace Bay as a secretary in the office of the United Mine Workers of America. Of the brothers, one followed his sisters and went off to Boston. My father and the others escaped the drudgery of weeding turnips and milking cows by going underground to do harder and more dangerous, more lucrative work, less boring, free of taking orders from demanding parents, and money in their pockets for dances and booze.

  Because of the need to house the hundreds of families whose men came to work in the mines, immigrants from Europe, Acadian, and Scotch and Irish Celts from rural Cape Breton, the coal company built hundreds of “company houses” substantial enough to withstand the rigours of maritime weather. These houses were mostly duplexes, attached side by side with a large kitchen/dining room, pantry, and living room downstairs and three bedrooms up. No basement or bathroom.

  But my father and his three coal-mining brothers built their own houses. They could because one of the brothers, Malcolm, was also a carpenter and he helped his brothers, Mickey, Frankie, and my father, Charlie, to construct whatever buildings they needed and of course they helped him build his. They could afford to do so because they had the toughest job in the mines, loading coal, which paid according to the number of tons each miner and his buddy produced. My father was over six feet tall with a lean body and enormous strength and endurance. He had large hands; we called them “pan shovel hands” after the oversized shovels used for manually loading coal blasted from the coalface into boxes resting on rails to be hauled to the surface accompanied by the miners’ check numbers so they could be paid by the tonnage they loaded. The skin of his hands was like leather. Once when I was helping him set up Christmas lights on our front veranda, he passed me a bare wire and I got a shock that nearly knocked me down the steps. “What happened?” he said. Apparently his hands were insulated from shock.

  I know from overhearing miners talk about him that he was a prodigious producer of coal and I know he would often work overtime doing double shifts to double his income. He also augmented his income with a part-time job as a policeman. I remember his uniform, billy club, and the handcuffs which I loved to play with until the day I handcuffed my friend, Charlie Frost, who had to wait until my father came home from work and produced a key to free Charlie so he could go home for supper.

  Our house, like the company houses, had no bathroom or basement. We did have a cellar, which served as a cool room for storing perishable food. We had an outhouse for a toilet and a coalhouse for storing fuel for our coal stove in the kitchen and furnacette in the living room. We had a dining room and upstairs three bedrooms and a storeroom intended to become a bathroom in a prosperous future, which never happened while we were there. We enjoyed no heat upstairs except what drifted up from the living room when the furnacette was fired up. Our mother provided hot water bottles for our feet to begin our bedtime on bitterly cold nights.

  When I was in grade nine, my parents moved us to a house where we enjoyed the luxuries of a bathroom, a basement for storing coal and a hot-air furnace capable of heating the upstairs hall and bedrooms, and eventually a telephone, a party line we shared with thirteen neighbours, a hotline for gossip if you had a mind to participate. I don’t remember my father ever answering or being called to the telephone or ever using it to make a call.

  My father was not a particularly religious man, but he attended Mass every Sunday dressed in his suit, shirt and tie, black leather shoes polished to a shine, and a dress-up cap many miners wore on formal occasions, a flat cap with a short peak, similar to a Highland tweed cap, which we called a peak cap. And when the parish priest imported a pair of “fire and brimstone” monks to preach a week-long retreat, he attended with one or two of his neighbours. When I was old enough to graduate from the children’s version of the retreat, I went with him and his buddies to the men’s version when there was at least one evening devoted to the sermons on sex to which I always went with anticipation. On that evening, usually the last, he always went home without comment, but with the same look on his face he aimed at the politicians of Question Period on television, except he added a slight smile, which I always took to mean don’t believe everything you hear but be tolerant.

  He was a tolerant man. Certainly I provided him with occasions to test the limits of his toleration: my attempt, with the help and encouragement of my friend Sandy, to set fire to the shingles of our house; in serial defiance of the rules by going to my grandparents’ house after school instead of going home; my dumb-headed idea to replenish the nearly empty gas tank of his car by filling it up with bog water from the swamp behind our house; the day Sandy and I stole a bottle of moonshine from our next-door neighbour, the moonshiner/bootlegger, and fed it to Sandy’s father’s pig … just to name a few idiotic enterprises we got up to. What he could never tolerate was the empty promises of politicians or the greed, hypocrisy, parsimony, and callous disregard for coal mine safety of the coal mines owners.

  Our mother, although quietly, moderately religious, unlike my father, did not regularly attend Mass on Sunday. If questioned or encouraged to accompany my father she would claim illness, disguised as “not feeling well.” Indeed she gained a reputation for being unh
ealthy, yet she outlived all of her sisters, sisters-in-law, and all her friends, dying well into her nineties. My father went willingly to church and spent time in the churchyard after Mass chatting with friends and neighbours. My mother was uncomfortable in crowds and was always reluctant to leave the house.

  In those days she would be called a homebody. These days she would be called housebound or even agoraphobic. But she was delighted to entertain friends, relatives, and neighbours in her house and often did because people liked her and visited often. She would visit her sister Nina in Glace Bay and her half-brother and his wife in New Waterford but not often. Our father spent much of his limited spare time going off to meetings of the boards of the Co-op, the Credit Union, the United Mine Workers of America, and occasionally he took a social holiday spent drinking with his buddies, sometimes away from home for several days, followed by a remorseful day at home “not feeling well.”

  But on Christmas our mother dressed in her best clothes, covered by a fur coat my father invested in, and accompanied him to Midnight Mass and afterwards they hosted a houseful of their friends for a feast of picnic ham, vegetables, beer, rum, and moonshine. On such occasions she even allowed my father to make her “a hot one,” a cocktail composed of moonshine and boiling water, a drink she allowed herself “now and again” as a medicine for a real or imagined congestion.

  But normally our mother followed the practice of most miners’ wives of trying to discourage drinking (because of its expense and the possibility of it causing absence from work and the home) by banning the men from drinking at home. Unfortunately, the effect of this ban on drinking at home encouraged the men to do their social drinking outside the home at bootleggers’, clubs, or taverns; the practice often enough led to absences from work and home.

  My father’s education was limited because he quit school as soon as he was old enough to work in the mine. But he insisted that his five children stay in school until the end, and we did, but with unintended consequences for our parents.

  As an adult, I came to realize that most people tended to think of coal miners as underground ditch diggers doing menial, unimportant work, not realizing that coal miners were in fact highly skilled workers at a trade providing energy essential for fuelling industry. During the Second World War, miners were particularly vital, along with the workers at the steel plant in Sydney, the sine qua non for Canada’s war against Germany.

  But like most of my cousins and friends, we thought of our fathers as heroic and we were impressed by them because of their difficult and dangerous work and we wanted to please them. I was an indifferent student, but I willingly went to school, though I found it boring and intimidating. I knew that if I failed a grade, I would be adding one more year of going to school, so I always managed to scramble in the end of the year and do well enough to pass on to the next grade.

  After it was over I looked in vain for a job. After a few part-time, short-term stints – picking potatoes in P.E.I., working at T. Eaton’s at Christmastime – I joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and never made a permanent return to Cape Breton. I could have landed a coal-mining job. My cousin Basil and I went to the office and applied. Basil did get the job, but I didn’t. I didn’t know why until years later a neighbour, a friend of my father whom I befriended because like me he was an avid reader, told me my father preceded me to the coal company office where he had a friend who owed him a favour and asked him to see to it that I did not get a job in the mine.

  My sister June finished high school to grade eleven, went to nursing school and lived in the nurses’ residence, graduated and left Cape Breton never to make a permanent return. My sister Iris finished grade eleven, graduated from a secretarial school, moved to Toronto and never came back home except for holidays. The youngest, my brother Donald, finished university and lived the rest of his life in Halifax. Only Frank, my other brother, stayed home in Reserve and lived next-door to my parents with his wife and children. The absence of their children and most of their grandchildren was a disappointment for both my parents. Our father never complained, but we know it was a deep disappointment for my mother, especially to be separated from her daughters and most of her grandchildren. Although I and my two sisters and brother returned home occasionally, Frank and our father became adult friends and his children became part of my father’s entertainment and joy in his retirement. I have always been disappointed I never got to enjoy an adult relationship with my father.

  When we were kids we didn’t see a lot of our father. When he was on day shift, he was gone to work long before we got up to go to school. When he was on night shift, he was gone to work in the afternoon when we got home from school. When he was on back shift, he came home in the morning when we were gone to school. But in both his presence and absence, he occupied the house like a benign spirit. He would be home on Sundays when miners were working a six-day week and on Saturdays when the week was shortened to five days. But for the boys the weekends were for hockey, baseball, and other games in the between seasons to the relief of our mother, who was spared the rainy-day havoc we would create in the house. Our main meals of the weekdays shifted from noon to late afternoon depending on what shift he was on. My holidays were spent at my grandparents’. And once we finished school, all of us but Frank moved away.

  Our father had no hobbies. He went to ball games, probably because many of his miner friends were excellent athletes, but he was a lukewarm fan and did not participate himself. He did not read much. He read the local newspapers: the conservative-leaning Sydney Post Record, the left-leaning Glace Bay Gazette, and the Communist-leaning Steelworker and Miner. When he was home for extended periods recovering from injury, he read the novels I brought home, but as soon as he was back to work he gave that up.

  I thought, without a hobby, when he retired he would wilt with boredom, but instead he took up housekeeping and except for cooking and baking did all the housework. Our mother was an excellent cook and baker. He enjoyed being in the house and doing the work. Otherwise, he walked every day to fetch the mail and no doubt chat with whomever he met, he read the newspaper, and sat by the window and watched the traffic flow between Glace Bay to the east and Sydney to the west. I heard him remark more than once that it seemed everyone in Glace Bay worked in Sydney and everyone in Sydney worked in Glace Bay and all of them drove to work every day past his house. And he would spend a lot of time entertaining the two grandchildren who lived next door: he was a man who loved children. Other than that, he took the occasional trip to the basement for a snort or two on the pretext of checking on the furnace or for some other unnecessary chore. I don’t know whether or not he knew he was not fooling my mother about his activity in the basement. I doubt it. But for her it was a harmless ritual and tolerable as long as he indulged inside the house but outside her territory.

  My sister June and I were present when he was dying of pneumonia complicated by the condition of his lungs after a lifetime of breathing coal dust. He was very sick but seemed not to be in pain. We stayed until the nurses came in, alarmed, and shooed us out of the Intensive Care Unit and while we waited in the next room, he died.

  Our family doctor ordered an autopsy, necessary, apparently, to prove the obvious, that his lungs were “compromised” by his work in the mines; otherwise, his wife, my mother, would not be eligible to continue receiving his disability pension.

  It seems odd to me that we think more of our loved ones, close relatives or friends, after they are gone, far more often than we ever did when they were alive. Never entirely gone, holy weights in our knapsacks hitching a ride up our mountains.

  The Incomparable Love Of A Father

  Lindsay Ruck

  As a teenager, I played competitive soccer. I spent many early mornings or evenings on a green turf in a warehouse or on mud-patched fields across Nova Scotia. It was basically the biggest part of my life and I loved every minute of it.

  When I was first starting out, I was afraid to kick the ball too hard. I’m no
t sure why I had this apprehension, but I would run as fast as I could down the field, dribbling the ball at my feet, and upon reaching striking distance I would give a little tap, cross my fingers, and hope the ball would somehow slowly roll past the keeper without causing any harm and find the back of the net. Upon watching this anticlimactic race down the field several times, my mother, Valerie, essentially told me to toughen up. She told me to put everything I had into kicking that ball and to send it soaring at every opportunity. My father, Doug, took it one step further and on weekends and after school, he and I would head to a field near our house and practise kicking.

  He would stand in the net with his arms wide or on the other side of the field and tell me to kick it as hard as I could. He showed me how to plant my left foot and where my cleat should connect with the ball. It took a while for me to find my strength. I did the same motion over and over again and must have kicked the ball a thousand times. I eventually found my rhythm and it felt amazing. As I would send the ball soaring to my father’s waiting feet, I received immediate approval. He was always there cheering me on and making me feel like I was unstoppable.

  As practices increased, Dad was ready and willing to pick up teammates and take us to whichever field was scheduled for the day. On cold Saturday mornings, he would wake me up before the crack of dawn with a nutritious breakfast and direct me to the car, eyes still half-shut, to take me to a poorly heated warehouse for a seven a.m. game. His deep, booming voice from the sidelines would travel across the field to my ears and be that extra shot of motivation needed to run faster and kick harder. He and fellow parents of girls on the team would sometimes join forces and create cheers. Admittedly, being a fifteen-year-old girl, those cheers would sometimes force me to give him the “that’s enough” eye, but that was rare. He was proud of me and his encouragement was rarely embarrassing and always appreciated. I knew at the end of the game, whether we won or lost, I would still get the same reaction from Dad – a hug and a smile. When I would wallow following defeat, he was wonderful at pointing out all of the things I did “right.” I will cherish those memories forever.