The Nova Scotia Book of Fathers Read online

  When my husband and I were in graduate school in Minnesota, my parents’ decision to visit filled me with a potent mixture of hope and dread. We were renting north of downtown, a huge space with three bedrooms and easy access to campus and highways.

  Something’s happened, I say to Allan. It’s already dark. They left Winnipeg at seven this morning.

  They’ll be fine. They probably made a lot of stops.

  No they won’t.

  Allan has no idea. How could he? What I worry about is not an accident, but the fumes of rage building inside that vehicle and spilling into our living room.

  Finally, the phone.

  What is wrong with these goddamned Yanks? my father yells. Where the hell is I-94?

  You’re probably on it, Dad. I don’t say what I am thinking: to get to Minneapolis, you drive south then turn left. Instead, I say I-94 runs into 52. We’re just off that. Describe to me where you are and we will go find you.

  I’m not an idiot. His voice is muffled, but I can hear him hiss: Grace, stop talking. Christ.

  The one time Dad visited Nova Scotia was before my parents’ divorce. He drove a rental. He and my mother fought the entire week, Mom ended up in the hospital with a cardiac ‘event,’ and Dad cursed bumpkin drivers, confusing signage, the lack of parking in downtown Halifax, bad road conditions. I suspected then he wouldn’t come back here, but I didn’t suspect he’d leave my mother, or lose touch with his own children.

  Manitoba drivers are aggressive, Dad, I remember saying. Rural drivers are slow everywhere.

  So there they are. The voice: a cold wheeze.

  An old man rose from an overstuffed chair, stooped and thin, his head low and bobbing. That neck was once a 35-inch collar – all those shirts Mom and I had ironed. And handkerchiefs. A force who wafted out of the house clean and tall, dressed in a grey suit and striped tie, leaving behind a diaper pail, soggy Corn Pops, four children, and coal dust. A man good at cameo appearances.

  Pretty fancy car you drove up in – must be all that money you teachers make. He chuckled, almost a cackle.

  Just stinkin’ rich, my brother said. Stinkin’.

  Brian held out his hand. How are you, Dad? Did I hear you’re still driving?

  Your father still has his license, but he’s applying to get it renewed. Morana’s voice was loud and I wasn’t sure if I heard a note of pride in it. This was the first time I’d met this woman; she was a talker.

  Let’s go! Where’s your cane? You’re not going anywhere with me unless you take the cane, it’s too damned hard on my back, and we got a reservation, the last time the girl there, I think she’s from Iraq or Iran, I’m not sure, I don’t know why they hire those people at a good restaurant – we had a reservation and they made us move! Yeah, eh? For some big hoity-toit coming in. But your father likes it there, he’s used to the food, you know. Elvin! Let’s go. Jesus, you’re slow.

  Behind her, Brian glanced at me, then mouthed: Hoity-toit?

  I’m old, that’s how I am. Eighty-two. There’s no cure for that. But I still have my license. Dad’s hand formed a quivering salute. He turned to me. And how’s the professor? What are you professing nowadays?

  I stood a little taller, took a deep breath as he studied my face. I wondered if he noticed I was looking more like Mom.

  I wanted to set off the powder keg then, to say it all: So, Dad, you flew back and forth to Thunder Bay for ten years for this? You’re a cliché. Couldn’t you buy a sports car instead, dye your hair, wear a medallion, go to Vegas? How’s this working out for you, you old fool?

  My head was roaring, and silence fell suddenly. I was pierced with panic: had I said those words out loud?

  Good, I said finally. Busy.

  At lunch, Dad meditated on his soup, then picked up his spoon with his trembling hand, swept it back and forth waiting, it seemed, for the right moment to lift it to his lips. A tombstone hand, I thought. A graveyard mind.

  A few years later I was back in Nova Scotia. It was January, the month after Mom and Dad had died, each in a different Winnipeg hospital.

  I lay in bed with Kleenex, a cup of tea, my notebook, and a mystery to solve. A stranger had approached me at my father’s funeral, a thin man who’d come up behind my chair, looked over his shoulder, then bent down to speak.

  He’d extended his hand. I was numb, unfocused. Across the room, Morana was holding court.

  Your dad would be glad to know you are all here, he said. He, uh – I think you should know – he had regrets.

  And then, in a rush – We wanted the Legion to be here. And we wanted something – he gestured to the table with photographs and memorabilia – to represent his shortwave radio buddies. We wanted it all to be different, but – he nodded his head in Morana’s direction. I have to go, he said. And he disappeared.

  Now, with some sleuthing, I’d learned who he was – my father’s former lawyer and, as it turned out, perhaps his only friend. We spoke carefully, I, trying to tease out what he knew about my father’s last weeks and months, and he, wanting to speak, but wary.

  I was fond of your mother, he said, but your father’s new wife, well … He left the words hanging.

  Did he know anything about Dad’s last days? When Dad was admitted to the hospital, a care worker accompanied him; Morana was nowhere to be found.

  We may never know, he said. I think he’d been put in full-time care, and she – well, I don’t like the sound of it. For such an openly grieving widow … His voice trailed off again.

  That’s what the priest had said. She plays the part.

  As we talked, he relaxed. He and Dad shared an interest in railway history. My father had begun work on the railway loading milk cans on slow freights, then took a job as a telegrapher, before moving on to a succession of small promotions in middle management across the Prairies. Together, the two had gathered artifacts and written descriptions to send to the railway historical society. No one knows where they are now.

  When you look at it, he said, your father was always in communications of some sort.

  I let the comment sit there; clearly, my father had saved all his communications for his job. His first emails, years before, were comically terse. Anytime he’d phoned me in Nova Scotia, which was rarely, each call was less than two minutes long.

  Then: Your father’s last outing may have been with me.

  I hung on to the voice. After decades of his absence, and now I’m privy to these details.

  We went to Tim’s, the man said. Your dad insisted on going on his own steam. He inched his way up the ramp, and a line formed behind him. But instead of becoming impatient, people began to cheer him on. You can do it, they said. One step at a time. And he made it.

  His last coffee and doughnut, I thought. Last taste of freedom.

  Your father wanted to see his old haunts. So afterwards we drove to the CN station, then over to St. Boniface and south to the Simington yard.

  During the drive, he said he’d wished he had reconciled with his family.

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.

  He seemed more – how can I say this? – spiritually conscious. I think he was referring not only to his children and the grandchildren, but to your mother. I sensed your father had let all sorts of old grudges go.

  My father, distant over years and geography, now brought to me in glimpses through the voice of a stranger.

  Oh, he added, and before we’d gone for coffee, I’d picked up the renewal forms for his driver’s license. He was so proud to be in his mid-eighties and still eligible to drive.

  He called me the next day to say he’d changed his mind.

  Looking Up To Dad

  Frank Cameron

  Irish songwriter and performer Phil Coulter wrote in “The Old Man”:

  I thought he’d live forever,

  He seemed so big and strong.

  But the minutes fly

  And the years roll by

  For a father and a son.


  And suddenly when it happened,

  There was so much left unsaid.

  No second chance

  To tell him thanks

  For everything he’s done.

  That’s the kind of relationship I had with my father. His name was Harvey Gilmour Cameron and I still say, in spite of all that’s happened during the last fifty-five years since his death, he was the smartest person I ever knew. To know Harvey Cameron, we have to go back to the good ship Hector and its appearance in 1773 in Loch Broom, Pictou County. Among those Scots who waded ashore was Alexander Cameron. He was fifteen when the Battle of Culloden took place in the Highlands of Scotland in 1746. Alexander witnessed his family being cut to pieces in the last great battle between the English and the Jacobites, Scottish clans who were buoyed by some mercenaries and disgruntled British soldiers. He saw the way the clans, indeed the Scots, were treated by the English after the Jacobites were humiliated at Culloden. The English took away the kilt and the bagpipes and other vestiges of Scottish culture that made the Highlanders unique.

  Alexander had noble blood and was known as a Cameron of Lochiel, a sect which spawned many chiefs of the Cameron clan. He settled in Loch Broom near Pictou and began begatting little Camerons. Skip to 1886 when my grandfather was born. His name was Augustus Frank Cameron and he went to war in 1916. Augustus (or Frank) and Mary Elizabeth Murphy were married by a Protestant or Presbyterian minister and a Roman Catholic priest. The proviso was that the children be raised in the Catholic Church, so my father was a Catholic until he was twenty-one. He spent a few years in limbo until he married my mother in the Presbyterian Church in Stellarton. Augustus was an engineer just like his father and was a member of the Canadian Army Service Corps. He was in collision with a horse while travelling through a winding country road in France. He was laid to rest on the outskirts of Bordeaux.

  Augustus left a wife and three children, one of whom was my father. Harvey was born in 1907 in Montreal, where his parents were living at the time. He was ten when his father died. The family was back in Pictou County by that time, and his mother, Mary Elizabeth, had to bring up her three children as a war widow. My dad met my mother, Janet Fleming, in the mid ’30s and they married in 1936. My sister Beverly was born in 1937 and I came along in 1938. My dad became an engineer like his father after working a retail job for a couple of years at Goodman’s Department Store in New Glasgow during the Depression.

  Harvey Cameron had a thirst for knowledge that surpassed any other person I have ever known. He was a voracious reader and I’m sure he read every history book ever written. When I was two or three years old, he would read to me before bed. I always liked a bedtime story and Dad would read books that most people found odd. My favourite was Moldy Warp the Mole by British children’s author Alison Uttley. I knew that book like the back of my hand. I could practically recite every word, even though my reading skills hadn’t yet developed. My father wasn’t a very demonstrative person, but he instilled a lifelong love of reading in his only son.

  I remember him stretched out on the old couch in our dining room with one arm propping up his head and the other one turning the pages of the latest book he managed to beg, borrow, or steal. We had a huge tomcat named Fluffy who used to curl up beside him on cold winter nights when he would put so much coal in the furnace, the heat in the house seemed to be on “stun.”

  Harvey was a quiet unassuming man until he had a couple of drinks of the demon rum. Then he came out of his shell. He had a theory (which he would explain in great detail if you fed him the black rum) that Jesus Christ was not Jewish, but he was a Celt. His theory was, and it wasn’t anti-Semitic, that anyone with that much intelligence couldn’t be anything but a Celt. He used to say the Celts were the smartest people in the world and everyone else was a Sassenach. It’s a word the Scots use to describe the Saxons or English, if you will, with the Celts being superior.

  My father was so steeped in the Celtic (or Gaelic) culture that he would keep us entertained while regaling us (and anyone else who would listen) with stories of how the English would come to Scotland to do battle with the clans. The English would approach the Scottish chieftains with a white flag and announce, “We being English and believing in giving our enemies a fighting chance, we are going to let you fire the first shot.” Before the English general finished his sentence, he and his fellow officers would be cut to pieces by withering gunfire from the surrounding woods.

  Harvey and Janet had great friends in Vi and Fraser Holmes. Fraser taught my sister how to play the bagpipes and formed the first girls’ pipe band in Nova Scotia, the Ceilidh Girls Pipe Band. Vi Holmes was one of the sweetest women I have ever known. She was born and raised in England and my father never let her forget it. He used to say things like, “If you want to find a good Englishman, you’d have to look in the cemetery.” Vi would laugh harder than anyone at Harvey’s cruel humour because she knew in her heart that he loved her dearly.

  Harvey Cameron had no use for the Campbells, although we knew many Campbells. There was even a Campbell in the Girls’ Pipe Band. I didn’t know it then, but his avoidance of anything Campbell stemmed from the massacre in Glencoe, Scotland, in 1692 when the Campbells accepted the hospitality of the MacDonalds and ended up killing thirty-seven of them in their beds while burning houses in the community. Another thirty-five women and children died of exposure in a raging blizzard. The Camerons were close to the MacDonalds and were not amused when this incident took place.

  My father never called himself an atheist, but I believe he leaned that way. Besides, your beliefs, religious or otherwise, are nobody’s business and my father never carried his beliefs on his sleeve. He believed in the engineers’ creed: Believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see. Twitter didn’t exist then, and if Harvey were alive today he would ignore it, as his only son ignores it.

  He used to sing the fight song of the Georgia Institute of Technology: “I’m a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech and a hell of an engineer.” Dad was a civil engineer who surveyed stuff and helped to build roads. In the early years of the war, he was one of the plant engineers at the steel plant in Trenton, which was building munitions in the fight against the Nazis.

  In 1942, the U.S. Air Force came to town looking for surveyors to build an airport in Torbay, part of St. John’s, Newfoundland. The province didn’t join Canada (or Canada didn’t join it) until 1949. That’s why the American presence was there. It was the first stop for the Germans if they decided to invade North America and the Allies needed that airport. Off he went, with his transom and sticks, and surveyed the runways for what is now St. John’s International Airport. He sailed from North Sydney on the ferry to Port Aux Basques and took the narrow-gauge railway to St. John’s. There, he was inducted into the Officers Mess at the base, which was run by the U.S. Air force.

  He used to tell the story of the British Spitfire pilots who would arrive to ferry their new planes to Britain. They would walk into the mess and immediately accost the local Newfoundlanders by saying, “Hey, Newf, what’s the fastest thing in the world?” One evening, one of the locals replied, “You bloody British running over here when the war broke out!” Harvey loved to tell that story. When he arrived on the train from North Sydney, my sister Bev and I called him a Newfoundlander. He took that as a compliment.

  From the late ’40s to early ’50s he was hired by that great Halifax construction firm, William Stairs, Son & Morrow and was tasked to survey the Number Seven Highway from Dartmouth to Sherbrooke. When he had the chance, he would bring me and my sister to Halifax where we would play with the Connolly kids. He boarded at the Connollys’ while he was on the Dartmouth end of the highway and Bev and I would go to the Armdale Theatre and catch a movie or take the trolley to Simpson’s for shopping. As the highway moved closer to Sheet Harbour, Dad rented an old farmhouse in Spanish Ship Bay one summer and we were next to the water with open spaces on both sides of the house. I remember him setting up his big easel in the livi
ng room where he would place his drawings and study them from every angle until he was satisfied with the results.

  I also remember my father approaching a curve in the highway (engineers hate curves) and sending word to his bosses in Halifax that he would like to build a bridge crossing a chasm. Otherwise, vehicles would have to navigate around a sharp curve that hugged the shoreline in a cove. The word came from Halifax that it couldn’t be done. It wasn’t as if it was too expensive. There was a general store located halfway around that curve that was owned by a diehard Liberal who contributed vast sums to the party and he was having none of it. Even though the store was doing okay, there were numerous accidents on the curve and it would have been safer to put in the bridge. My dad curled with Premier Angus L. Macdonald at construction bonspiels, but the Premier’s hands were tied and the bridge wasn’t built. My father was a creative curser and I hadn’t heard him swear like that since his 1947 Chevy had a flat tire the year before.

  When my father had his first heart attack in 1950, I was twelve years old. I remember the flurry of activity surrounding him when the doctor visited the house. That’s back in the day when doctors made house calls. And I remember the hushed voices and the fact that my mother was beside herself. Mom was a worrywart anyway, but she was almost hysterical. The heart attack in those days was almost a death sentence, and in my father’s case it was ten agonizing years of pain and glycerine pills when his heart gave out completely. Among my memories, too, are the late-night snacks he used to devour, including the endless cans of kippered snacks and crackers which weren’t good for his heart.

  I was working in Halifax in June 1960 when I got a call from my mother telling me that Harvey had another heart attack and I should come home on the weekend because the doctors weren’t sure if he would last another week. My wife Diane was eight months pregnant so she couldn’t come home with me. My sister Beverly came up from Cape Breton even though she, too, was eight months pregnant. I got into the hospital on a Friday night and rushed into his room. He was awake, but in a lot of pain. First thing he said was: “Is Diane with you?” I said, “No, Dad. She can’t travel but her mother is home with her.” He replied, “I don’t know why your mother brought you here when you’re about to be a father. And Beverly shouldn’t be here either. I’m gonna be fine.” But he wasn’t fine. He died a few days later.