Great Cape Breton Storytelling Read online

  “So I come back with six other fellows and a motorboat, and we cornered the bugger and put a rope around her neck and led her down to the beach, but when we got her there do you think she’d go in the water? Not on your Jesus life she wouldn’t. We all got in the boat and sagged on the rope, and she wouldn’t budge an inch. Just dug her old hooves down in the sand and that was that.

  “Well, I got mad. I said to myself, I don’t care if I kill that cow or break its neck or whatever the hell happens I don’t care. So I cracked the old throttle full out, and I let out all the slack and went roarin’ out into the harbour, and that rope come taut and ’bout jerked that cow’s head right off. She drove her hooves down in the sand to the knees and then she buckled, just come a-flyin’ up in the air like a cork out of a bottle and hit the water about thirty feet out. I never let up on the throttle one bit till I got to the other side, I like to drowned that fuckin’ cow, and she was comin’ up and down and sideways and wallowin’ around, her eyes buggin’ out, you never saw anything like it. Jesus, I said to myself, that’s the last time I ever have anything at all to do with that cow; and it was. Vet killed her before the next spring come around.”

  I was laughing too hard to speak.

  “It’s true, honest to God. And we had some parties, too.”

  “We did,” sighed Alfred. “Oh, I guess we did.”

  “Remember that time Muriel Naugler and Loretta O’Leary got loaded at the beach party?”

  “Lord, Lord,” said Alfred.

  “Jesus, that was some funny. The two of them got lit, and Loretta, she’d been foolin’ around with Harry Naugler, and Muriel started to come onto her about it. So Loretta gave her a scandalizin’, said if she was any kind of a wife to him there wouldn’t be nothin’ anyone could do about it, and Muriel — well, I guess she got right savage wild then. So she starts screamin’ about how she’s got a dose of clap from Harry bringin’ it home from Loretta, and Loretta says it was Harry give it to her in the first place, so who’d he get it from, that’s what she wants to know, and before anybody can say Boo they’re clawin’ at each other and tearin’ off each other’s clothes and pullin’ hair and I don’t know what all, and they’re practically bareass to the weather — and all the guys standin’ around, you know, and cheerin’ and watchin’ and havin’ the finest kind of a time.”

  “What a night,” sighed Alfred.

  “’Twas the women broke it up, but it must of took ’em a good half hour. Those days,” Phonse explained, “used to have parties someplace or other every night, practically. Nothin’ else to do. There wa’n’t no television, and you couldn’t get nothin’ on the radio, and the movies was a travelin’ affair, used to come here once every two weeks, so what else could ye do?”

  “The wakes was the best,” Alfred opined. “D’ye mind Reg Munroe’s wake?”

  “Guess I do,” declared Phonse. “’Twas me picked up the coffin.”

  The cable from Halifax was very specific: TRAWLER ATLANTIC STAR RAMMED AND SUNK BY FREIGHTER HALIFAX HARBOUR, it said, REGINALD MUNROE KILLED STOP REMAINS SHIPPED CNR MONKSTOWN CHARGES COLLECT STOP PLEASE ARRANGE COLLECTION REMAINS YOUR END STOP SINCEREST REGRETS DEEPEST CONDOLENCES THIS TRAGEDY STOP CORONER CITY OF HALIFAX.

  Phonse had been living with Reg’s sister Alice, and while Alice comforted her mother, Phonse offered to take his pickup truck the fifty miles to Monkstown and bring Reg’s corpse home.

  “Lord dyin’ Jesus, I’ll never forget it,” said Phonse. “I got down there about noon, and didn’t they have him standing on his head in the freight shed? They had boxes of stuff and bales and rolls of linoleum and bicycles, and tucked away right in the middle of it was old Reg, standin’ on his head. I said to the agent he might at least let the fellow lie down, but he said he was stuck for space, it was just before Christmas, you know, and the shed was right jammed. It looked some strange, though, that coffin standin’ on its head in all that pile of stuff.” Phonse waved his glass in the air. “I believe I’ll have another.”

  “Me too,” said Jud. “Phonse, I been wondering if there ain’t some way we can get them scales checked.”

  “Dunno,” said Phonse. “We could try, I guess.”

  I tried to imagine that trip home over the twisting road to Widow’s Harbour with the corpse of your woman’s brother behind you in the truck. Tried to imagine how you would secure it against the swings and bounces of that unkempt gravel road. What would the coffin look like? Plain, no doubt; would there be places to tie ropes?

  The road winds through fifteen miles of forest with hardly a house to be seen, nothing but scrubby evergreens in low, folding country. Perhaps it would have been snowing, isolating Phonse and the corpse in a moving dome filled with drifting white flakes, settling a coating of fluff on the coffin so that in the truck’s lights it would seem, as you looked over your shoulder through the rearview mirror, as though the coffin were becoming vague in outline, but alarmingly larger. The truck would be slipping and slithering around rock outcroppings, over little wooden bridges, past the entrances to abandoned logging roads. The coffin growing and fading.

  Reg Munroe, fisherman. Alice’s brother. Dead, as you could be dead yourself any day of your working life. Drowned. Lying back there in the box of the truck, cold and bloodless, chewed up by the big blade of some freighter.

  The road comes down to the shore at Owl’s Cove, a handful of houses clustered around a gas pump. The winter night comes down, and nothing shows but a scattered light; and after that, darkness, and surf beside the shore road, flying cloud and wind.

  Phonse would have remembered, surely, all the ghost stories: the Spanish galleon in flames that enters one little cove every seventh year, the woman in white seen in the bows of a sinking windship just before a shipwreck, the tales of jealousy, torment, and murder recalled in minor-key folk songs as common as rocks along this shore. Once, fishing in a dragger on the Grand Banks, Phonse had found a human skull and a thigh bone in the nets: some poor sailor or fisherman drowned God knows how many decades or even centuries before, one of those lost at sea whose bodies were never found, nibbled clean by the codfish and sand fleas. The crew had gathered around on the afterdeck, passing the skull from hand to hand, uncertain what to do with it, and finally they had cast it back into the heaving sea whence it had come, to continue its long rest without further disturbance.

  Reg Munroe, Alice’s brother, fisherman, in a coffin in the back of the truck, a coffin growing larger as the snow continued to fall and the truck ground along the foaming edge of a cold sea . . . .

  “Jesus, Phonse!” I said. “That must have been some spooky ride.’’

  “What’s that?”

  “Down from Monkstown with that coffin.”

  “Nah, shit, there wa’n’t nuthin’ spooky about that. There was three of us went and we took a bottle o’ rum and got right polluted. Nah, somebody had to do it, an’ I had the truck, that’s all.” He pulled at his beer and then wiped his lips on his checked shirt-sleeve. “But I tell you somethin’ that wa’n’t too canny when we got here.”

  A mile before Widow’s Harbour they nearly went off the road, swerving to avoid a snow-shrouded figure trudging along. Stopping the truck to give the fellow a proper old scandalizing, Phonse was greeted by a cheery, “Evenin’, Phonse, thanks a lot,” and Jack Kavanaugh climbed into the crowded cab. “What’s in the back?”

  “That’s Reg Munroe’s corpse.”

  “No,” said Jack. “It ain’t.”

  “It is,” Phonse protested. “I picked him up in Monkstown. I got signed papers and everythin’.”

  “You look inside?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Well, it ain’t Reg.”

  “How come you’re so Jesus sure?”

  “Well,” said Jack, “Reg’s body come in by sea this afternoon. I seen it. I’m just goin’ in to the wake.”

  “G
o away.”

  “It’s true, Phonse.”

  “Snappin’ Jesus Christ,” said Phonse reverently. “Then who the hell have I got in the back of the truck?”

  “It ain’t Reg; that I do know.”

  “Well, Jesus,” said Phonse grimly. “Soon’s we get to town I think we better have a look at you, stranger.”

  Under a streetlight they stopped and opened the coffin. A man’s face stared out at the sky. Snowflakes fell on his eyes: They did not melt. Phonse whistled low.

  “My God, it’s Teddy Lundrigan.”

  “I didn’t even know Teddy was dead,” Jack marveled.

  “Nor I,” Phonse agreed. “But I’d say he is, all right.”

  “That was some wake,” Phonse chuckled. “By the Jesus, I was half cut already. I went right wild that night.”

  “I’ll never forget you runnin’ down them stairs with your trousers around your ankles,” said Alfred.

  “Oh my God, yes. Jesus, Ma Munroe was some savage when she come up and found all four couples ridin’ together in them two beds. Didn’t she take the broom to us, though?”

  “Didn’t she?”

  “And Alice, she was right owly when she found out about me being up there with Stella.”

  “But she wa’n’t nobody to talk. She was married to Buzz when you were livin’ with her, wa’n’t she, and him off workin’ the lake boats in Upper Canada?”

  “He always wanted to get me for a divorce,” Phonse said. “But he never did.” He turned to me. “But that ain’t the best of it, or the worse, dependin’ how you look at it.”

  “No?”

  “Hell, no. See. Later on that night we was just right out of our trees, you know? I don’t think I was ever so full, never ever in my life. And old Wilf Rattray, him that drowned on that dragger, him and I heard that old Reg was cut up some when that freighter run them down. So what d’ye suppose we did?”

  “What’d you do, Phonse?”

  “We went into the room where the two corpses war, see, ’cause it was one big wake for the two of them, and we took old Reg out of his box and stripped him down. There was nothin’ on his face, but his chest and legs was cut up pretty bad, all black and blue and the chest crushed in. Funny thing to see, all them cuts and him not bleedin’.”

  “Jesus, Phonse!”

  “Well, hell, we didn’t think old Reg’d mind. I wouldn’t have minded, if it had of been me instead of him in that box. I mean, shit, we was old friends. Anyways, what d’ye suppose we did then?”

  “Christ, Phonse, I hate to think.”

  “Why, we dressed him all up again, just like he was, and then old Wilf and me, we put one of his arms around each of our necks and had our pictures took.”

  “That’s right,” said Alfred, shaking his head. “That’s right. God save us, you did that.”

  “Sure,” said Phonse. “Sure we did. I still got the picture.” He drew out his wallet.

  The man on the left is Phonse. The man on the right is Wilf. The man in the centre appears to be drunk.

  D.C. Troicuk

  Overburden

  God fashioned the first man out of the dust of Eden. But there exists a breed of man made of a dust blacker than this, the dust of eons ago, though it was not dust then, but a murky oblivion that time compressed into solid night. The men who descend daily to those sunken remains of primeval forest feel it still. The overburden that transformed it, transforms them. This is a breed not made by God in a single day, but formed by a man’s own overburden — the unceasing oppression of tons of earth and ocean water upon the ceiling of his heart. He is a man such as this who stands staring down into the small fire burning in his kitchen stove.

  Roddie MacSween sifted through these ideas, his thoughts not phrased as eloquently as he believed the poetic images deserved. He was a smart man, quick with concrete information, awkward when it came to concepts and emotions. A man of few and simple words, he could rarely do justice to the complex impressions that swept over him at times like this, when the constant accusing voice inside him stilled and the feelings were all he had.

  He held his cold morning hands, blue-veined and arthritic, to the open port, rubbing them one over the other. Below, the bed of kindling ignited a shovelful of coal at its dusty perimeter, sending up a sulfurous cloud. In minutes, energy subdued for three hundred million years would be released as heat to this chilly September day.

  Roddie MacSween — Doc, they called him — had not entered this world as black dust any more than Adam had entered as clay. But black dust he became. Day in, day out, for thirty-two years he had ingested the dust for lunch with Kam sandwiches and Maple Leaf cookies. He drank it with cold, over-sweetened tea from the mickey bottle that fit with a flat-curved neatness into his back pocket. He inhaled it with every breath until, like the prehistoric seam he worked, he slowly petrified — became a creature of the mine, his lungs crusted, his heart made hard and dark with a hidden anger that released, when it did, in a slow, hot burn. The dust ground into his pores, branding ownership with blue scars on his hands, at his temple, in places people never saw. Once, he had driven a pickaxe through his left foot and there, he supposed, the dust had even penetrated his ruptured cells because afterwards he noticed that, even to the naked eye, his own blood sample looked darker than the others in the rack lined up for testing.

  And yet, after the years he had considered utter misery, years that had gone by like eons, he missed the routine of the mine. Some days he believed he would trade his remaining days on earth for one last ride to that hell — down the rake with his buddies, forty minutes of vulgar camaraderie over a hand of tarabish, forty minutes stolen out of the shift by travel time to the wall face where the seam was being worked. That daily ride, the human contact of it, had been even more significant when, as Deputy Mine Examiner, his duties sent him into virtual isolation to pace off the miles of ordered underground roadway he inspected for safety hazards and air quality.

  He knew the caverns of the north wall complex as well as the upstairs hall of his own house. Yet, with every monotonous shift, his eyes craved substance, searched the darkness ahead for some reference point and, never quite convinced that the next intersection was not a turn into utter oblivion, his mind charted his progress on a mental map. Before passing through each wooden air trap, he chalked his initials and the date on the man-door. This procedure, as official as a notary’s seal in the event of an accident, was for Doc a validation of his own existence.

  He stepped through, needing a conscious reminder that the barrier had been erected not to conceal some subterranean black hole, but to redirect maximum ventilation to the areas where men were currently working.

  The lamp on his hard hat showed him the way, but his way was always and only a tangible void, a black tunnel at the end of the light.

  War had focused his vague, juvenile image of himself as a man to one involved in some healing occupation: male nurse, physiotherapist, something that would sterilize the gangrenous souvenirs his mind had picked up in the mud and trenches. Fresh back from Europe, recovered from a foolish barracks accident but unscathed by Hitler’s army, he had openly bragged about his three-year stint as a medic, but never spoke of the risks — to the lives of those he had saved, to his own future career — the risks of performing procedures he was not qualified to tackle.

  The same young women who had ignored him in youth listened, rapt and silent, as he embellished accounts of gruesome operations he had witnessed under impossible conditions, and of the miraculous recoveries that followed. He had never thought past a hospital job before, but the new attention made him cocky. Soon he was telling them he had set his sights on the top of that pyramid of medical professions, believing it himself.

  For four long years Doc had kept a running tally in his head of the army pay he sent home for safekeeping and an image of a brand new shiny blue Chevrol
et with himself behind the wheel. But he’d had to pry the bank book out of his mother’s hands. She was confused. Wasn’t this money the government provided his parents, in consideration of the son they had contributed to the war effort?

  What was left would barely cover his first year’s tuition. Angry and deflated at first, Doc resurrected faith. It was a start. And the army would help him out.

  His old man had other plans. He would get his son on at the pit. Roddie would work with him, shoulder to shoulder. Make him proud.

  Doc was lucky to get on at Caledonia. Lucky to get work at all, they all told him. He knew it himself. So each day, trying to be grateful for his meagre pay until the fall term at Dalhousie, he donned the same filthy pit clothes he had worn the day before and descended the deep. And if the dream of becoming a doctor was like heaven to him, the heat radiating up into the mine from the molten core of the earth was a constant reminder of the hell he must endure in order to get there.

  Before long it felt irreverent, taking his lofty dream down there with him where no living thing could take root. Instead, he sent it up on the wash-house hook with his day clothes and there it hung, untended, as airy and frivolous as a dandelion gone to seed awaiting the merest breath of wind.

  His retirement routine had evolved to this: tend the garden, read the paper, drive Theresa to the mall. While she scouted for the ultimate bargain, Doc methodically paced off the enclosure of the mall, the same room-and-pillar formation he knew from the mine, one long central corridor with parallel side tunnels shooting off in either direction. Mentally he chalked the perpendicular passageways, the click of his cane on the terrazzo floor drawing him into the past, stirring up the questions of a young man, now old, whose dreams had been thwarted.

  Mickey Porter elbowed him in the ribs. “If life’s a bowl a’ cherries, b’y, then what’m I do in the pit?”

  A shiver shocked Doc’s body as he swung around, dodging hands that groped for him from out of some unearthly darkness. The blue-black bodies had raced through his sleep again last night. These were not night-dwellers, but cried out from his stream of consciousness at every turn. He would like to have believed they were nameless, faceless spectres, but he knew. He knew who they were, knew them by name, knew their families. He saw them in the eyes of their fathers, their brothers, their sons. He rarely met those eyes anymore. More than he feared his own death he dreaded the stiletto death wish in their warm hellos, the slash of violent reproach in passing nods of greeting.