Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Read Online Free PDF Page A

about one of the Indian chiefs who had, it seemed, given Chrétien a hard time.
    MacEachen paused beside my seat. We exchanged some pleasantries about being home.
    “Everybody well?”
    “Everybody well,” I replied.
    MacEachen returned to resume his seat near Chrétien.
    The plane engine came alive, whining. I looked again towards the terminal window. My father was still standing there, hands folded in front of him. And a sudden strange image came back to me and transformed him into someone else.
    The snow continued all through the night of my grandfather’s wake and, just before dawn, one of the cousins noted that the hearse would never be able to get up the mountain road. We were going to have totake Grandpa out to the highway on the back of a truck. But, even for a truck to get through, we were going to have to clear the road in places.
    So my father and John Boy and a gang of the cousins and I went off with shovels and axes to break down the worst drifts between the little house and the highway and to cut spruce boughs for extra traction in the hard places. We worked like that for a couple of hours.
    Then the truck, a three ton with a flatbed on back, came struggling and groaning up through the snow, and somehow fought its way into the yard between the two houses, and then backed up close to the little house where Grandma now lived alone.
    They carried the casket out and heaved it up onto the back. Then my father and I and a couple of the cousins climbed up and sat on it so it wouldn’t slide around on the slow slippery trip down to where the hearse was waiting, on the side of the Trans-Canada.
    Driving out the lane, my father suddenly elbowed me and, when he had my attention, nodded back in the direction of the little house. No words were spoken.
    Peigeag was standing there in the doorway, watching silently as we drove away with the old man in his casket. It was an image I’d never forget. The old woman just standing there, a black woollen shawl draped over her head and shoulders, bony old hands clasped before her, but hidden under an apron. Just the latest witness to a long, long history of departures.
    The image came back to me with a particularly jarring effect that Sunday afternoon, staring at the old fellow who just kept standing there silently, hands folded in front of him in the window of the airport terminal. I had a sudden urge to leave the plane, go back inside, ask the questions. Who were those old people? Did Peigeag really have those special powers—the second sight, the power of the buidseachd? Howdid they and this glorified ridge we grandly call MacIntyre’s Mountain escape the relentless flow of time? And who are you, born and raised there, exempted in so many ways from the progress of your century but not its pains?
    Of course, by then the whine of the plane had matured into a louder, ringing roar.
    I made a silent promise to myself and to my father. I was definitely going to get to the bottom of things—next time.
    I leaned close to the small oval window and waved one last time. But he seemed to be distracted just at that moment, watching as two men wheeled the ramp away from the front of the aircraft.
    The plane moved. And then we were gone.

2
THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE INKSPOTS
    We live in a village called Port Hastings. I think I understand the difference between a village and a town. People who live in towns are more important than people who live in villages. The most important people of all live in cities.
    I am told our village was supposed to be a town, which is why it seems to have streets. There is a road by our house, and it is really Field Street. The hill by MacKinnons’ is Lovers’ Lane. The Green Path is really Saddler Street. And the road to my Aunt Veronica’s is Church Street.
    I have heard there were a dozen stores here once upon a time and thirteen places where men could drink. Jack Reynolds’s big old barn was once a stagecoach station.
    My imagination is defeated in