Causeway: A Passage From Innocence Read Online Free PDF

the effort to picture how it was. There is nothing interesting now.
    There is the church, but it is not on Church Street. It is on the Victoria Line, which is a gravel road that runs up through the middle of the village, past our back door, up by Archie the Piper’s, over Little Brook, and off into the woods, vanishing towards “out back.” I think it meanders all the way to the other side of Cape Breton Island, but I’ve never gone past the side road that leads up MacIntyre’s Mountain, which is thirteen miles out.
    Our school is beside the church. The school has two rooms, called the Big Room and the Little Room, even though they’re both exactly the same size. The Big Room is for big kids, grade six and up. Next year I will be in the Big Room.
    The village has two stores. One is large, three stories high, and sells almost everything on the first two floors. The third floor is where they keep the coffins. This store is called R.J.’s because the man who owned it years ago was R.J. MacDonald. The other store belongs to Mr. Clough, and it is also the post office.
    I think the merchants always ran the village, the way priests did in Catholic communities. Field Street once ran all the way across to Church Street, and poor people from out back would use it to bypass the stores on the main road if they owed the merchants money. They’d come out the Victoria Line, cross over Field Street, then sneak down Church Street and continue on to town. The merchants solved the problem by building a shed in the middle of Field Street, just past Alex MacKinnon’s. Then they built fences, and what was once a street is now part of a hayfield. Now the poor people have to continue down the Victoria Line, or turn down Lovers’ Lane, and take the main road through the village. Now they have no choice. They have to pass the stores.
    Hardly anybody remembers R.J. anymore, and his store is now run by a quiet, sober relative who is called Ronnie the Minister because his father was a clergyman. R.J.’s store was recently bought by Mr. McGowan, who, like his name, is new and modern. Mr. McGowan, I have heard them say, has big plans for the store and for the village. Ronnie the Minister is, I hear, retiring and will be replaced by a pretty woman named Isabel Grant, who lives in Long Point, ten miles to the north.
    Mr. Clough, who owns the other store, seems to be as old as the village itself and thinks the merchants are still the most important peoplehere. Mr. Clough is a Grit. He is a very important Liberal and a Mason, which is why he has the post office and a great deal of influence over who gets jobs and contracts.
    I have heard discussions when my father was away, working in a mine somewhere: Dan Rory should go see Clough.
    And my mother laughing at the very idea.
    But now he’s home, and I hear discussions about a time, not far in the future, when our village will become a city.
    I find it difficult to imagine Port Hastings as a city. We’ve had pavement for a few years now, but the pavement ends with a bang exactly where the village ends, in front of a house they call Hughie the Slut’s. It doesn’t start again until below the Catholic Church, which is on the edge of town, Port Hawkesbury. When I ask why, the answer is always the same: politics. That tells you nothing even if you’re ten and already know from listening to them that politics determines many things, including where the snowplough stops and who gets jobs and pavement.
    But this gap in the pavement, and the dust and potholes after you pass Hughie the Slut’s and the Kennedy cabins and the MacDonalds’ and the MacLeans’ and the Meisners’, past Grant’s Pond and through Embree’s Island, doesn’t even make political sense. The dirt road discriminates against everybody.
    I know there is pavement on the main street in town because important people live there—the lawyer and the doctor and the policeman, bankers, ministers, and the priest whose name is Father Doyle.