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

The stores in town seem bigger than the ones at home and have more things to sell. There are places people pay to sleep and eat—the Farquhar House and the Black and White Inn, Mac’s Lunch and the Cabot Grill. And there’s Rocky Hazel’s movie theatre. Town is also where the ferry from the mainland stops. But the pavement stops, below the Catholic Church,at the edge of town, and doesn’t start again until Hughie the Slut’s.
    Why?
    Did they stop the pavement here because this man named Hughie isn’t very nice?
    “Good God, no. Poor Hughie is as fine a man as ever walked the earth.”
    Oh.
    “Why then,” my sister wants to know, “is he Hughie the Slut?”
    She’s always asking the obvious question even when she knows there’s no answer.
    “You’re not supposed to say that.”
    “What?” she asks.
    “Slut,” I say.
    “Everybody calls him that,” she insists. “Mummy. Why do they call him Hughie the Slut?”
    I just look out the window of the car, annoyed at myself because I feel a tiny bit of pleasure at her audacity—using a forbidden word in an unassailable context; asking a perfectly legitimate question.
    Why is he called Hughie the Slut?
    “It’s just a name,” our mother sighs. “Didn’t you bring your coronation scrapbook?”
    Meaning: next time you ask that question there will be consequences.
    “But why?” she insists.
    Dan Rory pipes up diplomatically: “I think it’s because he used that word, and that’s what happens.”
    “Yes,” the mother says. “A bad word will stick to you, like a burdock.”
    Now my sister is thinking. A troubled look darkens her face because, even though she’s only eight, she knows it’s true how real names get shoved aside by mockery and worse. She’s probably thinking of poor John Allan Laidlaw, who innocently used the word “function,” and theywere calling him Function behind his back for years afterward. And there’s John Dan Guts. And Louie the Cat. And George the Wheeler. And Squint MacCormack.
    And then there’s the name they stuck on me because of something stupid I said. I don’t even want to talk about it. Spruce!
    She stares out the window, thinking and thinking, twirling a strand of hair on the nape of her neck. I wait. There is more to come.
    “Is a slut the same as a slink?”
    Dan Rory chortles, almost hitting a yawning pothole in the dirt road.
    “That’s enough,” the mother says.
    “Daddy says slink all the time,” she says gravely.
    And this too is true. He’ll say: “It’s a clear slink of a day out,” or “I’m coming down with a slink of a cold.”
    And I remember that people use slut the same way. “I’ve got a slut of a headache.”
    “That’s different,” mother says.
    And there are other words: I remember the barber telling the men how the Mountie came into the shop complaining about the heat last summer, and a customer said to him, “You got a prick of a job all right.” And I knew by the roar of approval in the barbershop that it was about the word prick, a word that always seemed to get the response that is reserved for what is forbidden.
    “You got a prick of a job,” the man said to the Mountie. “But it suits you.”
    I understand how people acquire strange names, but I haven’t yet got around to finding out what that one means and what makes a word like that so interesting. A prick, after all, is what happened to Grandma Donohue’s finger when she was darning a sock last winter.
    “I pricked my finger,” she said with a shocked expression, then licked the tiny wound. Nobody laughed at that.
    The Mountie has a prick of a job. I am curious about words, but there are not many people you can safely ask about a word like that. Now that I’m ten I could probably ask my father—if he stayed around long enough to permit that kind of familiarity. But that is by no means a sure thing.
    And it occurs to me that pavement might make the difference. I recall that my father was around for a while a few