Free Causeway: A Passage From Innocence by Linden McIntyre

say he is my best friend here. When we got him, they said that everybody owned him—mother, father, me, the two girls. Skipper is everybody’s dog, but he and I both know that he is mine.
    He is part boxer, with a broad chest and no tail. He belonged, briefly, to my uncle Francis Donohue, and we got him because Francis planned to shoot him. The reason Francis was going to kill him was because Skipper killed a hen. My uncle said that once he started that work, he’d be more trouble than any dog was worth. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” he said.
    They were having an unscheduled chicken dinner when my mother pointed out how unfair it would be to kill the dog who made the dinner possible. There was considerable discussion then about fairness and crime and justice, and they finally agreed that killing the dog who made the lovely chicken dinner possible was, perhaps, a punishment too cruel and final. Maybe the more appropriate penalty was banishment. Give the dog away to someone who has no hens. We have no hens, and so we got the dog.
    My father seems to like Skipper even more than I do. Whenever he’s leaving home, you’ll see him sitting on the doorstep playing with the dog, talking to him or just sitting with his arm around him, rubbing at his neck and ears, looking and sounding as though he doesn’t want to go. And Skipper seems to be asking the question nobody asks: “Why? Why do you not live at home like everybody else?”
    The dog knows when my father is about to leave and becomes very quiet. And he also seems to know exactly when he’s coming home and becomes noisy and hyperactive long before we see him. The dog will suddenly run to the top of the hill in the field below the house near Harry and Rannie’s, or right down to the main road below the church, prancing nervously, looking up and down the road. That is often how we know when my father is arriving.
    If he was working close to home, he’d come for weekends when he could get a ride or if he wasn’t working Saturdays. He’d come strolling up the Victoria Line on a Friday evening with the dog running in circles around him, bumping his feet and almost knocking him down. Sometimes I’d run to meet him. Before Stirling, when he’d be far away in another province, we’d see him only at Christmas or maybe in the summer. Once he was home for part of a winter, but he couldn’t do much here because he had a cast on his body from waist to neck, like a plaster undershirt. He’d let us knock on it, pretending he was a door. When the cast came off, he went away again.
    When he’s working in another province, Quebec or Newfoundland, we write letters. He writes short, funny letters, and though he doesn’t bother with things like punctuation and capital letters, the spelling is perfect and the words are exactly like his voice.
    This, I guess I should admit, is my father’s secret. He never went to school. He learned to read and write from his father, Grandpa Dougald.
    My mother taught him how to do arithmetic, and now he knows it well enough to be a captain in a hard-rock mine, working with engineers and geologists and bosses. My mother always says my father could have been anything in the world if he’d had a chance. He never got a chance because he never went to school, which should be a lesson for us all.
    I ask why he never went to school, but nobody ever answers—except to say he wasn’t well enough. He was sick when he was a boy and nearly died, which is another secret.
    I know he had a brother and a sister who died when they were children. And that there was a time when he was small when epidemics passed through here like forest fires. And that people living out back, in places like MacIntyre’s Mountain, rarely ever got to see a doctor.
    But we don’t talk about things like that. Not yet, anyway.
    I know all about the causeway and all that it will do because I listen at The Hole in the floor of my bedroom and read the newspapers that