Free Causeway: A Passage From Innocence by Linden McIntyre Page A

come in the mail. I read the Sydney Post Record and the Victoria-Inverness Bulletin. We also get the Star Weekly from Toronto and the Free Press Weekly, which is from out west. We get the Standard, which comes from Montreal and is folded into the Post on Saturdays. And also the Casket, which is a Catholic newspaper that has news only about religion and the church.
    Binky and I had our names in the Bulletin once for pulling Brian Langley out of the strait after he fell off the pier. We suddenly realized,after he kept sinking out of sight, that he couldn’t swim. All we did was pull him out and take him home, but somebody put it in the paper and spelled all our names wrong.
    It is in the Post and the Bulletin that I get the news about the causeway. At The Hole I discover what it means.
    First it was supposed to be a bridge. Then some engineers pointed out that a bridge wouldn’t last a single winter. I could have told them that. From my bedroom window in the winter I can see the drift ice sailing past like swift ghost ships on the racing tide. First it travels south; then, a few hours later, north—reversing constantly with the tide. At least once a winter it comes through in massive packs that carry off the ferries, shouldering them off course and shoving them all the way down into the open waters of Chedabucto Bay, where they have to wait for the tide to change and the ice to reverse direction. Anybody here could have told them what that ice would do to the pillars of a bridge, especially as the pillars would have to be hundreds of feet in length to reach the bottom of the strait.
    But they were desperate for something. There is a steel plant in Sydney and big coal mines in Glace Bay and New Waterford and Sydney Mines. Crossing on ferries is a nuisance for them. Besides all the coal and steel, more than a hundred thousand passenger cars have to cross the strait each year. Now that Newfoundland is part of Canada, they’re saying there will be even more and that the Newfoundlanders are demanding better access to the country they didn’t want to join in 1949.
    They say the causeway will cost twenty-two million dollars and will have a road and a railway track and a sidewalk for pedestrians.
    Of course I know the biggest reason for it happening is Angus L. I know this from listening at The Hole. Angus L. is the premier of Nova Scotia and is famous all over Canada because he was a war hero in World War One and built the Royal Canadian Navy in World War Two. They say when Angus L. became the minister of the navy inOttawa, there were only six ships and two thousand men. In a flash he built it up to five hundred ships and ninety thousand men and women, and they helped to win the war. My uncle Francis Donohue was one of the people in Angus L.’s navy. But, most important of all, Angus L. is from here. He grew up poor like everybody else, in Dunvegan, which is near Inverness.
    Angus L. is a great man, and it’s a shame that he’s a Grit, they say. He even speaks perfect Gaelic.
    Here is my secret, something I cannot tell to my mother or Grandma Donohue or my Aunt Veronica, who are all Tories, or even to my father, who is nothing: if Angus L. can really build this causeway and make jobs for men from out back who are not Grits or Masons, who almost died from sickness and have never been to school, I will become a Grit and vote for him as soon as they let me and for as long as there are men like him in charge.
    There was a time when we all lived together. When I was born, my mother and my father lived in the same little house in Newfoundland. I learned this in the attic. Access to the attic is through the ceiling in my bedroom. You could say that I learn about now and the future through a hole in my floor, but that I learn about the past through a hole in my ceiling. It was in the attic that I found a suitcase that was full of old letters and other papers.
    One document in the suitcase was a small blue card, and when I brought it to