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

the light I could see that it had my name printed on it. So I put it in my pocket.
    Sitting on my bed afterwards, I examined the card and saw, written in bold black letters across the top: LANDED IMMIGRANT. Then my name and date of birth and some other information that was smudged. I seemed to have discovered something very important: I amnot who they’ve been telling me I am. I was dizzy with excitement. I am someone else and, perhaps, I even have another name.
    My mother explained it to me afterwards.
    She was the schoolteacher in Troy. My father was home from working somewhere in Quebec. They met and married and moved to Newfoundland, where another mine was just beginning. It was during the war, and working in the mine in Newfoundland was the same as being in the army or the navy. The mine produced a mineral called fluorspar, which they need for making aluminum, which they use for making airplanes, which were important in the war. Anybody who was even indirectly helping them build warplanes was as good as in a uniform. I was born in Newfoundland, but Newfoundland wasn’t part of Canada then. So when they brought me to Cape Breton I was, technically, an immigrant.
    A DP?
    Not exactly, my mother said. After Newfoundland joined the Confederation, everybody born there became Canadian—whether they wanted to or not.
    But I was different anyway and went around feeling special for several days, all thanks to the blue card that said I was a landed immigrant.
    My mother says we were happy then. Newfoundland was a lovely place, and the Newfoundlanders she met in St. Lawrence and Lawn and Lamaline were the kindest human beings she’s ever known. Friendly and generous, bringing things to the house, even though they were so poor themselves that when she brought some oranges over from Cape Breton once, the children didn’t know what they were. But I think she was lonely there because she kept coming home for long visits at Grandma Donohue’s, which is at the very northern tip of Cape Breton island, in a village called Bay St. Lawrence. It was also around the time that Grandpa Donohue died of cancer.
    Then we moved to Port Hastings, where my father planned to start his own business and live like everybody else—in his own house with his own wife and children and his own dog. But that didn’t last for long, and eventually he was gone and we were here and I became the man of the house—until my tenth birthday.
    The last of the cars have gone. The waiting vehicles facing down the hill towards the ferry have begun inching forward. I can hear the first of them boarding—thump, clump, over the ramp. On a sudden impulse I rush down the hill to meet the family and grab my father by his free hand. It is a large, strong hand with rough skin. He has his sleeves rolled up. On his right forearm there is a faint tattoo: DRMI. His initials—Dan Rory MacIntyre.
    I have asked: “Why do you have your name on your arm?”
    I would never, in a hundred years, tattoo my own miserable name on my arm or any other part of me.
    “It’s a long story,” my father says, looking slightly uncomfortable.
    What he always says when he’s being evasive.
    There is a brilliant parade to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second. A coal miners’ marching band from Donkin, over near Glace Bay, dressed dramatically in red and gold. The Port Hawkesbury fire brigade in crisp blue uniforms with white gloves. Brave veterans, heads high and shoulders back, medals clinking and flashing. Scores of kids from the two town schools, some in silly sailor suits and kilts. Girl Guides. We keep our position at Eddie Fougere’s garage and watch as they all straggle by, then run up the steep hill to the public school, where there are speeches and kids singing “Land of Hope and Glory,” directed by Miss Ladd, who looks like the Queen. I wave and try to catch her eye, but she doesn’t notice me in the large crowd.
    Later, at the Legion Grounds, there is a picnic. It