Free The Last Best Place by John Demont

engaged to a woman, even while he was married to someone else who lived a few blocks away from his fiancée in the same subdivision—now being charged with embezzlement. Buried on the same page might be the latest on the war in Moser River: a poisonous little town on the eastern shore where a gang of white trash had been terrorizing the local folk. On another page might be a short story noting that a man had been found guilty of an elaborate hoaxto fake his own death by pretending he had been hauled into the ocean by a wave from the much-photographed and visited rocks of Peggy’s Cove. I kid you not.
    They like their faith in big doses, their heroes doomed and larger than life. They play card games called Tarabish, drink gallons of boiled tea, smoke cartons of cigarettes and down any sort of alcohol they can raise to their lips. Not much has really changed in that regard. “There are 1,000 houses in the town,” a Halifax settler wrote home to Britain in the 1750s. “We have upwards of 100 licensed [drinking] houses and perhaps as many without licence, so the business of one half the town is to sell rum and the other half to drink it.”
    Nova Scotians think the kitchen is the only place for a party. They call everyone Buddy, label anybody who doesn’t tuck a napkin into their shirt “big feelin’,” call anything that they liked “some good” and anywhere that is not Nova Scotia “away.” They have a dark sense of humour, stemming from the fact that catastrophes are what is funny, and if Nova Scotians see more humour than other people, it is perhaps because more things go wrong here than anywhere else.
    They tend to treat money with little respect—the quintessential example being the legendary Halifax rummy who spent most of the million he won in the lottery during a vicious month-long drinking binge before giving the rest to his buddies and charity. Conversely they can be cheap, even the rich ones—of which thereare a surprising number. Partly that’s just an almost pathological desire not to appear showy. Which is why a visitor would have no sense that behind the facade of those big understated houses in old South End Halifax are interiors that drip shipping and brewing wealth, that the great houses looming on the hill in Yarmouth are still furnished with treasures brought back from the Orient during the days of the windjammers, that in bank accounts in small towns throughout the province low-key fortunes still moulder. Roy Jodrey, the sharpy from the Annapolis Valley, may have made millions investing in apples and pulp and paper. But he liked to fly economy to stay one of the boys. Once some friends got him a ticket in business class so he could sit with them. “He planted his fatness in his roomy seat,” his biographer Harry Bruce wrote, “glowered at the cabin’s luxury, squirmed guiltily and grumbled to no one, ‘The people of Hantsport will know about this before I even get home.’ ”
    When it comes to sex they are a surreptitious, darkly randy lot. I have a friend who in his early twenties was carrying on an affair with an acquaintance’s aunt. Once, in the middle of the night he climbed an elm tree in the hope of getting into the second-floor bedroom of the house she shared with her nephew and his family. Now my friend once separated his shoulder playing hockey and periodically it pops out of place, sometimes at the worst moments—like when he is thirty feet up a tree at 3 a.m. It’s damn painful too. Which, I suppose, was a good thing in this case, because a neighbour heard his agonized moans and called the firedepartment, who dispatched a hook-and-ladder truck. They detreed my friend as his lover and her family watched from the window in sleepy-eyed disbelief.
    Thus it has always been. Why else would the name Ada mean so much to generations of Halifax males? True, Ada McCallum may have been no Doll Tearsheet, the madam who operated in Halifax during the early 1940s, wore a fur coat and