Free The Last Best Place by John Demont Page B

straight. In the run of a couple of hours I’ve already run across Andrew “G’day” MacDonald, “Lucky” John C. MacDonald, Billy Collie Billy MacDonald, who is most definitely not to be confused with Collie Hughie MacDonald, and Ronnie “D.D.” MacDonald, whose immediate family is known as “The D.D.s”.
    The layers of names often conjure up the ghosts of ancestors. John Angus Andrew Hughie MacIsaac—I create this name at random, although I have no doubt that such a person exists somewhere in Nova Scotia—could have had a father named Angus, a great-grandfather named Andrew and a great-great-grandfather named Hughie. Sometimes, the nicknames refer to a physical feature, an occupationor where a family lives. Other times, they refer to some piece of family history. I remember a conversation with Richard MacKinnon, who teaches at the University College of Cape Breton, in Sydney, and is an expert on Celtic nicknames. To prove a point he told me about a great-uncle living in Glace Bay who tried to steal a barrel of biscuits from the mine company store during the bloody labour riots of the 1930s and ended up breaking a toe when he dropped the barrel on his foot. MacKinnon had pretty much forgotten about the whole sorry episode until he gave a lecture on Highland names at the University of New Brunswick, in Fredericton. Once finished he asked for questions. A shaky hand went up in the back of the room. “Excuse me, Mr. MacKinnon,” said an ancient, quavery voice, “but are ye one of the Biscuit-Foot MacKinnons?”
    Of course, I am not the first person to discover that Nova Scotians are more or less a tribe. If, say, a person named MacIsaac came down from Toronto to a wedding they wouldn’t make it to the bar and back before somebody would be wondering aloud whether they were related to the MacIsaacs of Judique. Someone would know Merle from his newspapering days. Someone else went to father Dunc MacIsaac’s parish. Someone would have kids who were taught by Al. Someone else would have gone to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish (everyone here just calls it St. F.X.) with one of the other seven kids in the immediate family. And so the conversation would go floating on like a jazz solo until someone finally changed the subject. Tribe, you see, matters here. It is atthe root of the great events and the small dramas. I recall a stag party thrown for a guy marrying a woman from a family I knew. It began convivially enough but ended with the father of the bride and his half-dozen sons and brothers standing back to back swinging it out with the groom and his father, brothers and uncles. A couple of days later they were casting dark glances from opposite sides of the church as the couple said their wedding vows. And now they are family, even if just by marriage—which means that while the bad blood may forever linger between the two clans, God help anyone from outside dim enough to take a swing at a member of either house at some distant stag.
    Blind, unquestioning loyalty definitely has a downside—“I was just doing my duty” being the last words every war criminal utters before the hangman opens the trapdoor. But it is good to know that no matter how bad it gets, there are always those who will have you. Home, as someone somewhere once said, is the one place where you can go and not be turned away. I say amen to that. It warms my heart to know that if I were on the run with the bloodhounds coming a mile back, there is always my tribe, with its boundaries and rivalries that extend beyond simple blood ties. This tribal sense of loyalty cuts many different ways. Protestants versus Catholics, Pictou versus New Glasgow, islanders versus mainlanders. You see it in fist fights after hockey games and in the way a stepdancer from Margaree will watch a guy from a few miles away move adroitly around the floor and sniff dismissively, “Oh, he’s from Inverness,” as if that explained
everything
.
    Sometimes we even