The Last Best Place (25 page)

“Who’s that?” a former Mulroney cabinet minister who’s been summering in Chester since he was a child asks no one in particular.

“A painter,” a white-haired swell standing nearby replies. “Jose Alcado.”

“Alcado. Alcado. What kind of a name is that?”

“Spanish, I think.”

“Sounds like Dildo to me,” spits the ex-politician, now back to practising law, before bursting into loud, humourless laughter.

I get back into my beater and make my way down the hill away from the Peninsula.

H
IGHWAY 4 BETWEEN
S
YDNEY AND
G
LACE
B
AY IS WHERE
I
HAVE MY VISION
. It hits quick and hard—an image in my mind’s eye of a cloudless day, a serene green cemetery and a four-year-old watching his father wiping away a single rivulet of tear. It has enough power to make me pull a sudden U-turn and head back, the car rumbling and groaning as the speedometer crosses 120 km/h. The woman minding the office at Forest Haven Memorial Gardens takes a few minutes to search the files, then hands me a map of the cemetery. I take my time walking across the well-tended grass so closely cut that it resembles a golf green. I pick my way through the rows of gravestones until I reach lot number 108 B. The markers are identical—polished bronze, each with a carving of an open Bible near the top. Only enough room to say that Clarence Demont (he never capitalized the
m
) died on September 14, 1959, at age sixty-six and Mabel, his wife, was seventy-eight when she died on September 6, 1975.

I already knew that. What is noteworthy is that I had been here just once before, thirty-six years ago. Furthermore, I never knew the name of the place where my grandparents lay buried. All I had was a nagging, vague memory, which hadn’t flashed through my
mind in years until a few minutes ago. A true Daphne du Maurier moment. I feel a grand gesture of some kind is in order, but I cannot, for the life of me, think of the right one. All I can say is it feels wholly natural to stand staring at the ground, hands sunk deep in my pockets, nostrils twitching from summer pollen, my feet rooted to the soil and the vanished generations.

I don’t normally let this sort of thing preoccupy me. Like everyone in the late twentieth century, I know that self-determination is the Zeitgeist of the moment. We all make our story up as we go along. We all live on our wits, not our past. But you can’t escape it either, no matter how hard you try. It is what bolts you to the earth. Particularly if you are suspicious of the Christian belief in heaven and hell and have no confidence whatsoever that a saviour was ever in sight. In blood can be found meaning—like all Nova Scotians, I firmly believe that. When you come from here, where roots run so deeply, it is easy to take that for granted. Then something will drive it home—that you are still just a small root from a great tree descending deep into the black, coal-laden soil.

It happened to me at a funeral for an ancient great-aunt, Eva Mount, a smart, lively woman I remembered for her Sunday dinners and organ playing as much as for her spirit and sharpness of mind. There I sat thinking how much the scene resembled some forty-year-old film footage I’ve seen, in which many of the same people sat in a church in Sydney Mines watching the nervous overheated couple who became my parents take their wedding vows.

Clarence Demont, my grandfather, was a newspaper printer and
church hall janitor in his working days. He was a fidgety man, with a bald head, long, downward-sloping nose and gentle eyes. But his double-breasted suit hid the remnants of a body that could once out-sprint racehorses, pin barn-storming wrestling champions and run down any flyball in the outfield. He could have gone to the Olympics, been the Donovan Bailey of his day. But, family legend has it, his boss in the composing room at the Glace Bay
Gazette
couldn’t promise him his job when he returned. And since a job was nothing to sneeze at in Depression-era Cape Breton he stayed in Glace Bay. No one found him a resentful man: shy in public, Clarie “Flash” Demont was a live wire in private, a Baptist with a high-pitched laugh who danced with a loosey-goosey up-and-down movement of the arms as he expelled air through pursed lips to some far-away rhythm only he heard.

I was just a toddler when he died so I have not a single actual memory of him—just stories from my father. And a few mementoes: an aged, leather-bound copy of
Wild Wales: The People’s Language & Scenery
by George Borrow, on the title page of which is written: “ 1st place 100 yards dash won by Clarence Demont, July 31/19 Knox Church Sunday School Picnic.” I also have a black-and-white photo of when he was in his prime, wearing shorts, an athletic top and sprinter’s spikes, legs and arms flexed ready to propel him forward to some unseen finish line.

Across the aisle in 1955 my mother’s father sat, straight-backed, sober looking, smelling of pipe tobacco and English tweed. John Briers was a kid when his father left the coal fields of Yorkshire and
crossed the Atlantic to work the collieries of Cape Breton. Like all good sons he followed his father underground, working a coal face that ran miles out under the water. When war broke out he enlisted in Montreal and saw action at Vimy Ridge. British to the core, he was not one to dwell on the horrors he experienced overseas. When World War Two began he enlisted again. Back in Cape Breton, he spent his days in the darkness of the mines, eventually rising to the level of inspector. But after a day on the job, a big English-style dinner and a nap, he headed for the parlour, where he rosined up the bow for his violin or played the piano, saxophone or clarinet into the night. Long decades later old women still shivered with pleasure at the memory of his alto sax floating across the water at dances at the Sydney Mines Yacht Club.

I own his saxophone now, or at least a refurbished version, which Lisa presented me on my thirtieth birthday. It is a made by the legendary C.G. Conn Ltd. of Elkhart, Ind. One of my sax teachers told me he thought it was a Chu Berry model (named after the American saxophone player Leon “Chu” Berry), which meant it was probably made in the late 1920s. I have been playing it, on and off and poorly, for at least a decade now. I am acutely aware that the inlay in the keys—where I fumble to place my fingers—has been worn down over time by my grandfather’s hands. Few days go by during which I do not think about how I now struggle to force lungfuls of air down the same valves he breathed into for so long. The instrument sits in my office in a battered black case a few feet away from a photocopy of a brief notice in the Toronto
Star
. It says:
“Clarie Demont, 66, once the fastest Canadian to run 100 yards, died in Glace Bay, N.S., yesterday. His mark of 9.6 seconds in the 100-yard was set in 1913.”

And thus am I reminded every day of my closeness to the past and the vast gulf separating me from my predecessors. I spend most of my day talking to people on the telephone. I make notes, then type ’em up. Cringe to think what my grandparents would make of a grown man spending his working life in such a manner. The life I have lived as a journalist, and that my cousins now live as doctors, lawyers, nurses, consultants, businesspeople, lab technicians, contractors, sports trainers, would have been unimaginable to my ancestors who lie in graveyards of such hamlets as Sydney Mines, Chester Basin and Windsor. For that matter, how high an opinion would Eva Mount—who died at the age of ninety-six—daughter of the late Angus and Catherine (Flynn) MacKeigan, have of such sedate people? The minister at her funeral told stories I’d heard many times before, but they now sounded fresh and exciting. About her days as secretary to J.B. McLaughlin, the fiery Scottish union leader who landed in Cape Breton just as the coal fields and steel plants were opening, when buying everything at the company store was a way of life and police rode down strikers in the streets of industrial Cape Breton. J.B., the people’s hero, was reviled by the big capitalists and their toadies in government. When he was jailed on a trumped-up charge of seditious libel, it was Eva MacKeigan who delivered his food, along with news of the labour wars, to the Glace Bay jail, then smuggled out his speeches
to be printed in local newspapers like the one where my grandfather Flash Demont worked.

“That’s what you should be writing about,” a cousin of my father’s—whose children are known respectively as Old Foot, Big Foot, Red Foot and Little Foot—scolded as I left the reception after the funeral. And I had to agree. My past is my inheritance. There are the ancestors in whose lives I hope to find the secret of my own. There is the land where I seek to find the grown-over road behind to help me navigate the dimly lit path ahead.

I am the only member of my family not born in Cape Breton. So my first significant memory of the island involves a high-school basketball tournament and a night billeted on the floor of a Sydney high-school gym. Instead of sleep, a marathon two-on-two tournament that ended at 3:30 a.m. with a dislocated index finger. We were knocked out of the tournament early—slaughtered by a ratty-looking bunch from the neighbouring coal town of New Waterford who ran our legs off and played a game so different from ours that we might as well have been from different planets. I knew something was terribly amiss when their centre, a feared intimidator in big-city Halifax, threw an elbow at an opponent. Shoulder-length hair flying, the Cape Bretoner turned without missing a beat and tried to
drop kick
my teammate in the head. It was altogether the strangest thing I’ve ever witnessed on a basketball court.

Not that we cared. This was about being sixteen, on the road and finding yourself in this strange place where girls you’ve never seen
before actually seemed to find you interesting. We made a nocturnal trip to the bootleggers in Whitney Pier, the home of Scottish, Jamaican and Italian steelworkers. Which was where I finally understood the meaning of an old exchange I’d been hearing for years between my parents:
Are you from the Bay, Boy?/No, I’m from the Pier, Dear
. Our hair was still wet from the shower as we ordered beers at a jovial little lounge on the edge of town. Then the day moved into evening like a slow dream. Only one image sticks clearly with me: watching the television and seeing Smokin’ Joe Frazier being seized by panic and starting to run—truly a sad sight—with George Foreman in lumbering pursuit. After that it’s all blurry and spinning around, the frigid rush of winter night air, a window breaking and a teammate trying to cart my suddenly paralyzed body across an icy field as the Mounties approach.

Prudently I pick this moment to fast-forward—I’m a parent now, for God’s sakes—to the here-and-now, a summer day that begins with rain, then turns hazy and hot as I drive slowly through the Sydney streets. Sydney, it must be said, is not one of the great cities for sightseeing. To be frank, whole parts of it are seriously ugly. It does have a pretty little park with duck ponds to commend it; down around the harbour can be nice; the new office and shopping complex, the hotels and entertainment centre add an air of modernity. But head in the wrong direction, past the steel plant and the tar ponds, say, and you can drive for long without seeing a sight that lifts your heart. That is its legacy, the price it has always paid for its very existence. Looking at it dispassionately, some
might say Sydney and the other towns of industrial Cape Breton appear an anachronism, without hope in this age of the information highway and the global economy.

I am looking today for the sad, drab building where I once lived. This was almost a decade after the indignity of the Riverview High tournament. I was then a newly minted university grad with my first job: sports reporter at the Cape Breton
Post
, a position I owed entirely to my father’s cousin, Gordon “Moose” Mercer, king of a local mini-conglomerate who ate lunch every weekday with the paper’s editor. Home was a windowless basement bachelor in a converted beauty salon. I survived on botched recipes from the
Joy of Cooking
and smoked meat sandwiches from Abe’s Deli. My shift ran from 7 p.m. until 2 a.m. and consisted mainly of typing up slow-pitch softball scores. The challenges were not overwhelming: once I figured out the dozen different substitutions for the verb “to hit” (
crack, line, whistle, belt, smack, drive, hammer, wallop, clobber, rap, crucify
and, my personal favourite,
ding
). After I just threw up my hands and admitted that I never was going to get all the different MacDonalds, Rudderhams, MacNeils, MacKinnons and Abbasses right, things were pretty relaxing.