Causeway: A Passage From Innocence by Linden McIntyre

isn’t really a picnic, but that’s what they call it anyway. Every year there is a picnic that isn’t really a picnic in Judique, which is twenty miles to the north, and they have games there. Everybody talks about the tug-of-war and the dancing and the fist fights at the Judique picnic. And in Lower River Inhabitants, which is to the south, I once watched real boxers beating each other as they danced around on a small platform surrounded by ropes and a cheering crowd. I remember one of them was a MacIntyre from Glace Bay, a hard little man with blue scars on his face from going back to work in the coal mines too soon after the fighting. Later there was a famous boxer from here named Rockabye Ross, who beat a larger man from Sydney.
    Every parish seems to have a picnic. Port Hawkesbury has no special attraction like the tug-of-war or boxing competitions, but this one is special anyway. There is a new Queen, and the highest mountain in the world has suddenly been humbled. The ferry, I have heard them say, will soon be “a thing of the past.” There will be a causeway, and it will be in Port Hastings, not here. I imagine that soon Port Hastings will be the town, and the town will be a village. Perhaps our village, when a town, will have a picnic of its own. But for now, Port Hawkesbury is up for celebration anyway.
    At the Legion Grounds there is a crowd of casually dressed people amid a jumble of shacks and booths, the smoke and smells of cooking meat, sounds of happy voices and mechanical music. The sense of fun is dampened only by the knowledge that everything there costs money, and money is “hard to come by.” My sisters have not yet acquired an understanding of this reality and ask for everything they see.
    I know that I must be selective. You can’t have everything—one of the things you learn as the man of the house. One of the reasons the man of our house is a boy is that, often, the real men have to go far away and work hard for the money necessary for survival. You mustnot waste what is necessary for survival. I know there are people here who have more money than they need to survive. Mr. Clough and Mr. McGowan, who own stores. Mr. Gordon Walker, who owns a bank. The Langleys, who seem to own everything else. But that, I’m told, is “neither here nor there.” We are who we are and we have what we have. And it isn’t very much, but it’s enough. There are always people who have less, and we must be thankful.
    I wander through the crowd, past the open-front stands where men and women with faces that are familiar from church self-consciously cajole the passersby to part with money.
    “Step right up,” they say. “Try your luck.”
    I pause. A tall boy hurls a softball towards a stack of fake milk bottles—he misses and looks silly. His second try, propelled by anger and embarrassment, is like a stone from a slingshot. The stack of bottles explodes in a clatter.
    “Hey, hey,” says the man inside, laughing. “If you can do that against Petit-de-Grat this evening…” He hands the tall boy a yellow teddy bear, and he walks off proudly, teddy tucked securely under the bulging arm.
    At night there will be a ball game against a team from Petit-de-Grat, which is in Isle Madame, where they all speak French, and, later, a chaperoned ball with Joe Murphy’s Orchestra.
    There is a wheel that spins. People are lined up, placing money on a piece of plastic that is like a tablecloth with crowns and anchors and other symbols that are duplicated at the wheel. A woman inside the booth spins the wheel with small yelps of enthusiasm. Round and round it goes, making a ticking sound, quickly at first, then slowing down. Where it stops, nobody knoooows.
    Someone shouts “Yahoo”—and gets a prize.
    I move on. I hear the crack of rifle fire and head towards the sound. There I find men lined up to fire a pretend rifle that looks like a .22 at arow of tiny mechanical birds moving along the top of a wall in a silent,