Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

James presses the electric starter on the Hupmobile and heads for home. He will take Frances out to the shed. And ask her to explain the joke.

That night, Mercedes, Lily and Daddy stand on the veranda and glimpse the torches processing through town. Frances is upstairs in bed with a damp cloth to her face. James has the car packed and gassed up in case they all have to leave in a hurry. The army won’t be here for another couple of days and, until then, it’s better to be prepared.

First the miners burn down Number 12 washhouse. Then they raid the company stores — they don’t burn them for fear of setting the whole town on fire. Then they go to the jailhouse to lynch the company police. But the priest meets them and talks them out of it. There are enough fatherless children in New Waterford.

to where your heart has ever been …

October 31, 1918

Dear Mr Piper,

Your daughter is in grave danger. Knowing Kathleen to be of good family and blessed with prodigious musical gifts, I feel it my duty to you and to the world to sound the alarm. Sir, you are from another country and perhaps fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the very term “miscegenation”. It is a modern evil and it is weakening the fabric of our nation. It now threatens to claim your own daughter. Through cunning seduction and flattery, your daughter has been ensnared in a net of godless music and immorality. I look on helpless to intervene because I am an invalid. I speak as one who knows to her own cost, when I say that by crossing nature’s divide, your daughter courts her own ruin and can end only by yielding to the dark remnants of the beast in man. It is, perhaps, not too late. She is yet young. It is your prerogative to ignore, yea to condemn the report of a stranger. My conscience dictates this letter. Thus discharged of my Christian duty, I remain,

An Anonymous Well-Wisher

since first you were my bonny bride …

Lily’s foot is bleeding. She doesn’t know it, because the bagpipes are drowning out the pain. This is what bagpipes are designed to do. But even if she felt the pain and saw the blood soaking the back of her stocking, Lily would not stop marching, because she is on top of the world. She is carrying the Nova Scotia flag up Plummer Avenue. Her heart and lungs are big and plaid like the tartan bags of air that feed the pipes. And for once Lily’s type of walking is the ideal type. The sway and lilt of her unevenly matched legs go with the every-second-beat flex and swing of the music. Lily has a big open smile on her face and tears in her eyes — the pipes always make her feel tragic and elated all at the same time. With a poppy pinned to her tartan sash, she feels like a brave soldier. It’s November 11, 1929, Armistice Day. Today we remember The War to End All Wars.

New Waterford is out in force. Plummer Avenue is lined. Even James is out — not in his capacity as veteran, but as proud father. Mercedes stands at his side in front of Cribb’s Bookstore. Across the street, Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian is closed, the blinds drawn down. There is no danger of them forgetting this day, but Mrs Luvovitz prefers them to do their remembering at home, far from the sights and sounds of Sacrifice and Honour. Frances is supposed to be here but she is at the Empire Theatre, watching Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box again before the authorities get wind and it gets banned.

The parade swings towards the Miners’ Monument. Although it was erected in memory of the sixty-five who died in the explosion of ’17, it has become a symbol of all the others who have been killed in battles both foreign and domestic: those like Mr Davis, who were shot in the street, and all those who ever have been or will be blown up or gassed in a trench or mine. The pipes fall abruptly silent. Lily and the rest of the parade march on to the stark beating of the drums, until they halt at the monument. Then it’s two minutes of silence.

You can hear the ocean. You can hear birds and the wind. You can hear the poppies blow in Flanders fields between the crosses row on row, “we are the Dead. Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved.” Men have stony expressions on their faces, their hands folded in front. Women look severe. Everyone remembers their dear ones who will always be young.

Then a wrenching groan, a high-pitched wail, the drones start up and the pipes are on the march again. This releases tears, although the bagpipes do people’s keening for them. A primitive reed instrument awakens something very old, and puts sorrow in a consolingly long perspective. Perhaps because grass is the oldest musical instrument for all kinds of people.

Lily feels secure among all the hard hairy pale male knees keeping time between socks and swinging sporrans and swaying kilts. She feels a camaraderie with the men. As if they’d all fought the war together. She would like to be a soldier. She’s ten. She would like to be a veteran when she grows up. She wouldn’t be afraid of the pain or the bullets, she’d leap over the top and charge with bare knees into battle. Daddy got the DSO medal. She knows because Mr MacIsaac told her.

It’s only when the pipes and drums cease and the brass band at the rear strikes up “Rule Britannia” that Lily feels the first twinge in her left foot, the little one. Her brown boot, with the built-up sole that Daddy made specially, is firmly harnessed between the steel supports of her brace, but it has been rubbing the top of her heel because it’s new. A red stain has spread around her ankle. Lily steals a look, but doesn’t miss a beat. There are Daddy and Mercedes. There are Mr and Mrs MacIsaac. Lily gives them what she hopes is a manly smile. Many people, not just those she knows, smile back.

Lily is unaware of the stigma surrounding her father, and people — not only her family — conspire to keep her that way. There are plenty of children with braces on their legs, some with crooked backs too, but Lily is the only one out marching. She is also the prettiest child ever to have been stricken. And the sweetest. Lily has become well known in town thanks to Mercedes, but she has become well loved because of herself.

New Waterford hasn’t changed much. The company stores have gone. Besco never reopened them after the looting of ’25. Many miners went back to work with an eight-percent wage cut but many others were blacklisted as Bolsheviks and wound up moving south of the border to Boston, and to the mills and lumber camps of New England. It was the beginning of the exodus to points south and west which shows no sign of stopping. The crash of ’29 rocked the world but registered as a ripple in Cape Breton, where it takes a while for the Depression to sink in because it had already been going on for so long. Besides, it is widely believed that Nova Scotia’s catastrophe occurred in 1867 with Confederation. Anything since then has just been an aftershock. No one can imagine how the thirties could be worse than the twenties. And as R.B. Bennett is fond of saying, “Prosperity is just around the corner.”

But nothing can dampen civic pride — the turn-out today shows that. Cape Bretoners have reconciled loyalty to King and country with scorn and skepticism for all things “from away” — the foolish arses in Upper Canada and the useless bowler hats in Whitehall. They are fiercely proud of their veterans, yet bitter about the Canadian army that has so often invaded the coalfields. In spite of this, the armed forces are increasingly an option for the jobless and the working poor looking to get off this cursèd godforsaken rock that they love more than the breath in their own lungs. There is no such place as “down home” unless you are “away”. By November 1929 the process is under way whereby, eventually, more people will have a “down home” than a “home”. Remembrance Day tends to stir up a lot of mixed emotions.