Scales of Eden

By Wayne Campbell

Courage and the loss of innocence in the dawn of a new age

For Wayne Campbell, growing up in the 1950s, Deep River is an earthly paradise. The Town Beside the Ottawa is an instant community, built in less than a year to house the scientists, engineers and others who work at Canada’s first nuclear research facility at nearby

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burnstown Publishing House
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781772571295

Book preview

CHAPTER 01

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IN LATER YEARS, Pork would remember the day as a sunny one, with little breeze off the river. It was a Saturday morning in the middle of May, 1955, carrying the first humid heat of Ottawa Valley summer in the still air. Pork was fourteen and couldn’t wait to be fifteen in a few short months but the way he was feeling, life might as well be coming to an end. Slim, muscled and growing fast, Pork was anything but pork, a bumbler nick-name that had misled people during an earlier, troubled period of his life. Now, his dreams of becoming an F-86 fighter pilot, a war hero, and finally a celebrated chemist, were in real jeopardy. What Ferg had just told them couldn’t be true, the lying bastard, but then again Pork knew with a certainty swelling out of his own hidden guilt that it was. Ferg might be the pack outrider, isolate and somehow strange, but he was no liar.

The surprise was that things had started so casually, almost sleepily, before flowering out of control so fast that the boy-teens found themselves trapped on a course of events that moved like a freight train, uncontrolled, inexorable and heedless of who was hurt in its headlong rush along its predetermined track. Pork would eventually come to see it as the first act in a rite of passage into adulthood, but one that twisted into a challenge to the community’s deep sense of propriety, for which there was painful albeit subtle retribution.

There were five of them, friends to varying degrees, all in their early teens, Pork, Batch, Oxer, Phoebie and Ferg. They were still a teen boy pack, each with a comforting pack role, not yet into that anxious, isolating stage of maturing where differences in ambition, talent and, especially in Deep River, intelligence, would divide them. They were lying on the mown grass of a hill overlooking their little Ottawa Valley town’s community center field facing the wide-bellied river, relaxing after the weekend basketball practice. Just to the northwest of the Staff House’s long, white-shingled northern arm and out of sight from their vantage point lay Dr C.J. MacKenzie High School. Its new, spacious gymnasium was the vital nexus of their young, athletic lives.

Across the Ottawa loomed the Laurentian hills, unsettled, unchanging and primeval, now reflected with palindromic perfection on the windless waters. They were mountains to everyone except the families who had come to Deep River from the West. To boys growing up it was a land of silence and mystery, a silvan place of wolves, windigos and endless tracts of forest, romantically dangerous in the way of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Where the village of 4500 now stood there had only been forest and farmland a scant 10 years before, a testament to the urgency and strategic import of Deep River’s single technology, the splitting of uranium atoms for electric power and nuclear weapons.

Gazing at the river, Pork cast his mind back to earlier, idyllic times when he and Batch were just starting out on their journey together. The great initiation of youth was that first trip across the dark waters, risking the hidden, spooling undercurrent at mid-river and sudden boat-tipping wind squalls out of the northwest. They had become schoolyard heroes with their first crossing in a stolen canoe.

Batch, supine and sleepy, let go with one of his famous extended belches while mouthing, ‘Fuck Cop Aldridge’ through the exhale. Eyes closed, pleased with himself, he uttered, Saves wear ’n tear on the arse. Sniggers, though everyone had heard it a thousand times before. Batch was almost fifteen, two months older than Pork, and already swelling into the Bachelder family’s powerful build. He was energetic, friendly by reflex, formidable in a fight, and with no interest at all in school, convinced by experience and the village vine’s ruthless family profiling that only the girls in his family were smart.

It had all started when Pork seized on Batch’s belch-talk as the opener he needed. He was the captain after all, and although no one else expected his leadership to extend beyond the basketball court, he expected it of himself. McKellar Jack Campbell, his hero grandfather and famous river logger, would certainly expect it. Joan would expect it too.

Pork uttered, Ferg’s the one who should be worryin’ about wear ’n tear on the arse.

What? snapped Ferg, paling and jerking upright.

The boy’s reaction startled the group, but then a lot of his behavior was strange, particularly in recent days.

I mean, what the fuck, Ferg! growled Pork. Raggin’ on Phoebie like that!

Ferg relaxed and lay back again, relieved. He had been sent to the showers at mid-practice that morning for mercilessly ribbing Phoebie for his trundling, arm-flapping gait, not stopping even after repeated warnings. Phoebie, overweight and generally overlooked, was too easy a target for Ferg’s razor wit, which was seldom mean-spirited. It was all very odd, very unFerg-like behavior. In fact, Ferg had been increasingly unFerg-like for some weeks now.

The big-boned, thick-set Phoebie threw up a dismissing hand from where he lay beside Batch, His problem, he uttered. I’m not the one in shit. Phoebie was muscled under all the fat and would eventually grow into a formidable linebacker. He could easily have hammered Ferg into the floorboards, but it was not in his conciliatory nature to be violent except in the ritual of contact sport. Besides, attention for the boy, either as the butt of ignoble humor or the shouldering of an execrable nick-name, was better than being ignored.

Ferg did not respond.

Rankled, Pork continued, Keep that kinda shit up and Art’s gonna kill you Ferg. Or worse, he’ll kick you off the team!

There was a murmur of agreement. Being a disappointment to their coach Art Johnson, ace basketball player, reputed atomic physicist at the Plant and overall role model was bad enough, but being kicked off the team was definitely a fate worse than death.

Ferg continued to stare into the height of blue. Ronald Allan Ferguson had been called Ferg for so long that it sounded strange when the teachers addressing him as ‘Ronny’. At fifteen, he too was beginning the slow morph into the taller, broader shape of manhood. All of the boys were changing in similar ways, and intensely aware of who was fast and who was slow, particularly in the appearance of facial and pubic hair.

Just when it looked like Ferg wasn’t going to answer, the kind of thing he’d do just to be irritating, he uttered quietly, That’s what I’m hoping.

It was a low sound, a whispered blasphemy.

Shocked, Pork laughed, Jesus Ferg! Y’er livin’ proof! Too much whackin’ off’s bad for the brain!

Laughter all around, some of it self-conscious. When a situation got serious or confusing, Pork leavened it with humor and he was good at it. He had learned early that humor deflected aggression and relaxed people, particularly hung-over drunks. Most people responded to his humor but some did not, most notably the town’s primary policeman, the thin-lipped, carefully shaven, Sargeant Aldridge, ex-British military with a missing left index finger. Aldridge had reasons not to laugh.

Oxer lifted onto an elbow and grunted, You nuts, Ferg? Oxer was solid middle class with two professional parents and he wore it like a badge of honor in a group where the other fathers except for Phoebie’s were blue collar or low-level white. Oxer was the only one with a mother who worked at the Plant in an office job. He affected never to swear, an overt class distinction from the others who would have said, ‘fuckin’ nuts." Always looking for an edge, Oxer had been discovered shaving his pubic hair to make it grow faster. The ribbing had been merciless, and led to blows between Oxer and a much larger boy in the schoolyard. Oxer was bloodied and beaten but the ribbing stopped. The boy back-paddled to no one.

Ferg glowered at Oxer, then turned to Pork, Who d’you room with on out-of-town trips?

Jeep Mungham uh course. You know that.

Well, then.

Well then what?

Ferg stared at him, his face beginning to flush. For a fearful moment, Pork thought he was going to cry.

Jeezus Ferg, he thought, don’t cry! Please don’t embarrass yourself! Don’t embarrass me! He hoped desperately that Ferg would just drop it, but the others were all looking his way, waiting for his reply. Pork could feel the situation sliding out of his control.

Everyone knew who Ferg’s room mate was. It was Art. The fact was, a lot of the guys on the team were puzzled by Ferg’s apparently special, anointed position given the fact that he exhibited merely moderate skills as a basketball player.

Ferg collected himself, and looking across the space between them, whispered, You know Pork. I know you know.

Ferg threw up an arm in frustration. It was a frail gesture, frail and resigned. And you, Pork. You’re the captain …

Pork stared back at him, guilt and fear swelling through him in waves, cornering him. Of course Ferg! He shared Art’s room on basketball road trips! Why had he thought that he was the only one? He suddenly felt as if he was in Cop Aldridge’s office, his mind racing to measure and evaluate the several threats of discovery arrayed against him.

Fer fuck’s sake, Ferg, Pork breathed, sliding the conversation sideways, What if I am the captain?

Tears welled in Ferg’s eyes, So you’re supposed to look out for me, goddammit! That’s what captains do!

In one of those flashes of insight that always seemed to come to him when he needed them most, Pork saw a way out. He could shut Ferg down by simply driving him right up against the unthinkable thought, forcing him – daring him — to put it into words.

C’mon Ferg, spit it out. This thing I’m s’posed to know. Spill it!

Ferg’s jaw dropped, his eyes widening, hurt around the outer edges. He had expected that Pork would be on his side, back him up, be his captain. But Ferg had never been up against the law, had never been forced to practice the art of survival on the fly.

At that frozen moment, Carla Milanovitch, the prettiest girl in Deep River or anywhere else, approached with her closest friend, Joan Baker, the plainest, uncommonly brightest girl in his Grade Nine class. It spoke to the power of The Carla’s blond, carefully coiffed curls, enormous blue eyes and rosebud red lips always set in a camera-ready smile that the pack turned as a unit, drawn from the cliff edge of Ferg’s awful revelation. Watching this girl, now swelling in her own wonderful way into maturity was reflex, part of the recent, powerful hormonal surging that was playing havoc with their lives.

Hi Carla, called Phoebie, the one who stood the least chance of gaining her interest. The Carla simply enlarged her smile, at no one and everyone, a priceless political response calculated to make each boy think the smile was for him alone. Phoebie wilted with pleasure, a pattern with women that would later bring him to grief. Oxer, the most advanced in the dawning art of dealing with the opposite sex, studiously ignored her, carefully examining his fingernails while affecting a disinterested yawn. Batch, wordless and bashful around girls, sat up smoothly, a motion that forced definition of his considerable forearm muscles.

Pork loved the look of The Carla too, but his interest was in the gangly, disdainful girl beside her. For her part, Joan Baker favored them with a quick look, which was ignored by everyone except Pork who knew it was for him. Pork and Joan had their own silent story, a so-far secret bonding which, for Pork the reformed outlaw, involved his seeking her respect, not only in school but in life generally. In the full sunlight, he was startled by how pale she looked. Sure, she was light-skinned by nature, just like him, but there was something in her pallor that was not there before. Studying too hard, too often, too long, he thought.

Joan’s glance suddenly recalled for Pork the kind of person he was still trying to become, the kind she and McKellar Jack expected him to be, and with this he turned back towards Ferg feeling guilt. He always had the instinct to do the ‘right thing’ but it had been routinely overridden during his ‘bad to the bone’ period as one of his Sunday School teachers described it, and it was not yet reflex. His timing was still off, and in his purposeful growth process he still relied heavily on the expectations of others to give him direction.

Ferg was walking away. Pork jumped up and ran after him, Wait up Ferg! C’mon, wait up!

Ferg stopped, but continued to look away, hastily brushing his eyes. Pork looked at the boy’s hunched shoulders and suddenly felt terribly sorry for him. Though he, Pork, ofen fancied himself as a kind of romantic outsider, Ferg was the one who was truly alone. The boy was often with the pack but never of the pack, blocked by a force field that seemed to emanate from both sides.

You’re right Ferg, said Pork quietly. I do know. Just didn’t know what to do, didn’t like to think about it. C’mon back.

Ferg, now composed, warned, You’ve likely got off easy, Pork. This’ll be harder to take than you think.

I know, said Pork, worried, but shit, you know and I know too. We gotta do something. It was the one positive legacy of Pork’s life of crime that he was a realist, and knew instinctively when a situation called for action.

As the boys returned, a window opened in the long, low, white-shingled hotel across the greenery from them. It housed the single staff who worked for the village’s only employer, the big atomic energy research centre at nearby Chalk River. They could hear the grinding beat of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, the soundtrack music to the current teen movie hit, The Blackboard Jungle, and progenitor song of the imminent rock’n’roll explosion: ‘We’re gonna rock, around the clock tonight, we’re gonna rock, rock, rock ’til broad daylight …’

Oxer, the group’s first rock ’n roll fan, nodded towards the Staff House and said simply, See, told you it was coming.

The girls had moved on and everyone turned to Ferg’s breaking news, something unbelievable, something that concerned Art. There was an uncomfortable silence until Oxer in a condescending tone copied from his mother drawled, Okay, Ferg, go ahead, bore us. Just don’t make it too long.

Like the others, Oxer could feel what was coming and wanted to make light of it, fearing as they all did that Ferg was about to peel away something vital from the comforting canopy sheltering them from the adult world, exposing them to the grave issues of life before it was time. Sure, they were anxious, even eager, to enter the realm of adults with all its freedoms, forbidden pleasures and late nights, yet they were hesitant. Wade shared their anxiety but not their uncertainty as he braced himself for what was coming. Like them, he could foresee the loss of what could well be their last long hot summer in the eden that was Deep River boyhood.

Ronald Allan Ferguson seated himself, hesitated a long tilting moment, and took them out of that halcyon world forever.

CHAPTER 02

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FATHER JOSEPH R. McElligott could taste the dust swirling up in the late afternoon heat as the big bulldozers ploughed away rocks and tree stumps along the invisible lines that charted the new townsite’s road system. When he first heard of the government’s plan to build an entire village in his agricultural parish in 1944, the year before, he had been pleased. The economy of the upper Ottawa Valley had been severely depressed ever since the collapse of the timber trade, and made worse by the market crash in ’29 and the Great Depression that followed. The new town with its substantial government payroll was the first good economic news in a long while — that is, if in-flowing soldier’s pay wasn’t counted, which Father McElligott was reluctant to do given the numbers of Valley men who had already died in the European war.

He did, however, worry about the disrupting effects of the new people on his conservative Catholic flock, numbering only about forty families of mostly Scots, Irish and French, and the ten or so Indian families recently uprooted along the river to make way for the village. They would be submerged by hundreds, even thousands, of fresh young families, many of which would be headed by scientists and engineers. Such people were notorious for their propensities towards atheism. And they would be coming from all over the world, mostly from Britain, but also from France and various other parts of liberated Europe. The influx of these strangers would bring in new ideas and strange customs, some of which might encourage too much free thought among his people, or worse, outright apostasy. After all, Europeans were always the source of the ideas that kept knocking society off its comfortable equilibrium: communism, fascism, illimitable democracy, a Darwinism that challenged God’s role in creation, and worst of all, a brand of ‘modernist’ thinking that ran counter to the social mores sanctioned by the Church, in particular permissiveness in matters of sex.

Not that he wasn’t up for a good fight; far from it. His big right hand tightened reflexively into a meaty fist. The liberals at the Catholic colloques in Ottawa had dubbed him ‘Father Syllogism’ for his relentless application of the Aristotelian logic system in his no-holds-barred brand of intellectual warfare. He wasn’t necessarily smarter than those ‘effete’ Catholics — his word — but he had greater conviction and a whole lot more aggression. As for physical combat, there were Protestant boys in his hometown of Eganville down the Valley who likely still carried scars from their encounters with him.

But the newspaper had called these newcomers the brightest people in the world, particularly some of the English and the French. Those damned French. Some of God’s secrets, he thought ruefully, should remain secret. Caution would be his watchword, caution and increased vigilance.

The builders themselves, the men on the ground doing the actual construction work for a company called Fraser Brace, had shown him the utmost respect. Some of them had even turned out to be good Catholics, attending Mass and giving generously to the St Alexander’s collection plates. And the scientific leaders, men from Canada’s National Research Council, and oddly from England too, had been excessively courteous, sensitive to local conditions and particularly respectful of his station in the community. After all, hadn’t they come to him, a Valley-born man and reputed local historian, when they wanted a name for the new town? The English, with their own ideas of Canada as a wilderness favored the name Indian Point after a prominent sand spit across the Ottawa river in Quebec, but the Post Office saw a problem of confusion with the existing village of Indian Point in Saskatchewan. He had only to point out that the early French voyageurs called the particular stretch of dark water facing the new community la riviere creuse, or Deep River, and Deep River it became, with even the Britishers showing enthusiasm.

He recalled with pleasure an evening spent in his study discussing philosophy and politics with two leaders from the project, an Englishman named John Cockcroft, the director of the so-called ‘Petawawa Works’ research complex being built near Chalk River where everyone would work, and Chalmers Jack MacKenzie, head of the project and president of the National Research Council of Canada, the NRC. Cockcroft, a middle-height, urbane tea-drinker was the quintessential English gentleman, diffident, brilliant and engaging, his accent a pure pleasure to listen to. Not like those hackneyed government bureaucrats with their ersatz Ottawa ‘English’. He was the scientific star, gifted by everyone’s account, with a mind that often seemed only partly there, a deeper dimension of the man wandering in regions accessible only to a few others of his kind. The priest was impressed with the way Cockcroft’s mind ranged through the Greek philosophers, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle and even Mohammedans like Avicenna and Averroes, taking away only what he needed in formulating his view of reality. All philosophy is personal, he said quietly, adding provocatively, like religion. His knowledge of St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscan Schoolmen had his host wondering momentarily if he was in the presence of a closet Catholic. It was no surprise to Father McElligott when the Swedes awarded Cockcroft the Nobel Prize in physics a few years later.

Chalmers Jack MacKenzie, who everyone including his car driver referred to as CJ, had the common touch and folksy parlance, just as he himself had, and with the same strict limits on familiarity. The man scarcely came up to the priest’s shoulder, but there was absolutely no doubt in his demeanor and the piercing intellectual acuity in his eyes that he was the man in charge, the leader. Cockcroft would do the heavy thinking but he would do the heavy lifting, twist the right political arms, marshal the necessary resources, bring in the needed people, keep to the schedule of their splendid enterprise. As the diminutive man matched him scotch for scotch, Father McElligott realized that they were natural allies and could be friends, a kind of Mutt and Jeff alliance, if of course either of them ever had the time to spare from work.

But the Priest also recognized that Mackenzie was not telling him the truth about the Petawawa Works, that it was simply a cover name to suggest routine war work for the nearby Petawawa military base.

For his part, Mackenzie was startled to discover that the priest was not only acquainted with the concepts of Cockcroft’s specialty, nuclear physics, but that he was privy to some of the very high level rumors circulating in official Ottawa regarding the project’s real purpose. The stories about the effectiveness of the Holy See’s intelligence network were likely not exaggerations. The circumspect NRC president explained that great care had to be taken because of the threat of espionage, not German espionage but simply espionage, and he added cryptically that the priest’s suspicions of a cover story, could not be dismissed outright. Father McElligott’s head ached the next day, partly from the scotch and partly from the after-effects of the prolonged intellectual wrestling match. It was weeks before he stopped missing the company of the two men. There was more of a price to pay than most people knew in taking Holy Orders.

On this particular afternoon, July 19, 1945, he was troubled and went for a walk into the townsite, strolling familiar pathways down towards his summer cottage on the river. He was a big, bulky man, always dressed in the black of his order even in the heat of summer, with large, round glasses that his critics said made him look too severe. He liked this reputation for severity, just as he liked the occasional whiskey. Those same critics would drop the word ‘occasional’ although never within earshot. His real passion, however, which raised the eyebrows of the citified Fathers in particular, was for hunting, and he knew every inch of the forest he now walked. His partridge trails used to lace down the slopes and across the two prominent terraces of land on which the town was now taking shape. It had been a beautiful forest, of pristine Jack, White and Red pine, redolent with conifer scent all the way to the cedars near the river. Along the higher terrace the silences were broken only by the distant sounds of wind over river wave. No more drumming of partridge or snorting of deer in this opening land, he thought, no more honking of geese in the shoreline marshes now being cleared. The Indian families living along the shoreline since the beginning, with their ownership acknowledged in letters from Queen Victoria herself, had already been moved to lands along the old Wylie Road to the southwest of the new townsite. McElligott felt a stab of guilt for not doing more to protest against their summary uprooting, closeted as it was under the neartheft legal term of ‘expropriation’. The solitude of his cottage, across from the magnificent upcropping of stone on the Quebec side that formed Mount Martin, would soon be gone forever. He would miss the silences. The purity in the way the wind from the north transformed the river’s darkness into blue, white-topped waves, cold even in summer, was best savored alone.

As he walked down newly graveled streets past two- and three-bedroom houses that had not been there short weeks before, he admired the way the planners had allowed the shape of the land itself to determine the layout of the town. There was something elemental, Indian, in this respect for the natural order of things. No simple, uncaring lattice grid for them, no casual scraping away what Nature and God had painstakingly laid down over the eons.

What had startled him initially were the houses themselves. They were not built from the ground up in slow, incremental steps like other houses, but hauled in on the beds of huge trucks from faraway places now closing called Nobel and Nitro near Parry Sound where explosives had been manufactured for the war. The houses had been cracked in half like so many eggs to fit on the long narrow beds, and simply grafted back together at their new sites and tipped onto cedar posts rooted in the red sand of the Valley.

Sweating workmen digging water main trenches paused to wave at the now familiar figure of the big priest from the church at the turn of the highway. One man, hunched and older, wiped a red handkerchief across his brow, looked up at him smiling and said, Good fer diggin’, but not fer growin’. Father McElligott returned the smile, thinking, Knows this is only potato soil. A farmer making ends meet? Not local, and hasn’t been to Mass. A final hope. Could be lapsed.

The black-tarred water piping already laid down behind them looked like an enormous, sinuous snake stretching off into the distance following the road bank. Father McElligott suddenly realized that there was a reason beyond mere respect for topology for making the streets flow in gentle curves the way they did. The intent was to slow cars on the roads. The planners had in mind the safety of children at play.

This common care for human life, particularly in these morally tainted technocrats, caused him to smile and helped lift the shadow that had spread in his soul since reading the Ottawa Journal’s lead story that morning. The headline trumpeted the destruction of an entire Japanese city, Hiroshima, with a single bomb that, it explained, unleashed the titanic energies found in the core of uranium atoms.

Whatever that meant. He didn’t know that much about what the paper called the ‘dawning of the atomic age’ but he did know that the people being called together at Deep River would be doing research into the same satanic energies that had just obliterated a hundred thousand souls, almost all of them innocent civilians. And, he thought grimly, there were Catholic churches in Hiroshima. What kind of people would come here willingly to do work like that? Granted, Canadians would not be building bombs, only working on what were called ‘peaceful’ uses for atomic energy, or so they were saying. But building such enormously powerful weapons might prove irresistible to a young country like Canada anxious to increase its prestige among the nations. There will come a day, he thought ruefully, when all countries will desire these fearsome weapons and in the long run they will have them. The biblical end-of-days battle of Armageddon was truly prophetic, but it would be human hands rather than the Hand of God that touched off the final conflict.

The distinctions that MacKenzie and Cockcroft made between the military and peaceful uses of the atom thus failed to resonate with him or allay his suspicions. Though these two captains and their men might be expert in building the machines that harnessed this new energy, they shared the same blind spot as everyone else when it came to confronting the real danger surrounding nuclear science – the foibles of human nature. Was he, McElligott, the only one who appreciated the grim irony of this new energy form destroying a community in faraway Japan at virtually the same time as it was creating another one here in the Ottawa Valley? He shook his head as he walked, feeling suspended on the horns of a moral dilemma, not knowing what to think. It was as if a kind of ethical dead hand had touched this earnest, youthful enterprise at its foundation and he feared for the souls and safety of the young men and women who even now were beginning to occupy some of the completed houses. He would have to pray for guidance.

As he walked over the soft gravel of Algonquin street, running down towards the northeast in the direction of Lemure’s beach and his cottage, he noticed a black Ford Victoria, a 1932 by his estimation, being unloaded at the corner of the recently cleared Glendale Avenue. The car was old, but well maintained. A young man with coal-black hair combed straight back and shiny, like the movie star Tyrone Power, was lifting a large brown trunk off the top of the car, and though possessed of the solidity and strength of a working man, he was having trouble with his awkward cargo. Not a scientist, thought Father McElligott, despite his prominent glasses, likely trade, and he doesn’t have a military bearing though he’s clearly military age.

Across the sand that would become the dwelling’s front lawn, a slim, pretty woman with dark brown, curly hair stood with a blond boy in her arms examining her new home doubtfully. The house, a two-bedroom ‘Wartime Four’ still lacked a front porch and steps, and was small for a family with more than one child. The carried boy could not be much older than three, and the woman on closer examination was more fulsome, with farm girl strength in her frame. Watching the man with a look of concern that verged on the critical, was another boy of about seven or eight, with the curly brown hair of his mother and a focus all his own. This one is too serious for his age, thought Father McElligott, and growing up too fast.

Suddenly the trunk lurched sideways. The man’s arm shot up to stabilize it but he was plainly in trouble. Father McElligott, moving with surprising speed for a man of his bulk, strode across the space between them, gripped the trunk on its further side, and together the two men lowered it to the ground.

Let me help you to the house, offered the priest.

The young man nodded, thankful, then noticed the white collar. His natural instinct was to be friendly, Father McElligott noted, but the collar triggered something else in him, something learned. Up close, the young man was pale, an inside worker, and the sheen of perspiration on his brow did not come from exertion. He had been drinking, but was still carefully in control. Father McElligott knew the feeling. Thanks, the man replied, but we’ll unpack it from here. Not unfriendly, but formal, and final.

Father McElligott had grown accustomed to that look since taking his Orders. This man clearly did not like to offend but could not quite mask the knee-jerk dislike for priests of the true faith. Still, he, Joseph McElligott, would observe the simple formalities. He extended his hand, Father Joseph McElligott, St Alexander’s parish on the highway coming in from Pembroke.

The young man hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second and took the priest’s hand, shaking it once with a grip of strength. Dugal Campbell.

Where do you hail from Mr. Campbell?

Little town near Parry Sound on Georgian Bay, McKellar.

A long way to travel in one day.

The young man simply nodded. The woman, watching him, smiled a sincere smile. Father McElligott knew that part of Georgian Bay. It was settled primarily by Scots and Dutch, all of them solidly Orange Free Lodge.

The priest stepped back up onto the gravel, on his way again. He turned before leaving and raised a hand of both greeting and farewell, Let me be the first to welcome you to Deep River, he said cordially. But the man had already moved to the other side of the car, to other luggage. The young woman’s hand came up, returning the wave, Thank you, she said, widening her smile, taking her own stand. Her three-year-old grinned and waved too, vigorously. The seven-year-old’s hand came up beside his waist and made a single fanning motion, furtive, a contingent wave best concealed. It was a fine balance of respect for the rules inside the family and the proprieties that existed outside.

Something’s wrong there, said Father McElligott to himself as he walked, noting that the planners had left a pretty little copse of white pine in the centre part of a short circular drive looping off the street. Family math’s all wrong. Five years between children is far too long…

His thought was interrupted by the young man’s voice, raised in anger. Wade! Where’d that boy get to? Jesus, Kate! Delbert, go find your brother! The older boy hesitated, then turned to his mother who simply nodded and off he went behind the house. Even now, the boy was filtering his father’s commands through his mother, the one he deemed to be the real responsibility in the family. The priest had seen it in drinking families before, in his own drinking family. He watched the young woman, still carrying her charge, move hurriedly along the butt extension where Glendale ended, calling, Wade, Wade Campbell! You come back here this instant! Wade! There was impatience in her voice, a mother accustomed to a wandering son, but there was also an edge of concern. This was a new, strange land to the woman, easy for a boy to get lost in, and darkness was already coming earlier.

As the priest hesitated, he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye in one of the partly finished houses to his right, a three-bedroom ‘Wartime Six.’ Inside one of the frames for the living room front window, he just caught sight of a blond head bobbing up, then down again. Next, he saw the same head peering out from the door frame at him, then darting back to avoid detection. Father McElligott smiled. This one was the rebel, just as he himself had been, an outsider by reflex. He felt relief in the edge of concern carried in the mother’s voice. The boy was loved.

Your mother is calling you, Mr Wade Campbell, announced the priest across the yard in a deep voice that both projected and was confidential. After a second the full boy, a sturdy five-year-old in a T-shirt and shorts, appeared in the door frame. He jumped down onto the sand, turned and shouted in a high, trilling voice, Over here, Mommy! He waved frantically. The mother returned his wave, and motioned him to her with a silent scoop motion of her free arm.

Instead, the boy trotted over to the priest. He was carrying a carpenter’s hammer. His hair was brush-cut short, and the widespaced blue eyes in the roundish face carried frank curiosity in them. He too had the family friendliness, but without the father’s reservations.

Who’re you? the boy asked, grinning.

Father McElligott, Mr Wade Campbell, but you can just call me ‘Father’.

Father? said the boy, perplexed. You a dogan?

Why yes, Wade Campbell, I suppose I am.

The boy’s nose wrinkled, smelling something bad. We don’t like dogans.

Do you know any dogans?

The boy thought a moment, Not really. Jist you, I giss.

How do you feel about me?

The boy thought about this, You’re okay, I giss.

But you’ll just have to wait and see.

I giss.

Where did you get the hammer, Wade Campbell?

I found it in that house there.

Don’t you think you should put it back? The man who owns it will be looking for it when he returns to work tomorrow.

Finders-keepers, losers-weepers, said the boy, setting his lower lip.

But the man didn’t lose it, Wade Campbell. He left it there.

The boy looked at the hammer, then up at the priest, then away, Maybe, he replied.

Why not just put it back? You’ll be glad you did.

The boy thought a moment, glanced up at the priest mischievously and slowly shifted the hammer behind his back.

A shout from the father broke the connection between the priest and the boy. He was standing at the corner, arms akimbo. His focus was on his son, ignoring the priest. There was anger and threat in his voice. Wade goddammit! You git back here when your mother calls you!

The priest could see fear in the boy’s face, but it was contained, Gotta go, Wade said quietly.

The hammer, Wade. I’ll put it back for you.

A final hesitation, and the boy handed it to the priest.

I’ll speak to your father, Wade, said Father McElligott, feeling some heat. Whatever was driving the man’s anger, he thought, it had better not be the boy’s ‘sin’ of simply speaking to me.

No, no, the boy said quickly. I’m in fer it anyway. His eyes were not so much on the priest as on his forfeited prize.

As the boy trotted off, the priest called, You’ll like it here, Wade Campbell.

Wade smiled back briefly, You’re nice, he whispered, then turned and broke into a run towards certain punishment.

He accepts it now, thought Father McElligott, and recalling his own hard-handed father and the incident that drove him out of his own home, but a time will come when he won’t.

CHAPTER 03

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THE COLD WEATHER came early to the Ottawa Valley in the Autumn of 1945, part of a general global cooling trend that would desiccate the bread-basket plains of the northern hemisphere in the Spring that followed. The chill air masses flowing out of the northwest that season led to one of the coldest periods ever recorded by Canada’s Dominion Bureau of Statistics, with so little snow cover that it precipitated one of the worst droughts and famines in the history of Russia, still in deep shock from a war that cost it over 25 million lives, about double Canada’s entire wartime population. Across the Russian steppes, weather was replacing weaponry as the principal threat to survival.

For Wade Campbell, roaming in the crisp, sunlit mornings of that first Deep River autumn, the only evidence of war was in the daily truckloads of gray-suited young men brought to the townsite from the big Centre Lake POW camp on the Petawawa Military Reserve to help in the construction. These arrived at just about the time that big green buses swallowed up his father and virtually the entire male population of the village and took them off for the entire day to what everyone called The Plant. The Plant’s hush-hush nature was a thrill to the children, a mystery place like Peter Pan’s Never-Never land. It became even more surreal when they found out that their fathers had to swear on the Bible not to talk about their work, not even to their wives and especially not to their children. Wade felt that the authorities could be confident that his dad would never break their ironclad rule. He never once spoke to his sons about the Plant’s guarded secrets nor anything else for that matter.

At the end of the first week of September, Wade’s parents sat at breakfast just before the Plant buses arrived, looking out the kitchen window at a layer of sparkle blanketing the sand where their lawn would be. It was the season’s first hard frost. Christ, it’s jist gone September, said Dugal morosely, this country’s cold.

Katherine, practiced at being upbeat to counter his melancholy, replied, It’s cold everywhere this year. Radio said farmers south of Toronto got frost yesterday.

Dugal sat back thoughtfully, I dunno Kate, maybe …

She could tell that he was losing hope in the new job, missing friends and family in McKellar. Back home in his Gaelic community drinking was ritual, part of the covenant among men. Here, it was just consumption, and for Dugal usually alone. Always moneyconscious, Dugal Campbell was not one to squander his wages in a bar.

Kate finished making his lunch and said briskly, So what’s goin’ on down there that you can’t tell your own wife about? Some of us wimmen think you’re makin’ one a them atomic bombs they hit the Japs with.

Dugal frowned, Hard ta say, not that they’d ever tell us in trades. But things git around. On Wednesday, one of our welding gang, Frank Baggs, heard a DIL engineer say … He paused. Wartime secrecy and the consequences of ‘loose lips’(they sink ships) still lingered even though World War II had just ended after two atomic bombs had obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ..he heard ’im say that somethin’ big was about tuh happen in the ZEEP building. ZEEP’s a weird lookin’ little machine with a circular metal drum in the middle and surrounded by a thick cement wall. The inside uh the thing is packed with cooling pipes. Took us all summer tuh do the weldin’ fer them. They say it’s the model fer the really big machine being built right next to it called NRX.

Katherine frowned, What does that mean, ZEEP, NRX?

Not sure. They say we’ll all know in a couple ’a months. But the P in ZEEP apparently means ‘pile’. It’s what they call an ‘atomic pile’. Dugal’s voice lowered, The same kinda machine the Americans used tuh make their atomic bombs. He looked across the table at his pretty young wife as the significance of this set in. He wondered what lucky star had ever gifted him with her. A few of us wandered over tuh ZEEP late Wednesday afternoon and found all the engineers and white-shirts shakin’ hands an’ celebratin’. Even breakin’ out champagne. No one said what the foofahraw was all about, uh course, the usual hush-hush bullshit, but things git around. We heard they had started up the ZEEP, that it ‘went critical,’ whatever that means, so the big one, the NRX, is also bound ta work. Good thing too, because if it didn’t we’d all likely get pink-slipped. Dugal paused, then added with some pride, Apparently it’s the first atomic pile built outside the States. We even beat the Brits to it, though they seem to be runnin’ things.

Katherine looked worried, Could it blow up? By accident?

Dugal’s brow knit as he considered this. Not likely. The big shots all seem ta be scientists, and a lot of ’em are English an’ others from Europe. Not the Ottawa office boys you kin count on ta foul things up. The guy in charge of ZEEP is a big white-haired Polack name of Lew Kowarski, real friendly. He brought us out some champagne when he noticed us watchin’. Used to chew the fat with us when we were doin’ his weldin’. He’s the real deal. You kin see by the way the other scientists treat him.

Kowarski, French despite his name, was part of the Anglo-French nuclear team that had come to Canada at the outbreak of the war. He would later return to head up the France’s nuclear program.

But we’re all workin’ people here, said Katherine, waving an arm to indicate the immediate neighborhood. Where are the families of these scientists?

Dugal smiled the grim smile of the permanently underappreciated. Gotta wait fer the real work ta be done by the likes uh us. Scientists need labs ta be scientists in. We heard they’re all comin’ up from Montreal soon. Frogtown. There’s a big lab down there and they’re transferrin’ the whole kit ’n kaboodle up here. Apparently some a the scientists there worked with the Americans on the bomb. Lotsa foreigners, English, French, an’ the like. Definitely not yer average DPs. DP or ‘Displaced Person’ referred to a European in Canada displaced by the war, waiting to be a citizen. It was a term of derision.

Kate hesitated, still not quite at ease, Well I jist hope they know what they’re doin’.

Dugal’s face softened into a rare smile that radiated his affection for her, Things’ll be fine, Kate. It’s gover’ment. No way they’d build somethin’ in danger of blowin’ up or expose us tuh anythin’ really risky.

Kate Simpson had been pursued by many young men in the Dunchurch-McKellar area before she met Dugal at a Christmas party in 1935, a time of exhaustion for farm people fighting the mortgage foreclosures that came with the worldwide Depression. She was scarcely 16, but knew immediately that the 18-year-old McKellar boy sitting by himself under a staircase, slim, silent, and tense, was the man for her. Later that winter, her father’s death from a burst appendix forced her to go down to Toronto to stay with her married sister Margaret and find work. Sometime around April or May, Dugal had hitch-hiked the 150 miles south to ‘the city,’ sought her out in the restaurant where she worked as a waitress, married her in a civil ceremony, and then returned alone to McKellar. Some months later in the summer, Ida Campbell met Mrs Simpson in George Angst’s McKellar general store and the other woman told her of a rumor that her son Dugal had married her own youngest daughter. When she asked Dugal about it later, he paused for some seconds before answering simply, It’s true ya know.

That autumn, Dugal and his father McKellar Jack built a bungalow across the road from the church, Kate returned from Toronto to set up house, and life simply continued as before with little comment or fuss. It was the bizarre but otherwise unremarkable beginning to a relationship of strength and lasting love that Wade later discovered was walled off by his mother’s prickly sensitivities to questions.

On this particular morning, Wade was up early and listening in on his parents from behind the couch. He caught his father’s loving expression and was warmed by it, feeling secure for some reason, but was shocked as tears suddenly welled up out of nowhere, catching him by surprise and blurring his sight. This worried him, since tear control was essential to a boy. Getting a reputation as a crybaby was just about the worst thing imaginable.

ZEEP! exclaimed Wade next day as he walked with Delbert and Clarey down Glendale towards Deep River Road. It was a sunny Saturday morning, and the three boys had been turned out of the house by their parents who were acting strangely towards each other, friendlier somehow.

What? asked Delbert, holding Clarey’s hand as they walked.

ZEEP! repeated Wade. It’s what ya make atom bombs with.

Where’d you hear that?

Dad said it to Mom.

Delbert turned on his younger brother, You spyin’ on ’em again?

Wade shrugged, realizing he had been caught out. Delbert might be another kid, but in their family he also seemed to be an adult, in charge of things, and had to be treated with the same caution at times.

Listen you little shit, warned Delbert. Dad knows secrets, and if they git out he could go to jail. You could go to jail! So watch your mouth. As they approached Deep River Road, they caught sight of a crowd around the Wartime Six that served as the temporary A & P grocery store. Okay, stick with me you guys. And do me a favor Wade, don’t mouth off so much. Try not to embarrass us with these people.

Delbert had been competent and bright for as long as Wade could remember him, a boy given to sober thought early and to taking charge of everything that his mother could not cope with, which in the longer run included his father. While the competence and brightness were likely genetic, especially the boy’s whiz-bang mind for math, others traits were definitely environmental, and here the crucial factors were his father and younger brother Wade. In a nutshell, he couldn’t rely on either of them, and stopped including them early in his plans for life. Delbert was a leader by reflex, and he seemed to realize that if the family was going to survive the chaos of his father and younger brother, it would be up to him and his mother. They were natural allies, and without ever discussing it the two of them set about organizing the household around Dugal’s fitful drinking, the need to police Wade and care for Clarey.

It was evident early that the hopes the Campbell parents had in their children were centred on Delbert. He was their poster child, serious and reliable, sitting effortlessly at the top of his class and a source of pride in the bruising, competitive conversations among parents that followed the issuing of school report cards. Katherine Campbell was often concerned that her exceptional son carried too much too soon on his still frail, seven-year-old shoulders, but the boy himself showed no ill effects. Temperamentally, Delbert was just being Delbert, a boy whose performance was not so much an effort as an intrinsic part of him. He was just like other boys with a singular difference that showed in his eyes when he was tired. They were older, and carried nothing of the carefree Huckleberry joy of being young.

Besides the responsibilities and expectations that fell to him, Delbert was also faced with the serious job of growing up himself, which placed time limits on his managing duties, in particular his riding herd on Wade. With his mother’s attention on Clarey and establishing an air of family normalcy in the young community, Delbert was left to control the movements of his wandering brother, but only up to a point. With his implacably Cartesian approach to problems, he simply supervised Wade up to a certain prescribed limit of endurance, and then cut him loose to get on with own life. For his part, Wade knew exactly where the limit was, recognizing when he could slip away and be free to observe the fascinating activity of an entire town rising out of the forest.

As yet only a few other families had arrived on Algonquin, Glendale and nearby Summit. Wade spent the cooling days of September and October getting to know his new domain and consolidating his knowledge of the family’s near neighbors, a prelude to the challenge of encountering the larger town and its legion of new friends and enemies. He scouted out the Catholic graveyard on a slope just above the old road that connected Pembroke in the south with Mattawa in the northwest. He wandered through the thickets of gravestones, some hoary with age but others more recent, unsure of what they were there for. The following year in the late spring, he would discover strawberries garlanding mounds in front of the stones which carried chiseled names like ‘Gleason,’ ‘Cotter,’ ‘Hawley’ and ‘Rathwell.’ He was not yet old enough to read the words nor appreciate what was buried beneath the sweet red berries. He regularly spied on Father McElligott as the big man strolled in the fields around St Alexander’s, careful not to alert the hounds running in sweeps ahead of him. Wade’s impulse was to greet the priest, but he couldn’t trust himself not to talk about it later, loquacity being his instinctive strategy for disarming the negative impulses of his father. He would always have to pay for his adventures when he got back home, but it would be to his mother and she never really had it in her to give him a real spanking.

One of the highlights of the end of summer for Wade was a visit by his uncle Wilfred from McKellar. Wilf was a physical replica of his brother Dugal, shortish, solid, with dark hair combed back tightly to the head, but there the similarities ended. At 18 years old, almost a decade younger than Dugal, Wilf resembled Wade’s hero grandfather in his upbeat cheerfulness, and like the older man laughed so hard when telling a joke that listeners had trouble hearing the punch line. Wade loved the younger man’s visits because he seemed to banish the somber atmosphere in the household. He smiled all the time, spoke with a kind of nasal drawl, and he had a raconteur’s genius for telling engaging stories with a take on life that was comic without being derisory. Though the meaning of what he said was often lost on Wade, the sheer metric resonances of the man’s voice and the way he paced through a tale with an operatic sense of sound and drama had a strong effect on the boy’s building appreciation of how to tell a convincing story. In later years, on reading Mark Twain’s book, Innocents Abroad, Wade would be struck by the similarity between Wilf’s dry wit and Twain’s, though Wilf lacked the great American writer’s occasional cruel sarcasm. When Wilf left again for McKellar the gloom seemed to settle in again, and Wade found himself wishing his secret, guilty wish of ultimate family betrayal — that his uncle, so like his father in appearance and his grandfather in nature, could stay on and be his father.

One afternoon, Wade and his recent friend, another five-year-old named Raymond (pronounced ‘Raymoe’) Brisebois were watching a truckload of young, mostly blond POWs as the vehicle was being gassed up at Kennedy’s Esso Station at the intersection of Deep River’s main road and the highway. Raymoe, who almost instantly became ‘Brizzy,’ could not speak a word of English and Wade knew nothing of French but this didn’t stop them from becoming instant friends. The men in the back of the truck had just finished work and were laughing and talking in a language Wade found as incomprehensible as Brizzy’s French although the syntax of their speech was oddly similar to his own. Behind the truck in a jeep sat four Canadian soldiers, all carrying rifles.

Jeez, whispered Wade to Brizzy, they’re guardin’ those guys. Maybe they’ll shoot one a them! Brizzy simply nodded, which felt like the right thing to do.

One of the soldiers, dressed in thick brown khaki, which looked uncomfortable, uttered, Christ, will you listen to those Krauts carry on, laughin’, jokin’ an’ all. We just flattened their country. It’s in ruins. You’d think they’da won the war instead of us!

Wade moved slowly towards the truck to get a better look. Through the wooden side slats, a blond head suddenly caught his attention. A young man whispered down to him, "Psst! Busche." Wade pointed a finger into his own stomach. The man nodded vigorously, and flipped a silver coin over the slats towards him. Wade stooped and picked it off the ground. It was a newly minted fifty-cent piece, beautiful and shiny. He would learn later that the Government of Canada paid the German prisoners for their labor. The young man then pointed to a red cooler beside the garage entrance and whispered, Coca Cola! and pointed to himself with both hands.

The man wanted Wade to buy him some cokes. The boy’s first thought was to simply run away with the magnificent coin. For sure the man in the truck would be shot if he tried to chase him. But as Wade looked up at the expectant, sweating face, he realized that the man, an adult, was asking him for help. Somehow this made a crucial difference. Wade turned towards the soldiers. The one who had called them Krauts was watching him, aware of what was going on. The soldier hesitated, looked around, and then back to Wade. He shrugged and nodded.

The garage owner, Mr Mark J. Kennedy who fought in the First World War, gave him five cokes at ten cents apiece, and a sixth one for free in a cardboard six-pack container. Boys look thirsty, said the rumpled old man. Wade noticed as he passed the bottles up to a chorus of Guten busche! that the man with the money shared the drinks with his fellow prisoners, about ten of them. This simple act of taking responsibility for the welfare of the others in the truck impressed Wade, reminding him of the close camaraderie he had seen in the logging gangs of his grandfather, John Campbell, known universally in the Georgian Bay watershed as McKellar Jack.

As Wade stepped back with the empty container, a soldier with gold broaches on his shoulders appeared at the front of the truck, and came striding back purposefully, waving him away, Get on home with you! Your dad’s gonna hear about this! He then turned on the jeep. Corporal! These are prisoners! Dregs that surrendered! Don’t show ’em any favors! It’s bad enough we pay ’em. He banged a crop he was carrying across the hood of the jeep, And collect every one of those bottles!

When the officer had gone, the soldiers smiled at each other with the casual contempt that tough men reserve for bravado. The Corporal growled, Chivvied-up brass hat! Those Krauts are Afrika Corps, every one of ’em. Seen more action in one day than that chicken hawk’ll see his whole life. He paused, and breathed, Officers! Then, remembering Wade, he uttered, Better beat it, kid.

The officer dutifully reported a description of the boy to the civilian Guard Station, the town’s fledgling police force, which singled Wade out as the culprit, and for which his father gave him a blistering spanking that left his buttocks red and raw. Normally when Wade knew he was ‘in for it,’ he would stay away long enough for his father’s anger to cool, but the Guard, the newly appointed Officer Edward Aldridge, ex-English military in the colonies, came to their house at supper time, leaving Wade to face his father’s fury while it was still fresh. The lesson he carried away from the disciplinary sessions was always the same: next time, be much more careful, don’t get caught. The beatings served to refine rather than reform his behavior, and strengthen his pride of endurance.

Wade was never sure why his father’s anger towards him was so immediate or why he seemed to dislike him so much. It plainly was not the way he felt about Delbert and Clarey. Whatever it was about him that caused the dislike, it always seemed to erupt at about his father’s seventh or eighth beer, Sunday afternoons being the worst possible time to be around him. It was then that Wade was singled out and his recent sins enumerated (a long, mostly accurate list), but it was often garbled with other problems his father was having at the Plant or the feelings he had for certain of his new Catholic neighbors. Somehow, Wade was tarred with responsibility