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When James Cameron broke the news to Peggy, she was dismayed. ‘We don’t know anything about running a boarding house, James.’
‘We’ll learn. We’ll share the work.’
And she had believed him. ‘All right. We’ll manage,’ she said.
And, in their own fashion, they had managed.
Over the years, several opportunities had come along for James Cameron to get better jobs, employment that would give him dignity and more money, but he was enjoying his failure too much to leave it.
‘Why bother?’ he would grumble. ‘When Fate’s agin you, naething guid can happen.’
And on this September night, he thought to himself, they won’t even let me enjoy my whores in peace. Goddamn my wife.
When he stepped out of Madame Kirstie’s establishment, a chilly September wind was blowing.
I’d best fortify myself for the troubles aheid, James Cameron decided. He stopped in at the Ancient Mariner.
One hour later, he wandered toward the boarding house in New Aberdeen, the poorest section of Glace Bay.
When he finally arrived, half a dozen boarders were anxiously waiting for him.
‘The doctor is in wi’ Peggy,’ one of the men said. ‘You’d better hurry, mon.’
James staggered into the tiny, dreary back bedroom he and his wife shared. From another room, he could hear the whimpering of a newborn baby. Peggy lay on the bed, motionless. Dr Patrick Duncan was leaning over her. He turned as he heard James enter.
‘Wa’s goin’ on here?’ James asked.
The doctor straightened up and looked at James with distaste. ‘You should have had your wife come to see me,’ he said.
‘And throw guid money away? She’s only havin’ a baby. Wa’s the big …?’
‘Peggy’s dead. I did everything I could. She had twins. I couldn’t save the boy.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ James Cameron whimpered. ‘It’s the Fates agin.’
‘What?’
‘The Fates. They’ve always been agin me. Now they’ve taine my bairn frae me. I dinna …’
A nurse walked in, carrying a tiny baby wrapped in a blanket. ‘This is your daughter, Mr Cameron.’
‘A daughter? Wha’ the hell will I dae wi’ a daughter?’ His speech was becoming more slurred.
‘You disgust me, mon,’ Dr Duncan said.
The nurse turned to James. ‘I’ll stay until tomorrow, and show you how to take care of her.’
James Cameron looked at the tiny wrinkled bundle in the blanket and thought, hopefully: Maybe she’ll die, too.
For the first three weeks, no one was sure whether the baby would live or not. A wetnurse came in to tend to her. And finally, the day came when the doctor was able to say, ‘Your daughter is going to live.’
And he looked at James Cameron and said under his breath, ‘God have mercy on the poor child.’
The wetnurse said, ‘Mr Cameron, you must give the child a name.’
‘I dinna care wha’ the hell ye call it. Ye gie her a name.’
‘Why don’t we name her Lara? That’s such a pretty …’
‘Suit your bloody self.’
And so she was christened Lara.
There was no one in Lara’s life to care for her or nurture her. The boarding house was filled with men too busy with their own lives to pay attention to the baby. The only woman around was Bertha, the huge Swede who was hired to do the cooking and handle the chores.
James Cameron was determined to have nothing to do with his daughter. The damned Fates had betrayed him once again by letting her live. At night he would sit in the living room with his bottle of whiskey and complain. ‘The bairn murdered my wife and my son.’
‘You shouldn’t say that, James.’
‘Weel, it’s sae. My son would hae grown up to be a big strapping mon. He would hae been smart and rich, and taine good care of his father in his auld age.’
And the boarders let him ramble on.
James Cameron tried several times to get in touch with Maxwell, his father-in-law, hoping he would take the child off his hands, but the old man had disappeared. It would be just my luck the auld fool’s daid, he thought.
Glace Bay was a town of transients who moved in and out of the boarding houses. They came from France and China and the Ukraine. They were Italian and Irish and Greek, carpenters and tailors and plumbers and shoemakers. They swarmed into lower Main Street, Bell Street, North Street and Water Street, near the waterfront area. They came to work the mines and cut timber and fish the seas. Glace Bay was a frontier town, primitive and rugged. The weather was an abomination. The winters were harsh with heavy snowfalls that lasted until April, and because of the heavy ice in the harbour, even April and May were cold and windy, and from July to October it rained.
There were eighteen boarding houses in town, some of them accommodating as many as seventy-two guests. At the boarding house managed by James Cameron, there were twenty-four boarders, most of them Scotsmen.
Lara was hungry for affection, without knowing what the hunger was. She had no toys or dolls to cherish nor any playmates. She had no one except her father. She made childish little gifts for him, desperate to please him, but he either ignored or ridiculed them.
When Lara was five years old, she overheard her father say to one of the boarders, ‘The wrong child died, ye ken. My son is the one who should hae lived.’
That night Lara cried herself to sleep. She loved her father so much. And she hated him so much.
When Lara was six, she resembled a Keane painting, enormous eyes in a pale, thin face. That year, a new boarder moved in. His name was Mungo McSween, and he was a huge bear of a man. He felt an instant affection for the little girl.
‘What’s your name, wee lassie?’
‘Lara.’
‘Ah. ’Tis a braw name for a braw bairn. Dae ye gan to school, then?’
‘School? No.’
‘And why not?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Weel, we maun find out.’
And he went to find James Cameron. ‘I’m tauld your bairn does nae gae to school.’
‘And why should she? She’s only a girl. She dinna need nae school.’
‘You’re wrong, mon. She maun have an education. She maun be gien a chance in life.’
‘Forget it,’ James said. ‘It wad be a waste.’
But McSween was insistent, and finally, to shut him up, James Cameron agreed. It would keep the brat out of his sight for a few hours.
Lara was terrified by the idea of going to school. She had lived in a world of adults all her short life, and had had almost no contact with other children.
The following Monday, Big Bertha dropped her off at St Anne’s Grammar School, and Lara was taken to the principal’s office.
‘This is Lara Cameron.’
The principal, Mrs Cummings, was a middle-aged grey-haired widow with three children of her own. She studied the shabbily dressed little girl standing before her. ‘Lara. What a pretty name,’ she said smiling. ‘How old are you, dear?’
‘Six.’ She was fighting back tears.
The child is terrified, Mrs Cummings thought. ‘Well, we’re very glad to have you here, Lara. You’ll have a good time, and you’re going to learn a lot.’
‘I can’t stay,’ Lara blurted out.
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘My papa misses me too much.’ She was fiercely determined not to cry.
‘Well, we’ll only keep you here for a few hours a day.’
Lara allowed herself to be taken into a classroom filled with children, and she was shown to a seat near the back of the room.
Miss Terkel, the teacher, was busily writing letters on a blackboard.
‘A is for apple,’ she said. ‘B is for boy. Does anyone know what C is for?’
A tiny hand was raised. ‘Candy.’
‘Very good! And D?’
‘Dog.’
‘And E?’
‘Eat.’
‘Excellent. Can anyone think of a word beginning with F?’
Lara spoke up. ‘Fuck.’
Lara was the youngest one in her class, but it seemed to Miss Terkel that in many ways she was the oldest. There was a disquieting maturity about her.
‘She’s a small adult, waiting to grow taller,’ her teacher told Mrs Cummings.
The first day at lunch, the other children took out their colourful little lunch pails and pulled out apples and cookies, and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper.
No one had thought to pack a lunch for Lara.
‘Where is your lunch, Lara?’ Miss Terkel asked.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Lara said stubbornly. ‘I had a big breakfast.’
Most of the girls at school were nicely dressed in clean skirts and blouses. Lara had outgrown her few faded plaid dresses and threadbare blouses. She had gone to her father.
‘I need some clothes for school,’ Lara said.
‘Dae ye now? Weel, I’m nae made of money. Get yourself something frae the Salvation Army Citadel.’
‘That’s charity, Papa.’
And her father had slapped her hard across the face.
The children at school were familiar with games Lara had never even heard of. The girls had dolls and toys, and some of them were willing to share them with Lara, but she was painfully aware that nothing belonged to her. And there was something more. Over the next few years, Lara got a glimpse of a different world, a world where children had mothers and fathers who gave them presents and birthday parties and loved them and held them and kissed them. And for the first time, Lara began to realize how much was missing in her life. It only made her feel lonelier.
The boarding house was a different kind of school. It was an international microcosm. Lara learned to tell where the boarders came from by their names. Mac was from Scotland … Hodder and Pyke were from Newfoundland … Chiasson and Aucoin were from France … Dudash and Kosick from Poland. The boarders were lumbermen, fishermen, miners and tradesmen. They would gather in the large dining room in the morning for breakfast and in the evening for supper, and their talk was fascinating to Lara. Each group seemed to have its own mysterious language.
There were thousands of lumbermen in Nova Scotia, scattered around the peninsula. The lumbermen at the boarding house smelled of sawdust and burnt bark, and they spoke of arcane things like chippers and edging and trim.
‘We should get out almost two hundred million board feet this year,’ one of them announced at supper.
‘How can feet be bored?’ Lara asked.
There was a roar of laughter. ‘Child, board foot is a piece of lumber a foot square by an inch thick. When you grow up and get married, if you want to build a five-room, all wood house, it will take twelve thousand board feet.’
‘I’m not going to get married,’ Lara swore.
The fishermen were another breed. They returned to the boarding house stinking of the sea, and they talked about the new experiment of growing oysters on the Bras d’Or lake, and bragged to one another of their catches of cod and herring and mackerel and haddock.
But the boarders who fascinated Lara the most were the miners. There were 3,500 miners in Cape Breton, working the collieries at Lingan and Prince and Phalen. Lara loved the names of the mines. There was the Jubilee and the Last Chance and the Black Diamond and the Lucky Lady.
She was fascinated by their discussion of the day’s work.
‘What’s this I hear about Mike?’
‘It’s true. The poor bastard was travelling inbye in a man-rake, and a box jumped the track and crushed his leg. The sonofabitch of a foreman said it was Mike’s fault for not gettin’ out of the way fast enough, and he’s having his lamp stopped.’
Lara was baffled. ‘What does that mean?’
