The boardinghouse 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 boardinghouse 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 boardinghouse 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 thirty-five hundred 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 traveling inbye in a man-rake, and a box jumped the track and crushed his leg. The son of a bitch 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?”
One of the miners explained. “It means Mike was on his way to work—going inbye—in a man-rake—that’s a car that takes you down to your working level. A box—that’s a coal train—jumped the track and hit him.”
“And stopped his lamp?” Lara asked.
The miner laughed. “When you’ve had your lamp stopped, it means you’ve been suspended.”
When Lara was fifteen, she entered St. Michael’s High School. She was gangly and awkward, with long legs, stringy black hair, and intelligent gray eyes still too large for her pale, thin face. No one quite knew how she was going to turn out. She was on the verge of womanhood, and her looks were in a stage of metamorphosis. She could have become ugly or beautiful.
To James Cameron, his daughter was ugly. “Ye hae best marry the first mon fool enough to ask ye,” he told her. “Ye’ll nae hae the looks to make a guid bargain.”
Lara stood there, saying nothing.
“And tell the poor mon nae to expect a dowry frae me.”
Mungo McSween had walked into the room. He stood there listening, furious.
“That’s all, girl,” James Cameron said. “Gae back to the kitchen.”
Lara fled.
“Why dae ye dae that to your daughter?” McSween demanded.
James Cameron looked up, his eyes bleary. “Nane of your business.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Aye. And what else is there? If it isn’t women, it’s the whiskey, isn’t it?”
McSween went into the kitchen, where Lara was washing dishes at the sink. Her eyes were hot with tears. McSween put his arms around her. “Niver ye mind, lassie,” he said. “He dinna mean it.”
“He hates me.”
“Nae, he doesna.”
“He’s never given me one kind word. Never once. Never!”
There was nothing McSween could say.
In the summer the tourists would arrive at Glace Bay. They came in their expensive cars, wearing beautiful clothes and shopped along Castle Street and dined at the Cedar House and at Jasper’s, and they visited Ingonish Beach and Cape Smoky and the Bird Islands. They were superior beings from another world, and Lara envied them and longed to escape with them when they left at the end of summer. But how?