Remembering Maggie, Lon and Footprints in the Snow.
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By Kenneth Bagnell
In a village, one I felt to be my home, there’s a house weathered by history and in sight of a wide and always silver sea. The village is in Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island, and is called Port Morien. The house, one lingering in memory as I pass my 80th year, has been there so many years I can’t guess the number. As I remember, it rises somewhat alone in the sprawling fields. Behind it are two sheds, a barn and — stretching to the distance in a green and silent meadow – -is the deep green forest. In front and beyond for at least a mile, is the sparking silver sea. It is a morning near the middle of December, over seventy years ago, and in the house are an elderly man, his wife and a small boy, then seven years old. In a sense the boy has become their boy, for they are childless. He is also their friend – their special friend – for he visits so often they call him, not by his name, but simply “Dear.” It will always be that way, even after the boy is grown and gone far away so does not often return. I was the boy. The woman, whose name is Maggie, is tall with strong features, eyes dark and flashing and hair swept to the back of her head. The man is called Lon, and like the sound of his name, is soft and gentle, with a face round and smooth. I am with him that day and many winter days because school is closed for Christmas recess. So, as usual, I have come to the village to be with my grandparents and their family — my eight aunts and uncles who live in the large house across the field from Maggie and Lon. Maggie is my grandmother’s sister, Lon my grandfather’s brother. Often Maggie crosses the field to visit my grandmother, Sarah, and they lapse into the language of their childhood, the Gaelic. Every morning after breakfast I pull on my winter leggings, put on my cap with its ear lugs, and run across the field, past the water well, sheathed in ice, and then over the footpath where the dead grass cracks beneath my feet. I rap on the back door of Maggie and Lon’s. The greeting is always the same: “Well dear, it’s time again.” Each December it’s always “time again,” year after year. I wait all fall and then the day comes, a cold and birdless day, which means it’s time for Lon and I to head off each morning for a winter adventure in the snow. We head to the woods beyond the house, into the deep cold forest, its spruce trees brushing the sky, its paths softened in winter white. We are looking for the places where, so often, we set the snare for rabbits. We know all the paths, since we pick the berries in the summer and set the snares in the winters. Some paths lead to bootleg pits that are very old and falling in. Lon keeps us distant for he is a careful man, having been made so by his life in the coal mines. He is slow, for he is bent over, after being badly hurt in the mines, not once but twice. When he was only in his twenties, his back was broken and years later, a stone fell on him crushing his shoulders, and leaving him alone underground for many hours. He barely lived and did not go to the mines ever again and is very hesitant to speak of his life below ground. So we never talk about it. Mostly and naturally, we talk of the coming of Christmas. He speaks of how it was when he was a young man, in the early 1900s, buying gifts for his mother and father. He was never well to do. “I made forty cents a day,” he told me. So he saved his coinage for weeks upon weeks to buy a gift for each parent. He would ask me over and over about how my school work was going and I thought for years how strange it was that he never used the word “grade” but instead the word “book.” “What book are you in now dear?” he’d say. Or else: “You should go on to the last book dear, and then perhaps you can go to college.” Each morning we will go back into the forest – or “the woods” as he called them, Year after year in my early childhood, I would follow Lon in his footprints in the snow, as we headed to his favorite place to set the snares. Once he surprised me, by recalling the story of good King Wenceslaus and his page. He laughs and pretends that like the King — whose steps, in the snow, made it easier for his page — my elderly friend was actually warming the snow for the boy behind him. Then one morning I woke with a sore throat and could not go to the woods so looked out my bedroom window, as he slowly trudged alone across the field, crawled beneath the fences, and disappeared into the forest. Before noon, he was back, climbed the stair to my room to show me the rabbit in my snare. I will not know until I have grown up and Lon is gone, that every evening, just at dusk, he went alone back to the snares he’d set, with a rabbit under his jacket, one’d he’d bought at the store so that if none were caught that day, he’d place the one from the store in a snare so I would not be disappointed. In time, life inevitably came between us. I’d go away, as he hoped to college, to become as he and Maggie hoped, a minister. Maggie gave me all the help she could: a large bundle of old church papers, yellow with age but with articles they felt might help me if I had to prepare a sermon while still a student. Now and then, while still young, I’d go back to the village and, once or twice, took part in the service in the church which still stands with, as elsewhere, declining members. Lon always spoke his usual sentence as I stood at the door to greet the departing congregation: “You are doing wonderful dear, wonderful.” All his life he was teaching me, through his life, without his intention or my understanding, one of life’s greatest truths: it is better to be truly good than merely clever. Soon the day came when he could no longer walk to the woods in winter. He and Maggie would go to a nearby city to a comfortable home for the aged. When I could go back to see my many relatives, I’d also go to “the home” to see Maggie and Lon as I reached toward my manhood. By then, I was in my early twenties, but Maggie still had a dish of peppermints she knew I liked. Lon would point to my picture at his bedside and say as he said year upon year: “Dear you are doing wonderful, wonderful.” Soon it happens. A hasty note reaches me at graduate school saying Maggie is gone. I almost know for certain that it will not be long before he is. Indeed, sixteen days later Lon slips away. Even yet I am grateful that, over a half century and more, each still lives on not just in history but in life. So every year as Christmas nears, I seem to search the snows of memory, looking for a pilgrim of another age, an elderly man and woman, showing a small child the way to heaven.
This column first appeared in The Toronto Star on Christmas Eve, 1968, beside the Christmas editorial also written by the author, then a member of the Star’s Editorial Board. Recently it was reprinted in “Cape Breton’s Christmas: a Treasury of Stories and Memories,” edited by Ronald Caplan. (All proceeds from the book go to “Light up a Life,” a Nova Scotia food program.) Kenneth Bagnell’s blogs and articles can be found on www.kennethbagnell.com
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