Wally’s Place Comes Back from the Dead

Wally would be ever so pleased. Just a couple of years ago Wally’s old house atop MacKenzie Hill was slowly melting back into mother earth. None of Wally’s own daughters had much interest in the home of their tender years. Passing it en route to Dalem Lake I often thought in a year or two the old place would be a collapsing ruin. Then, two summers ago, a wondrous thing occurred: people from away acquired the old house and since that time, over a period of three summers, breathed life back into it, investing long hours in patching, painting and preserving.

I care about Wally’s old house because the house and I go back a long way – fifty-four years if you must know. Back in 1959 when I was 12 a new job took my father, HJ, back to Cape Breton, his ancestral home. On Sunday afternoons throughout the year the whole family would travel out to Boularderie Island and Big Bras d’Or to visit relatives: old Jack Campbell, his son Donnie and family, Sandy and Jimmy MacKenzie at New Dominion, and most faithfully, Wally and Edith on MacKenzie Hill. So you know who’s who, Wally was Wally MacKenzie, who just happens to have been Bob Nagel’s favourite uncle; his wife Edith was my father’s first cousin, descended like him from a great-great grandfather, Angus Livingstone, the first Scots settler in this part of Cape Breton.

Wally and Edith had four daughters and some of them were particularly easy on the eyes. In winter there was snow to play in, in summer wide-open fields, excellent places to gambol with girl cousins. Nearby, Dalem Lake provided opportunities for cooling off on a hot summer afternoon.

Wally had a terrific big garden and the margins of his fields had hosts of berries: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. No kids had smart-phones back then, you couldn’t while away the hours sexting your pals but there were woods to explore, fields excellent for kite-flying, a barn to nose about in. None of us considered ourselves deprived.

Maybe I was a strange kid but I was interested in the older folks too. In Wally’s living room I liked to listen to the adults talk of the characters and mischief of their youth in the 1920s and 30s. Of the time they painted grumpy Jack Morrison’s pig, or when they moved Jack’s outhouse on a moonless night for the good clean fun of seeing him step into the muck. Of pretty Florence Livingstone and ugly Bella MacLeod, and Bella’s scandalous claim that the mark of Florence’s arse was imprinted on every cradle hill from the Slios a Brochan to Fife’s brook.

Of Edith-and-HJ’s fiercely Presbyterian grandmother, ‘Widow Bill’ Livingstone, who, when HJ was just 5, told him she saw the mark of the rope around his neck. Who could resist such characters and such stories? Not I.

The years, the decades, and a whole half-century passed away. Eventually, though he lived well past 90, even good old Wally had to go. After a few years Wally’s old place appeared exactly what it was: a vacant house. The old garden disappeared entirely. The lawn grew wild. Weeds took over, growing high as the windows. Foxes moved into the crawl-space below the bedroom addition.

Then, two years ago, Derek and Donna bought the old place, and went to work. They live and work in Calgary but are born-and-bred Cape Bretoners glad to have a summer place back on the Island. They put a new roof on this summer, installed a spiffy new kitchen window, applied another coat of paint, painted the shutters too. Best of all, the old house now hums with conversation, laughter, children’s voices. It pleases me no end and if that’s the case you can well imagine how happy Wally would be.