(image: Mahone Bay Museum, Accession Number 2018.1.111A)
A long time ago, when the county was still young, you might be walking along Main Street in Mahone Bay on a hot August afternoon, and an old man might say, “Some nice day, you!” As if you’d said it wasn’t. “Yah headed to Keddy’s Landing? It’s a fine day for swimmin’! And a bottle o’ whisky.” Back then each little brook or curve in the road had a name. The stores in the town then told you what they thought of you, stores like F. U. Himmelman’s Hardware, and so did the people. A jolly man named the Hello Fellar might stop you in the street and say, “You have nice teeth, young man!” Other townsfolk had names and personalities and stories attached to them too eccentric and lurid to print: Birthday Tanner, Christmas, Moonshine Andy, the Butt Picker.
But the thing I am most interested in is not a person, but a building I have never stood inside. It was supposed to have been called the Kenerik Cinema: a single screen movie theatre built over the Maggie Maggie River between the pentecostal church and the Pharmasave.
If you stopped as you crossed the bridge on foot, years ago, you could still see remnants of torn apart foundation and stone in the river, below the wooden weirs, which have also nearly disappeared. A doorway to a secret world as a kid: upriver, circular rooms of trees, hidden paths, stands of cedar.
What is it that played there? At quiet parts of the film, could you hear the rushing water below? Sometimes I imagined Humphrey Bogart in “In a Lonely Place,” the scene where he pretends he’s strangled someone on the side of the road. That the rushing water was so loud, you heard he drowned them in a river. Or the film noirs that take place on the docks in New York or Los Angeles, the quiet ripple of salt water a whispering counterpoint to what was happening in the dark.
Other times I have heard the cinema called other names, as if it changed hands. “Do you mean the Moonlight Cinema? I don’t know anything about any Kenerik.”
Someone showed me an old photo of the cinema, only once. The streets in front of it somehow rippling with shallow water. “Main Street, flooded” was written below, in dark ink. But not its name.
