The next morning Angela called out to Jack to come to the breakfast table.
“I’ve made your favourites,” she said cheerfully and held out his chair. Yellow foam hung out from the torn powder-blue plastic seam. A large loaf of steaming homemade bread, a square slab of creamy butter, a bottle of crisp red partridgeberry jam, bacon and fried eggs, and a pot of hot sugared tea covered the blue Formica table. She placed a steaming mug of milky tea in front of him. He sipped it slowly and blew cool air over the lip, the steam rolling away like early morning fog lifting at noon.
“Do you think you’ll hear anything today?” Angela asked tersely and twisted a napkin over her delicate fingers so tightly, her veins looked as thick as purple velvet ropes.
Jack looked at her sharply through the wisps of steam. “No,” he said, his face flushed from lying.
“But we know it’s only a matter of time.”
“We’ll be safe and sound, my love, one way or the other; I won’t let anything happen to any of ye —”
“But what about when exploration stops?”
“I told you I’ll take care of you. All of you.”
Angela sighed and got up to get a napkin. She dutifully placed it beside him then watched him as he ate, kept her eye on him as he walked to work. Stood up by the window and looked at him as he disappeared into the folds of the mineshaft. She could hear it as it cranked and creaked ceaselessly through their half-open window. The weather-beaten iron shaft jutted out of the dirt, triple the size of the bunkhouses, little square shacks covered in aluminum siding surrounding the sloppy triangular tower. A classic “company town,” all housing meant to serve the purpose of work, with access to and from easy and uncomplicated. No excuses, rain or shine, for not making it to work on time or lasting throughout your shift. If you were hungry, you simply called your wife, and she walked the fifty feet to the mine site and gave you the packed lunch forgotten on the dining room table. If you were drunk or hungover, you simply rolled out of bed and trudged up the little hill to the mine site. If you were sick, other men carried you.
She couldn’t imagine how they worked all day and all night, in dented hard hats, the flashlight a third eye prowling for minerals. Cold and damp in their torn yellow rubber suits and oversized mucking boots, riding on clanging trucks — they used to carry pick-axes but now explosives were slung over shoulders by the boxful — as layers of soot dried on their faces until the shift change whistle blew and they came home to their wives, patiently waiting by the windows.
After lunch Angela turned on the news. After only a few minutes she turned it off again. Goodbye Mulroney, Reagan, and Thatcher and your mine strikes, she thought as she sat back down again, somewhat defeated as she crossed and uncrossed her thin legs, the beige corduroy rubbing together softly. The situation in northern Manitoba’s nickel belt looked no better than in Newfoundland — or across the Atlantic, for that matter. The miners’ strike in England had been brutal, corporations making money and getting tax cuts, with devastating results for families living on a shoestring. Angela pondered her fate and that of her children. Could we really stay here if the mine closed? Would it be at all possible? The thought filled her with dread. No, better to head someplace where new development was taking place, better to take their chances with something new. A mine has a good long lifespan if it’s rich. She pulled up the sleeves of her green turtleneck and peeled an orange. Bursts of juice exploded as she inched her thumb through the skin. She sucked on a segment. Katie, Maggie, and Lily were playing at her feet. Katie, the eldest, ashen blonde and frail, like her English grandmother Harrington, was tall for her five years. Her two younger siblings were dark Irish like Jack’s family. Katie was quiet, colouring dutifully, worn out from a morning at school, while Maggie, three, and Lily, almost a year old, petite with big blue eyes and fiery tempers, were engaged in a tug of war with a rag doll.
“Maggie,” Angela said warningly and peered at them over the thick rims of her eyeglasses.
Lily cried loudly. Angela reached down from her chair, snatched the doll, and gave it to her. Maggie frowned, crossed her arms, and stamped her little feet.
“Maggie, Mommy’s got a surprise for you behind her back,” Angela said coaxingly. Maggie stopped pouting and walked eagerly to her mother. “Guess which hand?”
“This one?” Maggie said and pointed to the right.
“Yes!”
Maggie clapped and took the orange in her delicate but animated hands.
As the children settled, Angela rose to make dinner. She stood in the kitchen rocking back and forth on her heels, humming along with a folk song on the radio, peeling potatoes, carrots, and turnips, dropping them in a scratched orange plastic bowl filled with cold water before she salted more water in a large yellow pot for boiling.
At five o’ clock the pale blue sky turned a deep navy, looking like a smattering of squashed wild blackberries. Fat grey dustball clouds spilled in and clung to the dark sky. Angela fussed with the white kitchen curtains and peered out the window, looking for Jack. Her boiled dinner was finished: moist salt beef, potatoes, soft and steaming cabbage and turnips in brown sugar were ready to be served. Across the gravel lane she saw straight into Wanda Fifield’s kitchen.
She was swathed in a baggy polka dot housedress, her hair in tight curls. She opened her fridge door, empty but for a carton of milk. She spooned sugar into her baby’s milk bottle and then put a spoonful in her own mouth.
Angela put her hand over her mouth quickly. Is that all she’s been eating?
“Momma, I’m hungry,” Katie said and hovered around the kitchen table.
“Supper will be ready soon.”
A bolt of bone-white lightning, crooked as a crab leg, singed the sky. Angela glanced at her clothesline. Out the front door Angela called to Wanda, “Will you give me a hand with these clothes?”
Wanda opened her door. “Oh yes, sure my dear, no problem at all,” she said and waddled out with her baby on her hip. Circles of dappled flesh were bunched around the child’s bucking wrists and ankles. Sculpted hair in a little finger wave crested on the peak of her small round forehead. Wanda pulled the wooden pins from the electric blue line. Angela asked about Pete.
“He’s still out looking for work. He’s been in town for most of the month.”
“Anything on the go in St. John’s?”
“Not a thing. As soon as we get something — anything — we’re gone. No use staying here out of sentimentality,” Wanda said resolutely.
Dense rain pelted their legs and pooled at the bottom of the clothesbasket.
“Help me get these inside,” Angela said.
Wanda hoisted a handful of facecloths and a bucket of pins on her other hip.
The girls were on the wooden storage box in the front porch, peering out the window. Inside the house, steam from the hot homemade food surrounded them like a shroud.
“I won’t take no for an answer. Join us for supper. I got enough food here to feed an army. Katie, go back in the porch and get that extra chair for Mommy. Maggie, come sit down for dinner,” Angela said and buckled Lily into her plastic highchair, the cushion sagging from years of use, bits of dried cereal clumped in the crevices.
Wanda’s brown eyes, transparent and light as almond skin, brightened as she sat down and lunged toward the big plate of food placed before her.
“Where’s Daddy?” Maggie asked.
“He’ll be home soon.”
Wanda spooned mounds of cabbage, thick carrots, and fluffy white mashed potatoes in her mouth. She tore at the salt beef and spooned bits of potato and carrot into Susie’s mouth. After her third plateful she rose to put her plate in the sink.
“That was some good. Do you need help with the dishes?”
“No, go on home, your man might call.”
“It hasn’t stopped raining,” Wanda said and pulled back the kitchen curtain. She flushed and lowered her head. “You can see right into my kitchen.”
Angela’s fork
stopped in midair. “Can you? I hadn’t even noticed.”
“Well, I better go, thanks again for supper,” Wanda said and hurried out of the kitchen, head held high.
As Wanda crossed the yard, she cried for the shame of it, the shame of having nothing. Pete had been out of work for so long, she could no longer bear it. They once had everything, when the mine was prosperous. They were the envy of the province, the town to live in, and she was the happiest girl around with a man like Pete on her arm. “And now, look at the lot of us, in some state,” she whispered. The nerve of Angela, pitying me like that, like this family is in some sort of habit of collecting the pogey, she thought and hurried through her front door, avoiding the downpour. “We’ll get a job, won’t we love?” she said and hoisted Susie from her hip, held her in front of her face, cooed and kissed her cheeks. “We’ll move far from here, far from anyone who knows what we’ve been through the last few months, yes, my love, guaranteed, all will be lovely grand.”
Long past supper, Angela’s children were in the backyard playing contentedly in the rain: little yellow jackets, hats, and boots their sunlit armour protecting them from the spit of the wrenching clouds. Angela sat in the easy chair sipping tea, fingernails drumming nervously on the edge of her porcelain cup. The clock ticked loudly in the kitchen. Jack’s limp supper was on the table, sealed with steam-filled aluminum foil. Angela went to the back door to check on the children. She tripped over the doormat, damp with the rain Maggie carried in on her ceaseless quest for cookies. A corner of a piece of paper caught her eye. She knelt down to retrieve it, certain it was merely a corner from a colouring book. She crumpled it and brought it to the trashcan. At the last second she saw the Azco Mining Company logo. Her heart constricted and her hands flew to her open mouth. In that second she knew it had happened. The girls at the hairdresser’s were right. Her temples throbbed and a blaze of silver fired across the nerve in her eye. It pulsed and jumped, blurring her vision. A migraine. She was having a migraine. She cautiously opened the letter. Two weeks, it said, Record of Employment forthcoming, recommendation letter available if required.
Why didn’t he tell me? How long has he known?
The anger in her heart rose and settled just as quickly. She knew she’d have to take charge. She went to the window. Outside her two daughters stomped in puddles the colour of milky tea. She thought of Susie across the lane, drinking sugar in her milk bottle.
Susie won’t have a tooth in her head if she drinks any more sugar in her milk. I won’t let that happen to my children. How could a father let his children starve if there are jobs on the mainland? How hard can it be to leave home? I won’t let Jack do that to me, no matter how earnestly he clings to this old rock. He’s as soft as a snail inside that barnacle of a battered hard. But the strength of the grip he’s got on home, I never heard tell of a man so sentimental before. But I’ll crack him. I’ve got to. Someone’s got to speak sense in this family. She sighed heavily.
The front door opened and a biting gust of cool air rushed in like the smack of a wave from the ocean.
Jack entered the living room, his hair awry, muck on the cuffs of his jeans, a smear of dirt on his collar, his mouth tight. He lowered his head and walked straight to the window.
“There’s nothing like rain. Sometimes that’s all you need, a bit of fresh air and clean water, nothing fancy, just the simple things.”
“I know what’s going on.”
“Look at those clouds, moving so quickly across the sky, heading west.”
“What are we going to do now?”
He stared out the window and slowly turned to her. “We’re going to stay here, of course. I’ll find another job in one of the communities nearby, close to home —”
“We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s nothing left here anymore.”
“There’s got to be something somewhere —”
“We’re not staying here. Pete is in town right now looking, and Wanda —”
“I won’t let that happen to you.”
“Then take us to the mainland.”
“I won’t. I can’t. Don’t ask me to do that.”
“We have children to think about.”
A second of silence hovered. The children.
They hurried to the back door. The yard was empty. Jack put on his shoes and followed a few little footprints in the mud heading toward Main Street. He foraged his way through the mud puddles in the back lane and made his way to Pebble Drive, which bisected the clapboard homes from the school, church, and library on top of the hill. Jack waited for a few cars to pass. All of the drivers waved and honked at him, slowed down and teased him by pretending not to let him pass. Jack smiled and played along, waved and gestured as he thumbed his nose at his co-workers. When the few cars had gone by, he ran nervously up the incline just as two little yellow coats with flapping arms and faces obscured by big floppy hats disappeared down the slope of the small ravine.
He ran after them and yelled at them to come back right now. They turned in unison, small mouths agape with pleasure, wide eyes framed by moist eyelashes. They ran the few feet over to him and grabbed his legs, their yellow raincoats and hats dribbling water on his blue jeans. He knelt down and encircled them.
“Where were you going?”
“To find the gold the end of the rainbow,” Katie answered and pointed at the arc in the sky.
“Can we go get the gold?” Maggie asked.
“Oh my darlings, there’s no —” Jack said, sighed, and lowered his head. He lifted his gaze to meet their innocent yet expectant eyes. “Of course there’s gold at the end of the rainbow, plenty of it, especially for little girls just like you, but the rainbow chooses who gets the gold, and when the rainbow falls over your house, it’s all yours.”
“Really, Daddy?” Maggie asked and watched him with tear-filled, accusatory eyes, her tiny lips pouting doubtfully.
“Yes, of course.”
Refusing to be soothed, Maggie continued to cry. She wanted the gold right now. Jack picked her up and held her tightly in one arm. He grabbed Katherine’s hand.
“Someday the gold will be all yours, I promise. But right now, Mommy is worried about you, and it’s time for your bath.”
Maggie curled into his chest like a water-drenched weed. He crossed the street, and his stomach grumbled. He hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. Weary with the knowledge that he was about to be unemployed with four mouths to feed, a wife insistent on leaving home, a mortgage, overdraft, and credit at the bank to pay, and no savings whatsoever, his stomach contracted. I can go without supper tonight so the girls can have leftovers tomorrow. I’ll find work in Newfoundland somehow or another. There’ll be something for me to do. Like it or not, we may be one of the families that have to leave Brighton. If we do, we’ll manage. I won’t want to go, but Angela does. I know that now. I knew that yesterday. I’ve known it since the first layoffs began.
Jack whistled and the children skipped home. His mind raced with worry, fatigue, and that awful sense of dread as the knowledge of what he’d have to do, pull himself away from this town and uproot himself, became clear. Jack’s heart sank, the sky darkened, and more heavy rain fell, as if they were already aboard a sinking ship.
At the top of the hill Jack’s mouth dropped in surprise and widened into a grin at the man who stood on his front step waving wildly.
Chapter Two
“When did you get home?” Jack asked.
“A few minutes ago,” Peter said.
“Katherine and Margaret,” Angela wailed and unravelled the children from his arms, “you know you’re not supposed to leave the backyard.”
“We were almost at the end of the rainbow, but every time we moved, it moved too,” Maggie told her before she whisked them inside the warm house.
Jack and Peter shook hands briskly. Peter stood over six feet tall, bulky and hairy, with thumbs as big as the head of a hammer, on
e of the largest miners on the underground crew. He had a self-satisfied air about him; he’d regained his easy swagger, the comfort in his own skin that the layoff had stolen.
At Brighton Catholic School Peter had convinced Jack to skip countless classes. Peter would always get caught and was harshly punished by the nuns. Burly Pete would cry but wouldn’t squeal on anyone under the sting of the thick leather whip the nuns used liberally. Nothing could make Pete cry now; he was beaming broadly, and his muscular chest was bursting with pride.
“I didn’t find anything in St. John’s, but I got a letter yesterday, an offer of employment for a small town on the mainland, in Northern Alberta at a gold mine.”
Jack gulped. “Gold?”
“Yes, they’ve been developing this for years, and they’re finally ready to let some of us boys at her.”
“I bet there’d be a lot of jobs.”
“Yes, and homes, stuff for the kids to do.”
“You’d go?”
“Of course. There’s nothing, I’ve looked everywhere.”
“When are you leaving?”
“In a month. When your time’s up, let me know, I can help you out —”
“It happened yesterday.”
“I’m sorry, buddy. Why don’t you apply, then? Here, here’s the address.” Peter ripped the return address from the corner of an envelope he’d pulled from the back pocket of his jeans. “Call them, send them an application. You can stay with us for a while until you get yourself together.”
“Peter Fifield,” Wanda yelled from her door, “I haven’t seen you in a month, get home right now.”
“I’m coming,” Peter yelled. “Think about it,” he urged.
“Go easy on him, Wanda.”
Wanda winked. “He’s in good hands.”
The next morning Angela bundled the girls up in their fall clothes while Jack fumbled with a warm black turtleneck and an old pair of scuffed blue jeans. Combing his black hair flat, he squirted a dollop of thick white hair crème onto his open palm and fingered it gently through to his scalp. Angela hoisted a plaid wool skirt over her slender hips and wrapped a white blouse, with a bib-like ruffled collar, around her waist, tying both ends of the cloth at her side. She tied her thick black hair in a low ponytail, securing the wisps tightly behind her eyes with a tortoiseshell buckle.
Saltwater Cowboys Page 2