Saltwater Cowboys

by Dayle Furlong

  Twelve other men sat around a splintered wooden table, training day for new members of the crew, each of them avoiding eye contact. They would leave this room and join their crews, Jack to the blasting crew, the man beside him to engineering, the other to his right would head for the geology department. Men from all over Canada sat around the table: men from Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. There was a man from the Philippines and one black man from South Africa. Those men were the quietest, almost as if they weren’t really there, as if their summons to this corner of the earth was not simply a choice for a better life. They had been lured by the promise of money — bait that kept them squirming and worming their way through the rock — but an acceptance of punishment, an exile from their homeland, a fall from grace into the low bowels of the cold, cruel, unforgiving Canadian north.

  A burly miner was telling a joke. “A surveyor, engineer, and miner were sent into a room, one at a time with a pool table and five balls on it to see what they would do in five minutes. The surveyor came out and he had all five balls in a perfectly straight line. The engineer came out and had the balls in the shape of an atom. The miner came out and only three balls were left, one was broken and one was in his pocket to take home.” A few of the men laughed while the rest sat quietly like children on the first day of school, no friendships formed or alliances bartered for, each wondering who the bully and his teammates would be. Jack feared this unknown force, feared it more than the explosives he would soon detonate. He had no backbone for that, no clue how to stand up for himself. He’d always left it to Peter to watch out for him, and now here, amongst all these strangers, he’d have to learn pretty quick.

  “Gentleman,” said Rick Bowers, the health and safety officer. He stood in front of the room in a grey work suit, a pair of new safety glasses over his warm grey eyes. Jack grunted in assent like everyone else at the table and didn’t smile and nod or wink as he’d like to, in friendship and familiarity. He felt shy and uncertain this morning with not a familiar face in sight.

  “Good morning, and welcome to Noraldo Operating Corporation. As you remember from my letter, today we’re going to do some basic workplace safety training. Each of you please fill out these forms,” he said and circulated several papers throughout the room. “Now —”

  “Sorry I’m late,” a woman at the doorway said.

  “Excuse me?” Rick said. “Are you where you’re supposed to be? Administration is one floor down,” he said helpfully, warm eyes twinkling.

  “I’m a miner,” she said and extended her hand. “I’m Bobbi Lake, I’m here for training.”

  Some of the other miners sneered. She reddened brightly and sat down stiffly, her head held high. She was pretty, with long blonde curly hair, creamy white skin, a small nose, and hard, tough, flinty blue-grey eyes. She had big hands, a solid jaw, and hefty shoulders. Splotches of scarlet colour were in her cheeks.

  “Where is your uniform?” Rick asked gruffly.

  “I couldn’t find the woman’s dry, so I left it in the lunchroom.”

  “There is no woman’s dry. You’ll have to use the women’s washroom in the administrative department.”

  The miners glared at her with hard faces. It was pretty clear to Jack who would be the first to be bullied.

  After the morning-long training session, they hustled out to go to their separate crews. Jack wandered through the plant. On the way to the ground floor, he passed administration. A young athletic-looking man in a grey suit, with copper-coloured hair and big brown eyes, led a group of plump women in floral dresses and big droopy glasses through the workings of what looked like a new financial data machine. It was huge, cumbersome, and bulky. Jack couldn’t stand those machines. To him they were like big chunks of stubborn rock themselves, full of data that was as precious as gold itself, but he yearned to run from those number machines, to blast them all to bits.

  As Bobbi walked with the crew, she was completely unresponsive. Her gaze was cemented forward. She was unsmiling and stiff, a soldier protecting her rich yet vulnerable territory.

  The foreman stood at the bottom of the stairs and called out names. He led the men to their appropriate places. When Jack’s name was called, he approached the blasting crew foreman, Russell Knox, a burly red-haired Ontarian, who, Jack was told later, had led a blasting crew in the abominable pre-Cambrian shield and wrenched more gold free from those boulders than any other blasting crew since. He was tough, commanded respect, yet he had a high-pitched nasal voice. Jack stifled a laugh at the sound of it. Russell eyed him savagely. Jack clamped his jaw shut and his smile withered.

  Jack joined the crew ready to load the skip-cage. The other men were steeling themselves for the descent into the black, rough, rocky earth. To spend the day in the hole in the ground that would swallow them whole and spit them out, hands dirty, nostrils and lungs full of dirt, skin paler than a freshly peeled potato at the end of the day. Their pockets would be full of the fruits of the ore, the kind that made a certain few rich and others even filthier with the dirt of wealth, while the men who worked it simply got filthy, tired, and resentful. Resentful that it was you and not that handsome, tanned, copper-haired gentleman from Finance who was going underground, risking everything, taking a deep breath before full descent, knowing that this could be your last taste of fresh air if something went wrong underground.

  Crowded into the skip-cage, pushed up against four other men — and one tough-faced woman — Jack wondered if they would look after one another, watch each other’s backs the way they had back home. He peered up at the last bit of light from aboveground and held his breath. He savoured the last bite of clean air before he had to inhale air forced in from ash-encased piping and hoped they would be a good team of drillers, blasters, and muckers. He could only imagine what could go wrong if they weren’t attentive to this exacting process. This process as told to him by his trainers and other miners, a language handed down through generations of men who’d given their lives to the work.

  Jack would load the dynamite into the casing and shove it into the holes made by the drillers and their long-hole air drills. Engineers had mapped out where the veins of gold were in the rock, due to the geologists who’d studied the ore samples. On Jack’s stope, seventeen holes, three and a half inches wide, six inches deep, were to be stuffed with dynamite with enough force to blast hundreds of tonnes of rock. After the rock was blasted, muckers like Pete Fifield and his crew used a muck machine to transfer the ore to cars headed for the main shaft and then above ground to the mill. The mucker’s waste rock was shoved back underground through a hole that seemed bottomless, a hole at the end of the stope where miners had to strap themselves to an oversized iron chain cemented into the side of the underground rock if they wanted to take a look down at the hole, the hole that seemed out of this world, with the strange iridescent light that seemed to come up from the bottom, the strange light the miners mythologized and made up stories about its origins.

  In the mill a crusher would reduce large chunks of ore to smaller gravel-sized pieces. The mill would pulverize these small rocks to bits the size of sand. The factory would add a water-and-cyanide solution and another mill would grind it into a mud-like pulp.

  This pulp would flow into settling tanks. The heavy, wet solids would settle on the bottom of the large tanks. Water would be drained. The wet solids would then be transferred to an agitation tank and air blown in. The oxygen would set off a chemical reaction between the cyanide and the gold trapped in the ore; that would dissolve the gold and leach it into the surrounding water. Drum filters would then separate the water from the solids. This water would now join the wastewater.

  Zinc powder was added to harden dissolved gold. To smelt the gold, chemicals such as manganese dioxide, fluoride, silica dust, borax, and sodium nitrate would be added. That would separate the gold from impurities. The chemical-and-gold mix would be poured into a smelter at 1,600 degrees Celsius. The smelter would rotate constantly so
that the contents heated evenly. For two and a half hours the heavy gold would sink to the bottom while the impure material, called “slag,” floated to the surface. Slag would then be poured out.

  The gold would be cast into bar-shaped moulds and left to cool in tubs of cold water. The gold bars would be extracted from the moulds and cleaned of any slag residue. Waste would then be sent to the tailings pipe and disposed of, chemicals like arsenic, cadmium, and lead would be sent to a man-made segregated pond — a pond covered with netting and routinely monitored to deter wildlife from feeding and drinking — where it would then be cleaned as best could be and prevented from entering the water supply. This was the miner’s routine, shepherding this process, day after day. In frequently dangerous conditions, working with toxic materials.

  At the end of the workday, Peter Fifield sat behind the wheel of a battered grey truck with his filthy fingers on the wheel, dirt under his nails as thick as an eel. His boots and jacket were black with soot and grease.

  Jack passed through the security gate and protectively hugged his metal lunch tin to his chest.

  “How was your first day?” Peter asked as Jack swung open the door and hopped in the cab. Peter put the truck in gear and they headed off the property.

  “Oh, best kind,” Jack replied and smiled falsely. He didn’t want Peter to know how lost he’d felt all day; no use looking like a sook.

  Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of Peter’s mobile home in the east end. Both of their wives and all of their children had huddled around the front window watching, waving, and smiling. Maggie jumped and waved so excitedly, she tore the plastic storm window covering. The puncture spread quickly and a large piece fell from the window and flapped against Wanda’s narrow and pinched face. She looked as if she’d eaten something rotten and sour.

  Jack gulped and apologized.

  “She’s only a child,” Pete said and climbed out of the truck. His lunch tin banged noisily against the wheel. Jack and Peter mounted the steps, opened the door, and walked into the open arms of their wives and children.

  “Mr. Fifield,” Wanda said through clenched teeth, “will you fix that torn plastic, please?”

  “Yes, missus, as soon as we’ve eaten,” Peter said, light-hearted and cheerful, winking at her as he made his way to the kitchen table. “Large family of eight, come, sit at my table,” he said and opened his arms wide and high in affected graciousness. “Let us break bread and proclaim the mystery of life,” he said solemnly, making fun of Father Donnelly, the Catholic priest from Brighton, who’d just become bishop.

  Wanda’s features broke and she smiled in spite of herself. The children scrambled for a seat next to Peter. They sat on phonebooks stacked on mismatched chairs.

  They cut their beef steakettes with dull knives, spooned buttery mashed potatoes, carrots, and turnips into eager, hungry mouths. For a while they were quiet, everyone eating contentedly with little to worry about. Wanda offered tea and trifle for dessert, after which they sent the children to the living room, thick crayons in their pudgy hands, to work in their colouring books. The adults set up for a card game. Jack and Angela teamed up against Wanda and Peter and lost shamefully.

  Jack scowled at him. Pete had always been the winner; he’d won all the hockey games for the teams he played on in Brighton, he’d won swimming contests, jumping contests, running contests, car racing, and “chicken” contests. Jack had never won a thing. He was always on the losing hockey team, choked on the winning swimmer’s wake, couldn’t jump higher than a foot, and his gangly skinny frame and his limp leg made him the slowest in any type of walking or running race, the veritable chicken itself when it came to car racing on the back roads of Brighton and its outskirts, frightened to go too fast and petrified of trying to force an oncoming vehicle in the same lane to switch sides.

  “What’s wrong?” Peter asked Jack.

  “Nothing,” Jack said and slapped his cards on the table. He pushed back his chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  “Come on now, Jackie, it’s only a card game.”

  “It’s easy for you to say. You always win.”

  “What’s the matter, did the baby lose his bottle?” Peter said and everyone laughed. The children had wandered in from the living room and laughed along, not because they knew what was funny, or because they knew they were laughing at their daddy — if they did, Maggie would be the first to join her father, stand by his side, cross her arms in front of her chest, and shoot sullen looks at the adults who dared to mock her precious dad — they laughed simply because the adults were laughing and they knew nothing better than to follow what they were doing.

  Tears gathered in the corners of Wanda’s eyes, she was laughing so much, no longer so cross and vexed, giddy from the tea and trifle — and the pleasure of a successive streak of winning at an evening of cards with her lucky husband and their oldest friends. The laughter grew until Jack slammed his fist on the table and yelled at them to shut the hell up.

  They were immediately silent as Jack’s wild eyes roamed from face to face. Peter’s eyes were pinched and narrow in puzzlement, Wanda’s wide in alarm, while Angela looked away with shame and fear that her husband had upset the people they relied on for refuge in this cold, new, strange, northern town. The children stopped laughing. Susie’s crinkly, rough, warbled cry issued from the back of the mobile home. Wanda pushed back her chair to tend to the baby.

  “The mobile home won’t be ready until the end of the month!” Jack said and hung his head.

  “Jack, why didn’t you —” Angela said and stopped as her children’s eyes volleyed back and forth between them, absorbing all words.

  “Bath time!” she said and rose to bustle off the girls toward the rear of the trailer. Maggie reached up to give her daddy a hug.

  “I’ve just had a long day at my new job, honey. Everything will be fine. Run along now and get in the tub. I’ll come and tuck you in,” Jack said and hugged her tightly.

  Jack stood with his back to Peter, who sat quietly at the head of the kitchen table, twisting a black ace and a red queen between his large thumb and forefinger. Jack slowly turned and dropped his arms to his sides, his mouth puckered and lopsided. He wiped the perspiration from his brow with the back of his hand. He sat in the chair brought from home that wheezed like an old man.

  “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “I didn’t want to be a burden.”

  “You’re my best friend. It’s cramped and I’m sure our women are going nuts, but listen, buddy,” Peter said and leaned closer to Jack, “I’ll watch your back, alright? Nothing will ever change that. Not a week of getting on my nerves in my home, not a month of getting on my nerves in my home, or even, for chrissakes, a year of getting on my nerves in my home.”

  “You won’t regret helping me.”

  Wanda returned and said, “Stay as long as you like. I’ll have patience with the youngsters. Fix that storm window tonight or I won’t have a drop of patience left for any of you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Peter answered. “Let me take you out for beer after, hey, Jackie?”

  A crude wooden sign hung above the chocolate-brown door. Scorched black sunken letters welcomed all to the small cream-coloured aluminum shack called Chinook’s Tavern. The interior was clean and new, with white linoleum skid-free floors, brown wooden tables draped with plastic runner, and an enclosed bar in the corner — with a cut-out window so the waitress could pass out drinks and dodge flying beer bottles.

  “Mick,” Peter called.

  A man in the corner of the bar rose and ambled toward them. He cracked a peanut between his feeble teeth and extended a bony hand. “How are ya, Pete?”

  Peter introduced Jack. “The friend from back home that I’d mentioned.”

  Mick tipped his ball cap and nodded. He drank his beer slowly and removed his ball cap to scratch the top of his head every hour or so, but kept his eyes on the hockey game.

  Mick, Peter explai
ned, was a contractor up from Calgary, but originally from Newfoundland. He had an eye for investments; he’d made a fortune last year in mining stocks alone.

  After the game, Mick whispered something indecipherable to Peter.

  Peter’s eyes widened.

  “What was that about?” Jack asked as Mick ambled off.

  “My investments are about to triple.”

  Jack stared at him.

  “When we first came up I invested a little with him. He’s got a friend who owns construction companies and they’ve even got mining equipment under patent. In this boom town we’re sure to make money.”

  “You don’t even know him. Why did you give him money?”

  Peter squared his shoulders. “I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

  “A good feeling?”

  “You want in?”

  “I ain’t got a pot to piss in, let alone money for investments.”

  “Try and get a loan from your family. Honestly, the money he’s made, we can make too.”

  “I don’t know. It seems fishy to me.”

  Peter shrugged and took a swig of his beer. “Suit yourself,” he said and raised his fist as the Winnipeg Jets scored against the Maple Leafs. Midway through the evening the room had divided into two camps. One side cheered for the Leafs while the other side cheered for the Jets. A few construction workers up from Edmonton sat at the table next to Jack and Peter. After the game the construction workers pulled their chairs up to Jack and Pete’s table.

  “Lots of work up here for you guys?” Peter asked.

  “We’ve built most of the homes, finishing the school now,” a shaggy blond worker said.

  “Not too many single women,” one said and winked.

  The men laughed and the barmaid returned with a tray of beer bottles. The shaggy blond, Charlie, whistled at her.