The interior of the church was packed with people, with some standing outside on the steps. The piper and the violinist and the singers waited for their time of contribution.
My other grandfather, “the man who could be counted on to be always in control,” went to the lectern to give the first reading. He was meticulously dressed, with his gold watch-chain stretched across his vest and his highly polished shoes glinting in the light. His neat red moustache was carefully trimmed and his fingernails immaculately clean.
He turned the pages of the Bible and began: “A reading from the letter of Paul to the Romans: ‘The life and death of each of us has its influence on others.’ ”
Then he stopped and seemed to reconsider, turning back towards the Old Testament. He began again: “A reading from the book of Wisdom: ‘The virtuous man, though he die before his time, will find rest. Length of days is not what makes age honourable, nor number of years the true measure of life; Understanding, this is man’s grey hairs.…’ ”
I had heard him read before, carefully selecting the texts to suit the occasion. Once, as a child, I had heard him read from the Book of Revelation. It was a description of the coming of the New Jerusalem and the attendant preparations and miraculous happenings. One line, above all others, had remained most forcefully in my mind. It was “And the sea gave up all the dead who were in it.”
After my grandfather had finished the reading, the service proceeded in accordance with our customs. The violinist played “Niel Gow’s Lament” and “Mo Dhachaidh” (“My Home”). And outside the church the piper played “Dark Island” before the coffin of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald was lowered into the grave by the hands of the men who had worked with him underground.
After the funeral we went back to my grandparents’ home, and later in the afternoon a long-distance call came from Toronto. It was a person-to-person call for my oldest brother and it was from the management of Renco Development, in fact from the superintendent of operations, the man who had sent the shaft crew to Peru. When he began to speak, Calum held up his hand for silence and the hubbub of conversation was stilled. The man spoke very loudly, as if the volume of his voice might transcend the distance of a large half-continent, and those of us who sat within the room could hear him clearly.
“Look,” he urged, “I’m very sorry about what happened up north. Sorry about the death and sorry about the hassle. It was all a mistake. The management up there doesn’t know you people the way I do. They should have just let you go to the funeral. If anything like that ever happens again, phone me directly. Phone me right away. I understand. You people have been working for me for a long time.”
There was a silence.
“Are you still there?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Calum, “I’m still here.”
“Well,” he said. “Listen. We want you back. I want you back. There is no problem. Just say you’ll come.”
“I don’t know,” said my brother, casting his eyes about the room. He looked very tired and the thread-like scar stood out whitely on his lip. He moved his head with difficulty and held it at a slanted angle, indicating that his neck was still causing him pain. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we’ll just stay home for a while.”
“Listen,” said the insistent superintendent. “We’ll raise your bonus by one-third. I guarantee it. Haven’t I always kept my word to you people?”
“Oh, it’s not the money,” said Calum.
“Haven’t I always kept my word?” repeated the voice. “Haven’t I always kept my word?”
“Yes,” said my brother.
“Well, give me yours. Just tell me you’ll come with the same number of men. Give me a date. The end of the week? The beginning of next week? We’ll send cars to meet you at Sudbury. Give me your word, and I’ll know I can depend on you.”
As the superintendent spoke, my brother’s eyes made contact with the eyes of the others in the room. He raised his eyebrows in the form of a question as he held the receiver in his hand. And he seemed imperceptibly to nod his head even as his eyebrows asked the question.
As his eyes moved from face to face, his men nodded slightly.
“Are you still there?” asked the superintendent once more.
“Yes,” he said, “still here.”
“Well, just give me your word.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll come.”
“Great,” said the relieved superintendent. “I knew I could count on you. And with the same number of men?”
My brother looked at me and I, in turn, looked at the faces of my grandparents and at the parents of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald. I nodded my head slightly.
“Yes,” he said into the telephone’s receiver. “With the same number of men. We’ll be there.”
That afternoon my brother took three loaves of bread and two boxes of sugar cubes and went down to the land beneath the Calum Ruadh’s Point. Past the house where he used to live and which was now even more worn by time and weather. Down to the rocky shore where the pilot whale had foundered and where some of the creosoted timbers of his skidway still remained. It was, as I said, in the time of spring graduations, when the summer had not yet come into its full splendour and the grass, though not lush, was new and green. He stood on the timbers of the skidway and on the boulders of the shore in the expensive shoes he had worn to the funeral, and he looked up towards the trees of the Calum Ruadh’s Point. It was a hot afternoon and only the forms of the horses could be seen standing in the trees to take shelter from the flies. But when he placed his fingers within his mouth and emitted the two sharp whistles, the response was immediate. There was motion among the trees and the horses, and she came galloping down towards the shore, sending the small rocks and flecks of turf flying before her eager hooves. “Ah, Christy” he said, “m’eudail bheag,” as she thrust her head into his chest. She had grown grey about the eyes and muzzle, and a slight film was beginning to appear in her left eye. All afternoon he lay on the warm grass offering her the bread and sugar cubes while she nuzzled his face and his twisted neck, placing her great hooves carefully about the outline of his body. Some of the younger horses who had once been her colts looked on with something like amazement at the behaviour of their mother. He sang to her in Gaelic, perhaps as he had at the time of the great storm when we had needed her strength, and she had needed his faith and calming confidence in order to go on. All day they stayed together on the green grass, giving and taking to and from each other.
Before we left, my aunt gave me the gift she had purchased for her son. “Take this and wear it,” she said, passing me the shirt. “Don’t leave it in the box. Will you do that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’ll do that. Thank you very much.”
When we arrived in Sudbury it was late afternoon approaching evening and the cars from Renco Development were there to meet us as promised. We started out driving westward on Highway 17, past Whitefish, and McKerrow, and the road to Espanola. Past Webbwood and Massey and Spanish and Serpent River. Some ten years earlier my brothers had come to the area as young miners in the first heyday of the region’s uranium boom. The boom had turned into a glut and many of the prospective headframes had been abandoned. Now with the promise of a contract to deliver 52 million pounds to the Japanese over the next decade they were back, rediscovering what they had already found. It was, as the man from Renco Development said, “all systems go.”
When we turned off Highway 17, the long spring day had become early night. The roads changed surfaces, the pavement giving way to what seemed like hastily laid-down asphalt, and later to gravel which had been covered with a solution to keep down the dust. Sometimes the solution smelled like oil and at other times like salt through the opened windows of the cars. Still later the solution vanished and there was only the smell of the dust and the sound of the stones thrown up by the tires against the bodies of the cars. Occasionally the cars “bottomed” on ridges of rock jutting up from the middle of th
e road and the oil pans and mufflers jarred and scraped against the exposed stone. On either side of the hastily constructed road lay the trees which had been bulldozed out of the way, their long yellow and white roots nakedly exposed, with strands of moss and disturbed muskeg still hanging from them. The roots looked like diseased and badly pulled teeth. Wrecked and abandoned cars had been pushed to the roadside’s edge and, once, on coming around a turn, our headlights picked up the eyes of a gigantic moose standing beside the front end of a smashed Buick. The red eyes of the moose glowed out of the darkness and into our lights like burning intense coals while the dead lamps of the Buick’s headlights and the silver of the grille’s chrome flashed bright and shining for only an instant. The moose did not move from its stand beside the road, where it seemed to be guarding the remains of what had obviously once been a high-powered and expensive car.
When we got to the camp near the headframe’s site, we were issued blankets and sheets and assigned temporary rooms. The rooms were in hastily constructed huts made mostly of plywood. There were four bunks in each room, two upper and two lower. We flipped coins to decide who would get the lower bunks. In the morning, we were told, the rooms might be reassigned. There were some rooms that contained only two bunks instead of four, but right now all of them were occupied. It might take a little time.
The superintendent came in and shook hands with my brother and clapped him heartily on the shoulder. Apparently he was the man in charge when the red-haired Alexander MacDonald had been killed and the one who had said, “It was only one man,” and, “The job has to go forward.” As he spoke to my brother he counted us with his eyes.
Out in the night the lights of the headframe glowed and we could hear the sound of the hoist and the singing cables and sometimes even the signals as the giant ore bucket thundered up and down the darkened shaft. The French Canadians were working the night shift, and we would begin in the morning. Now that Renco Development had “the same number of men,” there was some discussion as to whether three eight-hour shifts or two twelve-hour shifts would be more effective. If it were the latter, one crew would begin at seven a.m. and the other at seven in the evening. If we wished to substitute for one another it would be okay and we could roughly keep our own time. Much would depend on the quality of the rock.
Early the next morning my brothers and the other members of clann Chalum Ruaidh began to assemble their underground gear. Some of the belts and the wrenches they had thrown into the bush at the headframe’s site had been retrieved and saved by men who thought the original owners might be back. Some of their gear they recognized as being worn by other men. Some of it was returned; some of it was not. When you throw things away, I suppose, you never can be sure that they will ever be yours again. My second brother recognized his miner’s belt on another man and pointed out his initials scratched with a nail on the belt’s inside. But the man said he had bought it from one of the French Canadians and would only sell it for twice its original price. He agreed, though, to lend it to my brother for a day as he was coming off his shift and my brother was going on. And so the summer began.
In addition to the frenzied activity beneath the headframes of the region there was also a great deal of action on the surface of the land itself Roads were being constructed and crews of labourers hacked and slashed at the forest and blasted at the surface rock in an attempt to establish footings for the foundations of new buildings. Trucks groaned in and out with lumber and revolving cement mixers. Hammers banged and saws of various kinds whined and shrieked, each saw having its own sound, like the motors of individual cars. Heavy earth-moving equipment rumbled constantly and shrill whistles pierced the air, announcing the imminent blasts and warning those nearby to take cover.
Financial transactions were conducted at the bank, which was in a hastily erected trailer, and the armoured cars clanked in, bringing the money to meet the various payrolls and also to take the money out. Many of the construction and cement crews were Italian or Portuguese, while some were German. Almost all of the men from a small village in the south of Ireland were there and, from our own region, the always cheerful Newfoundlanders. For a while all of us ate in a common dining hall and when the whistle would blow announcing noon, the construction crews would drop whatever they were doing and run to be near the front of the jostling line, throwing their hard hats in the air and leaping over whatever obstacles might be in their way. Within the dining hall the ethnic groups sat by themselves, each group speaking its own language, leaning forward intensely amidst gesticulating hands. Because we worked underground, those of us on the surface at midday were not as frantically influenced by the noon whistle, having at that point of the day more time than those who were limited by the boundaries of twelve and one. We would come later or perhaps earlier, slightly before the havoc-creating blast of the anticipated whistle. Taking our trays, we too would go to certain areas, like students who always choose specific seats in the classroom although such seats are never formally assigned. We would pass by the various groups bound for our own region of the country while voices from the small intense divisions of Europe rose around us. Sometimes as we passed by certain voices would quietly attempt to identify us. “Those are the Highlanders,” they would say, “from Cape Breton. They stay mostly to themselves.”
It is hard to know why, in such circumstances, we spoke Gaelic more and more. Perhaps by being surrounded by other individual groups we felt our lives more intensely through what we perceived as “our own language.” Sometimes we would talk to the Irish, comparing phrases and expressions. There was a determined effort in Ireland, they said, to preserve Gaelic or “Irish.” “It was the language spoken in the garden of Eden,” they said. “It was the language that God used when speaking to the angels.” We could understand each other reasonably well if we spoke slowly and carefully. “Why not?” said one of them. “After all, we are but different branches of the same tree.”
As the days of summer lengthened, our own work became more desperately intense. After the shafts were sunk to the required depths the drifts were driven in the direction of the ore. Clann Chalum Ruaidh leaned into the jacklegs at the rock face, the hammering of the wet revolving bits changing the stone into dribbles of grey water which trickled from the holes like constant streams of watery semen or liquid, weak cement. The snaking yellow airhoses trailed behind the jacklegs and the men leaning into them. If the rock were “hard,” a shift’s “round” might progress only eight feet, but if the rock were “soft,” twelve-foot steels were often used to drill the deeper holes. When the holes were drilled they would be loaded and wired with dynamite, the slender, dangerous sticks tamped in with long wooden poles and connected to each other with the fragile, delicate blasting wire. It was important that the centre of the face explode first and that the succeeding blasts be directed towards the blown-out centre. The dynamite in the holes at the bottom of the face, in the “lifters,” would have to lift the rock towards the empty centre while that in the holes at the face’s top would be helped by gravity. The skill was in knowing not only how many holes to drill but how deeply they should be drilled, and in calculating the rock’s resistance to the dynamite’s force. If the blast was not clean and the rock was not blown away evenly and to the required depth, all the work of the shift would be largely wasted, and much of it would have to be begun again. Only it would be more difficult because of the unevenness of the face, the dislocated piles of rubble, and the fear of concealed and unexploded dynamite or non-ignited blasting caps.
When the face was wired we would withdraw from it, walking back out the drift or tunnel we had earlier already created towards the station and trailing the detonating wire behind us. When the handle of the plunger was pressed down we would listen to the sequential explosion of the charges. Counting them on our fingers one by one, telling by the sound the effectiveness of each. Worried and fearful of “blowouts,” which meant that the dynamite, instead of shattering the rock around it, would merely shoot back o
ut of the hole in which it had been tamped. When there was a blowout the charge would “pop” instead of explode and, on hearing it, we would curse or shake our heads or drive one fist into the palm of the other hand and wonder what went wrong. By the time the last charge had exploded, the acrid smell of the powder from the first would be wafting towards us, accompanied by its yellow sulphurous cloud. Often we would ring for the cage and the hoistman would take us to the surface so that we could breathe.
It was always something of a surprise to come to the surface and to be reacquainted with the changes of weather and of time. Sometimes it would be four in the morning and the night would be giving way to dawn, and the stars would appear to be going out like quietly snuffed candles as the sky began to redden with the promise of the sun. Sometimes the moon would gleam whitely above us and my brothers would say, “Coimhead, lochran aigh nam bochd,” “Look, the lamp of the poor.” And sometimes at the appearance of the new moon Calum would bow or almost curtsy in the old way and repeat the verses taught to him by the old Calum Ruadh men of the country:
“In holy name of the Father One
And in the holy name of the Son
In holy name of the spirit Dove
The holy three of Mercy above.
Glory forever to thee so bright
Thou moon so white of this very night;
Thouself forever thou dost endure
As the glorious lantern of the poor.”
Sometimes he would repeat them in English or switch to the original Gaelic:
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