“Gloir dhuit féin gu bràth,
A ghealch gheal, a nochd;
Is tu féin gu bràth
Lochran àigh nam bochd.”
In the country of the clann Chalum Ruaidh the moon governed the weather and the planting of potatoes and the butchering of animals and, perhaps, the conception and birth of children. “The moon will change tonight,” Grandma would say to the overdue, anxious expectant women who were her daughters and daughters-in-law. “After supper we will take a walk, and if God is with us the baby will be born tonight.” And even as I think and tell this now, the moon-affected waters are exerting their pressure by the Calum Ruadh’s Point. Within the circle of the sun the tides are rising and falling, thrusting and pulling and bringing to bear their quiet but relentless force under the guidance of the moon.
At other times when we would come up from the shaft the sun would be blazing. We would shut off our miner’s lamps almost in embarrassment and drape the rubber cords around our necks, even as we blinked our eyes in an attempt to accustom ourselves to the fierceness of the sun. We would take off our miner’s hats and our oilskin rubber coats and throw them on the ground. And we would unfasten the braces from the bibs of the rubber oilers which covered our more conventional clothes and let them dangle below our waists down to our knees. We would take off our rubber gloves, sometimes pulling the fingers inside out to give them some chance to dry, or else we would merely shake the water droplets out of them. The gloves would smell from the stench of human perspiration – like socks that had been worn too long. Regardless of the hardness of our hands, our fingers were always pink and crinkled from the heat and moisture of the gloves. They would appear almost like someone else’s fingers at first, or like the hands of women who spend too much time in the dishpan, or the hands of small children who are left too long in their baths. When they were exposed to the air they would assume their normal colour and texture once again. The wet grey muck that clung to our steel-ribbed rubber boots would dry in the sun and be converted to finely powdered grey dust.
Sometimes when we came to the surface it would be raining and this too would be a surprise. Or the wind would be blowing, causing the still-standing trees to moan and sigh as their moving limbs rubbed against each other.
Underground, beneath the earth’s surface, the weather was always the same. The sun never shone and there was no reflection from the moon. There was no wind, except the slight whisper of the air forced down the shaft to keep us alive, and there was no rain, although the trickle and tinkle of water sounded everywhere. Besides the water there were no natural sounds other than those of our own voices. Only the humming of the air compressors and the generators and the sound of moving and revolving steel hammering and grinding into stone. It was easy to lose track of time and space because life underground dictated, for us, what happened on the surface.
One summer, my oldest brother told me, clann Chalum Ruaidh worked at Keno Hill in the Yukon. They would awaken from their off-shift sleep at four o’clock and the sun would be shining through their bunkhouse windows. Sometimes they would tack their shirts over the inside of the windows to keep out the sun so that they might sleep better, but when they awakened and looked at their watches they would at first be uncertain as to whether it was four in the afternoon or in the morning. They would lie quietly for a while and think about themselves and where they had been before they went to sleep and what was expected of them during the coming day or night. Sometimes they would get up and take down the tacked-up shirts and look at the position of the sun as it hung in the sky. Looking at the sun to give them information or to reconfirm what they thought they believed. Uncertain of time, just as those who travel a great deal are often uncertain on awakening as to place. As the frequent traveller awakens to the strange but familiar decor of yet another hotel room. “Where am I?” he may think for a moment, as his eyes rove over the pulled beige drapes and the bolted-down brown television set and the cream-coloured card announcing room service. “Oh,” he will say, after the moment has passed, “it is all right. I am okay. I am in Toronto, or Cleveland, or Biloxi, Mississippi.”
When our shifts were over we would trudge wearily to the wash house, or “the dry,” as it was called. We would check in our miner’s lamps to the old man with the missing fingers and silicosis who could no longer work underground, and he would place them on the charger so that they would be ready for our next shifts. We would take off our rubber oilers and then our steel-toed rubber boots and our perspiration-soaked woollen socks. And then our flannel shirts and whatever we chose to wear as trousers. Some of us would take off our tattered grey undershirts and our shorts. My brothers, however, wore the long combination suits of woollen underwear. The underwear prevented chafing, they said, and absorbed both the underground water which fell upon them and the perspiration produced by their own bodies. Sometimes they would take the long suits of woollen underwear in their hands and wring them out, the splashing water forming grey, expanding puddles beneath their pink and wrinkled feet. We would go then and stand for a long time beneath the hot jets of water in the huge communal shower, clearing our throats and spitting out the gobs of phlegm, grey with silica, and lathering ourselves with the strong antiseptic yellow soap.
We would wash away the acrid sulphur smell of the blasting powder and look with a kind of wonder at the changes which had taken place upon our bodies during the past eight or twelve hours. There would be new lumps and swellings and fresh cuts and contusions. Sometimes on the backs of our necks there would be small cuts caused by chips of flying stone. And when we removed our hands from lathering our necks there would be tiny trickles of blood mingled with the soapy water which coursed between our fingers. And our necks would sting from the action of the strong soap within small wounds we could not see. Sometimes tiny particles of dust would enter our pores, which opened in the heat and moisture of our work, and later small infections would set in, resulting in eruptions not unlike the salt-water boils which rose on my brothers’ wrists during the years they fished off the Calum Ruadh’s Point. The eruptions rose most frequently under our arms and in the area of our groins and, later, in the privacy of our rooms, we would lance them with needles and squeeze out the pulsating poison. Before the lancing we would hold the points of the needles over the flame from a cigarette lighter to prevent further infection from establishing itself.
After our showers we would retrace our route to the bench and baskets which contained our clothes. We would leave our individual wet footprints on the grey cement floor, where they would remain in their uniqueness for only the briefest of moments before evaporating in the gusts of heat. From the lowered wire baskets we would select our “street clothes,” although we knew that outside there were no streets. And then we would hoist our work clothes on their pulleys up to the roof of the building where they would revolve and dry until we came for them again. We would run combs through the black or redness of our hair and then take our empty lunch cans and go out either into the darkness or the day. If it were day the blackflies would form around us in clouds: entering our nostrils, our ears and the corners of our eyes. They attacked the red-haired people most viciously of all, and even those who were not regular smokers sometimes puffed on cigarettes so that the smoke might keep the flies at bay.
We lived in special bunkhouses provided for us by Renco Development and, given the camp’s condition, our housing was relatively elite. Many of the construction workers slept in large open bunkhouses with twenty or thirty beds pressed too closely together. Men worried about where to leave their wallets while they worked and complained about the petty thievery of shaving cream and razor blades and undistinguished socks. Many of the men kept calendars above their bunks and at the end of each shift crossed off the date of the day that was done. Some of them had futuristic specific dates circled or boxed, often with a word or phrase beneath: “Freedom” or “Gone” or “Last Day” written in English; or words of equivalent meaning in the various languages of Eu
rope. If and when the authors made it to the specific date, they would whoop and shout and throw their hard hats into the bush. Some of them would spray-paint obscenities on the rocks of the Canadian Shield – directing their remarks towards exploitative companies or disliked foremen or unappreciated cooks.
They would go with their earnings to the lives envisioned beyond the circled or boxed dates. To Toronto or Portugal or southern Italy. To get married, or to take a course, or to start a business, or to buy a car. Some few would get no farther than Espanola or Spanish or Sudbury and would return days or weeks later, wan and depressed, having lost their money in poker games or to conniving pimps, or to muggers in men’s washrooms, or to investments in short-lived expensive cars, smashed and abandoned and forever beyond repair. They would return wan and depressed, hoping that no one would associate them with the obscenities of what seemed like another time. Hoping for another opportunity and the chance to begin another calendar. Making private vows and resolutions.
The clann Chalum Ruaidh worked in a different manner. As specialized drift and development miners, we worked on a series of short contracts with Renco Development. Although we were paid a fixed hourly wage, the various bonus clauses were what really interested us financially. We were paid by our footage and by how rapidly we progressed to the black uranium ore which waited for Renco Development and for us behind and beyond the walls of stone. In some ways we were like sports teams buoyed forward and upward by private agreements and bonuses based upon our own production. We worked mainly for ourselves, our victories and losses calculated within our individual and collective minds, and our knowledge of individual and collective contributions a shared and basic knowledge.
When we were not working or sleeping we played the records of the Cape Breton violin which accompanied my brothers everywhere. Sometimes my brothers played their battered violin themselves. And sometimes we hummed or sang the old Gaelic songs. And when we talked, often in Gaelic, it was mostly of the past and of the distant landscape which was our home. The future was uncertain and, for us, it did not have to do with where we were. The death of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald hung heavily on all of us, emphasizing the danger and transience of our lives. Already there was talk of the new townsite that would develop, and of where houses and hockey rinks and schools might stand. And simultaneously there were conversations as to where our branch of clann Chalum Ruaidh might go when the sinking of the shafts and the driving to the ore were completed tasks. One week Renco Development flew Calum to Squamish, British Columbia, to set up a blast at a rock face. The company paid him upward of fifteen hundred dollars to set up a blast that lasted only seconds, but which was so fine and delicately expensive that it was felt that only he could engineer it. Perhaps when dental school rolled around for me in the fall the others would go to Squamish. Perhaps they would go back to South America or South Africa. Vaguely people looked at their passports to check expiry dates. Perhaps they would go home.
Sometimes those of us who were off during the days or early evenings would sit on benches outside our bunkhouse doors. We would engage in desultory games of horseshoes or talk with the Irish and the Newfoundlanders. Many of them were older married men with families who, on paydays, lined up at the small temporary bank to purchase money orders or international bank draughts to send to their distant loved ones. Sometimes they would sit on the benches unconsciously rubbing themselves between their legs. “In Ireland,” said the red-haired Irishman, “I have a home but I have no money. Here I have lots of money but I have no home.” We raised our eyebrows in unison to indicate that we understood.
Sometimes when we passed the bunkhouses of the French Canadians, we could hear them singing and playing their own music through the partially opened windows. Many of their violin jigs and reels were like our own, although played at a faster tempo. We could hear them slapping their feet on the plywood floors and clapping their hands together or upon their thighs without ever missing a beat. Sometimes we could hear them “playing the spoons” in accompaniment to their music, the rhythmic clicking of the spoons, pilfered from the dining hall, changing in texture as they snapped off the hand, the thigh, the knee, the elbow, or the shoulder, in time with “Les Souliers Rouges,” “Tadoussac,” or “Le Reel St. Jean” We never entered their bunkhouses, as they never entered ours. It would have been like going into the dressing room of the opposing team.
In South Africa, my brothers said, the Zulus always sang. They sang mythic songs and tribal songs and work songs with choruses of wordless but rhythmic sounds and syllables. In the season of migration to the mines, they came in singing convoys from their homelands. Strong, arrogant young men singing songs about the lengths of their penises and the many women they intended to impregnate in some distant but uncertain future. Coming for money and bravado to the heat of the underground, and the quarrels and knife fights of the miners’ compounds.
Outside the camp gates and beyond the posts of the security guards, there existed another world. No one was legally allowed within the camp gates unless an identification card or badge number could be produced, indicating the company of employment. To the security guards in their small plywood huts, there came a constant stream of people with a variety of petitions and requests. Some were looking for work and had driven in over the rough and rocky roads encouraged only by the possibilities of speculation. Others had hitchhiked in and stood with their backpacks at their feet, the sweat-blotched outlines of the packs still visible on their shirts. Others were looking for real or invented relatives: brothers, cousins, boyfriends, men who had not paid their child support. Some were there to collect debts. Some were looking only for a meal. “No,” said the security guards over and over again. “No badge number, no entry.” “No, I don’t have a master list of everyone who works here.” “No, I don’t know if anyone is hiring now. You’ll have to go back to Sudbury and register there at the Unemployment Office.” “No, I don’t know any tall dark man with a missing finger and a scar running down his cheek.” “No, I don’t recall anybody by that name.” “No, you can’t go in just to have a look around.” “No, there is no need to leave a message here, because I can’t deliver it.” “No, I told you the same thing yesterday.” “No, I can’t let you in even if you give me twenty dollars.”
Farther outside the camp gates a primitive parking lot had been hastily bulldozed out of the bush. Amidst the overturned boulders and the uprooted stumps waited the automobiles of the few employees who considered it worthwhile to own them, as well as the cars of uncertain visitors. At the edge of the parking lot and strewn along the roadside were other smashed and abandoned vehicles which had been bulldozed to one side or the other. Most of these had been stripped of their licence plates by former owners who wished to avoid detection, and many of them now served as temporary shelters or primitive places of commerce. Out of the abandoned cars and those of the visitors came individuals who offered products and services for sale. Pedlars sold work shirts and gloves for prices lower than those of the commissary within the gates. There were men with trays of rings and watches, and others with pornographic pictures and various sexual gadgets. The nervous, suspicious bootleggers were always there, constantly looking over their shoulders as they offered cases of warm beer they had secreted among the tree stumps, or jugs of wine or bottles of liquor at twice the legal price. In some of the cars sat young native girls from the reservations who had come looking for money and perhaps adventure and excitement. Sometimes they sat on the hoods of the cars in the hot summer sun, sitting on blankets spread to absorb the hood metal’s heat. Sometimes they leaned sideways, combing and brushing their long black hair in the reflection of twisted side-mirrors or cracked or splintered windshields, pursing their lips as they applied their blood-red lipstick and concentrating fiercely as they lacquered and buffed their long and pointed scarlet nails. Offering one another sticks of gum, or crumpled cigarettes, or drinks of warm wine from opaque paper cups. Trying to pick up the country western stations
on their tinny portable radios; turning the radios one way and then another in an attempt to lure the music in and over the static-producing rocks of the Canadian Shield.
If one walked in the area of such cars at night one could hear the moans and groans as well as the snatches of muffled conversations. Sometimes the oral sounds were diminished by the creaking of the shifting springs beneath the soiled upholstery.
One morning Calum and I went for a walk outside the camp gates. We had just come off our night shift and eaten our breakfast and although we were tired the sun hung in the sky like a molten ball forecasting the coming heat and the difficulty of sleep for our weary bodies. We decided to postpone the effort of sleep and walked out of the gates, over the small grey stones of the crushed still gravel, and towards the direction of the parking lot. And then we could hear the sound of the fiddle hanging or beckoning us in the promised heat of the day. We looked at each other, recognizing the tune of “MacNab’s Hornpipe,” which was a classic piece at the Cape Breton square dances. The music was coming from one of the abandoned cars and as we were drawn in its direction we focused upon what had once been an elegant dark-blue Crown Victoria with its grille now smashed and its hood buckled back so that it looked like the peaked roof of a house. It sat on its wheel rims, as someone had removed the tires and also, it appeared, its trunk lid. Most of the glass from the windshield and the windows was broken and only the jagged edges remained, seeming, even in the summer’s heat, like the beginning slivers of ice at the edge of an autumn pond.
Through the broken front window we could see the form of a small man hunched forward in the passenger seat. He moved his whole body as he played, and his right foot tapped out the beat on the floor mat of the car even as the bow flew over the four taut strings. Although it was still early in the morning, beads of perspiration were already beginning to form on his upper lip and his forehead. He looked up at us through the broken glass of the window and smiled. “Cousin agam fhein,” he said in a mixture of English and Gaelic, looking directly at my shirt although not quite into my eyes. He wore a soiled red baseball cap which read “Last Stop Hotel” above the sketch of a gigantic fish leaping towards a lure. He was a James Bay Cree, he said, and his grandfather or his great-grandfather, he was not sure which, had been a man from Scotland who had plied the trade routes of the north in the years when fur was king. This was the man’s fiddle, he said, offering us the battered instrument. He told us that his own name was James MacDonald and he had recognized the tartan on the shirt of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald, which I had been wearing at the time. The English/Gaelic phrase meant “cousin of my own.”
No Great Mischief Page 13