“But still,” she says after a quiet pause and in a sober tone, “it was what he was good at and wanted to do. It was just not what I wanted him to do, or at least I did not want him to do it here.”
She unties the shoelace and shows me the two letters. The first is dated March 12, 1938, and addressed General Delivery, Kellogg, Idaho: “I am getting old now and I would like very much if you would come back and take my working place at the mine. The seam is good for years yet. No one has been killed for some time now. It is getting better. The weather is mild and we are all fine. Don’t bother writing. Just come. We will be waiting for you. Your fond father.”
The second bears the same date and is also addressed General Delivery, Kellogg, Idaho: “Don’t listen to him. If you return here you will never get out and this is no place to lead one’s life. They say the seam will be finished in another few years. Love, Mother.”
I have never seen my grandfather’s handwriting before and for some reason, although I knew he read, I had always thought him unable to write. Perhaps, I think now, it is because his hands have been so broken and misshapen; and, with increasing age, hard to control for such a fine task as writing.
The letters are written with the same broad-nibbed pen in an ink which is of a blackness that I have never seen and somehow these letters now seem like a strangely old and incompatible married couple, each cancelling out the other’s desires while bound together by a single worn and dusty lace.
I go out of the pantry and to the window where my grandfather sits. “I am going away today,” I shout, leaning over him.
“Oh yes,” he says in a neutral tone of voice, while continuing to look out the window and finger his rosary. He does not move and the pipe smoke curls upward from his pipe which is clenched between his worn and strongly stained teeth. Lately he has taken to saying, “Oh yes,” to almost everything as a means of concealing his deafness and now I do not know if he has really heard me or is merely giving what seems a standard and safe response to all of the things he hears but partially if at all. I do not feel that I can say it again without my voice breaking and so I turn away. At the door I find that he has shuffled behind me.
“Don’t forget to come back, James,” he says, “it’s the only way you’ll be content. Once you drink underground water it becomes a part of you like the blood a man puts into a woman. It changes her forever and never goes away. There’s always a part of him running there deep inside her. It’s what will wake you up at night and never ever leave you alone.”
Because he knows how much my grandmother is opposed to what he says he has tried to whisper to me. But he is so deaf that he can hardly hear his own voice and he has almost shouted in the way deaf people do; his voice seems to echo and bounce off the walls of his house and to escape out into the sunshot morning air. I offer him my hand to shake and find it almost crushed in the crooked broken force of his. I can feel the awful power of his oddly misshapen fingers, his splayed and flattened too-broad thumb, the ridges of the toughened, blackened scars and the abnormally large knobs that are his twisted misplaced knuckles. And I have a feeling for a terrible moment that I may never ever get away or be again released. But he finally relaxes and I feel that I am free.
Even potholed streets are lonely ones when you think you may not see them again for a very long time or perhaps forever. And I travel now mostly the back streets because I am conspicuous with my packsack and I do not want any more conversations or attempted and failed and futile explanations. At the outskirts of the town a coal truck stops for me and we travel for twenty-five miles along the shoreline of the sea. The truck makes so much noise and rides so roughly that conversation with the driver is impossible and I am very grateful for the noisy silence in which we are encased.
By noon, after a succession of short rides in a series of oddly assorted vehicles, I am finally across the Strait of Canso, off Cape Breton Island and at last upon my way. It is only when I have left the Island that I can feel free to assume my new identity, which I don like carefully preserved new clothes taken from within their pristine wrappings. It assumes that I am from Vancouver, which is as far away as I can imagine.
I have been somehow apprehensive about even getting off Cape Breton Island, as if at the last moment it might extend gigantic tentacles, or huge monstrous hands like my grandfather’s to seize and hold me back. Now as I finally set foot on the mainland I look across at the heightened mount that is Cape Breton now, rising mistily out of the greenness and the white-capped blueness of the sea.
My first ride on the mainland is offered by three Negroes in a battered blue Dodge pickup truck that bears the information “Rayfield Clyke, Lincolnville, N.S., Light Trucking” on its side. They say they are going the approximately eighty miles to New Glasgow and will take me if I wish. They will not go very fast, they say, because their truck is old and I might get a better ride if I choose to wait. On the other hand, the driver says, I will at least be moving and I will get there sooner or later. Any time I am sick of it and want to stop I can bang on the roof of the cab. They would take me in the cab but it is illegal to have four men in the cab of a commercial vehicle and they do not want any trouble with the police. I climb into the back and sit on the worn spare tire and the truck moves on. By now the sun is fairly high and when I remove the packsack from my shoulders I can feel, although I cannot see, the two broad bands of perspiration traced and crossing upon my back. I realize now that I am very hungry and have eaten nothing since last evening’s supper.
In New Glasgow I am let off at a small gas station and my Negro benefactors point out the shortest route to the western outskirts of the town. It leads through cluttered back streets where the scent of the greasy hamburgers reeks out of the doors of the little lunch-counters with their overloud juke-boxes; simultaneously pushing Elvis Presley and the rancid odours of the badly cooked food through the half open doors. I would like to stop but somehow there is a desperate sense of urgency now as if each of the cars on the one-way street is bound for a magical destination and I feel that should I stop for even a moment’s hamburger I might miss the one ride that is worthwhile. The sweat is running down my forehead now and stings my eyes, and I know the two dark patches of perspiration upon my back and beneath the straps are very wide.
The sun seems at its highest when the heavy red car pulls over to the highway’s gravelled shoulder and its driver leans over to unlock the door on the passenger side. He is a very heavy man of about fifty with a red perspiring face and a brown cowlick of hair plastered down upon his damply glistening forehead. His coat is thrown across the back of the seat and his shirt pocket contains one of those plastic shields bristling with pens and pencils. The collar of the shirt is open and his tie is loosened and awry; his belt is also undone, as is the button at the waistband of his trousers. His pants are grey and although stretched tautly over his enormous thighs they still appear as damply wrinkled. Through his white shirt the sweat is showing darkly under his armpits and also in large blotches on his back which are visible when he leans forward. His hands seem very white and disproportionately small.
As we move off down the shimmering highway with its mesmerizing white line, he takes a soiled handkerchief that has been lying on the seat beside him and wipes the wet palms of his hands and also the glistening wet blackness of the steering wheel.
“Boy, it sure is hot,” he says, “hotter’n a whore in hell.”
“Yes,” I say, “it sure is. It really is.”
“Dirty little town back there,” he says, “you can spend a week there just driving through.”
“Yes, it isn’t much.”
“Just travelling through?”
“Yes, I’m going back to Vancouver.”
“You got a whole lot of road ahead of you boy, a whole lot of road. I never been to Vancouver, never west of Toronto. Been trying to get my company to send me west for a long while now but they always send me down here. Three or four times a year. Weather’s always miserable. Hott
er’n hell like this here or in the winter cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.” He beats out a salvo of hornblasts at a teenage girl who is standing uncertainly by the roadside.
Although the windows of the car are open, it is very hot and the redness of the car seems to intensify the feeling and sense of heat. All afternoon the road curves and winds ahead of us like a bucking, shimmering snake with a dirty white streak running down its back. We seem to ride its dips and bends like captive passengers on a roller coaster, leaning our bodies into the curves, and bracing our feet against the tension of the floorboards. My stomach vanishes as we hurtle into the sudden unexpected troughs and returns as quickly as we emerge to continue our twists and turns. Insects ping and splatter against the windshield and are transformed into yellow splotches. The tires hiss on the superheated asphalt and seem almost to leave tracks. I can feel my clothes sticking to me, to my legs and thighs and back. On my companion’s shirt the blotches of sweat are larger and more plentiful. Leaning his neck and shoulders back against the seat he lifts his heavy body from the sweat-stained upholstery and thrusts his right hand through his opened trousers and deep into his crotch. “Let a little air in th ere,” he says, as he manoeuvres his genitals, “must be an Indian made this underwear, it keeps creeping up on me.”
All afternoon as we travel we talk, or rather he talks and I listen, which I really do not mind. I have never met anyone like him before. The talk is of his business (so much salary, so much commission plus other “deals” on the side), of his boss (a dumb bastard who is lucky he has good men on the road), of his family (a wife, one son and one daughter, one of each is enough), of sex (he can’t get enough of it and will be after it until he dies), of Toronto (it is getting bigger every day and it is not like it used to be), of taxes (they keep getting higher and it doesn’t pay a man to keep up his property, also too many Federal giveaways). He goes on and on. I have never listened to anyone like him before. He seems so confident and sure of everything. It is as if he knows that he knows everything and is on top of everything and he seems never to have to hesitate nor stop nor run down nor even to think; as if he were a jukebox fed from some mysterious source by an inexhaustible supply of nickels, dimes and quarters.
The towns and villages and train stations speed by. Fast and hot; Truro, Glenholme and Wentworth and Oxford. We are almost out of Nova Scotia with scarcely thirty miles of it ahead according to my companion. We are almost at the New Brunswick border. I am again in a stage of something like exhausted relief as I approach yet another boundary over which I can escape and leave so much behind. It is the feeling I originally had on leaving Cape Breton, only now it has been heavied and dulled by the journey of the day. For it has been long and hot and exhausting.
Suddenly the road veers to the left and no longer hooks and curves but extends up and away from us into a long, long hill, the top of which we can see almost a half mile away. Houses appear on either side as we begin the climb and then there are more and more of them strung out loosely along the road.
My companion blasts out a rhythm of hornblasts at a young girl and her mother who are stretching up on their tiptoes to hang some washing on a clothesline. There is a basket of newly washed clothes on the ground between them and their hands are busy on the line. They have some clothespins in their teeth so they will not have to bend to reach them and lose their handhold on the line.
“If I had my way, they’d have something better’n that in their mouths,” he says, “wouldn’t mind resting my balls on the young one’s chin for the second round.”
He has been looking at them quite closely and the car’s tires rattle in the roadside gravel before he pulls it back to the quiet of the pavement.
The houses are closer together now and more blackened, and the yards are filled with children and bicycles and dogs. As we move toward what seems to be the main intersection I am aware of the hurrying women in their kerchiefs, and the boys with their bags of papers and baseball gloves and the men sitting or squatting on their heels in tight little compact knots. There are other men who neither sit nor squat but lean against the buildings or rest upon canes or crutches or stand awkwardly on artificial limbs. They are the old and the crippled. The faces of all of them are gaunt and sallow as if they had been allowed to see the sun only recently, when it was already too late for it to do them any good.
“Springhill is a hell of a place,” says the man beside me, “unless you want to get laid. It’s one of the best there is for that. Lots of mine accidents here and the men killed off. Women used to getting it all the time. Mining towns are always like this. Look at all the kids. This here little province of Nova Scotia leads the country in illegitimacy. They don’t give a damn.”
The mention of the name Springhill and the realization that this is where I have come is more of a shock than I would ever have imagined. As if in spite of signposts and geography and knowing it was “there,” I have never thought of it as ever being “here.”
And I remember November 1956: the old cars, mud-splattered by the land and rusted by the moisture of the sea, parked outside our house with their motors running. Waiting for the all-night journey to Springhill which seemed to me then, in my fourteenth year, so very far away and more a name than even a place. Waiting for the lunches my mother packed in wax paper and in newspaper and the thermos bottles of coffee and tea, and waiting for my father and the same packsack which now on this sweating day accompanies me. Only then it was filled with the miners’ clothes he would need for the rescue that they hoped they might perform. The permanently blackened underwear, the heavy woollen socks, the boots with the steel-reinforced toes, the blackened, sweat-stained miner’s belt which sagged on the side that carried his lamp, the crescent wrench, the dried and dustied water-bag, trousers and gloves and the hard hat chipped and dented and broken by the years of falling rock.
And all of that night my grandfather with his best ear held to the tiny radio for news of the buried men and of their rescuers. And at school the teachers taking up collections in all of the classrooms and writing in large letters on the blackboard, “Springhill Miners’ Relief Fund, Springhill, N.S.” which was where we were sending the money, and I remember also my sisters’ reluctance at giving up their hoarded nickels, dimes and quarters because noble causes and death do not mean very much when you are eleven, ten and eight and it is difficult to comprehend how children you have never known may never see their fathers any more, not walking through the door nor perhaps even being carried through the door in the heavy coffins for the last and final look. Other people’s buried fathers are very strange and far away but licorice and movie matinees are very close and real.
“Yeah,” says the voice beside me, “I was in here six months ago and got this little, round woman. Really giving it to her, pumping away and all of a sudden she starts kind of crying and calling me by this guy’s name I never heard of. Must have been her dead husband or something. Kind of scared the hell out of me. Felt like a goddamn ghost or something. Almost lost my rod. Might have too but I was almost ready to shoot it into her.”
We are downtown now and it is late afternoon in the period before the coming of the evening. The sun is no longer as fierce as it was earlier and it slants off the blackened buildings, many of which are shells, bleak and fire-gutted and austere. A Negro woman with two light-skinned little boys crosses the street before us. She is carrying a bag of groceries and the little boys have each an opened sixteen-ounce bottle of Pepsi-Cola. They put their hands over the bottles’ mouths and shake them vigorously to make the contents fizz.
“Lots of people around here marry niggers,” says the voice. “Guess they’re so black underground they can’t tell the difference in the light. All the same in the dark as the fellow says. Had an explosion here a few years ago and some guys trapped down there, I dunno how long. Eaten the lunches of the dead guys and the bark off the timbers and drinking one another’s piss. Some guy in Georgia offered the ones they got out a trip down
there but there was a nigger in the bunch so he said he couldn’t take him. Then the rest wouldn’t go. Damned if I’d lose a trip to Georgia because of a single nigger that worked for the same company. Like I say, I’m old enough to be your father or even your grandfather and I haven’t even been to Vancouver.”
It is 1958 that he is talking about now, and it is much clearer in my mind than 1956, which is perhaps the difference between being fourteen and sixteen when something happens in your life. A series of facts or near-facts that I did not even realize I possessed flash now in succession upon my mind: the explosion in 1958 occurred on a Thursday, as did the one in 1956; Cumberland No. 2 at the time of the explosion was the deepest coal mine in North America; in 1891, 125 men were killed in that same mine; that 174 men went down to work that 1958 evening; that most were feared lost; that 18 were found alive after being buried beneath 1,000 tons of rock for more than a week; that Cumberland No. 2 once employed 900 men and now employs none.
And I remember again the cars before our house with their motors running, and the lunches and the equipment and the waiting of the week: the school collections, my grandfather with his radio, this time the added reality of a TV at a neighbour’s house; and the quietness of our muted lives, our footsteps without sound. And then the return of my father and the haunted greyness of his face and after the younger children were in bed the quiet and hushed conversations of seeping gas and lack of oxygen and the wild and belching smoke and flames of the subterranean fires nourished there by the everlasting seams of the dark and diamond coal. And also of the finding of the remains of men flattened and crushed if they had died beneath the downrushing roofs of rock or if they had been blown apart by the explosion itself, transformed into forever lost and irredeemable pieces of themselves; hands and feet and blown-away faces and reproductive organs and severed ropes of intestines festooning the twisted pipes and spikes like grotesque Christmas-tree loops and chunks of hair-clinging flesh. Men transformed into grisly jigsaw puzzles that could never more be solved.
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