“I don’t know what the people do around here now,” says the voice at my side. “They should get out and work like the rest of us. The Government tries to resettle them but they won’t stay in a place like Toronto. They always come back to their graveyards like dogs around a bitch in heat. They have no guts.”
The red car has stopped now before what I am sure is this small town’s only drugstore. “Maybe we’ll stop here for a while,” he says. “I’ve just about had it and need something else. All work and no play, you know. I’m going in here for a minute first to try my luck. As the fellow says, an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.”
As he closes the door he says, “Maybe later you’d like to come along. There’s always some left over.”
The reality of where I am and of what I think he is going to do seems now to press down upon me as if it were the pressure of the caving-in roof which was so recently within my thoughts. Although it is still hot I roll up the windows of the car. The people on the street regard me casually in this car of too-bright red which bears Ontario licence plates. And I recognize now upon their faces a look that I have seen upon my grandfather’s face and on the faces of hundreds of the people from my past and even on my own when seeing it reflected from the mirrors and windows of such a car as this. For it is as if I am not part of their lives at all but am here only in a sort of movable red and glass showcase that has come for a while to their private anguish-ridden streets and will soon roll on and leave them the same as before my coming; part of a movement that passes through their lives but does not really touch them. Like flotsam on yet another uninteresting river that flows through their permanent banks and is bound for some invisible destination around a bend where they have never been and cannot go. Their glances have summed me up and dismissed me as casually as that. “What can he know of our near-deaths and pain and who lies buried in our graves?”
And I am overwhelmed now by the awfulness of oversimplification. For I realize that not only have I been guilty of it through this long and burning day but also through most of my yet-young life and it is only now that I am doubly its victim that I begin vaguely to understand. For I had somehow thought that “going away” was but a physical thing. And that it had only to do with movement and with labels like the silly “Vancouver” that I had glibly rolled off my tongue; or with the crossing of bodies of water or with the boundaries of borders. And because my father had told me I was “free” I had foolishly felt that it was really so. Just like that. And I realize now that the older people of my past are more complicated than perhaps I had ever thought. And that there are distinctions between my sentimental, romantic grandfather and his love for coal, and my stern and practical grandmother and her hatred of it; and my quietly strong but passive mother and the soaring extremes of my father’s passionate violence and the quiet power of his love. They are all so different. But yet they have somehow endured and given me the only life I know for all these eighteen years. Their lives flowing into mine and mine from out of theirs. Different but in some ways more similar than I had ever thought. Perhaps it is possible I think now to be both and yet to see only the one. For the man in whose glassed-in car I now sit sees only similarity. For him the people of this multi-scarred little town are reduced to but a few phrases and the act of sexual intercourse. They are only so many identical goldfish leading identical, incomprehensible lives within the glass prison of their bowl. And the people on the street view me behind my own glass in much the same way, and it is the way that I have looked at others in their “foreign licence” cars, and it is the kind of judgement that I myself have made. And yet it seems that neither these people nor this man are in any way unkind and not to understand does not necessarily mean that one is cruel. But one should at least be honest. And perhaps I have tried too hard to be someone else without realizing at first what I presently am. I do not know. I am not sure. But I do know that I cannot follow this man into a house that is so much like the one I have left this morning and go down into the sexual embrace of a woman who might well be my mother. And I do not know what she, my mother, may be like in the years to come when she is deprived of the lightning movement of my father’s body and the hammered pounding of his heart. For I do not know when he may die. And I do not know in what darkness she may then cry out his name nor to whom. I do not know very much of anything, it seems, except that I have been wrong and dishonest with others and myself. And perhaps this man has left footprints on a soul I did not even know that I possessed.
It is dark now on the outskirts of Springhill when the car’s headlights pick me up in their advancing beams. It pulls over to the side and I get into its back seat. I have trouble closing the door behind me because there is no handle so I pull on the crank that is used for the window. I am afraid that even it may come off in my hand. There are two men in the front seat and I can see only the outlines of the backs of their heads and I cannot tell very much about them. The man in the back seat beside me is not awfully visible either. He is tall and lean but from what I see of his face it is difficult to tell whether he is thirty or fifty. There are two sacks of miner’s gear on the floor at his feet and I put my sack there too because there isn’t any other place.
“Where are you from?” he asks as the car moves forward. “From Cape Breton,” I say and tell him the name of my home.
“We are too,” he says, “but we’re from the Island’s other side. I guess the mines are pretty well finished where you’re from. They’re the old ones. They’re playing out where we’re from too. Where are you going now?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t know.”
“We’re going to Blind River,” he says. “If it doesn’t work there we hear they’ve found uranium in Colorado and are getting ready to start sinking shafts. We might try that, but this is an old car and we don’t think it’ll make it to Colorado. You’re welcome to come along with us, though, if you want. We’ll carry you for a while.”
“I don’t know,” I say, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll have to make up my mind.”
The car moves forward into the night. Its headlights seek out and follow the beckoning white line which seems to lift and draw us forward, upward and inward, forever into the vastness of the dark.
“I guess your people have been on the coal over there for a long time?” asks the voice beside me.
“Yes,” I say, “since 1873.”
“Son of a bitch,” he says, after a pause, “it seems to bust your balls and it’s bound to break your heart.”
THE GOLDEN GIFT OF GREY
(1971)
At midnight he looked up at the neon Coca-Cola clock and realized with a taut emptiness that he had already stayed too late and perhaps was even now forever lost. He lowered his eyes and then quickly raised them again with the rather desperate hope that he might on a second try somehow catch the clock by surprise and find the hands somewhere else, at nine or ten perhaps, but it was no use. There they were, perfectly vertical, like a rigid arrow of accusation seeming to condemn by their very rigidity and righteousness everything in the world that was not so straight and stern as they themselves.
He felt sick at first and almost numb along his arms and down through his wrists and into his fingers, the way he had felt the time he had been knocked out in the high school football game. He moved his shoulders beneath his shirt in an attempt to shake off the chill and ran his tongue nervously over his lips and travelled his eyes then around the pool table to the men with the cue-sticks in their hands and to the stained brown-black wood that framed the table’s squareness. There were three quarters on the wood indicating that three challengers still remained. And he looked then at the soft, velvet green of the table itself, that held him, he thought, like a lotus land, and finally to the blackness of the eight-ball and the whiteness of the cue, good and evil he thought, paradoxically flowering here on the greenness of this plain. He was in his first real game, and it had somehow become a series of games, a mar
athon that had begun at eight when he had paused, books in hand at the doorway, and it had gone on and on, the night’s hours fleeing with the swiftness and unreality of a dream. The type of dream that holds you in a delicate tensile web, even while a certain part of you knows that you will not remember in the morning, and you do not quite know if the feeling is one of ecstasy or pain, or if the awakening is victory or defeat, or if you are forever saved or yet forever doomed.
And now a voice said, “Boy, you goen to wait all night? I ain’t got time.” And he moved with a jolt, out of the dream but in it, and said, “Side pocket,” indicating the direction with his head, and taking the cue he leaned over and across the table, raising his right leg and feeling his belt buckle press into his stomach, and the brown-black wood strong against his testicles and then the sensation of the smoothly polished wood running slickly through his fingers as he shot and then watched the gently nudged eight-ball roll softly and silently across the field of green until it vanished quietly before his eyes, and he could hear it then, clanging and rolling noisily now somewhere beneath and within the table on its clattering way to join its predecessors in an underworld of dark. And then he saw the green dollar bill flutter down to the table before his eyes and even as he reached for it, someone else was pushing one of the quarters into the slot and redeeming the balls from their cavern and preparing to arrange them within the rack. And it was now after midnight and he knew he had stayed too long.
He had not been home since before eight that morning when he had walked out into the early October sunshine with his books beneath his arm. He could see the books now lying just inside the door on the end of the narrow bench that ran along the wall. They were covered defensively by his jacket and from beneath the sleeve he could see the algebra, and the red-covered geometry into which he had pencilled his marks, 90’s mostly, and the English text whose poems he had almost totally committed to memory. They looked incongruous in this setting and he vaguely wished that somehow he could cover them more adequately; to protect them and perhaps to protect himself from the questions that they asked and the questions that the men might ask about them. He flicked his eyes nervously down the canyon-like room. It was long and narrow and he could hardly discern the far end with its hazy EXIT sign because of the tobacco smoke that seemed to hang in wavering layers in the stale and sour air. A long uneven bar ran almost the total length of the room, beginning near the pool table and stretching like a trackless narrow-gauge railway toward a distant bandstand where two guitarist-singers and a drummer perspired beneath the ever-changing coloured lights and blasted the heavy air with the twanging heartbreak sound of Nashville. On the bar itself three bloated no-longer-young go-go girls moved with heavy unimaginative movements, their net-stockinged feet not always avoiding the sad little puddles of spilled beer. Beneath them and along the bar the men they were supposed to entertain looked up at them dutifully and wearily, although one with hair of snow moved his heavy, calloused hand rhythmically up and down the neck of his beer bottle with a slow and thoughtful masturbating motion.
Over everything and all of them the odour hung and covered and pressed like the roof of a gigantic invisible tent from which there could be no escape. It smelled of work clothes, soaked and dried in sweat and seldom washed, and of spilled beer and of the sour rags used to mop it up, and of the damp and decaying wood that lay beneath the floor, and of the reek that issued forth from the constantly swinging doors of the men’s washroom: the exhausted urine and the powerful disinfectant and the shreds of tobacco and soggy cigarette papers which appeared in the trough beneath the crudely lettered signs: This is not an ashtray; Please don’t throw cigarette butts in our toilet, we don’t urinate in your ashtray; DON’T THROW CIGARETTE BUTTS HERE.
And as it all assailed his senses he felt that everything was wrong with his life and that all of it was ruined, though he was yet but in his eighteenth year. And he wished that he were home.
He could see the situation at home now. The five younger children would be in bed and his sister Mary, who was sixteen, would be helping his mother prepare the lunch that his father would carry in his pail to the meat-packing plant. His younger brother, Donny, who was thirteen, would be desperately hoping, though he knew his hopes were doomed, that the television might remain on longer. And his father who had been propped in front of the television in his undershirt, and in his sock feet and with the waistband of his trousers undone, and with his greying reddish head flopping occasionally from side to side as he dozed and slept more than he dared admit, would have risen and gone to lock the door for the night. And then he would stop and ask gruffly, “Where’s Jesse?” And then there would be the awful, awkward silence, and, “Well, don’t he live here no more?” And they would all squirm and his mother would dry glasses that were already dry, and Mary and Donny would glance furtively at one another, while the heavy-set man, now fully awake and puffing on his pipe, would walk from one window to the next, shielding his eyes against the glass while trying to catch a glimpse of his eldest son approaching beneath the street lights. He would walk ceaselessly back and forth with the long, loping outdoor stride which he had brought to the northern Indiana city from eastern Kentucky and which he could not or would not change and he would mutter: “Where is that fella?” or more strongly, “Where’n hell’s that boy at and it goen on past twelve midnight?” And his wife would watch too, as intently but secretly, so that her husband would not see and become more agitated because of her awareness. And sometimes to make it better she would lie or tell one of the young children to say, “Jesse is studyen over at Caudell’s tonight with Earl. He said he wouldn’t be in till late.”
Then she alone bore the burden of the watching and the waiting and it was much easier then, for unlike her husband she bore her burdens silently and you did not realize that she worried at all unless you happened to catch her at an unguarded moment and saw the trace of strain about her high cheekbones and the tautness of her jaw or the tight compression of her lips. So she would say or cause others to say, “studyen at Caudell’s,” because if it was not the best answer it was better than any other that she knew. And she realized that her husband, even like herself, looked upon “studyen” and whatever it might entail with a deep respect not far removed from fear. For they were both of them barely literate and found even the signing of the magnificent report cards that their children triumphantly and relentlessly presented to them something of a task. Yet while they were sometimes angry and tried to be contemptuous of “book learnen” and people who were just “book smart” they encouraged both as much as they could, seeing in them a light that had never visited their darkness, but realizing that even as they fanned the flame they were losing a grip on almost all they had of life. And feeling themselves as if washed by a flood down the side of a shale-covered Kentucky mountain, clutching and grasping at twigs and roots with their hopeful fingers bloodied raw.
They had been at the base of a very real Kentucky mountain ten years ago when Everett Caudell had finally convinced them to come North. He had been a friend of the boy’s father in the isolation of that squirrel-hunting, pie-social youth and their girls had become the wives they had taken with them to the anguish of the coal camps where jobs and life were at best uncertain amidst an awful certainty of poverty and pain. Caudell had come North and secured the job in the meat-packing plant and then returned with the battered half-ton truck for his family and their belongings and then again for the friend of his youth. The friend who had recently been almost killed when the roof of the illegal little mine that burrowed into the hillside had come crashing down. He had escaped only because he saw the rats racing by him toward the light and had dropped his tools and followed, sprinting after them and almost stepping on their scaly tails as the beginning roar of the crashing rock and the shotgun pops of the snapping timbers sounded in his ears.
Ever since, both he and his wife had been more strongly religious than before, because they felt somehow that God had either sent the f
leeing rats as a sign or had physically propelled the man upon his way, and perhaps had even planned it so that they might come North to a new life. A life that found them ten years later waiting after midnight for the sound of footsteps at their door.
Always before, he had been home by eleven-thirty. Always. Always. But now he was here with the music and the odour in his ears and in his nose, with the cue-stick in his hand and with the green table beneath the tarnished yellow light flat before him. He could see the quarters of the challengers and hear the voices of the men quietly placing side bets behind him and he knew somehow that no matter what the cost, and almost against his soul, he would not, could not go. For it had taken him a long time to reach this night and it could never be again.
It was two years since he had first stopped outside the open door and gazed in at the life that moved beyond it. It had been a hot night in midsummer with the heat moving in little waves off the sidewalk and he had been returning from his job at the Grocery. He had been first attracted by the music, the sound of Eddy Arnold and Jim Reeves, that his father played constantly and of which both he and his sister were ashamed. They did not know the aching loneliness of which it spoke and when it floated from the windows of their house on warm summer nights it branded their parents indelibly as hillbillies and they themselves as well, as extensions of those parents. And it was a label that they hated and did not wish to bear.
He had watched, that night, fascinated, from the sidewalk and when people began to jostle him he had stood in the doorway and then with one foot inside the door, mindful of the signs that read: We do not serve minors; If you are under 21, do not enter; but entering nevertheless, although with one eye always careful of the door, while wearing that expression that he had often noticed on the faces of nervous gentle Negroes on the fringes of all-white crowds.
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