My almost-attackers wait awhile, scuffing their shoes on the ashy sidewalk, and then they separate and allow us to pass like a little band of cavalry going through the mountains.
We continue down through the town and farther beyond to the seashore where the fishermen are mending their gear and pumping the little boats in which they allow us to play. Then we skip rocks on the surface of the sea and I skip one six times and then stop because I know I have made an impression and doubt if I am capable of an encore.
And then we climb up a high, high hill that tumbles into the sea and a cousin says we will go to see the bull who apparently lives about a mile away. We are really out in the country now and it is getting hot and when I go to loosen my tie the collar button comes off and is forever lost in the grass through which we pass.
The bull lives in a big barn and my cousins ask an old man who looks like my grandfather if he expects any cows today. He says that he does not know, that you cannot tell about those things. We can look at the bull if we wish but we must not tease him nor go too close. He is very big and brown and white with a ring in his nose and he paws the floor of his stall and makes low noises while lowering his head and swinging it from side to side. Just as we are ready to leave, the old man comes in carrying a long wooden staff which he snaps onto the bull’s nose ring. “Well, it looks like you laddies are in luck,” he says, “now be careful and get out of the way.” I follow my cousins, who run out into a yard where a man who has just arrived is standing, holding a nervous cow by a halter and we sit appreciatively on the top rail of the wooden fence and watch the old man as he leads out the bull who is now moaning and dripping and frothing at the mouth. I have never seen anything like this before and watch with awe this something that is both beautiful and terrible, and I know that I will somehow not be able to tell my mother, to whom I have told almost everything important that has happened in my young life.
And later as we leave, the old man’s wife gives us some apples and says, “John, you should be ashamed of yourself; in front of these children. There are some things that have to be but are not for children’s eyes.” The chastised old man nods and looks down upon his shoes but then looks up at us very gravely from beneath his bushy eyebrows, looks at us in a very special way and I know that it is only because we are all boys that he does this and that the look as it excludes the woman simultaneously includes us in something that I know and feel but cannot understand.
We go back then to the town and it is late afternoon and we have eaten nothing but the apples and as we climb the hill toward my grandparents’ house I see my father striding down upon us with his newspaper under his arm.
He is not disturbed that I have stayed away so long and seems almost to envy us our unity and our dirt as he stands so straight and lonely in the prison of his suit and inquires of our day. And so we reply, as children do, that we have been “playing,” which is the old inadequate message sent forth across the chasm of our intervening years to fall undelivered and unreceived into the nothingness between.
He is going down to the mine, he says, to meet the men when they come off their shift at four and he will take me if I wish. So I separate from my comrade-cousins and go back down the hill holding on to his hand, which is something I do not often do. I think that I will tell him about the bull but instead I ask, “Why do all the men chew tobacco?”
“Oh,” he says, “because it is a part of them and of their way of life. They do that instead of smoking.”
“But why don’t they smoke?”
“Because they are underground so much of their lives and they cannot light a match or a lighter or carry any open flame down there. It’s because of the gas. Flame might cause an explosion and kill them all.”
“But when they’re not down there they could smoke cigarettes like Grandpa Gilbert in a silver cigarette holder and Mama says that chewing tobacco is a filthy habit.”
“I know, but these people are not at all like Grandpa Gilbert and there are things that Mama doesn’t understand. It is not that easy to change what is a part of you.”
We are approaching the mine now and everything is black and grimy and the heavily laden trucks are groaning past us. “Did you used to chew tobacco?”
“Yes, a very long time ago, before you were ever thought of.”
“And was it hard for you to stop?”
“Yes it was, Alex,” he says quietly, “more difficult than you will ever know.”
We are now at the wash-house and the trains from the underground are thundering up out of the darkness and the men are jumping off and laughing and shouting to one another in a way that reminds me of recess. They are completely black, with the exception of little white half-moons beneath their eyes and the eyes themselves. My grandfather is walking toward us between two of my uncles. He is not so tall as they nor does he take such long strides and they are pacing themselves to keep even with him the way my father sometimes does with me. Even his moustache is black or a very dirty grey except for the bottom of it where the tobacco stains it brown.
As they walk they are taking off their headlamps and unfastening the batteries from the broad belts which I feel would be very fine for carrying holsters and six-guns. They are also fishing for the little brass discs which bear their identification numbers. My father says that if they should be killed in the underground these little discs would tell who each man was. It does not seem like much consolation to me.
At a wicket that looks like the post office the men line up and pass their lamps and the little discs to an old man with glasses. He puts the lamps on a rack and the discs on a large board behind his back. Each disc goes on its special little numbered hook and this shows that its owner has returned. My grandfather is 572.
Inside the adjoining wash-house it is very hot and steamy like when you are in the bathroom a long, long time with the hot water running. There are long rows of numbered lockers with wooden benches before them. The floor is cement with little wooden slatted paths for the men to walk on as they pass bare-footed to and from the noisy showers at the building’s farthest end.
“And did you have a good day today, Alex?” asks my grandfather as we stop before his locker. And then unexpectedly and before I can reply he places his two big hands on either side of my head and turns it back and forth very powerfully upon my shoulders. I can feel the pressure of his calloused fingers squeezing hard against my cheeks and pressing my ears into my head and I can feel the fine, fine, coal dust which I know is covering my face and I can taste it from his thumbs which are close against my lips. It is not gritty as I had expected but is more like smoke than sand and almost like my mother’s powder. And now he presses my face into his waist and holds me there for a long, long time with my nose bent over against the blackened buckle of his belt. Unable to see or hear or feel or taste or smell anything that is not black; holding me there engulfed and drowning in blackness until I am unable to breathe.
And my father is saying from a great distance: “What are you doing? Let him go! He’ll suffocate.” And then the big hands come away from my ears and my father’s voice is louder and he sounds like my mother.
Now I am so black that I am almost afraid to move and the two men are standing over me looking into one another’s eyes. “Oh, well,” says my grandfather turning reluctantly toward his locker and beginning to open his shirt.
“I guess there is only one thing to do now,” says my father quietly and he bends down slowly and pulls loose the laces of my shoes. Soon I am standing naked upon the wooden slats and my grandfather is the same beside me and then he guides and follows me along the wooden path that leads us to the showers and away from where my father sits. I look back once and see him sitting all alone on the bench which he has covered with his newspaper so that his suit will not be soiled.
When I come to the door of the vast shower room I hesitate because for a moment I feel afraid but I feel my grandfather strong and hairy behind me and we venture out into the pouring water and t
he lathered, shouting bodies and the cakes of skidding yellow soap. We cannot find a shower at first until one of my uncles shouts to us and a soap-covered man points us in the right direction. We are already wet and the blackness of my grandfather’s face is running down in two grey rivulets from the corners of his moustache.
My uncle at first steps out of the main stream but then the three of us stand and move and wash beneath the torrent that spills upon us. The soap is very yellow and strong. It smells like the men’s washroom in the Montreal Forum and my grandfather tells me not to get it in my eyes. Before we leave he gradually turns off the hot water and increases the cold. He says this is so we will not catch cold when we leave. It gets colder and colder but he tells me to stay under it as long as I can and I am covered with goose pimples and my teeth are chattering when I jump out for the last time. We walk back through the washing men, who are not so numerous now. Then along the wooden path and I look at the tracks our bare feet leave behind.
My father is still sitting on the bench by himself as we had left him. He is glad to see us return, and smiles. My grandfather takes two heavy towels out of his locker and after we are dry he puts on his clean clothes and I put on the only ones I have except the bedraggled tie which my father stuffs into his pocket. So we go out into the sun and walk up the long, long hill and I am allowed to carry the lunch pail with the thermos bottle rattling inside. We walk very slowly and say very little. Every once in a while my grandfather stops and turns to look back the way we have come. It is very beautiful. The sun is moving into the sea as if it is tired and the sea is very blue and very wide – wide enough it seems for a hundred suns. It touches the sand of the beach which is a slender boundary of gold separating the blue from the greenness of the grass which comes rolling down upon it. Then there is the mine silhouetted against it all, looking like a toy from a Meccano set; yet its bells ring as the coal-laden cars fly up out of the deep, grumble as they are unloaded, and flee with thundering power down the slopes they leave behind. Then the blackened houses begin and march row and row up the hill to where we stand and beyond to where we go. Overhead the gulls are flying inland, slowly but steadily, as if they are somehow very sure of everything. My grandfather says they always fly inland in the evening. They have done so as long as he can remember.
And now we are entering the yard and my mother is rushing toward me and pressing me to her and saying to everyone and no one, “Where has this child been all day? He has not been here since morning and has eaten nothing. I have been almost out of my mind.” She buries her fingers in my hair and I feel very sorry for my mother because I think she loves me very much. “Playing,” I say.
At supper I am so tired that I can hardly sit up at the table and my father takes me to bed before it is yet completely dark. I wake up once when I hear my parents talking softly at my door. “I am trying very hard. I really am,” says my mother. “Yes, yes, I know you are,” says my father gently and they move off down the hall.
And now it is in the morning two weeks later and the train that takes us back will be leaving very soon. All our suitcases are in the taxi and the good-byes are almost all completed. I am the last to leave my grandmother as she stands beside her stove. She lifts me up as she did the first night and says, “Good-bye, Alex, you are the only grandchild I will never know,” and presses into my hand the crinkled dollar that is never spent.
My grandfather is not in, although he has not gone to work, and they say he has walked on ahead of us to the station. We bump down the hill to where the train is waiting beside the small brown building, and he is on the platform talking with some other men and spitting tobacco over the side.
He walks over to us and everyone says good-bye at once. I am again the last and he shakes hands very formally this time. “Good-bye, Alex,” he says, “it was ten years before you saw me. In another ten I will not be here to see.” And then I get on the train and none too soon for already it is beginning to move. Everyone waves but the train goes on because it must and it does not care for waving. From very far away I see my grandfather turn and begin walking back up his hill. And then there is nothing but the creak and sway of the coach and the blue sea with its gulls and the green hills with the gashes of their coal embedded deeply in their sides. And we do not say anything but sit silent and alone. We have come from a great distance and have a long way now to go.
IN THE FALL
(1973)
“We’ll just have to sell him,” I remember my mother saying with finality. “It will be a long winter and I will be alone here with only these children to help me. Besides, he eats too much and we will not have enough feed for the cattle as it is.”
It is the second Saturday of November and already the sun seems to have vanished for the year. Each day dawns duller and more glowering and the waves of the grey Atlantic are sullen and almost yellow at their peaks as they pound relentlessly against the round smooth boulders that lie scattered as if by a careless giant at the base of the ever-resisting cliffs. At night, when we lie in our beds, we can hear the waves rolling in and smashing, rolling in and smashing, so relentless and regular that it is possible to count rhythmically between the thunder of each: one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four.
It is hard to realize that this is the same ocean that is the crystal blue of summer when only the thin oil-slicks left by the fishing boats or the startling whiteness of the riding seagulls mar its azure sameness. Now it is roiled and angry, and almost anguished; hurling up the brown dirty balls of scudding foam, the sticks of pulpwood from some lonely freighter, the caps of unknown men, buoys from mangled fishing nets and the inevitable bottles that contain no messages. And always also the shreds of blackened and stringy seaweed that it has ripped and torn from its own lower regions, as if this is the season for self-mutilation – the pulling out of the secret, private, unseen hair.
We are in the kitchen of our house and my mother is speaking as she energetically pokes at the wood and coal within her stove. The smoke escapes, billows upward and flattens itself out against the ceiling. Whenever she speaks she does something with her hands. It is as if the private voice within her can only be liberated by some kind of physical action. She is tall and dark with high cheekbones and brown eyes. Her hair, which is very long and very black, is pulled back severely and coiled in a bun at the base of her neck, where it is kept in place by combs of coral.
My father is standing with his back toward us and is looking out the window to where the ocean pounds against the cliffs. His hands are clasped behind his back. He must be squeezing them together very tightly because they are almost white – especially the left. My father’s left hand is larger than his right and his left arm is about three inches longer than normal. That is because he holds his stevedore’s hook in his left hand when he works upon the waterfront in Halifax. His complexion is lighter than my mother’s and his eyes are grey, which is also the predominant colour of his thinning hair.
We have always lived on the small farm between the ocean and the coal mining town. My father has always worked on his land in the summer and at one time he would spend his winters working within the caverns of the coal mine. Later when he could bear the underground no longer he had spent the time from November to April as an independent coal-hauler, or working in his woodlot where he cut timbers for the mine roof’s support. But it must have been a long time ago, for I can scarcely remember a time when the mine worked steadily or a winter when he has been with us, and I am almost fourteen. Now each winter he goes to Halifax but he is often a long time in going. He will stand as he does now, before the window, for perhaps a week or more and then he will be gone and we will see him only at Christmas and on the odd weekend; for he will be over two hundred miles away and the winter storms will make travelling difficult and uncertain. Once, two years ago, he came home for a weekend and the blizzard came so savagely and with such intensity that he could not return until Thursday. My mother told him he was a fool to make such a journey and that he h
ad lost a week’s wages for nothing – a week’s wages that she and six children could certainly use. After that he did not come again until it was almost spring.
“It wouldn’t hurt to keep him another winter,” he says now, still looking out the window. “We’ve kept him through all of them before. He doesn’t eat much now since his teeth have gone bad.”
“He was of some use before,” says my mother shortly and rattling the lids of her stove. “When you were home you used him in the woods or to haul coal – not that it ever got us much. These last years he’s been worthless. It would be cheaper to rent a horse for the summer or perhaps even hire a tractor. We don’t need a horse any more, not even a young one, let alone one that will probably die in March after we’ve fed him all that time.” She replaces the stove-lids – all in their proper places.
They are talking about our old horse Scott, who has been with us all of my life. My father had been his driver for two winters in the underground and they had become fond of one another and in the time of the second spring, when he left the mine forever, the man had purchased the horse from the Company so that they might both come out together to see the sun and walk upon the grass. And that the horse might be saved from the blindness that would inevitably come if he remained within the deeps; the darkness that would make him like itself.
At one time he had even looked like coal, when his coat was black and shiny strong, relieved by only a single white star in the centre of his forehead; but that too was a long time ago and now he is very grey about the eyes, and his legs are stiff when he first begins to walk.
“Oh, he won’t die in March,” says my father, “he’ll be okay. You said the same thing last fall and he came through okay. Once he was on the grass again he was like a two-year-old.”
For the past three or four years Scott has had heaves. I guess heaves come to horses from living too near the ocean and its dampness; like asthma comes to people, making them cough and sweat and struggle for breath. Or perhaps from eating dry and dusty hay for too many winters in the prison of a narrow stall. Perhaps from old age too. Perhaps from all of them. I don’t know. Someone told my little brother David who is ten that dampening the hay would help, and last winter from early January when Scott began to cough really bad, David would take a dipper of water and sprinkle it on the hay after we’d put it in the manger. Then David would say the coughing was much better and I would say so too.
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