He was backed in that view by the district magistrate, H.W. Quinton, who said: “[S]uch a situation, wherein several hundreds of workmen who are engaged in dangerous occupations are without a resident doctor’s services, is probably without parallel in the whole of the British Commonwealth of nations.”
There would be no response from St. John’s. But the officials in St. Lawrence might have been encouraged had they known that a solution to the problem was slowly gaining traction—in Washington.
JUST months before the accident at Iron Springs, Rear Admiral Arthur Bristol had written his memorandum to the naval secretary, and his comments, in tone and substance, were identical to those of the ranger and the magistrate who investigated Gus Haskell’s death. Bristol had also discussed his proposal for a small but well-equipped hospital for this remote place—a mining town that, unfathomably, didn’t even have a doctor—with Captain Gail Morgan, one of his senior officers in Argentia. When Admiral Bristol died suddenly, just two months after writing to the secretary of the navy, Morgan tried to keep the dream alive. He embraced the idea and began lobbying senior military officials in Washington.
It was an impressive tale—the loss of 203 sailors in a shipwreck, the dramatic rescue of 186 survivors. But in the middle of a war, it was easily lost in the larger global drama. For one American, however, the story of what had happened to the USS Truxtun was the memory that would define much of his long, productive life.29
Ensign James Seamans couldn’t stop thinking about his brush with death on February 18, 1942. How, but for the meaty hand of a St. Lawrence miner, he’d probably have been hauled back out to sea by the wave that had tossed him onto a beach in Chamber Cove and drowned with so many of his shipmates. How they’d trussed him like a side of beef and hauled him on a rope to safety. How this merciful family, the Loders, and this extraordinary mother, Lillian, had nursed him, cared for him. Seemed to love him, a total stranger.
Among those he told about it was his father, Richard Seamans, a prominent Republican and a friend of the local congressman, George Bates, who also lived in Salem, Massachusetts. Seamans and Bates were, like the ranger and the magistrate, indignant that a mining town would have no doctor, no hospital. And that the survival of 186 Americans was only by the grace of God and the courage of civilians who, for all their kindness, could possibly have helped save even more lives that day if there had been a hospital.
Before the year was out, Bates formally proposed that the United States allocate $50,000 to help start a hospital in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. The proposal was well received but went nowhere. Bates, however, was persistent, and for the next seven years, he continued, with the encouragement of Richard Seamans, to pursue his goal—a suitable demonstration of American appreciation.
CONGRESSMAN Bates was a frequent passenger on the Eastern Airlines shuttle from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to Washington, DC. He was one of fifty-five passengers and crew on board the shuttle as it approached Washington National Airport, as it was then known, just before noon on November 1, 1949.
He would not have known that a new American-built P-38 fighter jet was nearby, being tested before delivery to the Bolivian air force. And he could not have known that the warplane had just taken a wrong turn half a mile southwest of Runway 3, the destination of the Eastern shuttle. It’s doubtful if Bates even saw the P-38 before it slammed into the shuttle mid-fuselage, cutting it in two. Nobody would ever know what, if anything, the unsuspecting passengers were aware of. The pilot on the P-38 jet fighter survived. There were no survivors on the shuttle.30
Among the many legislative projects left unfinished on Congressman Bates’s desk was a proposal for funding a hospital in a place that would have meant little to him—Newfoundland, a former British colony that had recently become a province of Canada. The item had been on his desk for a long time—since late 1942.
IT WAS a freak accident. The test pilot at the controls of the military plane was having engine trouble, asked for clearance to land, was told to come down behind the Eastern shuttle on the same runway—misunderstood, thought he was to go ahead.
It might have been the end of an idea that had promised to profoundly alter the quality of life in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. The congressman’s project, however, didn’t die that day. In fact, it got new life and impetus. Congressman Bates had been immensely popular in Washington, and some of his colleagues remembered this passion of his, this dream of helping to build a little hospital somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a place where there lived simple people who were unusual for their generosity.
And so it happened—the eighty-first sitting of the US Congress, in 1949, finally approved an appropriation of $375,000 to build a hospital in St. Lawrence. There were no votes there for American politicians. There were no lobbyists, other than a grateful dad. There were no influential “interests,” except perhaps the US Navy, which, for all its lack of action, still seemed interested.
By April 1950, navy officials from Argentia were sitting down with members of the new provincial government of Newfoundland, Canada, and local officials from the Burin district, drawing up a plan. Construction started in 1951. By then, the estimated cost had risen to $400,000 and so Congress amended the appropriation to add another $25,000.31
On June 6, 1954, at an official ceremony that drew, as reports would state, “Americans and Canadians from all walks of life,” including the premier of Newfoundland, Joseph R. Smallwood, and the US ambassador to Canada, Robert Douglas Stuart, the new facility officially became a part of Newfoundland’s system of “cottage” hospitals.
It had taken twelve years to evolve from a vague idea in the mind of Rear Admiral Arthur Leroy Bristol Jr. to this reality. But, finally, St. Lawrence and the nearby communities had a small but modern, fully equipped hospital, an incentive for doctors and nurses to come to town and stay for more than a month at a time.
It had been twelve years of political and bureaucratic paper shuffling, mostly in Newfoundland, and responses to many practical questions. What if the $400,000 isn’t enough? What about resentment in other places? So the rich Americans will pay to build it, but who will pay to run it?
US naval officials had suggested that because there were already two cottage hospitals in the Burin region, the money should be spent on a facility especially for the treatment of tuberculosis. The practical merit in that idea was that Ottawa would pay to run a regional TB hospital, while the financially strapped Newfoundland government would have to fund a new facility in the cottage system by itself.
One senior provincial official, the deputy minister of health, Leonard Miller, strongly opposed the project and suggested that they take the money from the Americans, thank them, then spend it somewhere else, where the need was greater than in St. Lawrence. Joey Smallwood vetoed both ideas, to the warm approval of the people of Lawn and St. Lawrence, who were insisting on a “general” hospital, with perhaps a special wing for the treatment of tuberculosis.32
And so, in mid-1954, the place was finally opened with great fanfare. They called it the US Memorial Hospital. There was a plaque with an inscription: “Presented by the President of the United States . . . in gratitude.” There had in fact been three US presidents since the idea first arose—Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower. From a political perspective, the old cliché “better late than never” justified forgiving any tardiness in the long, long journey from idea to reality. But from the practical point of view of many families in the area, “late” was just another word for never.
Conversations with the Dead III
vii.
I turned nineteen on the 450-foot level in Tilt Cove on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Notre Dame Bay. I felt dramatic, turning nineteen underground. Manly. There was nobody with me in the drift, or even on the level. I was on maintenance that night and bored. Working alone, I had a lot of time to think.
A miner was killed that summer when he fell into the crusher. I was working night shift that week too. Perhaps it was
the same night, the night when, at midnight, I realized: Hell, I’ve just turned nineteen.
I sat down on a large rock. I reached up to my headlamp, found the little knob and switched it off. It was absolute, the darkness. The only absolute that I will know until I die. And then, of course, I won’t know anything. A wasted experience, death. A chance to know an absolute, but no opportunity to think about it, talk about it.
Then again, what’s to think about? And why talk? Sooner or later, everyone will get an opportunity to know it for themselves.
I could hear water trickling. There were rumbles in the rock around me from drills on other levels.
The man was killed in the early evening. Around five. They blew a whistle, shutting down briefly. I was on my way to the cookhouse. Early supper. Pick up the lunch can. By seven thirty I was in the dry, putting on my work clothes. There was a first aid room in the dry, and that was where they’d put the dead man.
There was a company doctor. He’d come and gone from the first aid room. The man was dead, officially. Certified. It was the same doctor who had examined me when I’d arrived. A stethoscope to my chest. Breathe deeply. In. Out. Say, Ahhhh.
—You’ll do. How old are you?
—Eighteen.
—You’re supposed to be nineteen.
—I will be, soon.
—I’m sure you will.
My father asked, How was the physical?
I laughed.
—Was that the physical? It was harder getting into Sea Cadets.
The dead miner was on a metal table in the first aid room. Naked. There was a small towel over his privates. There was a fifty-cent coin in each eye socket.
We stood around and stared. Nobody spoke. Charlie Angus MacLeod was silent, the only time I’d ever seen him speechless. An older miner named Philip MacPhail, who was a war vet, touched the dead man’s chest. It moved like jelly. One by one the living miners sighed, shrugged and left the room.
It felt odd, sitting in the absolute absence of light, hearing the drip of water, the buzz and rattle in the rock around me.
When I was getting off the cage at the 450, someone asked if I was working there alone. I nodded. Someone else said that in places, it was illegal to work alone like that. A third person chuckled.
—In Newfoundland, nothing is illegal.
—Not without a union, a voice said.
And someone else scoffed,
—Unions. Hah.
I turned the lamp back on. After the absolute darkness, the light seemed to be coppery. The walls glistened with the seeping water. In places there were little rivulets. And the rock around me buzzed and rattled.
I stood, picked up my shovel. I felt chilled. There was a slight ache in my joints from sitting down.
Nineteen, I thought. Getting older. Getting up there.
My father woke me up that morning. I was confused at first. Then he threw two packages of Export A on the bed.
—Happy birthday, he said. Then sat down on the other bed.
—How goes it?
—Good.
—Nineteen, eh?
—Getting on.
I opened one of the packages. We lit up.
—So, you’ll be going back soon.
—Back where?
—You know where. Back to the books.
—I’m not so sure about that.
—Why not?
—Just not.
—You get the marks?
—I got the marks.
—And how were the marks?
—So-so.
—They haven’t kicked you out?
—Not yet.
—Then you’re going back.
He stood.
—You’re just passing through here.
—Maybe not.
—No maybe about it.
He poked the half-smoked cigarette into an empty Coke bottle. The smoke curled and expanded in the bottle, looking for a way out.
—No maybe about it, he repeated. And left.
One of my father’s close friends in Tilt Cove was another itinerant Cape Breton miner, Angus MacDonald. A very common name where we were from. Everybody knew him as Black Angus. He’d probably had very black hair once, but he was going grey.
They were old men, I thought, Black Angus and my father, in their early forties, more than twice as old as I was.
They preferred to converse in Gaelic, which seemed to make them even older, and I tended to be invisible when they were talking to each other. I wouldn’t have expected Black Angus to recognize me if I was shouting at him. And then I found out. He’d recognize me anywhere.
My father went home to Cape Breton for a holiday and I was on my own. There was a beer hall not far from the bunkhouse. The proprietor was a mysterious individual whom everybody called Itchy. I think it was a corruption of a difficult European name. He didn’t seem to mind.
The evening of the day my father went away for his holiday, I went to the beer hall for the first time. I was nineteen, still underage but I didn’t think anyone would notice. I bought a beer and sat down, listening to all the exciting noise. Men over-talking one another. Everybody working hard at seeming hard.
Then Black Angus pulled up a chair and sat down. He stared at me for a while and then he stared down at the tabletop, at the beer bottle. And then back up at me. And gesturing towards the bottle, he said,
—I’m going to tell your father.
—Tell him what? I said.
—That you were in here.
—He won’t mind.
At that, he looked away towards a noisy table full of younger hard guys, maybe in their early thirties. Going at each other. Test-driving masculinity.
He looked back at me, nodding. He sighed.
—He’ll mind.
I took a defiant swig from the bottle.
—You’re not the boss.
I smiled.
He stood and hitched his trousers.
—We’ll see about that.
And he walked over to the bar and chatted for a little while with Itchy. I was reassured because neither of them looked in my direction.
But when I went over for my second beer, Itchy said,
—Sorry.
And he nodded towards where Black Angus was now sitting among the hard fellows.
—Not while he’s here.
—What’s he got to do with it?
I was suddenly feeling very cocky. A miner. Nineteen years old.
—He’s supposed to be looking after you, said Itchy.
viii.
My father told me an interesting story about St. Lawrence, from when he worked there, when he was just a little older than I was. Nothing instructive or significant. Just interesting. There were miners from St. Lawrence working in Tilt Cove.
He had two close friends in St. Lawrence when he worked there in the forties, two other miners from Cape Breton. I have a vague impression he told me they had all worked together driving tunnels on the south side of St. John’s Harbour in the early part of the war. The tunnels were for storing munitions. I later found a travel document from 1941. He was going to Newfoundland on behalf of the Department of Munitions and Supply, Dominion of Canada. Something about the secret nature of his work. Obviously, the tunnels.
They got word near the end of that job that there was work down in St. Lawrence, down at the end of the Burin Peninsula. You had to get there by boat. They were looking for men with hard-rock experience. They were mining fluorspar. A strategic mineral. The war was raging overseas. Mining fluorspar, like driving tunnels for munitions, was considered military service. And maybe healthier than the battlefield.
The tunnel men had all worked in Northern Quebec before Newfoundland. A group of them headed for St. Lawrence. Got on. My father and his buddies were supposed to raise the standards of professionalism in the local mines. My father was only twenty-three, going on twenty-four. He’d already been a miner for about seven years. They made him a shift captain. A boss of bosses undergr
ound.
Two of the friends were Jack MacIsaac and Joe MacNeil. They were from Inverness County, in Cape Breton, which is where my father and a lot of hard-rock miners came from. Jack and Joe were contract workers, sinking a shaft for one of the new mines in St. Lawrence.
The story started like this.
—Those skates you have at home?
—Yes.
—They belonged to Jack MacIsaac.
—And who was he?
—He was from home. Long Point. Brought up on the Chisholm Road.
—Right.
And one Christmas, my father and his friends were talking about the coming celebration. How nobody would be getting home because of the difficulty travelling, especially that time of year and the war and everything. And how the festive season was shaping up to be kind of grim. You couldn’t buy liquor in St. Lawrence. But you could get it in Lawn, which was about eight miles away. Lawn was that much closer to St. Pierre. There were bootleggers in Lawn.
Jack and Joe volunteered to walk to Lawn to get the Christmas liquor. What was Christmas without a treat? And then, of course, New Year celebrations.
They all chipped in, and Jack and Joe set off on foot for Lawn one morning just before Christmas. It was a clear day, chilly but not too cold. But the weather turned.
By the time they were on the way back, it was a howling blizzard.
Father Thorne was on a sick call that evening with the horse and sleigh. He came across one of them half in, half out of a brook. He was already gone.
The second man was barely alive, a little farther on, trying to get a fire started by burning the alcohol. The priest got him on the sleigh, but he kept rolling off. And by the time they got to town, he was dead.
The Wake Page 19