The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  —So that’s where your skates came from: Jack MacIsaac.

  They all chipped in again and sent the boys back home for burial in their own Cape Breton parishes, Margaree and Judique. Alex MacDonnell from Mabou went along—making sure they made it home okay, to their waiting families. Looking after them. To the very end. The absolute end.

  That was the story he told me. And I thought, Isn’t it peculiar how conversations about the mining business always seem to end with someone being dead?

  Seven

  Mr. Isaac’s (Extraordinary) Wake

  35.

  IN St. Lawrence, in early December 1952, Therese Slaney was expecting her first baby, so to be on the safe side, she decided to go to the little cottage hospital in Burin for the delivery. There was talk about a new hospital for St. Lawrence, but it was still almost two years off in the uncertain future.

  It was a daunting prospect, having this first baby. Her family had originally been from near Lord’s Cove, but after losing all they owned in the 1929 tsunami, they’d relocated to St. Pierre. Therese was born and raised there, and was technically a citizen of France. English was her second language.

  Burin could be intimidating. But she was nervous about having her first child at home. There was much that could go wrong. And there was so much illness lurking, preying on the vulnerable, the elderly and the newly born. Which reminded her: before setting out for Burin, she should look in on her ailing neighbour, Isaac Slaney, or Mr. Isaac, as he was known around the neighbourhood.

  Isaac Slaney, a distant relative and close friend of her father-in-law, Rennie Slaney, had been a miner and, like Rennie, had started out at Black Duck back in the early thirties. Now he was very sick, possibly dying from some mysterious disease.

  He was weak when she dropped by and apologetic for the fact that he probably wouldn’t be alive when she returned—that he wouldn’t get a chance to meet and celebrate the new addition to the Slaney clan. It was just a feeling he had.

  This premonition weighed upon his cheer, and Therese went out of her way to reassure him—of course he’d be there when she came back, and he should not lose hope. But deep inside she knew that his words were no appeal for encouragement or sympathy, and that they came from a profound subconscious knowledge of his fate.

  She brushed aside the fatalism anyway, urged him to keep up the good fight for her sake and for the sake of the baby and the celebration that always accompanies new life. He smiled thinly and shook her hand, and she departed for Burin to begin the prenatal waiting.1

  SHORTLY after her arrival at the hospital in Burin, Therese was surprised to see her husband, Herb Slaney, at her bedside. She hadn’t been expecting a visit, at least not right away. But there he was, looking fidgety as would be expected. He also seemed to be in a hurry, and when she asked him why, he told her that he was actually in Burin on a secret mission and would explain everything in due course. But for now, he couldn’t.

  And by the way, he added, Mr. Isaac had passed away on December 4, shortly after her departure. Everyone back home was mourning. Mr. Isaac was a true gentleman, but his death was also merciful because he had suffered greatly, and all the doubts and questions about the mystery illness that was killing him had increased his agony.

  Isaac Slaney was forty-six years old.

  SUCH deaths were not yet especially remarkable, although St. Lawrence miners had been suffering from mysterious and usually fatal illnesses since about 1945. Isaac might even have considered himself fortunate. He’d have known Augustus Pike, who had also started work at Black Duck. Pike, when he was little more than a boy, started out picking spar—literally working at a sorting table in the mill. Like many of his generation, he then moved underground, where he continued working until his health gave out. He died in 1946, at the age of twenty-seven. He left a wife and four children, one of whom was suffering from polio.2

  There is no official record of the cause of his death, but to his friends, neighbours and family, there was an unavoidable suspicion. His suffering and his symptoms were becoming familiar, even in the mid-forties. The dead and dying all had worked in Black Duck mine. It was becoming difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion: there was something sinister and deadly lurking underground.

  Patrick Rennie, who’d lost his wife and three of his children in the tsunami of 1929, died in January 1951, after debilitating health problems. Patrick, like Isaac Slaney and Augustus Pike, had gone to work at Black Duck when it started up in 1933. A decade later, there was obviously something wrong with Patrick’s health, and soon he couldn’t work at all. He was forty-two and healthy when he started mining at Black Duck. He was sixty when he died.

  Rennie Slaney, who had also gone to work at Black Duck at the beginning, suffered from chronic breathing problems and had his first heart attack when he was in his early forties. In early 1952, he had actually missed the marriage of Herb and Therese, his son and daughter-in-law, because of illness. He was very much aware of Mr. Isaac’s decline, which had started in about 1946, and he was concerned about the health problems of many of their contemporaries, almost all of them miners or former miners at Black Duck and Iron Springs, even the relatively modern Director mine.

  He was especially worried about his brother, Arcule, who seemed to be aging before his eyes. Arcule was ten years older than Rennie, but he had always been a healthy six foot four. Now he was slowing down, almost withering. The consensus was tuberculosis. There was a lot of this in St. Lawrence—men breathing with difficulty after exertions that they once would hardly have registered. But it had to be more than tuberculosis. Miners with TB were dying. Other people with TB were being cured.

  It bothered Richard Clarke to the extent that once the fishery had recovered in the forties, he’d spend as many months of every year as possible on the water—the physical effect of working underground was alarming to him, even when he was a young man. In 1997, he told his nephew, the historian Richard Rennie (Patrick Rennie’s grandson) how much it had bothered him: “I knew that there was something down there because when I went in the mine after fishing all the summer up to November . . . after you’d get there for a couple of months you’d start losing your appetite and the strength would go, you’d start losing the strength in your legs, and you’d find it hard to breathe.”3

  Isaac Slaney, like Clarke and most underground mine workers, had experienced shortness of breath in the beginning and then symptoms that seemed to be from tuberculosis, which was raging across the island at the time. Herb Slaney had attended high school in St. John’s and would frequently visit the TB sanatorium to comfort the men from St. Lawrence he’d routinely find there—up to twenty at a time. He would, much later, describe the hospital visits to Richard Rennie this way: “It became so common for miners to be admitted to the sanatorium that people began referring to their condition as ‘miners’ TB.’”

  Herb’s brother, Adrian, had a similar experience visiting the hospital, according to Richard Rennie, who became a meticulous chronicler of the mining history of his hometown. Richard Rennie wrote: “[T]here were ‘all these men from St. Lawrence, and the ones who were there before had come home and died, while men from other places treated for TB were recovering.’ One former tuberculosis patient . . . even went back to work at the mine, and died two months later. As Adrian Slaney put it, it was obvious by the early 1950s that St. Lawrence miners were dying but ‘we didn’t know what they were dying from.’”4

  Rennie Slaney, Adrian and Herb’s father, would later write: “[T]he men of St. Lawrence could not be cured. They received the best of treatment. They were given all available drugs and needles. They gained in weight and even looked healthy, but their shortness of breath could not be improved. After being discharged from the San, some lasted a very few months and others somewhat longer. All are now deceased.”5

  JEROME Kelly suffered injuries to his chest and back working underground when he was jammed between a tramcar and a chute in 1951. He had five kids between five and twelv
e and had to struggle back to work. By February 1954, he had to stop again, this time permanently, because of failing health. That month, he went to the sanatorium in St. John’s, where he was told that he had tuberculosis. He refused the standard treatment and told the doctors he just wanted to go home to St. Lawrence and die there.

  They sent him home, and on October 15 that year, he died. He was thirty-five years old.6

  His widow applied for workers’ compensation—her husband had been working around fluorspar for twenty years. It took her fifteen years to get it. In the interim, she supported herself and her family by collecting welfare of eighty-five dollars a month.

  IT WAS ingrained in the character of people like the Rennies and the Slaneys, the Pikes and the Kellys, to endure challenges and hardships with minimal complaint. Their feelings, as they struggled through unimaginable suffering, are difficult to grasp. Richard Rennie, Patrick’s grandson, assembled an encyclopedic record of the St. Lawrence mining story for a doctoral thesis. But the story of his own family connection is absent from the narrative.

  Self-effacement seems to run in the Rennie family. His grandfather, Richard recalled in correspondence, was “a bit of a private man.” Paddy Rennie’s sorrows after 1929 were private matters, not to become burdens for others who had troubles of their own. “No one knows or will ever know how his loss affected him,” Richard Rennie explained. “My father [Albert Rennie] likewise did not speak much of him, except to relate things about particularly difficult or successful fishing seasons, etc. The history of the tidal wave and the death of my father’s family . . . was a thing that was somehow always there but seldom spoken of.”7

  Even the specifics of their work-related illnesses were unspoken—until much later in their lives, or after death.

  THEN, in the late forties, a potential explanation for the deadly mystery. A word. A word that only doctors used, but that would soon become part of the industrial vernacular in St. Lawrence: silicosis.

  A crucial part of the health care system in Newfoundland in the late forties was a floating clinic, a boat called the Christmas Seal. The little ship had a daunting mission—providing care to more than twelve hundred small communities scattered along six thousand miles of coastline.

  She visited St. Lawrence in 1947 and again in 1950. During the 1947 visit, three of the miners who showed up for x-rays were found to have “suspicions of silicosis.”8 Isaac Slaney was one of them. It was on the strength of that x-ray that a young doctor, John Pepper, who’d arrived from England in 1949 and settled in St. Lawrence for a while, concluded that Mr. Isaac was suffering from a work-related illness.

  Dr. Pepper’s diagnosis, while clear to him, was inconclusive to almost everybody else. Silicosis, at least in the early stages, is hard to diagnose by x-ray. Dr. Pepper didn’t dispute the fact that Isaac Slaney probably had tuberculosis, but it was his opinion that the TB was secondary—perhaps even caused by respiratory vulnerability resulting from pre-existing silicosis.

  There was only one sure way to diagnose silicosis—studying the lung itself, before or after death. Before 1950, when silicosis was first recognized as a compensable disease in Newfoundland, there was little interest among the dead and dying and their grieving families to go through the discomfort, not to mention the medical and bureaucratic hassles, of a biopsy or an autopsy.

  It has been around for a long time, this curse on the health of people who work in dusty subterranean caverns and tunnels. It was mentioned by Hippocrates two thousand years ago. In De re metallica, his 1556 German tome on mineralogy, Georgius Agricola observed that when “dust is corrosive, it ulcerates the lung and produces consumption.”

  It’s an insidious disease. Besides being difficult to diagnose, silicosis is cumulative. As the time of exposure to fine rock dust particles goes on, it becomes more serious. It will continue to compromise the lungs years after exposure ends. Its symptoms—a nagging cough and shortness of breath—can continue to grow more debilitating even after a miner stops working underground. It will often lead to fatal stresses on the heart. It is, essentially, irreversible, incurable.

  Dr. Pepper’s conclusions about the real cause of Isaac Slaney’s ailment should have explained why so many St. Lawrence miners diagnosed as having TB died after standard treatment for the disease, while men from other occupations, like fishing, were cured. But the doctor’s link between silicosis and tuberculosis raised troubling legal questions about corporate and political accountability. Which meant Mr. Isaac’s case was likely to be controversial. And so it was ignored.

  A.V. CORLETT, a mining engineer from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, was familiar with the St. Lawrence mines. The commission government of Newfoundland and the new provincial administration, after 1949, had both retained Professor Corlett on several occasions to inspect mining operations in various parts of the island, including St. Lawrence—and to pay special attention to working conditions for the miners.

  His main focus was on safety. But he commented on the need for improved ventilation underground at Iron Springs and had been advised in 1949 by an underground captain that the corporation was committed to driving new raises from underground to surface for ventilation and emergency escape. Corlett made subsequent visits in 1950 and 1951, but he found no evidence that the corporation had followed up on its assurances.

  Newfoundland mines generally fared well, in terms of serious mining accidents. In St. Lawrence fatalities were rare, but there were too many lesser lost-time accidents at both fluorspar operations, Corlett found. The professor considered the Alcan mine in St. Lawrence to be “carefully run,” while the St. Lawrence corporation had “grown up the hard way” and needed improvements. Corlett noted that even at the corporation mines, “the attitude of management towards the crew” mitigated risk in a work environment that might otherwise have been even more dangerous.9

  Given his awareness of the ventilation problems in the corporation mines and his concern for the well-being of the miners, Professor Corlett’s reaction to Isaac Slaney’s medical file is puzzling.

  He discovered Isaac Slaney’s case in 1950, and it should have served to buttress arguments he was making for better ventilation underground. Mr. Isaac’s medical file seemed to prove that there was a causal link between poor ventilation, dust, silicosis and TB. His ailment was interesting and perplexing, and the suggestion of silica-related tuberculosis was troubling. But after studying the Slaney case, Corlett concluded that Dr. Pepper was mistaken and became aggressive in his efforts to debunk the doctor’s findings.10

  It was “highly unlikely that a miner would contract silicosis in the extremely wet mines that prevail in St. Lawrence,” Corlett insisted in his report to the government in 1950. He presumed that the notorious water problem in the mines there would have had the salutary effect of suppressing dust. That Isaac Slaney had worked in choking dust caused by the dry drills and jackhammers at Black Duck mine was irrelevant, in Corlett’s view, as Black Duck had been an open-cut operation, where dust would have quickly dissipated in the fresh air.

  The observations were surprising for their superficiality. Black Duck, after about two years, became an underground mine. The drifts were narrow, as they were in Iron Springs, and ventilation was mostly from the natural airflow through the main production shafts. Dust and smoke, from primitive equipment and blasting, were often overwhelming, especially when the mines worked on a three-shift rotation. Miners at Iron Springs, where water poured in constantly, frequently complained of gagging and vomiting, and they often passed out from dust and lack of oxygen.

  Corlett, however, had referred his opinions for review and comment to medical specialists in St. John’s and Ontario. Both specialists expressed ambivalence about the Slaney case and were unwilling to either confirm or challenge Dr. Pepper’s diagnosis. Professor Corlett, however, cited these two non-opinions as proof that there was no scientific basis for claiming that Isaac Slaney had silicosis. In 1951, he noted that Isaac Slaney had, in fact, bee
n released from the St. John’s sanatorium and was back at home in St. Lawrence.

  Then, in December 1952, Mr. Isaac died.

  36.

  THERESE Slaney arrived home in St. Lawrence from the hospital in Burin with her new baby girl, Christine (the first of ten children), and a throbbing curiosity: What was the “secret mission” that had led her husband to her bedside? Now that the mission had been accomplished, Herb was happy to explain.

  After her departure, Dr. Pepper and Rennie Slaney had been in deep discussion about health matters in general and the death of Isaac Slaney in particular. The doctor then called on Rennie’s son, Herb, with a proposition. Dr. Pepper knew that Therese was giving birth in the Burin cottage hospital and he asked if Herb would like a free trip to visit his wife. Herb was delighted to accept the offer, and the undertaking that accompanied it—that he pick up a package while there and bring it back to St. Lawrence. No questions to be asked or information to be disclosed about the real reason for his trip to Burin.

  Mr. Isaac was being waked in the traditional manner, in his own home. His body would be available for visitation there, the family available for condolences. There would be long conversations about Isaac’s virtues, his fortitude. There would be prayers and laughter. There would be food and, maybe, drink. But Mr. Isaac’s wake would be unusual in one respect.

  Before the public viewing, Rennie Slaney and Dr. Pepper removed a kitchen door from its hinges and placed it on the dining room table, near where Isaac Slaney’s body had been laid out. A sheet was placed on the door, and Mr. Isaac’s body was placed upon the sheet.11 Herb Slaney was instructed to sit outside the room and prevent anyone from entering. Rennie Slaney agreed to witness the procedure that would follow. For Rennie, who was a management official at the corporation and not a member of the union, this was a dicey situation. He had a large family—eventually fourteen children—and he was the uncle of Donald Poynter’s second wife. If Seibert ever found out what was going on there, Slaney could lose his job. But what he witnessed in that room would have greater consequences than dismissal—it would shockingly identify a time bomb that was ticking in the local mining industry.