The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  The most striking proof that Dr. Pepper and Rennie Slaney had been prophets in the early fifties was accumulating in the hospitals and homes and St. Cecilia cemetery in St. Lawrence. By 1969, there were more than two hundred former miners who were either dead or dying.

  THE royal commission, while it changed little in the short term, seemed to bring a kind of weary public closure for a while. The tragedy of the St. Lawrence miners had now been thoroughly investigated. It came too late for far too many people, but better late than never. No policy or regulation could reverse the damage that was already done. Improvements in the workplace were already under way, and there would be some material relief for people who were sick and for their families. All in all, the situation had been dealt with, from a political and bureaucratic viewpoint.

  The story of the St. Lawrence mines would become another episode in a long history of tragedy in a place where, it would seem, destiny had never smiled and never would. But like most tragedies, it too would gradually fade from the public consciousness, except in those small communities where, for decades, it had been conspicuous: St. Lawrence, Little St. Lawrence, Lawn, Lord’s Cove, Lamaline . . .

  In those places, families and friends would share a continuing sense of frustration. The frustration, as months and even years went by, would metastasize to anger and gradually outrage.

  IN the summer of 1974, Priscilla Turpin had a visitor. The anthropologist Elliott Leyton, a professor at Memorial University in St. John’s, had been following the St. Lawrence story for years, ever since it became inflamed by the revelations of radiation, cancer and neglect. That summer, he’d decided that it was time the tragedy and its consequences were explained by the people most directly affected—the dying miners and the widows of those who were already in their graves.

  He went to the communities of the south coast of the Burin Peninsula and recorded thirty lengthy interviews. Priscilla Turpin, by then nine years a widow, was among those he talked to. He published ten of the recorded interviews in a book that would quickly become a sensation across the country. The book was Dying Hard.

  Leyton didn’t alter the plain and anguished words of the people he spoke to—didn’t torque them for impact. His own words, in a brief introduction, were spare and simple and, because of the restraint, all the more shocking.

  “Those who have received their death sentence watch each other with intense interest,” he wrote. “They listen for the worsening of a cough, the gasping for breath and the vomiting. They watch for the collapse of the skin on the face, the hollowing of the eye sockets and the dulling of the eyes which presage the end of their suffering.”17

  And he reported the reactions of worried, ailing men to the instruction that they should immediately prepare for death. “One man locked himself in his room for a day and a night; others pace the floor, pounding their fists and weeping. Others are so traumatized they wander in a deep depression, tears coming to their eyes when they realize that this might be their last Christmas, or their last summer on the pier watching the skiffs unload.”

  It was the third time that people beyond the Burin Peninsula had been told the story in shocking human terms: first in 1960, when news of the toxic levels of radioactivity in the St. Lawrence mines initially hit the headlines; again in 1967, when Rennie Slaney’s dramatic submission to the workers’ compensation review became public; and now the story would be told once again, but this time in the voices of the miners, many of them dead when the book appeared. And once again, the story would find a sympathetic audience.

  In her interview with Elliott Leyton, Priscilla Turpin captured what had become and would remain the reality of existence for many families and their communities on the south coast of Newfoundland. “The first few days he came home,” she explained, “he made two trips. One down to the meadow and he looked all around the harbour . . . and that was the last time he was out through the door. He’d get up; he’d try to get up and he’d come out and have something to eat.

  “It’s hard of course when it comes. And it does something to you. There’s no way I can explain it, it’s just something that you can’t explain. But there were nights that I came home, and I knelt, and I asked God to take him. He was suffering.”18

  Dying Hard excited widespread commentary. But inevitably the public indignation faded. There was nothing left to do. The damage had been done.

  RENNIE Slaney would briefly celebrate the final report of the royal commission, which was released in July 1969. The commission had been, largely, a response to his passionate submission to the workers’ compensation review more than four years earlier.

  The volumes of official reporting were confirmation of what he had, in five typewritten pages, described as a human tragedy brought on, to a significant extent, by human negligence. He was not a vindictive man and would probably have been able to shrug off the failure of the commissioners to criticize the companies he held responsible for the carnage, including the St. Lawrence Corporation, where he’d worked for nearly twenty-five years.

  He might not have begrudged the commissioners’ faint praise for Newfluor’s safety record: “It was generally conceded by all individuals who appeared . . . that the working conditions at Newfluor (Alcan), from its inception, were undoubtedly much better than conditions in the mines operated by the St. Lawrence Corporation of Newfoundland, particularly in the early years.”19

  The commissioners even quoted him—Rennie Slaney, who was now working for them—as witness to what they considered a comparatively okay performance by the Alcan company: “Rennie Slaney says of the Director mine, ‘there is no doubt that the mine was operated in accordance with good mining principles . . . from the start.’”

  He would have understood the words of the Director mine manager, Rupert Wiseman, when he told the royal commission, “[T]here are means for sure of getting any mineral out of the ground without people being exposed but . . . overriding this is the economic picture, and it’s not ore unless you can get it out at a profit.”20

  Rennie Slaney had prefaced his own comments in 1965 with the assurance that his intentions were “not to injure anyone, or any company.” And he might have agreed with the commission that the origins of the disaster were set in complex historical and political circumstances, exacerbated by an earthquake and a tsunami.

  But he might not have been so receptive to the notion, implicit in the commission’s findings, that inaction by the mining companies and the various government agencies, provincial and federal, was probably excusable, considering the complexity of questions, the elusiveness of answers.

  And it’s probably a blessing that Rennie Slaney would not live to see how grudgingly the Smallwood government responded to so many of the commission’s findings and recommendations.

  ON Sunday morning, July 20, 1969, along with 530 million other people around the world, Rennie Slaney was watching television. Three Americans in a rocket ship were circling the moon, and before the day was done, they would become the first humans to set foot upon another heavenly body.

  Rennie Slaney was, however, being circled by a more immediate distraction—grandchildren. The family had planned to spend the day at a cabin on Salmonier Pond, between St. Lawrence and Burin. History could wait; the children were insistent. Rennie sighed and turned off the television set. He’d catch up with history later. One way or another, historic moments are preserved, remembered.21

  Slaney was twenty-two years old in 1929 when a tsunami struck and altered the course of history on the south coast of the Burin Peninsula. He was there in the aftermath of a tidal wave that wiped out the infrastructure of St. Lawrence, but mercifully spared the people. He was there when Walter Seibert arrived, promising deliverance from poverty.

  He believed the New Yorker, as it seems did everybody in the place, and he pitched in, working for a pittance at Black Duck mine and eventually as a boss at Iron Springs. He was among the first to understand the price that he and his community were paying for material prospe
rity, and he would have felt a terrible frustration had he been able to foresee how Seibert and his family would evade accountability.

  But there was something about this large event that was now unfolding near the moon that gave a kind of perspective to his life on earth. The spectacle of men walking there would be persuasive evidence that the potential for human progress was unlimited when there was unity of purpose.

  The royal commission on radiation seemed to have at least demonstrated unity of purpose in confronting the consequences of a catastrophe enabled to a large extent by carelessness. Being of a positive disposition, Slaney would have presumed that justice and correction would inevitably follow the acknowledgement of blame.

  But all that was for the months—and more likely, years—ahead. As for the lunar landing, he would watch it later in the endless replays, hear the details in the breathless commentary in the weeks and years ahead. He turned his thoughts back to the children and the pond.

  RENNIE had a boat, a recent Father’s Day gift from his sons, Gerard and Ray. He’d subsequently won an outboard motor for the boat by entering a contest advertised on a cornflakes box.

  They were at the pond by noon. Like his grandchildren, he headed straight to the shore. He’d always loved the water. He felt uniquely peaceful on a boat, a place where, but for random circumstances, he might have spent a lifetime. It would have reminded him of a distant past, when he and Arcule were fishermen—back before the fish mysteriously vanished, before Rennie and Arcule went to work as hard-rock miners.

  His plan had been to cross the pond to a place away from where the kids were raising a commotion, splashing and tumbling, where he could do a bit of quiet fishing and, perhaps, remembering.

  Halfway across, the outboard engine stalled.

  From the shore, the sudden silence caught the attention of his wife, Bertha. The boat was drifting. Rennie was leaning over the engine, concentrating. Bertha remembered precise details of the moment—that he’d tugged the starter cord five times. He seemed to give up then. He picked up a set of oars, seemed about to sit down, to begin to row. But then he toppled.

  His granddaughter Lisa Loder, who was seven, recalls the panic among those who witnessed what had happened. “We were all on the beach watching, and I remember Grandmother yelling out that he fell in the boat. His two sons-in-law went in another boat to check on him, but he was already gone.”22

  He was sixty-two years old. He had died from a massive heart attack. An autopsy revealed deep, debilitating silicosis in his lungs. A kidney had already ceased functioning.

  For at least two years, he had been denied compensation because he had two adult children who were employed and still living at home. Now, because of the evidence of silicosis and thanks to the groundbreaking autopsy on his neighbour Isaac Slaney, Rennie’s widow would be entitled to the compensation he couldn’t get while he was living.

  He had died at 1:00 p.m. By eight that evening, as the world celebrated the historic moment that he would never see—two Americans in spacesuits walking on the moon—the people of St. Lawrence were gathering in the church for Rennie Slaney’s wake.

  This time there would be no mystery, and no denial, about the cause of death. No need for subterfuge. Rennie Slaney, like so many of his friends and neighbours, died because of how he’d earned his living.

  Ten

  Memory

  49.

  ST. LAWRENCE, NEWFOUNDLAND

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2017

  CYNTHIA Farrell is remembering the morning Ray Slaney died. September 10, 1991.

  She is a nurse and one of seven former caregivers who agreed to talk about their work at the US Memorial Hospital during the last three decades of the century, when the plague of fatal illness crested and removed a significant segment of the town’s male population.

  The women are no longer young, not yet old. For their generation, it is not unusual to have grown up without a grandfather or a father. For them, the past is full of empty spaces where there should be images of warm and vivid personalities.

  The mining industry in St. Lawrence broke the continuity of the community in much the same way the First World War robbed Newfoundland of a generation of potential, of memory. The losses in the war, of course, happened over weeks. The mining losses happened over decades.

  Cynthia had left her home long before dawn that day in September 1991. Ray Slaney, like many of the men who had worked in the mines and contracted work-related illnesses, had chosen to spend his final days in his own bed. To die in a familiar place was a little bit less frightening. And it would be easier on his family.

  Ray had lung cancer as well as cancer in his bones. He knew what the final moments looked and felt like. He, too, had been part of endless vigils at the hospital, while friends and relatives and former colleagues faded slowly.

  The hospital was staffed by people he knew, relatives and friends. The patients were also mostly people he knew, had grown up with. But it was a clinical environment just the same. No matter how the nurses tried, or how personal the efforts of the doctors, dying in the hospital was something many of the doomed men wanted to avoid.

  And so, nurses like Cynthia Farrell had informally agreed that they would help by visiting the homes with medications or for basic care, whenever it was needed, regardless of the hour, so the dying men could have that final simple comfort.

  Cynthia recalls arriving at the Slaney home at 4:00 a.m. with a vial of morphine and a syringe. The injections were fairly regular at this stage. She worked at being cheerful. The house was brightly lit for the early hour, the family gathered round.

  Her colleague Betsy Slaney was scheduled for the next morphine visit, later on that morning. But Betsy had her own ordeal at home. Her husband, Steve Slaney, was also sick with cancer—terminally, it would soon become apparent—and she was spending her spare time looking after him.

  Cynthia had decided that she would try to relieve Betsy of the later visit. She would come back herself. But she realized shortly after her arrival that Ray wasn’t going to last that long. She decided she would stay for however long she felt needed. And Ray died before the sun was up. He was forty-six years old. He was Bertha and Rennie Slaney’s youngest son.

  Betsy’s husband, Steve Slaney, who was not related to Ray, lingered until March 1993. That year, there were seven deaths from cancer among the former miners in St. Lawrence. Steve was forty-nine.

  THESE nurses are the embodiment of local memory. They experienced the personal intensity of the final days, weeks, months of the men who suffered through the hard and ultimately lonely business of dying while still relatively young. They were the fathers or the brothers of their friends—they were, in some instances, their own fathers. Five of the seven nurses were still young women when they lost their fathers to mining accidents or illness.

  Sue Tobin and Connie Hendrigan are sisters. Their father had worked in Iron Springs mine for ten years. When men from the mine began to get sick, he decided to quit while he was still ahead, while he was relatively young. But at the age of sixty-three, he was diagnosed with bone cancer. He lingered for five years. His two daughters nursed him through his final days.

  Sue Tobin’s husband grew up without a father. Sam Tobin was killed in an underground explosion in 1952, at the age of thirty-two.

  Carmelita Rowsell’s father died when he fell down a mineshaft. She had six uncles who were also miners, and she nursed most of them as they succumbed to work-related illnesses, including cancer. All died in their fifties.

  Joan Turpin’s father, John Slaney, was one of the three miners killed in the rockfall in the Director mine on September 15, 1967. Joan was fourteen years old, the eldest of ten kids, when her father passed away.

  These nurses have an understanding of the mining tragedy that is deeper and more visceral than the insights of all the doctors and the scientists, the lawyers and the politicians, who have studied data and weighed the facts and tried to understand what happened and pass judgemen
t on who, if anyone, should be held responsible.

  Their memories extend back to childhood: the chill that would pass through a classroom in the local school when, in the middle of a lesson, they’d hear someone knocking; watch the teacher put her book down, walk briskly to the door; watch the priest enter quietly, whisper to the teacher, grimly scan the room and all the silent ashen faces. Raise a heavy arm and beckon . . .

  From the nurses’ viewpoint, there could be no accountability sufficient to undo the damage they have lived through, dealt with up close, intimately.

  Now, long after their work at the hospital has ended, they stay in touch. They are like legionnaires, survivors of deep and lasting trauma. And like war veterans, they get together socially whenever there’s a reason, whenever there’s a plausible excuse, and collectively, they share the burden of memories that might have crushed them individually. They share the stories, a necessary form of therapy. And they share laughter, which was what kept them going in the darker days. They could always laugh. At something.

  THERE was an old lady who died one night. There were two patients in the room. Both were toothless. It was policy that patients with false teeth had to store them somewhere while in the hospital. Carmelita Rowsell hunted through the dresser drawers for the old lady’s false teeth. Finally located a set of dentures and installed them in the deceased. Prepared the body for the wake and funeral. There were no undertakers in St. Lawrence. Sent the dear dead old lady off for a wake and funeral and burial. The teeth were impressive but for one small detail: the family informed her later that their mom had never owned false teeth.

  BETSY Slaney had, in her care, a dying miner who had quit smoking. Dr. Hollywood encouraged him to start again. Why not, when you have nothing left to lose?