by JN Lenz
At that point all we really needed was for all six of those services to pay their invoice and I could put Fred’s debt to that damn loan shark to an end.
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Chapter 7
Gladys McGovern had lived all of her ninety six years living in the same home her father Nelson had built. Nelson McGovern had had built the mansion after making his fortune in mining and railroads of Northern Ontario, this all after leaving England with his wife Endean shortly following Gladys’s twelfth birthday. Nelson had been a poor coal miner in Wales and hoped taking an iron ore mining job in Canada would provide for better working conditions and an escape from the coal dust of the Northern United Kingdom.
After almost ten years in the dirty, dangerous coal mines of Northern England, young Nelson had developed a habitual cough. The only relief from the cough came from when he smoked cigarettes; this provided temporary relief from the coal dust attacks as he would call them. Gladys would forever remember the sight of her father as a little child, waiting for him to arrive home before her bed time. His face, hands and clothes covered in the dark black soot, with only his white teeth and coal reddened eyes wishing Gladys a good night.
The iron ore mining in Canada would be in a deeper mine, but the rock was harder and iron ore mining produced far less dust than coal mining. Soon after arriving in Canada, the cough from the coal relinquished its grip on Nelson’s lungs. The cough only making its return years later when the old man died of lung cancer, but he also continued to smoke cigarettes up to the day of his death.
The McGovern’s first home in their new country was one owned by the large mining company in a town they called Copper Cliff. Unlike Northern England when workers at the time were paid with Company currency, only to be paid back out to the company grocery store and to the company for rental fee in a flat. The wages and working conditions in Canada were much more to Nelson’s liking.
The town was lined with nice little homes, there was just no vegetation or trees, the Sulfur had killed all of that off. As far as the eye could see the trees had all been cut or had died, the rock was as black as coal from the open smelters for the iron ore. Copper Cliff was a small town of some ten thousand residents. Schools, hospitals and even shops had been built and where also operated by the same company as the mine.
In the year nineteen twenty three after Nelson had been working in the Iron Ore mine for seven years, his father who was a coal miner himself back in the same Walsh town. His father worked in the same mine Nelson has left seven years earlier, there had been an accident in the mine and Nelsons father and twenty two other miners had perished in the incident.
With passage back to England by rail and steam ship taking weeks from the remote mining town of Copper Cliff, Nelson would not attend his father’s funeral. The inheritance Nelson would receive as a result of his father’s death would turn him into a very wealthy man, but not before it almost ended his marriage of sixteen years.
When the money from his father’s estate arrived from England, Nelson’s wife Agatha felt it was time to perhaps move out of the small company owned bungalow into a newly built home on the edge of town, maybe even purchase a car. Nelson had different plans for the three thousand dollars that had been wired to him from his father’s estate. It had been six years since Nelson had managed to work his way out of the deep web of tunnels in the Iron Mines, out onto the railway tracks. The tracks delivered the rock extracted from the deep mines to the smelter, and beyond to the slag waste land.
It was here on the rail lines of track that dumped the hot waste or slag (the byproduct after the iron ore and other heavy metals that had been extracted) into pits which stretched out for miles. The land here was barren of all trees and vegetation, the rocky hills and valleys black from the open pit smelting of the iron ore and the sulfur which killed all the vegetation for dozens of miles in each direction.
The constant flow of timber arrived daily from the forests further north; the timber would be piled for hundreds of yards on end. The bed of massive timbers would be covered in the rock full of iron ore and set ablaze; the thousands of trees would burn for days to extract the iron ore from the rock.
The vast amounts of sulfur emitted in these fires killed all vegetation for several miles in each direction, the white and pale grey rock turned pitch black. It would be this blackness of the rocks which initially terrified Nelson after seeing them for the first time upon arriving from his native England, from the windows of the train as it chugged across the Canadian Shield just miles from Copper Cliff.
Nelson would be convinced he had been deceived, having just traveling clear across the world only to be trapped in another coal mine. He would spend the first day in Copper Cliff in fear of the place being just another coal town. The blackness of the rock he was reassured from the residents, was only from the sulfur when they burned the iron ore out of the rock. Yes it killed miles of surrounding land of all its vegetation, and settled on the rock turning it pitch black, but it was certainly not coal.
One of Nelson’s first jobs after getting top side from the depths of the mine would be to travel back and forth on one of the back rail cars. The rail cars shuttled the slag into the waste lands from the smelting pits, activating the latches to release the waste when the train was in position along one of the many deep gorges alongside the rail track.
These same waste lands would be used to dispose of all scrap metal and old damaged ingots used to divide and pour the hot slag and heavy metals. Two years prior to the passing of Nelsons father back in Wales, the CC Iron Ore Company constructed a series of rail lines into new land to be used for their waste. It was here on the lands the CC Iron Ore Company had filled with their slag that Nelson chose to invest the three thousand dollars his father had left him. In the year of nineteen thirty two Nelson would invest three thousand dollars into three thousand acres of Northern Ontario land, half the property consisting of dense forest, half of slag.
The mine had been on a tear of increased production from the year nineteen hundred and one to nineteen hundred and ten. Following that year sales and values of iron ore had dropped off a cliff, so much so that the company was eager to accept the three thousand dollars for the waste lands offered by Nelson. He had offered to purchase the land in a bid directly to the president of the company. So impressed with the offer was the CC Iron Ore Company President, that he even promoted Nelson to a foreman position on the foundry floor.
Convinced the land was useless, the President looked at the three thousand committed by Nelson as a commitment to the wellbeing of the company. Nelson’s wife Agatha was not so appreciative of the manor in which Nelson invested his three thousand dollar inheritance. She too viewed the purchase to be nothing more than a useless piece of land covered in discarded rubble and metal, she was convinced Nelson had lost his mind.
The arguments between the two, over that purchase of the waste land would continue for years. The couple would be close to divorce on several occasions. Their marriage somehow survived to see the outbreak of World War One, three years after the purchase of the acres of slag. By the nineteen twenties the hundreds of acres of property Nelson had purchased for three thousand dollars would turn the family into millionaires. At the time of his death in the Fifties, Nelson would be worth tens of millions of dollars.
Canada’s entrance into the war brought on the immense and immediate need for steel. The iron ore and nickel which were key components required in the manufacturing of the steel, which was in high demand. Since the CC iron Ore Company had finally moved from the primitive method of massive exterior smelting fires, to smelting the iron ore and precious metals from the rock in new interior housed blast furnaces. These new furnaces fired by Natural gas and vast amounts of Electricity extracted the iron ore and other heavy metals from the stone. This technically advanced process greatly increased the percentage of nickel, iron ore and heavy metals extracted from each ton of rock.
Using the same abandoned trac
ks which delivered the slag and scrap to the waste land years earlier, Nelson would ship the same slag back to the CC Iron Ore Company to be refined again. Those disposed of ingots and piles of slag would be reprocessed in the new technically advanced furnaces, there were vast amounts of heavy metals which still remained from the primitive refining practices of the past. By the end of the Second World War, Nelson would own forty per cent of the CC Iron Ore Company, in addition to sole ownership of his Nelson McGovern Mining and Rail Company. During much of the war, Nelson would sell the majority of the slag for stocks in the CC Iron Ore Company.
Having developed a passion for rail lines, Nelson would purchase several small rail line operations to the south, west and east of Copper Cliff. Three of these newly acquired lines converged in the small railway town of Largo. It was here where Nelson would settle with Agatha and his only daughter Gladys. Gladys had attended a private school only thirty minutes south of Largo when she was a teenager, the finest education for Gladys followed Nelson’s financial success. Unlike the vast majority of women at that time, Gladys would go on to post-secondary studies after graduated at the age of eighteen. Gladys would attend a finishing school in Montreal before moving on to study art at an academy in New York. From there Gladys would return to Largo to live permanently with her parents in the newly constructed Mansion in Largo in the very early nineteen twenties.
Sixty six years after Nelson had built the Mansion in Largo, the train tracks had been long gone from the town. The majority of the McGovern’s businesses had been sold long ago; Gladys was still in control of millions of dollars. The majority ownerships were long gone, replaced with investments in bonds, gold and GIC’s. Within the town of Largo, there still remained a high level of respect from its residences toward Gladys. The decades of support and charitable donations her family had made to the town resulted in her still maintaining a prized position throughout the community.
Up to the time of her death, Gladys’s still possessed considerable real estate assets, based mostly within the town of Largo. Without question she was still considered one of the town’s wealthiest residents. Gladys was the last of the McGovern name, her father’s brother Dale had two sons, neither of whose wife’s gave birth to a son. Both of her first cousins died years ago in their eighties. So Gladys was the last of the McGovern name, as the remaining blood line had thinned to nothing.
Since Gladys had never married, nor bore any children, she too would contribute to the death of the McGovern legacy for future generations. The closest Gladys ever came to being heavily involved with a man, was in the form of a two year relationship in her early twenties. The relationship occurred while she was in finishing school in Montreal, although Gladys had said the relationship had never really come close to marriage. At the end of her formal education in New York, Gladys had returned for a visit and to see the newly constructed Mansion in Largo for the first time. Those that knew her said she fell in love with that home on that very first day; she would remain living there until the day of her death.
All the local shop owners and longtime residents knew her by name; Gladys frequented the downtown shops of Largo up to her last days, well into her nineties. When asked by a resident one day on how she was managing in that large old home alone, Gladys would reply that she would manage quite nicely.
“As long as I can breathe it will be behind those very walls, where I am quite comfortable. Thank you. The ghosts of the McGovern’s will always take care of me behind those walls”.
Gladys would often joke to the local shop keepers and residents that still knew her. In reality, the voices and visions that Gladys had been witnessing for the past few years around the grand old home, did not make her laugh at all. In fact they worried her to the point Gladys thought she might be going mad. Gladys had openly talked to her gardener and maid about the ghosts she had seen at night in the huge old home.
Of course Fred, who knows and talks to everyone in town, had been told by her gardener about Gladys’s nightly visitors. Fred would tell Clyde and I, her whole life story the night before her funeral, as we sat in the back office. The three of us had been sharing a bottle of whiskey.
The rumors around town, was that perhaps Gladys had bouts of dementia. Not that it would be a surprise, since she was approaching one hundred years in age. You would not know it during the day around town; the old girl still had a quick wit even if her feet were not. The gardener and maid reported similar stories, that by all accounts her day to day actions remained sane in form and function, in fact rather brilliant for a ninety some year old woman. She exhibited no excessive forgetfulness or bizarre behavior during the day light hours, it would not be until the late hours when she was alone in that big dark home that her visions materialized.
Only in the last years of her life would Gladys begin to see things, knowing in her mind they could not be real. Gladys would speculate to the gardener that perhaps these ghosts or visions had been sent to lead her through the gates of death, perhaps to join her dead mother and father? The gardener wondered if she had expected an answer from him, the way she would just pause after explaining her nightly visions.
“Either that or I guess I’m going stark mad, its one or the other!” the gardener would quote her as saying.
It was only after her death that Gladys’s long time gardener and maid revealed the entire story to a local gossip paper. The stories of ghosts and voices that Gladys had begun to hear at night alone in the big old home became the talk of the town, for several weeks after the article. The staff had been sworn to secrecy by Gladys concerning the matter while she was alive; Gladys had no interest in the town of Largo believing she had turned into the mad old McGovern spinster. Word around town was that both of them had been bitter since Gladys left them the equivalent of what their severance pay would amount to upon her death. The pair had assumed after taking care of the very rich woman for several years, they would be able to retire comfortably at the time of Gladys’s death.
The newspaper article would even detail how Gladys McGovern would often sleep the entire morning away. Often Gladys would only be willing to fall asleep after the gardener and maid had each arrived at the house in the morning. The maid told of the change Gladys had made a few years back to both her and the gardener, requesting that their start times move to six in the morning. The two hour earlier start time solely due to Gladys’s sleepless nights, she wanted them there early so she could finally go to sleep.
Before her death Clyde or I knew very little about Gladys McGovern, certainly we had no idea the woman had taken to the halls and rooms in a series of all-night encounters with the dead. Clyde would have no way of knowing before he entered 33 Maple Drive that night, that it’s last living resident walked it’s halls late into each and every night watching the spirits of her mother and father visualize around her. Clyde’s plan in murdering Gladys McGovern rested on the assumption she would be soundly asleep during the night, not wide awake pacing the halls of the large home.
The Funeral Home was no stranger to Gladys McGovern; Fred had made a point of introducing us to her on two occasions. Gladys paid little attention to either Clyde or I, we were not locals after all and of no consequence to her. We were not part of any family in town so any information she might be after would not be extracted from the two of us. Clyde wrote how after seeing Gladys’s name listed on the pre arrangement file, he remembered a conversation during a visitation, when a pair of women had mentioned how active Gladys still was and the fact that she lived alone in that huge old home on Maple Avenue.
The Sunday evening after the funeral of MNM, Clyde grabbed one of the old bicycles from the Funeral Home garage and headed along the town streets of Largo. He had decided to drive to school in the city early the next morning, staying in Largo for an extra night. Riding the bike along the streets of town, Clyde made his way south along Maple Avenue. Riding the bicycle slowly past the cast iron plaque with the two copper numbers reading thirty three, behind the stone pillars s
at a beautiful old world plantation style manse on a very manicured two acre city lot.
The home was partially hidden by the clay brick and limestone half wall that surrounded the entire property along with the numerous mature trees and shrubs. Without a doubt the entire property had been meticulously maintained for many years, the condition of the grounds made it hard to believe it was the home of someone in their nineties.
Not that she would be doing the work but usually at that age they have lost the quest for perfection, this must take a significant portion of her remaining wealth towards the maintenance of this grand old estate, Clyde would write in the file. Standing there on the street straddling the stopped bike, Clyde was admiring the stunning home while he tried to study the entrances and windows as best he could with the view from the street. Swinging his bike down the stone laneway, Clyde breezed the bicycle through the port o cache and into the back yard of the home. He was hoping to catch a view of the back entrances of the home and a clearer picture of the entire large house without being noticed.
“Hello there can I help you out with something?” the voice was faint and seemed distant, turning the bike sharply Clyde caught the hat of the small man who was beginning to pull himself up out of a distant flower garden.
“No sorry to intrude. I am not after anything, I am just admiring this beautiful home and these incredible gardens, I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it. It is just beautiful” Clyde’s voice was apologetic yet upbeat and friendly, the guy could really pile on the bull shit when he wanted to, I’ve seen him action many times.