Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  They drive through the saline twilight of the 102 while the boys nod into their soft oblivions and Julie stays terribly alert, watching for the wildlife she half-expects to dart into the road. They arrive at the site around nine, a floodlight cast over the scene, and find a fleet of ambulances and media and a man in an orange vest telling everyone to go home. He uses his best gym teacher voice but there is fear in the pallor of his face, worry limning his deep-set eyes. He is saying “twenty-six,” saying “draegermen,” saying “all’s we know.” She takes far too long to decode that there are twenty-six men underground. She pushes up and tries not to scream but hears her voice wail like a trapped housecat as she asks after her brother. Asks after her brother when of course she already knows, has known from the moment the announcement came over the PA: he is down there. He is down there buried and alone and there is nothing she can do to help him. The man in the vest says yes Lorne was reported below ground at the time of explosion and that’s all he can say.

  She walks to the edge of the police tape and looks out towards the shaft. Men with headlamps huddle there, readying themselves to enter a cavern that exploded mere hours before. Preparing to brave that darkness to rescue her brother. She wonders how deep she would go to save him. Would she climb down the shaft and dig through the debris of that blasted cavity?

  She races up the hill for her brother and sees the men leaping out of their trucks. Trucks that judging by the bent door and busted headlight had hit each other. Trucks that had hit each other and hit Lorne and sent him wheeling out of control onto the road where he is lying now, clinging to his leg and whimpering.

  Julie shouts, “Let me see,” surprised by the ferocity in her voice. Lorne is holding tight, both hands around his thigh, squeezing and looking up at the sky, breathing through his teeth. Blood leaking between his fingers and Julie wanting to retch but knowing she has to see more. She asks is it broken and he shakes his head and then she asks if he’s okay. He nods and she hugs him and says “Lorne you have to let me see” and without warning he pulls his hands back and she beholds the bare pink flesh of his thigh, like the inside of a lobster tail. A veiny ropework of ligaments thatched with a snaggle of sinew. The scared hiss of her brother’s breath and the naked muscle twitching as he squirms.

  Then a crimson pool fills the wound. Turns the seam nearblack before bubbling and leaking and spilling over onto the pavement. Her brother’s blood running fast down his leg and she pulls off her T-shirt and ties it tight around the lacerated limb. Lorne on his back and his face is white, almost clear, as he drifts away from her. She takes his head in her hands and rubs his forehead, saying “Lorne! Lorne!” and crying out for water.

  Julie has seen the blood and she has seen her brother’s bare flesh—his thigh muscle pink and twitching like a tongue. She has seen the flesh beneath that veil of skin and now, as a man splashes water on Lorne and he comes to, as she helps him rise to his feet and clamber dazed into the man’s pickup, she knows that she can never unsee this thing. That some part of her will always see her brother’s body as a writhing amalgam of vein and bone, a fragile marriage of blood and flesh.

  The ceiling fan in the Clinton motel turns slowly overhead and she finds herself thankful for this small stability. Thankful as she lies awake with no hope of sleeping. Lies awake thinking of her brother. Their childhood homes in Vancouver, Sarnia, Boston, and finally Halifax. Her brother at five, his face covered in Easter chocolate. Her brother holding vigil in her bedroom after she’d been traumatized by The Exorcist. Her brother bringing her sliced grapefruit when she was sick with strep throat. Her brother racing by her on the ski hill, dragging his poles between his legs so that the snow flew up in her face. A flash of rage and resentment and then, when he glanced back beaming over his shoulder, a contagion of joy.

  She rises at three in the morning and walks out onto the patio overlooking the parking lot. A cold night in early May and the air wet with North Atlantic breeze. She has wrapped herself in a coarse motel blanket but still she finds herself shivering.

  Franz appears on the patio and she thinks who is this man? This tall and generous man from Senegal who had wooed her, once, with lines by Damas and Césaire, lines by Léopold Sédar Senghor, lines with a concave lilt that were sublime perhaps because they eluded understanding as much in English as in French. This man who just the night before had crawled into bed reciting Baudelaire—Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux; / Retiens les griffes de ta patte.

  This man with his serpent sun, his vampire flowers. This man who could look at the sky and see patterns where she had always seen a senseless slur of cloud and chaos. Who points upwards, now, and says that that star glowing rose is Mars. This man trying to comfort her with a discourse about the god of war and the difference between Homer and Virgil until she says no, stop. Until she says Mars is a planet where nothing can breathe and regrets saying so as the sadness spills through his dark eyes. She says maybe she just needs to be alone right now and he nods gently, kisses the back of her head, and slips back inside through the patio door. She looks up at Mars and imagines her brother there, alone, as the storms build and close in on that sapphire world. She sees him standing alone on that uninhabited planet, staring out into the vast indifferent open of space. And she sees the clouds drawing closer and closer, her brother helpless against them. Whether on Mars or lodged in a coal seam in East Rock, Nova Scotia, her brother is alone. Alone in a world that is closing in around him and there is nothing she can do.

  After falling into a fitful sleep, she dreams an avalanche. It is a spring day and they are traversing, trying to get to a chute on the far side of a bowl. They are in the middle of a wide alpine tongue when the slope cracks and the white world buckles beneath them—buckles and roars and begins to slide.

  She looks for Franz and can’t see him and there is nothing to do but cling on as one ski comes off and the white overcomes her and she is looking for blue, scanning for sky, finding nothing but a flailing chuck of white. Trying to swim to stay on top but bottom and top slur together and there is no ground, now, no ground or sky. Everything a blast of gravity, sucking her onward, blind and helpless and nothing to do but give in. The world slanted and rushing as she tosses her limbs in a parody of breaststroke and feels the snow begin to settle, begin to clamp.

  Which is when she remembers to put her hands in front of her face. She knows enough to raise her arms and put her gloves in front of her mouth as the snow congeals—a quicksand abruptly frozen. Her head a thunder of pulse and echo and wheezing breath. The profound silence of the outside world and her body a deafening clamour. Her breath is panicked and she tells herself to settle, wills herself to wait. She counts her breaths and tries not to think about how many she has left.

  Gradually, the panic eases. There is nothing left to do but breathe and wait. She is cold, cold and drifting into an eerily pleasant calm. The snow around her seems soft, now, as she floats through time, her body a cloud bathed in moonlight.

  In the nineteenth century, horses from Sable Island were regularly captured and taken to work in the Cape Breton mines, hauling tubs of coal through the dinge of the underground railways. Horses raised feral, chewing marram in the salt-harsh air of the open Atlantic, would surface once a year for the colliery holiday. If they were fortunate their stables would be near the shaft, where now and then a breeze licked through.

  She wakes to the sound of the radio and rises fast in bed. Franz is saying “I thought you would want to” and she says “yes, yes, of course.” The boys sit bleary on the couch and when she looks at them they are plaintive, hungry for consolation. On the radio they are saying “fifteen,” saying “recovered,” saying “bodies.” The reporter on the radio is saying that fifteen men have been found dead and the “rescue effort” has officially become a “recovery effort.” They are asking family members to come identify bodies and she is thinking no, thinking of course not, knowing that she will go, must g
o.

  She stands beside her brother at the hospital as the red-haired doctor stoops over him. Their mother is rushing over and their father is at a meeting at the plant and cannot be reached. So it is just the two of them as the nurse cleans the wound and the doctor prepares his tools. The doctor asks what their father does for a living and when Lorne answers he puts the long needle into the thigh. Lorne winces and clings to Julie’s hand. The doctor injects more anaesthetic and the nurse asks what school does Lorne go to, says she knows a teacher there. The doctor asks, “Can you feel this?” Lorne shakes his head and the nurse wipes some blood and then the first stitch goes through. There is a piece of wax paper over the wound so Lorne cannot see and he asks Julie what it looks like. She tells him that it is strange, how thick the skin is, how easy the stitch runs through. “No,” he says, “I mean on the inside.” And so she tells him, as the doctor runs the thread through his flesh, about the red like lava, twitching beneath the blood. She tells her little brother a story about the lean muscle in him, like a giant tongue streaked with strands of fat. He holds her hand and the doctor finishes and he says he’s sad he will never get to see it, will never know what his body looks like on the inside.

  Where was he now, her balding blue-eyed brother? Her brother who had moved with her from town to town as their father designed refineries for Streamline Energy. Her brother who’d sat in the garage night after night, making go-karts out of old baby strollers. Her brother with a scar on his palm from when he’d cut himself changing an oil filter, that thick black grease seeping in and staining him under the skin. The boy who had flunked and stumbled through high school, who’d become a navy seaman and an Alberta pipefitter and been so happy, that September, to come back to Nova Scotia. Her brother whose quadriceps she’d seen twitching beneath skin drawn back like a lip. Not yet thirty and now he was buried underground in a seam of earth that had raged and rumbled and closed.

  Franz ushers the boys into the Camry and they begin the drive from Clinton to East Rock. As they cruise the two-lane country road she thinks of the seam sprawling beneath them. She thinks of the coal limning those caverns like some dark and precious blood clotted in the underground.

  They arrive at the makeshift hockey rink morgue and Julie thinks of the fissure beneath her, the ribs of the drift sloughing chunks of gaseous rock. She thinks of the methane blooming in those earthly arteries and wants to blame the gas, longs to blame the methane. But she finds herself unable. How can she fault that gas for wanting to escape its earthen womb, to crawl out into the open and ride the sky?

  Franz stays in the car with the boys as she enters the rink, inhales the sour chemical reek of Zamboni and formaldehyde. She gives her name to the attendant and walks slowly across the carpeted ice. Families huddle and whisper and she feels herself move through them, a finger passing through candle flame.

  Six months before, Julie had stood with her brother and her sons on the Halifax waterfront. Lorne was down for Thanksgiving. They watched a grey sky slide over a grey ocean and Lorne talked about benefits, talked about down payments, about a semi-detached in New Glasgow. He said maybe a couple children of his own. Jack was sprinting up the huge concrete wave over and over and never making it to the top, sliding down each time on his corduroyed knees. Owen stood riveted by the three candy-cane smokestacks rising up from Dartmouth until Lorne told him it was called Tufts Cove Generating Station. It was built on the site of the Mi’kmaq gathering place that was obliterated by the Imo, the place where Jerry Lonecloud took a jettisoned screw through the eye and staggered half-blind about the wreckage, screaming for the two daughters he would never find.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of the Halifax Explosion?”

  Owen said he had but not that part. Lorne pointed out towards the Eastern Shore where there was a little colony of smokestacks and scaffolding and concrete stills the size of houses, lights blinking on like a tired, tangled Christmas. Lorne asked Owen if he knew what that was and the boy said no. “It’s called a refinery,” Lorne said. “Your grandfather, he helped build that.” Owen looked up at him like he was confused at the connection between his grandfather and this dazzle of ugliness. “You know,” Lorne said, and he no longer seemed to be talking to his nephew, “most people go their whole lives walking past refineries and they never even notice them, never even see the vats of crude being processed.”

  Jack came to wrangle Owen and the two of them scampered away to play pirates in a creaky, salt-rotten ship with frayed nets of rope luffing off the sides. Half-watching her children, Julie asked her brother how he could choose to go work underground. First he said it wasn’t that different from what she did, wasn’t much more dangerous than flying for a living, soaring through the sky in a pressurized cabin offering cookies or pretzels as if salt or sugar could assuage the everyday hubris of a passenger jet.

  He took a moment staring out at the slate-grey harbour then answered again. This time he said that he wanted to go below, wanted to open up the earth and touch what was inside. He knew it was strange but sometimes he felt like a beetle or a mole and he just wanted to bore right down into the darkness and let it hold him.

  “Why do you think people like to be buried down there?” She must have seemed frightened because he looked at her and added, “Course it’s not so bad coming back up at the end of the day.”

  Julie moves from table to table, surveys the body bags with their yellow labels, many still blank. She approaches each figure, scans the palms for that familiar rind of oil, looks deep into every face. Faces wiped clean but forever dark from the blackness that claimed them. Men in their twenties and thirties, cheeks still puffed with boyhood bloat. Men with thick moustaches and deep smile lines. Men who’d worn plaid, who’d sat in blinds and waited for bucks to saunter out into clearings. Men who’d held guitars and pool cues, told jokes and stories, tickled babies and watched time buckle and drift in the eyes of their children.

  She treads the ice among this maze of bodies and feels herself a failed Antigone. Here in a hockey rink surrounded by the unknown dead Julie realizes that she needs a body. She had not expected this feeling, has never felt it before. Until this point she had wanted to find him alive but now she feels a new longing emerge, a longing for her brother’s corpse.

  And then she sees it. Not here in this crude crypt rimmed with ads for Sobeys, for St. FX, for Courtney Clarence attorney at law. She sees her brother as he is, as he will remain—caught in the slough and the rock, a slash of coal across his temple, a boulder squatting on his blasted lungs. She sees Lorne crushed and motionless in the indifferent dark. Sees him inert and pale and filthy, cradled by the world he had been compelled to explore. Sees his eyes, open and peering through the darkness, staring at the roof of the drift, his eyes locked in stunned wonder. The strange thing is that he looks tranquil, clutched in that petrified seam. Her brother looks serene as he stares into the rock, finding patterns only he will ever know in that darkling, vascular world. The earth holding her brother close and him feeling the safe, steady grip of the rocks, their unwavering contain.

  Around 5:20 in the morning on May 9th, 1992, a worker using a continuous miner to cut into the Foord Coal Seam hit a strand of pyrite braided into the coal vein. The pyrite produced sparks, causing a draft of methane to ignite. Gaining momentum instantly, the flaming gas roared through the chambers of the mine, setting off a series of rockfalls and explosions, collapsing the roof and replacing all oxygen with poisonous carbon monoxide. The fifteen workers whose bodies were recovered are presumed to have died in less than a minute. The ten men whose bodies were never found were working in a vulnerable part of the mine where the post-explosion rockslides were particularly aggressive. These men are thought to have died instantly.

  The Streamline Energy Corporation will act predictably. A parade of clones will say “standard procedure,” say “protocol,” say “safety regulations.” The surviving miners will have to wait six years to receive
twelve weeks’ severance.

  The memory of her brother will burrow inside Julie, boring gradually deeper. His emptiness will eventually settle in her right side, between the seventh and eighth ribs. Sometimes—walking along the waterfront with her son, standing up from the toilet, clearing a miniature wine bottle from a tray table as turbulence picks up—she will feel a gentle burn in that spot, like the cool kiss of VapoRub. And at this point there will be almost nothing so dear to her as this strange soft hurt, this cherished cleft of pain.

  Shortly after her brother’s funeral, Julie will begin to have the dream. In the dream there is nothing but total blackness, but it is a blackness that sings, a blackness that hums. In the dream she reaches out and touches the walls and they are chalky, gritty on her fingers and knuckles and palms and she feels each crook and rise like a dark bathymetry, like a dead language coming back to life. “Most people look at a rock and they see a rock,” Lorne had said to her once. “Me I see stories. I see coal and coke, I see sediments and cystics, anticlines and binders and pyrites.”

  He had said this and she sees it now but she doesn’t tell him that, doesn’t whisper to him. In the dream they don’t talk and they don’t need to. They lie still in the total darkness, at rest, at last, in the drift.