by Leo McKay
ACCLAIM FOR
Twenty-Six
“A cleanly crafted, richly evocative portrait of a community of families.… Leo McKay Jr. has created an entire world so skilfully that it’s jarring when the book ends, when one is reminded that these are merely characters, no matter how human they seem.”
– Vancouver Sun
“Just as David Adams Richards has made the Miramichi district of New Brunswick his own literary turf, so has McKay laid claim to Nova Scotia’s Pictou County.… Full of pulsating life, crisp dialogue and clear observations that you want to consider long after you’ve read the last page.”
– Winnipeg Free Press
“Sparse yet powerful prose, sharply etched characters, a riveting story with a catastrophic tragedy about to befall; these make for a compelling novel.… It’s a stunning debut, showing a deft touch with language and an ability to depict human frailty.…”
– Hamilton Spectator
“A compelling account of lives shattered and lives redeemed by disaster.… An unforgettable story of one family’s anguish and survival.”
– Halifax Chronicle-Herald
“Engrossing.…”
– Edmonton Journal
“Brilliant.… Twenty-Six is a beautiful book.…”
– St. John’s Telegram
BOOKS BY LEO McKAY JR.
Like This (1995)
Twenty-Six (2003)
Copyright © 2003 by Leo McKay Jr.
Cloth edition published 2003
First Emblem Editions publication 2004
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McKay, Leo, 1964-
Twenty-six / Leo McKay Jr.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-713-1
1. Westray Mine Disaster, Plymouth, Pictou, N.S., 1992 – Fiction.
I. Title.
PS8575.K28747T84 2004 C813′.6 C2003-906713-0
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
This is a work of fiction and all of the characters are fictitious. However, this novel was inspired by the Westray mining disaster and the tragic impact it had on families and a community.
The epigraph on page v is taken from an unpublished poem, “Death Opens a Window in the Body,” by Robert McCabe. Used by permission of the author.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem
v3.1
This book is dedicated to memory
“Death opens a window in the body.”
– ROBERT McCABE
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
1988
1 Circling and Cursing
2 An Inoperable Heart
3 Packing
4 Bakuhatsu
5 Helmet with Lamp
PART TWO
1982
6 A Handicap of Place
7 A Sharp Eye for Fabric
8 Scraps
9 In a Quiet House
10 Making Things Worse
11 People Weeping
PART THREE
1988
12 Close to Home
13 Bodies
14 Memories
15 Culture
PART FOUR
1987
16 Opportunity Knocks
17 Heart Beating Fast
PART FIVE
1989
18 An Intellectual Ruffian
19 Telling the World
20 Movement
21 Canada Day Years Ago
22 A Moose
23 The Rest House
24 Under the Weight of Snow
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PART ONE
1988
Death hides its face in winter, when trees are impossible to distinguish. The bony hands of branches clutch at the sky, waiting for the sun to rise high enough to warm them back to life. With so many elms sick, and some of them dying now, the only thing was to wait for spring before you put your hope anywhere.
Spring was a far-off place to Ziv as he stood in his parents’ driveway, his hot breath rising in clouds into the dark air above him. He looked up at the grey branches of the pair of elms that marked the boundary of his parents’ property and could not recall whether they’d been dead last summer or merely sick.
He put a mittened hand on the rear fender of his father’s car to steady himself as he stared at the translucent blind pulled down over the living-room window. “I hope the bastard’s dead,” he said out loud to no one. He was trying to detect movement inside the house, but he was good and drunk, and it was difficult to detect anything in his condition. He saw nothing but filtered light through the blind. All three bulbs in the pole lamp beside the couch were switched on; he could tell that. The TV was flicking the room light, then dark. But if there was any movement inside, he could not see it. The smell of furnace oil from the nearby tank hung in a thick layer over the more subdued smells of a cold winter night.
He took off his mitts, stuffed them into the pockets of his parka, and unzipped his fly in the biting February cold. “Shit,” he said as he pissed onto the snow. When he was finished, he zipped himself up again, put the mitts back on, and went unsteadily back to the end of the driveway to continue his aimless walk. It was now one thirty in the morning and it had been more than an hour since his last drink. Still, he was too drunk to go inside. He hated being drunk now. He hated himself for having got so drunk that he could not show his face inside his house. It was his parents’ house, actually, and he hated that, too. Five years ago he could have called it his house. But he was twenty-three years old now, he’d be twenty-four in a few months, and he could not bring himself to call it his house when he was paying room and board. He’d lived in this house his whole life. He’d been brought here directly from the Aberdeen Hospital in New Glasgow a few days after his birth, and except for a short time at university in the early eighties, he’d been here, a permanent resident of this address, ever since.
He walked to the corner of Hudson Street and looked down the channel the sidewalk plough had made. He’d passed through here several times already tonight, wandering around and around the neighbourhood, wishing for himself to sober up, or for the light to go off in the living room, the signal that his father had gone to bed, so he could go inside without setting off a row. His legs felt wobbly and weak. He was drunk, he was tired, he was hungry.
The neighbourhood he was walking through was called the Red Row, a half-dozen or so blocks of duplexes built by the Acadia Coal Company in the first decades of the century. The Red Row had originally housed miners who worked in the many pits that had pocked the landscape of Pictou County, Nova Scotia. Although the original pits had long been closed, a few elderly retired miners and descen
dants of those deceased still lingered in the company houses at the north end of the little town called Albion Mines. This is what Ziv was: a descendant of coal miners. And he was acutely aware of it. Even drunk, when the list of what he was aware of dwindled to a dozen or so items, being the descendant of coal miners was on that small list. He only had to raise his eyes and look at the company houses all around him to understand how completely submersed he was in that murky history.
He walked drunk down Hudson Street, into the heart of the old neighbourhood. The steeply pitched roofs of the identical storey-and-a-half houses had all shed their snow. Snow lay clumped in even heaps below the eaves. Fifty, sixty years ago, a person could have walked down this street and known with certainty that someone in every house had worked in some capacity in one of the mines. But Ziv looked at the houses now and realized he did not know where all these people worked, though he could guess at the relative success of the occupants by the state of repair of the house itself. Some Red Row houses were dilapidated. They had not been painted in years, roofing shingles had not been replaced. Chimneys had crumbled, shedding bricks down the roof. Other houses, freshly painted or sided, featured newer windows. Some even had paved driveways.
Ziv himself worked at Zellers in the Aberdeen Mall, over in the nearby town of New Glasgow. His father, now on disability, had been one of the last few men employed in the Car Works, the shrinking railcar factory in Trenton. Once, he knew, in his father’s lifetime, people had been defined by their work. “What do you do?” had been a question that opened conversations. But there was a growing class of people now, some of whom lived in the Red Row, who didn’t do anything. They were not really unemployed, because they weren’t looking for work. Long past their eligibility for unemployment insurance, many of these people lived on welfare, the generosity of relatives, and whatever odd jobs they could do for the neighbours in exchange for a few dollars.
His own job was barely even a real job. Zellers classified him as extra, a category that all but a handful of the people who worked at the store fit into. He received no benefits, contributed to no pension, had no reliable schedule. About all he got from Zellers was enough money to pay his keep and to get drunk a couple of times a week.
He’d been working earlier this evening, and had gone directly from his Zellers shift to the bar called Stumpy’s.
He still wore the shirt and tie that were part of the Zellers dress code. When he’d started coming here, more than three years ago now, after he’d decided not to go back to university, he’d bothered to bring a change of clothes with him to work so he would not look so out-of-place. But now he didn’t care what he looked like, and Stumpy’s was so overcrowded that no one could step back far enough from you to notice what you were wearing anyway. The dance floor tonight had throbbed with writhing bodies. The music had pounded into Ziv’s skull like nails. He had taken the letter from his pocket and unfolded it against the surface of the bar. Anyone who’d cared enough to notice might have thought him strange for that letter. He had it with him every time he came. Sometimes, when he was sober, he pictured what he must have looked like, night after night, unfolding that piece of paper against the surface of the bar. It was too dark to read, so he’d stare at the surface of the paper, where he could just see that there was writing on it.
He always put twenty dollars in his shirt pocket when he went into Stumpy’s, and he’d stand at the bar, gagging on cigarette smoke, staring at a letter he was too drunk to read, going deaf to the music and to everything else, until he reached one final time into the shirt pocket and found it empty.
Halfway down Hudson Street he stopped and leaned over the sidewalk. He took a mitten off his right hand and jammed two fingers down his throat to try to get rid of the alcohol that was in him like a demon. Spasms pinched his guts and he dry-retched several times before ejecting a reddish-green jelly onto the brownish snow.
The snow chirped beneath his boots, a crisp high sound that meant it was minus fifteen or colder. The hard, frozen branches of trees clacked and rattled against each other in the breeze. Unnamed things around him went snap as something inside them froze and broke. Only the odd light in the odd window shone out onto the snow. The crystal air was so clear and empty that even up at this end of the neighbourhood, trucks on the Trans-Canada in Lourdes made a roar that echoed down the streets and between the houses.
As he walked through the Red Row, he saw his whole life twisted around itself like a dog staring at its own tail, running in circles, too stupid to know it was chasing itself. He walked because he was too drunk to face his father. How many times had he walked this same pathetic route for the same pathetic reason? How many times had he been in this same position: too drunk to show his face to anyone who was supposed to care? He was drunk and sick and useless. And tired. Tired into the marrow. This walking, this pointless circling of the neighbourhood, had gone on for years. If he had any brains, he’d be walking the loop through New Glasgow. It was 8 K and would take almost two hours. He’d be sober by the time he got back to his parents’ place. But his hollow legs, aching from the ankles up, had already taken him from Stumpy’s, a forty-minute walk. What if he started out around the New Glasgow loop, got as far as downtown New Glasgow, then passed out on Provost Street? He could picture himself face-down on the dirty snow of the sidewalk in front of Goodman Place, too exhausted to stand and too drunk to roll over. So he hovered around home, restlessly circling. He traced and retraced his steps, stopping in his parents’ driveway, peeking in at the living room – watching the light from the television flicking against the curtains – then circling again. Cursing and spitting, hating his father for waiting up for him. Hating himself for doing the worst of what the old man expected. Hating his father for being drunker than he was, no doubt, but having the power not to have to answer to anyone for it. Would he have thought, at fifteen, the first time he got too drunk to go home, the first time he traced this useless trail, would he have guessed he’d be twenty-three and still doing it? Twenty-three and working at Zellers. Twenty-three and living at home. There were guys twenty-three years old making seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year playing hockey in the NHL.
In the side of a bank near the corner of Scott Avenue he kicked a ledge out of the snow and sat on it, pulling the bottom of his down-filled coat so the cold wouldn’t soak in.
He took off his left mitt and searched with the bare hand under his parka. He retrieved the letter from his pants pocket and turned the envelope over in the light of the street lamp. He looked at the blue-and-silver foreign stamp: some sort of stylized bird with a long beak. A stork? The envelope was wrinkled and creased, soiled from being examined and re-examined in his big, clumsy hands.
Dear Ziv:
This is the first letter I’m sending to you since I’ve been in Japan, but it’s not the first letter I’ve written. I’ve got the others back in my desk drawer (I’m writing this in a coffee shop, drinking a coffee that cost me three dollars and fifty cents), all of them in envelopes. Some of them even have stamps on them. I don’t know why I didn’t send them.
I can remember each one. I can remember what I said in it, what I was thinking about, how I was feeling. It’s funny how you do things. You just end up doing them and you don’t know why. Sometimes you don’t even know that you are doing them until later when you look back. I keep writing “you” but it’s not you I’m talking about at all. It’s me.
The first letter I wrote you started off like this:
Dear Ziv:
I don’t know what I was expecting when I came here. I guess I was expecting things to be completely different from Canada. But what I’m surprised at is how similar things are. The sky is still blue, people here walk on two legs, and if you drop something, gravity brings it to the ground. I guess the world is the same wherever you go.
One reason I didn’t send that letter is that it didn’t take long for me to realize how wrong I’d been. This place is so deceptive. Things look so familiar
on the surface, but the interior of the place and of the people is so completely alien to me. And the weird thing is, the longer I’m here, the less well I understand it.
Without finishing the letter, he folded it up, put it back into its envelope, and slipped it into the front pocket of his parka. From the other big pocket on the coat’s front, he pulled out a creased copy of The Educated Imagination. He’d bought it at the university bookstore while he’d still been a student. In the small hours of the morning on a night of drinking, the time he’d wasted on that particular night became a ragged patch of colour on the giant collage of his wasted life. At these times he always decided he had to read. He knew reading was something he did not do enough of, and he always carried some book or other in his parka pocket, intending to read it but never setting aside a specific time. He looked at the book and blinked at the glare reflecting up from the cover. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried a second look. He turned to the table of contents and looked at the letters that made up the words of the chapter names. “The Motive for Metaphor” was the first chapter. He’d read that one already, months ago. He blinked and looked away, up into the glare of the street light that blotted out the black-and-grey sky behind it. His breath rose above him, a white ghost disappearing. When he looked back at the book, he tried to read the title of the next chapter, but he was too tired to make sense of it. “The Singing School,” the next chapter was called. He turned to page 12, where that chapter started. The bookmark that held the page was a laminated column of newspaper print, an obituary from several years ago. The edge of the lamination was serrated, cut with pinking shears to give a fancier appearance. The obituary, before it had been encased in clear plastic, had been backed by a yellowish length of ribbon with “A Prayer for the Living and the Dead” printed on it. Ziv read the name on the obituary: James Alexander Morrison, then quickly tucked the bookmark inside the back cover. On page 12 he read a paragraph that talked about being shipwrecked, about imagination and identity, and about associative language. All the words were familiar, but he could not decipher how they related to one another.