Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  “These people don’t know how lucky they are,” his mother said. She sat with a blank glare at the tube.

  “How long did Didu work at the pit?” Ziv asked.

  “What?” his mother said. She shook her head and peeled her eyes from the TV.

  “How long did your father work in the pit? I know he retired from there. But did he work there his whole life?”

  “All of it that I remember,” she said. She was looking at him suspiciously. “He lived in Winnipeg when he first came over.”

  “Winnipeg! I didn’t know that!”

  “That was where most of the Bohunks were going. He did something for the city there. There’s an old picture of him in front of a fountain. That is from Winnipeg. Then he moved to Halifax and worked as a streetcar conductor. Why are you asking me about all this now?”

  “Why in the name of God would a streetcar conductor go into the mines? Especially in the old days, when there wasn’t very much money in it?”

  “He fell in love with my mother. I guess there weren’t many Bohunks in Nova Scotia at the time. My uncle Stan, my mother’s uncle. He was born in the old country. He ran into Daddy up in Halifax and invited him down for the weekend. He met Mumma and that was that. They got married. She didn’t want to move to Halifax, so …”

  “Mum …” She had drifted back to the TV. “Mum …” She turned to face him again.

  “I’ve been offered a job at Eastyard. Eastyard. You know, the new mine.”

  He considered mentioning that Arvel had applied, too, that they’d both been interviewed and there was a good chance they’d both be hired. But he did not want to bring up that possibility now. And it was Arvel’s job, anyway, to tell her what he was and was not going to do.

  His mother hit the remote, shutting off the TV. She sat back in her chair and eyed him up and down.

  “They want me for underground. I applied. I didn’t think I had a chance. Because I’ve got two years of university on my application, I thought that if I did get hired, they’d put me in an office job. Shuffling paper or adding up columns. I don’t know a thing about underground work. Maybe it’s because of my size.”

  “Well, Ziv,” she was silent for a long time. “This is a complete shock to me.”

  “The money is good there.”

  “The people who worked the mines in the old days didn’t have the choices that you do. I can’t believe the politicians who are pushing to get this mine started. Do they have rocks in their heads? They’re offering you a free ticket on the Titanic, and you’re taking it.” She had a desperate look on her face, somewhere between fear and anger.

  “I’m going to have to think about this. Anyway, don’t tell Dad about this. Whatever I decide, I want to be the one to tell him.”

  His mother gave him a stern look. “A young person today would be crazy to go down there,” she said.

  The old neighbourhood looked much better than it used to, even in his own childhood. Federal grants in the seventies had reroofed most of the places, provided energy-efficient windows, and covered the buildings with vinyl siding that was almost a visual duplicate of the clapboard that had been on many of them originally.

  Ziv went for a walk. It was moving into late fall now. Many trees had shed their leaves completely. Those with leaves remaining held a ghostly yellow halo of light. Most Red Row backyards looked well-kept. The odd sundeck had sprouted at a back door. There was wooden lawn furniture scattered about, here and there. Piles of leaves had been raked up, orange garbage bags held more.

  He passed the house his father had grown up in, stopped and tried to imagine it in 1928, the year his father was born. He sketched in a picket fence, an outhouse. He shrank the cherry tree to a sapling. He looked at the side yard and the area around the back door, and tried to imagine his father out there as a child, playing in the dirt.

  At the north end of the Red Row, just before the Heather Motel and the Trans-Canada overpass, he came to the house where his mother had grown up.

  The people who lived there now had done some upgrading since he could remember visiting his grandfather there. The original shed and outhouse had been replaced by a prefab plywood garden shed. The big black spruce tree his mother had told him she’d planted as a little girl was gone, the branches had been close enough to the roof of the house to cause a moss problem. The white picket fence that encircled the little front yard was the same one he remembered from his childhood. But his grandfather’s garden, once the pride of the family, if not the neighbourhood, had grown over with grass. He stopped at the fence for a moment and looked at the ground there, the plot that was in fact tiny, but that had seemed enormous when he’d been a boy. He remembered walking through it, between the rows, flowers towering over him, the fragrance of fresh-grown lettuce, the excitement of pulling a carrot right from the ground, wiping it on his pants, and eating it, the flavour bursting in his mouth, the dirt and grit scratching his teeth.

  Across the street stood the big cut-stone remains of the Cornish Pumphouse, a hundred-year-old relic of the mining heydays.

  Ziv climbed up to the top of the highway overpass on Foord Street and leaned against the guardrail as cars whizzed past. Before him he could see the whole Red Row. Though the peak of his own family’s roof was obscured by houses and trees, he could see the steeple of Christ Church right across the street.

  He looked at the river, the railroad tracks, the Cornish Pumphouse, the wash plant that had operated until recently for the tiny strip mine out on Foster Avenue, the single-storey row-houses and duplexes at the north of the Red Row, leading to the storey-and-a-half duplexes farther south. This neighbourhood was built almost a hundred years ago, and it hadn’t been meant to last. It was supposed to just crumble and disappear when the big seams had been depleted, or to be razed and replaced with something bigger and better as industrialization expanded. The supply of coal in Pictou County was far from exhausted. Having heard about the size of the original coal seam beneath the ground at Albion Mines, he’d once asked Fred Moore, an old Red Rower who’d been an underground foreman, about how much of the coal had been mined. “We haven’t had the half of it,” he said. “In a hundred and fifty years we haven’t had the half of it.” A hundred years ago, the possibilities for this area mushrooming into a city to rival Halifax must have seemed pretty strong. The steel industry had a strong foothold, the first hold it had in North America. North American railroading had started here. The harbour in Pictou was excellent, the shipyard there as good as any.

  When you stood back from this place you could see the marks, like looking at the rings of a stump: the growth, the stunted growth, the decay, the resuscitation. Albion Mines was not so much a ghost as an exhumed corpse, a half-charred body pulled prematurely from the crematorium.

  That night, at the desk in his bedroom, he took out a sheet of loose-leaf and wrote the date at the top. He was going to write a letter to Meta in Japan. Her mother had been into Zellers last week and had given him her new address. He couldn’t believe that she’d really gone through with it. She’d moved to Japan. He remembered the first poster she’d ever seen advertising teaching opportunities overseas. It had been in a stairwell of the Student’s Union building, years ago, when Ziv had still been a student and he and Meta had still been going out together. She’d said then that that was what she’d do when she got out of school, but it had seemed so remote a possibility at the time.

  He couldn’t help but admire Meta’s ambition and determination for making such a big decision for herself and following through with it. And he wished he could feel so certain about what to do next. But he felt like hell. His relationship with Meta had officially ended years before, and they’d only seen each other occasionally since, but he thought of her at times like this. Times when he needed consolation.

  Dear Meta:

  I hate it here.

  He wrote these words, then sat back. He read the sentence again and realized several things. It was true. He did hate it here. What
seemed odd was that, when he began the letter, he had thought he was going to continue writing about Albion Mines and how smart she’d been to get out of it. Here, he had supposed to mean just that: this town and every miserable aspect of the fact he was stuck in it. Especially the fact that he felt he had no other option than to choose between a shitty job and a deadly one.

  But he realized that, though the sentence he’d written was true and felt true when he reread it, here did not mean Albion Mines at all, for when he tried to think about what it was that he didn’t like about the place, everything seemed several times removed from him, as if on the other side of a glass wall. I hate it here had very little to do with what was on the opposite side of the glass. Little to do with Albion Mines, and nothing to do with his parents’ house, though he resented living in it, resented having to live in it, and resented each of the people who lived there, most of all himself.

  He straightened up in the chair, put the pen back to the paper, scratched out the original sentence, and restarted the letter.

  Dear Meta,

  I hate myself.

  He looked at this sentence and knew that there was something important in it. He knew that if Meta were here instead of on the other side of the world, he’d be able to talk to her. But how could he write a letter that began with that sentence? And how could he continue a train of thought in that direction that had any bearing on what he was feeling? How could he expect her to understand what was inside of him with just a few black squiggles on a page to represent it all?

  He picked up the page, folded it neatly several times, then tore the paper into many tiny pieces.

  It was the following morning when Arvel called to tell him that he had been hired.

  “I got my letter yesterday,” Ziv said. “I’m not sure what the hell to do. I do not want that job, but I feel like I can’t pass it up.”

  “Just think it over for a few days. You’ll come around. This is going to be the best job you’ve ever had.”

  “I wonder if Roly got on.”

  “He called me this morning already. They gave him some kind of custodian’s job. Sounds like one step up from janitor, if you ask me.”

  At Arvel’s request, Ziv agreed that they’d tell their father about the job offers together, that night after supper.

  Ennis was late getting home from work that evening. They had already eaten. Arvel had come down from the apartment on Bridge Street, and he and Ziv waited in Ziv’s bedroom for their father to get home. As soon as they heard Ennis’s voice, they made their way to the kitchen, where Ennis had already settled himself at the table.

  The brothers stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, Ziv looking at Arvel with a slight frown, Arvel smiling, barely able to contain how pleased he was.

  Ennis was bent over a plate of baloney and molasses and had not turned to speak to them.

  “Dad,” Arvel said.

  Ennis turned around long enough to take in the two of them, then went back to his baloney.

  “We’ve been hired at the new mine.”

  Ennis sat up straight in his chair. For a moment he remained facing away from them, then he turned again.

  “You’re shitting me!” he said. He looked at Arvel and Ziv, then turned to Dunya. The two sons shook their heads. They both looked at their father now. Arvel was grinning, but Ziv stood silently with a blank look on his face.

  “I still haven’t decided …” Ziv began to say, but he did not know how to continue.

  “Ziv told me yesterday he’d been hired on,” Dunya said. “I didn’t know I’d have two sons working there.” She was not smiling.

  “Well, now. Don’t be so down-in-the-mouth about it. This will be good, steady work,” Arvel said.

  “I only have two sons. That’s all I have,” she said. “I’ll be left with no one, you wait and see.” Her face was dark with anger and concern.

  “Boys,” Ennis said. “I’m proud of ye’s. The two of ye’s.” He stood up from the table and approached them both, and they instinctively backed away from him. “Come here till I slug the two of ye’s.” He slammed the thumb-ends of his fists into their shoulders, then took the car keys from his pants pocket. “We’re going to the Tartan, boys. I’m buying the pitchers.”

  “Don’t do this, Ennis,” Dunya said. Ennis looked at her and waited. His big, childish grin melted her hot stare.

  “You should know better,” Dunya said. “You of all people should not be encouraging your sons to go into that mine. You can’t let this happen. Put a stop to it.”

  “Jesus, Dunya, neither of these boys has had a decent job between them. Now they’ve both got good jobs.”

  She shook her head in disgust. “This is what you call a good job?”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “So now you’re going to take your sons out drinking?”

  Ennis grinned at the boys. “You bet your arse I am.”

  “And what about the operation? Does that mean nothing to you, either? You know what the cardiologist told you about alcohol.”

  “Drinking never killed me yet,” Ennis said. “The operation isn’t for two weeks.”

  Ziv shook his head in disbelief. “You’re a textbook case of something,” he said. “I wish I’d stayed in university long enough to find out what.”

  “I wash my hands of the bunch of you,” Dunya said. “Ennis, go ahead. Give your sons a lesson in foolhardiness and lack of responsibility. Boys, pay careful attention tonight. You’re learning from a pro.” Dunya turned her back on the three of them and walked through the living room toward the stairs that led to the second floor.

  “Don’t worry,” Ennis said. “She’ll come around. You boys’ll get your first paycheques and she’ll realize you did the right thing.” He had his coat on and was heading for the door with the car keys in his hand.

  Ziv stayed back in the kitchen, not wanting to spoil the moment of celebration Arvel was probably looking forward to. All the same, he did not feel like going to the Tartan tonight to rejoice and then have to tell his father tomorrow that he wasn’t going to take the Eastyard job.

  “I’ll walk,” Arvel said.

  “What!” Ennis said. “I’m driving. Get in the car.”

  “If we’re going to be drinking, I don’t want to take the car,” Arvel said.

  “It’s my goddamned car. I’ll drive it if I want.”

  “I don’t have to get into it, do I?”

  “I’m treating you to the goddamn beer, and if I say we go in the car, we go in the goddamn car,” Ennis said.

  Ziv stepped off the back doorstep and moved away from the house. He wanted to stay out of the argument.

  They ended up at a standstill in the driveway, Ennis in the driver’s seat, the door open so he could bicker with Arvel. Ziv stood back and stayed out of the way.

  “We’re not even drinking,” Ennis kept saying. “We’re just going to have a few drinks.”

  Without making any suggestions or getting involved in the argument, Ziv called Jim’s Taxi. Arvel and Ennis bickered pointlessly back and forth until the car came. When the headlights of the cab were shining on all of them in the driveway, Ziv said, “Let’s just get in the fucking taxi.”

  Ennis looked at him, then back at Arvel, who was already moving back from the car to give his father room to come out.

  “To hell with it,” Ennis said at last. He put his own car keys in his pocket and followed his sons into the taxi.

  Finally, his sons had begun lives he could understand. So what if they were in their middle twenties, and he had started his working life at sixteen? They were finally going to do real work. For the first time ever, the three of them were going to do something together: get drunk.

  “Two more pitchers!” he shouted towards the bar. It was a quiet night at the Tartan Tavern, a few people were scattered here and there throughout the room. Most of the action was taking place in the snooker area, where every table was full and the players leaned seriou
sly and quietly over their cues, as though some money might be at stake.

  “Christ, boys,” Ennis said when the pitchers he’d ordered arrived. He threw back his head in reverie. “I remember when I was starting at the Car Works.” He shook his head and laughed. A clatter of snooker balls punctuated his speech. “Those were crazy times. We were kids back then. Just kids, a lot of us. Quit school in Grade seven, eight, nine. Start earning your keep young. That’s something young people today don’t understand.” He hadn’t meant this as a dig at his sons, but Arvel began to bristle in response.

  “Another thing we don’t understand,” Arvel said. “Is how anyone could quit school in junior high and get any job, let alone a good one. Let alone keep it.”

  Ziv shook some salt into the palm of his left hand. He prodded the salt with his right index finger as though counting the grains. Ennis put his beer glass down in front of him. He hunched over it and peered quickly back and forth at his two sons. “Those jobs were good jobs because we made them good jobs. We organized and we fought for what we wanted. You think the company was tripping over itself to give us a seniority system, a decent wage, holidays? We got that stuff because we were smart enough to demand it. If young people today aren’t happy, it’s up to them to fix it.”

  “You can only make demands if you have an employer,” Arvel said. “Who are today’s young people going to threaten with a strike? The unemployment office? Their social worker? The parents they’re living off?”

  Ziv spilled the salt from his palm over his draft. Foam began rising vigorously to the top.

  “Take this guy,” Ennis said, indicating Ziv with his thumb. “He’s been working at Zellers for years, now. If he’s not happy, why doesn’t he organize? Get a bargaining committee instead of that Employees Relations Council he’s got.”

  Ziv seemed in no mood for a fight and did not reply to his father’s dig.

  “Have you had your head up your arse for thirty years?” Arvel continued. “Unemployment for people our age is through the fucking roof.”