by Leo McKay
“What’s the point in only having these forms in Japanese if they let you fill them out in English?” the man was saying to no one in particular. Neither of the women across from him was listening. “What’s this part again?” He held the sheet up and pointed at a corner of it. Both women leaned in and looked carefully at the sheet.
The sugar on Meta’s table was in the form of brown, rock-like crystals. She dissolved a few of these in the black coffee, then picked up the tiny white china creamer from the side of her saucer and emptied it into the cup. She stirred this mixture together with a small gold-coloured spoon and savoured the first sip of the bittersweet blend.
She took her green notebook from her handbag. HIGH GRADE NOTEBOOK was written in big black letters across the top. In smaller lettering beneath appeared the statement: this notebook was made by automatic and excellentic machine. Two months ago, when she’d seen this notebook on a shelf in a stationery store, it had delighted her. Since then, she had seen a pencil case with “The recycling strategy with a 100% increase in fascination” on it, a plastic ruler that said “Bastard!”, and a T-shirt with a picture of a rooster on it that said “I am king of cock.” She’d enjoyed having a chuckle at the slightly askew sentence on the notebook’s cover before, and probably would again, but at present it only bewildered her.
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 the people is so completely alien to me. And the weird thing is, the longer I’m here, the less well I understand it.
“Excuse me.”
Meta jumped back from what she’d been writing, and instinctively, without looking up, flipped the page so no one could read it. She glanced up to see the big foreigner she’d been watching fill out the form earlier. He stood over her with what he no doubt considered his best, most pleasant smile. His cotton dress shirt held big creases where the starch had given way. He wore a dark-blue tie and a navy suit that was slightly too large for his slim frame.
“Can you speak English?” he asked.
She leaned back from him a little and could not stop herself from quickly eyeing him up and down. His brown shoes were scuffed down to the undyed leather.
“Yes,” she said quietly, cautiously.
“I’m sorry,” he said, softening his face even more. “Was that a yes?”
Meta nodded.
“I need to ask a favour,” the man said. His hair needed trimming, and his face was grey, as though he hadn’t eaten properly in a while. Still, Meta realized now that he was younger than she was. He was twenty-one, twenty, maybe even nineteen. She did not respond, physically or verbally. She did not move a muscle to indicate that she’d even consented to listen.
“I’m going to marry that girl over there,” he said. He pointed back to the table where he’d been sitting, where there were clearly two young women. He did not bother to acknowledge this, let alone differentiate his intended from his unintended. He paused now to regard Meta. His eyes focused on her forehead, then her lips, then quickly flitted down to glance at her breasts before returning to her eyes.
“I need …” he glanced over his shoulder and seemed slightly unnerved, much less sure of himself than he’d been a minute ago. “We need … another witness.”
Meta bit her top lip as she thought a moment.
“What would I have to do?” she asked.
“Just sign this form.”
“Just sign it. Nothing more?”
“Name and address is all this form asks for.”
“I don’t have to go to the ward office?”
“No.”
“They’re pretty trusting.”
“One thing I really like about this country,” the man said, “is it proves that if you treat people as though they deserve to be trusted, they will act trustworthy.”
“I can’t read this form, so I don’t know what I’m signing,” she said.
“I know it’s asking for a lot in a way. It’s just that we have to do this today because …”
“All right, I’ll sign,” Meta said. She interrupted him deliberately so she would not have to find out anything about him and his wife-to-be.
“This says name and this says address,” the man said, pointing to the blanks on the page.
“Mathilde LeBlanc,” Meta wrote in the square for name. Beside address, she furtively copied the address of the coffee shop off of the dessert menu posted on the napkin dispenser.
“Thanks so much,” the man said as she handed him back the form. “We really appreciate this. Listen, can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?”
“No,” Meta said, guilty that he was so appreciative of her lie. When Meta got back to her own apartment, she was tired enough to sleep, though it was only mid-afternoon. There was a note taped to her door, a piece of pink paper, folded once in the middle.
Please come to my place! it said in the scrolly writing of someone to whom the Roman alphabet was straight and square and foreign. She left the note on the door in the hope that Yuka would think she hadn’t returned yet. She almost had the door closed when a knock on the opposite side of it startled her. When she opened it, Yuka stood in the doorway in a faded floral smock. Her head was inclined forward in an attitude of supplication.
“Please come to my place!” Yuka said in a breathy voice.
Too tired to argue, Meta followed Yuka into her apartment and took off her shoes before stepping up onto the tatami.
Yuka and her son lived in an apartment only a little larger than the one Meta lived in by herself. Three of them had lived there for years, before her husband had died. Yuka herself had been here for at least nineteen years, since her wedding day in 1968, and it seemed to Meta that she had not had the heart yet to change much since the husband had passed on. Yuka’s husband, whom she referred to as Mr. Tamaguchi, had been a highly placed salaryman in a Japanese pharmaceutical company. His salary had afforded them very nice furniture and appliances, but Yuka had explained that Mr. Tamaguchi’s family, when he himself was scarcely old enough to remember, had been deeply affected by the hardships and scarcity of the war. Yuka’s nice furnishings were crammed into the apartment alongside the older furnishings that no one would buy second-hand, but that Mr. Tamaguchi had not been able to bring himself to throw out. The apartment was overwhelmed with an accumulation of things. Their small living room contained two couches, two armchairs, two televisions, two stereos, a china closet so full that the contents seemed painted on the glass of the doors, a coffee table and four chairs, a portable sewing machine, a gas heater, a dehumidifier, and a partially covered stack of tightly folded clothing, for which there was no other storage space, that reached almost to the ceiling in one corner.
The cluttered room, along with the stale smell of years of
smoking in this tiny place, pushed in on Meta’s chest, making it difficult for her to breathe.
She sat at the dining table while Yuka poured coffee for them and took a seat opposite her. Her son, Kazuhiro, sat slumped, completely without expression or movement, into a corner of the newer couch. He did not speak any English, so Meta greeted him in Japanese. “Konichiwa.” He did not respond. The newer television was turned on, but no one was watching it. On screen was a game show in which a group of shivering, frightened-looking young men were being forced to jump into a pool of ice water.
“What happened to your hand?” Meta asked, pointing at a circular mark at the V of Yuka’s right thumb and forefinger. Yuka covered it quickly with her left hand. “I burn it at the cooker,” she said. Meta stood up to get a better look at the wound. “My god, that looks really painful,” she said, gently pulling away the concealing hand.
“Not so painful,” Yuka said.
“Ouch!” Meta said in sympathy. She looked Yuka in the eye. “You burned this … at the cooker?”
Yuka blinked uncomfortably a moment, then looked away.
PART FIVE
1989
Ennis attends the families’ group meetings at the Plymouth Fire Hall, and unlike most others, he has never cried here with grief. He’s never shouted, either, into a microphone or from his seat on the floor. He’s never spoken, as a matter of fact, and except to raise his hand to vote for or against some motion, he has not participated at all in the proceedings. He feels emptied somehow of emotions, and comes to the meetings mostly out of a feeling of obligation to Arvel’s memory, and the memory of the terrible thing that was done to him.
He sits today where he always sits: in the very last row at the back, in an aisle seat near the door so that he can get up and walk out quickly at any time he desires without being noticed or making a scene. Dunya has never come to one of these meetings, although he always asks her to go with him. She sits in her white room at the front of the house and quietly refuses. He feels this sitting is somehow something she must do now, and he himself has such mixed feelings about the meetings that he has no desire to try to convince her.
Ziv has also refused to join him here, and the two have fought recently, just last night, over whether there is any point in the families fighting for redress after their loved ones have died. Ziv accused him of living in the past, with his talk about justice and democracy, words that Ennis himself hardly felt he believed in any more.
“Going to those meetings is the least I can do for my son,” Ennis had said.
“Well, I’m your son as well, and if you want to do something for me, don’t ask me to go with you and watch people fight for what they won’t get. It’s too late to do something for Arvel. And why now? You never did a thing for him in life. You know, the only reason he took that job was to please you. If it wasn’t for you, he would never have taken it.”
At these words from his son, Ennis felt anger and hurt rise in him, but he merely lowered his head and walked away.
Despite the fact that the families were duped in this very building by Eastyard in the early days after the explosion, tricked under false pretenses into not speaking with the media while the whole world was still watching, family members seem to have grown attached to the Plymouth Fire Hall, the place where many of them had first met each other, first formed the idea of themselves as a group. They’d hoped here, they’d hugged here, they’d feared, they’d cried, they’d prayed, they’d mourned.
And so, with the disaster now months behind them, they gather here in the smell of motor oil and disinfectant, in the over-cleaned, underlit banquet room, still used most for wedding receptions. They plot and debate, searching for a way of rescuing some sense of justice out of such a terrible event. They want an investigation into what led to the deaths of their loved ones. They want financial compensation for survivors. Many of them want to see a criminal trial for former Eastyard managers, all of whom have fled the province.
From the podium today, all the talk is about money. On the floor is a demand for a forensic audit of Eastyard’s books, partly to trace every dollar of taxpayers’ money that got spent on the mine. The managers, the high-salary-drawers, are all still alive, and many family members want someone to track the government money and whose pockets it made its way into.
The whole idea of a forensic audit is a waste of time, as far as Ennis is concerned. None of the money is ever coming back to the government anyway, even if they do find out where it went. There are more important things they could be focusing on, things that might actually make a difference for the families who’ve lost loved ones. But he feels only half-present at the meeting as it is, and the prospect of standing up at the podium himself and speaking into the microphone seems impossible, unthinkable, like trying to breathe underwater. He would stand up and open his mouth to speak only to drown in his own despair.
The woman at the mike is Audrey Jenkins, the wife of Steve Jenkins, whose body was the first one recovered after the explosion, one of the eleven bodies actually brought back to the surface. In the first days after the explosion, she stood out as one of the strongest, patting others on the back in the fire hall, on her hands and knees with her own four children and the children of others, smearing poster paints over newsprint with the names of the missing in the vain hope that the miners would return. From the hospital, after he’d had his face broken, Ennis saw her on the news, filmed from across a police barricade, breaking down on the way from her car to the fire hall, minutes after identifying her husband’s charred body. She’d gone right to the ground, face-down and without movement, until her twin sisters each took an arm and dragged her through the door.
She is a small woman with wide shoulders under a brown T-shirt. “Is anybody adding all this up?” she is saying, her voice strong and firm, but just strained enough to suggest that it could crack at any moment. She waves a newspaper clipping over her head. According to what she has already said, the clipping dates from the planning stages of the Eastyard operation, and details the provincial government’s promise of millions of dollars in loan guarantees for the company.
Ennis glances down into the coffee-stained khaki tote bag at his feet. On the outside there is a Co-op logo. Inside, brown manila folders are stuffed with his own collection of clippings.
“I can’t make head or tail of these numbers,” Audrey Jenkins is saying. There is a sudden rush of feedback and she pulls back from the microphone until it stops. “What’s the difference between an operating grant, a tax break, and a loan guarantee?” The podium is a portable music stand. A single microphone plugged into a guitar amplifier is the only PA system. “We need an independent person who knows something about money. They’ve got to get into those locked cabinets over there.” She points in the direction of the mine, although documents have been removed to RCMP headquarters. But mine officials had been given unimpeded access to company files for days following the disaster, and the chance of there being any incriminating documents among what the police have are nil.
Ennis puts a hand through the loops of his Co-op bag and rises to his feet. He’s had enough already. The speaker looks at him accusingly. With hunched shoulders he excuses himself into his chest, inaudible to anyone but himself, and walks out through the main door.
It is a clear, windless winter day. The landscape is all white snow and grey trees. Here and there is the pale yellow of stubborn oak leaves, still clinging to their branches. Ennis’s breath is pushing out now in crisp columns from his mouth as he contemplates the walk home, more than two miles. He sets the bag between his feet and it slouches heavily to one side while he zips his jacket.
“Ennis.”
He turns at the sound of the voice, almost tripping over the canvas bag between his feet. Allie McInnis is coming through the double doors from the fire hall, the chemical smell of the interior coming with him.
Allie is part of the families group, although he is not closely related to anyone who died. His wi
fe is a distant cousin of the Comber family, whose boy Nicholas is one of those still underground. Everyone in that family is still grieving too much to get involved with the group, so Allie stands in for them.
“Allie,” Ennis says. “I didn’t see you in there.”
When Allie opens his mouth again to speak, Ennis notices that his lower dentures are missing a tooth, a black square in his smile. He wonders whether he is responsible for this.
“I was a way up front,” Allie says. He looks down a moment at the bag at Ennis’s feet. Manila folders are visible. Clippings of all sizes protrude at odd angles, “Ennis, can I talk to you for a minute?” Allie has already zipped up his heavy coat and is winding a long navy scarf about his neck. Long tubes of steam exit his nostrils as he exhales.
Ennis works his watch out of his sleeve and looks at it. “I have to walk home. It’s getting dark.”
“I’ve seen you walking a lot. You’re looking real good. You look like you lost a lot of weight.”
“Well,” Ennis says. He shifts uncomfortably. “The face isn’t looking so good.”
“Swelling’s come down a lot. I saw you up by the post office last month. I was just driving by.”
Ennis looks at the ground and notices the pebbles of salt he is standing on. He scrapes a foot back and forth and listens to the gravelly crunch. “I guess the boys at the Tartan probably wonder what the hell happened to me.”
“I haven’t been back there much,” Allie says. “Anyway … Look, Ennis. I’m not really a family member here, Ennis, or anything. I’m here for the Combers.”