Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  “I doubt very much anyone did.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because the mine inspector was always accompanied by a member of Eastyard management.”

  “Eastyard management accompanied the department inspector?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there any time when the inspector was alone and could have spoken privately with an Eastyard worker?”

  “Not at the job site,” Gavin takes in a breath, lets it out. “But I met with him myself once, face-to-face, one-on-one.”

  The inquiry commissioner sits up straight. He cocks his head sideways and raises both eyebrows. The inquiry counsel has been sitting at her desk, rummaging back through some transcripts of previous testimony. She stops and looks up at the witness chair. No one at these hearings has so far mentioned a one-on-one meeting with the inspector. The inspector himself, testifying from the same stand, denied any complaints were ever made to him by an Eastyard worker.

  The day of Gavin’s meeting with the mine inspector came only a week or two after he’d quit his job at Eastyard. He knew from talking with the few guys from his old shift that Bill Reynolds, mine inspector for the province of Nova Scotia, would be in Albion Mines for a couple of days. He’d be meeting with management and looking at paperwork and plans on the Thursday, and on Friday he was scheduled to go underground to look at operations there. The men from Eastyard that he met and spoke with at Tim Horton’s told Gavin they’d spent several shifts cleaning up and liming dust to put on a show for the inspector.

  On Thursday night, Gavin walked through town to the Heather Motor Hotel. It was one of the first truly cold evenings of late fall, an overcast night when a few dry flakes of snow might waft before your eyes in the darkness and be gone so quickly that you’d wonder whether you’d actually seen them. Gavin stood on the orange carpet in the hallway and knocked on the door of Reynolds’s room. The sound of the TV came blasting through the door, and Gavin pounded several more times before the latch clicked and the door opened to let him in.

  Bill Reynolds’s complexion was ghostly white and he walked back and back from Gavin as Gavin entered the room. He sat in a stuffed chair beside the blaring television and motioned to Gavin to sit in a straight-backed wooden chair positioned on the other side of the television. As Gavin took off his coat, he saw Reynolds scanning him carefully, looking him up and down, as though searching for the bulge of a concealed weapon.

  When Gavin sat in the chair and edged it closer to Reynolds, Reynolds scraped his own chair backwards.

  “I’m …” Gavin began to introduce himself.

  “I know who you are,” Reynolds said. He was speaking very softly. Gavin almost had to lip-read the words over the deafening television.

  “I want to talk about …” Gavin began.

  Reynolds leaned over and turned the television a notch louder. He scanned the room carefully, looked Gavin up and down. He walked to the bed, where Gavin had lain his parka, and picked it up. He dangled it from one hand and shook it over the bed. One of Gavin’s gloves fell from a sleeve and Reynolds picked it up and turned it over in his hands. He went to the window and opened the curtains suddenly on the black night outside, thrust his face to the glass with his hands shading the sides of his eyes, peered out that way for a second or two, then pulled the curtains quickly back over the window.

  He sat back in his chair, turned the volume on the TV a little louder still, then cupped his hands to the sides of his mouth as though about to scream. Instead, he began mouthing something wordlessly at Gavin, moving his lips in an exaggerated way.

  Gavin gave him a puzzled look and he began again, this time more slowly.

  There – is – nothing – I – can – do, Reynolds said without his voice. There – is – nothing – I – can – do.

  Gavin finishes relating this story in front of the hot lights of the inquiry and there is a brief silence broken by a scuffling sound. He looks up, past the bright blind spot made by the lights, to see reporters scrambling out the door of the hearing room, some of them mumbling quietly into hand-held recorders, making their way to the lobby, where they can use their cellphones.

  The inquiry commissioner seems stumped for a moment. The hum of the public address system swells to the fill the room.

  “We’ve already spoken to Mr. Reynolds,” the inquiry counsel says at length.

  “I’m aware of that,” Gavin replies. He is expecting a series of questions about the scene he’s just related, but both the commissioner and counsel seem disoriented.

  “And you had already quit by this time,” the commissioner says.

  “That’s right.”

  “You’d already met with Fred Brennan, the underground manager.”

  “And with Don Barry, the general manager. They both told me the same thing: put up with conditions or quit.”

  The commissioner blinks against the television lights. He draws a folded handkerchief from inside the jacket of his suit and mops his brow with it. He looks down at his yellow pad and scrutinizes some of the notes he has made, then looks up at Gavin.

  “This is a strange little incident you’ve just described, Mr. Fraser.”

  Gavin nods. “It certainly stands out in my mind,” he says.

  “Do you have any thoughts on Mr. Reynolds’s behaviour? How do you explain what happened that day at the Heather?”

  “Well, sir, you know that it’s my job to tell you what happened and it’s your job to figure out what it means.”

  The commissioner smiles and pours himself a glass of ice water.

  “But just look at a timeline of events,” Gavin continues. “Reynolds tells me there is nothing he can do. A few weeks later Eastyard explodes and kills twenty-six of my friends. A few months after that Bill Reynolds retires from the Department of Labour with a full pension.”

  “Do you believe Reynolds’s hands were tied?”

  “No I do not, sir. No I do not,” Gavin’s voice is rising for the first time in his testimony. “He was a mine inspector. Read the Coal Mines Regulation Act, sir. The inspector has power to enforce the act.”

  “Why would he say there was nothing he could do?”

  “Well, I could make a few guesses. He was a provincial government employee. The province and the federal government were into the mine for millions. But if you want to know anything about Bill Reynolds, you’d better ask him, sir. I won’t pretend to understand the actions of a man like that.”

  “And this meeting took place after you quit.”

  “As I said.”

  “You were no longer working at Eastyard when you went to see Bill Reynolds about safety underground.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You had already made your decision about Eastyard. Why bother going to see the inspector when you were no longer working there?”

  “Because,” Gavin says calmly and slowly, “there were human lives at stake.”

  “If the dangers were so clear at Eastyard, why were you the only one to quit?”

  “I wasn’t. There were other guys who quit. They just hadn’t kicked up as much fuss as I did. They quietly up and left.”

  “Why didn’t more quit?”

  “You’d have to ask them that.”

  “A lot of them are dead. What’s your opinion? Why did people work under such conditions?”

  “Money.”

  “They risked their lives for money?”

  “What else? Money and a kind of blind faith that things had to get better. Progress. That’s what we’re all supposed to believe in. Everybody knew an explosion could happen. But they convinced themselves it wouldn’t. Or that it might happen, but not to them.”

  The commissioner shuffles through some of the notes he’s taken.

  “Could I get someone to refill this water?” Gavin says. “Please.”

  A clerk comes by with a pitcher and fills his glass.

  “We understand from previous testimony that, after you left the underground operation at
Eastyard, there was a meeting between yourself and the rest of your former crew.”

  Gavin’s stomach tightens. A pulse begins pushing in at his temples. “That’s right.” His eyes flit to the spot where Arvel Burrows’s brother is sitting. The glimpse is so brief, he is unable to see an expression on the big man’s face.

  “Whose idea was it to have such a meeting?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. It wasn’t mine. I don’t know if one particular person on the shift asked for it, or if they all just agreed to it together.”

  “Why did they want to meet with you?”

  “Well, it wasn’t clear to me at first …”

  “Where did the meeting take place?”

  “At the Tartan Tavern.” Laughter fills the hearing room.

  “That’s a local beverage room,” the chairman says.

  “It’s walking distance from here, if you’re looking for a place to get a steak for supper. Stay away from the fish and chips.” More laughter.

  “Why was the purpose of the meeting unclear to you?”

  “Well, I didn’t know if they had a clear idea of what they wanted to talk about right off. There was a lot of griping and complaining about safety, but that was nothing new to me. I told them if they all quit together, something would have to be done.”

  “Why would something have to be done?”

  “Because a company with that much public money in it would come under real close scrutiny if a quarter of the workforce quit overnight. Quit or die, is how I explained it to them, more or less. They already knew that anyway.”

  “You told them they could quit or die?” The commissioner has a surprised look on his face. “What was their response?”

  “Well, I could see they were thinking about what I’d said. But I didn’t expect them to start writing out their letters of resignation on their napkins or anything.”

  “What did happen, then?”

  “Well, I was getting ready to leave, I thought the conversation had reached an end when one of the guys, Arvel Burrows, a big guy, a guy who’s dead now. One of the twenty-six. We worked together on the United Mine Workers drive.”

  Gavin stops in mid-thought and peers again into the gallery. He looks Ziv Burrows straight in the eye and feels himself tear up momentarily as the emotion of the memory overtakes him. “Arvel Burrows was a real good fellow,” he says. He takes a drink of water, sets the glass back on the ring of condensation on the desk in front of him. “He told me they had a request to make of me,” he continues.

  “A request.”

  “Burrows said that if they died underground, would I make sure and tell the world what happened?”

  “Tell the world what happened.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what did you say to that?”

  “I told them I’d do what I could.”

  “Who, exactly, was at that meeting? Arvel Burrows. How many others?”

  “It was A-shift. The shift that died. My old shift.”

  “It was the same twenty-six men who perished.”

  “Well, it would have been close to the same guys. Not everyone from the shift would have been there. But I’d say, of the twenty-six who died, there were, conservative estimate, fifteen or sixteen guys out of the twenty-six at the table that day in the Tartan Tavern.”

  “How do you feel about the request now? Do you feel burdened with a responsibility?”

  “What responsibility?”

  “Telling the world.”

  “I just did. You’re the world,” Gavin says to the commissioner. He points at the TV camera. “There’s the world right there. The world knows what went on at Eastyard Coal. Now it’s the world’s decision what they want to do about it. You can’t bring the dead back to life. I know that much for sure.”

  Gavin senses some movement in the gallery and looks over to see Ziv Burrows standing up, towering over the gallery and the whole proceedings before him. He has his mouth open as though he has just said something and is waiting for a reply. Gavin looks at Ziv’s hands and notices how much they are trembling.

  The commissioner looks nervously at Ziv and there is a momentary stirring among the security guards positioned in the corners of the room. The commissioner looks at Gavin, as though Gavin might know this massive man standing over them, trembling, his bruised face terrified or enraged.

  “This man’s brother, …” Gavin begins. But Ziv has turned around quickly and is halfway to the door before Gavin can finish his sentence.

  Meta crosses the square of bus gates behind the south exit of Shinjuku Station. For the only time ever, out of the hundreds of people visible, she is walking the fastest. The ground is dusted with enough snow not to have melted immediately, and the city has spun into confusion. Taxis have all been fitted with snow chains or belts of reinforced wire wrapped around the tires. These have turned the streets into a calamitous racket as the chains clank and squeal, the wire belts drum the roadway. Pedestrians are slipping and writhing about everywhere with no idea how to negotiate snow-covered ground. The more comical ones are motionless as if frozen, clinging helplessly to a light post or phone box, terror blanching their faces as they watch the people who have foolishly unmoored themselves from something solid sliding about in a completely uncontrolled manner.

  Meta has never before thought of the ability to walk on snow-covered ground as a skill. When she got up this morning, she saw the snow and made sure she wore shoes that had a tread. Once she was about and realized she was not experiencing the same troubles as others were, she noticed that she had adjusted her stride. She was taking smaller steps and focusing the thrust of each step upward rather than back. The other secret is to slide when the sidewalk dictates, skating on the soles of your shoes when conditions underfoot are especially slippery.

  The cliché among the Japanese is that all Canadians ski. But as she walks toward her college, Meta forms a fresh stereotype: all Canadians can walk easily on slippery sidewalks.

  She is the first to arrive in her section of the office, but she is just hanging her coat in the locker when Sue Shooltz, a teacher from Tennessee, arrives. She is wrapped in a down-filled parka. Half of her face is covered by a scarf. Thick lambskin mitts are pulled halfway up her forearms.

  Meta bursts into laughter at the sight of her, so outrageously overdressed for such a mild cold. “Where’s your Ski-Doo?” she says.

  Sue pulls the tasselled wool hat from over her ears. “My what?” she says, her Southern accent drawing out the second word.

  “You look like you came to work on a Ski-Doo,” Meta says.

  “A Ski-Doo? I’n’t that one of those skimpy little bathing suits that men wear?”

  “You’re kidding me,” Meta says. “A Ski-Doo! A Ski-Doo! You’ve never heard of a Ski-Doo!”

  Sue looks blankly at her as she peels the heavy clothes off and tucks them into her locker.

  “ ‘Twenty-three skidoo,’ ” Sue says. “My granny used to say that. I have no idea what it means. It’s freezing out there!”

  “What a country!” Greg Ulesso says as he comes through the door. “Boiling hot in summer,” he says. “Freezing cold in winter, typhoons, torrential rains. It’s the worst of all possible worlds.”

  A tremor sets up in the building, the room begins shifting slowly from side to side. Everyone stands up straight and looks at each other with blank expressions. The Great Kanto quake flattened Tokyo in 1923, and the same tectonic plates and the faults between them are set to release a similar disaster at any time. Each time the floor begins to rock this way, Meta braces herself for the Next Big Shakeup. She closes her eyes briefly and thinks, I wonder if I’ll open my eyes to find this building destroyed around me. I wonder if I’ll ever open my eyes again.

  She opens her eyes when the rocking gets worse. Someone in the room is screaming. The sound rises up against the rattling furniture, the growling of the walls and ceiling and floor. She grips the edge of the nearest desk and feels her stomach beginning to
heave, her equilibrium lost. She goes down on one knee. Books and papers come down from shelves that are bolted to the walls. The coffeemaker skitters off its table in the corner and falls to the floor, the carafe disintegrating immediately, sending coffee up the wall beside it.

  “Stand in a doorway!” someone in the room screeches, remembering an instruction from some safety pamphlet or other. But walking to a doorway is impossible. The floor has turned liquid, rising and falling in waves.

  When the earth stops moving, the building keeps rocking a few moments longer, the walls reorienting themselves to the foundation.

  Thank God, thinks Meta. Thank God. Thank God. This is not going to be it. She releases her grip on the edge of the desk, and when she looks at her hand, discovers that she was holding on tightly enough to make her fingers bleed. A few crimson pellets creep out from beneath the nails of the index and middle fingers of her left hand.

  Sue Shooltz is flat on her back. Her hands cover her face, protecting it from whatever might have fallen on her but didn’t.

  “Hadja. Hadja-ja,” Meta says to her. She is surprised to hear herself say this, since it does not mean anything, and what she was trying to say was, “Are you okay?”

  She shakes her head. A mild aftershock rocks the building gently, sends the walls swaying in a manner that is almost soothing. She rights a seat that was sent over onto its side and sits on it. Greg Ulesso stands to his full height and smoothes the wrinkles from his clothing.

  “Earthquakes!” he says. “I forgot earthquakes. What a bloody country!”

  Meta tries hard to pull herself together after the quake. At her desk, she sits jittering and fluttering, drinking several cups of green tea from a pot someone had brewed just prior to the quake that had miraculously not been damaged or even spilled. Janitorial staff and a few teachers are moving noisily about the room, trying to put things back in order. They mop up coffee, stuff books back on shelves. Meta pulls all the materials together for her first class and tries to review them. She cannot hold a book still enough in her hand to read it. When she steadies the book by placing it flat on the desk, she finds it difficult to control her hand enough to turn a single page. With ten minutes remaining before the first class, she goes down the hallway from the teacher’s room and through the door to Mr. Takeuchi’s office.