by Leo McKay
Ken carries on. “You were a better brother to Alec than I ever was. Arvel was lucky to have you.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Ziv says and stands up. “Ken, listen, I have to go now.”
“I mean it,” Ken says. “I just wanted to tell you.” He gets to his feet. “Well, nice seeing you, Ziv.”
“You too, Ken. Good luck with the law-school business, eh? I guess the next time I see you you’ll be wearing pinstripes, no doubt.” Ziv gives a friendly laugh.
“Ya, thanks. Take care.”
They step outside the door and turn in opposite directions as Ken heads into the parking lot and Ziv makes for Foord Street.
Ziv stops at the top of the drive. The Miner’s Museum sign points to where he’s just come from. There is a space between houses here and he can see down across a field to a place where two branches of the river meet. Beyond this, the silos of Eastyard Coal stand silent and brooding, as though facing each other defiantly against the shifting pattern of grey and blue sky behind them.
In a magazine article he saw some time ago, there was a cutaway drawing of the Eastyard mine. The picture showed approximate depths and equivalent surface distances. There was a red dot to mark the place where most of the recovered bodies were found and another to show where company records, “shockingly inadequate,” according to the article, indicated the remaining fifteen bodies might be located. It would take someone who knew a lot more about maps to locate that spot on the surface of the ground. But as Ziv looks out across the landscape, he strains to see the tunnels as they would be now, black and burnt and airless, Arvel’s body decomposing on the floor. The body that in life seemed so hulking and large, crushed and puny beneath countless tons of earth.
Ziv remembers a geometrical figure he studied in Grade 12 math. It is called a hyperbola. It consists of two curves that never intersect, that move endlessly away from each other. As a student, it took him several days to grasp the idea that these two curves that never touch are not two objects, but that they form one shape, a shape that can be expressed in a single formula. This is what brothers are: non-intersecting curves that form a single entity. With Arvel gone, Ziv is half of something whose wholeness has ceased to exist.
The next morning Ziv gets up at nine to find a letter from Meta sitting on the kitchen table. His father has obviously been to the post office already. Today’s Chronicle-Herald is folded up near the letter. As he moves the paper out of the way, he notices a small article at the bottom of page 1. The headline reads “Brother of Killed Miner Battles Government, Families Group for Memorial.” He scans the first two paragraphs quickly. The Eastyard families’ group has apparently issued a news release taking Jeff Willis to task. To many in the group, the silos are an unnecessarily painful reminder of an event they will in any case never forget. Passing through Pictou County on the Trans-Canada, they are unignorable, one of the most visible landmarks in the province. They are a symbol of all that’s wrong with Nova Scotia’s political and economic life.
Willis is sensitive to those family members who want the silos removed. But according to the article, he’s critical of the Nova Scotia government for the way it is pushing through its plans. “They’re trying to sweep the history of this event under the rug. And the death of my brother along with it,” the paper quotes Willis as saying. “My brother is buried at Eastyard Coal. Until his body is recovered, those silos are his gravestones. To tear them down would be as disrespectful as the desecration of any cemetery.”
Ziv gets up and goes to the window. The sun is up now, and Bundy Burgess stands squinting in his backyard, shielding his eyes with his hand. He’s got the shaft of an old hockey stick in the other hand and he’s knocking big icicles off the eaves of his house with it. Ziv turns back to the room and pours himself the half-cup of lukewarm coffee his father left in the machine. When he settles back down at the table he opens Meta’s letter.
Dear Ziv,
I spent two days outside of Tokyo in a place called Hakone. There was snow there, and the whole experience of quiet and cold reminded me so much of Canada.
Did I ever tell you about my neighbour Yuka? What this woman has been through since I’ve known her, I could not even begin to describe for you. I seem to be her only friend.
Sometimes I’d like to walk away, but somehow she always manages to pull me back. But can I be responsible for this person’s well-being?
I started writing this letter yesterday and I got interrupted. What has happened in the meantime has been so horrible. Now, suddenly, everything has changed, and it has changed in such a radical way I can’t really put it into words. I’m not sure I understand it myself.
I won’t write any more right now. I just want to let you know I’m thinking about you, and thinking about home.
Ziv folds the letter up and puts it back inside the envelope. He examines the outside of the envelope, looking for something else from it, something that might help him comprehend not just the words of the letter, but a feeling he can sense beneath the words. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, perhaps some further sign of Meta’s state of mind when she was sending it, maybe even some last-minute postscript she wrote on the way to the mailbox. But there is nothing but a Japanese stamp and the coloured markings of an airmail envelope.
He resolves to write to her. He wants to tell her he misses her. He wants to tell her to come home, that this is where she belongs.
“Somebody told me the Morrison boy was around.”
Ziv startles at the sound of his father’s voice. Ennis has entered the kitchen without Ziv’s having heard him.
“Ken Morrison,” Ziv says. He turns to his father, who is busying himself with something in the cupboards. “He said he was surprised you weren’t attending the inquiry hearings.”
There is no reply from his father for an instant, then he says, “What? Who?” as though he’s just been roused from a dream and has no idea where he is.
“Ken Morrison said he was surprised you weren’t attending the inquiry hearings.”
“The commissioner’s going to reach the same conclusion whether or not I attend the goddamn hearing.” Ennis has fixed himself a bowl of something. He begins making his way into the living room with it.
“Don’t you think …” Ziv stops in mid-sentence. Ennis has walked right past him and out of the kitchen. Ziv feels like calling after his father. He feels like giving him hell for his apathy about everything since Arvel died. He feels like chasing the old man into the front room and shaking him until his false teeth fall out.
He picks up the Chronicle-Herald from the table and follows his father into the living room. “Look at this!” he says. He dangles the paper from one hand so the full front page is in view. His father looks up at him with a peculiar, puzzled look.
“A few months ago this paper would already be torn up with holes. There’s a bag of clippings up in your bedroom, stuffed full of information. Turning newspapers into confetti is next to useless, but you’ve given even that up now.”
“What do you want me to do? What the hell can I do? Can I bring my son back from the dead? Tell me that, eh?”
“Look at this Willis guy, here,” Ziv points at the article on the front page of the paper. “He’s doing something. He’s fighting to get the mine silos declared a memorial. We can’t bring Arvel back, but we can make sure nobody is allowed to forget what happened to him. Go on outside and take a look at those silos. They’ll make the biggest memorial to workers killed on the job in the country.”
Ennis shakes his head. “Those silos are coming down in the spring. Haven’t you even read that article? The government has already made the decision. It’s a foregone conclusion. It’s over.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you.” Ziv throws the newspaper on the floor and walks into the front room, where he stands in front of Ennis’s plaques hanging again on the wall. “According to this stuff, these so-called plaques of recognition,” he turns to look back at his
father, “you actually had some guts at one point in your life. But you’re a coward now. Your whole life has come apart, your son is dead, your wife is gone, she pasted your face to the back of your fucking skull for you before she left. And you don’t have the guts to try to put it all back together. Look at this.” Ziv takes the picture of Ennis and Tommy Douglas off its hook on the wall.
“Take a look at this!” he says, walking up to his father, “You with your arm around one of the greatest men this country ever produced. You don’t deserve to be in the same room with him now. You should be ashamed.”
Ennis’s arms are twitching at his sides. “Give me that picture,” he says.
Ziv recognizes the fury in his father’s eyes and backs away from it.
“I said give me that Jesus picture or I’ll snap you in two.”
Ziv holds out the framed photo, and Ennis grabs it from him.
“Don’t you tell me how I should feel,” Ennis says. “You haven’t lived my goddamned life. You don’t have to tell me I’m not the man Douglas was. Maybe I’ve made mistakes with my life and maybe I’ve got regrets, but you have to do something before you can make a mistake. And you haven’t done a fucking thing. Take a look at yourself, man, if you can stand to do it. What have you ever done that’s changed anything?”
His father glares at Ziv an instant, picks up the bowl of cereal from the floor, and brushes quickly past Ziv to the kitchen. He sets the bowl he has not yet eaten from on the table and goes into the porch where he begins putting on his boots and coat to go outside.
“Go ahead,” Ziv says after him. He feels sick in the pit of his stomach, as though he’s been kicked. “Run away. What difference will it make? Bury your damn head in the sand.”
His father slams the door on his way out and Ziv goes to the window. He watches him walk between the banks of snow shovelled up on either side of the driveway, past his own car, and into the street.
“To hell with you,” Ziv says aloud. He picks Meta’s letter from the kitchen table and storms back through the house and up the stairs to his bedroom.
His father’s words have stung him. He lies down heavily on top of his bed. His thoughts are reeling. When he was a boy he always looked up to his father. His father was the one, he thought, who would protect what was right, the one who would fix whatever might be broken. Then it all changed, and for as long as he could remember after that, there was anger spilling into everything between them, as if when they looked at each other, they saw themselves.
A short time later, he gets up to go downstairs, but stops in front of his father’s bedroom door. The canvas bag of news clippings is on the floor at the foot of the father’s bed. Ziv puts off going out to mail Meta’s letter a moment and steps into the room. With the slightest twinge of guilt, he plucks up the bag by the carry handles and takes it into his bedroom. He palms the bedspread flat on the top of his bed, then carefully spills the contents of the entire bag onto the spread. His father has organized everything carefully into labelled file folders. Testimony, Political Promises, Company Claims, Legal Action are the first of the labels he reads. He pulls out a folder at random from the stack. Families’ Group is written on the tab. He opens the folder, and clippings slide out onto his lap. Suddenly, he feels a wave of sadness. All this care his father has taken. All this care that has come to nothing.
Ziv wonders if it has taken Arvel’s dying for him to see that maybe his father is right – what has he done to change anything?
Ziv wakes suddenly when he hears a loud noise from downstairs. It’s Christmas morning, not yet light out.
He goes downstairs and sees his father sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in a flannel shirt and thick wool socks. There’s a pot of coffee on, and Ziv pours himself a cup without even looking at his father, who is finishing up a piece of toast. They have exchanged only a bare minimum of words and have mostly managed to avoid each other since their fight several days back. He puts bread into the toaster and takes the jam out of the fridge.
“Look,” Ennis says abruptly. “There’s only the two of us here so we might as well act like we have something to say to each other. Why don’t you take those skis I got you last winter and come with me.”
“Skiing!” Ziv is surprised. He’s never skied in his life.
“I’ve got everything we need.” Ennis picks up an orange nylon backpack from the floor near the door. “You’d better put on some warm clothes.”
Ziv looks at the serious expression on his father’s face. “Fine. Fine, I’ll go, if it’s so important,” he mumbles awkwardly.
“Go on, get yourself ready.”
“I have to eat something. That is, if you don’t mind,” Ziv says, throwing his toast on a plate and taking it with him upstairs.
When he comes down a few minutes later he puts on his parka and boots. His father is already outside, clearing snow from the car with a broom. Ziv sees two sets of cross-country skis and poles strapped to the roof rack of Ennis’s car.
Snow has softened the backyard. His father has swept the step, but the driveway is unshovelled. A plough has gone by, but that could have been hours ago, and snow has fallen since, though now that it has stopped, there are clear patches of sky overhead, a dusting of stars over purple-black that will turn blue before long.
Ennis throws the backpack into the trunk and sits down in the driver’s seat. Ziv settles in beside him.
“So where are we going?” Ziv says.
“Out past MacLellan’s Brook,” Ennis says. “I saw a moose out there not long ago.”
Ennis pulls the car out of the driveway and turns down Foster Avenue, steering between high banks of snow on either side. They pass the miner’s monument, towering over them like a figure from Greek mythology. The heater motor in the car hums noisily as they drive south and east.
When they get to a section of Bridge Avenue where the Eastyard site is visible, Ziv is almost surprised at the sight of the silos. The two pale columns of featureless concrete could not look more like a memorial if they were originally designed that way. Lit with floodlights, they are visible far above the roofs of houses.
Ziv is convinced the silos must be saved, preserved, made part of a larger display that memorializes the whole ugly history of coal mining in the county. The people in the families’ group who want the silos removed will come to see what a powerful symbol they’ve got, right there on the landscape.
He will call Willis and offer to help in the fight to preserve the site.
“The Eastyard Memorial,” he finds himself saying aloud.
“What?” Ennis says. He turns the car off Bridge Avenue and up the hill in Blue Acres, headed for MacLellan’s Brook, leaving Albion Mines behind them. Snow has clung in blankets to houses and cars, trees are heavy with it. The temperature has dropped overnight so that the earlier layers of snow, which were moist and sticky, have frozen into ice on the road, and the more recent layers, lighter and more powdery, have dusted the surface of the ice, making it even more slippery.
Ennis tells Ziv he has been skiing recently at the place where the plough stops and turns around, but heavy snowfall has erased any traces of his visits. They pull up next to a snowbank and park the car. They untie their skis and stand them in the bank. Ennis throws the stick of blue wax into the snow next to them and opens the backpack. He takes out the Thermos and pours coffee into a small cup. He offers a larger cup to Ziv.
“My father took me out here when I was a kid,” Ennis says. “It’s so long ago now that I don’t even recall if we came here just once or if it was more than that. We were hunting. I’m pretty sure this is just about exactly the spot. I remember the way the road curves. He had his brother’s truck and we parked it over here.” He indicates a place in the woods to the left of the car. “This was all a field at the time, and there was an abandoned farmhouse right behind the field. I remember we took the old Winchester out of the box of the truck. I was too young to carry it. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. An
d we walked over to a spot about here where the tops of those two hills almost line up.”
Ennis nods to the right. There is so little light yet that Ziv can just make out the two hills his father is indicating.
Ziv takes a drink of his coffee, which is rapidly cooling in the cup. He and his father are standing almost shoulder to shoulder. The snow squeaks under their ski boots as they shuffle their feet a little to stay warm.
Below them, to the east, there is a shallow valley that undulates under a thick blanket of snow.
The sky above the horizon is beginning to streak purple and red. Then an orange-yellow spire appears above the trees, pointing upward from the place where the sun will soon rise. Then an odd
The sky above the horizon is beginning to streak purple and red. Then an orange-yellow spire appears above the trees, pointing upward from the place where the sun will soon rise. Then an odd shape begins to form under the spire.
After a moment, a flat wedge of bright orange begins to lift out of the trees in the distance. It’s such an odd sight, Ziv finds himself holding his breath, as though waiting for something else momentous to accompany it. But the wedge rises, broad end first until it takes on the shape of a long flag or banner. Then, even more quickly than it arose, it sinks into the horizon again and immediately the sun itself begins creeping above the horizon, exactly the colour of the wedge that preceded it.
“What the hell was that?” Ziv says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“When the conditions are right, you can get this,” Ennis says. “False sunrise, my father used to call it. He showed it to me once a very long time ago. He died when I was eight. I’ve only seen it a couple of times since.”