Ebbie stuffed her hands deep into her pockets. She didn’t really think she wanted to go back there again. It felt like a betrayal to feel that way. She dragged her feet, scuffing the tops of her shoes without caring. She scuffed them for Irene, who she was sure would get locked up in her room for the rest of her life if she ever dared to scuff a shoe.
Irene knew she would have to pay for her hour with Ebbie. There was always a price to pay for nice things. She quickly put the trowels and the pail away in the shed. She patted her hair and smoothed her dress, then ran up the steps and into the kitchen. Her mother leaned against the kitchen counter, tying a red scarf around her head so the bow flopped down like rabbit’s ears.
“Did you have a nice afternoon?”
“Sort of.”
“With Ebbie Watkins? Really. I’m surprised.”
Irene didn’t want to play along. She pulled at a piece of dead skin next to her thumbnail, and a small spot of bright red blood appeared. She rubbed at it until it disappeared.
“Why?” she said finally, angry with herself.
“Well, she’s such an ugly girl, isn’t she? And so bad mannered. That whole family’s low class. I’ve always said that.” This was not true. Her mother used to say that Mrs. Watkins was a lady of good breeding.
“She’s my friend.”
“You don’t really want to play with that girl, do you?” Margaret laughed. “She’s the bottom of the barrel. Just look at her. She only wants to be your friend because no one else will have her. But I suppose you prefer being with her than spending time with your mother?”
“No, Mum.”
“I can see it in your eyes. I always know when you’re lying, you know. Well, now I know where we stand with each other. Stand up straight. Look at me.”
Irene raised her face to look at her mother, but she kept blinking and her eyes skipped off to the right and left.
“Yes, I can see how duplicitous you are. You’re not a very good girl after all.”
“I try.”
“Well, we’ll see how hard you try.” Margaret turned to the sink and snapped the ends off green beans. Snap. Snap. Snap. Like small bones cracking. “You may go to your room now, Irene.”
Irene went up to her room. She knew that when Ebbie came knocking tomorrow, she wouldn’t answer the door. But she hadn’t cried today. And that was something to be proud of.
8
September 1930
Rory Cameron and Joe Fleischman sat in the Blue Tulip Restaurant at the corner of Spadina and College.
“Son of a bitch,” said Rory. “Son of a bitch.”
“It’s for the best. They were bound to sniff you out. You can concentrate your efforts now.” Joe was a former boxer known on the street as Joey Onions. He and Rory had met at a May Day march two years before. He had a mound of curly black hair that lay back in a series of waves, shimmering with pomade. He rarely smiled. He cracked the knuckles of first one hand and then the other.
“My efforts,” said Rory, “are going to be concentrated on getting some grub on a regular basis.”
“We’re all in the same boat.”
Rory scowled, but he knew Joe was right. The truth was, he’d been in a stinking mood for two days, ever since he’d opened his pay envelope and found the pink slip waiting for him. It hadn’t come as a surprise. He’d been lucky to keep his job as long as he had. At least he’d left with all his fingers attached, which was more than he could say for some. The boss was sorry and all that, but what could you do? Since Rory had hated the job for such a long time, the fact that he was upset surprised him.
“I’d hoped to get the shop organized before they pink-slipped me,” he said. “It would have looked good to the higher-ups.” The Communist Party was like anywhere else. There was a hierarchy. There were guys in the know. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. If you weren’t paying for this meal, I’d be eating air.”
“I thought the Party was talking about sending you up to Sudbury.”
“Yeah. To the nickel mines. Sounds like a godforsaken place.”
“It ain’t so bad. Besides, if the Party wants you to go, comrade …”
“Yeah, I know. You go where the cause needs you.” And Rory believed that, even through the haze of his anger.
“When they sending you?”
“Sending me? You make it sound like I’m going to be riding on the inside of the train.” Rory ran his hands through his hair.
Joe’s family ran a bakery on Baldwin Street, and although they weren’t putting much butter on their bread these days, at least they had bread, and some assurance that they’d ride out the Depression without finding themselves on the street. Rory swallowed the words threatening to bust out. Fine for you, you’ve got a roof over your head. You won’t end up with a train bull’s nightstick up your ass.
“The thing is, I gotta go and tell my sister and her family I’m leaving. She’s been kinda squirrelly lately. I ain’t looking forward to it.”
“Best get it over with quick as you can, then,” said Joe, and Rory figured he was right.
Margaret stood at the sink, wiping the same plate over and over again with the red-and-yellow tea towel. Her eyes were swollen with crying, and now and again she wiped at her face with the inside of her wrist. Irene stood near the sink, scuffing her shoes on the tile floor. Douglas had excused himself to the living room, where he listened to some radio play.
“Irene, stop that! You’re leaving marks on the floor.” Margaret put the plate down and tossed a sponge at her daughter. “Wipe those scuffs off.”
Rory watched his sister and niece. There it was again, the weird similarity between them, the mirroring of emotion. Margaret turned to him and put her hand up to her mouth.
“I can’t bear to lose you.”
Rory sat at the kitchen table, leaning forward on his chair with his elbows on his knees. He wrung his hat in his hands. His sister was making him crazy. He’d expected her to be sad and worried and all that, but she was carrying on like she was the one with no job and no place to live and a long hungry journey ahead of her.
“You could stay here. You could get another job. Douglas, come here!”
Rory slapped his hat down on the table. “There aren’t any jobs. I’m not going to go around with a bucket and a rag like some of the guys do, asking if they can clean windows for a few slices of bread. I ain’t gonna stand on the corner with a sign around my neck: Will Work for Food. I won’t do it.” He would not, of course, tell her that he had a job with the Party, even if it paid no more than a living allowance that wouldn’t feed a cockroach and often not even that. For her sake, the less she knew the better.
“What is it, Margaret?” Douglas stood in the doorway.
“Take the car and drive Rory over to his room. Get his things. He can sleep in the solarium for the time being.”
“You could stay, Rory, if you’d like. We could make the room,” Douglas said, somewhat hesitantly.
“Now you listen to me, Sis. I know you mean well and I appreciate it. But I can’t hang around here.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do if you go,” said Margaret. “I’ll be all alone.”
“What’re you talking about? That’s a fine thing to say. You’ve got Douglas and Irene here. You’ve got your family.”
“You can’t go. You don’t even have any money, I’ll bet.”
“I have a few dollars, and you don’t need much, a man alone.”
“I hear terrible stories about what happens to young men riding the rails.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, and it won’t be forever. I’ll land some work. Things here will change in a year or so. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“You haven’t even tried to get other work here. You don’t care about me.”
“Now, you know that’s not true.”
“Do I?” she said. The tone of her voice put a knot in his stomach.
Irene watched them from the corner of the room, press
ed as far up against the wall as she could get.
“I want to do this,” said Rory.
“And what you want is all that counts, of course.”
“Come on now, Peggy. Let a guy sow some oats before he settles down, eh? See some of the country?” He put his arm around her and she didn’t move away, but he could feel how stiff she was. She looked up at him with such desperation he wanted to shake her.
“You’ll come back, won’t you?” she said. “And you’ll write? And come home for holidays?”
“’Course I will. In the spring things are bound to pick up and I’ll be back home. In the meantime, think of it as me going off to camp.”
“I don’t like it, Rory. I don’t want you to go.” She had taken to wringing the dishtowel again and scratching at the back of her hands. He took her hands in his to stop their restless movements.
“Let’s make this a going-away party. Send me off in style, eh?”
“That’s a good idea. Yes, a very good idea,” said Douglas. “How about drinks all round? Little celebration, indeed.”
“When are you leaving, again?” said Margaret.
“Tomorrow.”
“I see,” she said, and then, “Bastard.” She pulled her hands away. She walked out of the room, and they listened to her footsteps on the stairs and the slam of the bedroom door.
“Goddamn it!” said Rory. He looked at Douglas. “What the hell’s wrong with her?”
“She’s just upset, is all.”
“She’s not just upset. She’s not goddamn normal! You’re her husband! What the hell are you doing about it?”
Douglas went over to Irene and gave her a quick hug. “She’ll be fine. Just fine.”
Rory had almost forgotten Irene was in the room.
“Yeah, course she will.” He smiled at his niece and she smiled back. “I’ll go see if I can talk to her.”
He knocked on the bedroom door and opened it without waiting for an answer. Margaret stood looking out the window, but she turned to face him. She was crying again. He went to her, sat on the edge of the windowsill and took her hands. He swung them back and forth like when they were children.
“Jesus, Peg, what’re ya making such a fuss for?” She tried to pull her hands away but he wouldn’t let her.
“I should have gone with John. I’d be in New York City now. The big life, you know what I mean?”
It took Rory a moment to figure out who Margaret was talking about. Christ! Was she still pining over him?
“Peggy, I didn’t know John’d asked you to go with him.” More than that, Rory knew he had not asked his sister, had never had any intention of taking her with him.
“He didn’t, not in so many words, but then he wouldn’t have, would he? He thought I’d say no, that I’d have to be married, that I just wouldn’t run away with him. But I would have.” She looked at Rory. “Are you going to New York? Could you find him?”
“No, Peggy, I’m not going to find him. We don’t know where he is. What do you want to find him for, anyway? After the way he treated you?”
“Maybe I could go with you.”
He looked into her face to see if she was joking, to see if there was something he was missing.
“Gee whiz, Peg. I can’t take you with me. I’m travelling rough. Sleeping in freight yards, riding the rails. You don’t want to go with me.”
Her shoulders sagged and she dropped her head.
Rory tried to laugh, as though it were a silly joke she’d made. “Leave this pretty house, leave your daughter? Come on, you wouldn’t do that.”
Margaret’s head snapped up again. “In a minute. I’d do it in a minute.”
“Margaret …”
She laughed then, shrilly. “Don’t pay me any mind. I’m just a little depressed, is all. I need a good night’s sleep. I can’t seem to sleep. But Douglas gives me these pills. They help.”
“Things bad between you and Douglas?”
“Bad? No. Not bad, I suppose. They’re just not anything. He’s simply someone who lives in the house. I want to be a better wife to him. I’ve made my bed, after all. I have to learn to lie in it. But there are days when I look at him and see him more like an annoying lodger than a husband.”
“I’m sorry, Peggy.”
“Things didn’t turn out like I’d planned. I’d planned so many big things.”
“Be patient. Times are hard right now. Give it a few years.”
“Now you sound like him.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”
Irene crept upstairs after her uncle. She didn’t want to sit with her father pretending nothing was wrong. She stood in her bedroom, listening. At first she had tried not to listen. She even closed the door so that she wouldn’t hear the things her mother said, but the words slithered through the thin walls and the heating vents and found her even there.
She heard them opening the door, going downstairs.
“Irene,” her mother called, knowing exactly where she was. “Come down and say goodbye to your uncle Rory.”
“Coming,” said Irene. And so she did as she was told. She ran down to the kitchen to get the parcel of sandwiches and tins of coffee and sardines she’d wrapped up. She gave them to her uncle and he thanked her and hugged her and she hugged him back. Mother and father and daughter stood on the porch and waved goodbye and watched him walk away. Irene couldn’t help thinking that all three of them were making an effort not to run after him.
1930
There is always the fear of cave-in, even though the men say methane is more dangerous. It makes him hunch his shoulders, and every few seconds he turns his eyes upward, scanning the malevolent weight above him for signs of instability. Water splashes all around and makes footing uncertain. Shadows fall on faces, and the dim gleam from helmet-lamps flickers on glistening stone. David feels as though he has stumbled into some circle of Hell reserved for those who squandered the pleasures of sun and space and solitude and silence. Riding down on the “man trip” every evening at the beginning of his shift, his knees and shoulders pressed against the fellows on each side of him, the contraption like a perverse version of a midway roller coaster, is an exercise in self-control. He keeps his eyes glued to the retreating entranceway as long as he can, until the small rail takes him into the belly of the Alberta foothills. They are only 250 feet down, but it might just as well be a thousand.
He works next to an Icelander named Ingvarsson, whose hands are hammer-heavy, hanging at the end of his arms. They share a tiny shack made of straw, mud and manure with two other men, sleeping in shifts on two bug-infested cots. The big Icelander has taken him under his muscular wing.
He looks down at the water, nearly at mid-calf.
“Don’t usually go any higher,” says the Icelander, but David doesn’t find this information consoling. A squib blows from down the line somewhere and he jumps as the percussion hits his eardrum with a thick pop. He coughs, tries to take a lungful of air and coughs again.
“Fans shut down again, I guess,” says Ingvarsson.
“Kinda hard to breathe,” David says, holding a filthy rag up to his mouth.
“Long as you’re breathing, you’re doing okay,” says a voice behind him.
He swings his pick, chipping away the coal as best he can. The blisters on his hands have broken and the wooden handle is slippery. The muscles in his back and shoulders burn. David has been down in the mine for seven days. He knows he’s taken a job away from another man, probably one with a family to support, but he had been hungry and taken it anyway. They’d hired him because they could pay him nine dollars a week, four dollars less than a full-grown man. He’d asked to be paid by tonnage, at twenty-five cents a ton. The more experienced men said if he worked fourteen to sixteen hours maybe he’d do better. Now he wishes he’d stuck to the wage. David bought his used, too-large boots from a guy who’d broken his leg, saving himself three of the five dollars the company charge
d, but he still had to pay them a dollar and a half for the doctor, and another fee if he actually visited him. He’d borrowed a pick and shovel from the same injured guy but had to pay to get it sharpened and for squibs and lamp carbon. Already he’s in debt to the company for six bucks. For as long as he can stand it, he’ll skip the fifty cents for a bath, but has paid the three-quarters of a cent for a gallon of water. Only halfway through his shift and he’s drunk it all.
“Look out!” The Icelander pulls him back from the mine wall. A live electrical wire swings perilously close.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Don’t mention.” Ingvarsson’s face looks ghoulish, covered in black except for his eyes.
David works another two shifts before a muscle in his shoulder tears. The night after, he lies on the floor of the miners’ shack, his arm bound to his chest with an old shirt, trying not to scratch at the bug bites, when the siren goes off. The two men sleeping in the cots before their next shift spring up, grabbing their picks and shovels.
David pushes himself up on his elbow. “What is it? What’s happening?” He hopes it is not what he knows it is.
“Accident,” mutters one of the men, stepping over him.
He hauls himself up and goes to the open door. Everywhere he looks men run to the shaft entrance. He seizes his pick and runs with them.
They stand around the opening in the earth, waiting for the first trips to bring the men out.
“Anybody know what the hell happened?” someone asks. “Cave-in? I didn’t hear no explosion.”
“Naw, the lamps went out’s what I heard,” says someone else.
“Fucking fans been out for days,” a man growls and throws his pick in frustration.
The air is always bad down below, thick with smoke from blasting, and then there is the black damp, air dense with carbon dioxide from old shafts. There are no alarms in the mines. When the lights snuff out it means there isn’t enough oxygen to keep them burning.
They hear the rumble of the trip and the first men appear. Some are vomiting. He looks for Ingvarsson, but he isn’t among them. Most of the men get out this time. Five don’t. The Icelander is among them. His body, water-bloated and black, is brought up the next day, after the air is cleared out.
The Stubborn Season Page 6