The Long Stretch

by Linden McIntyre

“Grow up,” she said.

  I headed for the door.

  The worst thing was that she wouldn’t tell you to stop and come back. So you’d head to Billy Joe’s and get yourself lost in a lot of mindless crap about the mill and the usual pile of discontent from people who were never really better off than right now.

  Then you’d try to make up for it with her over a thirty-dollar dinner at the Skye Motel dining room. Of course it was 1970, near the end of everything up until then. Thirty dollars down the drain.

  6

  On his last Saturday night home, Uncle Jack came over unexpectedly. We were all sitting around the kitchen table drinking tea. Jack was catching the Sunday-evening train to North Sydney. Heading back on an overnight boat.

  Out of the blue I said: “I should go with you.”

  They all looked at me.

  “Back to school is where you should go,” Ma said.

  Aunt Jessie said: “My God. Why would anybody want to go into that?”

  “What do you think?” I asked Uncle Jack.

  “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

  I said, making it up on the spot, “I could make some good money this summer, get myself a car, and go back to school in the fall.”

  I think it was the reference to school that slowed them down. Ma probably thinking, Well, maybe it would get him out of the house for a while. Aunt Jessie thinking it might be good to have somebody keeping an eye on the old fellow. Jack saying no way I’d last more than a few weeks in that place but not sure if that was good or bad.

  Eventually he said, “Where did you get the notion you’d be making good money?”

  “Well, in Ontario I hear they can make fifty or sixty dollars a day bonus.”

  “Ho-ho,” he said. “We’re not talking about Ontario, where they’ve got unions and modern technology. We’re talking about the ass-end of the industry. You’d be on pick and shovel all summer. Think about it. Pick and shovel. The tools of ignorance.”

  “So how much do they pay?”

  “You’d be looking at a buck forty an hour, probably.”

  Jesus. They were making twice that at the mill. But it wasn’t the money anyway.

  “Sounds pretty good to me,” I said.

  “Right off the top, they’ll be taking room and board. Plus you’ll have to buy thirty or forty dollars’ worth of gear at the store. Before you get started.”

  “The pulp Grandpa and I cut is worth about a couple of hundred bucks,” I said, looking at Ma. “You could loan me that, couldn’t you? Squint’s already promised to haul it out to the road for nothing. Says he’ll take it in to the mill if I want.” Ma laughed. “You really want to go, don’t you?”

  And at that moment, I did. Really.

  “What do you think, Jack?” she said.

  “Well…I dunno,” he said. Which was what he always said when he knew.

  Squint seemed to be around a lot those days. Dropping in out of the blue. You’d be in the middle of eating at noon. The door would open. Squint would walk in. Hello everybody. Just passing by and wondering. More likely smelling the grub. Squint lived alone. Never married. Nobody would have him, they used to say. Big joke: When Uncle Jack would have been away for an unusually long time they’d be saying to Jessie, We’ll have to line you up with Squint. Her howling and pretending to gag. Everybody getting a big kick out of it, including Ma. The old man smiling, saying, Don’t be so hard on poor Squint. Of course Squint had been overseas. You couldn’t say anything around the old man about anybody who’d been overseas. Not even Squint.

  “Those letters probably more than anything else opened up the possibility of something between us.”

  It’s me who knows about her letters.

  “I know there are plenty thinking it’s a lot of crap. But there are enough others saying great things. But there’s one thing. It’s down home that really matters. And she was the one voice of encouragement from here. Her and, eventually, Duncan, of all people.”

  “So what did you fucking expect?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think it was so outrageous.”

  “The old man stood out like a sore thumb. And the Swede’s wife.”

  “I heard that,” he says. “The lawyers were a little worried about the Swede.”

  “I wish they’d have been as worried about some of the others. Like your father,” I say.

  I pronounce the words carefully and aggressively. In his face.

  “That’s pretty unfair,” he says gently.

  “Unfair?”

  “I didn’t think he’d be so…sensitive.”

  “He was a dying man.”

  “I didn’t know that.” His face now haunted.

  Well, everybody else knew.

  “I expected he’d give me at least…that much credit for it.” He holds thumb and forefinger about a millimetre apart. “You know? You realize…Jesus Christ, here I’ve been doing pretty well. Good jobs. People away acting like I’m a celebrity. But him? Fuck-all recognition from him.”

  Tugging at me to say something.

  Then looks away and says: “That’s when I told him about what happened to Uncle Sandy. As much out of spite as anything else.”

  Early in ‘64, the Swede moved away. We heard New York City. The mill had a sales office there and he was supposed to run it. She and the boy went with him. Then later, there was a story that she and the boy moved back to Sweden. Some local men, sent by the mill to Sweden for special training, saw her at a company reception. Looking good as ever, they were saying. I never saw her again after the wake. He eventually came back for a while and I saw him several years later, when I went to work at the mill myself.

  Here’s what Millie thinks. The closer people were to the war, the more inflexible they became. You’d think it would be the other way around, but they weren’t. And that’s why people like the old man and Angus and Squint and the Swede’s wife and the whole sorry lot of them were so vulnerable. Your life is battered by circumstances the way a tree is battered by the wind. If you can’t bend, you break. And the first sign of danger, like the rot that weakens the tree, is self-loathing. Something she heard about when she was in Toronto. Apparently she went to a therapist there for a while. Then it got too expensive and she quit. Ironically, after she quit, she really started drinking hard. Spent more on booze than on the therapist. But that’s a whole other story. So, she says: The secret of survival is flexibility.

  7

  April 19, 1964. A Sunday night. Jack said the train left at eight o’clock. Stupid time to be heading out on a long complicated trip, but there you are. We’d get to North Sydney just in time to connect with a coastal boat that was crossing the Cabot Strait that night. Jessie drove us to the station. I think it was the first evening of daylight saving, so it stayed bright longer. One of those chilly, crunchy evenings you get in the spring when everything goes kind of blue as the sun sets. Not like the copper colour you get in July when the sun is an incinerator at the end of the fire ditch.

  Going up the long crawl of Sporting Mountain, Uncle Jack produced a flask from his coat pocket. Took a swig.

  “I’d offer you one,” he said, “but you’re a bit young to start.”

  I didn’t want one anyway.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  “Oops,” he said, smiling.

  “What?”

  “You have to be eighteen. To go underground.” Pausing for effect. “You’ll have to go back.”

  I laughed.

  “When’ll you be eighteen?” he asked.

  “October.”

  “Oh well. You look older. Say you’re eighteen. If they ask for proof I’ll back you up. Say you’re sending home for your birth certificate. They’ll forget.”

  He was looking out the window, dreamily, allowing his head and body to rock in alternating rhythms as the train clattered through the night.

  Sextus is sitting with his chin practically touchi
ng his chest. No wonder, the amount of booze in him. Heaped ashtray in front of him.

  “That book,” he says. “If it did nothing else, it opened my eyes. Made me realize just what it’s all about.”

  “What what’s all about?” I say, allowing a trace of impatience.

  “You’ll be the pride and joy of a place, then you do something that’s more about something you care about. Then you realize. Only reason anything ever mattered to the place all along was because it reflected well on them. You know what I mean?”

  “Frankly, I’m sick of the subject.”

  “Frankly, eh?”

  I should have been watching him more carefully.

  A stunning blow to the side of my head leaves me momentarily in darkness though I can hear him saying, “You big-feeling sanctimonious prick,” and can feel the chair tipping backward as in slow motion.

  I still have wits enough to roll off sideways, landing like a cat, hands on the floor in front of me, and stand quickly. Even I’m impressed. He’s one arm length away. Oddly, I feel no impulse to retaliate. My head has only one thought: Pa lives! I can see him in front of me, eyes dancing.

  I almost smile but instead, I say: “That was fucking clever.”

  I’m sure he wants something else. Wants me to come flailing at him. Provide closure. Another shrinkwrapped notion. Screw him. Let’s leave it open.

  He wheels, stomps toward the door, grabbing a jacket as he goes, then outside. Slam!

  I have this queer image: him out there in the storm with the Lineman, or Stickman. Me in here with Uncle Jack.

  Jack’s voice comes to me through the wind. He’s saying something like: You did good there. That was the proper thing. You’re all right.

  Part 9

  1

  Driving home in the spring of ‘68. After four years away with Uncle Jack. Three of them at Bachelor Lake. Time past but not past at all.

  November 22, 1963, and my father occupy my life as real and present as all the experience I have since. The day seems like yesterday. And the going away with Uncle Jack. The living in Tilt Cove. Bachelor Lake. Just layers.

  May 1968. Driving down the long hundred miles of packed dirt from Miquelon to Senneterre, with nothing but trees and low cloud and dirty clods of spring snow to look at. Then pavement to Val-d’Or. Reviewing layers of time. Old people gone. Ma now Mrs. Squint. Effie clinging to me from the distance, me to her. Feeling really good. Thinking: I’ve got the worst over with and I’m only twenty-one going on twenty-two.

  Jack didn’t get up to say goodbye. Working graveyard, but I still found it disturbing. Us together most of the time since we went to Tilt Cove, April 19, 1964.

  Uncle Jack was right about my age. The doctor in Tilt Cove told me I had to be eighteen. I said I was but that I didn’t have anything on me. Jack backed me up and they said send home for it. Which I did. By the time I got it I was eighteen and they didn’t care. I was only a labourer. I got all the worst jobs underground. Pick and shovel stuff, like Jack said. Breaking rock on the grizzly with a sledgehammer. Cleaning the sump in the bottom of the shaft, using shovels and a muck pig to get out the water and sludge that accumulated there. Installing air and water pipes. Laying track. Every shit job that nobody else would do.

  I didn’t mind at first. I got a buzz going underground. The cage ride down. The cool black privacy below. The pneumatic roar of the jacklegs and the sudden silence when the miners finished the drilling and were loading powder and fuse. You’d be looking forward to the end of the shift then. And there’d be talk, in the quiet. About other mines, the war, the depression. Stuff I knew vaguely about from the old man and Angus at the kitchen table drinking.

  Everybody seemed to be a little bit crazy. Everybody but Uncle Jack. And they seemed to know it. He was different. Always listening. Always the first to laugh at something funny. He was a boss, but he’d stand and talk, twirling the safety glasses in his hand. Sometimes he’d even grab a shovel and help with the hand-mucking.

  I even got kind of fond of the smell, the dense damp exhaust of the rusting machinery, compressed air, ore dust, blasting smoke. Just as well I didn’t mind it since it got into your clothes and your skin and nothing seemed to get it out. Only cheap shaving lotion if the occasion was important, which it rarely was.

  I can still remember trudging down a drift at the end of shift, waiting for the snap and thunder of rounds going off. Rumbling guts of granite. And the guys giving each other a hard time.

  Hey, young fella, bring that eight-foot steel out to the station when you’re coming.

  Me doing it.

  Asking, when I got it out, what to do with it.

  Them saying, Work it up in yeh.

  Everybody laughing like mad. Including me.

  The whisper and rattle of the cage hurtling up and down the shaft, the snap of signals as it stopped at each level, the clank and thump of heavy wooden doors echoing through the emptying drifts, loading the guys for surface and the shower and a beer at Itchy’s or, after ‘65, Ikey’s, and a pile of mass-murdered supper wherever. Compliments of Crawley-McCracken.

  I was just a helper. But they were promising that I’d get into production work by that fall. I was related to Jack. And a lot of them knew the old man. From the war.

  “You Sandy Gillis’s boy?” they’d say, eyes narrow.

  “Yes,” I’d say.

  “We were overseas together,” they’d say. As if that told me everything.

  Letter from Aunt Jessie. August ‘64.

  “So the young fella is on the paper in Halifax,” Jack says. “Son of a gun.”

  But you could tell he was pleased. Aunt Jessie sent a clipping of the first story that had his name on it. It didn’t mean much to me. But it was something to see the name: A. Sextus Gillis.

  “Great that he’s using the A.,” Uncle Jack said.

  Showing it around the club later, his best friend, Black Angus MacDonald, said: “What the fuck kind of a name is that?”

  We were still sharing a room then. Barely big enough for two. In a big rectangular bunkhouse made mostly out of plywood. Fifty men living in it, yet somehow it always smelled clean. You left the work clothes over in the dry, a change house located right next to the headframe, that perpendicular odd-shaped building that straddles the shaft and distinguishes every underground mining community you’ll ever see. The dry had hooks and baskets, raised close to the roof by chains and pulleys. The way campers hang food to keep it from bears. You’d lock the chain since your wallet would be in the basket. Nobody ever pretended that there was much respect for private property in the camp. People came from everywhere.

  Letter from Effie. September ‘64.

  “Dear Johnny,” it said. Dear? That was a first. The letter was full of news, mostly about people getting married. People a little bit older than we were, but whom we’d know from the dances. There must have been five or six couples tied the knot that summer. Even the one from Long Point, the girl I took home that night. In the family way, Effie implied.

  She said she was going out with somebody but it wasn’t serious. Was thinking of going to Mabou in the fall. Taking secretarial. But there was a new motel opening in town. Maybe getting on there. Said she missed me.

  I bet.

  In August of my summer in Tilt Cove a young MacNeil fellow from Mabou, working in a raise, lost a finger. Sandy MacNeil. I couldn’t forget the name. He was on Uncle Jack’s shift and I’d heard Jack warn him half a dozen times about wearing his wedding ring underground. But he’d only been married a few months and wouldn’t listen.

  “Wife said she’d be checking when I go home,” he said. “Wants to see that soft, white little band of skin around the finger, next to the knuckle, where the wedding band is supposed to be. Or I’m in for it.”

  He laughs the way the newly married do, when it’s still okay to be soft.

  Jack just shrugged and walked away.

  And one day MacNeil tried to yank his hand out of the way of a moving
tugger cable but the ring hooked on a single broken strand of wire. Lucky he didn’t lose the whole hand, Jack said. Jokes in the club that night, about the finger and the wedding ring. He’s real handicapped now, Black Angus was saying. That finger was the best thing he had going for him. MacNeil went home. Jack spoke to the captain and they decided to break me in working in the raise. Gave me MacNeil’s job.

  Before I left Bachelor Lake, Jack had told me they were talking about moving me up. Putting me to work with the geologists. Maybe paying me to go to the mining school at Haileybury in Ontario. After that, fast track to shift leader. Me laughing, thinking about the way they talked about guys who learned mining in school. But Jack’s face was serious.

  Uncle Jack was my biggest discovery in Tilt Cove. He had a life there. He had friends. Not just fellows from home, like Black Angus and Philip MacPhail. Young guys too who talked to him the way they talked to each other. He was the only shift boss people seemed to like. Maybe that was because he lived in the bunkhouse instead of the staff building across on the other side of the pond. Guys could sit at his table in the club and talk about anything they felt like over a beer. It was because he was able. They’d say he could operate two jacklegs at the same time. Somebody saw him once. His partner had a hangover and was sleeping behind some old timber in a crosscut. There was Jack, running both machines. And the time somebody lost a tram car down an orepass. The engineers were baffled. Jack got it out. And not just underground. You’d be crazy to arm wrestle Jack. When Itchy, who was the club manager in Tilt Cove, needed somebody to keep the place under control when he’d have a special night he’d get Jack. Nobody fucked with Jack. Nobody ever saw Jack raise a hand against anyone. Jack only had to look your way and you paid attention.

  Standing around in the headframe when we’d be waiting to go down, guys giving me the hip into something solid. Or whack my hardhat with a stick or another hardhat. Stun me for a minute. Just joking, but also testing. And judging. You sure don’t take after old Jack. But I didn’t mind.

  And things gradually changed. I got hit in the face with a piece of stone from a rock I was breaking with a hammer on the grizzly. I hardly felt the blow. But when I put my hand up the blood was just pumping out. Coming off the cage the guys in the headframe looked shocked.