“He almost fell down the fucking waste pass,” one said. Sounding alarmed. They quickly started making jokes. Figuring I’d soon be gone. But I stayed and I became one of them. A member of the establishment.
“A good man,” Jack said to me one night after I’d been there a few months. Looked me in the eye steadily and said it again: “You’re a good man.”
I grew inches, just sitting there.
Letter from Sextus. October ‘64.
“He must need something,” Jack was saying, carefully tearing the end off the envelope.
“Getting along good…likes the job…awful busy…thinks they’re going to put him in the Legislature—That’ll be something. Maybe swing something for us then, what do you think?—Saw Duncan in a restaurant the other day…he was with a bunch of seminarians and they aren’t allowed to talk to civilians—You think!—Says hello to you…wants to know how you’re getting along.”
“Getting along good,” I said. “Tell him.”
Guys would go out every opportunity. To Springdale. Corner Brook. Just raving about Newfoundland girls when they came back. Real broad minded, they’d say. Haw haw. Didn’t bother me a bit.
There was a young one working in the company store. She was from Tilt Cove. Actually grew up there. There were a few real families there. Fishermen before the mine came. Now the cove was blocked from the sea and gradually filling in with tailings.
The girl in the store was Norma. I’d call her Normal, joking around. She was pretty in a way. There had been girls around during the summer. The manager’s daughter and a couple of other locals. We all played ball but you wouldn’t dare try getting anything going. But Norma was different. She’d always talk to me. Chit-chat about the news. Whether or not Canada should have a real flag. She didn’t think so.
The only female at Bachelor Lake was Ikey’s daughter, Miriam. Young and pretty but the word was out: look at her crossways and Ikey will cut your balls off.
Letter from Aunt Jessie in November ‘64.
“She says Grandma is doing good. Had her in to the doctor last week but she’s fine considering. Says your ma is fine. Says the young fellow was down at Thanksgiving. Got his own car now. Got himself a Volkswagen bug—death trap! Doing good at work. Got a story in the paper almost every day.
“Ran into Squint out at your place the other evening. Getting into the pulpwood contracting. Looks like he’s going to lease your woods for the pulp. Got a couple of trucks. Himself and Grandma beat the other two at cards.”
Squint? Playing cards?
“That’ll be a help to Mary. Those woods were ready for cutting for years now. As long as Squint doesn’t ruin them. Was always kind of a gwoik, Squint. In the woods, anyway.”
Everybody getting on with life, or acting like it.
Letter from Aunt Jessie. End of November ‘64.
“Your ma and Squint were at the card game in Glendale last week.”
We just looked at each other.
Finally I asked: “And did they win anything?”
Jack looked back at the letter. Studied it.
“She doesn’t say.”
“Ma loves her cards.”
“Ah well,” Jack said. “It’s been over a year. Since poor Sandy.”
I dream about him a lot. I can never remember where we are or what we’re talking about. Always very casual and friendly. The way I never knew him. Except, almost, once. Up on top of Creignish Mountain, watching the sun go down.
2
It was starting to rain halfway to Senneterre. Big spatters on the windshield. I passed a young fellow on the other side of the road, heading in the opposite direction. Standing there in his underwear, staring at me. A hitchhiker, changing out of his good clothes so they wouldn’t get wet. Had a big bag of mining gear on the ground beside the suitcase. Like somebody from home. Heading in. Looking for work. Me heading out.
Letter from Effie. November ‘64.
Kept it in my pocket until Jack went off to the club. “Dear Johnny.” The words were like a touch.
It was a long letter. Stuff I already knew. Her working in the motel. Not liking it much. Then a lot of woe. She never realized she could miss somebody as much as she misses me! More than Duncan. She could never really talk to Duncan. And while she never really talked to me either, she knew she could. Not out for number one like all the guys she knew. Somebody she knew she could tell anything to without worrying that it would be all over the place in twenty-four hours. Was I planning on coming home for Christmas? Please say yes. Et cetera.
It was the kind of letter you’d expect to sign off with a love So-and-so. But she didn’t. She signed it like this: “Your (best) friend. Effie.”
And that was how Christmas ‘64 happened.
I was asking Jack what his plans were for Christmas.
“I wasn’t thinking about Christmas. When is it? Jesus. We’re that close. Well. Well.”
After some thought he said: “I suppose I should talk to the brass. Figure out what the schedule is like for Christmas.” Then: “What about yourself?”
I don’t know. “What do people usually do at Christmas?”
“Some go out. A lot stay. No place to go. You make extra, working over Christmas.”
“I suppose,” I said.
At night I’d just lay there, listening to Jack snoring. Or if he had a few in him, coughing. Sometimes expecting him to expire in a great gagging spasm. It was scary. Especially thinking that this could be my whole life. Me, eventually, the guy keeping somebody awake with the hawking and coughing and farting. There had to be something better.
Then I’d think of Effie.
Getting gas outside Val-d’Or. There was a car on the other side of the pump. Nova Scotia plates. Two big guys in the front seat. Asked the guy at the wheel where they were coming from.
“Walton,” the driver said. A mine down near Windsor, on the Bay of Fundy. Heading for the new development near Matagami Lake.
“Heard of it,” I said. “I’m just coming out of Coniagas Mine in Bachelor Lake.”
The guy on the passenger side said, “Poor you,” and the driver snickered.
“Quite the shithole, that is,” he said.
Jack still there. The best damned miner in Canada. Not likely to be working in a shithole.
“We need a little break,” I told Jack, just before Christmas.
“Whatever you think yourself,” Jack said, nursing a beer in Itchy’s club.
I was drinking a Coke.
“I wouldn’t mind going home for a visit,” I said. “It’s about time.”
“Yeah,” he said. “A fellow should make the effort. Check in on Grandma. How she’s getting along. And have a visit with the young fellow. Before he’s the premier and too busy.”
Letter from Sextus. Mid-December ‘64.
Dear Pa.
“He’s getting some time off at the holidays,” Jack said.
“Great,” I said. “When’s he coming?”
“Hmmm. I guess he’s not…Himself and some friend are going down south for the holidays. Bermuda.”
The way he said it. Bermouda.
“That’s queer,” I said.
“I always wanted to go to Bermouda. They say it’s hot down there.” “Probably,” I said. “Who’s the friend?”
“It doesn’t say,” Jack said.
A week before Christmas Uncle Jack was into it pretty good. Getting his Christmas cheer out of the way before going home, he said. Aunt Jessie was strict about liquor. I was having rum and Coke and feeling the buzz.
Jack brought it up. “Do you ever think of the old man?”
“Now and then,” I said.
“You might hear some bullshit around home,” he said. “People with nothing better to do.” A pause. “You just…you just let it go by,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Right?”
“Right.”
“You’re a good man,” he said.
Not a stickman.
3
&n
bsp; After Bachelor Lake, Val-d’Or looks like a city. Billboards and neon signs and car dealers. The air is different. Hazy. People are all in a rush. Wondering what it would be like working in a place like that, right on the edge of the city. You’d never have a nickel to your name. That’s what it would have been like in Sudbury. Toronto would have been a disaster.
Prunes was from Val-d’Or. My partner at Bachelor Lake, Proulx. Nice guy. Always practising English on me. Probably because of him I’ll never work underground again.
A Friday evening in January 1968. Men in the dry quieter than usual. Coming and going from the first aid room down back. Somebody hurt, probably. Picked up my lamp from the usual spot on the rack, strapped the battery on. Slung the light around my neck. More people heading for the first aid room. Jack with them. Something going on down there. Went along to look.
First I couldn’t see anything. Just a row of broad-backed sweat-and dirt-stained shirts, in a little semicircle, like a singing group. I moved up closer, looking between two of them. I see a yellowish corpse on a trolley, a small towel covering his privates. Everything else exposed. Showing large bruises up the chest. Jawbone askew. Arms stiff and formal at his sides. Jack poking at his side saying Jaysus. He’s practically turned into jelly inside. The corpse quivers when Jack touches it.
Prunes. Took a shift on the crusher, hoping to get on there full time. Surface work. Prunes never liked underground the way some do. Me included. Until that moment.
Clearing something from a conveyor belt, he got caught. Went into the hopper. Halfway through before they got to the shutdown.
Coins covering his eyes. New wife in Val-d’Or.
Life’s too short. Even if I had to go on pogey.
I think it was the coins in his eye sockets that did it.
I had a number for his wife. He gave it to me before, saying if I was ever in Val-d’Or. But I didn’t have the heart for it. She probably couldn’t speak English anyway.
It was mid-afternoon when I parked my car on the main drag and checked into the Hotel Louis-something, same place Jack and I had stayed on the way up. Got into my room, then crashed. Had been up with some of the boys at Ikey’s kind of late the night before. Ikey left the bar open for as long as we were there. A lot of free rounds.
Had a restless sleep. Dreamed I was in my bunkhouse room with Jack and Effie. Effie was sitting on a chair. Wearing her father’s old army jacket. A big row of medals across the front. Has her legs crossed carelessly, so you could almost see up. Jack was studying her, saying “Kind of coarse, she is.”
Keeps repeating it.
Effie just looking at him like she couldn’t care less, but like she expected me to do something.
And I couldn’t think of a thing. Then she hauls out a gun. I wake up in a sweat.
Wherever that came from. It wasn’t like Jack to make comments like that. A few weeks earlier he had a letter from Jessie. Maybe that caused it.
“Says here she’s acting like she owns the old place.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The young one,” he said. “Your missus.”
“Oh, for Christ sake,” I said.
He laughed and said: “You’ll be having the fuamhair in there with you before you know it.”
“Not likely,” I said.
It was late when I awoke. The hotel room was dark. Downstairs there was a babble and a stink coming from the beer parlour, so I went in there. Ordered a quart of Molsons and a bag of chips. A couple of pieces of pepperoni. Just sitting there enjoying the beer when I looked up and it was the hooker, Scotty. As soon as she opened her mouth I realized how lonely I had been. It was the accent. In this place. It made me smile.
After some small talk she said, “We never finished the business we started the last time…we don’t have to, but.”
Looking over her shoulder.
“I’m surprised you remember,” I said. Almost three years gone.
“I remember you dad,” she said. Pronouncing it like “dod.”
I was about to correct her but, realizing it felt good, stopped myself. Then told her I had a room. Alone this time.
She laughed and grabbed my hand.
Going up the stairs I was panicking. Thinking we should have had more to drink. Suddenly not liking the look of her rear end as it swung up the stairs before me. Looking large and threatening. Feeling everything but lust.
At the door she looked in cautiously, then went straight to the bathroom and looked around. Smiled and opened her arms to me. I just stood there. So she came toward me with her head cocked to one side, caught the end of my belt and gave it a tug.
I was suddenly feeling wretched. But Scotty was oblivious, opening my trousers, reaching in and beginning to rub. I closed my eyes, so it would be forever unseen, and unremembered.
When I opened my eyes, she was taking things off as anyone would for any reason. To wash, or swim, or sleep. With no more ceremony that Uncle Jack or Black Angus or Prunes in the dry. It was only when I saw her breasts exposed. They were larger than I would have guessed and they startled me with a primal longing, to put my hands and my face on them.
“You’re a miner,” she said, after removing the rest of her clothing, and then mine. “Normally I’m afraid of the miners. They get rough. But this is your first time. Paying for it. I can tell. Which reminds me.” And neatly plucked my wallet from my trousers hanging on the back of a chair beside the bed. Extracted a twenty, put it in her purse, and was back to me almost without having interrupted what she was doing.
“I could never live with a miner,” she said again, busying herself at my neck. “My husband works on the railroad.”
“That’s queer,” I said. “First time I met you, he worked in Cadillac, you said. Underground.” She sat up then, laughed, and gave me a playful slap.
“Never contradict a lady,” she said with that accent.
“So what does he really do?”
“Ask me what my dod does,” she said, lifting her sentences at the end.
“Your father?”
“Aye,” she said. “M’dod is a prison guard. Back home. A screw, they call them. I used to tease my dod, askin’, Dod, what’s a screw gettin’ an hour these days?”
Threw her head back and laughed. She had a lovely long neck.
“M’dod’s a hoot,” she said.
“So what is it your husband does?” I asked again.
“You really want to know?” she asked, with a wicked look on her face.
I nodded.
“He works behind the bar. Downstairs.”
She giggled.
But before the panic got me, she went to work, pushing me back on the bed, then straddling me energetically, one hand holding me by the hair, the other busy where I couldn’t see but could feel an avalanche. And I suddenly went spastic, then an explosion, replaced by shame and embarrassment.
“Ooh, what a naughty boy,” she said, wiping her hand on the blanket and climbing out of the bed.
She was putting her clothes on as quickly as she had taken them off. Then she said: “Let’s go down and you can buy me a drink. Maybe try again later.”
And I said I don’t think so, thinking about the big fellow in the wrinkly white shirt down behind the bar.
4
I hadn’t told anybody exactly when I’d be arriving, so Effie wasn’t home. I drove out to Squint’s. Aunt Jessie was there. The three of them sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. Jessie and Squint had coats on. Big hugs from Ma and Jessie. Squint shook my hand, looking glad to see me. Squint seemed okay after all. Then he went out again. Had a big tree-farmer in the yard, a bunch of cogs and gears spread out under it on a piece of cardboard.
“Ask Jessie about Sextus,” Ma said when I had a cup of tea in front of me.
“My God, you never know where he’s going to be next,” Jessie said. “One day he’s calling from Ottawa. He was there when Trudeau won the leadership and became the prime minister. Then it was straight down to the Stat
es to cover the uproar over Martin Luther King. Wasn’t that awful? The poor man.”
The month before, April, they’d been talking about Trudeau at the camp. All the Frenchmen excited getting one of their own in the big job in Ottawa. Jack telling them they were all being sucked in. Some old draft dodger pretending he was a hippy. Only half-French anyway.
In ‘65 Jack said he voted for the Ralliement des Créditistes. Some fringe party I could never figure out. When their guy came to the camp he couldn’t talk enough English to explain himself. Jack voted for him anyway. Then ragged the guys who voted Liberal or Tory. Calling them patsies. Them shouting back at him in English and French: “You’re just fucking around, Jack. Makin’ a mockery of democracy.”
Jack saying: “Bulllllshit. That old Caouette is the real McCoy. An honest man. I bought a car from him in Amos in ‘39.” Then laughing his head off. Jack was always looking for ways to rile people up, then laugh at them.
Ma asked, “Have you seen Effie?”
Exchanging a quick glance with Jessie when I said, “No, she wasn’t home.”
Then Ma says, “Och, she won’t be far. So where will you be staying?”
Jessie finally asks, “So. How did you leave the old man?”
“Prospering,” I said. “Doing great. Could land home any day.
You won’t know him.”
“Oh,” she said, laughing. “What’s he been doing? Watching the diet, I hope.”
“Getting younger and better looking every day, Jack is.”
“Well, he’d better give me a little notice,” she said, brushing crumbs off her lap.
“You better be careful,” I said. “Jack’ll be taking up with some old French one if you’re not careful.”
“Will you listen to him,” said Ma. “The lip.”
“No big loss,” Jessie said, laughing.
A few days before my last shift underground, I could hear Jack roaring in the washroom of the dry, the spasms deep in his lungs. Imagine windowpanes rattling.
One of the shift bosses tossed his head to one side and said, “You better check.”
“Jesus, Jack, is this you?” I said. Standing at the urinal looking at a fibrous red blob the size of a jellyfish.
The Long Stretch Page 18