“But when they’re not down there they could smoke cigarettes like Grandpa Gilbert in a silver cigarette holder and Mama says that chewing tobacco is a filthy habit.”
“I know but these people are not at all like Grandpa Gilbert and there are things that Mama doesn’t understand. It is not that easy to change what is a part of you.”
We are approaching the mine now and everything is black and grimy and the heavily laden trucks are groaning past us. “Did you used to chew tobacco?”
“Yes, a very long time ago before you were ever thought of.”
“And was it hard for you to stop?”
“Yes it was, Alex,” he says quietly, “more difficult than you will ever know.”
We are now at the wash-house and the trains from the underground are thundering up out of the darkness and the men are jumping off and laughing and shouting to one another in a way that reminds me of recess. They are completely black with the exception of little white half-moons beneath their eyes and the eyes themselves. My grandfather is walking toward us between two of my uncles. He is not so tall as they nor does he take such long strides and they are pacing themselves to keep even with him the way my father sometimes does with me. Even his moustache is black or a very dirty grey except for the bottom of it where the tobacco stains it brown.
As they walk they are taking off their headlamps and unfastening the batteries from the broad belts which I feel would be very fine for carrying holsters and six-guns. They are also fishing for the little brass discs which bear their identification numbers. My father says that if they should be killed in the underground these little discs would tell who each man was. It does not seem like much consolation to me.
At a wicket that looks like the post office the men line up and pass their lamps and the little discs to an old man with glasses. He puts the lamps on a rack and the discs on a large board behind his back. Each disc goes on its special little numbered hook and this shows that its owner has returned. My grandfather is 572.
Inside the adjoining wash-house it is very hot and steamy like when you are in the bathroom a long, long time with the hot water running. There are long rows of numbered lockers with wooden benches before them. The floor is cement with little wooden slatted paths for the men to walk on as they pass bare-footed to and from the noisy showers at the building’s farthest end.
“And did you have a good day today Alex?” asks my grandfather as we stop before his locker. And then unexpectedly and before I can reply he places his two big hands on either side of my head and turns it back and forth very powerfully upon my shoulders. I can feel the pressure of his calloused fingers squeezing hard against my cheeks and pressing my ears into my head and I can feel the fine, fine, coal dust which I know is covering my face and I can taste it from his thumbs which are close against my lips. It is not gritty as I had expected but is more like smoke than sand and almost like my mother’s powder. And now he presses my face into his waist and holds me there for a long, long time with my nose bent over against the blackened buckle of his belt. Unable to see or hear or feel or taste or smell anything that is not black; holding me there engulfed and drowning in blackness until I am unable to breathe.
And my father is saying from a great distance: “What are you doing? Let him go! He’ll suffocate.” And then the big hands come away from my ears and my father’s voice is louder and he sounds like my mother.
Now I am so black that I am almost afraid to move and the two men are standing over me looking into one another’s eyes. “Oh, well,” says my grandfather turning reluctantly toward his locker and beginning to open his shirt.
“I guess there is only one thing to do now,” says my father quietly and he bends down slowly and pulls loose the laces of my shoes. Soon I am standing naked upon the wooden slats and my grandfather is the same beside me and then he guides and follows me along the wooden path that leads us to the showers and away from where my father sits. I look back once and see him sitting all alone on the bench which he has covered with his newspaper so that his suit will not be soiled.
When I come to the door of the vast shower room I hesitate because for a moment I feel afraid but I feel my grandfather strong and hairy behind me and we venture out into the pouring water and the lathered, shouting bodies and the cakes of skidding yellow soap. We cannot find a shower at first until one of my uncles shouts to us and a soap-covered man points us in the right direction. We are already wet and the blackness of my grandfather’s face is running down in two grey rivulets from the corners of his moustache.
My uncle at first steps out of the main stream but then the three of us stand and move and wash beneath the torrent that spills upon us. The soap is very yellow and strong. It smells like the men’s washroom in the Montreal Forum and my grandfather tells me not to get it in my eyes. Before we leave he gradually turns off the hot water and increases the cold. He says this is so we will not catch cold when we leave. It gets colder and colder but he tells me to stay under it as long as I can and I am covered with goose pimples and my teeth are chattering when I jump out for the last time. We walk back through the washing men who are not so numerous now. Then along the wooden path and I look at the tracks our bare feet leave behind.
My father is still sitting on the bench by himself as we had left him. He is glad to see us return, and smiles. My grandfather takes two heavy towels out of his locker and after we are dry he puts on his clean clothes and I put on the only ones I have except the bedraggled tie which my father stuffs into his pocket. So we go out into the sun and walk up the long, long hill and I am allowed to carry the lunch pail with the thermos bottle rattling inside. We walk very slowly and say very little. Every once in a while my grandfather stops and turns to look back the way we have come. It is very beautiful. The sun is moving into the sea as if it is tired and the sea is very blue and very wide – wide enough it seems for a hundred suns. It touches the sand of the beach which is a slender boundary of gold separating the blue from the greenness of the grass which comes rolling down upon it. Then there is the mine silhouetted against it all, looking like a toy from a meccano set; yet its bells ring as the coal-laden cars fly up out of the deep, grumble as they are unloaded, and flee with thundering power down the slopes they leave behind. Then the blackened houses begin and march row and row up the hill to where we stand and beyond to where we go. Overhead the gulls are flying inland, slowly but steadily as if they are somehow very sure of everything. My grandfather says they always fly inland in the evening. They have done so as long as he can remember.
And now we are entering the yard and my mother is rushing toward me and pressing me to her and saying to everyone and no one, “Where has this child been all day? He has not been here since morning and has eaten nothing. I have been almost out of my mind.” She buries her fingers in my hair and I feel very sorry for my mother because I think she loves me very much. “Playing,” I say.
At supper I am so tired that I can hardly sit up at the table and my father takes me to bed before it is yet completely dark. I wake up once when I hear my parents talking softly at my door. “I am trying very hard. I really am,” says my mother. “Yes, yes I know you are,” says my father gently and they move off down the hall.
And now it is in the morning two weeks later and the train that takes us back will be leaving very soon. All our suitcases are in the taxi and the good-byes are almost all completed. I am the last to leave my grandmother as she stands beside her stove. She lifts me up as she did the first night and says, “Good-bye Alex, you are the only grandchild I will never know,” and presses into my hand the crinkled dollar that is never spent.
My grandfather is not in although he has not gone to work and they say he has walked on ahead of us to the Station. We bump down the hill to where the train is waiting beside the small brown building and he is on the platform talking with some other men and spitting tobacco over the side.
He walks over to us and everyone says good-bye at once. I am again the last an
d he shakes hands very formally this time. “Good-bye Alex,” he says, “it was ten years before you saw me. In another ten I will not be here to see.” And then I get on the train and none too soon for already it is beginning to move. Everyone waves but the train goes on because it must and it does not care for waving. From very far away I see my grandfather turn and begin walking back up his hill. And then there is nothing but the creak and sway of the coach and the blue sea with its gulls and the green hills with the gashes of their coal imbedded deeply in their sides. And we do not say anything but sit silent and alone. We have come from a great distance and have a long way now to go.
FIVE
The Golden Gift of Grey
AT MIDNIGHT he looked up at the neon Coca-Cola clock and realized with a taut emptiness that he had already stayed too late and perhaps was even now forever lost. He lowered his eyes and then quickly raised them again with the rather desperate hope that he might on a second try somehow catch the clock by surprise and find the hands somewhere else, at nine or ten perhaps, but it was no use. There they were, perfectly vertical, like a rigid arrow of accusation seeming to condemn by their very rigidity and righteousness everything in the world that was not so straight and stern as they themselves.
He felt sick at first and almost numb along his arms and down through his wrists and into his fingers, the way he had felt the time he had been knocked out in the high school football game. He moved his shoulders beneath his shirt in an attempt to shake off the chill and ran his tongue nervously over his lips and travelled his eyes then around the pool table to the men with the cue-sticks in their hands and to the stained black-brown wood that framed the table’s squareness. There were three quarters on the wood indicating that three challengers still remained. And he looked then at the soft, velvet green of the table itself, that held him, he thought, like a lotus land, and finally to the blackness of the eight-ball and the whiteness of the cue, good and evil he thought, paradoxically flowering here on the greenness of this plain. He was in his first real game, and it had somehow become a series of games, a marathon that had begun at eight when he had paused, books in hand at the doorway, and it had gone on and on, the night’s hours fleeing with the swiftness and unreality of a dream. The type of dream that holds you in a delicate tensile web, even while a certain part of you knows that you will not remember in the morning, and you do not quite know if the feeling is one of ecstasy or pain, or if the awakening is victory or defeat, or if you are forever saved or yet forever doomed.
And now a voice said, “Boy, you goen to wait all night? I ain’t got time.” And he moved with a jolt, out of the dream but in it, and said, “Side pocket,” indicating the direction with his head, and taking the cue he leaned over and across the table, raising his right leg and feeling his belt buckle press into his stomach, and the brown-black wood strong against his testicles and then the sensation of the smoothly polished wood running slickly through his fingers as he shot and then watched the gently nudged eight-ball roll softly and silently across the field of green until it vanished quietly before his eyes, and he could hear it then, changing and rolling noisily now somewhere beneath and within the table on its clattering way to join its predecessors in an underworld of dark. And then he saw the green dollar bill flutter down to the table before his eyes and even as he reached for it, someone else was pushing one of the quarters into the slot and redeeming the balls from their cavern and preparing to arrange them within the rack. And it was now after midnight and he knew he had stayed too long.
He had not been home since before eight that morning when he had walked out into the early October sunshine with his books beneath his arm. He could see the books now lying just inside the door on the end of the narrow bench that ran along the wall. They were covered defensively by his jacket and from beneath the sleeve he could see the algebra, and the red-covered geometry into which he had pencilled his marks, 90’s mostly, and the English text whose poems he had almost totally committed to memory. They looked incongruous in this setting and he vaguely wished that somehow he could cover them more adequately; to protect them and perhaps to protect himself from the questions that they asked and the questions that the men might ask about them. He flicked his eyes nervously down the canyon-like room. It was long and narrow and he could hardly discern the far end with its hazy EXIT sign because of the tobacco smoke that seemed to hang in wavering layers in the stale and sour air. A long uneven bar ran almost the total length of the room, beginning near the pool table and stretching like a trackless narrow-gauge railway toward a distant bandstand where two guitarist-singers and a drummer perspired beneath the ever-changing coloured lights and blasted the heavy air with the twanging heart-break sound of Nashville. On the bar itself three bloated no-longer-young go-go girls moved with heavy unimaginative movements, their net-stockinged feet not always avoiding the sad little puddles of spilled beer. Beneath them and along the bar the men they were supposed to entertain looked up at them dutifully and wearily, although one with hair of snow moved his heavy, calloused hand rhythmically up and down the neck of his beer bottle with a slow and thoughtful masturbating motion.
Over everything and all of them the odour hung and covered and pressed like the roof of a gigantic invisible tent from which there could be no escape. It smelled of work clothes, soaked and dried in sweat and seldom washed, and of spilled beer and of the sour rags used to mop it up, and of the damp and decaying wood that lay beneath the floor, and of the reek that issued forth from the constantly swinging doors of the men’s washroom: the exhausted urine and the powerful disinfectant and the shreds of tobacco and soggy cigarette papers which appeared in the trough beneath the crudely lettered signs: This is not an ashtray; Please don’t throw cigarette butts in our toilet, we don’t urinate in your ashtray; DON’T THROW CIGARETTE BUTTS HERE.
And as it all assailed his senses he felt that everything was wrong with his life and that all of it was ruined, though he was yet but in his eighteenth year. And he wished that he were home.
He could see the situation at home now. The five younger children would be in bed and his sister Mary, who was sixteen, would be helping his mother prepare the lunch that his father would carry in his pail to the meat-packing plant. His younger brother, Donny, who was thirteen, would be desperately hoping, though he knew his hopes were doomed, that the television might remain on longer. And his father who had been propped in front of the television in his undershirt, and in his sock feet and with the waistband of his trousers undone, and with his greying reddish head flopping occasionally from side to side as he dozed and slept more than he dared admit, would have risen and gone to lock the door for the night. And then he would stop and ask gruffly, “Where’s Jesse?” And then there would be the awful, awkward silence, and, “Well don’t he live here no more?” And they would all squirm and his mother would dry glasses that were already dry, and Mary and Donny would glance furtively at one another, while the heavy-set man, now fully awake and puffing on his pipe, would walk from one window to the next, shielding his eyes against the glass while trying to catch a glimpse of his eldest son approaching beneath the street lights. He would walk ceaselessly back and forth with the long, loping outdoor stride which he had brought to the northern Indiana city from eastern Kentucky and which he could not or would not change and he would mutter: “Where is that fella?” or more strongly, “Where’n hell’s that boy at and it goen on past twelve midnight?” And his wife would watch too, as intently but secretly, so that her husband would not see and become more agitated because of her awareness. And sometimes to make it better she would lie or tell one of the young children to say, “Jesse is studyen over at Caudell’s tonight with Earl. He said he wouldn’t be in till late.”
Then she alone bore the burden of the watching and the waiting and it was much easier then, for unlike her husband she bore her burdens silently and you did not realize that she worried at all unless you happened to catch her at an unguarded moment and saw the trace of strain about
her high cheekbones and the tautness of her jaw or the tight compression of her lips. So she would say or cause others to say, “studyen at Caudell’s,” because if it was not the best answer it was better than any other that she knew. And she realized that her husband, even like herself, looked upon “studyen” and whatever it might entail with a deep respect not far removed from fear. For they were both of them barely literate and found even the signing of the magnificent report cards that their children triumphantly and relentlessly presented to them something of a task. Yet while they were sometimes angry and tried to be contemptuous of “book learnen” and people who were just “book smart” they encouraged both as much as they could, seeing in them a light that had never visited their darkness, but realizing that even as they fanned the flame they were losing a grip on almost all they had of life. And feeling themselves as if washed by a flood down the side of a shale-covered Kentucky mountain, clutching and grasping at twigs and roots with their hopeful fingers bloodied raw.
They had been at the base of a very real Kentucky mountain ten years ago when Everett Caudell had finally convinced them to come North. He had been a friend of the boy’s father in the isolation of that squirrel-hunting, pie-social youth and their girls had become the wives they had taken with them to the anguish of the coal camps where jobs and life were at best uncertain amidst an awful certainty of poverty and pain. Caudell had come North and secured the job in the meat-packing plant and then returned with the battered half-ton truck for his family and their belongings and then again for the friend of his youth. The friend who had recently been almost killed when the roof of the illegal little mine that burrowed into the hillside had come crashing down. He had escaped only because he saw the rats racing by him toward the light and had dropped his tools and followed, sprinting after them and almost stepping on their scaly tails as the beginning roar of the crashing rock and the shot-gun pops of the snapping timbers sounded in his ears.
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood Page 9