by Mick Lowe
“And so what if some of ’em are Commies?” Big Bill pressed on. “It’s a free country, and we don’t ask a man what his party preference is before he becomes a member of the Mine Mill … Despite all the persecution we’ve faced down in the States our union has done some great things. Did you know, for example, that down in the Deep South we long ago admitted Negroes as full members and even leaders right alongside our white members?”
Jake didn’t. But he knew his father was referring to the growing unrest in the deep southern states like Alabama and Mississippi where lunch counter sit-ins and bus boycotts were all the rage as young protesters of both races were beginning to deploy non-violent tactics against the deeply rooted segregationist policies of the Jim Crow South.
“Sworski took the lead when your Uncle Walt and Uncle Bud and I pitched in to organize the union back in the Forties, that’s all I know. I couldn’t prove he is a Commie, couldn’t prove he isn’t … Besides, what if some of ’em are Commies, like they say? They’ve still provided some mighty good leadership to this union over the years. They built this union. And what else really matters?”
They had crossed over the rocky, treeless height of land that separated Sudbury from the Valley they were dropping down into, a series of scattered, sprawling subdivisions where the McCools had taken up residence just a few years earlier in Farmdale Subdivision in Hanmer. Jake paused in the conversation to take in the lights of the Valley as they glittered, stretching off for miles to the north on the Valley floor. Jake never tired of the sight.
“He wants to meet with me next week,” Jake told his father as they pulled into the driveway.
“Spike?”
Jake nodded.
“Does he now?” Big Bill yanked on the parking brake. “Hmmm … Maybe better not tell your mother about that. Or what just happened at the bar.”
Jake nodded again.
7
Crossing the Rubicon
“Mr. Sworski will see you now.”
Jake had been cooling his heels in the inner sanctum of the Mine Mill Hall, studying the heretofore off-limits upstairs office area with keen interest.
He was shown to a seat by a crisply efficient secretary, who then returned to her desk behind a glass partition. She wore a telephone headset and pounded away at her typewriter when she wasn’t answering the telephone, which rang incessantly. Occasionally a man in a suit—Jake recognized each of them as members of the Local Union Executive who’d been sitting up on the stage at the membership meeting—would emerge and exchange a few words with the secretary before disappearing again into a row of offices down a hallway.
Finally Sworski himself came down the hallway, and, after greeting Jake cordially, invited him into his office.
The space itself was nothing special—small, rather spartan quarters with a window overlooking Regent Street and Queen’s Athletic Field, a big wooden desk, a high-backed desk chair, a few cardboard boxes, evidently containing old files, stacked in a corner—Jake took the chair facing the desk, and studied Sworski, who was now ensconced in his office chair, which tilted, pivoted and rolled around on casters. As a result, Sworski was never still. He was in his forties, Jake guessed, precocious for a position of such power. With his neatly trimmed moustache, gnatty three-piece suits and gentle manners, the ever-dapper Sworski had a courtly, old country air about him.
“So,” Sworski began. “The reason I’ve asked you to come here today. What happened at the bar the other night,” he paused with a rueful smile, “I’m afraid it’s but a sign of things to come. The Steelworkers will not rest until they’ve smashed this Local Union and, quite possibly, me along with it.”
Jake listened in silence.
“I’ve seen you in action, young man. Your reputation precedes you. You’re from a good Mine Mill family. I’d like you to become my personal assistant, to accompany me in, ah, shall we say situations of some difficulty, and there will be many such situations in the months to come, I fear.”
Slowly it dawned on Jake: Sworski was asking him to become his bodyguard!
“Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Sworski, my mother would never— ”
Sworski cut him off with the wave of a hand.
“I spoke with your mother just now. Everyone remembers Alice McCool and what she’s done for this Local Union. While you’re right, she certainly wasn’t crazy about the idea at first, she did come around to the idea it could afford you an opportunity, besides the, ah, risk.”
Jake, impressed, sat back in his chair.
Sworski pressed on. “We would, of course, work around your regular shifts and, in the event of scheduling conflicts, arrange with the company for an excused absence on the basis that you’re attending to union business, which, in a manner of speaking, you would be …
“The, ah, position will be remunerated on top of your Inco pay, of course. The amount must first be approved by the treasurer, and I’m afraid it will not be overlarge, especially considering the demands on your time and the, ah, danger that may well be involved.”
Jake tried to take it all in. The thought of earning more money, over and above his Inco wages and bonus, certainly appealed. Rather than being intimidated, he was attracted to the prospect of scrapping for a living—or part of one, anyway. And he quite liked the idea of spending more time with Spike Sworski. For reasons he couldn’t quite put his fingers on, he found himself liking the man very much. Certainly he’d never been around anyone quite like the union president.
Sworski looked at Jake across the big desk. “So, we have a deal then?”
Jake stood up, and stretched out his hand. “Yes sir, Mr. Sworski. We have a deal.”
Sworski chuckled and shook Jake’s hand. “Splendid. Splendid. I look forward to it.”
Jake was surprised at the softness of Sworski’s hand, so unlike his father’s, Bob’s, or even his mother’s.
Still in a daze, Jake excused himself from Sworski’s office before swiftly descending the stairs leading from the union offices.
There are moments and there are moments and then there are moments in all our lives that are, if we but knew it, mini-Rubicons. Such was the moment in the life of Jake McCool as he paused on the curb to await a break in the traffic streaming past on Regent Street in front of the Mine Mill Hall that steamy June evening in 1963.
Some things—the unmistakeable whiff of sulphur that begins first as an acid taste in the back of the throat—Jake senses.
Others—the ancient Siren song of danger, adventure, wealth and beautiful women that has lured young men since the time of Odysseus—are also clear enough to Jake as he waits for the river of chrome to part that night.
But the more profound and subtle portents pass him by, as they nearly always do in such moments. He does not sense the air currents stirred by the wings of the year’s first returning Monarch as it floated over Queen’s Athletic Field. He does not hear the preternatural death rattle of the leaves in the scrub poplars studding the lip of the basin that ringed the running track surrounding the field—an odd sound for so early in the summer—as the foliage burned beneath the dirty yellowish cloud that was even then descending over the intersection of Regent and Elm Streets.
Instead Jake, finding his opening, bites back the aftertaste of sulphur, swallows and plunges head-long off the sidewalk, into Regent Street and into history.
Part two
To Catch a Killer
8
Is Bob Dylan a Communist?
It was early yet and his parents weren’t expecting their car back until later, so Jake headed straight for Jo Ann’s to tell her his exciting news.
“Oh yes, Jake. She’s right here. Won’t you come in?” Jo Ann’s mother appraised him coolly at the front door, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen. Neither of Jo Ann’s parents cared much for Jake, high school drop-out and semi-rounder that he was, and not from a particularly promising family, either. A Mine Mill family.
Mrs. Winters ushered Jake into the living room where he found J
o Ann playing records. As always, Jake was impressed with the Winters’ home—the scale of it—the rooms were so much larger than his parents’ place. And the smell of it—every room, it seemed, was infused with the aroma of cigar smoke—so much richer and more exotic than the smell of Export A and Sweet Caporal cigarette tobacco that his own dad and mom smoked. And then there was the stereo, nested in the top of a long wooden console that also contained the Winters’ television, as well as a pair of stereophonic speakers. Their stereo played the latest, newest thing in high fidelity recorded music—long-playing, vinyl records that turned at 33-and-a-third revolutions per minute, while the McCools were still stuck with the much-heavier, much-scratchier old 78s. No way his parents, who still insisted on paying cash for everything, would ever waltz into the store and plunk down a thousand bucks for such a thing. They maintained that any form of debt—”buying on time,” as they called it—was nothing more than a bosses’ plot to ensnare the unwary working man. Jake was just resolving that with his first paycheck he’d head straight for Eaton’s to buy his own hi-fi when Jo Ann approached him with a record cover in her hand.
“Oh, Jake, I’m so glad you’ve come! You’ve got to hear this new album I just got in the mail today from the record club!” She handed him the record cover. He glanced at it and saw a photo of a skinny young guy he didn’t recognize walking down a wintry city street with a pretty girl on his arm. They both looked cold.
“Has your mom been crying?”
“Yes, the sulphur came in and burned her garden just now. Killed her plants and all her flowers just like that!” Jo Ann snapped her fingers for emphasis.
“Oh. That’s too bad.” Jake found it impossible to feign much interest in flower gardens. That was one advantage of living in the Valley: inconvenient as the longer drive into town often was, at least they were out of range of the worst of the smelter fumes.
“This just came out.” Jo Ann pointed at the skinny guy with big hair and cowboy boots striding through the snow with his hands jammed into the pockets of his blue jeans. “Bob Dylan. You’ve heard of him?”
Jake shrugged. Not really.
“He’s the one who wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’”
“Oh, sure.” Who hadn’t heard that? The anti-war ballad sung by the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary was played incessantly on both CKSO and CHNO.
Jo Ann turned back to the stereo, let the needle drop, and Jake heard “JO ANN WINTERS, NO! NOT THAT HORRIBLE THING AGAIN! MUST WE? THAT YOUNG MAN CAN’T CARRY A TUNE IN A BUCKET!” as Mrs. Winters objected loudly from the kitchen.
Even here, in a house so much more spacious than his own, privacy was impossible, Jake realized.
Jo Ann sighed loudly.
“Very well, Mother! I’ll take Jake up to my room, if that’s okay—”
It was, as both Jake and Jo’s mother understood, more a statement than a question.
Jo Ann snatched the album cover out of Jake’s hands, scooped the record off the turntable and led Jake by the hand to the plushly carpeted stairs.
Her room always struck Jake as a foreign country, filled with stuffed toys, adorned with pink chiffon. And, most importantly on this day, her very own portable hi fi. It had a hinged lid and removable speakers on wires that could be moved around the room for the best stereophonic effect. Jo Ann let the needle drop again and they both listened in silence as “Blowin’ in the Wind” filled the room. But in this version the pretty vocal harmonies of Peter, Paul and Mary were absent, replaced only by a strummed acoustic guitar and a single gravelly male voice that seemed to channel an oracular, timeless wisdom. Jo Ann’s mother was right about one thing: this guy really couldn’t sing.
“Jo Ann, I’ve just come from the Union Hall, and—”
“Shhh! Shush Jake! Listen to this!”
Jake lapsed into obedient silence and was drawn into music unlike any recorded music he’d ever heard—spare, unadorned tunes rasped out by that raucous voice accompanied only by a strummed six-string guitar, and the occasional harmonica break, an off-key screech that sounded like the alley cats of early morn. But what really sucked you in were the words. Brash, angry, accusatory, the raspy, howled lyrics fused the anger of youth—a resentment that Jake, Jo Ann and just about everyone their age shared—at the cloying beliefs their parents held so dear—in material things, in religion, in the Cold War, in institutions like unions—with melodies that were flat and compressed, and yet appealing …
“. . . so we can buy a car even sooner.” Jake concluded his news when the music finished at the end of the record.
Jo Ann frowned. “Wanna hear the other side?”
“Sure.” And it was true. He did want to hear what came next.
And once again they fell silent, swept up in a world where youth dared to question everything; a world turned upside down.
“I dunno, sweetie, it sounds dangerous.” Jo Ann bit her lower lip, as she always did when something worried her.
Her dark brown eyes, which at other times could beam with mischief and wonder, were clouded now with worry and self-doubt as she crossed the room to face him.
“Jake, do you think Bob Dylan is a Communist?”
“What? I dunno. Why do you think that?”
“Well, he’s obviously against war, and they say he went down into the South, to sing to the Negroes, and now you’re going to work for Mine Mill, and even Mr. Sworski personally, and just last Sunday Father Legault preached about the need to be constantly on the look-out for Communists. They’re everywhere, apparently. Especially around the Mine Mill Hall.”
“Oh Jesus, baby! Not you, too! Look, I’m around the Mine Mill Hall because Spike Sworski offered me a job, that’s all. We can use the money. I can buy a car, and then, who knows? Maybe I can even get a place of my own! Here! Let me check!” Jake lay out flat on the floor before lifting the pink chiffon bed skirt under Jo Ann’s bed. “Nope, no Commies under the bed. I checked.”
He could see she was not amused.
“Aw, c’mon, Jo. Just because someone supports civil rights and speaks out against nuclear war doesn’t make ’em a Communist! Look at what happened last year over Cuba! We just can’t keep doing this! ‘Masters of War,’ he’s right! We’ll blow ourselves right off the face of the earth if we’re not careful.”
But Jo Ann’s frown remained, and Jake paused, drawing a deep breath. What a time they were in! She was still chewing on her lower lip. The chafing made her lips even pinker, and swollen.
Finally, Jake drew her to him, into his arms, and did what he’d been aching to do the entire afternoon: he began gnawing hungrily on that lower lip.
9
Brother in Arms
Jake barely recognized him—Ben had changed that much in just one short school year. And yet there was no doubting that the scruffy, guitar-toting stranger who stood looking up at him in the “Arrivals” area now was indeed his brother Ben.
“Hey there, little brother.”
“Welcome home, big brother.”
Jake held his older brother at arm’s length, looking him up and down.
“You-you’ve changed.” It was true. Ben’s hair was longer than he’d ever seen it, and it looked as if he hadn’t shaved in days—weeks, even.
“What’s Mom gonna say?” Jake was dubious.
Ben laughed, waving aside Jake’s reservations. “Not to mention the old man, eh? Well, let’s go find out.”
“Don’t you have any luggage?”
Ben pointed down at the soft-sided guitar case resting on the airport floor. “Naw, just underwear and a toothbrush, is all. It’s all in there. Let’s go face the music.”
For as long as Jake could remember, he and Ben had always shared a bedroom, so it was only natural that he’d stay in Jake’s room on the spare bed now, during this summer’s visit.
They’d just sat down on their beds when Jake eyed the guitar case.
“Can you actually play that thing?”
“A little. Wanna hear?” Ben reac
hed down and unzipped the case.
“Sure.”
Ben lovingly pulled out an old Gibson, and began tuning, before picking a melody, which Jake recognized as Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” The second time through, Ben even sang along.
Jake sat in dumbfounded silence. So much had changed since the fall, when Ben, also a talented enough hockey player, had left home to attend college at the University of Michigan on a full-ride athletic scholarship. Such things were non-existent in Canada, and Bill and Alice were hard-pressed to decline the chance for their middle son to gain a free college education at a first-rate university, even though it was in a different country. The decision had actually been easier for Alice, who, strictly in private, harboured special affections for her middle son. Ben was different from his father and brothers. His comparatively diminutive stature lent him a sense of vulnerability that the taller, raw-boned McCool men lacked. Ben was her dreamer, with his nose in a book often as not. This gritty old mining camp, with its beer-and-hockey macho culture, was no place for a boy with Ben’s spirit and sensitivity. And she dreaded the prospect that he might end up in the mines, with their lure of fast money and the ever-present spectre of sudden death God knew how many ways. So many miners were killed each year it barely made the papers. No, far better to ship her middle son off to a brighter, if uncertain, future out of this sulphur-blasted God-forsaken place.
The sight of their scruffy, guitar-toting son, though, had given both Bill and Alice pause.
Jake, however, was intrigued by the change. Although he was smaller, Ben was two years older, and so would always be Jake’s “big” brother. And, even though he was six inches shorter, Jake had always looked up to the brother who sat across from him now. He’d never been much of a reader, but it was Ben who had introduced Jake to Catcher in the Rye, when Jake was still in junior high. Jake had devoured the book, finding a kindred spirit in the outlaw worldview of Holden Caulfield.