Great Cape Breton Storytelling

by Great Cape Breton Storytelling (epub)

  The Roscoes had lived in the house next door. They had come from Wales where Mr. Roscoe’s father and grandfather had been miners. Mr. Roscoe was tall, black-haired and fierce. His skin was so dark that Emily used to imagine that coal dust had gotten into his pores and into his blood, that his spit was black, even the wax in his ears. She was always surprised when he appeared on his porch or in the parlor window without his shirt, his long underwear unbuttoned to the waist, showing an incongruously pale chest, the hairs looking like black wires stuck into a peeled potato. Sometimes when he was dressed like this, he would sing hymns. He sang tenor standing beside the piano in the parlor while Peggy, the eldest, played. Danny and Damien sang too and Megan, the youngest. Even timid Mrs. Roscoe.

  Mr. Roscoe had gotten a choir together, miners who enjoyed singing. They never sang publicly. They never got that far. It was Mr. Roscoe’s temper that broke them up. It was nothing for him to jab someone in the chest if he didn’t like what was said, to hurtle a plate across the room if the food didn’t suit. Both Danny and Damien had been bruised by his belt. Sometimes Mr. Roscoe roared so loud it seemed the shingles of his house shuddered. Emily was always on guard against these dark and sudden outbursts. Even when he was sitting placidly on his front step in his underwear, Emily knew that Mr. Roscoe had only momentarily stepped out of his bearskin, that it was hanging on the hook in the hallway ready to be put back on. Sometimes if she was sitting on the veranda, he would call out pleasantries to her, about the freshness of the breeze, the greenness of the grass and how she was doing in school.

  Emily never allowed herself to be drawn past a polite response. She thought being friendly toward Mr. Roscoe somehow betrayed Damien’s confidence in her. It was Damien who had told her about the beatings and the smashed china.

  Damien looked like his father’s paper cutout. He was tall and thin with black hair and dark skin but he had none of his father’s robustness. Those times when he was in bed with bronchitis, Emily brought him his homework. All through junior high school they did their homework together, coloring maps, writing definitions out of the same dictionary, copying each other’s notes.

  Whenever Emily brought home Damien’s work, Mrs. Roscoe ushered her into the parlor. By then Damien was downstairs waiting for her, sitting on the chesterfield in his blue-checkered bathrobe. Emily kept her eyes off the hair that was beginning to show on his legs where his pajamas rode up. She did not want any reminders that Damien was becoming a man, that he would one day need the same things of her as her father had needed. She avoided looking at the whisker eruptions on his chin, the tapered strength of his fingers. Instead she concentrated on the cleanliness and order of the Roscoes’ parlor. Because it was so different from her mother’s careless housekeeping. Every spring Mrs. Roscoe repapered walls, painted woodwork, washed doilies and polished the piano with its shrine of family photos on top. After Emily had shown Damien his assignments, Mrs. Roscoe came in with tea and cookies on a tray. The teacups were Dutch blue with houses on them. Emily never got used to this. She felt like royalty. As if something more than delivering homework was expected of her. At home her parents served tea in mugs. Visitors had to shove books off chairs in order to sit down. Emily interpreted the good china as meaning Mrs. Roscoe approved of her as Damien’s girlfriend. She was uncomfortable with this possibility. In her mind’s eye the word girlfriend loomed large on a billboard with DANGER and WARNING stickers pasted on top.

  Damien was the only Roscoe who was good at school. Peggy had quit grade nine to work as a housekeeper at the hospital. It was too soon to tell about Megan; she was in grade one. Danny hated school. He wanted to quit, Damien said, but the old man wouldn’t let him. He was determined to send Danny to a conservatory for voice lessons, something he’d always wanted to do himself. Danny wanted to work in the pit. He went there every chance he got. Damien couldn’t figure out why anyone would choose to work in such a dark stinking hole. He’d gone down once with the old man and that was enough. It was so bloody cold he couldn’t keep his teeth from chattering. He wanted to get as far away from Harbour Mines as he could. Whenever he talked to Emily about his future, Damien always spoke with fearless bravado, there was nothing he couldn’t do. After graduation he was getting a job in the city but only for a year or two until he earned the money for voice lessons. Then he’d get a scholarship to university and work toward a music degree. Someday he’d be a famous singer. He was fifteen when he told Emily this.

  “Whatever happened to the Roscoe boys?” Emily said, though she already knew about Danny. Mr. Macdonald and she had been going over different people in town seeing whom they had both known so it was inevitable that they should come to the Roscoes.

  “Danny’s on TV. You must’ve seen him,” Mr. Macdonald said. “Or don’t you bother watching us down here in God’s country? Maybe,” he gave her a sidelong look, “maybe you watch all them Yankee programs.”

  On Saturday nights Emily liked to go downstairs to watch Jolly Danny Roscoe on TV. She liked to do this alone. She never lost the wonder of someone from back home being on her television screen, a wonder she could never explain to her husband and kids. Danny was one of the stars on the Cape Breton Islanders Show; the other star was hymn singer Gracie Murphy. Danny moved across the floor in the graceful shuffle Emily had come to expect of fat people. He’d taken up tap dancing, she’d supposed, because his voice had run out from hard living and drink. Sometimes he’d take a mouth organ out of his pocket and puff good-naturedly into it but he could only play with one hand so it wasn’t done with any skill; it was for comic relief. He seemed so impervious to ridicule that Emily wondered if off screen he smashed china and jabbed people.

  “He’s made a pretty good living for himself, Danny has,” Mr. Macdonald said approvingly. He didn’t mention Damien.

  They were in grade ten when Damien made a move. Walking home from school together Damien would suddenly take her hand and hold it in his. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings so she never told him she didn’t want this. Instead she tried to remember to keep both hands wrapped around her books. She pretended not to notice where he had written D loves E on his bookcovers.

  They had been to a high school dance together, Emily in a blue bengaline dress out of the catalogue, a step up from her mother’s dreadful sewing, Damien in Danny’s navy blue blazer whose sleeves were inches too short for his long arms. Like the other pairs of stick figures, they moved two steps sideways, one back, across the gym floor, the crepe paper streamers pulled into a tent above their heads. She was safe enough here.

  The time he picked to kiss her was walking home afterwards along the back streets where the lamp posts were widely spaced and there were tunnels of murky air between them. It was a tender kiss, his lips were soft, insistent. He put his hands on either side of her head, tilting it back. Tilting her gently. Beneath her feet ground shifted dangerously. She ducked down. His hands held her, cupped warm on her shoulders.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said, “I would never hurt you.” He bent forward to kiss her again, eyes closed.

  This time Emily got away. She ran through the tunnelled air, hair flying, mouth agape.

  Behind her she heard him call, “Don’t. Don’t run.”

  At the corner where there was light she glanced back and saw Damien two street lights away, hands in his pockets, slouching along, letting her go.

  After that she started getting up earlier in the mornings and driving to school with her parents. She waited for them after school so she wouldn’t meet Damien. If there was homework she sent it over with Megan.

  Peggy Roscoe passed her by on the street without speaking. Though she’d quit school, Peggy still had a girlfriend in grade twelve so the news was out — Emily was stuck up. She thought she was too good for Damien.

  This was partly true. Emily thought Damien should have been made of sterner stuff, that he shouldn’t have given up so easily. When he got a steady gir
lfriend a few months later, she disowned ever having known him. She left Harbour Mines when she was seventeen, determined to disown it too.

  For a long time after she’d moved away, she went so far as to lie about having lived in Harbour Mines. If someone asked her about where she’d grown up, she’d say Cape Breton. If pressed she’d say in a vague sort of way, oh a small place near Sydney, you wouldn’t know it. She felt ashamed of this now.

  Harbour Mines hadn’t changed much since she’d left; it was still the same size. But her perception of the landscape had changed. It wasn’t monochromatic grey as she had remembered it but blatantly technicolor. It seemed every color on the paint charts had been used. The town hall was teal blue, the school forest green, the churches robin’s egg blue, moss green, maroon. Down here near the mine the houses looked like brightly painted codfish boxes strung along lengths of rope tossed overboard into a sea of green scrub. Some of the streets had houses on one side only. Here and there front steps hadn’t been built, deliberately cutting off access to the parlor, preserving the sanctity of carpeting and color TV. Yards were treeless: trees here did not do well. There was no protection against the winter wind that swept off the ice floes in Cabot Strait.

  Emily wondered if Damien lived down here somewhere. She knew he’d sold the big house next door. Her mother had mentioned that years ago in a letter. When Emily had written back asking where did he go, her mother’s reply was that she’d no idea, he might have moved off the island altogether for all she knew.

  Emily doubted that. He’d left leaving too late. Probably he’d become one of those Cape Bretoners who couldn’t leave, who believed this island, this rock of red cliffs and green hills, was God’s country. Maybe it was to catch God’s eye that they used so much bright paint.

  As she sat on the bench Emily imagined what it would be like bumping into Damien. Coincidentally, of course. She’d ask him about his family. He’d married early, her mother had said, there were four kids close together. Maybe she’d go home with him. Have tea. She might even talk him into singing something for her. She’d keep the conversation light. There would be no mention of the past. She couldn’t tell him now — any more than she could then — that her running away had to do not with him but with her father. He wouldn’t remember anyway. Her wanting to see Damien had to do with knowing she’d disowned him, of living that down. She wanted to do this even though she knew that this was an indulgence that more than anything else made her a tourist in Harbour Mines.

  “What’s Damien doing now?” She finally came out and asked because Mr. Macdonald hadn’t said a word about him. She was beginning to think that he was deliberately avoiding the subject but when he answered she thought she understood why.

  “He’s retired,” Mr. Macdonald said, “same as the rest of us.”

  Emily knew retired meant laid off, unemployed. Had Damien become another hospitalized war veteran spending winter in thermostatically controlled rooms, summer warming himself on a sunny bench at the minehead watching tourists like herself? Or had he found other things to do, organized a choir perhaps?

  “You just might see him around,” Mr. Macdonald said. “He comes down here sometimes if the weather’s nice. If I see him, I’ll tell him you were asking for him.”

  Another miner came up. He was rotund and ruddy-cheeked and, she guessed, bald beneath his hard hat. He reminded her of Danny Roscoe.

  “The tour’s starting,” he said to her. “You’d better come with me.”

  “Isn’t that just like an O’Hara,” Mr. Macdonald said. “Always thinks the women are after him.”

  “Listen to that would you!” O’Hara turned to Emily. “These Scotchmen think they own the whole island. Talk about hogs.”

  Mr. Macdonald adjusted his bow tie.

  “If he gives you any trouble, you just report him to me.”

  Inside there was more of the same. Emily presented her ticket but O’Hara waved it away. She jammed the ticket into her jeans pocket, hooked her jacket onto one of the gaffs hanging from the shed beams and went into the room where they stored the gear. There another miner, much younger than O’Hara with buck teeth, was handing out flashlights. When he went to strap on Emily’s, O’Hara took the flashlight from him and fastened the belt around her waist so that the battery hung just above her hip. Then he looped the cord over her shoulder so she could manoeuvre the flashlight in front.

  He fiddled with the cord making sure it was the right length. The other miner stood there, buck-tooth grinning, leaning one elbow against the shelf.

  “What a way with women you have, O’Hara,” he said.

  “Jealousy will get you nowheres.”

  “I’m not jealous. I’m full of admiration. I’m just standing here hoping to pick up a few pointers.”

  O’Hara put a red poncho over Emily’s shoulders.

  “It’ll keep you clean.”

  And a hard hat.

  “Regulations. You wouldn’t want to hit your head on a tie.”

  “Hey O’Hara, don’t take all night,” one of the miners yelled. “We got seven others ready to go down.”

  Besides the two men, students they looked like, there was a family of five, three school-aged daughters and their parents, campers, probably on their way to the Cabot Trail. O’Hara picked up a pointer and indicated the elevator. They got on. The door clanked shut. They started down. The elevator was an open cage with grey metal bars badly rusted. Water dripped off the sides of the shaft. Emily heard it splashing below.

  The elevator cage thudded to the bottom. The door grated open. It was black, cold and wet.

  “Put your flashlights on and follow me. Watch the water,” O’Hara said; he was all business now.

  Flashlights on they followed O’Hara past puddled water. At the entrance to a tunnel, O’Hara stopped.

  “This mine goes six miles under the sea, 2360 feet down to be exact, but we’re only going to 680. We’ll be following the rail line. Keep your heads down and watch your step. She drops a foot every ten feet so we’ll be walking on a slant.’’

  There were dim lights strung out at intervals along the tunnel and as they bent over, crab-walking the ties, Emily was able to see that the mine walls were shored up with heavy timbers and iron ties irregularly spaced. The whole mass had been sprayed with white powder to retard fire. The yellow lights and white powder gave a sulphurous thickness to the air.

  They came out of the tunnel to a higher ceilinged cave that was an intersection where the main tunnel plunged down and a smaller tunnel went off to a coal seam. O’Hara took them into the room where the engine controlled the cable drum, the cable that ran the coal cars to the tunnel bottom and back up. There were WARNING and DANGER signs pasted on the walls, large numbered instructions.

  “This is the most important piece of equipment in the mine,’’ O’Hara said. “Used to be up on top. But after the accident she was moved down here.”

  “What accident?” one of the daughters wanted to know.

  “Cable broke. Fourteen men were killed.”

  Mr. Roscoe was in one of the cars that was cut off, racing out of control, plummeting down the tunnel, gathering speed, down, down the sulphurous walls flashing past, stomachs sucked out, chests ripped out, eyes squeezed shut on inner darkness, the last chilling minutes careening past.

  Despite Mr. Roscoe’s temper, the Anglican church couldn’t hold all the miners who came to the funeral. Emily went with her parents. She remembered her father saying the music would have made the old boy proud. Although Danny had come home for the funeral, it was Damien who sang the twenty-fourth psalm. He was eighteen then and his voice had come out of the change a tenor.

  Outside the engine room, Emily caught sight of a grey stag’s head. It was lumpily constructed and clumsily painted with red spots for eyes and antlers too thick for realism but there was no mistaking it was a stag’s head.


  O’Hara saw her looking at it.

  “Some of the men made that. Used grease from the machine. Sort of built it up with blobs that fell off. The leftovers like. Did a good job, I’d say.”

  Emily stared at the eyes hoping she would see pupil dots emerge and dilate so she could see inside the stag’s head, to know there were pictures inside it: meadows open and green, maple groves, autumn sunshine, colored leaves. But the eyes remained blank, painted shut with what looked like nail polish.

  O’Hara was leading them into another tunnel. Hunched over, their hats bumping rock, they switched on their flashlights and followed. This tunnel didn’t open up even when they reached the coal face, so they had to stay bent over while O’Hara explained things.

  Emily put her handbag down and sat on that.

  “You couldn’t have done that when the mine was operating or the rats would’ve crawled right up your pantlegs,” O’Hara said.

  Below her jeans the meat of Emily’s tanned ankle was exposed as tender white against the black coal. She got up quickly.

  O’Hara laughed. “Don’t worry. When the men left, the rats left. But boys o’ boys when they were here, you had to look out. We tied string around our cuffs so they wouldn’t crawl up our legs. When you opened up your lunch pail, you had to kick ’em off with your boot. I always went back to where the tunnel opens up so I could eat standing up.” Here the light bulbs were larger and closer together so visibility was better. But the shadows were blacker. The light shone on the layered coal face glittering like rats’ eyes.

  “This machine is what gets the coal out of the seam. See, it’s got a jack to hold up the roof while it digs out the coal. It goes in so far then moves sideways. We always used this. Never used a pick and shovel.”

  The machine had a huge rounded saw-toothed blade that rotated when O’Hara switched it on. The blade moved forward, chewing into the seam. Chunks of coal dropped easily, tumbling into a cart. A black cloud of coal dust puffed out. The noise, rolled into a hard probing core, drilled into Emily’s ears.