Great Cape Breton Storytelling

by Great Cape Breton Storytelling (epub)

  O’Hara switched off the machine and directed their attention to the coal cars.

  “With the machine doing the digging, we had a devil of a job keeping up with it. The empty cars kept moving in. We had to keep moving the full ones out. Had to be quick about it or you’d jam your hand.”

  That was what happened to Danny Roscoe. After the old man was killed there was nothing to keep him out of the mine. But he’d only worked down here a few months when he jammed his right hand between two cars. Broke the bones. Pulped them to sausage meat. It didn’t show on the television screen. Danny had become skilful at keeping it behind his back or tucked inside his jacket front against his chest as if he really was singing those true-blue love songs from his heart.

  Damien quit grade twelve after that to work in the mine. There was no other money coming in. Peggy had married a farmer and moved to Margaree. It was a year before Danny’s hand healed and he was able to get a job with a pick-up band playing Saturday night dances. Even then he wasn’t paid much and there was Megan to get through school.

  “You want some coal for souvenirs, this is your chance,” O’Hara said. He took out plastic bags and handed them round.

  Emily couldn’t imagine a piece of coal as a souvenir. What was it a souvenir of anyway? Would they be handing out jars of tar sand and oil someday? She was surprised at O’Hara. She would have thought that handing out coal as a memento somehow cheapened the risk in getting it.

  But O’Hara didn’t seem to mind. He was helping the little girls load up their bags.

  Emily’s back ached from bending over. How did the men stand it, hunched over all day in the cold and damp? She straightened up and her plastic hard hat hit metal. She looked up and saw it had hit a horseshoe nailed to a beam.

  After Emily had moved out West, her mother used to send her the Harbour Mines newspaper tied up in brown paper and string third class mail. Sometimes it was months before she looked through the pile of weeklies and then it was only a quick glance before throwing them out. But she read every word of the cave-in. Clipped out the front page and folded it into her photo album. Eight men were trapped. Six days of no food, water, fresh air, the coal wedged tight around them. One of the men, it had to be an Irishman, was quoted as saying he knew they’d be rescued because there was a horseshoe nailed to a beam, they could feel it in the dark. Another miner, an Englishman, said it was Damien singing to them that kept their spirits up. Down there in the dark, he said, Damien sounded like a nightingale. There was a photograph of Damien on the front page. He looked old, haggard, his eyes staring whitely from blackened skin. He looked like someone returned from the dead.

  There was a last stop in the mine tour, at the tipple that dumped the coal cars onto the conveyor belt that took the coal out, before O’Hara had them riding the cars up the long slope to the surface, the fresh air rushing down to meet them. At the top they took off their gear and returned it to the shed.

  Emily stepped outside to blinding July sunlight, to the plaintive wail of bagpipes. A girl in kilt and lace was playing “Road to the Isles.” Behind her unrolled a tartan of green swamp and blue sea, the water woven through with yellow threads.

  Mr. Macdonald was waiting for her. Beside him was a tall man, badly stooped, with a polka dot ascot at his neck. Damien. Just when she was beginning to wonder if she should ask Mr. Macdonald where he lived. He looked old, a paler version of the miner in the photograph. Without the coal dust and with his hair turned white he no longer looked like his father’s paper cutout, but the silhouette surrounding it.

  “This is the fellow you were asking about,” Mr. Macdonald said unnecessarily.

  Emily took a step forward and stuck out a nervous hand.

  “Do you remember me? I used to live next door to you.”

  He looked so aged Emily thought he might have forgotten her.

  But he didn’t. He took her hand, squeezing the fingers hard.

  “How are you, Damien?” she said.

  Damien smiled. He wore dentures, she noticed, and had shrinkage lines on his upper lip. The lips, thin now, pulled back and a faint F came out. A voiceless F. An F squeezed out and shaped by a wheeze of air.

  “He says he’s fine,” Mr Macdonald interpreted.

  But Emily didn’t get it right away. It didn’t register fast enough. Both men must have seen the disbelief on her face.

  Mr. Macdonald helped her out. “Damien had an operation two years ago. Had his voice box removed. A plastic one put in. He’s doing pretty good with it, wouldn’t you say?”

  Emily stood there holding Damien’s hand unable to let go of it, unable to speak.

  So Mr. Macdonald went on. “These Welshmen are terrible fellas. Stubborn as mules. You wouldn’t believe how stubborn they are. You can’t get rid of one no matter how hard you try.”

  But even with Mr. Macdonald’s help, Emily couldn’t say what she wanted to say. What she wanted to say, now that he was finally in front of her, was: I loved you, Damien. Once a long time ago I really loved you. But there was a risk in saying this even to herself. The risk was not that Damien would be indifferent to this admission or think her guilty of foolish exaggeration, but that it might be mistaken for pity.

  “He may have trouble speaking,” Mr. Macdonald was prodding her, “but he has no trouble listening.”

  Slowly, with her other hand, Emily took the crumpled ticket out of her jeans pocket and held it up for Damien to see.

  “Look,” she said, staring at it, “I bought a ticket. I must say it seemed strange buying a ticket. I meant to go down and see the place where you and your father and brother worked. They sell tickets to all sorts of things nowadays, don’t they?” She was babbling, she knew, trying too hard. “Would you believe just last week in Calgary, I bought a ticket . . . .” She looked up then to engage Mr. Macdonald but he had walked quietly away. She wanted to run after him. She felt a tightening around her hand. There was a wheezing sound.

  Emily looked at Damien’s mouth. She saw his tongue curl upward. She felt the soft explosion of air against her cheek. She watched the lips funnelling a D. The D, disembodied — separate from Damien — floated past her ear.

  “Don’t run,” he was saying.

  The “away” was indiscernible, gulped down with an intake of air. But the next words were distinct enough; a T exploded.

  “This time,” he said and grinned. Then with a gentlemanly grace which Emily remembered he always had even in his own parlor, he indicated a bench they could sit on.

  They talked about their families, people they had both known, the energy crisis, the weather. Though Damien kept smiling and nodding, wheezing unselfconsciously, and the summer sun warmed the lobster red bench where they sat, Emily could not tear her mind from the dark tunnels below. She wanted to go back down the mine, to pry out the nails, bring the horseshoe up here, to hurtle it skyward, but it was such a pitiful, useless tool for smashing the eye of God.

  Sheldon Currie

  Lauchie and Liza and Rory

  I knew he’d take her in. I couldn’t predict it, mind you, a minute before it happened, but when it did I said as a person often does: I knew it. Once it got to the point, he had to.

  She wasn’t even good-looking. I can say that because she looked an awful lot like me. Red hair. Not the kind that glistens and goes good with green sweaters, but the other kind that looks like violin strings made of carrots. It had a part in the middle looked like an axe-cut, and it was pulled back hard and flat and tied at the back in a little ball you’d swear was nailed to the back of her neck. The same way I did it myself. She didn’t exactly have buck teeth, but when her lips were closed her mouth was a little mound like she was keeping an orange peeling over her teeth. When she opened her mouth to talk you could see her teeth were round, and big, and almost the same color as her hair.

  My brothers were identical twins, but as people the
y were day and night. Liza married Lauchie, the one everybody said was the good one. I could of told her, but I didn’t. Even Mother, a smart woman, thought Rory would be a gangster even after he went to work in the pit like everybody else.

  “He won’t last,” she said. “He’ll get fired, if he don’t get killed first, doing something foolish.”

  One Friday in the winter he left with a quart of rum and a dozen beer and a smile and never showed up ’til a week from Monday, out of a taxi, a cast on one leg from toe to hip, a smile on his face, two crutches, and two poles, and one ski.

  “You fool,” I said when I got him in the house and sat him down on the sofa. “You can’t ski.”

  “Whyn’t you tell me that before I left?” he said, and, of course, the big smile.

  “The beginning of the end,” my mother said, with her eyebrows.

  Lauchie went steady with Liza six months. Then he took her home to meet me and Mother and Rory. Soon as she laid eyes on Rory she knew right then she made a mistake. How she knew I don’t know. There wasn’t a hair of difference between them. Rory knew it too. He shook hands with her. He never shook another person’s hand in his life. He put out his big paw and she put her little red one in it, and he put his other hand on her shoulder; you could see her sink under it a fraction. You could almost see her eyes lock into his. “You’ll like living here, Liza,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun if you look at it the right way.”

  “We’ll not be living here,” Lauchie said.

  “Oh,” said Rory. “I thought you were, next door, when the MacDonnells move out.”

  “Well, we are,” Lauchie said. “The there is not here. This is a duplex. Two different houses; one building.”

  “Some say it’s a duplex,” Rory said. “I say it’s a company house.”

  “Well, what’s the difference?”

  “Difference is simple,” Rory said. “In a duplex you can’t hear people drink water on the other side.”

  Lauchie wouldn’t marry her ’til the MacDonnells moved out, so we had six months to watch her trying to make up her mind. Of course, she couldn’t be sure Rory loved her. He might of been laughing at her. With him you couldn’t tell for sure. I could, but I’d been watching him for years. Every time she came to the house he shook her hand, and he curled his middle finger so it stuck in her palm, but he did it so it looked like he was making fun of Lauchie, how formal he was when he introduced them. “Rory,” he had said, “may I present to you my fiancée, Liza.” And Rory shook her hand, like he did every time after, even after the marriage, and said, like an Englishman in the movies, “Awfully good of you to come,” and everybody about doubled over laughing, except, of course, Lauchie and, of course, our mother; she stood there and waited for things to get back to “normal.”

  So Liza and and Lauchie got married; Mother died — “Mission accomplished, I suppose,” Rory said. And they lived across the wall from us, and honest to God we never heard a peep out of them ’til their kid was born. Then we heard the kid. They called him Rory. He cried for two years.

  When he stopped, Liza started. Both our stairs went up the wall that separated us and I first heard her through that wall, sitting on her stairs, sobbing. After that I took to going over every day to console her, but she never admitted to anything, though she knew I knew. She caught on pretty quick how much alike we were. She talked about it one night we were playing cards, which we did every Friday. “If me and her,” she said, meaning me, “if we got our x-rays mixed up, they wouldn’t be able to tell which one had TB.” We all looked at her but Lauchie; he looked at his cards.

  “What’s it mean, anyway, TB?” he said.

  “Tough biscuit,” Rory said.

  “You wouldn’t need an x-ray to figure that out,” I said, thinking to make a joke, but when I looked at Liza for her little smile, she was crying, and I knew there was no secret between us.

  When little Rory was five and about to go to school they left him with us on the miners’ vacation and went to Halifax to visit Liza’s sister and get Lauchie’s lungs looked at. “The little bugger needs a little fun before he goes to school,” Rory said, and gave him every minute of his time, took him everywhere, showed him everything he could think of, even took him down the pit and showed him where him and his father worked.

  When Lauchie and Liza came back, the boy go wouldn’t go back with them. They had to drag him back. Then he started school and every day he came home he came to the wrong gate and landed in our place.

  Lauchie would have to come over and drag him back.

  “I thought I told you to come straight home.”

  “I forgot,” he’d say.

  He kept it up ’til we locked him out. We had to, to keep Lauchie from getting desperate. But he’d start again every time he went through a new phase of growing, until he got to be nine, and after that he wouldn’t do his homework except at our place. He hated school, but he was first in his class because he did so much homework. Of course, Rory helped him; he couldn’t resist; and when he got to Grade Nine and Rory couldn’t help him anymore he started to teach Big Rory. He taught him Algebra, French, Latin, Geometry, Chemistry, English, and God knows what all. He used to bring home the exams and Rory would do them and make high marks. “If I’d a known I was that smart I’d a stayed in school,” he’d say. “Probably coulda been a teacher.’’

  Of course he’d show off in the wash-house and turned it into a big joke. “What did you learn today, Rory?” somebody’d say.

  “Today I learned that the sailor loves the girl,” he’d say.

  “And what have you got for homework?”

  “For homework we have the girl loves the sailor, but I know it already, puellam nauta amat.”

  “What would that be in Gaelic?”

  “In Gaelic, I couldn’t say. I’m a Latin scholar. You’d have to ask me grandmother.”

  But he wouldn’t carry it too far. He knew Lauchie felt bad and Rory wasn’t a mean man, no matter how much he liked to make fun.

  Once young Rory got to high school his home was nothing to him but bed and board. He had his tea first thing in the morning and last thing at night with us. He went into his side of the house for meals and bed. Nothing to do about it; he was too big then to make him. Liza sat on the stairs and sobbed.

  Rory felt bad but nothin’ he could do, and he couldn’t help it that he enjoyed the boy so much. I just watched. I knew something had to happen.

  When it happened, it happened very quietly. Of course, that was Liza’s way; but I was surprised; I expected a big fight; after all, seventeen years is a long time.

  When young Rory graduated he got a big Knights of Columbus Scholarship and off he went to College. Liza picked the worst day she could find. It was coming down in buckets. She took her big suitcase and a kitchen chair and sat in the road between the two gates in her Burberry and big-rimmed felt hat. It was the first time she ever looked beautiful. It was a Sunday. Both men were home. She went out after Mass and Rory and Lauchie, each in his own side of the house, opened the front doors and watched through their screen doors as she sat there in the mud. In those days there was no pavement, or even a ditch; the road came right up to the picket fence and she sat at the edge of it between the two gates. Talk about a sight. I can still see Rory standing there, peering through the screen, cup and saucer in his hand, sipping tea. And Lauchie on the other side, the same. I knew he would be. I just went over to check.

  “What do you think, Lauchie?’’ I asked him.

  “I think it has to be up to him.”

  And so it was. About six o’clock, Rory said to me, “You better go and tell her to come in. She’ll stay there all night.”

  So in she came. Put on dry clothes and sat and had tea. She cried. They were tears of joy. She was ashamed of them, but couldn’t help it. “I realize,” she said, “that I’m probably not making anybod
y happy but myself. I can’t help it.”

  After a few days when we all got the feeling it was settled for good, I moved over with Lauchie.

  “Are you mad, Lauchie?” I asked him.

  “Nobody to be mad at,” he said. “I’d like to be mad. But, you know, it’s not Rory’s fault. He didn’t encourage her; you know that. Just the opposite. Same for Liza. She tried for seventeen years. It’s not my fault. It’s nobody’s fault. Unless it’s all our faults. It should of been fixed up seventeen years ago when it started wrong. We all knew.”

  I certainly didn’t know he knew.

  “Well,” I said, “young Rory will be surprised when he comes home for Christmas.”

  “I wonder,” Lauchie said. “He’s supposed to be smart, too. I don’t imagine college’ll take it out of him that quick.”

  Clive Doucet

  Philibert Goes to Heaven

  Did you ever notice that people remember failure better than success? Wherever I go, it’s always the same story. Wonderful goes with the meat and potatoes, failure with dessert. The soup has barely hit the table and I’m told that the eldest son has just married a lovely girl. It was a marriage like no other. The bride looked wonderful. She was dressed all in white. The groom was as handsome as could be. We finish the soup with the mother’s eyes glistening at thoughts of her son’s marriage.

  The soup is cleared away.

  Monsieur tells me that he had a fine harvest this year. The barn is full of dry, sweet-smelling hay. He received a good price for his summer cattle. The Mrs. nods her head in agreement when her husband speaks and we all eat our meat and potatoes to the tune of a farm report.

  Then the dessert arrives.

  The husband leaves the room and the Mrs. tells me with deep regret in her voice that her first husband, a tall, handsome man, was drowned in a storm, not a mile from the harbour. Her second husband drinks too much, that’s why the kitchen is painted blue instead of white. He got drunk and mixed the blue paint with the white. When he gets one drink in him, he can’t seem to stop until the bottle’s gone. Then, there’s the daughter who went to the Boston States. Her mother did not want her to go. They had an argument. She had an operation last year, but the Mrs. doesn’t know what it was for, the daughter never writes. It’s these stories that the Mrs. dwells on like beautiful stones, she can never stop polishing.