Great Cape Breton Storytelling

by Great Cape Breton Storytelling (epub)

  His man-to-man approach was meant to indicate that both he and Gibbo were well versed in mining mishaps, and that it would be bad form all round to be anything but cynical in talking about the situation.

  “Freddie the Faker missed Wednesday; said he was sick. You can pick up the pays next payday, Gibbo. Doesn’t look like they’re going after them. Saves on undertakers, I guess.”

  Bington called Gibbo’s young nephew Fred, the Faker. In his opinion, Freddie was missing too much time off work for no good reason. Gibbo briefly considered choking Bington to death in his grimy office, for his disrespect. Years of self-discipline asserted themselves, and he wheeled around and left without responding to the cold taunts.

  Bington had delivered the message clearly. There wasn’t going to be too much fuss about two boys with Italian names who had been lost in a little coal mine in Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, in 1944. Not when every hour spent looking for them was an hour of production lost to the company. Not when it was a scene which with a little bad luck could repeat itself next week in a dozen places in Nova Scotia. Not with so many local boys slogging their way through Italy with the Allied Army during the past year.

  Gibbo understood.

  All the mining inspectors in the province couldn’t prevent a freak cave-in. If the rescuers started poking around in the wrong places, there was no telling how many other lives might be lost. Gibbo felt the enormous weight of practical logic and social barriers which sealed his two nephews forever below the ground of Sydney Mines with their pan shovels, their lunch cans and a colony of hungry rats.

  Gibbo thought of these things as he led his relatives away from the pithead. Some of the crowd remained, wondering when the next shift would be. Bington acted like he knew and wasn’t saying, but Mr. Waddell had not entrusted him with this information.

  The Marenellis and Legattos were quiet as they left. There wasn’t much to say, or preparations to be made. The boys were gone and that was it. Coal mining was risky, they were all aware of this, especially Gibbo.

  He had come to Cape Breton in 1912, marking his twelfth birthday on the boat coming over. His father was a widower who brought his four children to Canada. Gibbo, another brother Anthony, and two sisters, Theresa and Margo. The twins were sons of Theresa and her husband, Emilio Legatto. In 1915, Gibbo was working steady in the mines and by 1944 he had already spent twenty-nine years underground in the pits around the northside of Sydney Harbour. He was a short man, with a barrel chest, and arms like two tree stumps. His eyes were surrounded by dark circles of coal dust which only partly faded during the summer vacation.

  He had survived rock falls, run-a-way coal cars, strikes, and depression conditions. He was used to crawling through mud and darkness while working hard with a pick and shovel. Gibbo had been there to drag bleeding, screaming buddies from beneath the debris which had squashed them; he was there at other times when there was no screaming because someone’s head had been cut off or the pit had silenced a man in some other final way.

  Gibbo had been drained of any childish expectations about life. His round, dark face had a seriousness about it which rarely changed.

  It wasn’t that he had done so badly. He owned his own home, a one-storey bungalow with a vegetable garden in the backyard which he kept in excellent shape. He and his relatives shared an ancient pickup truck to poke around with. Gibbo was comfortable and what mattered more to him, he could look anyone in the eye knowing he didn’t owe them a nickel.

  None of this, however, had turned him into a jovial man. For him it was always a strange experience to hear miners laughing at work. They acted like they were on the sand at Lockman’s Beach on a summer day watching the waves come in, instead of scratching out an uncertain living coated with coal dust.

  Some miners would swear they had never heard Gibbo laugh underground. Because he was a foreigner they just assumed he didn’t catch their jokes in English. A few wondered if he might be too stuck up to pay attention to their vivid, funny stories of drunken, Saturday night encounters with the town police; or their blow-by-blow accounts of fist fights with some unsuspecting out-of-towner — or with one another, if that was all that was available.

  Actually Gibbo had caught on to the language easily, although he had never learned to read or write in English. He even found the stories entertaining. He stayed serious because he found coal mining serious. His attention was constantly on his surroundings, listening for warning noises which tipped him off about a hidden problem. Miners had lost count of the number of times he was the first to notice a build-up of gas; water pumps or air fans which were ready to quit; cables which had frayed and wouldn’t carry another trip safely. He had stopped hung-over shot-firers from carelessly blowing them all to kingdom come. In some miners this kind of alertness was a sure sign of fear. With Gibbo it simply showed that he couldn’t be haphazard when the fate of so many, including himself, was at stake.

  His buddies soon caught on and no longer cared whether Gibbo was a happy-go-lucky type or not. They were more secure knowing he was working alongside them. They saw he was not just a talker but a great man in a jam; that he could outwork just about any three men and usually did. When Mussolini entered the war and so many other Italian-born miners felt harassed, no one bothered Gibbo.

  The shrewder miners figured there was more to Gibbo Marenelli than met the eye, but none of them was able to explain it. Gibbo’s natural shyness, and his caution with liquor, which had washed away so much reticence in other miners, prevented him from talking freely about how his twenty-nine years underground had led him to his own upside-down way of seeing the world.

  As a young man, Gibbo had looked at mining as a dirty job, which had ruined his chances in life and brought a great deal of pain to a lot of people. He carried an unexpressed resentment towards his father for bringing him to this cold island, instead of going to the States like some of their cousins. As the years went by, however, the earth, the ground Gibbo worked in, had assumed a very different stature in his mind.

  Neighbors of his were familiar with the sight of the icy waters of Sydney Harbour and the Cabot Strait which spread out endlessly from the high rugged cliffs bordering the town. They carried on their lives in the kitchens, streets, grocery stores, and ballfields of Sydney Mines. The trains which passed noisily through their neighborhoods sometimes distracted them and took them to visit relatives in Boston or Halifax. Gibbo noticed though that very few people cared much about the earth they stood on, or built their houses on, even in a mining town like Sydney Mines. To Gibbo they were just on the surface of things, missing what had become so obvious to him.

  Whenever he heard on the radio about miners down in the bowels of the earth, he found it a bit insulting. He felt they should be talking about the heart and soul of the earth instead. That was how he had come to regard the mines, as the heart and soul of the town and of Cape Breton itself. Too many men had spent too much of their lives in the pits to describe them carelessly. All the lost friends, squashed arms, and broken backs, all the indignities suffered to put bread on the kitchen tables, these had earned for the mines and those in them, their own kind of special respect.

  Gibbo had visited the Roman catacombs with his grandfather when he was a boy back in the old country. To him the mines had that same feeling to them. Underground places where important events had taken place away from the eyes of the rest of the world. Events which couldn’t be just thrown aside like they didn’t count.

  Gibbo’s faith had also changed with time. The story of Adam and Eve being created out of the clay of the earth, and other beliefs, came closer to home. They lost their distant, make-believe quality, and melded in with his life as a miner.

  On Ash Wednesday, it pleased Gibbo to hear the priest say to everyone: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” as they were marked with the ashes. Gibbo thought this was a fine greeting and he couldn’t agree more with
the prediction. Nor did it surprise him any longer that Easter was so important. In fact, each day as he came out of the mine shaft towards daylight, he was reminded of Easter and the Resurrection and what life was all about over the long haul. Gibbo was sure that after spending their lives in the pits, miners like himself, who didn’t hang around the church an awful lot, knew more about pain and Easter than a lot of religious people might think.

  If he attended a funeral, Gibbo always made it a point to go to the graveyard. It was his favorite part of the whole ceremony. To see a coffin going into the freshly dug hole didn’t strike him as sad or scary. In fact it gave Gibbo a peculiar sense of satisfaction that things ended up the way they did. He felt that no miner could be surprised that everyone, even Mr. Bington, took a trip underground eventually, and they needn’t bother bringing a lamp, or a lunch or anything.

  It was understandable then that Gibbo was far from content with the way his two nephews had been left behind forever, without a word from the company. The two-inch column in the Sydney newspaper, reporting that two unidentified miners were thought to have been accidentally killed in Sydney Mines, was no help either when it was read to him. A familiar uneasiness disturbed Gibbo. He’d noticed it before many times when a miner was lost underground, and people just went on with their business as if the man didn’t count; or as if it was one of those things no one could do anything about, like a rainy day. This time though it was his own nephews who had been trapped, and Gibbo was convinced that the whole affair had not been finished decently for those boys along with a lot of others he could name.

  The thought of this neglect festered away inside him, with the fury of an underground inferno which no one could see or imagine.

  The pit re-opened on Monday. The general opinion was that the sooner the miners got back on the job, the better all the way around. Gibbo understood this too and went back with the rest when his turn came.

  But as summer went on, he found that his usually clear thoughts remained unsettled. He would go as often as possible and sit on Greener’s Hill, near the cliffs overlooking Sydney Harbour. The Harbour was busy with convoy ships getting ready to set out for the North Atlantic. The naval base across the water at Point Edward was active with repairs and refits. A few boats were loading coal at the coal piers. Usually Gibbo’s interest was absorbed by all this activity. That summer though, he spent long hours staring at an imposing brown monument near the main road on Greener’s Hill, where everyone coming into the town could easily see it. It stood about eight feet high by three feet wide. It was made of stone and sited on an empty field, so that it could also be seen on a clear day from the boats as they steamed about in the Harbour. One of Gibbo’s other nephews, Arthur, Margo’s son, who was smart in school, had read the words engraved on the monument for him and Gibbo was able to repeat them without any trouble — something he did often that summer.

  It was dedicated as follows:

  ERECTED TO MARK FIRST

  LANDING MADE BY H.M. EDWARD VII

  THEN PRINCE OF WALES

  ON CANADIAN SOIL

  JULY 28 — 1860

  UNVEILED BY

  H.R.H.

  DUKE OF CONNAUGHT

  GOVERNOR GENERAL

  AUG. 3 1912

  Gibbo thought this was an awfully fine monument for a Prince of the British Empire who had never worked inside a coal mine or done anything for Cape Breton except visit it a long time ago. He knew people whose tour of Cape Breton had lasted far longer than that of the Prince of Wales.

  He remembered Jim LeBlanc, a good rugby player who had lost his right arm above the elbow in 1927 when he was twenty-two years old, and who hadn’t drawn a sober breath since they took him out of the pit. He thought about Fred Nicholson who had to walk on two wooden crutches since one March night in 1923 when a coal car went over his legs and cut them off. Fred hadn’t been seen outside his house again, except once in 1932 when Nicholson’s house caught on fire, and his father carried him outside to safety, despite Fred’s struggle to remain inside. Gibbo thought about Leo MacPherson’s widow Ada, who had been living mostly on hand-outs, including some from Gibbo himself, after Leo was killed in a 1936 gas explosion.

  As he sat on the hill that summer, many other buddies tumbled through his vision. Old miners he had worked with over the years, pretty well forgotten now with the war on and all; young miners like the twins he would never see again, although they weren’t that far away. And one warm sunny afternoon during August while he was alone and watching the pit ponies standing outside in the shock of the unfamiliar fresh air, Gibbo was startled to find himself crying helplessly for the first time since he had left his grandparents in Italy, knowing he would never see them again either. He stayed on Greener’s Hill a long time that day.

  When he got up and started for home, Gibbo realized he needed to do some things and that evening he felt better than he had since the accident.

  What he had in mind was going to take a lot of time to do properly; still he had no idea in 1944, that fifteen years would pass before he was done, and that in some ways the task would always remain impossible to finish completely.

  His first worry was whether he could buy the property he wanted. As it turned out, it was not until 1955 that Junior Roberts’ old lot came up on a tax sale. At least Junior owned it when Gibbo became interested in 1944. Junior had no use for the land, but Gibbo knew it would be hard to arrange a deal with Roberts. Junior wouldn’t sell anything unless he could gouge you; whether it was the bootleg liquor he sold, or some useless land. Gibbo wasn’t about to be fleeced by Junior Roberts.

  There were other problems between Gibbo and Junior besides money, which assured that Roberts wasn’t going to sell Gibbo something he wanted, supposing he was starving to death and Gibbo was the only buyer on earth.

  Like several other local feuds this one had its roots during Prohibition. Junior had squealed that some of Gibbo’s relatives were selling homebrew booze. Even when he was in a fair mood Junior liked to go out of his way to stir up trouble for no good reason. In this case, avarice was his chief motive. He didn’t want anyone luring away his bootlegging customers. Finally, with Junior pushing and paying, the authorities raided Gibbo’s Uncle Angelo. Angelo and his wife got the worst fright of their long lives. They fully expected they would be shipped back to Italy on the next boat.

  There were few juicy stories around town which did not float through the pit, sooner or later. Within the week Gibbo knew that Junior Roberts was bragging that he was behind the raid. Soon after, Gibbo and his brother Tibby waited quietly for Junior as he stepped outside his back door after supper, for a Saturday evening’s entertainment. Junior was dressed sharply with a new white silk scarf and white shirt.

  Gibbo didn’t introduce himself, or make any speeches, before he grabbed Junior and started hammering away with his big fists. Junior’s white scarf, like his face, was very messy, and he was sore and stiff all over, after about five minutes violent action with Gibbo. Gibbo had a bruised right shin from a good kick Junior had landed, but otherwise he was unscathed. The next week Gibbo’s outhouse was burned down while he was at work, which most people agreed was uncalled for. If the wind had been blowing in a slightly different direction, it could have been much worse, because Gibbo’s house would have gone up in smoke as well.

  After that, things settled down to a state of mutual hatred, which was manageable as long as they avoided each other. There was no hope though that Gibbo would ever buy anything from Junior.

  In 1952 matters took an unexpected twist in Gibbo’s favor, when Junior lost his property to Les Flanagan during an all-night poker game at The Confederation Hotel in Charlottetown. Junior had run out of cash at 4 a.m., causing him to wager the little lot in Sydney Mines instead of cash. Fortunately for Gibbo’s plans, Les was holding the right cards for the occasion. He relieved Junior of his property along with nearly six hundred dollars, co
mpletely spoiling Junior’s trip to the Old Home Week harness races that year. Les soon realized that he didn’t have the slightest use for the land he had won, and that maybe Junior had slipped one by him after all. Les stopped paying taxes on it as soon as he saw it.

  The lot in Sydney Mines was a narrow, pencil-shaped strip which measured 125 X 25. It was too small to put a house or any building on. There were alders on the front part towards the road and in the rear some bullrushes grew sparsely where it started to get swampy. The land was wedged between a larger open field and a short stone fence. Many years ago the whole area had been one farm. When the farming was abandoned the entire acreage had been split up unevenly among the family members.

  The Town Clerk was surprised that Gibbo showed up at the lot sale. There were better properties available at the time, and on the face of it, the purchase didn’t make much sense. Gibbo’s own place was twenty minutes walk from there, and Gibbo was known in the town as a man who was careful with his money as with everything else.

  Gibbo had other ideas. He would have gladly paid a great deal more and if it were necessary he would even have borrowed money at the Credit Union, unless the money was going to Junior Roberts. But land in Cape Breton was cheap in those days, and more often than not, a person couldn’t give it away, let alone sell it. He’d had a chance to get the Young property further up the street, house and all, in 1951, when Charlie and Agnes Young had moved to Toronto. Gibbo had considered this seriously but he wasn’t satisfied their place was situated exactly where he wanted it.

  When the Town Clerk handed him the deed, Gibbo was elated. As close as he could figure, the lot wasn’t one hundred yards from the site he had wanted for so long and he was sure it was a lot closer than that.

  Gibbo liked to be precise about things and, for a location as important to him as this one, he intended to make no mistakes. What Gibbo wanted was the land directly above the tunnel where his nephews had been lost in June of 1944 and where they had remained ever since. To find this, he had painstakingly traced out the maze of mining tunnels under the town of Sydney Mines for months until he knew them better than Malcie MacVicar himself. Finally he was able to match up the two locations above and below ground to his satisfaction, which had led him to Junior Roberts’ land which lay right over the boys.