Twenty-Six

BOOKS BY LEO McKAY JR.

Like This
(1995)
Twenty-Six
(2003)

D
eath hides its face in winter, when trees are impossible to distinguish. The bony hands of branches clutch at the sky, waiting for the sun to rise high enough to warm them back to life. With so many elms sick, and some of them dying now, the only thing was to wait for spring before you put your hope anywhere.

Spring was a far-off place to Ziv as he stood in his parents’ driveway, his hot breath rising in clouds into the dark air above him. He looked up at the grey branches of the pair of elms that marked the boundary of his parents’ property and could not recall whether they’d been dead last summer or merely sick.

He put a mittened hand on the rear fender of his father’s car to steady himself as he stared at the translucent blind pulled down over the living-room window. “I hope the bastard’s dead,” he said out loud to no one. He was trying to detect movement inside the house, but he was good and drunk, and it was difficult to detect anything in his condition. He saw nothing but filtered light
through the blind. All three bulbs in the pole lamp beside the couch were switched on; he could tell that. The
TV
was flicking the room light, then dark. But if there was any movement inside, he could not see it. The smell of furnace oil from the nearby tank hung in a thick layer over the more subdued smells of a cold winter night.

He took off his mitts, stuffed them into the pockets of his parka, and unzipped his fly in the biting February cold. “Shit,” he said as he pissed onto the snow. When he was finished, he zipped himself up again, put the mitts back on, and went unsteadily back to the end of the driveway to continue his aimless walk. It was now one thirty in the morning and it had been more than an hour since his last drink. Still, he was too drunk to go inside. He hated being drunk now. He hated himself for having got so drunk that he could not show his face inside his house. It was his parents’ house, actually, and he hated that, too. Five years ago he could have called it his house. But he was twenty-three years old now, he’d be twenty-four in a few months, and he could not bring himself to call it his house when he was paying room and board. He’d lived in this house his whole life. He’d been brought here directly from the Aberdeen Hospital in New Glasgow a few days after his birth, and except for a short time at university in the early eighties, he’d been here, a permanent resident of this address, ever since.

He walked to the corner of Hudson Street and looked down the channel the sidewalk plough had made. He’d passed through here several times already tonight, wandering around and around the neighbourhood, wishing for himself to sober up, or for the light to go off in the living room, the signal that his father had gone to bed, so he could go inside without setting off a row.
His legs felt wobbly and weak. He was drunk, he was tired, he was hungry.

The neighbourhood he was walking through was called the Red Row, a half-dozen or so blocks of duplexes built by the Acadia Coal Company in the first decades of the century. The Red Row had originally housed miners who worked in the many pits that had pocked the landscape of Pictou County, Nova Scotia. Although the original pits had long been closed, a few elderly retired miners and descendants of those deceased still lingered in the company houses at the north end of the little town called Albion Mines. This is what Ziv was: a descendant of coal miners. And he was acutely aware of it. Even drunk, when the list of what he was aware of dwindled to a dozen or so items, being the descendant of coal miners was on that small list. He only had to raise his eyes and look at the company houses all around him to understand how completely submersed he was in that murky history.

He walked drunk down Hudson Street, into the heart of the old neighbourhood. The steeply pitched roofs of the identical storey-and-a-half houses had all shed their snow. Snow lay clumped in even heaps below the eaves. Fifty, sixty years ago, a person could have walked down this street and known with certainty that someone in every house had worked in some capacity in one of the mines. But Ziv looked at the houses now and realized he did not know where all these people worked, though he could guess at the relative success of the occupants by the state of repair of the house itself. Some Red Row houses were dilapidated. They had not been painted in years, roofing shingles had not been replaced. Chimneys had crumbled, shedding bricks down the roof. Other houses, freshly painted or sided, featured newer windows. Some even had paved driveways.

Ziv himself worked at Zellers in the Aberdeen Mall, over in the nearby town of New Glasgow. His father, now on disability, had been one of the last few men employed in the Car Works, the shrinking railcar factory in Trenton. Once, he knew, in his father’s lifetime, people had been defined by their work. “What do you do?” had been a question that opened conversations. But there was a growing class of people now, some of whom lived in the Red Row, who didn’t do anything. They were not really unemployed, because they weren’t looking for work. Long past their eligibility for unemployment insurance, many of these people lived on welfare, the generosity of relatives, and whatever odd jobs they could do for the neighbours in exchange for a few dollars.