Twenty-Six (16 page)

The towns of Pictou County were all larger than the university town, and had probably grown just as much since the Second World War. But whereas growth in the university town had taken place along with the campus, growth in the towns of Pictou County had come in the waves of the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism, and each bust had left its scars on the landscape. There were abandoned industrial rail lines here and there, their railbeds gone over to weeds. There were old sheds
and warehouses, small factories that had been sitting empty since before Ziv was born. There were factories large enough to house a workforce of thousands, in which mere dozens were now employed.

As the bus pulled off of Provost Street and into the loading zone next to the rear door of the Acadian Lines terminal in New Glasgow, Ziv caught a glimpse of his father standing uneasily against the sandstone wall, waiting for him. When Ziv stepped off the bus, Ennis rolled onto the balls of his feet. His shoulders moved up and forward. The heavy canvas of his coat crinkled in the cold.

“Is this your only bag?” he said. He’d been suppressing a smile up to now, but one sneaked out, and once it had appeared, he was unable to wipe it off. He leaned forward and took the knapsack away from Ziv. Neither of them spoke as they made their way across the quiet parking lot. As his father drove from New Glasgow to Albion Mines, a feeling grew in Ziv of having been disconnected, unplugged from the place of his birth. He’d spent his whole life in Pictou County up to four months ago. Before he’d left at the beginning of September, the landscape of Albion Mines and the other towns, these had etched themselves on his mind as something permanent. The whole world, before September, had sloped slowly to the East River. The university town had its own topography that had begun eroding the permanence of the shape of Pictou County in his mind. But the most remarkable changes since September were completely internal. In four months, he’d been exposed to Freud, Pavlov, Marx, Weber, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Milton, and Chaucer. He’d never had an inkling before of how deeply and completely the world had been examined for and shaped by ideas.

After an intensive two-week period of exams, he emerged from the Acadian Lines bus, his head aswim with notions. The whole universe seemed to have been pried loose from itself.

His father was talking to him as they drove, had been talking to him since they’d got into the car. But Ziv had not been hearing or listening. Ziv had written his philosophy exam that morning: three hours of rehashing the Sophists to Scholasticism. He had a hand on the dashboard before him and he kept drawing it back and replacing it on the padded surface, each time surprised that his hand did not pass through the plastic, rubber, and metal.

He knew he was sitting forward in his seat, and that his head was tilted forward on his neck. He knew that the top of his back and shoulders were not touching the seat behind him, and that there was a forward twist in his neck. But his equilibrium was out-of-order. He felt as though he were lying back, far back on a flat surface, his feet elevated above his head, the world pouring through his forehead and directly into his brain.

Ennis had left school at the end of Grade 8, back in the mid-forties. So the notion of university and what Ziv was doing there was vague and alien to him. All the same, he had an idea that Ziv was reading. He’d always been an avid reader himself: non-fiction books, pocket novels, magazines, and newspapers. He was so familiar with the literature of the labour movement that the younger people in the movement referred to him as a walking encyclopedia of labour history and law.

Secretly, all fall, for the first time in his life, Ennis began to keep a scrapbook. He’d bought a cheap one at Stedman’s on
Foord Street with a picture of a covered bridge on the front that looked like a photo for a jigsaw puzzle. He’d filled that with newspaper and magazine clippings.

He read the
New Glasgow Evening News
, the
Chronicle-Herald
, and the
Globe and Mail
almost every day. On the weekends, he picked up the
Cape Breton Post
. He read
Canadian Forum
magazine,
This Magazine, Atlantic Insight, Maclean’s
, and
New Maritimes
.

Anything he thought might have held interest and deserved a second look, he clipped. He bought a Swiss Army knife, one with a little pair of scissors, at the House of Knives in the Highland Square Mall, and hooked this to his key ring. When he read something he thought was of particular interest, he snipped out the whole article and Scotch-taped it into the scrapbook. After he’d filled the first, cheap scrapbook, he went back to reread the articles so he could brush up on the issues in them. He quickly realized that the thin newsprint paper and glue binding of the scrapbook was not very durable, so for his next book he went to the art-supply section of Hobby World and got an artist’s sketchbook with a spiral binding. Using a glue stick, he discovered, was faster, cheaper, better-looking, and gave a more reliable bond than Scotch Tape. By mid-October, he had the first scrapbook and two sketchbooks stuffed and bulging with clipped articles. Every individual piece he read at least twice, and soon he’d started a special scrapbook in which he put all the material he’d deemed worthy of a third look.

At first he thought he was collecting random bits of unrelated information, so the first few books had no organizing principle. But on rereading the material he collected, he noticed that there were certain ideas he was drawn to collect over and over again. Eventually he began to notice that almost everything he clipped
fit under one of four headings: Labour Issues, Nuclear Issues, Nova Scotia Heritage, and Futurism. There were also articles on the Tylenol murders that had shaken up the U.S. that fall. These did not belong neatly in any particular category.

Under the heading of Labour Issues, there were articles on unemployment, workplace automation, two-tier contracts, and the massive wave of layoffs washing over every industry.

He hadn’t shown anyone the books of clippings. And though Dunya knew he was doing something that he wasn’t telling anyone about, she never asked what it could be. Wasn’t that typical of her?

He took the longer way to Albion Mines from the bus station: up Provost Street, East River Road, and through Blue Acres, the whole time his tongue and brain working furiously. Ziv sat silently beside him and did not say a word. Why did the U.S. refuse to ratify
SALT II
? Where was the Canadian government going to store the long-term waste from the Point Lepreaux reactor, set to start production soon? Why was the Canadian government kowtowing to the American military by allowing cruise-missile tests in Canadian airspace? Management was squeezing union members hard, pressuring members with seniority to sell out those at the bottom of the scale. The media and politicians were such hypocrites that they could cry real tears over union leader Lech Wałęsa when the economic establishment he was up against was a communist one, while at the same time being so obviously biased against the union movement here at home. Researchers in artificial intelligence were creating new life, silicon-based life as opposed to the carbon-based life that evolved on Earth by itself. Soon the silicon-based life would be in direct competition with humans for control of the planet. All
of these advances were put in perspective by the failing health of Barney Clark, recipient of the first artificial heart.

By the time Ennis had pulled the car into the yard, he’d worked himself into a lather.

“I’ve got something I want to show you, Ziv,” Ennis said once they were inside the unheated porch. He was huffing and puffing. His blood pressure was up.

“Don’t get yourself so worked up,” Ziv said. “You’re red as a beet.”

“Come on upstairs, I’ve got something I want to show you.”

“Geez, Dad. Can’t it wait? I’m tired and hungry.”

“Ziv!” his mother said when he entered the kitchen. “Look at you! Son, you look terrible. What’s wrong?”

“I’m exhausted. I just finished my exams this morning. I was up half the night. My head is swimming.”

Ennis grabbed Ziv by the elbow and pulled him in the direction of the stairs. “He don’t have time for this right now. I got something upstairs I want him to see.”

Ziv was blinking away his bewilderment as his father almost dragged him through the two rooms and up the stairs at the front of the house.

“I’ve been using your desk,” Ennis said. “I knew you wouldn’t mind.” They entered Ziv’s bedroom. Ziv plunked down on the bed and sprawled back onto the mattress. “Ah,” he said. He closed his eyes and looked to be drifting off to sleep.

“Look at this,” Ennis said, slapping Ziv’s leg lightly with the back of his hand. “Jesus, don’t sleep. It’s the middle of the day. Look at this.”

Ennis had placed a cardboard box on a shelf of the brown cabinet that had been in this room when he had bought the
house. He unfolded the flaps of the box now as though he were expecting the package to explode. He took scrapbooks one at a time from the box and set them on the desktop nearby.

Astonishment was the only thing Ziv felt as he looked through the scrapbooks his father had put together. The books had been thumbed through so many times that they looked aged. The covers were crinkled, the corners dog-eared. After the weeks of writing exams and four months of stuffing his head full of information that, just last August, he had not even been aware existed, Ziv had no room in his brain for any of this. His eyes passed over the headlines and photographs. Labour relations, he thought. Nuclear waste. Some of the articles were labelled as to their sources: the
Chronicle-Herald
, the
Globe and Mail
, the
Cape Breton Post
, and the
New Glasgow Evening News. Time
was represented in the pages his father had collected.
Maclean’s
. There were several magazines he was unfamiliar with.

“I don’t have time to read this stuff now, Dad,” he tried to sound apologetic. His father was waiting for him to do something; Ziv was trying to imagine what.

“I don’t want you to
read
it,” Ennis said. His voice was tender; the unfamiliar tone of it frightened Ziv. Ziv’s tongue was dry. He could taste the metallic flavour of the roof of his mouth. He set the book he was holding to one side and picked up one he had not yet seen.

“I … I don’t really understand,” he said. He looked out his bedroom window at the lamp out on Hudson Street and the circle of dun earth it illuminated. It had grown dark in the short
time since the bus had arrived. A tremor set up in his chest. A hollow feeling. An awareness of the importance of whatever words he’d be able to summon.

“It’s a scrapbook,” Ennis said, his face slowly darkening. “I collected this stuff.”

“Why? I don’t get it.” It was all Ziv could think to say.

“I knew it,” Ennis said. “I knew I shouldn’t have shown these things to you.” He began angrily repacking the cardboard box, throwing scrapbook upon scrapbook, then folding the flaps back over the top.

“Dad, Dad, look,” Ziv said. He got up and followed his father into the hallway and down the stairs.

“It’s my mistake,” said Ennis. “Everything’s my goddamn mistake. I never should have tried to show you nothing.”

“Dad, I’m tired. You don’t know what I’ve just been through.”

“No, I don’t know. Of course I don’t. I don’t know nothing.”

“Let’s look at this stuff tomorrow. You can tell me what you’ve been thinking about.”

“Like hell,” Ennis said. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

“What are you two fighting over already?” Dunya said when she caught sight of her husband and son.

Ennis set the box down on the floor of the porch and put on his coat and boots.

“Dad, for God’s sake,” Ziv said. “Let’s look at that stuff. We’ll look at it now. For God’s
sake
.”

When Ennis left the house he took the box of scrapbooks with him. Ziv went to the living-room window and watched his father putting the box into the trunk. Anyone watching from another house, or from the sidewalk on the way past, would have thought merely:
there is a man putting a box into the trunk of
his car
. Ziv had been part of the scene leading up to this, but he understood little more. He knew what was inside the box, and he knew that wherever the man was going, when he returned, the trunk of the car would be empty.