Twenty-Six (24 page)

By late afternoon, the
TV
news had turned George Hannah into a prophet. When the Eastyard mine had still been in its planning stages, a news crew had gone to the Albion Mines Miner’s Museum, where the old man worked as the caretaker, and asked him what he thought of opening a new mine on the volatile seams that had been worked in Pictou County for over a hundred years. “You’d might as well build the memorial to the dead right now,” the old man had said, the crest on his Royal Canadian Legion beret glinting in the sun. The camera zoomed in on his face so that its shadows showed every crag and scar. “Just leave plenty of room on it to carve the names in later.” Even the American networks had picked up on the year-old footage, and it was impossible to watch any channel for very long without seeing it.

At the surface, the
TV
showed the draegermen reappearing from the twisted portal, black with soot and dust. Shaking. A supply of fresh air had been restored to parts of the number-one deep, but in the areas without ventilation, the air temperature soared to a swelter that made the full draegerman’s gear almost unbearable. With the shaft so badly burnt, the metal supports so twisted and melted, the primary fear of the draegermen was rock fall from overhead. Even a minor collapse under these conditions could prove fatal, since access to machinery and personnel was limited.

Media were being held at bay some distance from the portal, when it was announced that the relief draeger crew was put together. A reporter from an American network caught up to someone who must have been part of the original crew as he was
driving away in his pickup. The man was reluctant to talk, but just before he closed the door of his truck, the reporter shouted: “What’s it like down there?”

The draegerman rubbed a hand over his face, looked down a moment, then faced the camera. “Hell,” he said. “Except … If you were in Hell, you’d have the peace of mind of knowing you were dead.”

By the third time this clip was shown, it was already after midnight. Dunya stood up and shut off the
TV
. “This is telling us nothing,” she said, and neither Ziv nor Ennis stood to turn the thing back on.

The morning of the second day, after very little sleep, they sat together in the kitchen. Ennis got up and made himself a ragged-looking fried egg, put it in a bowl, and poked at it with a fork, moving it back and forth across its own trail of grease. The three of them sat silently, sipping at black coffee because they were afraid they could not hold down milk. This was the first time in years that the three of them had sat at table together without fighting.

They did not discuss going to the fire hall. When the coffee pot was empty, they got up from the table, put on their coats and boots, and got into the car together.

Snow fell lightly as Ennis drove south on Foord Street. The early-morning winter light was dim, and diminished further by the curtain of falling snow that seemed draped over the car.

“You had a hand in this, Ennis,” said Dunya, her voice quiet, but menacing.

“For the love of God, woman,” Ennis said.

“You encouraged that boy to go into the mine.”

“It was my shift,” Ziv said. “Arvel got moved onto it the day I quit.”

“Nobody blames
you
,” Dunya said.

“Who are you blaming, then?” Ennis said.

“I can’t see the town clock through the snow,” Dunya said as they drove past the town hall. She pulled back the sleeve of her coat and looked at her watch.

“I asked you a question,” Ennis said.

The Plymouth Fire Hall was just across the river at the south end of Albion Mines, only a few hundred metres from the gates of Eastyard Coal. It was still snowing as they approached. Through the heavy gauze of flakes, Ennis could see the crowd of media, cameras, microphones, vans with satellite dishes bolted to the roof. This group was being held back, within sight of the fire hall, but beyond a distance at which anyone on the outside of the makeshift fence of yellow traffic barricades could communicate with anyone in or around the fire hall. Police patrolled barricades vigorously and pushed back newspeople to make way for the approach of the car of a family member.

Ennis sat bolt upright. He felt like a scab, driving through the throng of cameras and reporters, where a Mountie unhooked a chain and pushed aside two yellow barricades to let the car pass through. He instinctively held a hand at the side of his face so no one could take his picture.

In the room usually used for wedding dances and community meetings, families hugged each other and wept. There were only two small windows, which let in hardly any natural light. Bare bulbs in round fixtures poured out a glare that was almost audible.

A big woman in a grey sweatshirt met them when they arrived. Ennis forgot her name as soon as she said it. Sheets of newsprint, painted in a childish way with the names of all twenty-six men, hung on the walls around the room. A small woman with broad shoulders, whom people called Audrey, was taping the last of these to the scuffed gyproc wall, as though in preparation for a homecoming. When he saw Arvel’s name, painted in big letters, a flower where the “e” should have been, Ennis had a vision.

Blackness turned to glinting half-light in the still atmosphere of the mine below. Overhead, melted steel arches curled toward the floor. Face-down and scorched blacker than coal, Arvel’s body lay in a powdery bath of ashes.

“I’ll not stay here,” Ennis said, his eyes racing about for something he could rest them on that made sense. Dunya was halfway across the room, a woman from the Catholic Women’s League had an arm around her shoulders and was leading her toward a tray of sandwiches. Ennis made his way to her. “I’ll not stay here,” he said.

Ziv had driven him home, and as they pulled into the driveway, he tried to change Ennis’s mind.

“You’ll be alone down here,” he said. “Come back up to the fire hall.”

Ennis would have none of it. He shook his head and stepped out into the ankle-deep powdery snow on the driveway. He bent over and looked at Ziv in the driver’s seat, shook his head again, and slammed the passenger door.

When he got inside, he sat at the kitchen table and listened to his silent house. His heel and his tailbone still throbbed from his kick at the fridge two nights ago. He looked at the familiar
kitchen. Arvel had lived so much of his life within these walls that he must in some way still be here. Arvel’s voice had vibrated through this air and had been absorbed by these walls. In the future, Ennis thought, there will be a machine that you can plug into a room which will replay every conversation that ever took place there.

He’d like to believe now that if there had been no explosion on Arvel’s shift, he would have apologized when Arvel had gotten home that morning. But even in his grief, he could not fool himself into thinking he would have done so. He’d never apologized to anyone in his life. For anything. He’d gone to confession in the days when he’d been a practising Catholic, but he’d done it by rote. His trips to the confessional had been little games of scorekeeping, where he’d rattle off a list of sins, prattle his way through the act of contrition, and go home feeling no freer of sin than he’d ever been.

He rose from the table and took the forty of rum from the cupboard. The furnace came on downstairs, setting up motion in the curtains. In the half-dark of the north window, a few dust motes rose up to the light. He poured Pepsi into a tall glass, then topped that with Captain Morgan. He stared hard at the doorway and tried to will Arvel to appear again in it. He recalled what they spoke of, the last words he would ever say to his son: a threat. He watched Arvel leave again, heard his own voice bellow.

Ennis was certain Arvel was dead, and thinking of Arvel’s body now, smothered with coal dust far below the surface of the earth, he remembered once having saved his son’s life. The boy could not have been more than five or six years old and the whole family was swimming in the river at Iona Park, south of Albion Mines.

Both boys had been knee-deep in the water when Ennis had turned away to get a beer from the cooler. When he looked back, Ziv was standing alone, pointing soundlessly downriver to where Arvel was rolling over and over like a log down some light rapids.

He recalled running through the shallows and scooping his spluttering son from just beneath the surface. He remembered the exact way he’d held the boy to his chest, and how warm he’d felt against him even after his plunge into the cold water.

The phone rang. Ennis took a moment to bring himself back to the world, then brought his rum and Pepsi to the table, sat, and picked up the receiver.

“Hello? Hello?” It was a young man’s voice, formal and rehearsed. The connection was slightly staticky.

“Hello,” Ennis said.

“Could I speak to Ennis Burrows, please?”

“This is Ennis Burrows.”

“Mr. Burrows, it’s Randolf Meyers calling from
NBC
television news.”

“I’ve talked with enough reporters already,” Ennis said. “I’m sorry.” He hung up abruptly. The instant he put the phone on the hook, it rang again, startling him.

“Hello,” he said warily, ready to hang up if it was another reporter.

“Ennis, it’s Allie.”

At the sound of Allie McInnis’s voice, Ennis remembered the argument they’d had at the Tartan. In a flash, he saw himself pushing a beer glass into McInnis’s open mouth. Had that been only two nights ago?

“I’m sorry,” the two men said in unison.

Ennis picked up his tumbler of black, syrupy rum and Pepsi and looked at the acid bubbles that rose through it to the top, where they burst into the air. He raised the glass to his lips and drank.

“I heard your boy is down there,” McInnis said.

“He’s found a place to stay,” Ennis said. McInnis was silent. How could he know what Ennis was talking about? “His wife kicked him out of one house, then I threw him out of another. He found a place now that he can’t get kicked out of.” Ennis picked up the rum and took another big drink.

“Don’t talk like that, Ennis,” McInnis said. “You have to stay hopeful.”

“Kaboom, and the whole fucking world changes. Listen to you. After what I did the other night, you should be waiting outside my back door with a baseball bat.”

“Forget about the other night. We were drunk, the two of us. I deserved to have my mouth shut for me.”

“And I deserved to be blown to fucking bits. Only it was my son that got that treatment.”

“I don’t want to tie up your line, Ennis. I’m sorry about this. I don’t know what the hell I can do, but if you think of something, just call me.”

“I never should have done it,” Ennis said.

“Will you forget that? I got you worked up. I knew what I was doing.”

“Anyway … I’m sorry.” Ennis hung up the phone and lowered his face toward the table, resting his forehead on the back of his arm.

The phone started up again, and he listened to it ring four or five times, certain it was another reporter. It rang again and
the thought that it might be Dunya with some news made him pick up.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Burrows?”

“Yes.”

“John Wexler,
ABC
news.”

Ennis put the phone back on the hook, waited a few seconds, then picked it up again. When he heard a dial tone, he left the receiver off the hook and put his head back down onto his arm.

They’d bought this house just before Arvel was born, moved out of the one down near Kirk Avenue they’d been renting from Stan Kravchuk, a friend of Dunya’s father. He’d spent years in this house, a young man’s entire lifetime, years at this table in this kitchen, years of ranting and storming. The room had soaked up all that anger. It had absorbed all that had taken place in it. He turned his head so his ear rested on the table. All those years, all that pain, could never be forgotten or erased. So he listened. He closed his eyes, silenced his own thoughts, and listened.

Jackie arrived at the fire hall with Colleen and the girls. Someone at the door told them there were toys set up for the kids in a room downstairs. It was a chilly room with a concrete floor that sloped in all directions toward a big steel drum in the centre. It looked like a place where equipment cleaning and maintenance might take place, though there was no sign of any gear in the room. Against one wall, three big fan-driven electric heaters created a warm blast at eye level, but did not dispel the chill that crept up from the icy floor.

As soon as they’d entered the room, the two girls ran to a big pile of yellow and black construction toys without even glancing back at their mother. Jackie checked to see that the children were supervised and she and Colleen climbed back up the stairs.

In the far corner of the big room upstairs, a group of haggard women consoled each other. As the day wore on, the group swelled and shrank and swelled again. At times there were men sprinkled in amongst the women. Almost always there were children. Sometimes the group formed a large, almost perfect circle, at times it broke up into smaller huddles. Among this odd collection of people who were on intimate terms with each other, despite the fact that most were strangers, Jackie was able to come face-to-face with her shock and grief. So many of the other wives of the twenty-six underground seemed to be holding out hope, believing, mustering the strength within themselves to believe that their husbands were still alive. These women were boisterous and demonstrative, giving encouraging hugs when someone showed signs of despair. Jackie was one of the others, one of the quiet, sullen women who strained through a tired smile when someone else tried to cheer her up.