Twenty-Six (29 page)

She’d lain for a time on the floor, her head resting on the overnight bag, drifting in and out of a light sleep. Later, she stood stiffly and looked around the empty room. She went into the kitchen and put the overnight bag into the garbage. When the lid dropped onto the can, she had an idea. She got out her Sears card and the catalogue and ordered three gallons of flat white paint. A few days later, Ziv rollered over everything; wood panelling, wallpaper, broken old plaster, bare wood, all of it. She covered it all in white, drawing up a sheet over the inside of the house.

And this was more or less the way the house remained. Ziv told her about futons, big pads of covered cotton you could buy for cheap. One of these was folded in half, part of it on the floor, part of it against the wall in the front room. She was getting old to be raising and lowering herself to such a level, but she noticed that it got easier, week by week, as she kept doing it.

She made a clean, white space for herself to thrive in. She thought of it as culturing herself, the way they cultured bacteria when they did a test on you in the hospital. She needed an environment where she could breathe and live. She came down the stairs every day, made herself some tea, and sat in the curtainless, colourless, furnitureless front room, and waited as the sun moved around, reflected off the snow outside, and filled the room with light.

People came to visit her. People from the neighbourhood, Arvel’s widow, people who had worked at Eastyard. They wanted to know how she was doing. “I don’t know yet,” was the answer she always gave. Many more people crossed in front of the house
on the sidewalk, shamelessly curious to look in at her. They’d heard all sorts of stories. They’d heard she slept on the floor some nights with no blankets, in front of the window in her clothes, which was true. They’d heard she took her clothes off sometimes and sat in the middle of the room where everyone passing by could see her naked, which was not. They’d heard she chopped the furniture up herself with an axe and was in the middle of chopping up her husband when her son stopped her.

Ennis occasionally entered as she sat in silence in the front room. He came in with the aspect of a non-family member, stood awkwardly in the doorway and said a few words that she might respond to. She’d say yes or no. She’d speak briefly about bills that had to be paid. She’d answer his questions when he was searching for something, questions about what she had and had not thrown away. But they hadn’t really spoken since he got out of hospital, not said anything of substance or consequence. He looked at her as though he was waiting for something. An explanation, an apology, forgiveness, another attack. She did not know. She did not know if she could forgive Ennis. She did not know if she could forgive him for what she’d done. They listened to each other’s breathing, as though the simple fact that they were both alive was all they had left to share.

W
hen the ad appeared in the
Evening News
, Arvel had gone five and a half years without work that was steady or reliable. He’d worked more than half of the time, earning stamps for unemployment insurance to hold him through the periods when he wasn’t working. He never waited for the
UI
cheques to run out before looking for work, which is what a lot of people did, and the longest consecutive period he drew full
UI
was nine weeks. But a lot of businesses were only set up to employ people for the minimum it took to earn a new set of pogey cheques, and the longest consecutive period he’d drawn a paycheque from the same place was sixteen weeks. Just about everyone he knew was in similar circumstances.

He’d done a lot of work in the woods, which was the hardest physical labour, and, since it was all piecework, was stressful from morning to night. He planted trees, he harvested trees for pulp, he helped people with hardwood lots cut and split cords for firewood.
He did spacing for the silviculture industry. He handled small jobs that private contractors did not have time to get to, some of which actually involved his trade. He rewired people’s houses to upgrade their service, he crack-filled drywall with a team that did the finish work on factory-built homes. He got hired in the fall by Nick Lowen, a man from the Red Row who ran his own burner service, checking and cleaning oil furnaces before the peak heating season. “Jobbing around” was what people called what he was doing, and although jobbing around kept him busy, and he sometimes earned a half-decent amount of money from it, it was no way to live for the long term. He looked at Jackie, who was the top salesperson at the store where she worked and was earning good money in commissions. She also had her friend Colleen in Halifax, who could get her an even better-paying job there.

Seeing how valued she was made him realize how unvalued he himself was. Arvel knew that the sort of work that had been sustaining him was economic table scraps, and when you are being thrown table scraps, you are no better than a dog whose owner doesn’t care enough to buy it its own food.

And as if it was his Jesus fault for not having steady work, Arvel had his father’s constant disappointment and lack of sympathy to contend with. His father had quit school in junior high and gotten on at the Car Works immediately. With the exception of the occasional time he was laid off due to a reduction in demand for railcars, he’d been employed at the Car Works since. In his father’s mind, anyone without a full-time job for longer than a few months was lazy and shiftless, not trying hard enough to find steady work. He would see Arvel at the end of an especially
hard day’s work, covered in dirt and sawdust, or elbows deep in soot from mucking about in people’s chimneys. He’d take a look at him and say, “Don’t you have a job yet?”

EASTYARD COAL COMPANY, A DIVISION OF COUGHLIN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
. The lettering was huge. The ad took up a whole page in the
New Glasgow Evening News
. The company was getting a big dose of taxpayers’ money, and there would probably be an election within a year. Everyone in Pictou County knew that the federal government wanted the operation up and running at full capacity by the time the campaign started.

The ad said nothing about mining experience, which everyone knew meant old-timers need not apply. Most of the experienced miners in the county were over the hill by the standards of an industry driven by demanding physical labour. There was a list of trades given that included electricians. Arvel knew that he had to apply for work at Eastyard, that he’d be one of thousands from across the region, across the country, applying for a few dozen jobs, and he held out no hope of being hired. Any workplace with that much government money tied up in it would be clogged up with political bumlickers, people who’d made a point their whole lives of getting themselves seen at all the Tory hot-dog roasts, and whose families for six generations had been doing the same low-grade schmoozing. The Eastyard offices were “under construction,” according to the ad. According to the construction site, where the buildings were set to go up, the ground had yet to be broken, except for the beginnings of the main shaft.

Selection wasn’t going to be first-come, first-served, so Arvel waited until the applications had been available at the employment office for five days before dropping in one afternoon right
at four thirty as the office was closing, hoping he would not run into anyone who knew him. He knew he would not get one of Eastyard jobs, and that many people would be in the same boat: qualified for something, good for nothing. But all the same, he did not want anyone’s sympathy when the first shift of Tory Youth went marching up to the chain-link gates on the first day of work.

That night on the supper-hour news from Halifax, there was an interview with George Hannah, a war veteran and retired miner from Albion Mines. Arvel recognized him instantly because he was wearing his Royal Canadian Legion uniform, as he always did. He’d been the caretaker of the Miner’s Museum when Arvel had been a kid. There was a newly built museum now. Hannah might still be caretaker, for all Arvel knew.

The
TV
lights glinted off the ribbons and medals on his chest as the old man warned about the hazards of the Pictou County coalfield.

“Nobody’s going to listen to an old fella like me,” Hannah said. “But it’s insanity to mine that coal. The politicians love the idea of this mine because they want to get elected. But if you start in on that gassy old seam again, you’d might as well build the memorial to the dead right now. Just leave plenty of room on it to carve the names in later.” Arvel had already filled out the application, and after the interview with Hannah, he gave some thought to what the old man had said. Coal mining had always been a dangerous occupation, especially in Pictou County, where he’d heard there was something about how the coal was formed that made it especially prone to producing explosive gases. But this was the only real job application he’d filled out in years where there was even a remote possibility at getting a steady job.

He dropped the application off at the employment office first thing the next morning, when the employees there were just opening the doors.

There was a special box for Eastyard applications, and he added his manila envelope to the stack in the box. At the door on the way out, he stopped and looked back at his application and thought for a moment about retrieving the envelope, withdrawing the application before it was ever submitted. He turned and walked outside.

At ten thirty that morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in his hand. Both kids were in front of the
TV
in the other room, Kate sitting on the couch, Melanie in the playpen, and he was hunched over a sheet of paper with phone numbers on it, scratching little
xs
by names as he dialled them up and asked whether they had been happy with the painting or roofing or electrical work he had done for them last time, and asking if they had any more work they needed doing around the home. He’d even split firewood, if they needed that done: no, no, he’d use an axe.

The receiver was under his left hand as he was about to make another call, so when it rang he picked it up before it had even finished the first ring.

“Jesus,” the voice on the other end said, not even giving Arvel time to answer. “You had that phone off the hook all morning.”

Arvel gave some silence to the person on the other end, then said: “I’ve been making calls all morning. And to whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

“Ya, right,” the voice said. There was a pause and a sucking sound as the person took a drag on a cigarette. “You got your electrician’s papers that time, didn’t you?”

Now the voice was starting to come back to him. Someone he’d known at the vocational school. “I spent two years studying electrical construction, if that’s what you’re talking about.”

“And what have you been doing since then? Somebody told me you can’t find steady work.”

It was Sam Kowalski, a man at least ten years older than Arvel, who’d lasted until Christmas of the first year in electrical construction. Everyone called him Roly-Poly because he was so fat that he waddled. Roly was such an abrasive person that no one in the program had liked him. Arvel wondered what he could possibly be calling about. He probably wanted something.

“What the hell do you want, Roly?” Arvel said.

“I got a job for you, that’s what I want.”

“Sure! You’re giving out jobs. How does a guy with no job himself end up giving them out?”

“I’m assistant manager of Atlantic Video Supply.”

“And I’m
CEO
of the Toilet Bowl Sanitation Corporation.”

“You’re lucky I’m not the kind of guy who hangs up on mouthy arseholes, because today I am opportunity, and the sound of my voice is opportunity knocking.”

“Hey. I’d be the last guy to knock opportunity.”

“Well shut up for two minutes and I’ll tell you what I’m calling about.”

Arvel did not believe in hanging up on people, but for a moment, fed up with Kowalski’s rudeness, he considered putting down the phone.