Twenty-Six (36 page)

Ziv slides the door back across until the latch clicks, then limps back into bed and covers himself with blankets.

When he opens his eyes again, it is nine o’clock. He’s not on until the four-to-ten shift tonight. He hauls himself straight on the mattress and lowers his feet to the floor. His head aches. His whole body, from the soles of his feet right up through his shoulders and neck and into the base of his skull, feels bruised and ready to snap. He looks down at his hands and opens and closes them. They are tight and achy. They feel as though they need to be soaked in hot water until they loosen. He puts the tips of his fingers gently against his injured eye. The swelling has already come down from last night. The eye is open enough that he can see out of it.

He goes downstairs and stops at the doorway to the front room. His mother sits like some Buddhist monk with her eyes closed in the middle of the empty room she’d had him paint white after the explosion.

“Good morning,” he says it anyway, though he knows she won’t answer. He has tried not speaking to her when she is in this state, but that is worse: too much silence. She’ll talk, but she’ll do it later, when she emerges from whatever reverie she is in.

The downstairs is bare and white since his mother threw almost everything they owned into the trash. The house looks so unfamiliar. He sometimes feels out of place here, alien, as though he’s barged into someone else’s place uninvited, but he likes the house empty. It has a refreshing feeling of possibility. On the kitchen table, the newspaper is separated into sections and folded. His father has read it already. On the front page must have been more news about the public inquiry. There are two big squares where articles used to be, a clear view to page 3, where his father clipped what he wanted from the front page. They are testifying
now in one of the conference rooms at the new Miner’s Museum in Albion Mines. In the remnants of one article, a little half-paragraph continuation on page 2, there is a list of the names of those who have already testified, along with who is about to. Ziv’s eyes stop at Gavin Fraser’s name. According to the article, he’s on for late morning or early afternoon. Ennis never bothers cutting out pictures, and the photo of Gavin shows him clean-shaven with short hair, neatly parted in the middle. Gavin is a savvy customer, Ziv thinks. For four or five years he’s shaved infrequently and worn his hair long. But he knows he’ll be on national television, and that people are more apt to listen to someone who is clean-cut. According to the miners Ziv’s talked to, Gavin is the star of the inquiry. He is smart enough to explain his points well. He has plenty of mining experience. But, mostly, it is that he quit, and he quit over safety concerns, which makes him a strong witness to the dangerous condition of the mine before the explosion.

Ziv pours himself a cup of lukewarm coffee from the pot his father must have made. He sits at the table and holds up the front page again to examine his father’s scissor work. What must the old man be thinking as he carries out this task? Deep in the pit of his stomach, somehow mixed with the pain of his own idiocy and self-abuse from last night, he feels a pang of guilt. There was an earlier time when his father had been keeping news clippings and he’d used them to try to reach out to Ziv. And Ziv had made a complete mess of that affair. He wishes now that he knew how to ask his father what he is thinking about. What he is feeling. But both of his parents are closed off to him now. He and his father have hardly been able to hold a conversation about anything their whole lives, let alone how they felt. What can he expect
either one of them to say to each other, after Arvel’s death? His mother has gutted the house of furniture. She spent weeks sitting on the futon in the front room, quietly weeping. She seems lost in her own inner world as she sits every day and meditates, if that is what she is doing.

As Ziv turns the newspaper over, a square of newsprint falls to the floor. It is too small to have come from either of the holes on the front page. It must have slipped from his father’s collection. “Lawyers Deny Pair in Hiding,” is the headline. Ziv scans through the article. The story explains how two former Eastyard managers, who now live in Ontario, have so far refused to answer their subpoenas to appear at the inquiry.

As he showers, he tries to work the knots of tension from his limbs, but the more he pulls at and rubs his arms, the more they hurt. There is a dull ache in the shoulder that was dislocated last night.

Back in his bedroom he puts his clothes on, retrieves a tablet of letter-size writing paper from beneath his bed, and looks about the room for space to write. In the corner, there is the brown powder-box cabinet, one of the only things left in house after his mother’s cleanup work after the explosion. He slaps the paper down on the waist-high shelf of the cabinet and opens to a fresh page. It’s a little uncomfortable writing standing up, but he’s keen on saying some things and the discomfort goes away quickly.

Dear Meta
, he begins. They’ve exchanged several letters since her visit of last year. He cannot remember whose letter was last.

Gavin Fraser is testifying at the inquiry today
.

He tears this sheet out immediately, drops it uncrumpled to the floor, and begins yet again.

The weather has warmed and recooled recently, softening the snow cover, then locking the landscape in a skin of ice. When he emerges from the back door of the house, the cold catches in his
lungs. He breathes in the air and feels it cool his whole body. In the centre of his chest, his fiery heart struggles to keep him warm. His feet slip over ice-slickened puddles and shatter shell ice as he makes his way to the end of the driveway. In his hand is the letter to Meta, sealed in a white business-size envelope and stamped with airmail postage. The sun breaks momentarily through the overcast, and the big, sick elm at the corner of Hudson Street shimmers under a crystal coating. He shields his eyes with the envelope and looks at the trees. Last week’s warmth would have begun teasing up the sap from the roots. These late-winter freezes can crack a tree from the heart of its trunk.

At the corner of Foord Street he drops the letter in the red mailbox and pauses to look up at the statue on top of the miner’s monument, the old-time miner with his safety lamp. There is no space left for names on the pedestal. Eastyard will require a whole monument unto itself. He turns left on Foord Street and heads for the new Miner’s Museum, where the inquiry is being held.

G
avin Fraser grips the armrests of the witness chair and pushes the top of his back against the backrest. The afternoon session has just begun, and he knows this will be the hard part for him. He was called to the stand late in the morning and spent most of that time recounting his experience in the mining industry and telling the story of how he ended up at Eastyard. Now the important questions will be asked and he will have to answer them. He shifts in the seat, squirms until his fingers let go the armrests, tries to let his body loosen into a comfortable position.

Only one camera is allowed in the room, the official inquiry camera, but the inquiry releases hours of the procedures for broadcast every day on the channel that carries footage from parliament. News organizations broadcast snippets and sound bites on the nightly newscasts. The light necessary for the camera flushes the room white and stabs deep into Gavin’s head. He squints against it, then when he remembers how awful people look when they squint on
TV
, he loosens his face blank, only to
find himself squinting again just a few moments later. The technical crew with the camera is setting up for the afternoon, someone accidentally switches off a power plate and the television lights go black. As the public seating behind the lights colours into view, he makes out a single recognizable face. It is Ziv Burrows, Arvel Burrows’s younger brother. He recognizes him because of how much the big forehead and wide cheeks resemble Arvel. His face is outlined in white light coming through behind him, making his face dark. All the same, his face appears swollen or bruised somehow.

There is a loud
conk
. Someone says
shit
. The lights blind him again.

“Continuing from this morning’s testimony, Mr. Fraser, reference was made to your reasons for leaving Eastyard Coal.”

He leans into the microphone and bumps his teeth on it. The sound echoes through the room. “I left because of safety concerns.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“I did not think the underground operation met a basic standard of safety, from the viewpoint of the workers, and I quit when I realized that management had no intention of dealing with those safety problems.”

“So in your opinion, the underground operation was not safe enough.”

“That’s right.”

“Again, could I ask you to be more specific?”

“You mean tell you what specific things were not safe?”

“Yes.”

“It’s hard to know where to start.” A faint, disgusted laughter sets up in the room.

“I can name several different types of safety problems, right off the top of my head.”

The Inquiry Commissioner nods slowly. “Maybe you should do that, then.”

“Well, right off the top of my head – I could probably do this better if I had a chance to write this down, make a list. But there were problems of tunnel construction, there were problems of maintenance and cleanup throughout the mine, and there were problems of worker training.

“Eastyard hired an outside company to design and plan the mine. That was Argon Engineering, a contracting company that specializes in tunnelling only. The big challenge of mining in this area is not simply getting the raw material out, it’s building and maintaining a reliable system of tunnels to get men and machines to the mineral itself. To understand how tricky this is, you have to understand that the precise conditions of any given mine are unique. The thickness of the mineral seam, the stability of the strata surrounding it, whether there are faults in the seam, what sort of by-products tunnelling produces in a given area: water, for example, or dust, or gas.” There is a stirring in the room somewhere and Gavin looks up briefly to see Ziv Burrows standing up noisily, scraping his chair along the floor. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” he says. He’s moving his seat closer to the front.