Twenty-Six (43 page)

Yuka raps the steel door with her fist.

Nothing happens. They stand looking at the door. Yuka holds the key in her right hand, but does not make a move. Meta is looking at Yuka, waiting to make eye contact with her. She wants to cut the suspense and move forward, quit hesitating. She feels like taking the key from Yuka’s hand and opening the door herself. She feels like stealing the key, leaving with it, taking Yuka by the hand and leading her away from that place, telling her to forget she’d ever known the idiot who lives in that apartment and to start a new life, better than the one she is leading, one with self-respect and some independence.

Yuka slides the key into the lock, turns it, and pushes back the door. The metallic smell that was just detectable with the door closed now billows out into the hallway. Meta swoons. Yuka puts her hand on the switch for the kitchen light but Meta stops her with a touch, and they walk into the apartment. They take their shoes off in the genkan and step up onto the softwood parquet. The wall opposite the door contains a big row of windows. The curtains are pulled back on the western sky. The sun, blazing through the clouds, casts the apartment in a white suffusing light. Yuka steps over something bulky in the middle of the floor and slides back two panels on the windows, opening them to the air from outside. She steps over the bundle again and goes back to the door, props it open with her shoes. Meta shivers as
the cold outside air blows through the room, but her light-headedness subsides almost immediately. Yuka bends to where the gas nozzle emerges from the baseboard near the bedroom door and shuts off the valve. The blue hose that comes from the nozzle snakes to the middle of the kitchen floor, where it sticks into a plastic-wrapped object there. Meta notices that the cherry-red gas heater, a small blue protrusion of hose coming out of its side where it was cut free, lies upside-down against a wall.

Yuka sits on the couch with her back to the two open windows and looks down at the body. The gas hose has been pushed through a hole in the end of a green garbage bag and the hose and the bag have been secured in place with heavy plastic packing tape. He lies on his side, curled in a fetal position. His bare feet are blue, the tops of the toes tufted with long black hairs. He is dressed in new blue jeans and a green T-shirt of thick, high-quality cotton. His head is obscured by the garbage bag except for where a small hole reveals a tip of purply flesh. His arms and shoulders are massive, his fists, clenched in the grip of death, as big as blocks of stone.

Meta slides back the door to the bedroom. In the middle of the floor is a suitcase. She walks across the tatami to the futon closet. She opens the first door, but it is full of hangers and clothing. Behind the next door are the futon and quilts. She pulls out a folded sheet, brings it into the kitchen, and drapes it over the body, so that only the blue hose, still attached to the nozzle in the wall, is visible. Most of the gas has dispersed. She moves the shoes from before the door to the hallway and lets the heavy spring draw the door shut with a clunk. She steps over the body and sits next to Yuka on the couch, puts an arm around her shoulders. The first notion that fills her is relief. Yuka is free of this
monster. Meta herself is free of worries for Yuka, that she’ll be killed, that she’ll experience more senseless pain and humiliation.

The overwhelming emotion she begins to feel is that of anger at the dead man. By implicating her in his suicide note he continues to punish Yuka, even after his death. He claimed he performed this act for love, to cleanse the world of himself. What an act of courage and compassion!

Whatever his motivation, cowardice or love, he can no longer harm Yuka. Meta realizes she herself is free now. She feels released, as though she can breathe for the first time in a long while.

A
week before Christmas, Ennis is surprised to see the letter in the mailbox is from Jackie. It does not look or feel like a Christmas card, but the envelope is somewhat bulky. His and Dunya’s names are written above the address, but Dunya is gone now, gone to visit some distant cousin in Halifax for the holidays. She said that she’d only be away a few days, she’d return right after the New Year, but Ennis sometimes fears she might never come back, or if she does, it might be a long time from now. He stands in the Albion Mines post office and turns the envelope over quickly, glancing at the blank side before stuffing it into a big pocket on the front of his coat.

Jackie and the kids are supposed to drive down from Halifax on Boxing Day. They’ll stay over at the Heather Motel a night or two, visit with him and Ziv during the days. Staying at a hotel seems like a big expense to Ennis, and he said so to Jackie the last time she’d called, but she said she could afford it. He hasn’t seen
Jackie or the girls in almost a year, but she sounds happy any time he speaks to her.

The strange thing about the
letter is, if it isn’t a Christmas card, what is it, just a short while before Jackie will be here herself?

It is still early in the morning when he enters the house through the back door. The Eastyard inquiry has not yet adjourned for the holidays, which means Ziv will be down at the new Miner’s Museum, attending the hearings.

He drops the envelope on the table, bends over, and unlaces his boots. He sits at the table and rips the letter open with his thumbnail. A photograph of his grand-daughters falls out, a studio shot in front of a painted backdrop.

Ennis cringes when he realizes that he hasn’t even told Jackie that Dunya has left. How will he explain when she and the girls arrive?

Ennis reaches into the envelope for whatever he’s missed and pulls out a newspaper clipping. At first glance, he thinks the photo is of one of his grandchildren, sitting on Santa’s knee. But the image is too dark to be recent, the paper too yellowed with age.

He hasn’t seen the picture in years, probably since the day it originally appeared in the
Evening News
all those years ago. He sits down and smooths the clipping flat against the tabletop.

It was the only time he ever dressed up as Santa. The man who’d done it for years was in the hospital with chest pains. Ennis
could not remember his name. The Steelworkers Christmas party was coming up and there were presents for the kids. They always had a Santa. Somehow, it got decided he’d do it.

He’d put on the red suit in the bathroom and felt like the biggest fool in the world. They gave him a jar of clear glue to put the beard on and it burned his face until it dried. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought he’d better have a drink of rum. He got Scrub Forrester, who was the bartender at the Steelworkers’ Hall at the time, to let him into the cabinet where they kept the liquor under lock and key. Ennis was screwing the top off the bottle when he changed his mind. No, he thought, I can’t do this. I can’t let these kids smell booze on Santa’s breath.

There was a big chair set up at the far end of the hall, on risers and decorated with streamers. The kids lined up across the front and had to climb up a few steps to sit on Santa’s knee. Three or four kids had already had their turn, some of them trying to pull the beard off, some of them screaming, terrified. Then he remembered that Arvel would be sitting on Santa’s knee. Dunya was there with both kids, but Ziv was just a baby then, not even walking. He looked at the lineup and saw Arvel, three or four children along, dressed in a little red jacket with a bow tie. He looked scared and lost, but so did every kid in the line.

Then finally it was Arvel’s turn, and Ennis became agitated. Here was his own son. But he had never held him this way before, taken him up on his knee, put his arm around him. Ennis cannot now remember what Arvel said, cannot recall what he asked for for Christmas. But he can still see the light brown hair, the bangs cut straight across his brow. “Hi, Santa,” Arvel said. He had no idea it was his own father.

Ennis sits quietly for a long time, holding the photo flat against the kitchen table with his fingertips. He thinks for a moment about Jackie, and how considerate it was of her to send the photo to him. There is no way she could have known just how strong a feeling the memory would spark. Of all the people he might show the photo to, only Dunya would understand what it really means to him. He raises his head and looks out the kitchen window to where the light of winter morning is brightening into the broad day.

The small room in the Miner’s Museum where the inquiry carries out its hearings has become familiar to Ziv. Its nondescript white walls and cheap grey carpet were probably meant for some administrative office for the staff of the museum, but the room has been taken over by collapsible tables and folding chairs, installed here on what was supposed to be a temporary basis over a year ago. The room seats about fifty people, but today there are fewer than twenty here. It tends to be only the high-profile political testimony that draws the big numbers of media and the family members, crowding into the room.

There are a few people Ziv does not know, but has come to recognize as relatives of someone who died in the explosion. Yesterday Jeff Willis was here. His brother is one of the fifteen still underground. Ziv saw him on
TV
a few weeks ago. He is fighting, against the wishes of most of the other members of the families’ group, to have the Eastyard silos declared a memorial site. The idea has taken root in Ziv’s mind and he’s sorry now he did not
approach Willis about it when he was here.

Ziv is seated next to the aisle that leads from the door at the rear of the room to the commissioner’s table and witness stand at the front, and he can see where footsteps of spectators and witnesses have permanently darkened the carpet. Allie McInnis, a friend of his father’s, is here today, as he almost always is, on behalf of one of the bereaved families. There is a line of tape on the floor near the back of the room beyond which the news media are not permitted to take their cameras and recording equipment. The wall behind this line is scuffed with black marks, where machinery and boot heels have scraped past.

In the months since Gavin’s testimony, something has compelled Ziv to return to the hearing every day. Gavin was a man who’d known and worked with Arvel, a man for whom Arvel had told Ziv he’d had great regard. This man had sat before the world, staring that
TV
camera in the eye, and told the truth. Ziv had felt the power of that, the power of bearing witness. There is a freedom or promise in that word: witness. But the straightforward truth of Gavin’s words, words that had seemed everything to him that day, had changed nothing. Twenty-six men are dead, fifteen of them are still lying where they died. What more needs to be known?

But for reasons he cannot understand, day after day, Ziv sits listening, absorbing information. Maybe it is because he feels he owes this much to Arvel, that someone be here for him, on his behalf.

During the testimony of a seemingly endless roster of mining experts, Eastyard employees, rescue workers, and government officials, memory has clashed with memory and fact has piled
upon fact in such a relentless way that Ziv feels as though his head might explode from the pressure of it all. Each witness, each new point of view, each new word, seems to do nothing more than undermine those words that have come before.

Today has been another day of technical testimony. This time, the commission has flown in an expert, all the way from Pennsylvania, who has been going on and on about the hazards of explosive dust. Yet another expert about yet another esoteric subject. These experts, Ziv is beginning to realize, would continue speaking their gibberish in this room for months. This one has been talking about physical barriers, oxygen starvation, and chemical suppressants. He’s talked about things that have seemed like nothing more than common sense, how to put out fires by starving them, cutting off their air. But there have been parts of his testimony that have been so specialized that Ziv is hard-pressed to imagine how it could possibly be understood, much less shed any further light on the explosion and what led to it.