Twenty-Six (9 page)

“It’s a beautiful morning,” Arvel says. From the street, he looks in through the window of his grandfather’s kitchen and sees his grandmother, six months pregnant with his mother. In less than twenty-five years this woman will be dead from tuberculosis, but this morning she appears as vigorous as any woman her age. She is washing apples under the water pump at the sink, working the handle up and down
.

“All begin beautiful, boy,” Arvel’s grandfather says
.

As they walk together to the pit, their leather boots crunch the gravel of the unpaved streets. In the clear air of morning, they can hear the wheels and gears of the elevator working in the shaft
.

When they pass through the gates and into the mine yard, Arvel’s heart jumps. He has only seen this place in pictures. By the time he is born, the coal boom will have passed and most of the operations will be shut down. But these buildings before him, this smokestack, the wheels
that turn on the big lift: these have been written on his mind by something stronger than memory
.

“You’re frightened, boy,” his grandfather says. “I
won’t tell you not to be.”

In the change house they don what they’ll need for work. The boots, the coveralls, the gloves. They check out their equipment from the tool room. The hard hats, the lamps, the shovels, the axes. They gather with the rest of the day-shift men at the mouth of the shaft, smoke final cigarettes. The sun splits down on them in rays between the beams and cables and pipes that run in all directions above their heads
.

The wheels on the giant elevator turn. A dozen men before them walk onto the platform and drop from sight. Arvel and his grandfather move ahead, and twelve more descend. Cables quiver. A platform swings into view. “I wish this could be different,” the grandfather says. Two men remain. They step forward and disappear from the surface of the earth
.

His grandfather Staciw had been a survivor of the mines. He’d worked his whole life in the pit and lived to see his retirement. The work had killed him nonetheless: he’d suffered chronic debilitating health problems in the time he’d survived after retirement, each year spending at least a month in the hospital, and suffering almost monthly from what Arvel’s mother called “turns,” violent convulsions that led to unconsciousness.

His grandfather had probably counted himself lucky nonetheless. He’d been born into debt to a peasant family in southern Ukraine and had come to Canada before the Bolshevik Revolution to get a job and buy his family out of economic servitude. So however miserable his life in Canada, however dangerous the work, however meagre the pay, he’d always known he was
better-off than he would have been if he’d stayed in Ukraine. After the revolution, he’d lost contact with his family, only getting letters through again during and just after the Khrushchev era. One of Arvel’s earliest memories was of a photo his grandfather had received of his village in the Ukraine. It had come in a paper-wrapped package that most of the extended family had gathered in Didu Staciw’s kitchen to see opened. It had been one of the first warm days in late spring. The windows and doors were open, letting in the earth smells from the damp garden at the front of the house. Didu was sitting at the kitchen table with a crowd of people standing expectantly around him. He cut the twine from the bundle and folded back the heavy paper wrapping. Inside were some pieces of cloth that Arvel was too young to understand the significance of. The women in the kitchen raised a fuss over these. In a yellow envelope inside the package was a photo of Didu’s village. Several stern-looking, bony-faced men and women stood, stuffed into ill-fitting clothing, in front of a small group of farm buildings.

Arvel’s father began laughing. “Look at what they’re living in,” he exclaimed. “Thatched roofs! Holy shit! Welcome to the twentieth century!” Didu pulled the photo from Arvel’s father’s hand, shouted something at Arvel’s father, and stormed into the living room. He sat in the swivel chair and spun his back to the kitchen. Arvel, three, maybe four years old, followed his grandfather into the living room and approached the swivel-based armchair from behind. When he got to the front of the chair, he looked up at his grandfather. The old man was holding the photo close to his face, a few centimetres from his glasses. Behind the thick lenses, his grandfather’s eyes were blinking rapidly, tears were pouring freely down the sides of his nose.

The air was dry and cold now and smelled of the frozen earth that had been ploughed up with the snow. Banks of old snow were pushed up on either side of the sidewalk as he made his way up Foord Street. Near the corner of Bridge Avenue, naked trees thrust their frost-whitened branches against the sky. A few ragged wreaths, weather-beaten, face-down, and half-covered with ice and snow, remained on the steps that led up to the war monument, leftovers from Remembrance Day. It could have been last winter that the wind had blown massive drifts over the ridge at the edge of the Anglican graveyard, up behind the monument. He and Ziv and Bundy Burgess and other kids from this end of the Red Row had taken running leaps into the snow, diving headlong into the powder, going so deep that a semi-darkness set in amid the translucent white of the drift. It could have been last winter, but it wasn’t. It was more than ten years ago, that day he remembered so well. No, it was more than fifteen years ago. Why did he remember this so clearly, when yesterday and the day before had already gone shapeless in his imagination?

Travelling south from the Red Row, it was only a short distance to the centre of town. Once across Bridge Avenue, a block of tall, square Victorian houses with big front porches and paved driveways quickly gave way to what was once, before the advent of one-stop shopping, the commercial district of Albion Mines. The century-plus-old buildings maintained their commercial appearance: front doors that opened directly onto the sidewalk, large display windows that had once housed samples of merchandise. But commerce had largely left the area. There were still a few banks, a couple of convenience stores. The original cut-stone post-office building still stood, still housed the post office. But many of the buildings, which had once held candy
shops, tinsmiths, clothing outlets, hardware stores, now were used as residences.

The Tim Horton’s on Foord Street stood out like an alien. With its plate-glass windows, brick and steel construction, paved parking lot, and iridescent plastic and aluminum sign, it was an envoy from another time. This was the unmistakable stamp of the present on the main street of Albion Mines.

Arvel crossed Foord Street and turned up the sidewalk. As he reached the doughnut shop, he crossed the salt-tinged pavement of the parking lot and looked through the front windows. From the back he recognized the square, shaggy head of Gavin Fraser, who’d worked Arvel’s shift at the pit until a short time ago. Gavin had been the most vocal member of the shift to try to get some safety improvements at Eastyard. He had connections in the United Mine Workers and, during their certification drive, had put his name down as interim local president. Gavin and not Arvel’s father, a man who had worked his whole life for the union movement, was the one who had convinced Arvel to get involved in the drive to certify the United Mine Workers union. As it had turned out, the
UMW
was a poor choice to organize Eastyard. The
UMW
represented Devco miners in Cape Breton, and Devco miners had fought the opening of the Eastyard operation, because the mine, once fully operational, would rob Devco of one of its markets: the Pictou County power station.

Despite Arvel’s months of work, despite Gavin’s assurances to workers, the
UMW
had lost the vote at Eastyard, and organization was back to square one. Gavin had always been more positive and direct in his approach to certification than Arvel had. Gavin did not have a father who’d spent his life battling anti-union companies and governments. He’d worked in unionized mine
operations in central and western Canada and had seen harmonious labour/management relations. He did not assume, as Arvel did, that management would fight tooth and claw against any idea that was not their own. So after the certification vote, Gavin went directly to the Eastyard management with safety concerns. He complained to the shift boss, the supervisor, the underground manager, and had a face-to-face meeting with the vice president and general manager of Eastyard Coal. Gavin had worked in mining operations in Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario, and was the most knowledgeable of anyone on the shift about how to run a safe mine. He’d drawn up a list of improvements that should have been made to the underground operations, but at his meeting with the general manager the man had not even glanced at the list. He was puffed up with confidence after the failure of the certification vote, and what he told Gavin, after Gavin had spent weeks agitating his way into the office, was simple, and the same thing Gavin had been told by others all the way along: if he didn’t like the way the mine was run, he should quit. The man pointed at a filing cabinet in the corner of his office and said, “We’ve got applications from thousands of guys ready to replace you.” Gavin left the general manager’s office, walked down the hall to personnel, and put in his notice.

Gavin’s experience of trying to solve problems directly after the failure of the union certification vote only convinced Arvel that his own response to the failure, complete despair, had been appropriate.

But after Gavin quit, Arvel had called a contact at the Auto Workers in Halifax and had got the ball rolling to start a new certification drive with a union that was not carrying baggage.

One day, not long after Gavin had left, they arrived at the mouth of a new drift and listened to the roof dripping. Bits and pieces of the chocked rock were clattering down like rain. They’d been working in this drift for a couple of weeks, and there had been two close calls already. The roof was not properly supported, and two good-sized rock falls had just missed men on their crew. They stopped outside the shaft, seven or eight of them from the A-shift, discussing what they should do, when Fred Brennan, the underground manager, had come along.

“What the hell are you doing standing here? Where are you supposed to be working?”

They pointed into the new drift.

“Well get your arses down there.”

There was a brief silence. Then Arvel said. “We don’t think it’s safe. The ground is working. Listen.”

Brennan took off his hard hat and smacked it into the floor at his feet. His lamp sprayed light in a crazy beam across the ceiling, then blinked out. Spit came flying from his mouth when he spoke. “Get the Jesus down there and get producing coal or you’re all Jesus fired.”

At that exact instant, with Brennan pointing right at it, the entire drift collapsed into itself. The noise was deafening and the ground shook. Dust billowed out to the main shaft where they’d been standing, and all the men there began to choke on it, coughing violently.

When the dust began to settle, Brennan’s eyes narrowed. He looked at the men before him as though they were guilty of some conspiracy.

“Get a fucking scoop down here and clean this mess up,” he said.

When Brennan had gone back up the shaft, they stood without speaking a moment, shaky with fear from the tons of rock they’d just missed being crushed beneath. Arvel looked down at the black-and-grey dust that had gathered on the tops of his boots. “Well, what the hell should we do?” someone said. Arvel realized everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to answer.

“I told you guys what you should have done,” Arvel said. He shook his head. “You should have voted to certify the union. If you had, we wouldn’t be standing here scared shitless right now. We’d have a safety officer in a meeting with management.”

“I
voted
for the union,” Steve Jenkins said. Steve was the only man on Arvel’s shift who’d been born in Albion Mines. And Steve was Arvel’s age, exactly. They’d gone right through school together. Steve’s father had worked at the Pepsi plant that Arvel’s father had organized, against great opposition and threats of violence from management, in the fifties. Steve had trusted the union drive because of Arvel’s involvement in it. But he’d beaten Arvel up once, in Grade 7, before Arvel had reached his present size. So he wasn’t beyond standing up to Arvel when he saw the reason and the opportunity. “You’re fucking right I voted for the union,” Steve went on. “So don’t look at me.” He was the only one to speak. Everyone else shifted uneasily.

“We have to have a meeting,” Steve said.

“A meeting!” said Arvel. “What the Jesus for? A meeting’s going to get us sweet fucking nowhere. What we need is to certify a union. You guys need to sign cards and vote for the Auto Workers.”

“Sure, maybe in a hundred years that’ll do us some good, but what about today? That’s going to do piss all
today
.”

“You’re fucking right it is.”

“What we need is a safety meeting. And we need one with Gavin.”

Arvel shook his head in disbelief. “Jesus, I can save you the trouble. You know what Gavin’s going to tell you about safety? Do what he did: quit.”

“How many think we need a meeting,” Steve said. Everyone’s hand went up but Arvel’s.

“I’ll
come
to a meeting,” Arvel said, “Fine, I’ll come to the goddamn meeting. But I’m telling you it’ll do no good. Gavin’s going to tell us to quit. Either that or sign cards with the Auto Workers and
hope
we get to have a certification vote before … In the meantime …” he mimed throwing his pit cap on the floor and screamed in imitation of Brennan:
“Get a fucking scoop down here and clean this mess up!”

The next day was a day off, and they gathered at the Tartan at just after noon. It was a Thursday, the place was quiet. Seventeen of the twenty-six men turned up, pulling their cars separately into spaces in the parking lot. All of the single guys had brand-new vehicles: four-by-fours, Toyota pickups with roll bars behind the cabs. The men who were married and who had children made do with whatever vehicle they’d had before getting on at Eastyard. Arvel was the only one who lived close enough to walk, and the vehicles of almost all the other men were already in the parking lot by the time he came striding in from Foord Street.