The slightly younger mortar of the riverside wall had fewer cracks than the other walls. The dusty top of the second cement wall hung in front of the wooden sill, not just below it. Four inches thick. Hard, but not impossible. Mentally, I was already working on To Do and To Get lists when Kate finally came down the stairs. I could afford to be a little honest. “We bury her, yet I think about him out there. His second No Man’s Land.”
“I hope you’re not thinking of joining him. Come back up. You inherited a house, not just a basement.”
Back in the living room she had already perfected an unfolding/enfolding new posture that could switch from displaying her belly to shielding it. Unfolded, she glanced out a window at the river then looked back at me. “When do we move in?”
It was my turn to say, “I don’t know yet, and I don’t know when I’ll know.”
41. Or Another
My career had started with a truck full of tools, not a pinging inbox. I hadn’t forgotten that making often starts with breaking. Two days after I inherited Gran’s house I raced down the basement stairs in my work boots to swing a sledgehammer at that doubled riverside wall. Nothing is mine until I’ve fucked with it. At minimum, I need to see how something works. I’d heard about Bill’s tunnel and grave all my life. Kate, Gloria, even me, we all half-knew that sometimes we choose to see while at other times seeing is forced upon us. With the basement, I chose to see. With Kate, well.
The real force is in the hips, not the arms. I raised the sledge to my shoulder and took a Babe Ruth stance. I tried to concentrate on my breath and my aim—not on that Orion’s Belt of distant bodies, that line of me, Bill, and Trevor somewhere in the distance—as I whipped my hips and arms forward. When the sledge hit I was just me, me, me.
A sledgehammer blow falls like a cannon shot, woofs deeper than thunder. When you’ve absolutely got to smash your way out or in, accept no substitute. At first the wall appeared to hold up. Castle-wall pride spat back the sledge (along with a few cement teeth). But I had felt the hammer’s sweet, deep punch. After another blow and another I went in with the masonry chisel and crowbar. Working just inches from the wall I noticed old, trowelled seams in the cement, signatures from the anonymous dead. Nothing makes you more attentive to something than your laborious, careful and planned destruction of it.
The first blows were just recon, a dusty assessment. Aside from my safety gear, I made my exploratory hole in the outer wall with tools no different from what Bill or even his grandfather would have used, just steel focussing muscle. When Bill dug for King George, he did so alongside officers licensed and armed to shoot him dead whenever they wanted. Eventually, though, every manjack among them, officer and tunneller alike, was invited to propose new tools for the epic dig, from stronger spoil bags to spear shovels to better waterproofing for the explosives. Both Tommy and Jerry went into the war hung up on class. Underground, there was no class, just the quiet, terrifying race to blow up someone who was working day and night to blow you up.
Underground, ingenuity prospered, and not just with steel and cloth. Pumps, rescue breathing apparatuses, underground geophones—everything perpetually refined for the push. In my basement digging, I often wondered if part of the violence of that war was a consequence of the armies being so close but unable to see each other. The smell of their sizzling supper. Singing in a language they could hear but not understand. The murder of proximity. Kate called me a jukebox of war stories, but we don’t always get to choose what we’ll understand, what keeps us whole.
I could feel the traces of Bill’s handmade work but knew early on that I wasn’t going to continue my work unplugged. I sat on the basement steps to compose To Get and To Do lists. Kate would be writing radically new versions of these same lists weekly for the next decade as Momma chained herself to pharmacy and grocery store. I tried to ignore all that by renting a diamond saw, a power saw so sharp it could cut through your sarcophagus, your coffin, and your bones without so much as a whine. The saw. Heavy-duty tubs. A conveyor belt. Screw jacks. Building permit. (To explain the sound of my digging, I whined to the condolence-offering neighbours about a neglected foundation in desperate need of repair.) Even more important was a lock for the basement door.
If this were a bookstore book, not a pixelated snowdrift of family history only one or two people in the world care about, I’d throw in exotic words for theories of camouflage. Something Japanese for same-hiding-same. A mouthful from Renaissance Europe would describe the art of drawing the eye away. Mother Russia would advocate grandiose distraction. In Windsor, toxic, sinning Windsor, I only had morning coffee and an industrial supply store every three kilometres to help me trick the eye. Here was the smuggler’s nearly spiritual question: how flagrant should I be about the fact that I was hiding something? Neither Kate nor Glore had many incentives to go into Gran’s basement. Simply gambling that they wouldn’t go down might be best. A new padlock hanging off the basement door would dangle more conspicuously than a mistress’s earring. Throwing a new deadbolt would be like turning on a look over here sign. Yet one stray trip into the basement by either of them—Kate assessing the storage space, Mom surveying the contested land—and my game’d be up.
I made a second door frame at the top of the basement stairs. Gran’s door swung out into the kitchen. Beyond it my new second door swung back over the basement stairs. Were two opposing doors awkward? Yes. Up to code? No. As I finished installing the second door I finally unpacked a nagging sense of déjà vu. I had seen a dozen similarly naked door frames good on just one side in Mom’s theatres over the years. Blond, unpainted two-by-fours temporarily angled down onto the staircase runners. Kate, Gloria, me, Gran, maybe you—we all discovered that good one side is true for lumber, theatre sets, and family members. No sooner had I triple-checked the lock than Basement Threat No. 1 knocked on the front door.
By this point in our lives—spared cancer, not yet guilty of affairs—only death or pregnancy could dwarf everything else in life, wash away mistreatment, overshadow my AWOL night and Kate’s theatre of cruelty. Spreading out her hands, thrusting her face forward a little, still on the porch, she said, “I’m a simpleton.”
Mea culpa, a diagnosis, and a sales pitch all in one.
She stepped in. “The more complex this is, the simpler it is. I’m finally binary: yes or no, on or off. I can’t pull the trigger, Ant. I won’t. I’m the lobotomommy now.”
Keeping a baby was definitely a decision someone made more than once. For her at least, yes had become daily.
“Every single second I’m part of this baby, a baby that’s made from us. Baby, body, us—there’s no difference anymore. I can’t even remember the me who would have been embarrassed to show in school. This is our baby.”
She started crying again as she stepped inside, but it was just a mild leak. No abdominal heaves, no quivering chin. The tears were no longer a surprise nor, really, was the hand she reached out to brush dust off my forearm, nor the circle of her fingers that lingered around my arm. Why question the way she grabbed my warm T-shirt and pulled me into her? Crying? That’s just one more coaxing of the inside out, another wet spill from the body. Besides, she was entering the hey-sailor trimester. More than just skin brought us together. Our chromosomes undressed us. We were ruled by the double-helix and briefly became one on Gran’s couch, upside-down, right-side up. Pregnancy: you’ve got to take it one shag at a time.
Despite that new glue, I used the basement work as an excuse to half-move out of our apartment. We were probably just in another lull between storms, so I attacked my foundation wall morning, noon, and night. Kate was hot and cold for me, and the house was near campus. She started stopping by for, well, brief, non-studious visits. Upstairs, we worked our way through the rooms, owning them in the canine, pungent way. Her future was clear, and ours was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” I did neither. One tunnel or another, all sweat, work, and hope.
42. Blow Your Mine
The Kate I wanted was eclipsed, displaced more and more each day. Some nights I’d spend with her in our apartment, others in the work house breaking large rocks into smaller ones. We were together for the first few nights after she announced her decision, part need, part going-away party. Quickly enough, where I spent Wednesday night had little influence on Thursday night. She wanted me then she didn’t. Re-opening the tunnel access I’d work into dangerous exhaustion one night, dragging my body from basement to shower to bed. The next night I’d date my probably-lost, exish partner. For better or worse, humour resurfaced.
“Prenatal classes,” she’d say. “More like pre-nuptial classes.”
Or, “I’ve always been an early achiever. Look at this, I’m a single mom before I’m even a mom.” Other nights there were tears, some silent, some not. We had breakup sex without fully breaking up.
Not yet. Not now. Most will think I should have crumbled, signed on, sublimated my life to the errands and chores of parenting. How could I treat a woman pregnant by my, er, hand, with anything less than slavish worship? She was expanding the tribe, was finally becoming a woman. Hello? The tribe doesn’t need expanding. (In fact, our tribe is killing all the others.) And doesn’t anyone else, maybe even a few women, think it’s reductive, offensive, and just plain sad to believe that a woman only comes into her own by caring for someone other than herself? In taek studios over the years I’d catch glimpses of the weekend self-defence industry, those pony-tailed instructors who briefly coach paying women by repeating, “Defend yourself like you’re defending your child.” Self-effacement for a fee.
Not yet. Not now. We’d have been driving to soccer practice on our thirtieth birthdays, would be just another pair of North American shoppers with a gas tank and plastic everywhere, the planet be damned. Banquo, how could we stoop for sippy cups when we hadn’t yet reached for ball gags? And, now more than ever, we’d be walking away from a fortune, life-changing money.
In Gran’s basement, I wasn’t quite digging to America. Technically, legally, and logistically, that would have been nearly impossible. Publicly accessible government documents, not conspiracy theories, alerted me to microphones and sensors in the ground along the US border. The International Boundary Commission was a long way from Bill’s war underground. Then, tunnellers were often required to lie in a tunnel’s side chamber while holding a stick in their mouths in the hope they’d feel if Jerry was at the shovel. A stick in the mouth. After the next war, in the 50s, one sacked atomic scientist used a seismograph at Berkeley to look for the successful testing of a hydrogen bomb he’d been removed from. The test explosion on the South Pacific island of Elugelab spiked a seismograph five thousand kilometres away in California. I’d tell you to look up Elugelab on Google Earth, but the American explosion destroyed the entire island. The sticks keep getting bigger and our mouths more sensitive.
I wasn’t trying to dig a new hole into America, just hoping to investigate an old one. Bill dug his tunnel long before Homeland Security probes were sunk into the Detroit mud. I couldn’t know what I would do with the tunnel, or its remnants, until I knew what was there. That same attitude worked for Kate and against her.
Archaeologists don’t dig like builders. Not even I would have wasted all that lost casino time sifting through dirt looking for finger bones or pottery shards, but each strike with the shovel, crowbar, or masonry chisel felt like I was cutting into an anniversary cake. From all my reading about Bill’s tunnels, I knew the basement wall wouldn’t open like a garage door. Instead of a muddy corridor, I was sure to meet a vertical access shaft that plunged down before a tunnel could crawl across. But knowledge and observation don’t always mesh. Despite digging with the precise hope of seeing a dark, vertical shaft, the first shadowy glimpse of empty blackness sent a squirt of fear down the whole length of my spine. The pneumatic hammer stopped simply cracking chunks of cement off the secondary wall and suddenly shot on through into dark, empty air (and nearly dragged my forward hand along with it). A couple more spurts and I had a pizza-sized hole. Swirling dust, hanging cobwebs, and the studs and wooden sheathing of the shaft’s other wall swung in the bright cone of my flashlight. Once more into the deep.
With my arm through the hole I couldn’t reach the wooden outer wall of the access shaft. Feeling every bit like the vet saying hello to the busy part of a cow, I bent at the elbow and began feeling along the inside edges of the closest wall. Just cobwebs, ropes of them, and the cement wall I was cracking off. Eventually I found one timbered corner. Tucked into it was the unmistakable, cylindrical solidity of an old cast-iron plumbing pipe. I ran my hand up and down the cool, five-inch pipe, that leg that just wouldn’t quit.
Build a house today and the sewage pipes are plastic. Lightweight, easy to cut, reliably uniform, less vulnerable to corrosion (we think). Build a house when Bill dug his tunnel, and your toilet drains would have been made from cast iron. Imagine my intrigue when I opened the walls to cobwebs, stale air, and an old iron pipe that had never carried anything dirtier than Windsor-Detroit air. It had one access opening here in the basement and climbed up through the walls, probably to the roof, for an endless supply of air. For decades, the house had been breathing internationally.
Of course I expected to uncover timber framing, but I was shocked as the cement chipped off to reveal letters then whole names engraved into the ottery hide of wood that framed the adit. I stopped using the jackhammer and worked the timber facing with a masonry chisel to uncover a long crawling list of engraved names. One letter then one name followed the next in a hand-carved honour roll. MILES • STAMPER • BANFORD. I uncovered them slowly, my blunt chisel following Bill the Ghost’s carvings of seventy years ago. HICKING • HEPBURN • DAVIS. Up one side, across the header and down the other. BARKER • LARGE • STAFFORD. Only the very centre of the header varied that march of names. ONTARIO FARM II. I had to set down my tools.
The Great War’s Battle of Messines was the underground battle of the war and the world’s worst pregnancy. Bill and company dug incessantly for eighteen months to place hundreds of tonnes of explosives in nineteen branches of tunnels, and then they waited. And waited. Once the canisters of Ammonal were placed, tamped, and wired, some tunnels sat unexploded for more than a year. Every second risked detection, a counter-explosion by the German miners, malfunction, collapse, or the enemy capture of the trenches that housed the tunnel entrance.
Finally, after up to a year and a half of waiting, the Battle of Messines commenced on 7 June 1917. The explosion of the nineteen mines was one of the largest explosions the world had ever known. Window panes as far away as London got rattled by the Messines blast. Combined, the explosives exceeded the blast of three million grenades. Flames shot 800 feet into the sky and cooked the air to more than 3,000ºC. The biggest mining attack in the history of warfare was to precede the largest English artillery attack to date, which would precede waves of bayonet-wielding bullet catchers. Attack by man-made earthquake. One of the mined tunnels had been named Ontario Farm.
Ontario Farm. Even before Bill’s engraving, the phrase had acquired multiple layers for me. As a teenager reading about the war I first thought Ontario Farm was just a label. By the time I fell for Kate, I recognized that in 1917 Ontario basically was a farm. Smelling my own deep, dark earth there in the basement, I could see that Ontario may have been one big hick farm back in 1917, but when the world went crazy in the Flemish mud, the steady supply of farm boys from Ontario (etc.) won the war. They had the higher ground; we had the numbers. To the English generals, Canadians were subordinates. To the Germans, we were death on two swift legs. They called Canadians “killers of Germans.” Flanders Fields was a thick ledger, and Ontario Farm had been written in the largest, boldest letters going, all in that red farmboy ink.
It wasn’t a coincidence that Bill had lived in and around the Ontario Farm tunnel in 1917 then immigrated to Ontario itself in 1919. When
he and Peg chose to start life over, they already had their Mecca, their North Star. Bill and Peg, Gloria and Trevor, Medea and Jason—they all knew you can build a destination up from a phrase, from an idea in a mouthful of words, especially when the phrase belonged on the other side of some contested line. Ontario Farm. Password. Beacon. Curse.
Solid, liquid, gas. Dig, go beneath the surface, and you’ve got so much to think about with solids and liquids that you can too easily forget about gas. You can even forget about gas before carbon monoxide makes you too stupid to think about gas. Bill and the lads had a variety of medievally simple technologies for gas detection. If a candle could no longer burn, oxygen levels were too low. Caged birds helped, the proverbial canary in a coalmine, but no bird loves a war. Eventually, bred canaries had their claws trimmed so they wouldn’t be able to clamp onto their perches if they died. Proper English soldiers, their feet were the property of King and country. Mice were also conscripted. Tunnel openings began in the same trenches where regular soldiers lived in daily struggle with rats: food-stealing, disease-carrying, latrine-haunting, corpse-eating rats. Down the line, tunnellers—already separated by higher pay, more rum, and less discipline—bred, housed, and fed mice. Not for me. I could buy carbon-monoxide detectors at any hardware store and look like a responsible citizen, not a criminal. I had electric monitors in the basement and several battery-powered units ready to crawl out with me.
Preparation aside, eventually you’ve got to dive in. The machined and reliable old vertical shit pipe illuminated by my flashlight was encouraging, but the abyssal black air of the vertical access shaft uncaged the butterflies in my stomach. Pipe and shaft dropped into rank darkness. Destined by character, I’d been driving around with ladders and work lights since I was nineteen.
Keeping Things Whole Page 22
