by Leo McKay
“My properties!” came the warning shout from behind the bar. It was Tommy, the owner of the Tartan Tavern, shouting his customary complaint when he felt something he’d paid good money for, in this case, Ennis’s beer glass, was being threatened.
“Look at Michelin,” Ennis repeated in an even tone. “All right, I’m looking at it.”
McInnis had seen Ennis erupt many times before and had not flinched. He sat looking calmly into his draft glass, then glanced up at Ennis as though he had just noticed him there.
“Plenty of people who work there say there’s no need of a union at Michelin,” said McInnis.
Ennis had heard this all before. He sat back down, looked for his glass on the table. When he discovered it broken on the floor near his feet, he grasped the handle of the pitcher and took a big drink straight from it.
“Maybe they do,” Ennis said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “But it’s their decision. It’s not the government of Nova Scotia’s business to make that decision for them. And it certainly isn’t the Michelin management’s decision. People deserve to have a say in how their lives are run. Unions are just an extension of democracy into the workplace.” Ennis had been pointing a thick finger at McInnis which he now thumped end-first into the table to put a period at the end of his sentence.
“If it weren’t for the Michelin bill, that company never would have come here in the first place,” McInnis said. “They don’t run union plants anywhere in the world.”
“The plant was here before the bill,” Ennis replied.
“They wouldn’t have come if they didn’t know they were going to get it.”
For Ennis, this Michelin argument was like a sliver of shrapnel lodged in his flesh from a land mine that had exploded years before. The bill, long since passed into law, was a piece of anti-union legislation used specifically to lure the French tire manufacturer to the province and to encourage it to expand its operations once established. Ennis had watched incredulously as fifty years of advancement of workers’ rights, his whole life’s work, was set back in a single motion. He kept telling himself he’d given up caring about it.
“The government kept the unions out of Michelin and they’ll keep them out of Eastyard,” McInnis said.
“I’m telling you, it’s not the government’s decision,” Ennis replied. “You don’t know shit about labour law.”
“The government can do whatever the hell they want. They’re the government. They propped that mine up with taxpayers’ money just to buy our votes. You talk about democracy, but Nova Scotia’s not a democracy. If this was a democracy, our new Member of Parliament would not be the son of the old one. Your son is wasting his time if he’s trying to organize that mine. The whole process is pointless.”
Ennis reached across the table and clamped his big fingers around McInnis’s neck. He pulled the man forward over the tabletop, sweeping pitchers, glasses, ashtrays, and lighters onto the floor.
“I’m going to do everyone a favour,” Ennis said. He dropped McInnis onto the floor, put a foot on his chest to keep him there. He fumbled around on the floor until he found a draft glass.
“I’m going to plug that fucking mouth of yours.” Ennis throttled McInnis until he opened his mouth.
“You fat fucking bully,” McInnis managed to say before Ennis stuffed the butt end of the beer glass into his open mouth.
It was only a short walk through the Red Row from the Tartan Tavern to Ennis’s house. In the old days, before the Breathalyzer, he’d driven it anyway. Even with the threat of the Breathalyzer, he would still occasionally drive home from the Tartan if he’d only had a few beer. But there were times in the past when he did not remember having driven home, times when the car was parked crossways in the driveway in the morning when he got up and he’d only been able to assume that he’d been the one who’d parked it that way.
Putting the Tartan Tavern behind him, Ennis walked south, under the Trans-Canada overpass, and listened to the cars whooshing past overhead. However many times he’d walk this route home, he was always surprised at how the Red Row had changed since he’d been a kid there more than fifty years ago. The single word that encompassed these changes was prosperity. The Trans-Canada highway itself was a huge marker of that prosperity. When he was young, if you wanted to go to Halifax, you had to wind your way through a crooked dirt road that would be rutted in spring and might be impassable with snow for a lot of the winter. The new highway’s on- and off-ramps at Lourdes alone were a more massive construction project than the Red Row had been decades before.
Foord Street, the main street in Albion Mines, and the main road that cut through the Red Row, was now a wide, well-paved, properly drained thoroughfare. He remembered when it had been a lane and a half without ditches or stormdrains, knee-deep in water or eye-high with dust. The dwellings in the Red Row were as well-serviced as any modern suburb in a big city. When he had been young, there’d been an outhouse in every yard. Many kitchens had featured a hand-pump connected to a shallow well. Coal sheds and chicken coops, horse barns and ash piles, all stuffed into a yard less than half the size you could legally build a house on now. Houseflies spent half the day on what was deposited in the outhouse, the other half on the food in the kitchen.
He regretted what he’d done to Allie McInnis back in the Tartan. He’d left the man on his back in a pool of spilled beer, spitting out the butt end of a glass. But McInnis’s cynicism had enraged him. That attitude of helplessness, of pointlessness, flew in the face of every worthwhile thing his life’s work had accomplished.
He looked around the neighbourhood now and felt a sense of satisfaction. He knew that he had played a role in the transformation of the Red Row. His union work had put upward pressure on the wage market. The unions and the New Democratic Party had pressed for and won the grants that had fixed up those houses, and for the universal health care that had lengthened and improved the lives of the residents. People he knew, living in Red Row houses they’d grown up in, had gone from having no sewage or running water, to owning camper trailers to take their vacations in, and snowblowers to clear the driveway after winter storms. He knew people who’d been afflicted with the complications of malnutrition in childhood who now had plastic hip joints that the health-care system had paid for in full.
“Red Rowers of the world unite!” he yelled. His open mouth sent up a column of steam. He thumped his arms against his chest, and the sound echoed out around him. Just beyond the parking lot of the Heather Motor Hotel, the Quick Pick convenience store at the north end of the Red Row glowed icily in the black winter overcast. Ennis crossed the parking lot, went in, and stamped his feet on the grate inside the door.
“Too late for the lotto, Ennis,” the girl behind the register called. It was a Sewell girl, one of Linda Sewell’s daughters. Her name wouldn’t be Sewell, though. Who was it her mother had married?
“It’s never too late for that,” Ennis said. “I can always buy for the next draw.” The girl laughed and walked over to where the lottery machine was set up. She had her mother’s square, honest smile and compact but shapely build. Ennis caught himself looking at her breasts, then turned quickly away before he could see if she’d noticed. He’d dated Linda Sewell several times in the late forties, right after the war. They’d been kids, really. Linda had probably been younger then than her daughter was now.
He walked to the pop cooler and stood swaying slightly before it. He put a hand to the door of the cooler to brace himself, then squeezed his eyes shut. He was trying to get rid of a picture that had arisen in his mind: Linda Sewell in the back seat of his ’38 Ford. He shook his head vigorously, like a dog trying to kill the prey clenched in its teeth.
“You okay, Ennis?” the girl called from over his shoulder.
“Aw, I’ve been having a drink, is all. The heat hit me, coming in the door, there.”
He went back to the counter with a 500 ml Pepsi. “Wet my whistle,” he said. The girl was still poised ove
r the lotto machine. She had a fresh, pepperminty smell that penetrated Ennis’s drunkenness and had him breathing deeply through his nose.
“Just the Pepsi,” Ennis said. He looked up and locked his gaze on the girl’s eyes, afraid that if he let his gaze wander somewhere else, it would go where he didn’t want it to.
“Down to the Tartan, were you?” the girl asked, moving in behind the register. With a different hairstyle, she could have been her mother. She had broad, flat cheekbones and a tiny, stone-chiselled nose whose nostrils scooped up and back in a way that suggested permanent arousal. Her eyes were … Ennis could no longer bear to look at her. He bowed his head over the counter and focused on the money he was handing over, and on the scratch tickets beneath the glassed-in case on the countertop.
“You’re going home early,” the girl remarked.
“There’s some real arseholes down there tonight,” Ennis said. He frowned at the memory of what had happened in the tavern, then looked up into the girl’s eyes again. “You’re Linda Sewell’s girl, aren’t you?” he said.
The girl looked surprised, then said. “I … guess so. Her name’s MacKenzie now. Seems funny to hear that name … Linda Sewell.”
“How’s your mother these days?” Ennis asked.
The girl looked alarmed and began to stutter a reply.
Ennis stopped her. “I have no right to be talking to you this way,” he said. “I’ve made a mistake. I told you, I’ve been having a drink.” He plucked the Pepsi from the counter, pushed it down into a pocket of his coat, and rushed out through the door.
When he reached his own house, Ennis stood at the end of the driveway a moment and thought about how much the place had changed. He and Dunya, his wife, had moved in years before, just a few weeks before Arvel had been born. The house had barely been worked on since it had been built. So although the house was old, and no one would ever mistake its uneven floors and chipped and repainted door casings for new, almost everything in the house had been replaced since they’d lived here. Ennis had reroofed it the first summer. The next year he’d got together with Ab Arnold, who owned the other side of the coal company duplex, and covered the original clapboard with smart cedar shingles. The floors had been tiled, retiled, and carpeted. Pressboard ceiling tiles had covered up the original plaster ceilings. The walls were covered in the simulated wood panelling that had been so popular in the seventies. The windows downstairs had all been replaced, those upstairs had been sealed over with aluminum storm windows. When they’d moved in, they’d barely had a stick of furniture, but over the years they had accumulated so much stuff (couches, chairs, bookshelves, china cabinets, lamps, and magazine racks) that you had to turn sideways to enter every room, the doorways were all blocked by furniture.
Ennis entered the back porch silently, and silently slipped off his boots and parka. Arvel was sitting at the kitchen table. His wife had kicked him out again. He’d been back in his parents’ house for several days, living out of the blue overnight bag that he always brought with him when his wife sent him packing. He was working the back shift, which started at midnight, so at eleven o’clock on Friday night he was chewing on toast and jam, washing it down with tea.
“You look like shit,” Ennis said to his son.
“You’re drunk, old man,” Arvel said. He had both elbows on the table and stared blankly into his teacup.
“I’ll old man you,” Ennis said. “How would you like to be called old man?” He took the Pepsi from his pocket and set it on the counter by the sink.
“How would you like to be called shit?” Arvel said.
“Jesus Christ. You’re the touchiest guy I know.”
Arvel shook his head and stared back into his tea.
“What the hell’s the matter, now?” Ennis said.
Arvel bit a corner off his toast and put the remainder of the slice back on the plate.
“For God’s sake,” Dunya called from the living room. “Leave the boy alone.” The voices from her TV show rose up again behind her, and it was as though she’d never said a thing.
Ennis opened the Pepsi and half-filled a glass. He took a forty of black rum down from the cupboard, topped up the glass, and sat across the table from his son.
Arvel looked up at his father and shook his head. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he said.
Ennis smiled and took a big drink of his rum. “What are you talking about?” he said.
“Your bad heart is saving you from getting your arse kicked.”
Ennis stood up, arms out at his sides, at the ready.
“Sit down,” Arvel said calmly.
Ennis knew the score. Arvel had inherited his size, his strength, and his temper. At twenty-six, the age Arvel was now, Ennis could have pounded him. Ennis had grown up in the old Red Row. The mean one. He had shovelled coal, picked peas, driven rivets, loaded wood. And he’d learned how to take a punch and give back two for every one he took. Arvel had grown up soft in comparison. All the same, Ennis’s aging, overweight body was no match for his son’s. He could not sit down on the command of this snot-nosed kid, so he grabbed his drink from the table and backed away to the counter, leaned against it, trying to look unaffected after such a loss of face.
Arvel showed no pleasure in the power he’d just exercised over his father. “Look at you,” he said. “You lousy drunk.”
“I’ll kick you out of my damned house.”
“Go ahead,” Arvel said.
“I raised you, you …”
“Raised me? Raised me?” Arvel’s voice was loud now. “You lowered me, old man. You lowered the bunch of us. You and your drinking and screaming and pushing us around. You spent your whole life looking after workers’ rights. Those people were strangers to you. What about your own sons?”
“Again and again, you screw up your own life and every time you come crawling back to me to save you. Don’t blame me if you can’t convince your wife to let you live in your own house. You’re not man enough to face yourself. Christ!” he said. He held the drink up to the light to examine its appearance.
“Did you poison this goddamned rum, woman!” he called into the living room. He sniffed at the glass and dumped the contents into the sink.
“Rum is poison,” Arvel said, then in response to seeing his father dump out the rum: “It’s like seeing the Pope dumping out holy water. You’d better cross yourself or you’ll go straight to hell.”
“Now I’m telling you, boy,” Ennis said. “You get the fuck out of here if you’re going to talk to me like that. Maybe I can’t throw you out, but I got a thirty-thirty upstairs that’ll get your arse moving, I bet. I’m nice enough to keep you here when your own wife won’t have you. You’d get one hell of a shock if you woke up one night with a mouthful of the end of that goddamn rifle. Now I’m telling you to get out of my sight, and I’m telling you to do it right now.”
Arvel put the last piece of toast into his mouth and drank a warm drink of milky tea to soften the toast. “I gotta get up to that grave, anyway.” He walked into the porch and put on his parka and heavy boots. He stopped at the door and turned to face his father, who stood backlit and grim-faced in the doorway to the kitchen.
“You ever point a gun at me, old man, it better be loaded and you’d better pull the trigger. That’s just some advice.”
Arvel left.
Ennis turned back to the kitchen. He swung up his leg to kick the side of the fridge. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, he could have knocked the fridge on its side with a single kick. This blow didn’t even land. His sock slipped up the slick enamel of the appliance, and as his foot was coming down, the heel jammed onto the top of the handle of the fridge door. It felt like someone had driven a nail into his foot, and the next thing he felt was his tailbone smacking the floor.
Dunya was in the doorway: “Ennis! Ennis!” she cried. Ennis had his eyes closed in shame and anger.
After he’d got up from the floor, he’d taken two painkillers and a nitroglycerine
and chased them down with a big drink of rum and Pepsi. He’d gone into the bathroom, taken off his shirt, and examined the scar down the middle of his chest. The wide pink line was like a pair of tightly pursed lips. It had been over a year since the operation, and the doctor said the incision was fully healed, but any time he suffered a bump or a shake, Ennis expected the place where he’d been ripped open to explode, his bloody heart to flop out onto the floor.
Bypass surgery was becoming routine, his doctor had told him before he’d gone to Halifax, but once they got him opened up on that table and had a look inside him, they’d pronounced his heart inoperable. They’d closed him up without having done the work and the surgeon signed the papers for him to draw on his long-term disability insurance.
“The heart is a queer machine,” the surgeon had said afterwards. They sat in his oak-panelled office in New Glasgow. The leather padding of the chairs they sat in squeaked when they shifted their weight. Ennis looked at the framed degrees and certificates on the walls, and thought, “A queer machine.” Is that the best that all this education can come up with?
“You’ve got some bad arteries in there,” the surgeon said. “They may never cause you trouble. On the other hand, you might just go out one day like that,” he snapped his fingers. “Like switching off a light.”
His foot hurt when he paced, but the pain in his tailbone kept him from sitting for very long. He was thinking about Arvel, about how much he loved him, and how all that love had somehow got twisted around into hate. He knew that whatever had gone wrong in their relationship, it could only be his fault. The boy had only learned whatever he’d taught him. But how could the best intentions have got so far off track?
He’d meant to come home and ask Arvel how the organization drive was going since they’d switched to the Auto Workers. Everyone assumed that Ennis – who’d played a major role in the organization of the steel mill, the railcar plant, the pop plant, the Sobey’s warehouse – was playing a major role in what his son was doing at Eastyard coal. When the first effort by the United Mine Workers failed, he’d read about it in the paper. Arvel hadn’t mentioned a word to him. He hadn’t even known his son was involved in the union drive. His heart had soared with pride when he’d read Arvel’s name in the paper and saw that the reporter had asked Arvel to comment from the union’s side.
