Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  He went into the front room and switched on the reading lamp. In the midst of his falling-apart life, the life in which his relationship to every member of his family was in shambles, evidence of another life abounded in this small room. It was propped in frames on top of the coffee table. It hung collecting dust against the knotty pine panelling on the walls. The life depicted here was one at which Ennis had excelled. Plaques of service and congratulations, certificates of appreciation and achievement, dating right back to the fifties. “Presented to Ennis Burrows in thanks upon the signing of our first collective agreement. Allied Food and Restaurant Workers local 324. January, 1958.” “Ennis Burrows, in recognition of 10 years’ service, United Steelworkers of America.” “Ennis Burrows, in recognition of 20 years’ service, United Steelworkers of America.” “Ennis Burrows, in recognition of 30 years’ service, United Steelworkers of America.” “Organizer Award. National Day of Protest. October 14, 1973. The largest organized demonstration in Canadian history.” Photographs showed Ennis shaking hands with provincial New Democratic Party leaders, handing out Labor Council Scholarships at high-school graduations. He’d run for the federal seat himself in 1968, and the most prized photo of all, the only one professionally mounted and framed in polished brass, showed Ennis with former Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, leader of the first democratic socialist government in North America.

  Ennis had met Douglas briefly at a rally in Halifax during the campaign of 1968. New Democratic Party candidates from across the province were lined up backstage after Douglas’s speech that afternoon. Ennis had just enough time with Douglas to snap a photo for inclusion in his campaign literature. The actual physical moment itself had been brief, but its memory had been immortalized with a permanent place on the wall here in the front room. The photo had come down twice before while they’d been re-papering that room, and once while he and Arvel had been tacking up the panelling from which it now hung, but each time it had come down, the photo had gone right back up to its original spot, directly above the only light source in the room, in the centre of the wall you faced as you entered.

  Beside Ennis, the Prairie firebrand looked like a prematurely aging child. Ennis’s big hand gripped Douglas at the upper arm, and standing so close to Ennis’s side, Douglas’s head barely came up to Ennis’s shoulder. But Ennis was looking at Douglas in the photo, and the awe and admiration on Ennis’s face, the pride in standing next to his hero, made it clear who was the bigger man.

  He was waiting for Ziv to come home. He wanted to have a conversation with his son. He didn’t care what they talked about, hockey, cars, work, it didn’t matter. He just wanted to say something to one of his sons that would not get turned in the wrong direction. He wanted someone to speak to him without anger. He knew from experience that this was unlikely to happen, but he had an image in his mind of himself and the boy, sitting at the table in the kitchen, drinking tea with sugar until they both sobered up, until the light crept back into the sky, until Arvel came home from the pit and the three of them would sit there, two guys hungover, one exhausted from work. Dunya would come downstairs and they’d all eat a big breakfast together.

  He paced back and forth, kitchen to living room, fridge to TV, table to chair to couch. Ziv would be drunk when he got home, Ennis knew that. He and the boy had fought before over this issue. Each fight with Ziv, it seemed, was an individual struggle over some specific issue. Their fights were about drinking or about something one or the other of them had said without thinking. With Arvel it was different. He and Arvel just had one long fight that got taken up anew whenever they saw each other.

  When he awoke it was still dark. The TV was hissing, its grey eye dancing with random dots. Dunya was standing over him, shaking him awake.

  “Ennis! Wake up, goddamn it. Did you feel it?”

  “What’s the time?” he said. He sat up, swung his feet to the floor.

  “Something happened,” Dunya said. He pressed the light on his watch. 5:29.

  “What?” Ennis said. “What?” His hangover came in through his eyes, pushing backward toward his brain.

  “The house shook. It woke me up.”

  “Forget it,” he said. “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  “Jesus, Ennis. Didn’t you feel it? I’m telling you, Ennis. Something happened.”

  Ennis rose slowly from the couch. He went into the kitchen and stopped when he got to the side of the fridge. The fridge door was ajar and a plastic pitcher of orange juice had somehow shaken loose and ended up spilled on the floor.

  “Did you do this?” Ennis said.

  Dunya came up beside him. “I haven’t been in here this morning. See? Whatever woke me up shook this juice right out of the fridge.”

  Ennis stepped around the pool of juice and filled a big glass with water. His heel ached, and now he remembered catching it on the door of the fridge. He put a hand back and pressed gently on his tailbone. It was bruised, but he wouldn’t know how badly until later. He was drinking his second glass of water when he looked out the kitchen window and down to Rutherford Street. In the light of the street lamp, he saw Ziv coming out the back door of the Burgess house.

  Jackie was leaving in the morning. Her friend Colleen was driving from Halifax to pick up her and the girls. They’d stay at Colleen’s place until they could find an apartment of their own. After years of complaining about Arvel’s drinking and his volatile temper, after years of throwing him out, taking him back, and throwing him out again, she was finally making a break.

  So she could gather what she and the girls would need at least to get them through the next few weeks, she’d set up the girls in the living room with enough toys and games to keep them occupied. The packing had gone much more quickly than she’d expected, and she was finished early enough to have the girls in their beds at the regular time.

  Yesterday morning she’d told them what was happening. The part about moving to Halifax, at least. The part about leaving their father behind she had not yet discussed with them.

  The girls had not asked any questions. In her mind, she’d gone over possible answers numerous times since she’d asked Arvel to leave the house a few days ago and decided that this was it, this was the last time.

  Is Dada going to come with us? she thought Kate might ask.

  No, dear, he can’t come. He has to stay here and work and we all have to go to Halifax, to work and to go to school. Why?

  Well, Mama and Dada have problems they can’t solve. They’ve tried to solve them for a long time, but they can’t. Now we have to move on, move out of our problems.

  There were only a few suitcases and an old sports bag of Arvel’s, full of clothing, some of the girls’ toys and books. She’d packed what they’d need to get them through the next few weeks, at which point she would come back and organize the rest. She moved the packed bags from the living room and piled them next to the back door, made herself a cup of mint tea, and sat down at the kitchen table. Halifax. Her friend Colleen Chisolm had been trying to convince Jackie to move to Halifax for years, ever since she’d gone there herself.

  Arvel would find a job there for sure. She said that it would be a lot easier for him there than in Albion Mines.

  Colleen was working at Gregor’s, an upscale women’s clothing store in an area of the downtown called Historic Properties, and for years she’d been telling Jackie about the amount of money she was able to make, the clean, modern apartment she could afford, the almost-new car she was able to make payments on. Colleen had worked with Jackie for a brief time at Exception Elle in the new mall in New Glasgow, where Jackie still worked. She claimed all along that Jackie was much better at sales than she herself was and that any time she wanted to come to Halifax for a better job and a better life, Colleen would get her on at Gregor’s.

  She’d called Colleen a week ago, even before she’d kicked Arvel out of the house. Colleen had been as positive as ever.

  “You’ve finally come to your senses!”
Colleen had said.

  “This is no joke, Colleen. I’m leaving … leaving Arvel,” she’d felt herself choke up just uttering the words, the words she’d formed in her mind already but had yet to speak. Arvel was at work, the kids were asleep, but she found herself crouching over the phone in a secretive manner and looking over her shoulder to see who might be there looking at her.

  “The way Arvel drinks. The way the two of us fight. This is not the kind of life I want for myself or for the girls. I told him I wanted to move to Halifax, but he’s on at the mine now and he thinks that’s the only thing he’s ever going to have to do. He refuses to see what this family really needs to better ourselves.”

  “So is Arvel just letting you go like that – Goodbye?”

  “Not on your life. He doesn’t know.”

  “You’re sneaking out?”

  “You don’t have to put it like that. I feel bad enough as it is. But this is the only way it will work.”

  “I’m sorry,” Colleen said. “If this is what you’re going to do, just come. You and the kids can stay with me until you get set up. Is this it? Is this the end, do you think?”

  Jackie paused. She looked around the tiny kitchen, lit only by the light from street lamps on Pleasant Street. “I don’t know. It feels like the end. I feel as though my whole life needs to be turned in a new direction.”

  She took the last drink of mint tea and looked at the kitchen. She wondered what she was headed for. It suddenly seemed unimaginable to her now, after more than six years of marriage: a life without Arvel, a life outside of Pictou County.

  Arvel had grown up in Albion Mines. Jackie had grown up in New Glasgow, a nearby town. She had no siblings, no aunts, uncles, or cousins. In the seven years since her parents passed away, her husband’s family had become her only link to a sense of rootedness or permanence. Her mother had a cousin in New Glasgow with whom Jackie was not on good terms. There were a few old friends from school, but most of the people she’d known then had gone off to university and either not come back, or come back changed and disconnected from her somehow. Colleen Chisolm had been her closest confidante after high-school graduation, and they had stayed in touch, but it had been years now since Colleen herself had moved to Halifax, and it was hard to stay close over that distance. Tomorrow she’d be living with Colleen and it would be Arvel who was a hundred miles distant.

  By looking around her, by examining the possessions they’d collected, she could trace a history of her life with Arvel. There was a pattern, as easily identifiable as the rings in the stump of a cut tree. Their bed, a ragged double mattress with no box spring and no frame, was from the meagre early period of their marriage. For a short time, a week, perhaps, it had been the only piece of furniture in their old apartment, a tiny one-bedroom on Bridge Avenue, bordering the Red Row. They had not conceived a child for the first time on this mattress. That had taken place before they were married, on a blanket at Melmerby Beach. But the first signs of the miscarriage which ended that pregnancy had started while she’d been lying on this mattress: the few days of heavier and heavier spotting, followed by the intense, painful cramping.

  The kitchen table was too small for a family of four and was surrounded by chairs that did not match each other or the table. She still thought of the table as new. Six years was such a short time. But the varnished surface of the tabletop was scratched and pitted, the result of countless turbulent meals.

  The living-room furniture, two matching couches and a wingback chair, were on the outer edge of the concentric rings. They were Scotchgarded, nylon-wool, button-tufted furniture, made by Sklar, and paid for in two payments less than a year ago, when Arvel’s mining cheques had started coming in.

  She wandered from room to room, taking a final look at what she’d be leaving behind in a few hours. She felt removed from the house already, as though in deciding to leave, in knowing she’d be gone in the morning, part of her had already left. As she looked at clothing and furniture, it struck her that all those things would have to be sorted through and divided. Final decisions would have to be made.

  From the floor of the closet in the hallway she dragged a grey plastic storage bin to the centre of the living-room floor. This was the box of memorabilia. All the loose ends of memory in her history with Arvel and before. When they had moved out of the old apartment on Bridge Avenue, all of the things this container held had been scattered about, some in smaller, disintegrating boxes, some loose at the bottom of drawers. Jackie had gone out and bought this box. She’d taped a label to the lid that said “Memories” and thrown things in in no particular order. She’d planned to sort through it all at a later date, but had never done so.

  She snapped the lid from the box and sat on the carpeted floor to examine the contents. The smell of yellowing paper and closed up dust rose into her nostrils. On top there was a scroll of paper tied with pink ribbon, a religious certificate. It was her first confession or confirmation document. The next thing that caught her eye was a square of yellowed newspaper. She picked it up and looked at the photo from the New Glasgow Evening News. This was a photo she’d seen several times before. It was Arvel at age two or three, sitting on Santa’s knee. Arvel’s big, square face was recognizable even as a toddler. The caption below the photo read: “Checking it twice. Santa stopped by the Steelworkers’ Hall last Thursday to double-check on his list of children who were being naughty or nice. Little Arvel Burrows, from Albion Mines, claims he’s been a good boy all year.”

  Jackie felt her throat thickening with emotion and snapped the lid quickly back on the box. She found a pencil on the shelf above the bar in the closet, and added a note to the label: “Arvel: half of these things are mine and half are yours. We’ll have to go through it some time soon.” She placed the box back inside the closet and closed the closet door, and considering what she’d just written on the box, realized that she had been putting off writing a note to Arvel.

  She dug in a drawer full of cookbooks in the kitchen and found a spiral notebook that looked as though it had never been used. Opening to the first page, she wrote Dear Arvel at the top. It was such a strange thing to be doing: writing a note for the husband she was leaving. It was an act from a soap opera. The page she was writing on was smaller than letter-size, but it seemed enormous and empty, white as a blank mind. What did she want to say?

  I’m sorry, she wrote. She paused a moment and considered keeping the note to these two words. I have moved to Halifax with the girls.

  The girls will miss you and in lots of ways I will too, but you know as well as I do that we just could not go on with things as they’ve been for a long time. There’s been so much strife, so much turbulence between us and it makes us both lesser people every time we go through it. But it’s been the effect on the girls that I’ve really been worried about. It’s just not right and we both want better than that for them.

  I’ll call next week and give you a number where you can reach us.

  She almost wrote “Love” before her name at the bottom of the note, but realized how strange that would look to him.

  The girls had migrated to her bed and were both asleep, curled beneath the ragged quilts when she entered the room. Not wanting to disturb them by turning on the overhead light, she crawled into the corner where the desk lamp stood on the floor. She switched on the lamp, aiming the broad end of its cone-shaped shade at the nearby wall, and changed into her flannel nightgown in the subdued light. She moved Melanie to the edge of the mattress and rolled Kate gently beside her to make room for herself. She set the alarm on the clock radio for seven, switched off the light, and crawled wearily between the sheets. She lay a short time awake, her eyes open in the total darkness.

  She remembered what this house had looked like the day they’d moved in, how big it had seemed compared to the apartment they were moving out of, how hopeful she’d been of her future here, how her life had seemed to be taking a shape she’d felt positively about.

  She thou
ght back to when she and Arvel had first started dating. There had been a dance for which they’d gotten dressed up: she in a gown of some sort, he in a dark suit with a white boutonniere in the lapel. It must have been a wedding party, what else would he have dressed up for? They had only been seeing each other a short time, and she could remember the remarkable sight of him in that suit: so large and powerful a man somehow tamed or gentled by his attire. She remembered dancing close with him that night and the soft way he spoke in her ear as he held her. That tender, beautiful side of her husband was real. It was a part of him she’d always tried to nurture.

  She’d been optimistic when he’d started working in the mine. Their financial troubles ended overnight. She saw Arvel’s self-confidence surfacing, especially since his recent work on the organization drive for the union.

  But they always found themselves shouting at each other. Drinking had been such a large part of his life for so long that he never managed to step away from it completely. Always some irresponsible action managed to further erode her faith in him.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on breathing slowly through her nose, and before long she drifted into an uneasy sleep.

  It was almost five thirty when she opened her eyes. Something seemed to have happened. A motion or a noise. She sat up in bed and listened, then put her head back to the pillow and drifted off again.

  It was the phone that woke her next, what seemed like a very short time later. She staggered to the kitchen and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Is Arvel at home?” a woman asked. She offered no explanation of who she was.