Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  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.

  Entering the Tartan Tavern was like diving into a dirty aquarium: the beverage room was little more than four glass walls and a roof. Light inside came from all four directions, but was dimmed from having filtered through the grime-coated windows. At the far end of the room, the bluish screen of a television set blinked behind its chain-link bottle-deflector. As always, there was the smell of onions frying in cheap fat, though none of the items on the menu ever seemed to contain onions. The men had pushed tables together, end-to-end, and they sat as though at a banquet. Arvel shook his head in exasperation when he saw that, consciously or not, they left the seat at the head of the table empty for Gavin.

  “What the fuck Gavin is going to tell us that we don’t already know is beyond me,” Arvel muttered as he approached the table, but if anyone heard him, they did not answer.

  Tommy, the owner of the tavern, and its only employee at this time of day, sat behind the bar with his feet up, watching whatever was on the screen. The only other people in the room were a pair of underage boys, obviously on hook from school, who sat guiltily crouched over their beer glasses at the far side of the snooker tables.

  It seemed the others had not been here long, and when Arvel sat down, Tommy came to the table without a word and distributed draft glasses from two trays he held stacked in one hand. Then he went back behind the bar and started filling pitchers from the tap.

  Arvel sat back with his glass of draft. He picked up the salt shaker from the centre of the table and dusted the top of his beer. Foam rushed up through the beer as the salt fell through it. Arvel took a drink and looked out the window at the north end of Foord Street. The field across the way was encircled by an off-ramp from the Trans-Canada highway, the grass there tall and brown.

  When Gavin entered the room, there was a light around him that Arvel saw shining. It was the light of someone who has exempted himself. He sat at the head of the table, and his erect, fluidly moving body made the men who flanked him appear twisted, self-conscious, and jerky. He was the only one to order food: a beef sandwich. When it arrived, he saw that Tommy hadn’t cut it, but instead of sending it back, Gavin pulled it apart with his fingers and ate it. For a while, the men waited for Gavin to speak. They’d been used to letting him lead, to his explaining issues and strategies to them. But of course he had nothing to say. The meeting had not been his idea.

  The men had not agreed on anything particular to say, so when they did start speaking, it was each man to his own grievance, from being pressured to work longer hours than the mining act allowed and the dangerous levels of explosive dust in the drifts, to the methane gauges on machinery that had been tampered with and rendered useless.

  These were all things that Gavin himself had once educated them about, but if he was growing impatient, he didn’t show it. He sat benevolently at the head of the table and nodded at each speaker in turn.

  Finally, in frustration, Arvel spoke: “Jesus, Gavin. These guys want to hear you say something.”

  Gavin laid both palms flat on the table. “I can tell you what you have to do, but every one of you guys already knows. Arvel, you know. You either do what I did and get out, or you wait to die.”

  There was the secret word: death. All of them could talk freely of accidents and explosions, but no one ever broached the truth. Now that the word had been spoken, it was as if the roof had been lifted off the Tartan Tavern and a gust of air had entered.

  “You’ve got to get a union in, is one thing,” Gavin said. He seemed unaffected by the emotion around him in the room. “But you fucked that up by not voting yes the last time.” Some of the men squirmed in their seats. “That process is going to take months now,” Gavin continued. He looked at Arvel. “Arvel has started up with the Auto Workers. You guys are fucking lucky he didn’t quit, too. You’re lucky he’s got the guts to put his neck on the line. And he’s willing to do the work that has to be done. But he has to start all over. In the meantime, you got to look at your day-to-day options, and there are two: quit or die.”

  Steve Jenkins looked at Arvel and shook his head. Arvel wondered what he was thinking. Death again, probably. The thought of death.

  “There are two ways to quit,” Gavin continued. He picked up his beer and placed it forcefully and as far to the left as his right hand could reach. “You can quit one by one,” he said. “In which case management either replaces you one by one, or rearranges the shift each time to do with one or two less men.” He picked up the beer glass and transferred it dramatically to the right to mark the other pole of his idea. “Or you can all quit together, in which case management has to act. They’ve got to clean up or shut down.”

  “They could replace all twenty-six of us at once, just about overnight,” Arvel said. “You know what this economy is like.”

  Gavin shook his head. “The federal and provincial governments are into this mine for a hundred million dollars. If a whole shift quit together, you’d have the media doing handsprings in a second.”

  “But what would happen to us?” Someone asked. Arvel looked around at all the grim faces, but could not determine who’d spoken.

  “Well, you’d be out of a job, for one thing,” Gavin said.

  Men were nodding into their beer glasses. At some point, the two underage boys across the room had got up unnoticed and left. At their table now sat two trim middle-aged men in white shirts and blue ties. One man had his tie flipped back over one shoulder to keep it out of his fish and chips. The other man had his shirtsleeves rolled to halfway up his biceps.

  Arvel stood up and moved in the direction of the bathroom. The few beer he’d had on an empty stomach had left him feeling woozy and oppressed, as though the air were being squeezed in around him.

  When he returned, the atmosphere at the tables had changed. Men were arguing heatedly about what they should do. Gavin’s face looked strained. He’d quit his job to get away from the endless, fruitless arguments and worries. “Listen boys,” Gavin was saying, though only a few were listening to him, “Listen boys …” Arvel knew the next thing Gavin said was going to be goodbye. Arvel stepped up to the edge of a table. “Listen up, now …” Arvel said more loudly. The bickering continued. He reached across the table, picked up an almost empty beer pitcher, and emptied it into his glass. “Listen here, now,” he shouted. Nothing. He raised the pitcher over the table and brought it down in a swift motion, its thick flat bottom smacking the tabletop, the sound shooting through the room and bouncing off the plate-glass windows.

  “My properties!” Tommy shouted from behind the bar.

  “Aw cripes!” came a voice from across the room. One of the two men in white shirts had jumped at the noise and knocked his plate of fish and chips onto the floor. Dabs of ketchup were spattered over his white shirt.

  “For God’s sake will you stop and listen,” Arvel said. “Gavin’s about to go and I want to say something.” Everyone was looking at him. Tommy had come out from behind the bar and was approaching the table where Arvel stood. When he got there he picked up his beer pitcher and inspected it in the light. He ran his hand over the tabletop where the pitcher had hit. He scowled at Arvel and returned to the bar with the pitcher cradled against him like a baby.

  “I hope to Jesus,” Arvel said, “we can decide what to do. Gavin, you said we could quit one at a time or we could quit all at once. You’re right. That’s our choice, and every day we don’t make that choice is a
day closer to the other option. Only with that one, we’ll have no choice. If we die, we’ll all die together. No one will be left.”

  Death again. Arvel picked up his beer. Took a drink. “That leaves you, Gavin.”

  “That leaves me what?” He looked steadily into Arvel’s eyes, as though he knew exactly what Arvel was suggesting, but wanted to make him say it.

  “You’re one of us,” Arvel said. He felt himself puffing up, almost patriotically. “But when we go, you’ll be the only one left.”

  “When we go,” someone piped up. “We went from if to when. Jesus!”

  “Shut up!” someone else said loudly. “Let him finish.”

  Arvel looked seriously at Gavin. Gavin looked at him and at every other man in the room.

  “Just tell people,” Arvel said. “Just tell them what it was like. Just tell them what happened.”

  Gavin nodded.

  Arvel remembered that nod as he stood outside the doughnut shop, his breath rising from his mouth in clouds. Through the broad windows, he watched Gavin inside, sitting serenely, nodding his head in the same thoughtful manner. He was like a vision of an otherworldly creature. Since he’d quit at Eastyard, no more than two months ago, his face looked younger than it had in years. His gestures and movements were smooth and relaxed. He sat and listened to the conversation going on around him, his head inclined slightly forward. He narrowed his eyes. He threw his head back and laughed at something someone said. Through its streaked windows, the Tim Horton’s emitted cold light into the dark winter night.