by Leo McKay
I’m quitting, Arvel thought. I’m not going to turn up tonight. To hell with it. He stepped around to the entrance and walked through the first set of doors. He stood in the semi-warmth of the storm entrance and watched the little crusts of snow fall from the sides of his boots into the grating, then turned back and continued up the street toward the mine.
Something had changed in the atmosphere among the men on their shift. They barely spoke to one another, and when they did speak, it was only about things not related to the mine: curling or hockey or hunting. When a sparking engine or a miner whose methane detectors had been disconnected flared blue momentarily in a pocket of gas, or when several men were trudging through fuel-soaked explosive dust that was halfway up their shins, or when a foreman or manager ordered them to continue using damaged equipment, the men no longer spoke about these things. They clamped their jaws and shook their heads.
The change room was full as Arvel got into his working clothes: coveralls, boots, hard hat. He remembered a film he’d seen in junior high called The Productive Classroom. According to the film, the productive classroom was a silent one. Each student was hunched over an open notebook. The sound of pencils scratching paper, and occasionally the sound of a pencil being sharpened: these were the only sounds in the productive classroom. In the productive change room, there was the ripping sound of laces being pulled tight in stiff leather boots. Zippers were being zipped, snaps snapped. Buckles and cinches and Velcro closures were being pulled at and folded over.
Arvel held his hard hat in one hand and looked at it strangely before he put it on.
His hard hat, the one he held at arm’s length every day and examined before putting on, the simplest piece of safety equipment he owned, and one he could have used every day without thought, was an emblem for him. It was like a fossil retrieved from the prehistoric, black-and-white world of his grandparents. But it wasn’t like a fossil at all, because fossils were impressions of bygone worlds, and as though having slipped through a hatch in a sci-fi movie, Arvel’s pre-past, the world of his grandparents, had been transported forward through time. The helmet with lamp connected him to his own childhood, in which he used to dream of having such a piece of headgear to play with. It connected him to a past he’d been told was over. When he’d started school, it was the late sixties. He was the tail end of the baby-boom generation. His teachers were the front end of the same boom, and they taught the kids to expect everything. The teachers said Arvel and his friends were the luckiest generation ever. They’d never known economic hardship, they’d never known war. They were the children of industrial workers whose twenty years of pay raises had lifted them from impoverished childhoods into the lower reaches of the middle class. By the time he graduated, the teachers were feeling sorry for the students they were sending off into the world. They were the least-fortunate generation of the century. Industries were shrinking, the job market was disappearing. They would be the first North American generation to fare worse than their parents.
Miner’s helmet with lamp. These words had been typed in black on a white file card under a glass display case at the old Albion Mines Miner’s Museum up the hill from the Albion Field ballpark. He and his friend Billy Michaels from the Heights spent two or three weeks’ worth of afternoons one spring going into the museum after school. The main purpose of each visit was to sign a false name in the guest book. Name: Jesus Christ. Date of Visit: 24 A.D. Remarks: I am the way, the truth, and the life. Name: Bobby Orr. Date of visit: May 1, 1971. Remarks: I wish I could play for the Albion Mines Royals. Ha! Ha! The last time they’d gone, Billy had just written Adolf Hitler under Name, when the museum’s caretaker clamped the two boys around the neck with his bony hands. They both wiggled free and bolted out the door. The old man was George Hannah, a retired miner, a survivor of the Allan Shaft explosion of 1935, a decorated veteran of two wars, a man who wore his Royal Canadian Legion uniform daily, beret clamped over his white, bald head, medals and ribbons pinned stiffly to the breast of the jacket. He chased them halfway down Park Street, shouting: “No respect for the dead! No respect for the dead!”
In the time before the caretaker caught on to their silly forgeries, they’d seen a lot of the museum. There were dusty frames full of black-and-white photos. White men, their faces blackened with dust, black men, skin coloured darker, staring steel-eyed at the camera. Some men, unable to stand still for the seconds-long exposures, were smears of black and grey, identified in the accompanying lists of names with a question mark. The pictures of the town of Albion Mines showed streets very different from the ones Arvel knew. Many of the buildings were the same, but time had changed the names of the businesses decorating their fronts, had turned the dirt sidewalks to concrete. When Arvel was a boy, when he was visiting the miner’s museum, the coal pits of Pictou County were all but closed. The McBean mine in Thorburn closed when he was nine or ten. There was a working pit in Westville, but the mining days depicted in the photos at the museum, when trolleys ran through the busy streets and thousands of men were employed underground, those days were gone.
The equipment on display at the museum was of special interest. The pieces were like the relics of a lost civilization. There were instruments that had been designed for procedures no longer carried out. Lamps and picks and shovels and buckets, and hundreds of nameless items for which Arvel could not have imagined a use. But the black pit caps with lamps affixed, these held a special fascination, because a ten-year-old boy could think of immediate uses. He imagined himself with the helmet on his head, lamp alight, running through the dark backyards of the Red Row, lighting the ground before him like a locomotive.
He tucked the pit cap under his arm and headed across the change room for the door. Halfway there he ran into Gerry Taylor, who was just coming up from the night shift. Gerry’s face, his hands, and the front of his coveralls were smeared black with coal dust. Sweat had plastered it especially thick just above his eyes. There were streaks sideways across his forehead where he’d tried to wipe the dust away. He shook his head at Arvel going past.
“What?” Arvel said.
“You don’t want to know,” Gerry said. He started taking off his coveralls.
“You better tell me,” Arvel said.
“They got the fucking methanometer at the miner disconnected.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? The methane levels are so high, the fucking thing keeps gassing out.”
“What’s Brennan say about it?”
“Brennan! What’s that guy ever say: ‘Get the fuck back to work.’ ” Taylor turned his furious face away from Arvel and headed toward the showers.
When Arvel stepped outside, there was a tractor parked at the portal to the number-one deep that already had six men on it waiting to go down. Arvel paused for a moment and looked at the machine. He exhaled sharply, shook his head, then jumped onto the platform at the back of the tractor as it took off down the decline. So much ice had built up on the floor of the twenty-five degree decline that, even on the way down, the tires were having trouble getting a footing.
The tractor bounced and hopped on the uneven floor. It slid sideways into an arch and a couple of sparks flew off the fender.
“Get ready for the fourth of July,” said Steve Jenkins, who was right beside Arvel and had seen the sparks too. Arvel rolled his eyes, and neither of them smiled.
There was debris piled up on either side of the number-one deep, but once they passed the number-three crosscut, it got worse. Roof bolts, oily rags, sheets of plastic, empty hydraulic fluid containers, all things that according to the Coal Mines Regulation Act should not have been there. Once in a while there was a little brown splat that was recognizable as human shit.
There was an accumulation of explosive coal dust on the floor of the deep the whole way down, but once they got into the east section, where most of the mining was taking place, the dust was drifted up like black snow. The tractor stopped when they turned onto the number-twelve
road. With the tractor engine shut off, the corridor was relatively quiet. There was the background hum of the ventilation system and a faint rumble of machinery from somewhere. Their mouths picked up the grit of the stirred dust from the floor and it mixed with the fading taste of diesel exhaust from the tractor.
As they began piling off the machine, they saw a light coming toward them from down the number-twelve. It was Albert Moss, the supervisor. He always chewed Juicy Fruit gum, and started every statement with All right, boys.
“All right, boys,” he said, when he got to the front of their tractor. His dentures clacked as he chewed his gum. He gave them their job assignments. “Fuck,” Arvel said when he got his. He’d been promoted to second operator of the miner. Months ago, when he’d just started, this would have seemed like an exciting chance. The miner was where the real production was taking place, where coal was being torn away from the face and conveyored back to a shuttle car. As second operator he would be a step away from the operator’s compartment itself. And running that big, important machine was a challenge he had once looked forward to.
But with the methanometer disconnected, the miner would be a hazard. And in this particular drift, they had been instructed to save some time by not bolting the roof over the miner. This unsafe practice had become so commonplace at Eastyard that hardly anyone seemed to give it a second thought. They’d cut six feet off the face, put in a set of arches, and cut six more feet off the face. The bolter would come in behind them, drilling holes into the roof, inserting resin tubes in the holes, and bolting in place the big mesh screens that would catch a lot of the ground that fell. He’d been working back at the bolter for a few days now, and though using that machine was no picnic either, at the bolter you were at least working under a supported roof.
John MacDonald was the miner operator for the shift. Arvel stood back by the trailing cable and waited for MacDonald, who’d come down on a different tractor.
“Methanometer’s been fucked with,” Arvel said when he saw MacDonald come round the bend in the number-twelve. MacDonald spat tobacco juice onto his own boot and kicked absently at the trailing cable. The plug in his jaw stood out like an abscess.
“What do you mean, fucked with?”
“Disconnected.”
MacDonald glanced at the idle miner. “Gassing out?”
“I met Gerry Taylor up on the surface. They used it that way all last shift.”
MacDonald shook his head. They both looked back up the drift to where the bolter crew was getting ready to start.
“What about this thing?” MacDonald gave the vent tube a boot.
“Working, I guess,” Arvel said.
“And she’s still gassing out?”
“According to Gerry.”
MacDonald reached two fingers into his mouth and pulled out the plug of tobacco he’d been sucking on. It oozed red-black juice into his palm a moment before he threw it angrily against the wall.
“Aw, fuck!” he said. He wiped his hand against his overalls. “This is typical. Do we operate this fuse while we’re in this cannon barrel, or do we get screamed at and maybe fired?”
Arvel looked at him, shook his head, and shrugged.
“I say we get screamed at,” MacDonald said after a long pause.
“It’s all the same to me,” Arvel said. “We can start now on our own, or we can start later with Brennan screaming at us like a big fat baboon.”
MacDonald had already tucked his gloves into the side pocket of his coveralls and headed back up the drift. He got back on the tractor he’d ridden to the face, and set off up the drift to look for Albert Moss. Arvel sat on the idle bolter with the bolter crew and waited for him to come back.
“You know exactly what’s gonna happen,” said Steve Jenkins. The rest of the crew sat reclined as well as they were able in their respective places and did not respond. Around them the hum of the ventilation system and the roar of machines being operated a short distance up the ramp vibrated against the walls.
“He won’t come back here with Moss,” Jenkins continued. “He’ll find Moss, Moss will tell him to find Brennan, Brennan will come down here and have a seizure, and the absolute most he’ll do will be to reconnect the methanometer and block the vent tube at the bolter. Which’ll make us first to fry instead of you,” Jenkins indicated Arvel.
It was an hour and ten minutes before the tractor reappeared. Brennan was behind the wheel. John MacDonald stood behind him, holding onto the back of the seat. The tractor lurched to a halt and Brennan’s fat body came flying off of it, arms flailing in rage.
“I can’t … I can’t …” Brennan said, choking on his anger. “I cannot fucking believe what I’m seeing. You fucking bunch of worthless pieces of shit punched in over an hour and a half ago and you’ve been sitting on your arses ever since!” Brennan’s face was scarlet. Saliva dripped out the corners of his mouth. “Why don’t you just sign on for pogey, like you’ve done all your worthless lives, and sit in your fucking living rooms doing nothing.”
Arvel stood up. Brennan instinctively backed up a step in the face of this mass of muscle and bone. “Why don’t you operate that fucking miner without a methanometer,” Arvel said.
Brennan clenched and unclenched his fists. He went back to the tractor and took a handheld methanometer from a bag. Arvel stood near him as he took a reading: 3.75 per cent. Close to the explosive range. Without looking up at any of the men, Brennan said, his voice strangely calm, “Reconnect the meter.” He walked over to the end of the vent tube near the bolter. Arvel saw Steve Jenkins roll his eyes. “We’ll need extra suction at the face, so block this tube and get the fuck to work.”
“So we’re not going to vent the bolter,” Arvel said.
“No need to vent both machines,” Brennan replied. He was already halfway to the tractor, his back to the crew.
“The gas’ll build up back here,” Arvel said.
“The tube at the face will draw it forward,” Brennan said. He was not looking anyone in the eye.
“The bolter’s got no methanometer on it.”
Brennan started up the tractor. It sparked to life and immediately began making a soft knocking and a sort of muffled pinging-buzzing sound, the little complaints that an oxygen-starved diesel engine made in a methane-contaminated atmosphere.
Arvel ran ahead to the tractor and jumped up beside Brennan. Brennan’s face went white and he flinched backwards, as though he expected Arvel to hit him.
Arvel placed one hand in the centre of Brennan’s back. The other he placed over the top of both of Brennan’s hands where they gripped each other at the crest of the steering wheel. Arvel looked down to where his big left hand was almost as massive as both of Brennan’s hands together. Then he looked into Brennan’s eyes. “If we get killed down here,” Arvel said. The tip of his nose was almost touching the tip of Brennan’s. He had the man’s full attention for the first time ever. “Don’t expect me back next shift.” Arvel hopped down from the tractor and began to laugh. Brennan gave him a startled look, put the tractor in gear, and sped away.
PART TWO
1982
Ziv looked at the stack of textbooks on the shelf above the desk in his residence room. At the beginning of the term, his first at university, he’d been overwhelmed by the amount of work he was expected to do. The reading list for one term of a single course was more than he’d had to do in all of high school. It had seemed impossible. Now, with two of his exams written already and only a week to go before his first term was over, he had a great feeling of accomplishment. He’d tackled that impossible mound of work, and for the most part, had conquered it.
The smell in the residence was of disinfectant and barely masked carpet mould. In late afternoon, he sat at the desk before a pile of class notes and texts whose pages were stained yellow with Hi-Liter pen and looked out the window at the last glint of light from a short December day. He’d only ever lived in one house before, only ever had one bedroom window, so he was s
truck with the difference a simple change of scenery made. What he noticed was light. He’d never noticed that before: that you could tell what time of year it was just by the quality of the light. In September the air began thinning out. Everything leaned northward. Some colours got more noticeable, more brilliant. By now the leaves had turned and fallen, there had already been several sprinklings of snow, and the span of light in a day was almost as short as it would get. Colours had slowly drained from the scene outside his residence-room window. Everything had lapsed into brown or dull grey.
Elsewhere on campus, there were craggy trees that covered the lawns with deep shade in the early fall. But on this newly developed corner of the university’s real estate, the trees were all under ten years old, and in winter stuck out of the ground like spindly broom handles, barely taller than most students.
Someone knocked. He looked at his watch. Could it be six thirty already? He opened the door on Meta and was surprised by her appearance. In high school she had always seemed a bit dull or frowzy, dishevelled, stooped at an odd angle. It had been this awkwardness or uncertainty that had first attracted Ziv. But here she stood in the hallway of his residence smiling confidently, her frame erect, her hair brushed back, silken and glowing from her forehead. She wore a purple-and-black knit coat with brass buttons she’d bought as a joke at Frenchy’s, but had later decided to wear.
“Oh God,” Ziv said. “Look at you.” He threw himself face-down on his bed.
“What?” said Meta. She closed the door and folded her coat over the back of a chair. She sat where Ziv had been sitting.
