by Leo McKay
The church was decorated with greenery and seasonal banners in preparation for Christmas. At the foot of the altar was a nativity scene with a manger empty and waiting for the arrival of the infant Saviour.
The whole town seemed to have come. There was standing room only downstairs and every seat was full in both balconies. All the teachers from the high school were in attendance.
Ziv held tightly to Meta’s hand. As the organ music started up, he looked back toward the main entrance where the men from the funeral home were putting the casket on a trolley, ready to wheel it forward. The priest was at the back of the church, stoking the censer. A seven- or eight-year-old boy held a big brass crucifix overhead and was positioning himself to move forward at the front of the procession. Two rows back, Arvel stood by himself, squeezed into the suit he’d worn at his high school prom, shoulder to shoulder with people Ziv knew were strangers to his brother. Ziv scanned the room in disbelief, looking at all the people, their forms crowding and darkening the church.
“They all hated Alec,” he said to Meta. “The adults, the kids. They all despised him. They dumped on him every chance they got. What are they doing here, crowding around him now that he’s dead? When he was alive, they were tripping over themselves to stay away from him.”
Meta put her free hand on his forearm. “They feel badly,” she said. “They know now that he needed help. They knew it all along, but they didn’t do anything.”
Ziv looked at the faces, the downcast eyes, the stooped shoulders, the stricken expressions. He became aware of how many people were weeping. Their muffled sobs echoed up into the vaulted ceiling. Meta was right. Everyone was here because they wished they’d done something to help Alec.
When Father Boudreau reached the head of the church, he circled the casket, waving the censer, filling the air with acrid smoke. When the censer had been placed next to the boat of incense, the priest stretched out his arms in an attitude of prayer.
PART THREE
1988
Ziv’s first thought had been the same one he always had when some unidentified disturbance awoke him in the middle of the night: nuclear war. He’d waited in Bundy Burgess’s bathroom for the light to blink off. He knew that just before the heat blast vaporized you, radio communication and electrical service would black out. The shadows in the tiny space beneath the stairs danced and skidded about as the bulb that cast its light onto the walls rocked at the end of its wire. Water in the toilet made waves against the sides of the bowl. He put a hand to the bulb to stop its swinging and awaited the loss of electricity. He wondered whether he’d have time to feel any heat before he was turned into steam and smoke and ash.
The house had stopped moving, and a profound silence had set in. He stood looking at the worn pattern in the linoleum and felt the pressure of a headache pushing in at his temples. Whatever had awoken him had not disturbed anyone else. He stepped out of the little bathroom and looked at the walls. To his groggy eyes, they looked fairly straight and sound. Subsidence, a fall of earth from the cave-in of an abandoned mine shaft, sometimes swallowed up a house. But it had not happened in the Red Row in his lifetime. Not yet, anyway. Several homes had given way in Westville, and there was an area near Bridge Avenue that had sunk by several metres when he was a kid.
He flipped on the kitchen light and filled a glass from the tap. He gulped the water, refilled the glass, and downed the contents again. Then he put on his boots and coat at the door and made for his parents’ house. The brisk air of early morning caught in his lungs and in his nostrils, and his head began to clear a little. The light in his parents’ kitchen burned white against the black row of spruce trees at the edge of the graveyard beyond. There were days when the old man might already be up this early, but not on a Saturday morning, not hungover. There were a few other lights on at this end of the Red Row, more than there should have been at this time. He became aware of his breathing and watched the ghost of his breath rise up into the dark air.
“What the hell else was it?” his father was bellowing. Ziv was in the porch taking off his coat and boots. Even through the closed door to the kitchen he smelled coffee brewing.
“It could have been anything,” his mother was saying. “It could have been anything.”
Ziv opened the door to the kitchen. “I was down at Burgess’s,” he said when he came in. He heard the fear in his own voice. “The house shook.”
“Your mother felt it,” his father said. He stood in the dead centre of the kitchen, his arms held out at an awkward, unfamiliar angle. “We came out to the kitchen here and saw it had knocked the juice pitcher right out of the fridge. Must have banged the door open first. I don’t know how the hell it could have done that without waking me up.”
The floor in front of the fridge was wet, freshly mopped. The empty juice pitcher sat on the sink.
“Your father thinks it was the mine,” Dunya said. Her face was white.
“It wasn’t anything else,” Ennis said. He had a confused look on his face, as though only part of him understood what he was saying. He looked down at the back of his leg, where a purple bruise carried from his heel to his lower calf.
“Do you think it could have been anything else?” Dunya said, looking desperately to Ziv. Ziv sat at the table. His stomach felt lighter than air. It rose slowly into his chest and squeezed against his heart, which began to pound with the struggle to beat.
The coffeemaker gurgled and sputtered.
“Arvel …” Ziv said.
“There would have been an alarm,” Dunya said. She went to Ziv and grabbed his shoulders in both hands. She dug in her fingers until Ziv pulled away in pain.
A high-pitched whining, muffled by the closed-up house, entered the kitchen from outside. It was the big siren at the town hall.
Ennis looked up.
The ringing of the telephone woke Jackie up, and she instinctively reached for the clock radio. She’d pressed the snooze bar several times with no effect on the ringing before she realized that it was too early for the seven o’clock alarm. The ringing was coming from the phone in the kitchen. She almost went over on an ankle on the way out of the bedroom.
She stood over the ringing phone an instant before picking it up. If it was Arvel, she would prefer not to answer. She did not want to take the chance that talking to him would change her mind, but a call this early in the morning could be something important.
“Hello,” she said when she finally picked up.
“Is Arvel at home?” It was a woman’s voice.
“No he’s not,” Jackie said, looking at her watch to make sure it really was before six in the morning. “Who’s calling?”
“Is he at work today?” the voice said.
Jackie hesitated, wondering who she was talking to. “I’m not … I’m not exactly sure, but I think he was twelve to eight last night. Who is this?”
The woman hung up.
The call bewildered her. Who calls before 6:00 a.m.? She sat at the kitchen table and put her head down into her hands. In a few hours Colleen would be here and they’d be off to Halifax. She hoped that an incident with Arvel was not going to interfere with that.
She was up now and thought she might as well make some coffee. She took the carafe from the Proctor-Silex, filled it with cold water from the tap, and poured the contents into the back of the machine. She took the coffee can from the freezer and set it on the counter beside the stove.
A noise rose up outside the house, a high wailing sound. Jackie went to the back door and opened it, put her head out into the cold air. It was a siren, but it was too loud and persistent to be a siren from an emergency vehicle. It must have been the big siren perched on the tower in the parking lot at the back of the town hall. They’d used it years ago, a single blast to sound the nine o’clock curfew for kids under sixteen, but she’d never heard it wailing like this, rising and falling, sending a cold shiver through the town.
First thing on Monday morning, the city hummed and th
robbed. The clack and whir of the machines in the print shop across the alley came in through the open window. Meta slid aside the pane and stuck her head out the window into the cool Tokyo winter. When she came back inside, she left the window open a few centimetres and sparked the gas heater to life, positioning it so that it faced away from the vinyl tubing that connected it to the wall. She sat at the table, consciously holding off grief. She had to call home, but she wanted some time to herself first. She wasn’t awake yet, and knowing earlier was not going to save anybody’s life. She wished she could close her eyes and stop time: She’d sit in this crummy little apartment in Tokyo forever, never knowing, never having anything to know.
There was a thirteen-hour time difference between Tokyo and Nova Scotia. The news reports had said the explosion had taken place at five thirty in the morning, but that must have been on Sunday morning, Nova Scotia time. It would now be after five in the afternoon on Sunday in Nova Scotia.
With a cup of hot tea in her hand, she went into the hallway, taking care to close the door noiselessly behind her. She rode the elevator to the twelfth floor without meeting anyone. Once on the rooftop, she put her cup down on the ledge and stared out over the buildings that cluttered the landscape. How early in the morning was it? She couldn’t remember. She always got up long before she had to go to work, so she wasn’t thinking about that yet. Even with a lined windbreaker she began to feel chilly. But it was not cold enough to see even a hint of steam on her breath. She looked down at the little side street that twisted up behind the building and saw that it was alive already. A paperboy, the basket of his bicycle now empty, limped along beside the bike, drinking something from a can. Old women were out, sweeping the spotless pavement in front of their little shops and apartments. The old man who lived in the storefront of a defunct small-engine repair shop stepped into the street wearing only his grey one-piece long johns.
She was sure that Ziv was dead. She had learned from her parents that Ziv had hired on at Eastyard and was working underground.
A strange new emotion began to affect Meta, and though she had never experienced the feeling before, she felt as though she had. The pit had exploded, the alarms had gone off. The alarm she’d heard had sounded halfway round the world. Now she was waiting for news of a loved one. She felt she was living in the wrong decade, the wrong century. She felt like her own grandmother, who had done this same waiting first for a father, then a brother, and then a husband.
There were two messages on the machine when she got back inside her apartment. The first must have been there, unnoticed, since last night. It was in garbled Japanese, half-spoken, half-sputtered. Meta guessed that in recent months a phone-sex line had opened with a number that must resemble hers. Men had been calling, leaving messages that had turned Yuka red when Meta asked her to translate. Some even switched languages when they heard her speak English on the tape, repeating the single related word they knew: sex, sex, sex, sex.
The next message was from her parents, telling her there was some news.
She went to the teapot and poured herself half a cup, sat at the table and drank it slowly, then went back to the phone and, after several attempts, was able to get through.
Meta told her mother she’d heard about the explosion. Her mother exhaled heavily into the telephone, making a dull percussive sound.
“Everything is just … it’s so unclear,” her mother said. “I don’t know what you know there. The company doesn’t know exactly who all is down there, yet. They didn’t have a list of the shift.”
“They don’t know who’s underground in their own mine!”
“Only immediate family has seen the list of names at this point, the people they know for sure are underground. They’ve got it posted in the fire hall in Plymouth. They’re only letting family members see it.”
“Is it Ziv, Ma? For God’s sake, is it Ziv?”
“Someone at Tim Horton’s told your father that his neighbour’s boy was on the shift before and no one had been in touch with him since, so they let the neighbour see the list. And … well … the fellow your father spoke to … he thought the other fellow saw Arvel’s name there. I tried to call Arvel’s mother, but the phone’s been busy there all day. Likely off the hook.”
Meta looked about her tiny apartment and felt all connection with Japan dissolve.
“Oh my God,” Meta said. “Arvel. You’re sure it’s not Ziv?”
“Your father said Ziv doesn’t work at Eastyard any more. He hired on and then quit not long after.”
“Why didn’t you tell me,” Meta said quietly, more a statement than a question.
“The company is talking about rescue operations. The draegermen have started down the main shaft already, but it’s slow going. They’re measuring for gas. The ventilation system is knocked out. But honey …” Her mother’s voice became dark, disappeared briefly in the staticky vapour of thousands of kilometres. “The explosion,” she continued. “It shook the house, here. It cracked a pane of glass in one of the old windows upstairs. The roof over the main shaft where it comes to the surface … the blast blew it all to pieces, bent the steel frame and everything. The old-timers here … the ones who remember other blasts. They say … well … they’re not very hopeful.”
“I’m going to hang up now. I’ve got to sit down and process some of this. If there’s any news, call me right away, will you?”
“I will. Are you going to be all right?”
“I’m okay. I’m okay. Just let me go now.”
Meta put the receiver down. She thought about Ziv and his family, pictured them huddled together in the living room, watching the TV, waiting for some news from underground. The sound of her own blood rushed through her head. Ziv had died and come back to life.
For the first day after the explosion, the AP Radio Network news featured stories about Eastyard on its hourly news broadcasts carried by American Forces Radio. In the ten-minute break between each class, Meta had rushed back to her office to listen. The draegermen were still underground, no survivors had been located or returned to the surface. No bodies had been discovered. So with no immediate drama to report, the network dropped coverage back to once or twice a day.
She had made several attempts to call Ziv at his family’s number, but got busy signals each time, just as her mother had. It had been so long since they’d spoken, she was half-relieved not to have got through. She feared the awkwardness between them in spite of the circumstances.
Outside, cold rain had been pouring down. Meta stopped inside the door of the staff room, twisted her brown umbrella so it would fit in the rack, and stuffed it into a square in the wire mesh. Greg Ulesso’s desk was empty. She felt relieved.
She noted that her hands were steady as she poured herself a cup of coffee and walked with it to her desk, where she sat and looked at the planbook and the texts she was supposed to use to organize her day. This office was officially called the Foreign Languages Department by the college. But some of the more jaded long-term foreign teachers had dubbed it “The Gulag,” since it housed the desks and working space of almost exclusively foreign teachers, and, except for a few administrators who had private offices adjacent, it was almost two city blocks removed from any of the other faculty rooms. It got a decent amount of natural light from a bank of windows at the end of the room opposite to Meta’s desk, and the decor was bland office beige and grey and white. Most teachers were in the room at the moment, but it was close enough to class time that conversations were at a minimum, as last-minute preparations were being made.
“Good morning,” called a voice from behind a filing cabinet. She stiffened. “Good morning,” she said.
“How was your weekend?”
“This is Tuesday,” Meta said. “The weekend’s long gone.”
“But I don’t think I saw you yesterday.”
Should she tell him? She had no desire to be on personal terms with Ulesso, but found herself saying, “There was a disaster in my hometown. D
id you see it on the news?”
Ulesso reached into his rear pocket and pulled out a rolled up copy of the Daily Yomiyuri. “It’s right here on the front page … Nova Scotia … Isn’t that where you’re from?”
“Yes.”
“I guess this hits pretty close to home.”
“It is home. It’s not pretty close. The explosion cracked a window in my parents’ house.”
Ulesso stopped for a moment, his face working to find an expression. “Coal mining is a dangerous business. When I was in Wales …”
“This isn’t Wales. It’s Nova Scotia. Can’t you see I’m upset?” She was starting to shake.
“Come on,” Ulesso said skeptically. “What are the chances you actually know someone underground?”
“Jesus, Greg! The chances are one hundred per cent!”
She turned away from him, scooped the books for her first class from the desk, and made for the door. Ulesso had turned his attention to another teacher who was at the photocopier, frantically doing some last-minute copying.
“Isn’t this smashing weather? This rain? All it does in this bloody country is rain. I’ve never seen a country with such appalling …”
Meta had had enough. She walked over to the photocopier and turned Ulesso around so he would listen to her. Not until she began speaking did she realize that she’d been unconsciously preparing for this moment for months. She’d been writing a speech, a tirade, in her head, storing it away for the moment she would confront Greg Ulesso and tell him what she thought.
“Listen, Greg,” she said. At the sound of her voice the whole office hushed. She took a breath and continued. “If it didn’t rain so much here, the Kanto Plain would not be a good place to grow rice. If the Kanto Plain were not such a good place to grow rice, Ancient Japanese culture would never have developed. If Ancient Japanese culture had never developed, there would never have been a Shogunate. If there had never been a Shogunate, there would never have been a Meiji restoration or a Commodore Perry. Without them, there would not have been an economic boom and military buildup before the war, there would have been no Pearl Harbor, the Japanese would never have been defeated, there would never have been the postwar Economic Miracle, and you wouldn’t have your cushy job.” She was speaking very loudly now. People had come in from adjoining rooms to hear. “So every time it rains in this town, you’d better get down on your knees and thank God for the rain that’s making you rich and keeping you from having to do honest work!”
