by Leo McKay
“I heard your boy is down there,” McInnis said.
“He’s found a place to stay,” Ennis said. McInnis was silent. How could he know what Ennis was talking about? “His wife kicked him out of one house, then I threw him out of another. He found a place now that he can’t get kicked out of.” Ennis picked up the rum and took another big drink.
“Don’t talk like that, Ennis,” McInnis said. “You have to stay hopeful.”
“Kaboom, and the whole fucking world changes. Listen to you. After what I did the other night, you should be waiting outside my back door with a baseball bat.”
“Forget about the other night. We were drunk, the two of us. I deserved to have my mouth shut for me.”
“And I deserved to be blown to fucking bits. Only it was my son that got that treatment.”
“I don’t want to tie up your line, Ennis. I’m sorry about this. I don’t know what the hell I can do, but if you think of something, just call me.”
“I never should have done it,” Ennis said.
“Will you forget that? I got you worked up. I knew what I was doing.”
“Anyway … I’m sorry.” Ennis hung up the phone and lowered his face toward the table, resting his forehead on the back of his arm.
The phone started up again, and he listened to it ring four or five times, certain it was another reporter. It rang again and the thought that it might be Dunya with some news made him pick up.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Burrows?”
“Yes.”
“John Wexler, ABC news.”
Ennis put the phone back on the hook, waited a few seconds, then picked it up again. When he heard a dial tone, he left the receiver off the hook and put his head back down onto his arm.
They’d bought this house just before Arvel was born, moved out of the one down near Kirk Avenue they’d been renting from Stan Kravchuk, a friend of Dunya’s father. He’d spent years in this house, a young man’s entire lifetime, years at this table in this kitchen, years of ranting and storming. The room had soaked up all that anger. It had absorbed all that had taken place in it. He turned his head so his ear rested on the table. All those years, all that pain, could never be forgotten or erased. So he listened. He closed his eyes, silenced his own thoughts, and listened.
Jackie arrived at the fire hall with Colleen and the girls. Someone at the door told them there were toys set up for the kids in a room downstairs. It was a chilly room with a concrete floor that sloped in all directions toward a big steel drum in the centre. It looked like a place where equipment cleaning and maintenance might take place, though there was no sign of any gear in the room. Against one wall, three big fan-driven electric heaters created a warm blast at eye level, but did not dispel the chill that crept up from the icy floor.
As soon as they’d entered the room, the two girls ran to a big pile of yellow and black construction toys without even glancing back at their mother. Jackie checked to see that the children were supervised and she and Colleen climbed back up the stairs.
In the far corner of the big room upstairs, a group of haggard women consoled each other. As the day wore on, the group swelled and shrank and swelled again. At times there were men sprinkled in amongst the women. Almost always there were children. Sometimes the group formed a large, almost perfect circle, at times it broke up into smaller huddles. Among this odd collection of people who were on intimate terms with each other, despite the fact that most were strangers, Jackie was able to come face-to-face with her shock and grief. So many of the other wives of the twenty-six underground seemed to be holding out hope, believing, mustering the strength within themselves to believe that their husbands were still alive. These women were boisterous and demonstrative, giving encouraging hugs when someone showed signs of despair. Jackie was one of the others, one of the quiet, sullen women who strained through a tired smile when someone else tried to cheer her up.
She was sure it was too late for hope. She was sure Arvel was dead. And this realization shocked and grieved her in spite of everything.
As Jackie sat at one of the folding tables that had been set up with little triangular sandwiches on it, she took some comfort from Colleen’s hand on her shoulder or placed gently on her forearm. But any time Jackie looked Colleen in the eye, Colleen would tear up and turn away, unable to say anything.
Across the room she saw Dunya. She had been in the room for some time, but did not seem to have noticed her. For a while Ziv had been with her, but he seemed to have disappeared somewhere. Dunya sat alone now at a table, dressed up as though for church and looking stiff and uncomfortable. Yesterday, Jackie had refused Ziv’s request to go down to their house. The invitation had been from Dunya, she knew, and she could not imagine Dunya really wanted to see her. She had kicked the woman’s son out of his own house innumerable times, and now that son was … she could not bring herself to think it.
She remained seated, Colleen at her side, half-hoping her mother-in-law would never see her, half-hoping she’d come seeking her out and find her.
“Go over and talk to her,” Colleen said, nudging her gently with an elbow.
“I know I should,” Jackie said. “But I just don’t have the heart.”
“It doesn’t take heart. It takes feet. Stand up and walk over. I’ll go with you if that’ll make it easier. Or else I’ll stay here. You decide.”
“Jackie,” a voice exclaimed. She scanned the room and saw Ziv coming toward her, looking so much like Arvel as he lumbered in her direction, towering above everyone around him.
The sight of him brought tears to her eyes. She blinked them back and choked on the sobs that wanted to bubble up into her throat.
They sat for some time without saying anything. Their hands covered each other’s, and the warmth that built up there might have been a little fire they were sheltering.
When she noticed Ziv looking at Colleen, Jackie said, “You’ve met Colleen Chisolm before, haven’t you?”
Ziv nodded. “At the wedding, I think,” he said.
Colleen said nothing but nodded back at Ziv.
After a while Jackie said, “I guess you know now who was right.”
Ziv raised his eyes and gazed into her face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“When you quit the pit,” Jackie said. “You always saw that as a weakness. Arvel talked about how brave you were to quit, how that took more guts.” She used the past tense without thinking about what it meant.
“I don’t have a family to support, for one thing,” Ziv said.
“Look … now …” Jackie said. She knew exactly what she wanted to say, but this was the wrong time to say it.
Ziv brought Jackie over to the table where Dunya was sitting on her own. Dunya stood up and the two embraced. Dunya asked how Jackie and the kids were doing. Before any of them had a chance to sit back down, Ziv suggested that they go home. It was early evening by now and he had been feeling uneasy and on display there all afternoon.
Jackie agreed to go back to their house and Ziv thought she actually looked grateful and relieved to be going. Colleen offered to bring the kids back to Jackie and Arvel’s house with her, but Jackie said that as tired as the girls might be at this time of day, she wanted them with her.
“I’ll leave you with your family,” Colleen had said. She drove her car back to the house on Pleasant Street. Jackie and the kids got into Ennis’s car, along with Ziv and Dunya. Though it was only a few minutes from the fire hall, both kids were already sound asleep by the time Ziv pulled his father’s car up to the house in the Red Row.
As soon as he saw it, Ziv didn’t like the look of the house. Although it was dark now, the curtains were not closed. A light was on somewhere in the downstairs, so he could see the surfaces of some interior walls and the dark outline of a doorway.
Jackie picked up Melanie from the back seat and Ziv took Kate. The snow from earlier had continued on for several hours before it stopped. There was now
a light sprinkle on the ground. The temperature had gone down, and in the few places where a centimetre or more of snow had collected, their feet squeaked down into it, packed it down into what had already accumulated.
Dunya was first to open the door and step into the porch. “Oh my God!” she said. Ziv readied himself for anything, for the body of the old man even, strung up from the ceiling.
But as soon as he entered the porch he saw why his mother had exclaimed, and why she was now having a difficult time making her way into the kitchen. The porch was in complete disarray. Coats had been taken from the coat rack and lay strewn around the room. Ennis’s two tool boxes, which usually sat on a small table by the door, had been overturned, the tools thrown every which way. There was a small electric range in the porch. It had been upended and hurled across the room, where it knocked out a big triangle of plaster when it had hit the wall.
In the kitchen, the curtains from the window had been ripped off their rods and stuffed into the sink. The refrigerator was on its side, half-blocking the door from the porch. The contents of the fridge – meat, eggs, milk, vegetables, opened cans of fruit, bottles of pickles and jam and olives – had been thrown against the walls, up into the ceiling, where the tiles were full of dents and stains. The kitchen table had been knocked over.
In the living room, the two chairs and the couch were overturned. The magazine rack was gutted. The china cabinet had been pulled forward onto its face. Broken glass and china shards lay before it, thick as spilled paint. The big ornamental cast-iron kettle from the cabinet top had put a large ding in a metal serving tray it had landed on.
Ziv and Jackie and Dunya stood frozen in the midst of the disaster, as though, by standing still, they could stop this scene from progressing. “Let’s put the kids back out in the car,” Ziv said to Jackie. She nodded, but neither of them moved for a moment.
Ziv shifted the weight of the sleeping child over one shoulder, and with his free hand guided Jackie out the door. They laid Melanie in the front seat, Kate in the back, and took off their own coats to cover them. They heard screaming when they reentered the house, and followed it, stepping over and around the obstacles in the trashed rooms. At the foot of the stairs lay Ennis, his head on the floor of the lower landing, his feet up five or six steps. An empty forty of rum lay in the corner by the front door, just beyond his reach.
Dunya was astraddle Ennis’s torso, as though she were doing CPR. In both hands she was holding the single handle of a big black cast-iron kettle. The one that had come from the top of the china cabinet. Then, as if everything in her life had been leading to this moment, as if all the years of rage had arrived at his breaking point, as if the reason her son had been taken from her lay drunk and unconscious at her feet, she brought the kettle up over her head and slammed it down on Ennis’s face. The kettle made a deep metallic kong on impact. She drew it back and brought it down again, and then again. “You bastard!” she said. “You bastard! You always make everything worse.”
Ennis Burrows with his jaw wired shut had been like a bucking bronco sealed up to its knees in a block of concrete. Agitated, angry, he lay grunting, mumbling, and struggling against the restraints that had shut his mouth for him. He had been told he’d been unconscious for more than two days, and that he was lucky more internal damage hadn’t been done. He’d asked the doctors what the hell had happened to him, but aside from outlining the details of the fractures in his skull and how they’d been put back together, the doctors were mum about his injuries. Ennis himself had no memory of what had happened, but he guessed, from the uncomfortable silence of the doctors, that someone had clubbed him good and the medical system was trying to stay out of it. Still, Ennis spent little time thinking about what had happened to him. All his mind seemed capable of thinking of was the mine, about the financial support that the federal and provincial governments had lent the Eastyard company: a hundred million dollars, and Ennis was determined that someone had to get to the bottom of what happened. Those responsible had to be held accountable.
On the second day after he’d awakened, Ziv had come, and he stood beside the hospital bed, looking awkward and uncomfortable, and was silent while Ennis ranted. The combination of painkillers and the immobility of his jaw reduced everything he said to a series of guttural exclamations. When he stopped, his energy expended, Ziv asked him how he was feeling. Ennis shook his head, then pointed at the swelling. “Did you do this?” he managed to say.
Ziv looked away a moment, and immediately Ennis knew it was Dunya. His own wife had done this to him. “Dunya!” he said through his teeth. An emotion forced a sound out of him, but he could not tell what the emotion was.
“Dad,” Ziv said. “They’ve given up the search.”
Ennis had looked at his son intently, trying to read his face. He was aware of his own breathing, and how the sound of it through his clenched mouth must have made his every expression seem angry.
“Arvel’s dead, they –” Ziv was unable to go on. His eyes blinked rapidly.
Ennis tried to speak through his wired mouth, but he was saying too much too fast, and Ziv could not understand. Ziv had brought his ear closer to Ennis’s mouth, and Ennis was able to pull his lips back enough to say, “Your mother. How is she holding up?”
Ziv lowered his gaze and Ennis said, “Is she feeling up to coming?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” Ziv said.
But by now, two weeks later, Ennis had given up on speech completely. His only form of communication was to smile at the nurses who came into the room to check on him or to nod or shake his head at one of their simple questions. When Ziv came in, they usually sat in silence. Occasionally Ziv would ask him a question and he’d write a short response on a notepad he kept at his bedside.
He was allowed up to use the bathroom now, and every time he did so he became mesmerized by the sight of himself in the mirror. Barely an external scar or blemish showed on his face, yet the bone structure beneath his skin had been broken and then reassembled. The flesh over the bones was so swollen and blood-engorged that his face was unrecognizable to him. He looked to himself not so much like a monster or hideous freak as he did a total stranger, someone whose eyes were a bit familiar but whose features sparked no recognition.
He’d been in plenty of fights in his life, had suffered innumerable injuries on the job. He’d had his nose broken, his eyes swollen shut. He’d suffered burns from red-hot rivets, he’d had flashes from arc welders. He’d been punched in the side of the head hard enough to break an eardrum. But he’d never before been rendered unrecognizable to himself. And this at the hand of his own wife.
Whatever had forced him and Dunya apart over the years, they both loved the boys. Ennis knew that whatever he could be accused of, neglect, mistreatment, pigheadedness, stupidity, he could not be accused of not loving his boys. What hurt more than the bludgeoning itself was that Dunya was staying away now, consigning herself to mourning her son alone.
Ziv had told him that there was going to be a memorial service. But now in his drug-hazy memory the details, time, and place had escaped Ennis’s mind. He had a little television beside his bed, and it was only by accident that he stumbled upon live coverage of the memorial to honour his son and the other men who were lost. They were carrying it on the national television, pre-empting regular programming.
He recognized the building immediately as the United Church in Albion Mines. The cameras panned through the crowded church, then switched to the auditorium in the hall next door, then to the overflowing crowds on the street outside the church that spilled across Acadia Avenue and onto the Albion ball field, already softening into mud with the first inklings of spring. The perspective of the cameras was from such a wide angle that it was difficult to pick out individuals as, one at a time, priests and ministers led the crowds in prayer. Dunya and Ziv would be there somewhere, Ennis knew, but when he scanned the crowd for their faces, more closely when the cameras went inside the church, he was unable to fi
nd them.
Then someone began reading a poem. Ennis started when he realized it was Ben MacGillivary, a representative of the United Mine Workers at the podium. What the hell was he doing there? The UMW lost the first certification vote at Eastyard. He should know better than to get involved in an Eastyard memorial. Inviting him there was only an attempt on the part of the company to blur public perception, to create the impression that the labour movement had somehow been involved in the operation when it had not. Ennis could remember when MacGillivary first got involved in unions. He’d seemed such a young man, a smart, well-educated idealist. It was a shock now to see how old MacGillivary had gotten, old enough to be thinking seriously about his own retirement. Ben had always been a reader, and it was just like him to bring a poem to such an occasion. He would have the best of intentions, Ennis knew, but it was still a mistake for a union official to speak at a memorial service for non-unionized workers. It was playing into the hands of the company, giving the public the impression that the union was somehow involved or associated with the mine.
The poem MacGillivary read seemed to be about toughness, strength, endurance, about how people cannot be defeated. At the line “Split all ends up, they shan’t crack,” when he heard the emotion break MacGillivary’s voice, tears blurred Ennis’s vision.
From the podium, the camera switched to a close-up of the prime minister.
Ennis’s eyes had been wet from the emotion of the poem, but they immediately dried, and pain like a nerve with a spike in it shot through his jaw as he strained to open his mouth to scream at the image of the nation’s leader. This was the bastard who’d tried to buy votes by setting up the mine in the first place. Arvel’s death was as much this man’s fault as it was anyone’s. An acking sound, muffled through his clamped mouth, began to rise from Ennis’s throat. Even so, it must have been loud enough for the nurse at the station to hear from down the hall.
