by Leo McKay
“Mr. Burrows, Mr. Burrows,” she was saying as she came through the door. She looked at the television, which had switched to an exterior shot of the church. “Well, if this is upsetting you so much, I’m going to switch it off,” she said. The screen went grey when she twisted the knob and Ennis settled his head back on his pillow. His anger subsided and all at once a stronger emotion overtook him. He began to weep. The tears rolled down his face and he could feel the moisture moving back past his ears and soaking into his hair.
The nurse moved to his side and took his hand gently in hers. “It’s an awful thing,” she said. “What happened to your son.”
All media coverage of the Eastyard explosion had ended in Japan. But as soon as Meta landed in Vancouver, on the other side of the country from Albion Mines, she realized what an impact the event had had in Canada. She was still thousands of miles from home, but it was as if she had stepped into the middle of events, as if news of the tragedy had just been heard. The sound was turned down on the big television in the corner of the passenger lounge she’d parked herself in until they announced her connecting flight to Halifax, but from time to time, an image of the mine site would appear on screen. Once, she looked up and recognized the face of George Hannah, the old man she remembered as caretaker at the Miner’s Museum in Albion Mines. The waiting was over now. In a copy of Maclean’s magazine she’d bought at a newsstand, she read a one-page timeline of events. On the fifth day of rescue operations, draegermen recovered eleven bodies. All the men were found about where they’d been working, which meant they didn’t have time to run from the fireball that must have ripped through the shafts. The men had died instantly, the ignited gas and dust robbing them of air. They would not have known what had happened. With no chance that anyone else survived, authorities decided that risking the lives of draegermen could no longer be justified.
Her mother had told her on the phone that Arvel’s body was not among the eleven recovered.
This was only Meta’s second visit home in the almost two years she’d been living in Japan. Last year’s visit, in the summer, had been brief, and she had not been away long enough to see things differently on her return. But immediately upon getting onto the highway from the airport, the surroundings looked alien to her. She was shocked, as they drove, by the unbroken stretches of green.
When her mother drove into the Red Row she realized that the Red Row in her imaginings was out-of-date. Her memory was of the Red Row of her childhood, with the neighbourhood’s run down houses, heaved and bumpy concrete block streets. Now she saw a respectable-looking working-class neighbourhood. As the car pulled into her parents’ yard, she noticed that the Donats, on the other side of the duplex, had actually painted their house, and it was the same colour now as her parents’ side.
Her father greeted her at the door with a hug. He did not say anything about the explosion or Arvel’s death. He merely held both of her shoulders in his hands and looked her in the eye for a moment, as though to assess her emotional state.
“It’s nice to see you, Dad.”
“How are you, Meta?” She shrugged and looked away.
Meta had eaten on the plane, so she sat quietly at the table and drank tea as her parents ate. She looked out the kitchen window to the backyard, which was small even by Red Row standards, but which, by contrast with what she was used to in Tokyo, looked substantial to her. There had obviously been some snow this winter, since the thawed and refrozen pile at the end of the driveway remained, and the low spot in the backyard, where the outhouse had stood long before Meta’s time, contained a flat layer of refrozen white. But the ground showed through, brown and grey and black, just about everywhere.
Meta looked at the Donat backyard. There was evidence of a lawn there.
“How are things next door?” she asked.
“They’ve been pretty quiet recently,” her father said between bites of spinach quiche. “Willy is in Dorchester. I can’t remember what for, offhand. Some of the other boys have gone out west for work. Leanne, I think she was a few years behind you in school, she’s got a baby and she’s moved in with the father in New Glasgow. Things are quieter there than they’ve been in years.”
“I wonder how things are at Ziv’s house.” She could sense her parents’ awkwardness as they both paused to consider before replying.
“Well,” her mother began. “I think it’s safe to say that things are not well in that house. Keep in mind that what I know I’ve got from the rumour mill only. But most of it is pretty reliable, I think.” She went on to explain how Ziv’s father had trashed the house after the explosion. He’d gotten drunk and thrown most of the family’s furniture and belongings about the house. In response, Ziv’s mother had somehow beaten him up badly, broken his skull, in fact. And afterwards, when the search for the missing miners was called off, she had thrown away most of her belongings.
Meta wished she’d been unable to believe the details of what her mother had told her. She worried terribly about Ziv. How would he be holding up in all of this?
After supper when she went out and stood in the backyard, breathing the icy air. She looked around her parents’ backyard and tried to let the stillness comfort her. Her parents had planted shrubs here at the back, with raised beds of chipped bark encircling their bases. Against the boundary with the old alleyway there was a row of spruce saplings that might some day form a hedge. Late winter would soon turn to early spring, and she could almost catch a scent of earth when she breathed in through her nose.
She turned back into the house and came in to the clanking of dishes in the sink and the smell of warm suds.
Her father had one arm around her mother’s waist, and they were leaning into each other. When her father nuzzled his face into her mother’s neck, and she leaned her head back, it struck Meta that since she left home, her parents had rekindled their sex life. Meta lowered her head, suddenly embarrassed, then cleared her throat.
“Wow!” she said. “It’s wilderness out there!”
It was already getting to be late on a busy day when the customers at Zellers started to seem especially rude to Ziv. First, a woman got angry with him because he was unable to copy a key for her. When Ziv had tried to explain that the rack behind the hardware counter just did not have a blank that matched the one she’d given him, she’d snatched her key from his hand and stormed off in a huff.
A sick-looking bald man with an untrimmed beard got Ziv to get a ladder and pass him a Shop-Vac from a top shelf at the far end of the hardware department. The man’s two kids stood and looked on like mannequins, stiff and silent with blank expressions on their faces. When Ziv set the box with the vacuum on the floor, the man dug into it as though it were Christmas morning. He peeled back the top flaps, snapping the factory sealing tape that held them down. “Sir, there’s one with the box already opened.” Ziv pointed at a box on the bottom shelf.
“I don’t want one that’s been opened,” the man said. He spilled the contents of the box onto the tiled floor and rummaged through what had come out, poking disdainfully with the toe of his leather work boot at pieces encased in cardboard and wrapped in plastic.
One of the kids picked up the brush attachment. “Hoi!” his father barked. The kid dropped the brush and hid behind his brother.
“How many gallons does this hold?” the man asked.
Ziv moved around to the front of the box the man had just gutted. “Eight-gallon wet/dry vacuum,” he read.
“And this model is good for both wet and dry spills?”
“Apparently,” said Ziv.
“Now, what’s the difference between this model and the five-gallon one?”
“Three gallons,” Ziv said with a straight face.
The man nodded gravely. “I’ll take this one, I guess,” the man said. He carelessly picked up what he’d spilled onto the floor and stuffed it back into the packing box. Nothing was in the right place, and hoses and attachments stuck up from the box’s mouth, making foldi
ng down the flaps impossible. He left the box on the floor and silently stepped up Ziv’s ladder, took an unopened box from the top shelf, and started down the aisle with it.
“Sir!” Ziv called after him. “Don’t you want the one you looked at?”
“I don’t want one that’s been opened,” the man said without turning around. His kids filed in behind him and they marched off toward the mall checkouts.
“What is this place? Self-service?” a gruff woman’s voice called from the next aisle. Ziv was partway through repacking the vacuum, but he wasn’t going to jump when someone yelled at him that way. He had to take everything, including the body of the vacuum itself, from the box, reposition it so it all fit, then reseal the box with a roll of clear packing tape.
“Can I get some service here!” came the voice again from the next aisle. He put the box back on the top shelf, replaced the ladder, and casually sauntered into the next aisle as though he hadn’t heard the voice bellowing for him. Leaning against the glass power-tool cabinet was Meta. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time, but it came back to him instantly, how good it felt to hold her.
Ziv was working until nine thirty, so they agreed to meet at nine forty-five at the Tim Horton’s behind the mall where he worked.
Meta had not arrived yet when Ziv got there. He ordered himself a coffee and sat in a booth as far away from the smoking section as he could get, his every move monitored by the clutch of nosy people who were responsible for the blue haze in the restaurant.
Neither one of them had a clear idea of how or why they’d split up. At the time, Ziv said Meta had broken up with him after he got into a fight with another student. Meta claimed she did not break up with him, instead that he had given up on them.
It had been the end of their second year, and Ziv had done something he would find difficult to explain. For two years he had hardly drunk at all, then he had gone out with a group from his residence to celebrate the end of exams, and he’d gotten into a terrible punch-up. Meta had seemed upset when he told her the next day. She had even seemed a little sorry for him. He had a cut over one eye. Then they’d gone to dinner at the cafeteria and they saw the man he’d been fighting with. His nose was broken and taped up, his lips and the lower part of his face swollen grotesquely.
A conflict with Meta had started with this fight, a conflict that had dragged on for the four months of the university summer. There were details of this dispute that Ziv could not remember clearly, but he recalled several heated arguments he and Meta had had, always sparked somehow by that night.
They’d seen each other less and less as the summer went on, but their interactions had become strained. She seemed to sense that there was something seriously amiss with him, but each time she tried to get him to talk about it, he refused. She had shaken him up with her response to the fight he’d been in. She’d noticed something in him, a part of him she did not like. And in response, partly as a way of protecting himself from her disapproval, he’d hardened himself to her.
At some point, he’d made the decision not to go back to university. Meta had gone back and completed her degree. In his memory, his reasons for not returning were tangled up with his own disappointment in himself for his violent outburst, and his shame and anger in the face of Meta’s obvious disappointment in him. He began to wonder what he ever thought he was doing, going to university in the first place. He didn’t belong there. Now, four years later, the whole incident and its aftermath seemed immature and pointless.
They’d exchanged a few letters and seen each other infrequently since then.
Although they’d been separated for years and had only been in contact intermittently in the meantime, their former closeness had survived, and it was as natural as breathing now to settle in across from her, to feel himself relax, his whole body loosen again, in Meta’s presence.
Ziv had been through so much, he wished he could tell Meta all about it all at once, send it to her telepathically so she’d immediately understand how he felt. His eyes began to fill up, and seeing this Meta said, “Oh, Ziv!”
He felt himself recoiling from his own emotion. He collected himself and sat up straighter in his seat.
“How’s the land of the rising yen?” he laughed.
They chatted for a while about Meta’s life in Japan. She told him she was banking between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars a month.
“Wait a minute,” Ziv said. “You’re making a thousand to fifteen hundred a month?”
She shook her head. “I’d hate to tell you what I’m making. What do you make at Zellers?”
When he told her, she said, “Doesn’t it bother anyone in that company that a full-time employee can’t even afford to live?”
“Full time? I’m not even part-time. You know what they call my job? ‘Extra’! Almost everyone who works there is extra. The biggest mistake I ever made was not going back to school. Now I feel as though I’m stuck.”
“It’s not too late. You can go back.”
They stopped speaking for a few moments and the noise of the coffee shop rose up around them. There was the taste of lukewarm coffee in Ziv’s mouth and the smell of cigarette smoke. He noticed Meta’s hands. He’d forgotten how beautiful her hands were, how he’d used to admire the slender elegance of each finger and the incongruously homely nails, which she habitually bit to the quick.
He looked up to her face and could sense the seriousness, the tender concern of her gaze.
“Ziv,” she said. “Tell me how you’re doing.” She reached out in his direction as though she wanted to take his hand. “I’ve been thinking about you and your family. It was hard for me to be so far away.” Suddenly there was anger in her eyes, “How the hell could such a thing have happened?”
“That’s what we’re all wondering. It seems like such a shock. But at the same time, looking back, it seems obvious that something like this was going to happen.” He looked down into the small space between them, as though that were the place the whole world had fallen. He reached across the table, held out his hands for Meta to take. When she held them, he felt relieved, as though some of the pain lodged in him had found its release.
Meta drove her parents’ car from Tim Horton’s to the parking lot behind the Heather Motor Hotel. Her ability to pay for the room, cash, without flinching, without even thinking about flinching, gave her a sense of freedom and power. She flipped on the light and walked into the room as though it were a new house she’d just bought.
In the middle of the hotel-room floor, they undressed each other. She unbuttoned his shirt and slipped the white T-shirt beneath it over his head. He seemed so large and hairy. His shoulder muscles were round, his chest hair crept up in a V from beneath the waistband of his pants. Motion became liquid as he unclasped her bra. She felt the cool air of the room on her breasts. They warmed again as he cupped them in his hands, brought his mouth to her nipples. Gently she tried pushing him to the bed, but his pants were halfway down, at his knees, and he toppled over, bounced, laughed. After pausing a moment to take her own pants off, she began rubbing the palms of her hands over all of him. She wanted to feel all of him at once. She pulled up on his knees until he was curled into a ball on his side and draped herself over him like a blanket, spread her arms to touch all of him. This feeling, the feeling of covering him, possessing him, was what she’d been thinking about, somewhere hidden at the back of her thoughts, since leaving Tokyo. The relief she felt was momentary. When it had gone it was followed by an empty feeling deep inside her, a hunger. She pushed back on the thigh of his upper leg, slid a hand over his hip to touch the penis that revealed itself as he moved.
Beginning at the bottom of his ribs, she moved her lips slowly along the skin of his belly until she felt his warm erection at her cheek. She turned her head and took it into her mouth.
“Oh,” he said, and exhaled.
She held his penis in her mouth and tasted the salty heat of it. She moved on it, up and down. Felt it slid
ing on her tongue.
He began to speak her name. Softly. So softly. She could hardly hear. “Meta. Meta. Meta. Meta.”
When it was over, Ziv began to cry quietly. She pressed herself into his back and felt the sobs shaking him. Soon she was crying too, and when they’d both stopped crying, they were asleep.
On the day of the explosion, Gavin Fraser had called the mine office without even thinking about it and told them to put him on the list of draegermen. While he’d been employed there he’d been the best-trained mine rescue worker Eastyard had, so he felt obligated to be a part of the rescue by his bond to the men he’d worked with. It had not been very long since he’d quit, and Roseanne, the member of the office staff who answered when he finally got through, was obviously not aware he didn’t work there any more. “It’s funny we didn’t call you already, Gavin,” she said. He could hear her shuffling through papers, looking for his name on some list.
He’d been placed with a crew who had come, within hours of the explosion, from New Brunswick, and since none of them was familiar with the operation at Eastyard, his main job with the team was as guide. The captain of the team was one of the New Brunswickers.
They sat in their full gear in the change room, and after they’d all been introduced they had nothing left to do until they got the word to go down. Gavin was sick to his stomach, and the little wooden benches in the change room, with lockers around them full of the clothing of the men who were underground, seemed like they were made of broken glass. None of the men from the rescue crew could get comfortable on them. Though they all knew they should be sitting down, conserving their strength for what they’d have to do underground, they each spent more than half the forty-five minutes they were kept waiting on their feet and pacing. The men from New Brunswick knew Gavin had worked with the crew that was underground at the time of the explosion, otherwise they might have made a few jokes to cut the tension.
