Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  Someone from outside the room opened the door a crack and told them to proceed to the portals, the entrances of the main deeps. They all breathed a sigh of relief to be on their way finally, but at the portals, they had to wait again in a little camper trailer.

  At last somebody came with the go-ahead from the rescue co-ordinator for them to proceed down the main decline. In the hour or so they’d spent together waiting for the signal to go down, the men had been mostly quiet, but the moment they entered the portal they fell completely silent. The place smelled charred, a sickening mixture of every burnt thing from the shafts below. Everything, every pipe, every arch, every piece of steel and concrete debris, was covered with a hard, black coating, the burnt remnants of the explosion. Gavin felt himself start to gag, but he knew that if he threw up now, it would slow down the progress of the whole team, so he fought his nausea and kept going.

  They took the first five hundred feet slowly, careful of every piece of debris underfoot, watching the roof overhead for any signs of weakness. Thick concrete bulkheads had been thrown far back up the shaft and smashed into little pieces. Big pieces of steel, once part of doors that towered to the ceiling, were strewn about, twisted almost out of recognition. The men came across two tractors slammed together with such force that at first Gavin thought the debris heap was one smashed vehicle, until he counted eight tires underneath it.

  Looking at this mass of compressed metal, Gavin stopped in sudden shock. He looked down for a moment, at his own feet and legs, at how the dust and soot had gathered on him already. He turned his back to the rest of the draeger team and felt himself well up. His vision blurred dangerously in the already poor visibility and he shuffled carefully until he could steady himself with a hand against a stone wall. A sob welled up in him, followed quickly by another. He closed his eyes and spoke aloud to himself briefly. “Okay, get hold of yourself. Get hold of yourself.” He took a few deep breaths of processed air.

  When he pulled himself back together, he took the team captain aside. Without anger, he confronted the man. “I think I’ve figured out what this rescue is really about.” The man had dark features and a bushy black moustache that made his face even harder to read beneath his breathing apparatus. “Is someone on this team carrying body bags?” Gavin asked. The captain looked down at the floor a moment, at the charred and strewn debris, then nodded without speaking.

  In an old scrapbook, something put together by a relative he never knew, Gavin had a clipping about the Moose River mine rescue of 1936. The clipping did not mention his great-grandfather, Leander Fraser, who had been a draegerman at Moose River, but Gavin knew about his family’s involvement. He knew that the reporters of the time referred to all the rescuers as draegermen, although most of them were not. Leander Fraser was the real thing, trained in the use of all the equipment and techniques. His brother’s name was William Barkhouse Fraser. He was a member of the Acadia Rescue Corps in the twenties. William’s picture appears in James M. Cameron’s book, The Pictonian Colliers, dressed with his team members in the full rescue gear of the time. Gavin took that book off the shelf in his bedroom from time to time and looked at the picture of his distant uncle, searching for something of himself in a man he never met.

  At Moose River, the Pictou County miners, unpaid volunteers all, had worked for eleven days, at times with pickaxes and bare hands, to save three company officials after the main shaft in a gold mine collapsed. Two of the three men were brought out alive, both with a Pictou County man on each arm to guide him. Descriptions from the time used the word elated to describe the rescuers, who were lauded as heroes on radio and in newspapers around the world.

  Gavin had first read the article as a kid, and he’d had to look up elated in a dictionary. It was such an exhilarating word. He used to say it aloud to himself when he’d flip through the scrapbook, and it somehow became connected with how proud he felt to be descended from such a skilled and brave man as Leander Fraser. Elated.

  After Arvel’s funeral, a funeral held without a body present to consecrate or bury, she and Colleen had packed most of the furniture and belongings in the house into a rental truck and put them into storage in Halifax. And now, three weeks later, she was back, pulling again into the driveway of the house on Pleasant Street in Albion Mines for the final time. The new renters would move in the next day. There were still a few belongings for her to collect, and if she wanted to get back the damage deposit, she’d have to do a little cleaning. Kate had started school in Halifax, but this was March break, so Jackie had taken both kids to daycare and left them for the day. If she was going to be a little late getting back, Colleen was working the eight-to-four shift and had said she’d pick the kids up and get them supper. They were still at Colleen’s apartment, but Jackie was hoping a unit would come open in the same building within the next month or so.

  She eased the parking brake into place and looked at the back door of the house. There was a fist-sized hole in the mesh of the storm door where Arvel had put his hand through last summer to let himself in after she’d mistakenly left the door latched. On the passenger’s seat beside her was a package from a convenience store that held garbage bags, Lysol, and J-Cloths. She picked this up, took her as-yet-untouched large Tim Horton’s coffee from the drink tray, and stepped out onto the driveway.

  The amount of salt on the roads at this time of year was apocalyptic. She wiped a finger through the white residue on her rusted vw Rabbit and looked at the tiny patch of black paint where the finish could almost have passed for new. When she got to the top of the steps at the back door, she looked back at the car. The gas station attendant in Halifax had squeegeed the front and rear windshields, and the cleaning solution had run down through the salt on the car, leaving the vehicle looking like a complete disgrace.

  Once through the back door, she was surprised that the house was so empty. She set the convenience-store bag on the counter and looked at the kitchen, bathed in the light that came through the windows. There was a smell in the air of closed-up rooms, of carpets holding odours from even before she’d lived there.

  She remembered how positive they’d all been, she, Arvel, and the kids, the day they’d moved in here. They’d come here straight from the old apartment on Bridge Avenue and the place had looked huge and pristinely clean.

  “Things are going to work out for us here,” Arvel had said. He’d bought a bottle of Windex and was going through the house, cleaning every pane of every window until it was spotless. Even when he’d expressed such optimism, as much as she’d wanted to believe in the same dream, as much as she’d wished she could face the new house with bright-eyed optimism, part of her had already lost faith that she and Arvel could work out their differences.

  But how could she have predicted this state of affairs? Arvel was dead. She was a widow. The girls only had one parent. She shook her head in sad amazement.

  In the kitchen, all that remained of her and her family were stains. A ring of grime encircled the handle of the refrigerator. The linoleum floor was scuffed with dark heel marks and the prints of dirty shoes. She opened the cupboard below the sink and took out an aerosol can of Easy-Off. She read the directions on the can, removed the racks from the oven, and sprayed a thick layer of foam over each surface inside the oven. The fumes burned her eyes and nostrils. She closed the oven door and switched on the vent fan over the stove. The fumes were still strong, so she rinsed her hands under the tap and took her coffee into the living room. She sat on the floor with her back against the front door. The carpet still held impressions of furniture that had been removed. Couch, couch, wingback chair, coffee table. She could make out clearly where each piece had been. On the bare wall opposite where she sat, there were outlines of the pictures that had hung there.

  Beyond the living room was the hallway leading to the bedrooms. The closet door was open, and Jackie caught sight of something in the darkness beyond the door.

  She stood up to investigate, then drew in a little bre
ath as she realized what it was. She’d put it there herself on the night before Arvel’s death. She remembered now making a conscious decision to leave it where it was on the day she’d finally moved. She hadn’t wanted to face it then, and she had not had a thought about it since.

  There were handgrips moulded into the plastic at either end of the box. She grasped the closer grip and dragged the grey box out into the light. The paper taped to the lid said “Memories” in black ink, then below that, scrawled in pencil: “Arvel: half of these things are mine and half are yours. We’ll have to go through it some time soon.”

  She lifted the box from the floor with both hands and was surprised at how heavy it was. It made no noise when she shook it slightly as she carried it to the spot by the front door where she’d been sitting. She set the box on the carpet beside her coffee and sat again with her back against the door. Resting the side of one leg against the box, she picked her coffee from the floor and took a sip. The cardboard cup had already pressed a little circular outline on the carpet.

  She got up onto her knees, pushed both thumbs down on the lid of the box, and lifted the locking tabs that held the lid in place. At the top of the box was a photo of Arvel, age two or three, sitting on Santa’s knee. Below the photo, the caption read: “Checking it twice: Santa stopped by the Steelworkers’ Hall last Thursday to double-check on his list of children who were being naughty or nice. Little Arvel Burrows, from Albion Mines, claims he’s been a good boy all year.” This photo had made its way into this container via an old shoebox full of childhood things that Arvel had toted around with him for years. When they were moving into this house on Pleasant Street, Jackie had seen Arvel taping the shoebox, which had disintegrated several times already, back together with Scotch tape. She’d urged him to go through the contents of the box, pick out what he wanted to keep, and toss the box itself away. Without thought or hesitation, he’d handed her the news clipping.

  The child in the photo was in the foreground, and since that child had grown up to be her husband, that’s all she’d ever taken notice of before. But there was something striking or off-putting about the picture.

  Santa was not merely large in comparison to the child, but almost gigantic. His big, meaty hand supported Arvel’s backside, the fingers nearly as large as arms. She suddenly recognized, behind the cheap cotton-batting beard, Santa’s dark lips and broad face. It was Ennis, though thinner than he was now. Behind the corny beard, he was smiling in a joyful way that seemed completely at odds with the man she knew. Was it just for the photo that he’d mustered this grin? Or had Ennis been a different person all those years ago?

  Arvel had never known it was his father in this photo: Jackie was sure of it. Over the years they’d looked at the picture several times together and he’d never mentioned anything about the identity of Santa. Would he have thrown the picture away if he had known? Would he have cherished it all the more?

  Jackie put the photo back inside the box marked “Memories” and snapped the lid down on top. She looked up at the living room, at the barren house, at the meaningless impressions her time there had left on the walls and the carpet. She walked into the kitchen and placed the box just inside the back door, where she would not forget it on the way out. The smell of Easy-Off in the kitchen was less corrosive than it had been. She took a heavy rubber glove from the cupboard beneath the sink, pulled a fresh J-Cloth from the box, and opened the oven door. The white foam of the oven cleaner had gone brown as it melted crusted grease inside the oven. Gobs of thick, toxic ooze dripped down from the top surface of the oven and drooled down its sides. She got down on her knees and began to wipe the oven walls clean.

  In a frozen moment in Dunya’s mind, she stood over her drunken husband with an iron kettle in her hand. His face was fairly flattened by her pounding. He was still breathing. She could see the bubbles coming up through the pond of blood below his eyes. She knew a few more swift, hard blows could have finished him. In a split second, she decided not to do it, not to kill her husband. Then Ziv grabbed her, stopped her hand, and it was all over. So it had not been Ziv who stopped her, though she could not have continued the beating once he’d had hold of her. This recollection, this knowledge that she’d stopped herself before killing him, was perhaps the only thing that spared her from complete condemnation of herself, the only thing that enabled her to go on.

  Sometimes this bloody image sprang itself upon her by surprise. She would be sitting in the front room drinking tea, when her imagination took over and she’d be right back at the foot of the stairs, blood splashed on the cuffs of her pantlegs. Other times, she sought out the memory and replayed it deliberately, trying to refind the moment, the spark of goodness and forgiveness that must still be inside her.

  With Ennis in the hospital and the house wrecked, she remembered she’d tried to clean up in the kitchen, where so many things had been broken and spread about. Bottled spices and boxes of cereal had been tossed from the cupboards, the walls dented where heavy cans – tomatoes, soup, kidney beans – struck. She’d started by picking the larger items from the floor and stacking them on the counter, but she could not move without stepping ankle-deep in some mess that needed sweeping: cornflakes that had spilled from their box; rice grains from an exploded five-kilogram bag; dried baking beans. Some things were pasted together with milk or pickle brine or mustard that had been thrown from the fridge. She’d got Ziv to help her locate and straighten up all the expensive items: electronic goods, appliances. She took a breather from her work, stood with her hands on her hips, and looked around the downstairs of the house. Then she got the phone book and looked up Danny Dykens’s number. He had a covered half-ton and did light trucking for a living.

  When she and Ennis had married, they hadn’t had a thing. They’d nailed three planks to a couple of orange crates, and called that their kitchen table for more than five years. Nowadays, everyone had to have a house full of furniture right away, and they went eye-deep in debt to get it. She’d done without things before, and when Danny came with his truck, she decided there were things she could do without again. Beds were expensive and you had to have them. The big-ticket appliances were also pricey and useful. She didn’t want to be stupid, and she didn’t want to have regrets. She walked through each room in the house, looked at everything, broken and unbroken, spread out before her on the floor, and decided what would be on the small list of things to keep. The rest, she told Danny, she wanted done with as quick as he could carry it.

  The blue overnight bag, from the room where Arvel had slept the few nights before the explosion, hung on a hook in the porch.

  One thing that would not budge was the brown cabinet with glass doors in Ziv’s bedroom. It had been there when they’d bought the house. They’d tried at the time to move it downstairs and use it for dishes, but they could not get it through the door. She told Danny Dykens to take it out the window if he had to, but he got out his tape measure and said it would not go through the window frame either.

  “It must have been built in this room,” Danny said. He opened a drawer and looked at the wood. “Pretty solidly put together,” he said. “Look at this,” he ran his hand along the inside of the drawer. “This says ‘explosive.’ ”

  “It was made with old powder boxes from the pit,” Dunya said.

  “Somebody put a lot of work into this,” Danny said.

  “I guess it stays,” said Dunya.

  Anything that remained on the walls, photos, paintings, calendars, she’d ripped down and piled on the floor, too, to take away. Ennis’s plaques and photos she saved in a cardboard box for him to decide about when he got out of the hospital. Once Danny had gone with the contents of the house, she realized how cluttered the house had been for years.

  On the day the rescue was called off, she came back from the fire hall and took Arvel’s overnight bag down from its hook in the porch. It felt so light in her hand, somehow lighter even than it was on the day she’d put it there. She brought it i
nto the front room of the house and sat beside it on the floor. It had been years since she’d sat this low in the room, if she ever had. She noticed a faint dusty smell from the carpet. Arvel’s overnight bag was closed. She’d zippered it herself after the explosion. She looked at the tab a moment, watched the way it reflected light that came into the front room through the curtainless windows. She put a hand on the zipper, thinking to open it. But she knew what was inside. Some underwear, some socks, a couple of clean work shirts. Maybe a pocket novel that Arvel had thrown in without thought as he left his house. There was no need to open the bag. It was full of meaningless objects. She hugged the bag to her chest and slowly lowered it to the floor, rested her head against it as though it were a pillow.

  She remembered when Arvel was smaller than the bag. Her first baby. Her first son.

  He had been big from birth. Almost eleven pounds, which in those days had been a lot. His size was his father in him. Dunya’s people were all small. But she never let his size fool her. Perhaps it was because she was older when he had her first. Older for those days. She and Ennis had been married almost ten years before she got pregnant. They had already given up on having kids. They’d forgotten, even, that it was a possibility.

  There were only cloth diapers, and the only thing to hold them were deadly big pins. She was scared of diaper pins. Her heart would skip a beat every time she had to open one to fasten a clean diaper on him. She’d look at his stubby body, see him wiggling around like a frisky puppy.

  She’d put him down for his nap and be unable to rest her mind. She was always sure she’d walk back in after an hour and he’d be dead, stuck through the heart with a safety pin. It seemed she’d always known how close he was to death.

  She’d lain for a time on the floor, her head resting on the overnight bag, drifting in and out of a light sleep. Later, she stood stiffly and looked around the empty room. She went into the kitchen and put the overnight bag into the garbage. When the lid dropped onto the can, she had an idea. She got out her Sears card and the catalogue and ordered three gallons of flat white paint. A few days later, Ziv rollered over everything; wood panelling, wallpaper, broken old plaster, bare wood, all of it. She covered it all in white, drawing up a sheet over the inside of the house.