Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  Ziv pours himself a cup of lukewarm coffee from the pot his father must have made. He sits at the table and holds up the front page again to examine his father’s scissor work. What must the old man be thinking as he carries out this task? Deep in the pit of his stomach, somehow mixed with the pain of his own idiocy and self-abuse from last night, he feels a pang of guilt. There was an earlier time when his father had been keeping news clippings and he’d used them to try to reach out to Ziv. And Ziv had made a complete mess of that affair. He wishes now that he knew how to ask his father what he is thinking about. What he is feeling. But both of his parents are closed off to him now. He and his father have hardly been able to hold a conversation about anything their whole lives, let alone how they felt. What can he expect either one of them to say to each other, after Arvel’s death? His mother has gutted the house of furniture. She spent weeks sitting on the futon in the front room, quietly weeping. She seems lost in her own inner world as she sits every day and meditates, if that is what she is doing.

  As Ziv turns the newspaper over, a square of newsprint falls to the floor. It is too small to have come from either of the holes on the front page. It must have slipped from his father’s collection. “Lawyers Deny Pair in Hiding,” is the headline. Ziv scans through the article. The story explains how two former Eastyard managers, who now live in Ontario, have so far refused to answer their subpoenas to appear at the inquiry.

  As he showers, he tries to work the knots of tension from his limbs, but the more he pulls at and rubs his arms, the more they hurt. There is a dull ache in the shoulder that was dislocated last night.

  Back in his bedroom he puts his clothes on, retrieves a tablet of letter-size writing paper from beneath his bed, and looks about the room for space to write. In the corner, there is the brown powder-box cabinet, one of the only things left in house after his mother’s cleanup work after the explosion. He slaps the paper down on the waist-high shelf of the cabinet and opens to a fresh page. It’s a little uncomfortable writing standing up, but he’s keen on saying some things and the discomfort goes away quickly.

  Dear Meta, he begins. They’ve exchanged several letters since her visit of last year. He cannot remember whose letter was last.

  Gavin Fraser is testifying at the inquiry today.

  He tears this sheet out immediately, drops it uncrumpled to the floor, and begins yet again.

  Dear Meta,

  My parents are suffering tremendously since Arvel’s death. I’ve never been able to talk to them anyway, regardless of what happened to Arvel. That’s what was great about having you here. I had someone I could talk to.

  I know you’re making a lot of money over there and that it’s great to have such a good job, but do you even think of coming home? For good, I mean? Permanently?

  There was this show I saw on TV a while ago about people who get limbs amputated. They get something called a phantom limb, where they feel like their leg or arm is still there, even though it’s not. That’s what it’s like with Arvel dead. I just cannot believe he’s gone.

  Arvel tried to kill me once. I’ve been remembering this in bits and pieces since his death. A fight we once had. To be fair, I tried to kill him, too. Whatever started the fight, I can’t recall. But we were pounding on each other in earnest with our bare hands. In the middle of the living-room floor we smashed vases, slammed furniture around, screamed. At one point I remember biting him. I don’t even recall what part of him I bit. I just remember finding my mouth a couple of centimetres from his body, reaching out with my teeth and clamping his flesh hard.

  I know it must have hurt like hell. Under normal circumstances it would have, anyway. But we’d already been pounding on each other for a long time, when suddenly I bit him. I think we were both just numb. I know I was. Either he was too numb to cry out or I was too numb to hear him cry out. Later, we were both too exhausted to hit each other any more and, unable to lift our arms for another blow, we lay side by side on the floor, panting and out of breath. We started laughing. Just like that after an hour or more of pounding on each other and wishing the other dead, we had nothing left but laughter.

  More than anything, though, it’s that bite that stays with me. That I would have that in me: to bite someone. To bite my own brother. Not playfully, but viciously, with the intent to hurt him. I never saw the mark I made, but there must have been one. There must have been a mark, a purple circle on his skin, for a long time. There was probably a scar on him from that bite right up to the day he died. When they’d finally given up on finding him, I used to think of that mark on his dead body down there, metres and metres under the earth. I used to imagine it like a tattoo, dark in the middle, white around the edges. Maybe even the clear indentation of a tooth that I don’t have any more. There is a part of me down there with him. Something only I am responsible for and only I know about. Something only he and I shared.

  I feel afraid, but I don’t even know what I’m afraid of.

  I’ll write again soon.

  Love

  Ziv

  The weather has warmed and recooled recently, softening the snow cover, then locking the landscape in a skin of ice. When he emerges from the back door of the house, the cold catches in his lungs. He breathes in the air and feels it cool his whole body. In the centre of his chest, his fiery heart struggles to keep him warm. His feet slip over ice-slickened puddles and shatter shell ice as he makes his way to the end of the driveway. In his hand is the letter to Meta, sealed in a white business-size envelope and stamped with airmail postage. The sun breaks momentarily through the overcast, and the big, sick elm at the corner of Hudson Street shimmers under a crystal coating. He shields his eyes with the envelope and looks at the trees. Last week’s warmth would have begun teasing up the sap from the roots. These late-winter freezes can crack a tree from the heart of its trunk.

  At the corner of Foord Street he drops the letter in the red mailbox and pauses to look up at the statue on top of the miner’s monument, the old-time miner with his safety lamp. There is no space left for names on the pedestal. Eastyard will require a whole monument unto itself. He turns left on Foord Street and heads for the new Miner’s Museum, where the inquiry is being held.

  Gavin Fraser grips the armrests of the witness chair and pushes the top of his back against the backrest. The afternoon session has just begun, and he knows this will be the hard part for him. He was called to the stand late in the morning and spent most of that time recounting his experience in the mining industry and telling the story of how he ended up at Eastyard. Now the important questions will be asked and he will have to answer them. He shifts in the seat, squirms until his fingers let go the armrests, tries to let his body loosen into a comfortable position.

  Only one camera is allowed in the room, the official inquiry camera, but the inquiry releases hours of the procedures for broadcast every day on the channel that carries footage from parliament. News organizations broadcast snippets and sound bites on the nightly newscasts. The light necessary for the camera flushes the room white and stabs deep into Gavin’s head. He squints against it, then when he remembers how awful people look when they squint on TV, he loosens his face blank, only to find himself squinting again just a few moments later. The technical crew with the camera is setting up for the afternoon, someone accidentally switches off a power plate and the television lights go black. As the public seating behind the lights colours into view, he makes out a single recognizable face. It is Ziv Burrows, Arvel Burrows’s younger brother. He recognizes him because of how much the big forehead and wide cheeks resemble Arvel. His face is outlined in white light coming through behind him, making his face dark. All the same, his face appears swollen or bruised somehow.

  There is a loud conk. Someone says shit. The lights blind him again.

  “Continuing from this morning’s testimony, Mr. Fraser, reference was made to your reasons for leaving Eastyard Coal.”

  He leans into the microphone and bumps his teeth on
it. The sound echoes through the room. “I left because of safety concerns.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “I did not think the underground operation met a basic standard of safety, from the viewpoint of the workers, and I quit when I realized that management had no intention of dealing with those safety problems.”

  “So in your opinion, the underground operation was not safe enough.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Again, could I ask you to be more specific?”

  “You mean tell you what specific things were not safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s hard to know where to start.” A faint, disgusted laughter sets up in the room.

  “I can name several different types of safety problems, right off the top of my head.”

  The Inquiry Commissioner nods slowly. “Maybe you should do that, then.”

  “Well, right off the top of my head – I could probably do this better if I had a chance to write this down, make a list. But there were problems of tunnel construction, there were problems of maintenance and cleanup throughout the mine, and there were problems of worker training.

  “Eastyard hired an outside company to design and plan the mine. That was Argon Engineering, a contracting company that specializes in tunnelling only. The big challenge of mining in this area is not simply getting the raw material out, it’s building and maintaining a reliable system of tunnels to get men and machines to the mineral itself. To understand how tricky this is, you have to understand that the precise conditions of any given mine are unique. The thickness of the mineral seam, the stability of the strata surrounding it, whether there are faults in the seam, what sort of by-products tunnelling produces in a given area: water, for example, or dust, or gas.” There is a stirring in the room somewhere and Gavin looks up briefly to see Ziv Burrows standing up noisily, scraping his chair along the floor. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” he says. He’s moving his seat closer to the front.

  The inquiry commissioner’s face is a mask of neutrality, his gaze so blank he appears set to doze off. He glances briefly at the commotion in the room, then settles back to look at Gavin. But he keeps a pad of yellow paper in front of him, and though he never looks down at it, a cheap plastic pen in his left hand scratches non-stop across the paper, pausing only long enough to flip to a new page.

  “So Eastyard hired Argon,” Gavin continues. “And they surveyed the site and made their plans as to the best way to safely get at that coal. Part of their plan was the method of tunnel construction itself, considering that the Eastyard seam is surrounded by soft rock and is unstable and prone to rock falls. They recommended a system of arches and screens be set up, and that this be sprayed with Quikrete, a super-fast-drying concrete that would keep the tunnels from caving in. But as soon as Argon left the site, after Eastyard workers had been trained in this method of tunnelling, management ordered an end to the Quikreting of the tunnel roofs. It was too costly and time-consuming, they said, and they said it was unnecessary.”

  “Did you witness any rock falls yourself underground?”

  “Regularly. Large and small rock falls were happening all the time.”

  “Did the rock falls occur in the areas that had been left without Quikrete?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever witness or know about a rock fall that took place in a tunnel where arches, screens, and Quikrete had been applied according to specifications?”

  “No.”

  Silence. Gavin is conscious of the dramatic effect of this pause. He’s giving people, perhaps across the entire country, time to process what he’s said.

  “Someone else could testify about shortcuts Eastyard made in the execution of the tunnel plan Argon laid out. I’m no expert there.”

  “What exactly do you mean by shortcuts?”

  “I’m not a tunnel expert, and I don’t know the specifics. But it was pretty common knowledge that changes had been made in the tunnelling company’s original plans for the layout of the tunnels.”

  “What was the purpose behind these changes?”

  “Well, Argon designed a system for getting the coal out safely. But the safest way of doing something is not always the quickest and the cheapest way of doing it.”

  “So the design of the tunnels was changed for the sake of saving money at the expense of safety?”

  “There’s no other reason for changing the tunnelling company’s plan. They’re the tunnel experts. They’ve done the complete assessment of the site to determine exactly how a safe modern mine could be built under local conditions. But as for exact details, you’ll have to ask someone else.”

  Gavin becomes aware of the sounds around him. People breathe, they shift in their seats. They whisper and scratch on paper. The inquiry chairman is hunched over his notepad, scribbling something in point form.

  “Now,” the commissioner continues. “What about maintenance of the mine?”

  “Maintenance.”

  “You identified that earlier as one of the areas where you thought there were safety concerns at Eastyard.”

  “The biggest maintenance problem was dust.”

  “Coal dust.”

  “Yes. It’s explosive. It’s a concern in any mining operation, but the coal we mined at Eastyard was especially bad for producing large quantities of dust.”

  “What exactly is the explosive hazard of dust?”

  “From what I understand, and I’ve read a fair bit about this, now, but I’ve never conducted a scientific study, and, well, the fact I’m sitting here proves I’ve never seen coal dust ignite in any appreciable quantity. But I understand that coal dust on its own won’t blow, but if there’s a gas ignition, the presence of dust will turn a small rumble into a giant explosion. And because the dust can be present everywhere throughout the mine, it creates a domino effect. A gas explosion alone would normally be localized, especially with the kind of detectors and ventilation available now. If gas ignites, it’s not likely to be widespread. But dust can turn the whole system of shafts into a rifle barrel.”

  Someone in the room makes a guttural noise that sounds close to a deep cough. Gavin looks up at Ziv Burrows. Now that he’s closer, it is obvious he’s recently been in a fight. Aside from the bruise on his face, he’s holding his body in a delicate, wounded manner. His face is framed by his hands. He is staring so intently at Gavin that the blue of his eyes appears almost aglow.

  “If you saw pictures of the portal of the number-one deep at Eastyard, right after the explosion,” Gavin continues. “Remember how the roof over the portal was all blown to bits, and there was debris scattered everywhere? That’s what happens when dust ignites.”

  “What can be done to reduce this risk of dust ignition?”

  “The coal dust can be removed, or it can be neutralized by mixing it with stone dust.”

  “This is what’s called liming.”

  “That’s right. The stone dust used is powdered limestone.”

  “Could you describe the liming process to us?”

  “Well, like most procedures we carried out at Eastyard, I’m sure there are better ways to do it. But we just used to haul in fifty-pound bags of lime on a pallet, break open the bags with the nose of a shovel, and shovel the lime right onto the floor. A little bit like spreading salt on your driveway in the winter.”

  “So this procedure, liming the dust, it was performed at Eastyard.”

  “Well, I’ve seen it done. I did it myself a couple of times. Once I spent half a shift liming dust.”

  “Was this a regular procedure at Eastyard?”

  “No.”

  A buzz in the hearing room. Gavin reaches for the glass of water on the table near him.

  “To the best of your knowledge, how often was this procedure carried out at Eastyard.”

  “I know of two or three times that it took place in the nine months I worked there, but it might have been done more.”

  “In your estimation, how often shou
ld it have been carried out?”

  “Liming dust should be an ongoing thing. There should be a little bit going on every day or every couple of days.”

  “When the liming took place that you were aware of, what were the circumstances of the liming?”

  “On both occasions, it was on the day before a visit by the mine inspector.”

  More rumblings in the hearing room.

  “Did you keep a diary, or another written record of these events?”

  “A diary! Lord, no. My memory is all I’ve got in that regard. But I’ve been told it’s a pretty good one.”

  “Part of the mine inspector’s job is to meet with workers at the job site. To your knowledge, did these meetings take place?”

  “Yes. The inspector visited people while they were working and spoke with them.”

  “To your knowledge, did anyone on these occasions express concerns to the inspector about workplace safety?”