Wintersong. The Nickel Range Trilogy • Volume 3

by Mick Lowe

  In this, at least, the company had an advantage. Its informational supply lines were much shorter and more compact. Front line supervisors remained on the job, reporting to their superiors, who passed word up the chain of command to Mahogany Row in Copper Cliff, and thence down to world headquarters in Toronto. Where the company was at a distinct disadvantage was in accurately gauging the mood among the rank-and-file.

  In the event the mediators’ efforts came to naught that bizarre day just seventy-two hours before Christmas Eve. Neither side was willing to present a new offer, and the session ended abruptly, and coldly. It was now clear both sides were digging in for the winter.

  The union negotiators packed their bags, surrendered their room keys, and set out, still empty-handed, for Sudbury, unsure of what greeting awaited them.

  10

  The Kindness of Strangers (1)

  Being in Sudbury, they soon discovered, was like being in a different world. The snow-covered city, though bitterly cold, seemed in a state of freeze-dried suspended animation, apprehensively awaiting the outcome of the only thing that mattered: the strike itself.

  The bargaining committee members, and especially Jordan as its leader, were immediately besieged by the Sudbury news media: how were the talks going? Had there been any progress at the bargaining table? What was the outlook? And, above all, was there any end to the strike in sight? Nelson and his colleagues did their best to fend off the persistent horde with vanilla, non-committal answers that concealed the grim reality that there were no talks, there was no progress at the bargaining table, and even less prospect for an end to the strike any time soon, and Merry Christmas to you, sir. They were careful not to raise false hopes without at the same time dashing too many, either. It was a delicate, exhausting balance that drove home a major advantage to bargaining in Toronto; the media scrutiny was much more desultory down there, at least a partial offset to the isolation and homesickness they all felt, lost in the bowels of the big city.

  The buzz around the Union Hall was all about the Wives’ impending Christmas Party. Here, too, there was apprehension: while notice of the affair had gone out to the local news media, there was still considerable doubt that the Wives could pull off a successful event.

  Presents remained a problem. While Jordan had ordered the newly formed Scrounge Committee to put on a full court press soliciting the donation of kids’ presents from local merchants, the results had been mixed at best. With the countdown on and the date for the Party fast approaching, the Scroungers’ meager haul lay in a small pile in a corner of the Vimy Room for all to see.

  “That’s it?” Nelson turned to Carruth. It was evening of yet another bone-chilling day, with wind chills approaching thirty below, and the Hall was deserted. Their words echoed off the ceiling and walls of the cavernous room.

  “Yeah, that’s all there is,” Carruth agreed with a reluctant sigh.

  No one knew what a pile of Christmas presents for fourteen thousand kids looked like, exactly—who had ever even dreamed of such an audacious event?—but clearly this wasn’t it.

  Jordan shook his head. “We’re not even close. Should we cancel?”

  Carruth answered with a shake of her own head, refusing to admit the Wives had been beaten. “Naaah, Jordy, we can’t cancel. There’s still a few days yet … Let’s just wait and see what happens and hope for the best …”

  The strike leader, weary to the bone at the great press of responsibility that had been foisted upon him, already sick to death—as they all were—at the severity of a winter that had only just begun, relented with a sigh. “All right, Carruth, but Jesus I hope you’re right about this …”

  With the news media already invited to attend the Wives’ Party, they were well and truly backed into a corner. But the fact was, there was some hope that someone, somewhere would hear their prayer and that some last minute help might arrive. Even before they’d left Toronto Jordan had been busy, travelling incessantly, appearing as a featured guest speaker at rally after rally organized by individual local unions and Labour Councils, first around the province, and then, increasingly, all over the country as word of the titanic struggle unfolding in Sudbury began to spread. The can demo inside Queen’s Park had generated bemused but sensational headlines all across the country, and it soon became apparent that the touching rank-and-file generosity the Sudbury strikers had experienced at the Oshawa plant gates was not an isolated aberration. Wherever he went, Jordan was showered with cheques and cash donations from fellow unionists, and the numbers had started to add up. And the “Nickels for Nickel Strikers” cans were beginning to come in, too, just as the Steelworkers’ Toronto communications people had foreseen, jammed with coins, yes, but often stuffed with bills. Some Steel locals, like 1005, which represented the thousands of workers at the giant Hilton Works of the Steel Company of Canada in Hamilton, had placed a can on every table of the union hall taproom, while other, smaller union locals—many of them not even Steelworkers—had placed the cans in workplace cafeteria lunchrooms on company property. Often this gesture was met by hostility and threats from the employer, which the union in question then resisted, and in this way the militant mobilization by Sudbury’s workforce began to have repercussions far beyond Inco’s own strikebound plants. The Sudbury struggle was a germ, and it was spreading.

  That word of Sudbury’s travails had travelled all the way to Canada’s West Coast became apparent to Jordan Nelson when he accepted an invitation from the B.C. United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union in Vancouver to give a speech there. The Sudbury union president was moved at the warmth of his reception, due, at least in part, to the respect the Sudbury Union had always accorded the militant Fishermen’s Union in its own battles with B.C. fish plant owners. Dating back even to the days of the old Mine Mill, Sudbury unionists had been renowned for their generosity in supporting striking trade unionists across the length and breadth of Canada. Now it was time to repay the favour.

  “Would you guys like some fish?”

  The question from the President of the B.C. Fishermen’s Union took Nelson aback. “What? Oh, sure, no doubt our members would like that,” Jordan Nelson nodded appreciatively.

  “We’ll ship some back East to you, then. Try to get ’em there before Christmas,” the UFAWU President vowed.

  “You Jordan Nelson, President of this here outfit?”

  Judging by the company logo sewn into his work shirt, the questioner was a driver for a courier company—hardly an unusual occurrence at the Steel Hall as Christmas approached. Random, unexpected deliveries of goods were pouring in now—everything from foodstuffs to children’s Christmas toys—as if the season of good will had opened some kind of flood gates, and thoughts and well wishes were now turned to the strikebound Nickel City, lying inert and exposed to the winter’s terrible cold.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” Nelson confirmed.

  “Okay then. Sign here.” The courier proffered a bill of lading for the union president’s signature.

  “Whad’ya bring me?” Nelson inquired with scant real interest.

  “Fish,” came the reply. “Lots of ’em. ’Bout ten thousand pounds of frozen fish.”

  “Yeah? No shit.” Nelson had all but forgotten the B.C. Fishermen’s Union President’s promise of a present of fish, what with all the pre-Christmas bustle and excitement around the union hall. It was after hours, and he’d repaired to his office to share a joint with Jake and Molly, two members of his inner circle with whom he felt the closest.

  “Let’s go have a look,” Nelson suggested to his companions, and they all trooped out of Nelson’s second floor office.

  “It’s a reefer, so I’ll just leave it parked out back,” the courier explained as they trudged downstairs to the door to the back parking lot. “Instructions say it’s s’posed to be left running at all times.”

  “Yeah?” Nelson was incredulous. “Jesus, in this cold i
t’s not like any cargo inside’s gonna thaw out!”

  At last the little group arrived at the back end of a five-ton cube van, grimy with the winter’s snowy sludge.

  “Let’s have a look,” Jordan grunted as he pulled himself up onto the rear deck of the truck. He pulled the latch, reefed up on the handle, and the back door rose on rusty pulleys to expose—

  “Jesus Christ!” exclaimed the startled union president. “Now what the fuck is this?”

  Molly tried—unsuccessfully—to stifle a stoned guffaw. “You said you wanted fish, Jordy, and now here they are.”

  She and Jake joined Nelson in staring incredulously at the sight that awaited them in the back of the truck—an impossible tangle of fish eyes, fins, tails and gills, all frozen into one huge, impenetrable, ice-encrusted mass.

  Nelson was speechless. While he hadn’t given the matter a great deal of thought, he’d envisioned a truck load of B.C. salmon—sockeye, maybe even coho—all individually wrapped and neatly encased in plastic, but this …

  The fish distribution was scheduled to begin in the morning, and the union president fully expected his members to begin lining up before dawn, drawn by the ever-powerful lure of getting something for nothing, word of the Fishermen’s Union’s generosity having travelled far and wide.

  They had maybe five hours to get this thing figured out.

  Jordan led the group, minus the courier, back up to his office, muttering to himself the while. “ … three hours time difference … maybe I’ll get lucky and they’re working late out there …”

  Once he’d settled behind his desk Nelson reached for his Rolodex, the circular card file that held a record of names and contact information. Jordan’s had at least doubled in size since the strike began.

  As Molly and Jake looked on in bemused silence, the union president punched in what was clearly a long distance number.

  “Yeah, George, it’s Jordan Nelson from Sudbury calling … just wanted to thank you for all that, fish, brother.”

  “Yeah, the truck just got here, and I wanted to ask, what kind of fish is that?”

  “Now listen, the driver said something weird, that he had to keep the reefer running, but listen, George it’s never warmer’n twenty below here right now so I don’t see …”

  “Huh! Is that right? Uh huh, I understand. Okay, brother, it’s getting’ kinda late here, but we just wanted you guys to know you fed many a Sudbury family, all right?”

  “Yeah, well, I can promise your generosity won’t be forgotten, okay George? All our best to you and your members out there, brother.

  “Merry Christmas to you, too, man,” and with that Jordan cradled the phone on his desk before looking at Jake and Molly, who were watching—and listening—in expectant silence.

  “Herring. It’s herring. He says they had a pretty good run of it this year. And he also said the truck has to be kept running—even in this cold—because if the fish do ever begin to thaw out, they’ll begin to thaw at the centre, and then from the inside out … “

  “ … now, we gotta figure out how we’re gonna distribute this stuff …”

  Nelson swiveled in his office chair to reach into the pocket of the winter coat that was hanging on a coat rack behind him. He pulled out a set of keys, selected one, and offered the ring to Jake. “Here, Jake. You’ve been to my house before. Here’s the key to the front door. Downstairs in the basement is a workbench. My chainsaw’s sitting on it. There’s a can of mixed gas right beside it. Can you bring them both down here to the hall, please?”

  “Sure thing,” Jake nodded, rising to his feet and heading for the door.

  “Oh, and Jake? Almost forgot. If you look in the kitchen you’ll find a bunch of plastic shopping bags wedged in between the cupboards and the fridge. Bring those, too, will ya?”

  “You got it, Pontiac,” agreed Jake, who was already halfway out the door, keys jingling in his hand.

  The whole thing was a nightmare from start to finish, and was destined to become one of Jordan Nelson’s worst memories of the strike.

  It didn’t help that he was sleep-deprived. He’d decided to pull an all-nighter (just one of many during the Year of the Long Strike, when he sometimes felt obliged to act as an ever-watchful sentinel, standing lonely vigil over the sleeping masses, peaceful in their respite from the terrible, unending struggle over which it was his duty to preside.)

  Jordan had sent Molly and Jake home for the night, and he was just settling in in his office chair to grab what little sleep he could when he heard an insistent rapping at the door.

  “Jordan? Mister Nelson, sir?”

  The voice, a timorous wheedle, Nelson recognized as belonging to Bill “Shakey” Akerley, the Hall custodian.

  “Yeah? What is it? Oh c’mon in, Sha—uh, Bill,” the union president answered wearily.

  The janitor, looking as disreputable and disheveled as ever, slouched through the door frame. As usual, he had no teeth. As a result his words were slurred, and also as usual, he had difficulty making eye contact with Jordan, which only enhanced his disreputable, furtive air.

  “Well, Mr. Nelson, sir, remember how you told me that there reefer out back had to keep running at all times?”

  Jordan nodded.

  “Well, sir, she’s stalled right out, not running no more. I just thought you’d wanna know, sir.” The tall, white-haired Akerley was clearly distraught at being the bearer of such bad news, and almost despite himself Nelson’s heart went out to this lost and lonely midnight apparition with his shock of unruly white hair and thick white eyebrows.

  “What? Oh, okay, Bill, I’m coming.” Feeling about as old and disheveled as the Hall janitor looked, the much younger man heaved himself out of his comfy warm office chair before beginning to bundle up once again for yet another foray out into the perishing cold.

  “You did the right thing, Bill, coming to get me,” Nelson reassured Akerley as they trudged down the stairs to the back door.

  As it always did not matter how many times he’d experienced it, the fierce cold came as a terrible shock to Nelson. The instinctive reaction was, always, to recoil, to hunch one’s shoulders, to duck one’s head, as a turtle might withdraw into its shell at the presence of danger.

  But Akerley was right—the truck had stalled. And he’d done the right thing by alerting Jordan as quickly as he had. Diesel-powered motors are notoriously balky in severe cold weather. All Nelson could do as he pulled himself up in to the cab was hope the engine hadn’t completely cooled down. The starter motor squealed in protest when Nelson turned the ignition switch, but it turned the engine over once, twice, and then to the young union president’s immense relief, the diesel engine itself sputtered back to life.

  The shivering duo retreated at once to the warm sanctuary of the hall. They parted on the first floor—Akerley to his cleaning duties, Nelson to his solitary vigil, but only after checking his watch. Three o’clock. He knew what was coming, and trudged tiredly back up the stairs to his office to brew a fresh pot of coffee.

  New York City likes to boast that it’s “The City that Never Sleeps,” but really, in its much more modest way, Sudbury, Ontario Canada is, and always has been, just such a place. It is, for one thing, an early rising place, a metropolitan centre geared to a continuous production cycle, with shifts changing endlessly three times a day, 365 days per year. As a result, the principal streets are almost never completely empty, with off shift stragglers wending their weary ways home even as the incoming shifts leave warm beds to catch an early cage. And so it came as little surprise to Jordan Nelson when he heard the slamming of truck doors and the stamping of winter boots at five in the morning. Expecting to find rank-and-filers eager to collect their catch of the day, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that the newcomers were scrounges, with Jean Claude Parisé at their head.

  “’Mornin’ Jordy, we just thoug
ht we’d help get some fish to the guys out on the lines,” Parisé smiled.

  “Oh yeah?” Nelson was pleased at this spontaneous solicitude, and brightened almost despite himself. “Well it sure ain’t gonna be what you were thinking—hold on, I gotta grab my saw.” He double-timed it back up the stairs to his office.

  “It’s out back. Okay? Let’s go.” Nelson, all business and now chain-saw equipped, and wearing rubber mucker’s gloves, led the way across the faux-terrazzo floor of the main foyer.

  Jordan, after hefting his saw on to the back deck of the truck, clambered up himself to the closed rear doors, which he opened by pulling hard on the frozen canvas strap at the bottom of the door.

  “Ho-aly fuck, Jordy! What in the name of Christ is that?

  “Five tons a’ frozen herring, J.P. Get one of your guys to back his truck up?”

  And so it began—the next twelve hours were a surreal blur for the union president. Deafened by the roar of the chain saw in such a confined space, his fingers nearly numbed by handling gobs of frozen fish, Nelson was surprised by how quickly the icy mass wore down the teeth on the saw, necessitating frequent breaks for him to stop and re-sharpen the chain. It was tedious, but at least the sharpening sessions forced him in out of the cold, allowing him to remove his rubberized miner’s gloves, and to begin restoring the circulation to fingers that, he feared, might be coming perilously close to frostbite.

  At first, he tried to at least wrap the still-icy chunks of frozen fish in plastic shopping bags, but as the day wore on he began to simply toss the chunks into the beds of an endless succession of pick-ups, where they landed with a resounding “thunk.”