Wintersong. The Nickel Range Trilogy • Volume 3

by Mick Lowe

  But even despite Jordy’s efforts and ingenuity, “the great fish giveaway,” as it became known, was a bust. Almost no one was satisfied—this one had received a larger share than that one, and the nearly shapeless masses of fish, held together mainly by ice crystals, was unappetizing in the first place. The scratchy feedback began to reach Nelson that same day, even before he laid down his chain saw for the last time, forced to call it quits out of sheer exhaustion and by the onset of the preternaturally early gloaming that always descended over the Nickel Capital on the shortest days of the year.

  What had started thousands of miles away with the best of intentions had, for some reason that Jordy never did fully understand, brought out the very worst in the Sudbury rank-and-file, a kind of crabbed mean-spiritedness in a working class army that was always volatile at the best of times, but that was now, after four months without a paycheque, becoming war-weary and battle-fatigued despite its own militancy.

  There were many times that year—and the end of the day of “the great fish giveaway” was one of those—when Jordy, as he closed up the Local Union office and turned the Hall over to Akerley, wondered if they hadn’t bitten off more than they could chew.

  11

  The Kindness of Strangers (2)

  For her part, Molly Carruth missed the fish giveaway—which she would soon learn about as it became the stuff of local legend—and, in any event, she had troubles of her own, a worry that was clearly shared and etched into the faces of the other Wives who attended the last pre-Christmas Party meeting at the same time Jordan Nelson was sawing his way through five tons of frozen B.C. herring.

  “So does anyone think we should cancel?” There was a quiver in the voice of the veteran community organizer as she posed the unthinkable prospect.

  There was no answer, but no one looked anyone else in the eye during the brief silence that followed.

  “No? Well all right then, so it’s decided we carry on.” The chairwoman turned to Molly. “Molly, you’ve been spending a lot of time down at the Union Hall lately, can you tell us what’s been going on?”

  Molly paused to collect her thoughts before answering. Then she chose her words carefully. “Look, don’t get me wrong …” she began, but then her voice trailed off, at a loss for words.

  “So how many presents are down there, Molly?” the community organizer asked gently, as if already sensing the bad news to come.

  “Like I said, don’t get me wrong, there are some presents down at the Hall, but not nearly enough. There’s been some response to the Toy Drive—and as Christmas gets closer the donations seem to be speeding up—and there’s definitely been some random acts of kindness. Last week a guy over at 2251 put a cap over the bed of his pick-up and loaded some gifts into the back and headed to Sudbury by way of Elliot Lake …”

  Molly could see the Local Union number meant nothing to them.

  “Twenty-two fifty one—that’s the big local over in the Sault at Algoma Steel—anyways this guy calls ahead to the Elliot Lake locals at Rio Algom and Denison Mines, tells them the truck’s on its way, and they fill it up the rest of the way, and by the time it gets here that truck is crammed with presents!” Molly beams at the group, hoping to soften the hard blow of her bad news somehow, but she sees they are not impressed. Elliot Lake, a major uranium mining camp two hours west of Sudbury, is full of Sudbury miners who have relocated during the strike. No one begrudges them the good money they’re making in the dangerous, silica-infested underground works of the uranium mines, but their generosity is to be expected.

  A deflated Carruth carried on, “Yeah, so anyways …”

  “So there’s nothing we can do now but stay the course and hope for the best,” the community organizer replied resolutely, lifting her chin and looking them each squarely in the eye.

  “I just wish there were more of the wives here,” offered the shy redhead who rarely spoke up during meetings. All of the heads in the room bobbed up and down in agreement. It was a constant, well-worn theme—although there were thousands of strikers’ wives out there in the community, only the same forty or fifty ever attended the group’s meetings. “Look, we all know the impact isolation can have on morale in the home. Now my husband comes home and tells me what’s going on in meetings, but a lot of the other men don’t. So most wives have to depend on the newspapers or television to learn what’s going on with the strike.”

  Local news media coverage of the strike was spotty and wildly unpredictable at best, they all knew, and often coloured by whether the boss in a particular newsroom was pro- or anti-union. The strike had long since badly polarized Sudbury’s 160,000 residents, splitting opinion down the middle. Either you were for the strikers, or against them. There was no middle ground—“Which side are you on, which side are you on?” was the refrain of an old union song.

  “Isn’t there some way to get the message out there to the other wives? We know they’ll turn out for the Christmas Party to bring their kids …”

  “I’ve got an idea—why not use the kids, and the Christmas Party, to get word out to those women we never see at our meetings?” queried the community organizer.

  “Sure, it’s a good idea, but how?” responded the redhead dubiously.

  “I know! I’ve got it!” exclaimed the community organizer. “Why not a comic book explaining the strike at a kid’s level? We can stuff a copy into every kid’s gift bag, and they’ll automatically carry it into the home, and to their mom.”

  “Ya know, that’s not a bad idea,” agreed Molly, herself a mother of two school-age children. “My own kids are getting hassled at school—‘Your mother’s stupid to be off the job and missing out on all that money’ and all that kind of playground bully bullshit …”

  “Huh!” snorted the normally placid redhead. “Sounds just like some bosses’ kids!”

  “Maybe we could deal with this kind of issue in the comic book, too,” suggested the community organizer, who could sense the comic book idea was gaining traction. “I may know somebody who could draw such a thing on short notice; nothing fancy, mind you, no full-colour illustrations, just plain, black-on-white pen-and-ink drawings. Colour would cost us a lot more, anyway.”

  Heads were nodding in agreement all around the room, which the community organizer took to be a consensus.

  “Okay then, I’ll reach out to my artist friend first thing tomorrow morning … “

  Two nights later, and Molly was once again sharing a fat, acrid joint with Jake McCool and Jordan Nelson in the Union President’s office. The Hall was closed for the day, and the huge old building loomed around them, darkened and silent, except for the footfalls of yet another after hours courier driver, who rapped softly on Jordy’s office door.

  “Jordan Nelson here?” asked the driver, waybill in hand.

  “I’m Jordan Nelson.”

  The driver proffered the waybill, which Jordy signed with his usual hastily scribbled flourish. “Let’s go see what we’ve got,” Nelson proposed to Molly and Jake, reluctantly stubbing out the joint, which was now little more than a roach, anyway.

  It was déjà vu all over again, a fact not lost on Molly, even as stoned as she was. But there was one major difference from the fish delivery—the size of the truck. This time, it was a full-size, ginormous eighteen-wheeler backed right up to the rear entrance of the Steelworkers’ Hall.

  “Wow!” Jake marvelled at the size of the thing.

  “What, Jordy?” Molly stifled a chortle. “D’ja order more fish?”

  The Union President stopped dead in his tracks, and turned a mournful, hangdog gaze on Molly. “That’s not very funny, Carruth.”

  “What’s in this thing, and where’s it from?” he asked the courier.

  “Dunno,” the driver answered. “Waybill’s kinda weird. Doesn’t specify the contents, and shipper’s showing only ‘Way up north,’ whatever that means.”


  “Huh! Well let’s see what we got,” grunted Jordy as he raised the frozen rear bars on the back of the van.

  He awkwardly opened one of the swinging rear doors, and peered inside, along with Molly and Jake.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed Molly, once she saw the van’s contents. Her hand flew involuntarily to cover her mouth, her eyes filled with tears, and her knees began to buckle as she realized she was looking at a tractor trailer load of children’s Christmas presents, shrink wrapped and stacked high on wooden pallets. She thought at once of the other Wives, and the sudden certainty that all the worry and anxiety of the past few months was now truly over was almost too much to bear. She stumbled backwards, through the back door of the Hall. She had to sit down before she fell down.

  “Can you drop this here?” Jordy asked the courier. “We’ll get a buncha guys here to hand bomb all this first thing in the morning.”

  “Sure thing,” agreed the courier amiably.

  Jordy closed the doors, and realized for the first time that Molly was nowhere to be seen. “Hey, where’s Carruth?” he asked Jake, who only shrugged and pointed back inside the Hall.

  The two men then went in the back door, where they found Molly sitting on the stair steps, head in hands, weeping silently, hoping not to be seen by the guys, who regarded her in silent embarrassment.

  The unloading process began early the next morning in the pre-dawn bitter cold. Jordan conscripted whatever guys were in the Hall so early, and a kind of “bucket brigade” was established, with presents passed from hand-to-hand, down off the back of the truck, through the back door of the Union Hall, up the stairs, across the foyer, and finally, into the Vimy Room, where the pile of presents was growing impressively.

  Soon enough, Jordan realized he had a new problem: where to put all those goddamned presents? They were beginning to overspread the floor space of the Vimy Room, always a busy space during the Year of the Long Strike. Strike voucher distribution was centered there, for one thing, as was any emergency membership meeting, guaranteed to be jam-packed by thousands of increasingly restive hard rock miners and surface workers, thirsty for news of progress in bargaining.

  No, clearly the presents couldn’t stay there. Jordan thought of the basement instead. Beside the clubroom, there were a number of smaller, unfinished rooms down there. Plans to upgrade the space into an education and training centre had yet to be realized, owing to a shortage in funding. Better down there than somewhere out in the community, Jordan figured. Wherever they were stored, the presents would have to be guarded night and day. Those presents were like gold, and this time of year? Forget it. And so, about mid-morning Jordan ordered the flow of presents re-directed, down the stairs inside the back doors, rather than up. Gradually the myriad of small rooms in the basement each began to fill with floor-to-ceiling presents.

  Within hours, the Wives buckled down to tackle the greatest logistical challenge of all: how to distribute Christmas presents to forteen thousand children? Somehow, a means must be devised to deliver the gifts in an age and gender-appropriate way, and, first of all, an inventory must be conducted of the presents in hand. And so the Wives began to rendezvous at the Hall to clamber through the basement rooms and to count and sort the gifts that had accumulated with the arrival of the big rig, and that were still arriving. Alice McCool led the way. In the days leading up to the Christmas Party she began to arrive daily at the Hall, working long hours with quiet determination to sort, wrap and label the presents. Was this burst of energy from the group’s matriarch some form of attempt at expiation for the wives’ sell-out of the strike of ’58, even though Alice had played no active role in the back-to-work movement? No one knew for sure, but the community organizer had her own suspicions.

  History cast a long shadow over each of them, and, even though they were too young to have taken any part in the disastrous strike of 1958, the Wives of 1978 were determined that history should not repeat itself.

  12

  The Wives Hold a Christmas Party

  By the day of the party the Wives had put their heads together and devised an ingenious method for the present distribution. Children were “streamed” as they arrived—by age and gender—and a clearly labeled table set up in the Vimy Room for each category.

  It was, all in all, a riotous affair, one of the first great triumphs of The Year of The Long Strike.

  The little boys arriving were instantly galvanized as they entered the Vimy Room, immediately thrilled at the sight of the great open space of the capacious room, the seemingly vast distance of it, and the high, airy ceilings. They clapped their hands in delight, and began to run about like maniacs, gamboling recklessly, heedless of their seemingly imminent and inevitable head-on collisions with more sedate passers-by.

  They had all been cooped up indoors for what seemed like an eternity owing to the astounding brutality of the terrible winter, and now, suddenly, they were set free, a boisterous tribe.

  For their part the girls were just as amazed at the sight of the huge room decorated for Christmas and crowded with tables overflowing with presents. The girls shrieked in delight in ear-splitting screams that only heightened the general, adrenalized pandemonium.

  The news media were out in force, too, with multiple cameras set up on tripods, shooting for the local stations, yes, but also for the big national networks, their sun guns glaring throughout the room, the news crews more than a little curious to see whether the Wives could make good on their seemingly outlandish promise that no striker’s child should go without a full measure of Christmas presents in The Year of the Long Strike.

  The Steelworkers’ Hall was the place to be on that day in the week before Christmas, 1978, the Vimy Room the hub of the entire community. For a few hours, at least, the grim business of the strike, with its mounting privations, was forgotten as beaming parents shepherded their children into the Hall to collect their Christmas presents.

  Conspicuous in his absence, though little noticed at the time, was only Jordan Nelson, who had elected to stay away from the Hall. Single and childless and still one of the youngest strikers, the strike leader really didn’t feel he belonged at the party. Instead, he remained at home, alone, in the run-up to Christmas, choosing not to answer the phone, which rang incessantly. Truth was, he rather enjoyed the peace and quiet, which gave him time to think, to recharge his spiritual batteries.

  And so, Christmas Eve found Nelson in solitary contemplation, nursing a cocktail in front of the Christmas tree in the living room of his apartment. He pulled the plug on the string of Christmas lights that festooned the tree and went to bed early, wondering what the New Year held in store. Knowing what he did, it was hard to contemplate the prospects for the coming year without an almost overwhelming sense of dread.

  PART TWO

  Winter

  13

  Lunch Bag Let Down—

  and a Surprise Announcement

  It was an unthinkable development, even before the holidays, but it happened that year: the weather took a sudden turn, and it became even colder in the New Year. It became so cold, in fact, that the Great Lakes that lie just to the west of Sudbury froze solid, a rare meteorological phenomenon that happened but once in a generation.

  This meant that whatever moderating influence the vast open waters of Lake Superior, Lake Huron, and Georgian Bay might have exerted to temper the plummeting temperatures in the Nickel Capital were gone now, the roiling, frigid waters of those huge inland seas replaced instead by limitless sheets of wind-scoured ice larger than a number of U.S. states. The westerly winter winds that normally blew through the streets of the Gatchell, Flour Mill and Donovan districts now packed a hypothermic punch backed by a thousand miles of Arctic, unobstructed fetch. The streets were, in fact, deserted. Pedestrian sightings had become a rarity—few souls were foolhardy enough to brave the cutting winds that made frostbite and even death an immediate prospect.


  Cars weren’t much better. Winter days like this were known in the local vernacular as “square tire weather” because in the unlikely event that your vehicle’s frozen battery had enough cranking power left to cause the engine to cough into listless, sputtering life in the morning, the first few hundred yards travelled produced the queer sensation of driving not a modern product of a Detroit assembly line but rather a Flintstones-era conveyance equipped with crude wheels that had been chiseled out of solid stone, and were not smoothly rounded at all, but were somehow out of round. The rubber that touched the roadway overnight had molded itself to the flat surface and the air molecules inside the inner tube were too frozen to expand and fill out the steel-reinforced tire rubber.

  The effects of the perishing cold were felt most acutely by the guys on the lines, of course. It was a matter of urgent necessity, pride and union militancy that the picket lines be stoutly manned day and night despite the brutal cold, and each line was equipped with a heated trailer, a barebones, sheet-metal affair, the type of ATCO trailer found on construction sites across Canada. For all its cheerless, Spartan simplicity, the trailer provided a welcome refuge from the biting cold and bone-numbing wind. They were not always, however, a place of warm camaraderie.

  Gone now was the ebullient swagger of the early fall, replaced by a thin-lipped look that could have been easily mistaken for dark and utter despair. The thousand-yard stare. No matter how prudent or profligate, each man’s family had long since exhausted its savings, and destitution now loomed. At least the holidays had leavened the bleak, foreshortened days of early winter with the distraction of carols, cheery greetings, and the Lions Club Childrens’ Christmas Telethon, an annual fundraising television staple that was both homespun and heartwarming.