Wintersong. The Nickel Range Trilogy • Volume 3

by Mick Lowe

  That they were able to straggle on at all was the result of desperate, ongoing, behind-the-scenes jawboning—some might say intimidation—at the Union Hall. Fuel oil dealers, prescription-drug and baby-formula purveyors, supermarket managers, each was summoned to the Hall in turn to confront a flinty-eyed Nelson and an ever-glowering Haywire. Which side were they on? The union leaders demanded. There was, there could be, no middle ground. Every weasel-word, each equivocation now is etched in stone, to be long remembered once the strike was settled, and it would be settled; today’s misdeed would be remembered once the fat Inco pay cheques were rolling in again. Supporters now would be favoured later, vacillators now would be punished—perhaps even boycotted—forever more. Memories were long in such matters. One hapless open-line radio host, who maintained his own staunch neutrality throughout the strike, was discovered by the old Mine Millers to have been the grandson of a would-be scab during the great Kirkland Lake Gold Strike of 1941, which had paved the way for the unionization of Sudbury in 1944. And anyway, what could be expected from such a scabby bastard?

  On the other hand, the tendons of Sudbury’s tightly knit community often held across class lines and Nelson and Haywire were sometimes pleasantly surprised by the responses of local merchants and franchisees. Nelson never forgot the quietly defiant pre-Christmas words uttered to him by the manager of a sizeable supermarket out on LaSalle Boulevard. His bosses, a blue-blooded family of Toronto plutocrats, had authorized him to donate a Christmas turkey to each striker’s family. Strictly Grade B, of course. “But there’s no way I’m giving a bunch of Grade B birds to a bunch of Grade A customers.”

  The first Wives’ meeting was a reflection of the mood out on the lines. With the excitement and undeniable success of the Christmas Party now behind them, there was a distinctly anti-climactic mood in the room, a sense of some titanic battle having just been won, but also an apprehension that the war was far from over, that another battle lay just ahead. But there was also an underlying sense of emptiness: so, they had done something great. But what did they do for an encore?

  The community organizer was in the chair that morning. Acutely aware of the mood in the room, and concerned about it, she hoped to smooth things over by retreating to safer ground. She turned to Molly. “So, what’re they saying about us now down at the Hall, Molly, after the Christmas Party?”

  Carruth just beamed. As they all knew, the event had been an absolute, unalloyed triumph. In the end, they’d actually had a surfeit of presents, and the surplus had been shipped to a small, struggling Lumber and Saw local fighting a tough wintertime strike out in frigid Thunder Bay. “Wow. Well, what can I say? We’re heroes down there.” Molly couldn’t help but bask in the knowledge that the Christmas Party had been her idea, an awareness she kept to herself. She turned to speak directly to Brenda Joyce. “And you’ll never guess who came up to apologize to me after—Eldon Critch! Told me he was sorry about hassling you that day in the Hall. I thought it was very classy of him to do that, Brenda.”

  The red-headed, shy Joyce, who rarely spoke at these meetings, coloured at this news, and she nodded appreciatively at Carruth’s tidings.

  “Oh, I have some news, too,” smiled Jo Ann Winter-McCool. “Jake and I are expecting!”

  This announcement, as sudden as it was unexpected, was met at first with stunned silence, except for Alice McCool’s gasp as the Wives’ matriarch realized she was about to become a grandmother for the first time. She rose swiftly, and crossed the circle of women—she fairly flew—into the arms of her still-lissome daughter-in-law. Alice was speechless, fighting an unsuccessful battle against tears, as she embraced Jo Ann. Soon all of the women had gathered around Jo Ann and Alice, their usual meeting circle shrunken now into one all-embracing joyous group hug, tears flowing openly as they peppered Jo Ann with questions:

  Had she told Jake? What had he said? How far along was she, she sure wasn’t showing much yet?

  “Yes,” “Happy, of course” and “About since the strike started,” came her answers, in quick succession.

  “So almost four months, then,” observed the university professor pensively.

  Although none of them realized it at the time, the moment was history beyond a personal measure: for the first time they had begun to measure the strike not in days, or even weeks, but in months.

  14

  The Mayor Drops a Bomb

  Clayton MacKenzie was entering the second year of his second term as mayor—still a relative newcomer—as the strike entered its nadir that winter. A former high school history teacher, MacKenzie was an educated man, a thinker who had read his Machiavelli, which would stand him in good stead in overseeing Sudbury’s notoriously fractious City Council. But his greatest asset, he knew, was Daisy Symanzki, his executive assistant. Daisy had served every Sudbury mayor in living memory, and she had shown him the ropes around City Hall, which had only recently moved from its former location in a red brick building on Cedar Street to palatial new digs, Civic Square, on Drinkwater Street.

  As he arrived at his office in mid-January, Daisy greeted MacKenzie with peculiar news: a priest from a local downtown parish had just called, wanting him to participate in a prayer meeting of community leaders to pray for a peaceful end to the strike—and surely preciptate it. MacKenzie, crossing through Daisy’s anteroom toward his own inner office, stopped short. “Eh, what?”

  Daisy repeated her message. MacKenzie frowned. “I don’t like it, Daisy. It’s a set-up, a sneaky way of starting a back-to-work movement, to get the guys to go back on the job, no matter what, and I’ll have no part in that,” MacKenzie declared as he hurried past Symanzki’s desk, headed once again for his own inner sanctum. The Wives were not the only people keenly cognizant of the lessons of the ’58 strike—MacKenzie was not about to repeat the example of his predecessor, who had rounded up the strikers’ wives into a mass meeting in the Sudbury Arena at Christmas that year, an opportunistic expedient that had broken the strikers’ resolve, the strike, and even, in the end, the union itself.

  “No, you don’t understand, Clayton. They WANT you to be there.”

  This stopped the Sudbury mayor dead in his tracks. “You mean he’s ordering me to be there?”

  Daisy nodded, eyes downcast. “That’s about the size of it, yes sir.”

  MacKenzie’s frown deepened into a scowl at such effrontery before his mood changed abruptly. “You know what, Daisy? They want a prayer? Let’s give ’em a prayer!”

  MacKenzie had long since come to his own personal conclusion about the strike: he hated it, hated what it was doing to his community, hated the way it was driving so many local merchants to the wall, hated the way some strikers were beginning to lose their homes, hated the unbearable stresses the strike was imposing on marriages, which were falling apart in record numbers. There were even dark rumours of an increase in suicides and suicide attempts. But which side was he, Clayton MacKenzie, on? Politically he was a Tory, which should have marked him on the company side of the ledger. But Clayton MacKenzie also counted himself among a dwindling number of a peculiarly Canadian strain of Toryism, a political brand that normally occupied the right side of the political spectrum. MacKenzie was a so-called Red Tory. Strongly communitarian and not averse to a robust nationalism when necessary, Red Canadian Tories were a fiercely independent political tribe, quietly pragmatic and open to compromise, yes, but also as ambitious and covetous of political power as any other Canadian politico, and MacKenzie definitely had ambitions beyond the confines of the Sudbury city limits. He weighed all these factors carefully as he rolled up his shirtsleeves that night at home after work, reached for a tablet of foolscap, and sat down to write.

  The finished product, which he’d read aloud as he wrote it out longhand in the evening quiet of his basement rec room, timed out to about forty-five minutes. He took it in for Daisy to type up and copy the next morning.

  “How many c
opies will you be needing?”

  “Oh, not that many. Just one for every reporter in the room.”

  Mayor Clayton MacKenzie paused at the entrance to the big room, to scan the spectacle he was about to enter. The grand ballroom of the Holiday Inn in downtown Sudbury really was a big room—and one of the city’s most expensive. MacKenzie took in the reporters waiting impatiently for the show to start—a loosely clustered semi-circle at the back of the room—and the assembled clergymen, seated in their own, facing semi-circle on the raised dais at the front of the room, and, as if to confirm his own most suspicious conspiracy theories, there, right in their midst—Cam Newton, the Ontario Division President of Inco!

  MacKenzie made a quick study of the religious at the front—their denominations, their neighbourhood church locations. His was not a particularly religious community—church attendance was down all over town, and the strike was especially ruinous at the offertory—which brought him back to his original question: who was footing the bill for this little bun fest? His eyes came to rest again on Newton, attired in his conservative dark businessman’s suit, sitting motionless in his chair stage centre, directly behind the speaker’s podium.

  MacKenzie drew a deep breath, put on his best sincerely phoney-as-all-hell smile, and stepped into the maelstrom.

  First the Sudbury mayor was careful to work the back of the room, smiling politely, shaking hands with each of the reporters in turn. “Hello,____, good to see you.” He knew each of the reporters by name, which station they worked for, the precise ratings each station had achieved in the latest BBM book. “Would you like a copy of my spee… er, prayer?”

  For their part each member of the press corps politely accepted the proffered sheets. The tacit consensus on MacKenzie was that he was a shrewd manipulator, verging on a conniver, and too Nixonian by half.

  Handshakes and frozen smiles were reciprocated, the niceties observed.

  Then MacKenzie crossed the vast, empty open space between the press corps and the religious assembled on the raised platform in the front of the room. He was surprised, and perhaps a trifle disappointed, that the priest who had demanded his presence had not issued an invitation to the public-at-large, and especially the strikers. The company was represented, but not the union, which did seem odd. MacKenzie was concerned to the utmost that the message he was about to deliver reach the strikers and their families.

  In this, as it was about to turn out, he need not have worried.

  His opening remarks were pure vanilla and about what everyone present expected: greetings, appreciation at having been invited to contribute his thoughts in this most difficult of circumstances.

  And he had been thinking about the strike, MacKenzie assured the gathering, had given the matter a great deal of thought. Around him the clergy, with prayerful, downcast eyes, were nodding slightly, and smiling beatifically. So far, so good. The mood was blissful, almost soporific.

  The strike had created an almost unparalleled crisis within their community, MacKenzie noted. And how had this come to pass? Just why had it come to pass?

  For his part, the mayor found it hard to fault the union in all of this. The union had not wanted this strike, as evidenced by its willingness to extend the old contract three times—an unprecedented break from its well-established tradition of “no contract, no work,” meaning that a strike call was automatic the instant the old agreement officially expired. No, MacKenzie had decided after long and careful—even prayerful—deliberation, the blame lay not with the union, but with the company. Someone, somewhere within the corporate hierarchy had deliberately engineered this strike, heedless of the cost to the community, or the suffering engendered by his decision. It was all a callous decision based on nothing more than cold, calculating corporate greed.

  Around him, though he could not see it, the beatific smiles above the clerical collars had begun to freeze, the smiles on a dozen freshly scrubbed and impeccably groomed ministerial faces had turned to subtly pouting moues: what was this? And then, for the first time, MacKenzie heard it: a whispered voice directly behind him, imperious, emphatic: sit down!

  The mayor pressed on. There were those who had dared hope that in this, the latter stages of the twentieth century, the company might have turned over a new leaf when it came to dealing with its host communities and corporate communications.

  But no, it had now become clear that the morally corrupt old ways still prevailed. “Sit down,” came the voice behind him again, louder now, more frantic. Suddenly, MacKenzie realized it was the voice of Cameron Newton, the senior-most representative of Inco in the city. Were it not for the large array of empty chairs that separated the speakers’ platform from the news media, at least one sharp-eared reporter would have picked up on the Inco boss’s whispered imprecation, which was gaining in amplitude and urgency with each repetition, and which MacKenzie continued to ignore.

  But, in the event, only MacKenzie heard the startling demands of the most powerful man in Sudbury, as he at last concluded his prayerfully disguised diatribe.

  Newton was, for once, powerless.

  MacKenzie’s “prayer” concluded the meeting, which ended in stunned silence. Newton wheeled around from behind MacKenzie to confront the Sudbury mayor with a withering glare. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  MacKenzie met him with a level gaze. “Oh yes, I know exactly what I’ve just done.”

  15

  Spook’s Return

  Foley Gilpin just happened to be in Jordan Nelson’s office when word of MacKenzie’s remarkable “prayer” first reached the Union Hall.

  The veteran newsman, who had shared a house with Jake McCool and Jo Ann Winter before they’d moved out and gotten married, had been prevailed upon by his good friend Jake to drop everything and come to work for the union as an unpaid volunteer propagandist writing leaflets, press releases, and articles for the small, ragtag little newspaper that had been started up by a group of non-union but politically progressive community members eager to somehow support the strikers. The cheap, giveaway half broadsheet little rag was dubbed “THE STRIKE SUPPORT NEWS.”

  It had been an excruciating decision for the perennially cash-strapped Gilpin, who was struggling to eke out an existence as a freelancer for The Toronto Globe and Mail, which styled itself as “Canada’s National Newspaper.” The strike had afforded him a first-rate running news story—a genuine national story that could last indefinitely—the gift that would keep on giving. But in his heart of hearts Gilpin had always known what he had to do.

  All his life Gilpin, a transplanted American, had had an affinity for the underdog. By the time he was asked to write for the strikers—and Lord knows they were the underdogs in this David versus Goliath contest—he’d been living in Sudbury for going on two full decades, and the place, difficult as it was in so many ways, had begun to feel like home. The strikers were his friends and neighbours. How could he desert them now?

  Besides, an abiding thirst for social justice was in his DNA. All his life his parents had been passionate advocates for the poor, racial minorities, the dispossessed. While he’d never really asked, Gilpin suspected they were both “security” members of the Communist Party U.S.A. Foley Gilpin was, in a figurative sense, “a red diaper baby,” which made him a perennial outlier in the conservative, middle-western world of the Chicago of his youth. He had, therefore, accepted Jake’s plea that he become a union propagandist. In the process he’d become a frequent visitor to the office of Jordan Nelson, whom he’d come to quite like and respect.

  The two men were huddled, deep in somber discussion about some aspect of the strike, when they could hear a loud commotion outside the thin walls of Nelson’s office. The sudden excitement was palpable. Within moments there was a sharp, urgent rapping on Nelson’s door, and a striker unknown to Gilpin stuck his head through the door. He was out of breath, though whether from running up the stairs to t
he second floor or from running a much further distance, or out of pure excitement, Gilpin could not tell.

  “Jordy! Jesus, Jordy, did’ja hear what just happened? The mayor just come out for us! In a prayer! Downtown! He just now did it, swear to God! Quick! Turn on the news!”

  A startled Nelson did as he was told, and the radio airwaves were filled with breaking news stories of Clayton MacKenzie’s sensational prayer lambasting the company while seeking the Lord’s blessing on the strikers, their union, and the entire crisis-gripped community.

  Both Nelson and Gilpin listened to the news bulletin in wide-eyed wonder, their black mood suddenly dispelled by an unexpected development that did seem truly providential.

  He returned the same way he had left the city nearly twenty years earlier—private, transiting through the private air terminus adjacent to the public terminal at the Sudbury Airport.

  The place was the same old bunghole he remembered, Buttfuck, Canada. But Jesus, the cold! He hadn’t remembered it as being this cold. Of course, after rapid rotations through places like Saigon, Ventiane and Santiago this end-of-the world place was bound to feel desolate. Wet work had become his specialty, and he rather liked it. His briefers back at Langley had explained this mission as succinctly as possible, on the usual need-to-know basis: seems there was a strike underway in the nickel mines, and the boys in the Pentagon were becoming concerned about the alarmingly low levels of the stuff remaining in their strategic stockpiles.

  While it was true the war in Vietnam had ended three years earlier, the American appetite for nickel remained insatiable—there was always some new stealth fighter-bomber project underway, and now, a ramped up multi-billion dollar program to build the latest nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

  But those were the big-picture, strategic matters. His mission here was purely tactical: devise some way to discredit the union, undercut its morale, and rupture its supportive relationship with the surrounding community, to bring the strike to an early end at all costs.