by Mick Lowe
They entered a vast structure, the size of several football fields placed end to end. What was even more impressive was the height of the ceiling, which could not, in fact, be seen at all. It was obscured by gas and dust, but beneath it, suspended from rails, a steady stream of hot metal ladles passed over head, each accompanied by the wailing of a warning siren that left no doubt that certain death was passing by, suspended high above their heads. This was, Jake decided, the most hellish place he’d seen yet.
“Well, that’s it!” announced a member of Jake’s little party. “I ain’t workin’ here!” His voice conveyed a combination of desperation and defiance, and with that he spun around and headed for the door. The speaker had a full beard and longish hair—clearly a devotee of the hippy look. Few of Jake’s friends could truly be described as hippies, though Jake himself had begun sporting a moustache and his hair was approaching collar-length, and his girlfriend Jo Ann was fond of floor-length denim skirts and wore her pretty brunette hair long, and parted straight down the middle.
“Hey!” sputtered White Hat, seemingly fazed for the first time that day. “You haven’t paid for your boots yet!”
The raw recruit stopped dead in his tracks, looking down at his boots and then at White Hat. In an instant he bent down to untie the laces on his brand new work boots, which he removed one at a time while hopping awkwardly on one leg. “Here!” He handed the boots to the astonished Mr. White Hat, turned, and in his stocking feet strode defiantly out of the building. Not for the last time, a part of Jake wished he’d gone with him.
2
A Call in the Night
Harry Wardell got the call late at night on the eve of his maiden speech in the Ontario Legislature. The newly-elected Member of the Provincial Parliament for Sudbury was comfortably ensconced, wearing his slippers and pyjamas, in his newly-rented apartment in downtown Toronto, a short walk away from the Legislature buildings in Queen’s Park. He was sitting with his feet up on the coffee table, contemplating that first speech—or was it to be simply a question during Question Period?—when the ringing telephone suddenly pierced the quiet of his rooms, scattering his thoughts about the morrow, but answering his questions, too.
The caller was one of Wardell’s prime sources of information about Inco, the huge nickel company that dominated affairs in his hometown. It operated on such a colossal scale that, like the mythical Colossus of Rhodes, it dwarfed everyone around it.
“Yes?” Wardell began.
“Listen, Harry, there’s something going on up here I think you should know about.”
“Yes?” Wardell repeated. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“There’s something going on at the smelter. The boys tell me they’ve got them in there workin’ around the clock, cleaning up. Word is there’s to be an inspection. . .”
“Let me guess: the inspectors have very kindly called ahead to warn the company, as usual.”
“That’s about the size of it, yes.”
This was useful information, and Wardell had no doubts as to its veracity. His caller was a health and safety activist with the United Steelworkers of America, whose Local 6500 represented production and maintenance workers at the sprawling nickel company. His informant’s tips had always proved spot-on in the past, and this latest heads-up was just the latest indication of the cozy relationship that existed between the nickel giant and the government that was supposed to regulate it on behalf of his constituents. Useful, even explosive, information, but somehow he had to turn it into more than just water cooler gossip at the Steel Hall in the morning. He needed a paper trail, some form of documentary evidence. . . Wardell’s mind went into overdrive, and then he had it. Suddenly he pulled his long, lean frame upright. His slippers hit the floor. “Listen, Paul, I need you to put this in a telegram. Go downtown to the CPR telegraph office right away and send me a telegram containing this information, but for God’s sake make sure there’s today’s date on the thing. Got that?”
Wardell repeated his instructions. There was no mistaking the urgency in his voice.
“Okay, Harry, okay. Keep your shirt on. I’m on my way downtown right now.”
And with that the caller hung up abruptly, and Wardell, excited now, began pacing the room, which suddenly seemed much too small for his six-foot-six frame.
His debut in the House tomorrow would be a question, and now he knew just what that question would be. Even better, he already knew the answer.
Jake flopped down wearily on the living room couch, which, like most of the rest of the furniture in the house, had just been purchased at the Sally Ann. His ears were ringing and he had the intense desire to clear his nostrils and lungs of the reek of sulphur, which at times that first day had been so strong he’d had to struggle to suppress successive waves of nausea.
“Well, how’d it go?” Foley Gilpin asked.
Jake, his head lolling back on the back of the couch, wagged it from side to side. The thought that he had to return to the smelter in a little over eight hours was almost more than he could bear.
“Awful. Just awful. The gas in there, the dust, the noise. . .”
“It’s an absolute hell hole.” Jake was staring up at the high ceiling of the old house as he said this, too weary and disconsolate to even look his friend in the eye.
At least there was this—his friendship with Foley, and the refuge this house had become. Theirs was an unlikely friendship; they were years apart in age, and their backgrounds were also worlds apart. Gilpin was much older, and there was a vaguely bohemian air about the bespectacled, slightly portly reporter, an air he was happily cultivating by letting what little hair he had grow long. Even though he was older than most of the downtown Sudbury crowd they hung out with, Foley was clearly ready to channel his inner hippy, embracing the Aquarian Age with open arms, a true free spirit. A native of Chicago and a newspaperman by trade, Foley also possessed a certain world-weariness, a worldly air of sophistication that Jake, the scion of a Sudbury working-class family, totally lacked.
Jake had lived his whole life in Sudbury, rarely venturing further afield than Toronto. He’d never been west of Wawa. The idea of freelancing for a living, living by his wits as Foley was now doing, was unimaginable. For Jake toting a lunch bucket each day to work for Mother Inco was part of his DNA.
They were poles apart when it came to education, too. Gilpin was a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Chicago’s Northwestern University, while Jake was a grade ten dropout.
But despite all the outward differences they had an unbreakable bond of friendship that had been forged during the recent Mine Mill-Steel raids. They’d both fought on the Mine Mill side—Foley with his writing, Jake with his fists.
And they shared something else: a bizarre mid-morning encounter on the top floor of the President Hotel downtown, where they’d gone in search of a mysterious, malevolent figure who had killed Jake’s brother Ben in a late night alleyway encounter behind the Coulson Hotel. They found their quarry, of that Jake was certain. But with him in his room they’d also found Jo Ann’s dad, a startling revelation that had sent Jake reeling from the room. It was a unique experience that only the two of them shared—to this day Jake had never disclosed the matter to Jo Ann—he’d no idea how to broach the subject with her, and, in any event the loss of his brother, and whatever role Jo Ann’s father might have played in his brother’s brutal murder was a place still too fraught with emotion to venture into. It was all a tangled web that might never be unravelled, as Mr. Winter had himself become the victim of a fatal downtown traffic accident a year later.
Gilpin listened in sympathetic silence to his young friend’s plight. “Yeah, Jake,” he replied at last, “the sulphur was really bad downtown today. . . I can’t imagine what it must be like at ground zero. . . Listen, if ever there’s anything I can do to help. . .”
“Yeah, thanks Foley, I appreciate that.” Though such a thing appeared highly unlikely to Jake. The sulphur was in the ore, after al
l. Its presence was a permanent fixture of life in Sudbury. What could a scribbler do against such an obvious, immutable fact of life?
Jake was just beginning to feel human again when Jo Ann arrived home after her own day on the job. As always, her presence cheered Jake up immensely. She, too, listened in silence to Jake’s description of conditions at the Copper Cliff smelter, except that she sat beside him on the couch, resting her head on his shoulder.
Jo Ann remained silent for a few minutes after Jake finished his account of his first day back at work. Then she snuggled up close to whisper in his ear: “Wanna go upstairs and puff one?”
Jake pulled back from her so he could look directly into her green eyes, which had lost none of their mischievous sparkle. The question required only the briefest consideration. “Sure.”
The couple headed for the stairs, while Gilpin headed for the kitchen. It was his night to cook, a duty each resident shared on a rotating basis. Nightly meals involving all residents and visiting friends of residents were part of the co-op’s daily routine. They lent the house a familial sense, and an opportunity for gossip and small talk everyone enjoyed.
Within moments Jake, enveloped in the pleasant smells of Foley’s cooking and Jo Ann’s dope, began to feel life just might be worth living again.
Jo Ann lit the joint and managed to ask a question while inhaling deeply. “So what are you gonna do, Sparky?”
Jake contemplated the joint she had just passed him. “What, about the smelter, you mean? I’m not sure there’s much any of us can do. . . That sulphur’s been a hassle since mining first started. My dad was partnered up with this old, old guy when he started working underground, and he told my dad he could even remember the days of the open bed roasters, when they’d just pile the muck in a big pit in the ground, stack in some cordwood, and set the whole pit on fire. One of the biggest roasters was in Copper Cliff, right where the park is today. This old guy said the smoke was so bad the workers’ wives used to have to stand in their doorways and holler out their husbands’ names up there in Little Italy, up there on the hill in behind where the smelter is now, just so their husbands could find their way home through the smoke . . . Imagine!” As it usually did, the dope had loosened Jake’s tongue. This was one of the things Jo Ann loved about getting high with Jake—it got him talking.
“So what did the people back then do about it?”
“Oh, they knew it was making them sick, all right, but the company claimed there was no other way. . .”
“By which they meant no other cheaper way. . .”
“Right. So this went on for decades, and the sulphur smoke eventually killed every tree around for miles, every shrub, and every blade of grass, and that’s how we ended up with all this black rock sticking up everywhere you look.” The city, as they both knew it, was notorious across Canada for its harshly barren “lunar landscape.”
“But something changed things in the end, though, right, Jake?” she passed him back the joint, and pressed the point.
“Yeah, I guess the pressure built up until the provincial government forced the company to build the smelter. . . ’Course, that wasn’t ‘til the Thirties.”
“So you don’t think history could repeat itself?”
Jake sighed, exasperated. “Honestly, Jo, I don’t see how. The company’s got this government in its pocket; everybody knows that. Practically owns ‘em, in fact.” It was the same old story: the rich and the powerful controlled everything. Jake had few illusions about the difficulty of effecting genuine change. He had, after all, fought on the losing side of the Mine Mill-Steel battle, a defeat that taught a cautionary lesson about the fight for social change and that still left a bad taste in his mouth. The good guys did not always win in the end.
Jo Ann took another hit from the joint. “So they are so big, we are so small, stay as we are. That’s your conclusion? C’mon there Sparky, you can do better’n that!”
If he hadn’t been so stoned, Jake might have begun to lose his temper at his girlfriend’s repeated, insistent jibes, but as it was, it all just made his head spin, and he fell into a silent, stony reverie. . .
3
On the Bull Gang
The euphoria of the night before gave way to harsh reality the next morning as Jake approached the environs of the Copper Cliff smelter once more. Located just a few miles west of Sudbury proper, the smelter complex was surrounded by a wide expanse of black rock, a lifeless no-man’s land that served notice that this was a place of almost superhuman toxicity. In fact, the burn created by the smelter’s fumes was sufficiently large that it could be seen from space, in LANDSAT photos beamed back to Earth from orbiting satellites.
Jake’s heart sank as he neared the sprawling old red-brick buildings topped by the smokestacks belching out sulphur gas that would soon be tasted and swallowed by shoppers on the streets of downtown Sudbury, five miles or so to the east.
Jake was in the dry changing out of his street clothes when he was approached by his new acquaintance of the day before, Randall McIvor. “Hey, Jake,” McIvor began casually enough as he slid onto the bench next to Jake. But then he lowered his voice. “Listen, I’ve met somebody—he was a Mine Miller, too, so I trust him—who says he’ll show us the ropes here, teach us a few things Mr. White Hat failed to mention. You interested?”
Jake shrugged. “Sure, count me in.”
“D’ja get your work assignment yet?”
Jake nodded. “Yeah. Something called the bull gang.” He understood it to mean a group of common labourers who were not assigned to any one place in the smelter complex, but instead “floated” to wherever they were needed.
McIvor nodded at the news. “Good! Me, too!” He stood up. “Okay then, I’ll introduce you to this guy first chance we get. See ya later, Jake.”
There were, in fact, a dozen bull gangs, as Jake learned when he reported for work. Each gang was made up of fifteen or so men. It was heavy, labour-intensive work, cleaning up any mess, any spill that might occur under a conveyor belt. Pure grunt work, shovelling up messes for a solid eight hours a day. To Jake a strong back and a weak mind seemed the prime requisites for the job. There were only two redeeming factors that Jake could see: as floating work parties they moved from place to place throughout the vast smelter complex, and it was interesting to experience so many different workplaces. The other highlight was that, purely through the luck of the draw, Jake was assigned to the same gang as McIvor. On their third day on the job together McIvor made good on his promise to Jake.
4
Haywire
McIvor steered Jake toward the lunch room, logically the only place where a pair of raw smelter recruits could have a quiet discussion with a smelter veteran—and well-known union militant—away from the prying eyes of company supervision. Already seated at the long lunchroom table was a solitary figure in a black t-shirt. McIvor nodded at the stranger as they sat down, and Jake found himself face-to-face with one of the most striking—and startling—countenances he’d ever come across.
“Robert d’Aguire, this is Jake McCool,” McIvor announced.
The stranger extended a burly forearm to Jake. “McCool? Big Bill? Walt and Bud McCool? That McCool?”
“My dad and uncles,” Jake affirmed.
The confirmation elicited an admiring grunt, and d’Aguire’s hand, which had twisted into a thumbs-up handshake, squeezed even tighter in a vice-like grip. It was all Jake could do to keep from wincing.
“Bob d’Aguire, rhymes with Haywire. Knew your dad and uncles back in the Mine Mill days. . . Stand-up guys, all of ‘em.”
“Bob here’s a steward in the converter building,” Randall explained.
Jake studied the man across from him. His head was shaved bald, but a long, wispy beard adorned his chin, and Jake noticed the words “Coffin Wheelers MC” tattooed on one bulging bicep.
“What’s your stencil, brother?” inquired Jake, curious to know exactly what role the big biker played in the production cycl
e in the converters.
“Crane operator,” was all d’Aguire said by way of reply.
Jake had to think about that for a minute. He had, after all, noticed no conventional cranes during his brief tour of the converter aisles. But those massive ladles of hot metal passing overhead had to have been moved somehow. . .
“ . . . so overhead crane, then?”
“Yessir.”
Jake gave out a low whistle, impressed. “Man, the gas must be some bad up there.”
D’Aguire merely shrugged, and nodded. “They give you a mask.”
Just the thought of the gassy, congested converter aisles with the ladles of hot metal passing overhead accompanied by the banshee wail of warning sirens made Jake shudder. “Does it work?”
D’Aguire shrugged again. “Most of the time.”
“Look, what I just don’t get about this place is how it can even be legal, I mean there oughta be a law. . .” Jake’s voice trailed off in bewilderment.
“Oh there’s a law,” replied d’Aguire, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “It’s just that the people who enforce the law are here,” he raised a forefinger in the air, “and the company that owns this shithole is here,” he jabbed his middle finger into the air for emphasis. D’Aguire’s dark eyes flashed with a degree of hostility that Jake found both fascinating and intimidating. He seemed the most intense person Jake had ever met. Intense, but not likeable. With his bald head and outlaw biker mien, d’Aguire projected an “I don’t give a fuck” attitude that made him appear both single-minded and fearless. Jake was glad they were on the same side.
