The Insatiable Maw

by Mick Lowe

  The big biker muscled the machine around in a circle, and soon enough he was in the wind, booting it down Balsam Street through the peaceful village of Copper Cliff where the accelerating roar of twelve hundred cubic centimetres of full-throated Harley thunder scared the stray dogs in the neighbourhood, and startled the housewives out sweeping their porches, leaving them staring after him in gap-jawed wonder. Within minutes he would be running on the open road to Sudbury, a wind-whipped fury, bent on a secret, private vengeful mission.

  Although the International Steelworkers Union had won the certification vote over the old Mine Mill by the narrowest of margins—a scant seven votes out of over ten thousand ballots cast—the Steelworkers’ newly-formed Local 6500 had at first been a union without a hall, owing to a court decision that awarded the old Mine Mill Hall on Regent Street to Local 598 of the Canadian wing of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.

  D’Aguire booted the big bike into fourth gear, finally, when he had cleared the small town environs of Copper Cliff and pulled onto the higher speed highway that ran east between Copper Cliff creek to his right and the high black mass of the slag piles on his left.

  Local 6500 had been forced to bounce around town, moving from one rented premises to the next, none of which was capacious enough to properly house an organization the size of the upstart local, which had been so recently carved out of the bones of Local 598. Besides the need of a meeting hall large enough to accommodate thousands of Inco workers at one time, there was also the requirement of sufficient office space to house a considerable clerical staff that served the elected Executive Board, which governed the union’s day-to-day affairs.

  D’Aguire was forced to downshift once again as he approached the western outskirts of the city. The big biker had made this commuter run so often he no longer really saw the Big Nickel, a many-times life-size reproduction of a Royal Canadian Mint nickel coin, erected high on a barren hilltop overlooking both Sudbury and Copper Cliff. The thing was a cheesy, tourist-trap gimmick in the eyes of many Sudburians, but it worked, both as a milestone on the segment of the Trans-Canada Highway that connected Sudbury to Copper Cliff, and as a tourist magnet for the hundreds who trudged up the hill to share a Kodak moment standing, smiling, beside the base of the monstrous coin.

  After years of searching, the Steelworkers’ real estate agents finally located just the place—a red-brick pile at the corner of Frood Road and College Streets. Erected initially by the Royal Canadian Legion, which had never been quite able to fully populate the place, the imposing structure at 92 Frood Road was soon sold to the Steelworkers Union, with the proviso that the Legion’s first floor memorial to fallen comrades never be removed. It never was.

  The three-storey former Legion Hall, which had a spacious first floor auditorium that was nearly as large as the meeting hall of the old Mine Mill building, also featured a rabbit warren of offices on the second and third floors. It was ideal for the big new union local, and, by the time d’Aguire had woven his impatient way through the shift-change traffic that congested Lorne Street to finally park his bike behind the building at 92 Frood Road, it felt as if the place had been a union hall forever. He could tell at a glance around the parking lot that the hall was already half deserted. Typical. Day shift had just ended, and most of the Local’s elected officers had already left the building. Each of the four table officers—President, Vice, Secretary and Treasurer—had his own reserved parking spot in a space designated by a stencil painted on the back of the building. Finding all four slots empty, d’Aguire wheeled into the President’ space. As a loyal Mine Miller, d’Aguire had no particular regard for any of Local 6500’s table officers, who had led the insurgency against Mine Mill before running for office as a right-wing slate. To the victor go the spoils, and in a union local the size of 6500 the top four executive posts were rich prizes indeed—full-time desk job positions in the union hall, a world away from the nasty, noisy dangerous business of actually working for a living. The perks of office included a prime designated parking spot closest to the back door entrance to the union hall like the one d’Aguire had, with an outlaw’s quiet satisfaction, just appropriated.

  He entered the back door, which opened onto a landing. To his right was a short flight of stairs from which an updraft brought the reek of stale beer and cigarette smoke. The hall’s subterranean taproom. But d’Aguire’s business was elsewhere, and he forged straight ahead, up another short flight of stairs, into the grand space outside the hall’s main auditorium. The spacious lobby was deserted at this hour, except for a solitary figure sweeping the floor. The footfalls of d’Aguire’s heavy-duty biker boots echoed loudly off the fake terrazzo floor, and the custodian looked up from his duties to nod at d’Aguire, who nodded back.

  The janitor, Bill “Shakey” Akerley, was a familiar figure around the hall. Also a part of the anti-Mine Mill insurgency, d’Aguire knew Akerley had won his current post, which was a considerable promotion from shovelling conveyor belt spills in the smelter, for his undying loyalty to the Steelworkers’ cause. Clearly wet-brained—there were even rumours that the man was illiterate—d’Aguire knew that Akerley was much more than the buffoon he appeared. He was the eyes and ears for the Local leadership up on the second floor, and the international union staff reps who occupied the third. They might desert the building on the dot at the end of dayshift, but Akerley remained well into the night, a trusted witness to everyone—and everything—that came and went in the big building after dark. D’Aguire had no doubt that his appearance would be dutifully reported, and duly noted, up on the second floor in the morning.

  The double wooden doors leading to the auditorium, still called the Vimy Room, pace Canadian Legion, were on d’Aguire’s right as he strode across the foyer toward the one office that was still functioning in the Union Hall. As he knew it would be, the door was wide open, and d’Aguire stepped through.

  It wasn’t much of an office—a cramped, cluttered, airless single room, smelling faintly of BO and long ago cigarette smoke. Its single interesting feature was a large, battered wooden desk, behind which sat Paul Sampson, Local 6500’s Chief Safety & Health Committee Officer. The single fluorescent ceiling light that illuminated the room cast a ghastly, blue-tinted light down on Samson, who appeared pale and haggard in the unforgiving glare of the cool blue fluorescence. D’Aguire knew that from this unassuming space Samson had almost singlehandedly built 6500’s Safety and Health Committee into a parallel structure nearly as extensive as the big Local itself, with a Safety and Health rep in each mine and shop floor. The impressive organization-within-an-organization did not represent any kind of threat to the entrenched Steelworker hierarchy, however—Samson was a trusted Steel loyalist, as were most of his horde of Safety and Health advocates. But this skeletal organization did provide another means by which a lowly rank-and-filer on the job could become active in union affairs and begin a rise through the union ranks.

  Beside the extensive Safety and Health network, the same modest space d’Aguire had just entered also headquartered Canada’s first union Inquest Committee, a unique innovation necessitated by the terrible fatality rate within Inco’s Sudbury mines and mills. It was the Inquest Committee’s grim duty to liaise with the deceased worker’s family, providing what comfort it could, and to represent the widow at the inquest which followed every mining death that occurred in the province of Ontario. The Safety and Health and Inquest Committees represented a dynamic response to workplace realities, and a pioneering sense of innovation that placed Local 6500 in the forefront of North American trade unionism. Still a Mine Miller at heart, even d’Aguire had to give the Steelworkers credit for that, however grudgingly. Sudbury reporters working the labour beat had long since learned that, in this beehive of a union hall, this beat-up room was where the action was, and, as d’Aguire entered the room it appeared that Samson was being interviewed by an older, balding reporter whom d’Aguire did not recognize.

  Samson glanced
up at the big biker who suddenly filled his door frame. “Why here he is now! Just the man you need to talk to!” Samson gestured back and forth to the reporter and the biker. “Bob d’Aguire, Foley Gilpin—Foley meet Bob d’Aguire, our head Safety & Health Commiteeman in the smelter, and also a damn fine shop steward in there. Bob, Foley’s a freelance correspondent for The Globe and Mail, and he was just asking about conditions in the smelter. . .”

  D’Aguire eyed Gilpin dubiously, giving his usual excellent impression of a man not being impressed. “Yeah? Why is that?”

  Gilpin, who was seated on one of the few pieces of furniture in the hole-in-the-wall office, looked up at the big man from his perch on what had once been a back seat in someone’s carry all. “My editor down in Toronto asked me to look into it, is all. Good friend of mine works there, and he comes home with some unbelievable horror stories about the place. . .”

  D’Aguire nodded, heavy-lidded and menacing, “Oh yeah? And who might that be?”

  “Young guy named Jake McCool.”

  “Sure, I know him. His stories are all true. . .”

  “That’s what I was just telling Foley,” Samson interjected. “But now he’s asking if there’s any way he could sneak into the smelter to see for himself. . .”

  D’Aguire heaved himself into the only vacant piece of furniture in the office, an ancient desk chair that faced Samson’s desk. The biker gave a noisy, dubious sigh. The chair gave a squeaky protest beneath d’Aguire’s weight, but it held. “Oooh, man, I dunno. That would mean a sure trespass beef if he was to get caught. . . Paul, you got a minute? There’s somethin’ I need to talk to you about. . .”

  Gilpin took the cue, and stood up to excuse himself. “Well, uh, I’ll let you two talk in private,” he muttered as he swiftly left the little office which, in the presence of the burly biker had suddenly begun to feel quite claustrophobic. . .

  D’Aguire paused long enough, looking over his shoulder, to be sure Gilpin was out of earshot before he turned to face Samson. “We had a plant-wide safety and health meeting today, and that young Jake McCool came up with a helluva idea I wanted to run past you. . .”

  7

  A Dinner at the Gilpin Commune

  Gilpin left the Steel Hall through the same door d’Aguire had just come in. On the short drive across downtown to his house Gilpin tried not to let his hopes race too far ahead of reality, but he was excited, there was no doubt about it.

  When he arrived home dinner was already on the table and being served. Gilpin barely glanced at his housemates as he took his place at the table. They were a motley crew, to say the least. The main thing they had in common was that, unlike Foley, they were all in their twenties. Jo Ann Winter and Jake McCool were familiar faces; the others less so. Pierre Dufour was a new breed, at least to Foley. A new arrival in Sudbury, Dufour was a recent participant in a student uprising at a high school not far from the Nickel Capital. In a year when university students from Mexico City to Paris were launching open, and often very violent, rebellion against all forms of authority, Dufour and his confreres had conducted a peculiarly Canadian revolt—they had peacefully, but with an utter determination that belied their tender years—occupied the school cafeteria to underscore their demands that courses be offered in their mother tongue—French. The entire affair had caught their district school board badly off guard, and it had also captured the imagination of Canadian news editors eager to find a domestic angle that reflected the angry global zeitgeist of the spring of 1968. The protest was assumed to be of a piece with the burgeoning movement to gain independence for the French-speaking province of Quebec where a growing radical movement to have Quebec secede from the rest of Canada was gaining traction. When he’d first met Dufour, Gilpin had assumed the outspoken young Francophone was part of the same movement. But to his surprise, Dufour had been deeply offended. “Oh, no,no, we are not Quebeckers, and we are not like them one bit,” Dufour insisted. “We are Canadians who simply want to live our lives, communicate, in our own language. We are not separatists, s’tie!”

  Gilpin’s friendship with young Dufour had begun in a venue that was fertile ground for animated conversation, amorous flirtation and more than a few one night stands—the basement of the President Hotel. The bar, in a long, narrow, L-shaped room that featured live music nightly from a raised bandstand in the corner where the two dog legs of the room joined, was a swirl of colour, movement, and noisy action much in vogue with the downtown Sudbury crowd who, still in their twenties, could drink, smoke and carouse until closing time and still manage to drag themselves out of bed with no more lingering ill effects than a wicked hangover.

  “So you’re not Quebeckers, but you support Quebec separatism?” Gilpin had to yell directly into Dufour’s ear to make himself heard over the rumour and roar of the noisy taproom.

  But once again, Gilpin learned, his stereotyping of French Canadians was badly off the mark. Dufour and his counterparts outside Quebec were, if anything, actually opposed to Quebec withdrawing from the Canadian confederation. Such a move would cost them their strongest leverage, in the form of millions of Quebec votes, that appeared to have brought them to the verge of securing their own newly-won, hard fought language rights as French-speaking minorities outside Quebec.

  Now more confused than ever, Gilpin shouted another question into the ear of the young Frenchman. “And your accent—is that what they call joual?” Foley just assumed that the unique French Canadian patois common in Quebec—a corruption of the French word “cheval”—horse—was the dialect spoken by all French-speaking Canadians. His own rusty high school French told him the vernacular form he heard around him in the streets of Sudbury—and here in the bar of the President Hotel—was far from the so-called Parisian French he thought he’d been taught in school.

  Dufour responded with a frown, and then laughed. “Quoi? Que tu dis? Joual? Oyons! Non, non!. Our French is—how you say it?—it is not perfect, but it is the speech of this place, of Nouvel Ontario, and not that of Quebec. . . Here we build our own. . .” Dufour struggled to find the right word, “. . .our own expression, our own culture, I suppose.”

  Gilpin nodded at this, hoping that his outward reaction masked his inward skepticism that such a lofty goal could ever be realized. The conversation came to an abrupt end when Dufour suddenly glimpsed a group of friends entering the bar, and motioned them over to the table. As he had warned Foley that it might happen, the conversation switched suddenly to French, excluding the transplanted American newspaperman from the discussion, which swirled on around him in a rapid-fire, staccato delivery French that was heavily accented in a way he’d never heard before and that left him wholly uncomprehending. This sudden inability to use his strongest single social attribute—language—left Gilpin feeling intensely uncomfortable.

  This jarring slight, Dufour had forewarned Gilpin, should not be taken personally, rude as it was. For generations, Dufour explained, when a group of French Canadians had gathered in the presence of a guy who only spoke English they had switched to English as a matter of courtesy. A measure of civility, yes, but also another step down the slippery slope of assimilation, and toward the extinction of the French language in North America. No more. Now it was time for the English to meet them halfway. It left Gilpin dangling, the unwitting adjunct of centuries of Canadian linguistic friction, but the newspaperman, who had grown up in the overwhelmingly unilingual environment of Chicago, hung in there, intrigued by the evident charisma and dynamism of the French language militants, to say nothing of the attractive young women in their midst. And so he remained at the table, suddenly dominated by a language he did not understand, struggling, with little success, to comprehend the animated conversation that now swirled around him.

  Back at his own dinner table in the stately old, red-brick downtown house Gilpin and his youthful friends had transformed into a “commune” of sorts, Gilpin’s gaze fell on another relative stranger at the table, a young man named Jerry McNally. Far from
his favourite housemate, McNally’s presence was the result of the general election campaign then underway across Canada. A professional organizer for the Liberal Party of Canada, McNally was there because of Gilpin’s long-standing friendship with Spike Sworski, the former President of Mine Mill Local 598, who had, after his ouster as union president, become one of the city’s leading Liberals. It might have appeared an improbable political metamorphosis to many—the militant leader of a left-leaning union local, joining the mainstream Liberal party rather than the more left-leaning, social-democratic CCF, but Gilpin understood Sworski’s choice completely. To Spike the CCF was the handmaiden of the Steelworkers Union, the political front for the powerful American-based union that had swept him from power and destroyed the old Mine Mill. It was a split Sworski could neither forget nor forgive. Instead, he’d found a political home in the more centrist Liberal Party, and, as the general election campaign of 1968 geared up, the national party had dispatched him a youthful organizer in the form of young McNally in the hope the duo could capture at least one of Sudbury’s two federal seats, which had been deemed as winnable and in play by the party’s national strategists. McNally needed a place to stay during the campaign, and Spike had asked Gilpin to find room for McNally at the co-op.

  McNally struck Gilpin as smarmy and too smug by half, all button-down collars, chinos and penny loafers, the cleanest-cut youngster at the table, and, judging by the way he was eyeballing Jo Ann, something of a lady slider as well. Jo Ann, who was also a Liberal party activist, didn’t appear to be actually flirting with the preppy-style young McNally, but they were both euphoric at the turn their campaign had taken the night before.