And if the little miracle doesn’t happen, if I don’t feel anything under my eyelid, it means that the will of the coins is to show their royal face, their shiny side, the one stamped with the effigy of the Queen of England, who is also their queen, or that they can’t decide and will fall any which way. In which case I bet a token amount out of courtesy, mainly not to arouse suspicion. Gambling is serious business in this country, and two-up is thought to be a game you can’t cheat in, another source of national pride. It’s even played in the tony Burswood Casino in Perth.
I discovered that the coins have a will of their own a long time ago. Maybe that’s the way it is for all objects, and you just have to tune into them to hear what they have to say. That would mean luck is not the result of the fickle law of chance, but that it comes from a state of total receptiveness to the object of our desire. I have tested this theory with roulette and other games, but either the mechanism was rigged or it was too complicated. I never managed to hear what they were telling me.
The first time, I thought I was hallucinating. I thought it was the Old Man speaking to me. An impromptu two-up had been thrown together in a pub, I don’t remember which one, and naturally I was one of the players. I hoped to win thirty or forty dollars, no more. The game was lacking in spirit, and the bets were pretty tame.
I was getting ready to place mine when a young digger shouted, ‘Hey, you, Canadian, can’t you do better than that?’
It was one of those arrogant young prospectors who hang around town. The night before, I had stolen a girl off him.
‘Can you do better?’ I snapped back, showing him a hundred dollar bill.
I was thrilled. Finally a bit of action.
He pulled out a bill, I pulled out another. The stakes climbed to four hundred dollars, and that was when, as the bid climbed, I felt the presence of the coins. It was just a tingle at that point, a light twitch under my eyelid, but already I knew I should put all senses on alert so I wouldn’t miss a thing. I remembered the Old Man saying to me, ‘It’s like a tickle, and then your eye starts to flutter like it has a life of its own.’ He told me how he had decided to dig a trench in Lot 7 of what was still just a planned residential area. ‘A trench two feet wide, twenty feet long and two feet deep. It was a sight to behold. Beautiful rock twinkling black and grey. Sphalerite at its best. I knew I had found something big.’
Until that day I had taken those tickles for the whimsy of a prospecting poet, but now I knew I had to trust them. I focused my energy on the two coins, and when I felt the shiver that heralded a flutter under my eyelid, I emptied my pockets of everything I had left.
‘Another hundred and eighty and I’m the one who calls it.’
And without thinking I said, ‘Kangaroos.’
I knew that the coins would come up tails, or kangaroos.
The Old Man had uncovered the gigantic zinc deposit that would give birth to Norcoville, and that evening, I went home with the winnings, a few hundred dollars at the most, but it was enough to convince me I was lucky in two-up.
Why didn’t the Old Man do the same? Why hadn’t he prospected at random, contenting himself with wandering the woods, just enjoying the birds chirping and the fresh air, waiting for his eyelid to flutter and point the way to a major mineral showing? Instead, he insisted on gridding his claims with the work ethic of an ant, counting his steps to measure the distance covered, noting in his notebook the orientation of streams and the slope of the land, inspecting the roots of plants he ripped from the ground, scrutinizing the banks of the streams, looking for the slightest clue that could lead him to an outcropping or a rocky point that he would carefully sound before taking a few samples with the cold chisel, precious manna that he brought back from his rounds and that occupied his evenings.
‘You can’t count on luck,’ he’d say. ‘She’s a fickle thing who flits from man to man without ever really undressing.’
He was prospecting scientifically, he said. He had learned about it in a book, The Prospector’s Guide, a small volume bound in oilcloth, its purplish reds streaked with long cracks darkened by sweat and dust. An old edition that heralded, with measured enthusiasm, the magnetometer and other magnetic and electric detection devices that left him scratching his head. It was his bible, his missal. He carried it with him wherever he went and sometimes even consulted it at the dinner table when doubt overcame him and he needed to put his mind at rest.
He was a man of letters more than a coureur des bois. Sometimes I went out with him, and I never saw him get distracted by a bird singing or a ray of sunshine through the leaves. He had a geological concept in mind that would give him no rest. It was a batholith, a diabase dyke or another rock formation of ancient times that he had made out on the maps and that he was pursuing tirelessly among the clues the ground offered. He was looking for lead, zinc, copper, nickel – but not gold. He didn’t like gold.
‘Too fickle, too unpredictable,’ he’d say. ‘You think you’ve found a vein and it’s actually a veinlet that splits off into the rock in filaments fine like hair, and then poof, it disappears for good.’
What he preferred were erratic blocks, blocks ripped from the rock mass by glaciers, blocks you could stumble upon, by chance, while walking, without any clues to their presence. They would appear suddenly, one by one, several hundred feet apart, and he had to follow them like a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. I think he liked them because they forced him to picture another geological concept, imagine the path of the glacier, imagine the huge boulders carried along a hundred thousand years ago under the mammoth ice, and, most importantly, imagine the enormous deposit that awaited him in the distance, the mother rock, the rock that had been stripped and grated by the glacier, violated and abandoned, and that would reveal its secrets to him. I liked listening to him talk about these things.
He was so taciturn at home, but he was downright chatty in the forest. He talked at length about his quest, his problems and his worries, the worst of his torments being his inability to talk money effectively when it came time to sell his rights to land he had developed.
‘Land that you walked, scratched, examined under a magnifying glass. Land that you wondered about constantly, even in your dreams at night, and that is gradually revealed to you, just you. You can’t put a price on that. And yet you have to sell it.’
I collected these confidences with a sense of incredible privilege. I was about twelve when he took me out with him. I would have followed him to the ends of the earth. For all of us, our father was a hero, a man who, like Christopher Columbus or Jacques Cartier, had discovered a new world.
At the time, Norco was at the pinnacle of its glory. The mine was producing at full capacity, zinc was selling for sixteen cents a pound, there was money to burn, the hotels and the restaurants echoed with laughter and fights breaking out. There were crowds at the movies and in the schools, and at home, in the sprawling shambles that served as our fortress, we watched prosperity pass us by. From the youngest to the oldest – and lord knows there was no shortage of children in our house – we all had, deeply rooted in our consciousness, the conviction that our father was a hero because he had discovered the mine that had given birth to our town.
Had they really stolen it from him? Even at the time, I, who was the eldest and therefore should have been on the front lines of the war of contempt that was brewing in the madhouse where we lived, I left it to the others to stoke the hatred.
In Norco, Albert Cardinal was known as the man who discovered the mine, but when the subject came up, it was to pity him. Poor Cardinal! The poor bastard! I don’t know how many times I heard that sort of remark before I understood that they were actually talking about our father. It took me even longer to understand that they weren’t pitying him for his poverty, or for the preposterous house he had moved from Perron, or for the swarm of children who called it home. They pitied him for of his inability to profit from his luck. Poor Cardinal. Couldn’t even get rich on a discovery that big.
And like our father, I let them talk because I knew that we were going to be fabulously wealthy one day. He had confided the details of the deal to me one night in the tent. We had spent the day chasing after a stream of rhyolite that had turned out to be nothing, and the evening was looking glum. A nasty little drizzle, an overcast, moonless sky, cold and the mosquitoes had driven us into the close dampness of our tent. Outside, our fire was slowly dying.
I never liked the idea of sleeping in a tent without a well-stoked fire to burn through the night and wait in the morning under the hot ashes.
I must have been grumpy because the Old Man, who was studying his maps by the light of his headlamp, lifted his head to me.
‘Something wrong?’
I grumbled something about the rain and the day’s long walk, and he smiled a little.
‘Would you like to hear how we’re going to get rich?’
So to cheer me up and restore my faith, like humming a lullaby to a child who is scared of the dark, he told me about his negotiations with Northern Consolidated.
They had offered him fifty thousand dollars. ‘They put ten thousand on the table and told me that forty thousand more would be waiting for me at the bank the next morning if I signed that very night.’
In the close quarters of our tent, it was hard for me – and it’s still hard today – to imagine that timid, cautious man, alone in front of three pointy-toothed sharks, with all that money spread out on the table like a threat. ‘All that money and their eagerness to close the deal made me furious. The drill core had just shown assay value of 3.2 percent zinc and 1.1 ounces of silver. Not bad. But I knew there was a lot more than that.’
‘You had your own tests?’
I was only twelve years old, but I knew enough from conversations with the Old Man to be surprised that an independent prospector would be able to pay for his own diamond drilling.
‘No, but I knew … ’
He paused for a long while, lingering on the memory of the three men he would stick it to. Or maybe he was thinking of the trench he had dug on the side of the mountain that had revealed beautiful white streaks furrowing deep into the rock. Our father’s silences were filled with glorious thoughts.
‘I knew what the deposit was worth.’
He had demanded five thousand dollars and three hundred thousand shares of Northern Consolidated.
‘Three hundred thousand shares, which were worth a dollar each a few weeks later, and five dollars and twenty cents two months later. Can you imagine?’
The drilling had revealed incredible assay values and a deposit of enormous proportions, such that we would be rich, incredibly rich, rich beyond our wildest dreams, the day when, ‘if we could sit tight,’ our father would sell his shares.
He sat so tight that the shares were hardly worth the paper they were printed on when the price of zinc plummeted into the pit of high finance, and Northern Consolidated moved on to make its millions somewhere else.
I had run the numbers. At $5.20 a share, we were millionaires one and a half times over: we could have repainted the house and laid sod down around it. We could have each had our own bike, fishing rod and a new suit, and in the basement, beside the hundred pounds of potatoes, there would have been a limitless supply of chips, chocolate bars and strawberry Kik. When the share price climbed to $6.50, we could have had a bath with a shower in every corner of the house and a television in every room. We could then have considered an in-ground pool, twice the size of the church, blue as a postcard sky, and it could have been converted into a skating rink in winter, covered with a see-through dome that would slough off snow and be the centre of attention in Norco. At $8.00 a share, I had run out of things to dream of.
Millions awaited us. I didn’t care about the knowing smiles or our abject poverty, because all it was going to take was ‘the right time’ to come, and all that money would start gushing.
This wild hope made me a dreamer, a boy isolated from the tempest that shook the house. Hostilities against the hicks had already started at the time. They were still minor skirmishes – battles waged in the schoolyard, snowball fights and other idle-young-warrior posturing – but at home, inside our fortress, there was a slow-burning rage I could do nothing about.
We were angry with everyone who had taken possession of the mine. Whether Northern Consolidated, a distant spectre in its Toronto offices, the poor miners, our neighbours, barely better off than us, or the others, petty merchants and their employees who had never set foot in the mine but who reaped the benefits of it, they were all duly and diligently held in contempt.
And even though I was the eldest, I couldn’t lead the troops into battle, because I was waiting for the big payoff.
In the absence of a real leader, a triumvirate was formed of the most fervent, loudest voices: those of Mustang, Yahoo and Fakir. During those years of prosperity, they were the ones who stoked the muted, hate-filled grumbling in the madhouse. When the mine closed and despair took over Norco, they had already left home, as had I. I was driving a cab in Montreal, and so Geronimo took command of the war of desolation that would make the Cardinals the princes of a kingdom that no longer was.
Which meant that I was merely the honorary head of the family, real power having been seized by those more violent and aggressive than me.
Anyhow, no one remembers that I was the first to go with the Old Man on his prospecting rounds. In the annals of the family, the only true apprentice our father ever had was Geronimo, who is also thought to be his only confidante, even though I know for a fact that Geronimo’s heedlessness worried the Old Man. ‘That boy’s heart pumps nitroglycerine,’ he’d say.
I don’t care about setting the historical record straight. I don’t care about restoring my place in the family annals. The only memories that are truly precious to me, my only bits of solace, are those private moments with our father, beside the fire or sitting on a tree stump while he explained the faults in the earth’s crust that fill with magma, the resinous sparkle of sphalerite or his money problems. What I liked more than anything was his discovery of the Norco deposit. The magical moment when, like a diviner senses the presence of water in his divining rod, he felt his eyelid flutter, ‘just a tickle’ – that was enough to convince him to dig a trench on the side of the mountain, because, he would say, ‘if the rock’s magnetism had stopped me dead at that exact spot and travelled through my entire body to make my eyelid flutter, it meant that below my feet was a deposit that defied the imagination.’ Magnetism! He searched for no other explanation for the incredible luck that flowed through him.
He followed the glacial boulders to the base of the rounded mountain that overlooks Norco, brownish float that could indicate the presence of galena or sphalerite equally. ‘It was hard to tell at that point given the weathering of the rock.’ The rest is history. He dug that incredible trench, which revealed long streaks of pure zinc sulphide going deep into the bedrock. The story made the papers. The entire mining world and all of Norco knows it, but no one knows about the little miracle that made his eyelid flutter.
I wouldn’t have betrayed his confidence for anything in the world. Our conversations were my only solace in Norco. Unlike the others, who have glorious memories of our youth, what I remember most is the joy of those conversations and how oppressive it was to be the eldest in the family.
When the price of zinc plummeted to six cents a pound, my first thought was for our father. I was twenty at the time. I had been living in Montreal for a while, and I was still waiting for the millions. The dreams I dreamed for my loved ones had changed quite a bit. I dreamed of a Cardinal dynasty: university educations and successful careers, one of us the prime minister, another a renowned scientist, and yet another – why not – a Nobel Prize winner. All of this perched comfortably atop our millions.
I heard the news on the radio in my taxi. Well before mourning my plans for our family, I thought of our father, of the shares that he cherished like pieces of eternity
and that would deliver him to a harsh reality now that they were worthless. I dumped my passenger on St. Laurent Boulevard, an old woman wound in scarves, and I headed to Norco, convinced that my presence was required.
Norco was in shock. Northern Consolidated had done the deed nimbly. The miners got the announcement that the mine was closing at the same time as their final paycheque and were escorted to the office by gorillas brought in at great expense from Toronto in case revolt was brewing in the ranks. A padlocked barrier was placed in front of the office, and they were already bustling about loading archives and other precious assets into vans. The precautions were unnecessary; the miners, too stunned by the disaster to entertain ideas of rebellion, were hunched over oceans of beer.
It was night by the time I arrived in Norco, and from the small hill on the road that offers a sweeping view of our little town, I could hear the clucking of the women, flocking together in front of the two hotels, beating their breasts over the final paycheques.
At home, all hell had broken loose. Geronimo greeted me with a triumphant smile.
‘Did you hear?’
They crowded around me before I could even take a step, and it fell to the loudest to recount the day’s events.
The kitchen was overcrowded and couldn’t hold everyone. People were jostling and tugging. They were slamming into each other to make room for themselves in the doorway that led to the living room and the bedrooms. No one was in bed in spite of the late hour. The Old Maid was there, a baby asleep in her arms, Tootsie I suppose, since the Caboose wasn’t born yet. Hanging on to her legs were Wapiti and Nefertiti – I could never tell them apart. And in a corner, the Twins were hand in hand. The entire household was assembled for an all-night vigil.
‘Tonight, the world is ours!’
They had decided to celebrate the closure of the mine with a huge bonfire behind the house. It was provocation, pure and simple. Provocation that was even more bitter for the people of Norco when the next day they discovered that the tires that had fuelled the Cardinal bonfire had come from their sheds.
Twenty-One Cardinals Page 10
