Twenty-Six (5 page)

Arvel put the last piece of toast into his mouth and drank a warm drink of milky tea to soften the toast. “I gotta get up to that grave, anyway.” He walked into the porch and put on his parka and heavy boots. He stopped at the door and turned to face his father, who stood backlit and grim-faced in the doorway to the kitchen.

“You ever point a gun at me, old man, it better be loaded and you’d better pull the trigger. That’s just some advice.”

Arvel left.

Ennis turned back to the kitchen. He swung up his leg to kick the side of the fridge. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, he could have knocked the fridge on its side with a single kick. This blow didn’t even land. His sock slipped up the slick enamel of the appliance, and as his foot was coming down, the heel jammed onto the top of the handle of the fridge door. It felt like someone had driven a nail into his foot, and the next thing he felt was his tailbone smacking the floor.

Dunya was in the doorway: “Ennis! Ennis!” she cried. Ennis had his eyes closed in shame and anger.

After he’d got up from the floor, he’d taken two painkillers and a nitroglycerine and chased them down with a big drink of rum and Pepsi. He’d gone into the bathroom, taken off his shirt, and examined the scar down the middle of his chest. The wide pink line was like a pair of tightly pursed lips. It had been over a year since the operation, and the doctor said the incision was fully healed, but any time he suffered a bump or a shake, Ennis expected the place where he’d been ripped open to explode, his bloody heart to flop out onto the floor.

Bypass surgery was becoming routine, his doctor had told him before he’d gone to Halifax, but once they got him opened up on that table and had a look inside him, they’d pronounced his heart inoperable. They’d closed him up without having done the work and the surgeon signed the papers for him to draw on his long-term disability insurance.

“The heart is a queer machine,” the surgeon had said afterwards. They sat in his oak-panelled office in New Glasgow. The leather padding of the chairs they sat in squeaked when they shifted their weight. Ennis looked at the framed degrees and certificates on the walls, and thought, “
A queer machine.” Is that the best that all this education can come up with?

“You’ve got some bad arteries in there,” the surgeon said. “They may never cause you trouble. On the other hand, you might just go out one day like that,” he snapped his fingers. “Like switching off a light.”

His foot hurt when he paced, but the pain in his tailbone kept him from sitting for very long. He was thinking about Arvel, about how much he loved him, and how all that love had somehow got twisted around into hate. He knew that whatever had gone wrong in their relationship, it could only be his fault. The boy had only learned whatever he’d taught him. But how could the best intentions have got so far off track?

He’d meant to come home and ask Arvel how the organization drive was going since they’d switched to the Auto Workers. Everyone assumed that Ennis – who’d played a major role in the organization of the steel mill, the railcar plant, the pop plant, the Sobey’s warehouse – was playing a major role in what his son was doing at Eastyard coal. When the first effort by the United Mine Workers failed, he’d read about it in the paper. Arvel hadn’t
mentioned a word to him. He hadn’t even known his son was involved in the union drive. His heart had soared with pride when he’d read Arvel’s name in the paper and saw that the reporter had asked Arvel to comment from the union’s side.

He went into the front room and switched on the reading lamp. In the midst of his falling-apart life, the life in which his relationship to every member of his family was in shambles, evidence of another life abounded in this small room. It was propped in frames on top of the coffee table. It hung collecting dust against the knotty pine panelling on the walls. The life depicted here was one at which Ennis had excelled. Plaques of service and congratulations, certificates of appreciation and achievement, dating right back to the fifties. “Presented to Ennis Burrows in thanks upon the signing of our first collective agreement. Allied Food and Restaurant Workers local 324. January, 1958.” “Ennis Burrows, in recognition of 10 years’ service, United Steelworkers of America.” “Ennis Burrows, in recognition of 20 years’ service, United Steelworkers of America.” “Ennis Burrows, in recognition of 30 years’ service, United Steelworkers of America.” “Organizer Award. National Day of Protest. October 14, 1973. The largest organized demonstration in Canadian history.” Photographs showed Ennis shaking hands with provincial New Democratic Party leaders, handing out Labor Council Scholarships at high-school graduations. He’d run for the federal seat himself in 1968, and the most prized photo of all, the only one professionally mounted and framed in polished brass, showed Ennis with former Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas, leader of the first democratic socialist government in North America.

Ennis had met Douglas briefly at a rally in Halifax during the campaign of 1968. New Democratic Party candidates from across the province were lined up backstage after Douglas’s speech that afternoon. Ennis had just enough time with Douglas to snap a photo for inclusion in his campaign literature. The actual physical moment itself had been brief, but its memory had been immortalized with a permanent place on the wall here in the front room. The photo had come down twice before while they’d been re-papering that room, and once while he and Arvel had been tacking up the panelling from which it now hung, but each time it had come down, the photo had gone right back up to its original spot, directly above the only light source in the room, in the centre of the wall you faced as you entered.

Beside Ennis, the Prairie firebrand looked like a prematurely aging child. Ennis’s big hand gripped Douglas at the upper arm, and standing so close to Ennis’s side, Douglas’s head barely came up to Ennis’s shoulder. But Ennis was looking at Douglas in the photo, and the awe and admiration on Ennis’s face, the pride in standing next to his hero, made it clear who was the bigger man.

He was waiting for Ziv to come home. He wanted to have a conversation with his son. He didn’t care what they talked about, hockey, cars, work, it didn’t matter. He just wanted to say something to one of his sons that would not get turned in the wrong direction. He wanted someone to speak to him without anger. He knew from experience that this was unlikely to happen, but he had an image in his mind of himself and the boy, sitting at the table in the kitchen, drinking tea with sugar until they both sobered up, until the light crept back into the sky, until Arvel came home from the pit and the three of them would sit there,
two guys hungover, one exhausted from work. Dunya would come downstairs and they’d all eat a big breakfast together.

He paced back and forth, kitchen to living room, fridge to
TV
, table to chair to couch. Ziv would be drunk when he got home, Ennis knew that. He and the boy had fought before over this issue. Each fight with Ziv, it seemed, was an individual struggle over some specific issue. Their fights were about drinking or about something one or the other of them had said without thinking. With Arvel it was different. He and Arvel just had one long fight that got taken up anew whenever they saw each other.

When he awoke it was still dark. The
TV
was hissing, its grey eye dancing with random dots. Dunya was standing over him, shaking him awake.

“Ennis! Wake up, goddamn it. Did you feel it?”

“What’s the time?” he said. He sat up, swung his feet to the floor.

“Something happened,” Dunya said. He pressed the light on his watch. 5:29.

“What?” Ennis said. “
What
?” His hangover came in through his eyes, pushing backward toward his brain.

“The house shook. It woke me up.”

“Forget it,” he said. “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“Jesus, Ennis. Didn’t you
feel
it? I’m telling you, Ennis. Something happened.”

Ennis rose slowly from the couch. He went into the kitchen and stopped when he got to the side of the fridge. The fridge door was ajar and a plastic pitcher of orange juice had somehow shaken loose and ended up spilled on the floor.

“Did you do this?” Ennis said.

Dunya came up beside him. “I haven’t been in here this morning. See? Whatever woke me up shook this juice right out of the fridge.”

Ennis stepped around the pool of juice and filled a big glass with water. His heel ached, and now he remembered catching it on the door of the fridge. He put a hand back and pressed gently on his tailbone. It was bruised, but he wouldn’t know how badly until later. He was drinking his second glass of water when he looked out the kitchen window and down to Rutherford Street. In the light of the street lamp, he saw Ziv coming out the back door of the Burgess house.

J
ackie was leaving in the morning. Her friend Colleen was driving from Halifax to pick up her and the girls. They’d stay at Colleen’s place until they could find an apartment of their own. After years of complaining about Arvel’s drinking and his volatile temper, after years of throwing him out, taking him back, and throwing him out again, she was finally making a break.

So she could gather what she and the girls would need at least to get them through the next few weeks, she’d set up the girls in the living room with enough toys and games to keep them occupied. The packing had gone much more quickly than she’d expected, and she was finished early enough to have the girls in their beds at the regular time.

Yesterday morning she’d told them what was happening. The part about moving to Halifax, at least. The part about leaving their father behind she had not yet discussed with them.

The girls had not asked any questions. In her mind, she’d gone over possible answers numerous times since she’d asked Arvel to
leave the house a few days ago and decided that this was it, this was the last time.

Is Dada going to come with us?
she thought Kate might ask.

No, dear, he can’t come. He has to stay here and work and we all have to go to Halifax, to work and to go to school. Why?

Well, Mama and Dada have problems they can’t solve. They’ve tried to solve them for a long time, but they can’t. Now we have to move on, move out of our problems
.

There were only a few suitcases and an old sports bag of Arvel’s, full of clothing, some of the girls’ toys and books. She’d packed what they’d need to get them through the next few weeks, at which point she would come back and organize the rest. She moved the packed bags from the living room and piled them next to the back door, made herself a cup of mint tea, and sat down at the kitchen table. Halifax. Her friend Colleen Chisolm had been trying to convince Jackie to move to Halifax for years, ever since she’d gone there herself.

Arvel would find a job there for sure. She said that it would be a lot easier for him there than in Albion Mines.

Colleen was working at Gregor’s, an upscale women’s clothing store in an area of the downtown called Historic Properties, and for years she’d been telling Jackie about the amount of money she was able to make, the clean, modern apartment she could afford, the almost-new car she was able to make payments on. Colleen had worked with Jackie for a brief time at Exception Elle in the new mall in New Glasgow, where Jackie still worked. She claimed all along that Jackie was much better at sales than she herself was and that any time she wanted to come to Halifax for a better job and a better life, Colleen would get her on at Gregor’s.

She’d called Colleen a week ago, even before she’d kicked Arvel out of the house. Colleen had been as positive as ever.

“You’ve finally come to your senses!” Colleen had said.

“This is no joke, Colleen. I’m leaving … leaving Arvel,” she’d felt herself choke up just uttering the words, the words she’d formed in her mind already but had yet to speak. Arvel was at work, the kids were asleep, but she found herself crouching over the phone in a secretive manner and looking over her shoulder to see who might be there looking at her.

“The way Arvel drinks. The way the two of us fight. This is not the kind of life I want for myself or for the girls. I told him I wanted to move to Halifax, but he’s on at the mine now and he thinks that’s the only thing he’s ever going to have to do. He refuses to see what this family really needs to better ourselves.”

“So is Arvel just letting you go like that – Goodbye?”

“Not on your life. He doesn’t know.”

“You’re sneaking out?”

“You don’t have to put it like that. I feel bad enough as it is. But this is the only way it will work.”

“I’m sorry,” Colleen said. “If this is what you’re going to do, just come. You and the kids can stay with me until you get set up. Is this it? Is this the end, do you think?”

Jackie paused. She looked around the tiny kitchen, lit only by the light from street lamps on Pleasant Street. “I don’t know. It feels like the end. I feel as though my whole life needs to be turned in a new direction.”

She took the last drink of mint tea and looked at the kitchen. She wondered what she was headed for. It suddenly seemed unimaginable to her now, after more than six years of marriage: a life without Arvel, a life outside of Pictou County.