No Great Mischief (17 page)

When we turned off Highway 17, the long spring day had become early night. The roads changed surfaces, the pavement giving way to what seemed like hastily laid-down asphalt, and later to gravel which had been covered with a solution to keep down the dust. Sometimes the solution smelled like oil and at other times like salt through the opened windows of the cars. Still later the solution vanished and there was only the smell of the dust and the sound of the stones thrown up by the tires against the bodies of the cars. Occasionally the cars “bottomed” on ridges of rock jutting up from the middle of the road and the oil pans and mufflers jarred and scraped against the exposed stone. On either side of the hastily constructed road lay the trees which had been bulldozed out of the way, their long yellow and white roots nakedly exposed, with strands of moss and disturbed muskeg still hanging from them. The roots looked like diseased and badly pulled teeth. Wrecked and abandoned cars had been pushed to the roadside’s edge and, once, on coming around a turn, our headlights picked up the eyes of a gigantic moose standing beside the front end of a smashed Buick. The red eyes of the moose glowed out of the darkness and into our lights like burning intense coals while the dead lamps of the Buick’s headlights and the silver of the grille’s chrome flashed bright and shining for only an instant. The moose did not move from its stand beside the road, where it seemed to be guarding the remains of what had obviously once been a high-powered and expensive car.

When we got to the camp near the headframe’s site, we were
issued blankets and sheets and assigned temporary rooms. The rooms were in hastily constructed huts made mostly of plywood. There were four bunks in each room, two upper and two lower. We flipped coins to decide who would get the lower bunks. In the morning, we were told, the rooms might be reassigned. There were some rooms that contained only two bunks instead of four, but right now all of them were occupied. It might take a little time.

The superintendent came in and shook hands with my brother and clapped him heartily on the shoulder. Apparently he was the man in charge when the red-haired Alexander MacDonald had been killed and the one who had said, “It was only one man,” and, “The job has to go forward.” As he spoke to my brother he counted us with his eyes.

Out in the night the lights of the headframe glowed and we could hear the sound of the hoist and the singing cables and sometimes even the signals as the giant ore bucket thundered up and down the darkened shaft. The French Canadians were working the night shift, and we would begin in the morning. Now that Renco Development had “the same number of men,” there was some discussion as to whether three eight-hour shifts or two twelve-hour shifts would be more effective. If it were the latter, one crew would begin at seven a.m. and the other at seven in the evening. If we wished to substitute for one another it would be okay and we could roughly keep our own time. Much would depend on the quality of the rock.

Early the next morning my brothers and the other members of
clann Chalum Ruaidh
began to assemble their underground gear.
Some of the belts and the wrenches they had thrown into the bush at the headframe’s site had been retrieved and saved by men who thought the original owners might be back. Some of their gear they recognized as being worn by other men. Some of it was returned; some of it was not. When you throw things away, I suppose, you never can be sure that they will ever be yours again. My second brother recognized his miner’s belt on another man and pointed out his initials scratched with a nail on the belt’s inside. But the man said he had bought it from one of the French Canadians and would only sell it for twice its original price. He agreed, though, to lend it to my brother for a day as he was coming off his shift and my brother was going on. And so the summer began.

In
addition to the frenzied activity beneath the headframes of the region there was also a great deal of action on the surface of the land itself Roads were being constructed and crews of labourers hacked and slashed at the forest and blasted at the surface rock in an attempt to establish footings for the foundations of new buildings. Trucks groaned in and out with lumber and revolving cement mixers. Hammers banged and saws of various kinds whined and shrieked, each saw having its own sound, like the motors of
individual cars. Heavy earth-moving equipment rumbled constantly and shrill whistles pierced the air, announcing the imminent blasts and warning those nearby to take cover.

Financial transactions were conducted at the bank, which was in a hastily erected trailer, and the armoured cars clanked in, bringing the money to meet the various payrolls and also to take the money out. Many of the construction and cement crews were Italian or Portuguese, while some were German. Almost all of the men from a small village in the south of Ireland were there and, from our own region, the always cheerful Newfoundlanders. For a while all of us ate in a common dining hall and when the whistle would blow announcing noon, the construction crews would drop whatever they were doing and run to be near the front of the jostling line, throwing their hard hats in the air and leaping over whatever obstacles might be in their way. Within the dining hall the ethnic groups sat by themselves, each group speaking its own language, leaning forward intensely amidst gesticulating hands. Because we worked underground, those of us on the surface at midday were not as frantically influenced by the noon whistle, having at that point of the day more time than those who were limited by the boundaries of twelve and one. We would come later or perhaps earlier, slightly before the havoc-creating blast of the anticipated whistle. Taking our trays, we too would go to certain areas, like students who always choose specific seats in the classroom although such seats are never formally assigned. We would pass by the various groups bound for our own region of the country while voices from the small intense divisions of
Europe rose around us. Sometimes as we passed by certain voices would quietly attempt to identify us. “Those are the Highlanders,” they would say, “from Cape Breton. They stay mostly to themselves.”

It is hard to know why, in such circumstances, we spoke Gaelic more and more. Perhaps by being surrounded by other individual groups we felt our lives more intensely through what we perceived as “our own language.” Sometimes we would talk to the Irish, comparing phrases and expressions. There was a determined effort in Ireland, they said, to preserve Gaelic or “Irish.” “It was the language spoken in the garden of Eden,” they said. “It was the language that God used when speaking to the angels.” We could understand each other reasonably well if we spoke slowly and carefully. “Why not?” said one of them. “After all, we are but different branches of the same tree.”

As the days of summer lengthened, our own work became more desperately intense. After the shafts were sunk to the required depths the drifts were driven in the direction of the ore.
Clann Chalum Ruaidh
leaned into the jacklegs at the rock face, the hammering of the wet revolving bits changing the stone into dribbles of grey water which trickled from the holes like constant streams of watery semen or liquid, weak cement. The snaking yellow airhoses trailed behind the jacklegs and the men leaning into them. If the rock were “hard,” a shift’s “round” might progress only eight feet, but if the rock were “soft,” twelve-foot steels were often used to drill the deeper holes. When the holes were drilled they would be loaded and wired with dynamite, the slender, dangerous sticks tamped in with long wooden poles and connected to
each other with the fragile, delicate blasting wire. It was important that the centre of the face explode first and that the succeeding blasts be directed towards the blown-out centre. The dynamite in the holes at the bottom of the face, in the “lifters,” would have to lift the rock towards the empty centre while that in the holes at the face’s top would be helped by gravity. The skill was in knowing not only how many holes to drill but how deeply they should be drilled, and in calculating the rock’s resistance to the dynamite’s force. If the blast was not clean and the rock was not blown away evenly and to the required depth, all the work of the shift would be largely wasted, and much of it would have to be begun again. Only it would be more difficult because of the unevenness of the face, the dislocated piles of rubble, and the fear of concealed and unexploded dynamite or non-ignited blasting caps.

When the face was wired we would withdraw from it, walking back out the drift or tunnel we had earlier already created towards the station and trailing the detonating wire behind us. When the handle of the plunger was pressed down we would listen to the sequential explosion of the charges. Counting them on our fingers one by one, telling by the sound the effectiveness of each. Worried and fearful of “blowouts,” which meant that the dynamite, instead of shattering the rock around it, would merely shoot back out of the hole in which it had been tamped. When there was a blowout the charge would “pop” instead of explode and, on hearing it, we would curse or shake our heads or drive one fist into the palm of the other hand and wonder what went wrong. By the time the last charge had exploded, the acrid smell of the powder from the first would be wafting towards us, accompanied by its yellow sulphurous cloud.
Often we would ring for the cage and the hoistman would take us to the surface so that we could breathe.

It was always something of a surprise to come to the surface and to be reacquainted with the changes of weather and of time. Sometimes it would be four in the morning and the night would be giving way to dawn, and the stars would appear to be going out like quietly snuffed candles as the sky began to redden with the promise of the sun. Sometimes the moon would gleam whitely above us and my brothers would say, “
Coimhead, lochran aigh nam bochd
,” “Look, the lamp of the poor.” And sometimes at the appearance of the new moon Calum would bow or almost curtsy in the old way and repeat the verses taught to him by the old
Calum Ruadh
men of the country:

Sometimes he would repeat them in English or switch to the original Gaelic:

In the country of the
clann Chalum Ruaidh
the moon governed the weather and the planting of potatoes and the butchering of animals and, perhaps, the conception and birth of children. “The moon will change tonight,” Grandma would say to the overdue, anxious expectant women who were her daughters and daughters-in-law. “After supper we will take a walk, and if God is with us the baby will be born tonight.” And even as I think and tell this now, the moon-affected waters are exerting their pressure by the
Calum Ruadh’s
Point. Within the circle of the sun the tides are rising and falling, thrusting and pulling and bringing to bear their quiet but relentless force under the guidance of the moon.

At other times when we would come up from the shaft the sun would be blazing. We would shut off our miner’s lamps almost in embarrassment and drape the rubber cords around our necks, even as we blinked our eyes in an attempt to accustom ourselves to the fierceness of the sun. We would take off our miner’s hats and our oilskin rubber coats and throw them on the ground. And we would unfasten the braces from the bibs of the rubber oilers which covered our more conventional clothes and let them dangle below our waists down to our knees. We would take off our rubber gloves, sometimes pulling the fingers inside out to give them some chance to dry, or else we would merely shake the water droplets out of them. The gloves would smell from the stench of human perspiration – like socks that had been worn too long. Regardless of the hardness of our hands, our fingers were always pink and crinkled from the heat
and moisture of the gloves. They would appear almost like someone else’s fingers at first, or like the hands of women who spend too much time in the dishpan, or the hands of small children who are left too long in their baths. When they were exposed to the air they would assume their normal colour and texture once again. The wet grey muck that clung to our steel-ribbed rubber boots would dry in the sun and be converted to finely powdered grey dust.

Sometimes when we came to the surface it would be raining and this too would be a surprise. Or the wind would be blowing, causing the still-standing trees to moan and sigh as their moving limbs rubbed against each other.

Underground, beneath the earth’s surface, the weather was always the same. The sun never shone and there was no reflection from the moon. There was no wind, except the slight whisper of the air forced down the shaft to keep us alive, and there was no rain, although the trickle and tinkle of water sounded everywhere. Besides the water there were no natural sounds other than those of our own voices. Only the humming of the air compressors and the generators and the sound of moving and revolving steel hammering and grinding into stone. It was easy to lose track of time and space because life underground dictated, for us, what happened on the surface.