Twenty-Six (10 page)

Entering the Tartan Tavern was like diving into a dirty aquarium: the beverage room was little more than four glass walls and a roof. Light inside came from all four directions, but was dimmed from having filtered through the grime-coated windows. At the far end of the room, the bluish screen of a television set
blinked behind its chain-link bottle-deflector. As always, there was the smell of onions frying in cheap fat, though none of the items on the menu ever seemed to contain onions. The men had pushed tables together, end-to-end, and they sat as though at a banquet. Arvel shook his head in exasperation when he saw that, consciously or not, they left the seat at the head of the table empty for Gavin.

“What the fuck Gavin is going to tell us that we don’t already know is beyond me,” Arvel muttered as he approached the table, but if anyone heard him, they did not answer.

Tommy, the owner of the tavern, and its only employee at this time of day, sat behind the bar with his feet up, watching whatever was on the screen. The only other people in the room were a pair of underage boys, obviously on hook from school, who sat guiltily crouched over their beer glasses at the far side of the snooker tables.

It seemed the others had not been here long, and when Arvel sat down, Tommy came to the table without a word and distributed draft glasses from two trays he held stacked in one hand. Then he went back behind the bar and started filling pitchers from the tap.

Arvel sat back with his glass of draft. He picked up the salt shaker from the centre of the table and dusted the top of his beer. Foam rushed up through the beer as the salt fell through it. Arvel took a drink and looked out the window at the north end of Foord Street. The field across the way was encircled by an off-ramp from the Trans-Canada highway, the grass there tall and brown.

When Gavin entered the room, there was a light around him that Arvel saw shining. It was the light of someone who has exempted himself. He sat at the head of the table, and his erect,
fluidly moving body made the men who flanked him appear twisted, self-conscious, and jerky. He was the only one to order food: a beef sandwich. When it arrived, he saw that Tommy hadn’t cut it, but instead of sending it back, Gavin pulled it apart with his fingers and ate it. For a while, the men waited for Gavin to speak. They’d been used to letting him lead, to his explaining issues and strategies to them. But of course he had nothing to say. The meeting had not been his idea.

The men had not agreed on anything particular to say, so when they did start speaking, it was each man to his own grievance, from being pressured to work longer hours than the mining act allowed and the dangerous levels of explosive dust in the drifts, to the methane gauges on machinery that had been tampered with and rendered useless.

These were all things that Gavin himself had once educated them about, but if he was growing impatient, he didn’t show it. He sat benevolently at the head of the table and nodded at each speaker in turn.

Finally, in frustration, Arvel spoke: “Jesus, Gavin. These guys want to hear you say something.”

Gavin laid both palms flat on the table. “I can tell you what you have to do, but every one of you guys already knows. Arvel, you know. You either do what I did and get out, or you wait to die.”

There was the secret word: death. All of them could talk freely of accidents and explosions, but no one ever broached the truth. Now that the word had been spoken, it was as if the roof had been lifted off the Tartan Tavern and a gust of air had entered.

“You’ve got to get a union in, is one thing,” Gavin said. He seemed unaffected by the emotion around him in the room. “But
you fucked that up by not voting yes the
last
time.” Some of the men squirmed in their seats. “That process is going to take months now,” Gavin continued. He looked at Arvel. “Arvel has started up with the Auto Workers. You guys are fucking lucky he didn’t quit, too. You’re lucky he’s got the guts to put his neck on the line. And he’s willing to do the work that has to be done. But he has to start all over. In the meantime, you got to look at your day-to-day options, and there are two: quit or die.”

Steve Jenkins looked at Arvel and shook his head. Arvel wondered what he was thinking. Death again, probably. The thought of death.

“There are two ways to quit,” Gavin continued. He picked up his beer and placed it forcefully and as far to the left as his right hand could reach. “You can quit one by one,” he said. “In which case management either replaces you one by one, or rearranges the shift each time to do with one or two less men.” He picked up the beer glass and transferred it dramatically to the right to mark the other pole of his idea. “Or you can all quit together, in which case management has to act. They’ve got to clean up or shut down.”

“They could replace all twenty-six of us at once, just about overnight,” Arvel said. “You know what this economy is like.”

Gavin shook his head. “The federal and provincial governments are into this mine for a hundred million dollars. If a whole shift quit together, you’d have the media doing handsprings in a second.”

“But what would happen to us?” Someone asked. Arvel looked around at all the grim faces, but could not determine who’d spoken.

“Well, you’d be out of a job, for one thing,” Gavin said.

Men were nodding into their beer glasses. At some point, the two underage boys across the room had got up unnoticed and left. At their table now sat two trim middle-aged men in white shirts and blue ties. One man had his tie flipped back over one shoulder to keep it out of his fish and chips. The other man had his shirtsleeves rolled to halfway up his biceps.

Arvel stood up and moved in the direction of the bathroom. The few beer he’d had on an empty stomach had left him feeling woozy and oppressed, as though the air were being squeezed in around him.

When he returned, the atmosphere at the tables had changed. Men were arguing heatedly about what they should do. Gavin’s face looked strained. He’d quit his job to get away from the endless, fruitless arguments and worries. “Listen boys,” Gavin was saying, though only a few were listening to him, “Listen boys …” Arvel knew the next thing Gavin said was going to be goodbye. Arvel stepped up to the edge of a table. “Listen up, now …” Arvel said more loudly. The bickering continued. He reached across the table, picked up an almost empty beer pitcher, and emptied it into his glass. “Listen here, now,” he shouted. Nothing. He raised the pitcher over the table and brought it down in a swift motion, its thick flat bottom smacking the tabletop, the sound shooting through the room and bouncing off the plate-glass windows.

“My properties!” Tommy shouted from behind the bar.

“Aw cripes!” came a voice from across the room. One of the two men in white shirts had jumped at the noise and knocked his plate of fish and chips onto the floor. Dabs of ketchup were spattered over his white shirt.

“For God’s sake will you stop and listen,” Arvel said. “Gavin’s about to go and I want to say something.” Everyone was looking at him. Tommy had come out from behind the bar and was approaching the table where Arvel stood. When he got there he picked up his beer pitcher and inspected it in the light. He ran his hand over the tabletop where the pitcher had hit. He scowled at Arvel and returned to the bar with the pitcher cradled against him like a baby.

“I hope to Jesus,” Arvel said, “we can decide what to do. Gavin, you said we could quit one at a time or we could quit all at once. You’re right. That’s our choice, and every day we don’t make that choice is a day closer to the other option. Only with that one, we’ll have no choice. If we die, we’ll all die together. No one will be left.”

Death again. Arvel picked up his beer. Took a drink. “That leaves you, Gavin.”

“That leaves me what?” He looked steadily into Arvel’s eyes, as though he knew exactly what Arvel was suggesting, but wanted to make him say it.

“You’re one of us,” Arvel said. He felt himself puffing up, almost patriotically. “But when we go, you’ll be the only one left.”

“
When
we go,” someone piped up. “We went from
if
to
when
. Jesus!”

“Shut up!” someone else said loudly. “Let him finish.”

Arvel looked seriously at Gavin. Gavin looked at him and at every other man in the room.

“Just tell people,” Arvel said. “Just tell them what it was like. Just tell them what happened.”

Gavin nodded.

Arvel remembered that nod as he stood outside the doughnut shop, his breath rising from his mouth in clouds. Through the broad windows, he watched Gavin inside, sitting serenely, nodding his head in the same thoughtful manner. He was like a vision of an otherworldly creature. Since he’d quit at Eastyard, no more than two months ago, his face looked younger than it had in years. His gestures and movements were smooth and relaxed. He sat and listened to the conversation going on around him, his head inclined slightly forward. He narrowed his eyes. He threw his head back and laughed at something someone said. Through its streaked windows, the Tim Horton’s emitted cold light into the dark winter night.

I’m quitting, Arvel thought. I’m not going to turn up tonight. To hell with it. He stepped around to the entrance and walked through the first set of doors. He stood in the semi-warmth of the storm entrance and watched the little crusts of snow fall from the sides of his boots into the grating, then turned back and continued up the street toward the mine.

Something had changed in the atmosphere among the men on their shift. They barely spoke to one another, and when they did speak, it was only about things not related to the mine: curling or hockey or hunting. When a sparking engine or a miner whose methane detectors had been disconnected flared blue momentarily in a pocket of gas, or when several men were trudging through fuel-soaked explosive dust that was halfway up their shins, or when a foreman or manager ordered them to continue using damaged equipment, the men no longer spoke about these things. They clamped their jaws and shook their heads.

The change room was full as Arvel got into his working clothes: coveralls, boots, hard hat. He remembered a film he’d seen in junior high called
The Productive Classroom
. According to the film, the productive classroom was a silent one. Each student was hunched over an open notebook. The sound of pencils scratching paper, and occasionally the sound of a pencil being sharpened: these were the only sounds in the productive classroom. In the productive change room, there was the ripping sound of laces being pulled tight in stiff leather boots. Zippers were being zipped, snaps snapped. Buckles and cinches and Velcro closures were being pulled at and folded over.

Arvel held his hard hat in one hand and looked at it strangely before he put it on.

His hard hat, the one he held at arm’s length every day and examined before putting on, the simplest piece of safety equipment he owned, and one he could have used every day without thought, was an emblem for him. It was like a fossil retrieved from the prehistoric, black-and-white world of his grandparents. But it wasn’t like a fossil at all, because fossils were impressions of bygone worlds, and as though having slipped through a hatch in a sci-fi movie, Arvel’s pre-past, the world of his grandparents, had been transported forward through time. The helmet with lamp connected him to his own childhood, in which he used to dream of having such a piece of headgear to play with. It connected him to a past he’d been told was over. When he’d started school, it was the late sixties. He was the tail end of the baby-boom generation. His teachers were the front end of the same boom, and they taught the kids to expect everything. The teachers said Arvel and his friends were the luckiest generation ever. They’d never known economic hardship, they’d never known war. They
were the children of industrial workers whose twenty years of pay raises had lifted them from impoverished childhoods into the lower reaches of the middle class. By the time he graduated, the teachers were feeling sorry for the students they were sending off into the world. They were the least-fortunate generation of the century. Industries were shrinking, the job market was disappearing. They would be the first North American generation to fare worse than their parents.

Miner’s helmet with lamp
. These words had been typed in black on a white file card under a glass display case at the old Albion Mines Miner’s Museum up the hill from the Albion Field ballpark. He and his friend Billy Michaels from the Heights spent two or three weeks’ worth of afternoons one spring going into the museum after school. The main purpose of each visit was to sign a false name in the guest book. Name: Jesus Christ. Date of Visit: 24
A.D
. Remarks: I am the way, the truth, and the life. Name: Bobby Orr. Date of visit: May 1, 1971. Remarks: I wish I could play for the Albion Mines Royals. Ha! Ha! The last time they’d gone, Billy had just written Adolf Hitler under
Name
, when the museum’s caretaker clamped the two boys around the neck with his bony hands. They both wiggled free and bolted out the door. The old man was George Hannah, a retired miner, a survivor of the Allan Shaft explosion of 1935, a decorated veteran of two wars, a man who wore his Royal Canadian Legion uniform daily, beret clamped over his white, bald head, medals and ribbons pinned stiffly to the breast of the jacket. He chased them halfway down Park Street, shouting: “No respect for the dead! No respect for the dead!”

In the time before the caretaker caught on to their silly forgeries, they’d seen a lot of the museum. There were dusty frames full
of black-and-white photos. White men, their faces blackened with dust, black men, skin coloured darker, staring steel-eyed at the camera. Some men, unable to stand still for the seconds-long exposures, were smears of black and grey, identified in the accompanying lists of names with a question mark. The pictures of the town of Albion Mines showed streets very different from the ones Arvel knew. Many of the buildings were the same, but time had changed the names of the businesses decorating their fronts, had turned the dirt sidewalks to concrete. When Arvel was a boy, when he was visiting the miner’s museum, the coal pits of Pictou County were all but closed. The McBean mine in Thorburn closed when he was nine or ten. There was a working pit in Westville, but the mining days depicted in the photos at the museum, when trolleys ran through the busy streets and thousands of men were employed underground, those days were gone.