Twenty-Six (30 page)

Roly said, “How’d you like one of those Eastyard jobs?”

Arvel began to laugh. “What are you? Personnel manager? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

“Just shut your smart mouth and listen. Did you see those guys with the shovels in the paper last week? Breaking sod or whatever?”

“Breaking wind is more like it. The premier and some other idiots.”

“Well, one of those idiots owes me a big favour, and I’m about to cash it in. Lucky for you I need someone who actually has some training to come into an interview with me. Don’t you have some college-boy brother? I seen him over at Zellers in the toy department. He looks just like you, the poor unfortunate bastard. Tell him he can have one of them jobs, too, if he can get his lazy arse outta bed for an interview.”

Someone at Eastyard Coal must have been mixed up with the wrong people in the past. How else did he owe the likes of Sam Kowalski a favour? Arvel never found out what the favour was about, but Kowalski did explain that he was using Arvel and Ziv to make himself look better. He had worked out a scam with someone on the inside where his own interview would be a joint interview with one or two other applicants whose education or qualifications were supposed to be real. He’d embellish his own resumé to make it look like he’d actually done some worthwhile work before, and his contact would make sure he only had to answer the easy questions in an interview. The technical stuff could be directed to someone else who actually knew something.

Whatever his feelings about Sam Kowalski, the mining jobs at Eastyard would be major, solid employment, and Arvel could not afford to turn his back on this sort of opportunity. He called Ziv as soon as he got off the phone. Ziv was reluctant.

“Coal mining? In 1987? That’s like deciding to be a caveman. Do you have any idea how many people have been killed mining coal in this county?”

“Come on, man,” Arvel said. “Do you want to work at Zellers for the rest of your life? Kowalski wants two people for this interview. Just come along for my sake. Nobody can force you to go underground if you don’t want to. And what are the odds we’ll get jobs there, anyway? This is a chance I just can’t pass up.”

Within a week, Arvel and Ziv were standing outside the new Miner’s Museum in Albion Mines. Even though Arvel had already filled out an application, Kowalski got both of them to fill out fresh forms, which he had given to his contact in the company. Coughlin Resources was holding interviews in one of the conference rooms upstairs. The two brothers were stuffed into suits whose legs rode up their shins when they bent their knees.

A maroon taxi pulled off Foord Street and parked in the no-parking zone in front of the main entrance to the museum. Kowalski squeezed his huge waist through the driver’s door and walked straight to the entrance without looking at or speaking to either of the Burrows brothers. When Kowalski was inside, Arvel and Ziv looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him.

As it turned out, at the interview, no one was expected to know anything technical at all. The interviewers first wanted to know whether Arvel and Ziv were twins, even though their birth-dates were on their application forms and the forms were on the table in front of them. They talked about Blue Jays baseball for a while. They sat in padded swivel chairs in a room just big enough for the few people and pieces of furniture that were in it. The
room smelled of crack filler, primer, and industrial adhesive, as though construction of the place had just been completed in time for this interview. The company president drank coffee from a cup so large it made his small hands look frail and childish. One of the two other management types, a man with a bald head and a big, square face, was from Alberta, and Ziv talked to him for twenty minutes about the scenic Cabot Trail in Cape Breton, about how beautiful it was and how, while the man was in the province, it would be a big mistake to leave without seeing it. When Arvel and Ziv stood up at the end of the interview, they towered over their interviewers as they shook hands. The other men stood back a little, as though intimidated.

Roly drove them to the Tartan Tavern in the maroon taxi he had come in, and bought them a pitcher to share. “How the fuck do you know so much about Cape Breton?” he asked Ziv.

“I’ve never been to the other end of the causeway,” Ziv replied. He laughed loudly. “My first roommate at university was from Mabou. I guess I must have soaked something up.”

Arvel picked up the salt shaker and tossed a light dusting of white over the head of his beer. Bubbles came rushing up through the amber liquid. He tapped the bottom of the salt shaker on the lip of the glass, causing another surge of foam. “Well,” he said. “We’re not getting anything out of that.”

“What do you mean?” Roly said.

“They’ll not give us jobs based on that foolish interview.” Arvel turned a grim eye on Ziv, who was still laughing.

“Boys,” Roly said. “You’ve got jobs. You can start spending the money right now. These guys owe me big time. The interview was just a hoop.”

“We’ll see,” said Arvel.

“No great loss, anyway,” Ziv said.

“Are you out of your fucking tree?” Roly said. “You’re working at fucking Zellers.”

“At least I’m qualified to work at Zellers,” Ziv said. “And Zellers has never blown up.”

“This mine ain’t gonna blow up. This is the 1980s, not the 1890s.”

“I’ll worry about that mine blowing up
after
I’ve got a job in it,” said Arvel.

“Wait and see, boys, wait and see,” Kowalski said.

Ziv flattened the letter from Eastyard against the surface of the kitchen table and reread the words that told him he had gotten the first real job of his life. He thought about calling Arvel to see whether he’d heard anything, but decided against it. He was already beginning to feel some fear and regret at the prospect of working in a coal mine, in a job he’d heard spoken of his whole life as the rough equivalent of being a soldier in a war. He did not want to call Arvel and find out Arvel had not gotten an Eastyard job. He did not want to feel Arvel’s envy for a job he only half-wanted himself.

The letter said he would be working underground, and as he looked at the word now, he felt a tightening in his chest, as though the weight of the earth were upon him, pushing him down.

He walked into the living room, where his mother was watching
Card Sharks
on
TV
.

“Look at that dishwasher!” she said. He looked at it. It was an Amana. Fully automatic, energy-saving and water-saving settings. Available in a range of colours to match any decor.

“These people don’t know how lucky they are,” his mother said. She sat with a blank glare at the tube.

“How long did Didu work at the pit?” Ziv asked.

“What?” his mother said. She shook her head and peeled her eyes from the
TV
.

“How long did your father work in the pit? I know he retired from there. But did he work there his whole life?”

“All of it that I remember,” she said. She was looking at him suspiciously. “He lived in Winnipeg when he first came over.”

“Winnipeg! I didn’t know that!”

“That was where most of the Bohunks were going. He did something for the city there. There’s an old picture of him in front of a fountain. That is from Winnipeg. Then he moved to Halifax and worked as a streetcar conductor. Why are you asking me about all this now?”

“Why in the name of God would a streetcar conductor go into the mines? Especially in the old days, when there wasn’t very much money in it?”

“He fell in love with my mother. I guess there weren’t many Bohunks in Nova Scotia at the time. My uncle Stan, my mother’s uncle. He was born in the old country. He ran into Daddy up in Halifax and invited him down for the weekend. He met Mumma and that was that. They got married. She didn’t want to move to Halifax, so …”

“Mum …” She had drifted back to the
TV
. “Mum …” She turned to face him again.

“I’ve been offered a job at Eastyard. Eastyard. You know, the new mine.”

He considered mentioning that Arvel had applied, too, that they’d both been interviewed and there was a good chance they’d
both be hired. But he did not want to bring up that possibility now. And it was Arvel’s job, anyway, to tell her what he was and was not going to do.

His mother hit the remote, shutting off the
TV
. She sat back in her chair and eyed him up and down.

“They want me for underground. I applied. I didn’t think I had a chance. Because I’ve got two years of university on my application, I thought that if I did get hired, they’d put me in an office job. Shuffling paper or adding up columns. I don’t know a thing about underground work. Maybe it’s because of my size.”

“Well, Ziv,” she was silent for a long time. “This is a complete shock to me.”

“The money is good there.”

“The people who worked the mines in the old days didn’t have the choices that you do. I can’t believe the politicians who are pushing to get this mine started. Do they have rocks in their heads? They’re offering you a free ticket on the
Titanic
, and you’re taking it.” She had a desperate look on her face, somewhere between fear and anger.

“I’m going to have to think about this. Anyway, don’t tell Dad about this. Whatever I decide, I want to be the one to tell him.”

His mother gave him a stern look. “A young person today would be crazy to go down there,” she said.

The old neighbourhood looked much better than it used to, even in his own childhood. Federal grants in the seventies had reroofed most of the places, provided energy-efficient windows, and covered the buildings with vinyl siding that was almost a visual duplicate of the clapboard that had been on many of them originally.

Ziv went for a walk. It was moving into late fall now. Many trees had shed their leaves completely. Those with leaves remaining held a ghostly yellow halo of light. Most Red Row backyards looked well-kept. The odd sundeck had sprouted at a back door. There was wooden lawn furniture scattered about, here and there. Piles of leaves had been raked up, orange garbage bags held more.

He passed the house his father had grown up in, stopped and tried to imagine it in 1928, the year his father was born. He sketched in a picket fence, an outhouse. He shrank the cherry tree to a sapling. He looked at the side yard and the area around the back door, and tried to imagine his father out there as a child, playing in the dirt.

At the north end of the Red Row, just before the Heather Motel and the Trans-Canada overpass, he came to the house where his mother had grown up.

The people who lived there now had done some upgrading since he could remember visiting his grandfather there. The original shed and outhouse had been replaced by a prefab plywood garden shed. The big black spruce tree his mother had told him she’d planted as a little girl was gone, the branches had been close enough to the roof of the house to cause a moss problem. The white picket fence that encircled the little front yard was the same one he remembered from his childhood. But his grandfather’s garden, once the pride of the family, if not the neighbourhood, had grown over with grass. He stopped at the fence for a moment and looked at the ground there, the plot that was in fact tiny, but that had seemed enormous when he’d been a boy. He remembered walking through it, between the rows, flowers towering over him, the fragrance of fresh-grown lettuce, the excitement of
pulling a carrot right from the ground, wiping it on his pants, and eating it, the flavour bursting in his mouth, the dirt and grit scratching his teeth.

Across the street stood the big cut-stone remains of the Cornish Pumphouse, a hundred-year-old relic of the mining heydays.

Ziv climbed up to the top of the highway overpass on Foord Street and leaned against the guardrail as cars whizzed past. Before him he could see the whole Red Row. Though the peak of his own family’s roof was obscured by houses and trees, he could see the steeple of Christ Church right across the street.

He looked at the river, the railroad tracks, the Cornish Pumphouse, the wash plant that had operated until recently for the tiny strip mine out on Foster Avenue, the single-storey row-houses and duplexes at the north of the Red Row, leading to the storey-and-a-half duplexes farther south. This neighbourhood was built almost a hundred years ago, and it hadn’t been meant to last. It was supposed to just crumble and disappear when the big seams had been depleted, or to be razed and replaced with something bigger and better as industrialization expanded. The supply of coal in Pictou County was far from exhausted. Having heard about the size of the original coal seam beneath the ground at Albion Mines, he’d once asked Fred Moore, an old Red Rower who’d been an underground foreman, about how much of the coal had been mined. “We haven’t had the half of it,” he said. “In a hundred and fifty years we haven’t had the half of it.” A hundred years ago, the possibilities for this area mushrooming into a city to rival Halifax must have seemed pretty strong. The steel industry had a strong foothold, the first hold it had in North America. North American railroading had started here.
The harbour in Pictou was excellent, the shipyard there as good as any.

When you stood back from this place you could see the marks, like looking at the rings of a stump: the growth, the stunted growth, the decay, the resuscitation. Albion Mines was not so much a ghost as an exhumed corpse, a half-charred body pulled prematurely from the crematorium.

That night, at the desk in his bedroom, he took out a sheet of loose-leaf and wrote the date at the top. He was going to write a letter to Meta in Japan. Her mother had been into Zellers last week and had given him her new address. He couldn’t believe that she’d really gone through with it. She’d moved to Japan. He remembered the first poster she’d ever seen advertising teaching opportunities overseas. It had been in a stairwell of the Student’s Union building, years ago, when Ziv had still been a student and he and Meta had still been going out together. She’d said then that that was what she’d do when she got out of school, but it had seemed so remote a possibility at the time.