Twenty-Six (34 page)

E
nnis attends the families’ group meetings at the Plymouth Fire Hall, and unlike most others, he has never cried here with grief. He’s never shouted, either, into a microphone or from his seat on the floor. He’s never spoken, as a matter of fact, and except to raise his hand to vote for or against some motion, he has not participated at all in the proceedings. He feels emptied somehow of emotions, and comes to the meetings mostly out of a feeling of obligation to Arvel’s memory, and the memory of the terrible thing that was done to him.

He sits today where he always sits: in the very last row at the back, in an aisle seat near the door so that he can get up and walk out quickly at any time he desires without being noticed or making a scene. Dunya has never come to one of these meetings, although he always asks her to go with him. She sits in her white room at the front of the house and quietly refuses. He feels this sitting is somehow something she must do now, and he himself
has such mixed feelings about the meetings that he has no desire to try to convince her.

Ziv has also refused to join him here, and the two have fought recently, just last night, over whether there is any point in the families fighting for redress after their loved ones have died. Ziv accused him of living in the past, with his talk about justice and democracy, words that Ennis himself hardly felt he believed in any more.

“Going to those meetings is the least I can do for my son,” Ennis had said.

“Well, I’m your son as well, and if you want to do something for me, don’t ask me to go with you and watch people fight for what they won’t get. It’s too late to do something for Arvel. And why now? You never did a thing for him in life. You know, the only reason he took that job was to please you. If it wasn’t for you, he would never have taken it.”

At these words from his son, Ennis felt anger and hurt rise in him, but he merely lowered his head and walked away.

Despite the fact that the families were duped in this very building by Eastyard in the early days after the explosion, tricked under false pretenses into not speaking with the media while the whole world was still watching, family members seem to have grown attached to the Plymouth Fire Hall, the place where many of them had first met each other, first formed the idea of themselves as a group. They’d hoped here, they’d hugged here, they’d feared, they’d cried, they’d prayed, they’d mourned.

And so, with the disaster now months behind them, they gather here in the smell of motor oil and disinfectant, in the over-cleaned, underlit banquet room, still used most for wedding receptions. They plot and debate, searching for a way of rescuing
some sense of justice out of such a terrible event. They want an investigation into what led to the deaths of their loved ones. They want financial compensation for survivors. Many of them want to see a criminal trial for former Eastyard managers, all of whom have fled the province.

From the podium today, all the talk is about money. On the floor is a demand for a forensic audit of Eastyard’s books, partly to trace every dollar of taxpayers’ money that got spent on the mine. The managers, the high-salary-drawers, are all still alive, and many family members want someone to track the government money and whose pockets it made its way into.

The whole idea of a forensic audit is a waste of time, as far as Ennis is concerned. None of the money is ever coming back to the government anyway, even if they do find out where it went. There are more important things they could be focusing on, things that might actually make a difference for the families who’ve lost loved ones. But he feels only half-present at the meeting as it is, and the prospect of standing up at the podium himself and speaking into the microphone seems impossible, unthinkable, like trying to breathe underwater. He would stand up and open his mouth to speak only to drown in his own despair.

The woman at the mike is Audrey Jenkins, the wife of Steve Jenkins, whose body was the first one recovered after the explosion, one of the eleven bodies actually brought back to the surface. In the first days after the explosion, she stood out as one of the strongest, patting others on the back in the fire hall, on her hands and knees with her own four children and the children of others, smearing poster paints over newsprint with the names of the missing in the vain hope that the miners would return. From the hospital, after he’d had his face broken,
Ennis saw her on the news, filmed from across a police barricade, breaking down on the way from her car to the fire hall, minutes after identifying her husband’s charred body. She’d gone right to the ground, face-down and without movement, until her twin sisters each took an arm and dragged her through the door.

She is a small woman with wide shoulders under a brown T-shirt. “Is anybody adding all this up?” she is saying, her voice strong and firm, but just strained enough to suggest that it could crack at any moment. She waves a newspaper clipping over her head. According to what she has already said, the clipping dates from the planning stages of the Eastyard operation, and details the provincial government’s promise of millions of dollars in loan guarantees for the company.

Ennis glances down into the coffee-stained khaki tote bag at his feet. On the outside there is a Co-op logo. Inside, brown manila folders are stuffed with his own collection of clippings.

“I can’t make head or tail of these numbers,” Audrey Jenkins is saying. There is a sudden rush of feedback and she pulls back from the microphone until it stops. “What’s the difference between an operating grant, a tax break, and a loan guarantee?” The podium is a portable music stand. A single microphone plugged into a guitar amplifier is the only
PA
system. “We need an independent person who knows something about money. They’ve got to get into those locked cabinets over there.” She points in the direction of the mine, although documents have been removed to
RCMP
headquarters. But mine officials had been given unimpeded access to company files for days following the disaster, and the chance of there being any incriminating documents among what the police have are nil.

Ennis puts a hand through the loops of his Co-op bag and rises to his feet. He’s had enough already. The speaker looks at him accusingly. With hunched shoulders he excuses himself into his chest, inaudible to anyone but himself, and walks out through the main door.

It is a clear, windless winter day. The landscape is all white snow and grey trees. Here and there is the pale yellow of stubborn oak leaves, still clinging to their branches. Ennis’s breath is pushing out now in crisp columns from his mouth as he contemplates the walk home, more than two miles. He sets the bag between his feet and it slouches heavily to one side while he zips his jacket.

“Ennis.”

He turns at the sound of the voice, almost tripping over the canvas bag between his feet. Allie McInnis is coming through the double doors from the fire hall, the chemical smell of the interior coming with him.

Allie is part of the families group, although he is not closely related to anyone who died. His wife is a distant cousin of the Comber family, whose boy Nicholas is one of those still underground. Everyone in that family is still grieving too much to get involved with the group, so Allie stands in for them.

“Allie,” Ennis says. “I didn’t see you in there.”

When Allie opens his mouth again to speak, Ennis notices that his lower dentures are missing a tooth, a black square in his smile. He wonders whether he is responsible for this.

“I was a way up front,” Allie says. He looks down a moment at the bag at Ennis’s feet. Manila folders are visible. Clippings of all sizes protrude at odd angles, “Ennis, can I talk to you for a minute?” Allie has already zipped up his heavy coat and is winding
a long navy scarf about his neck. Long tubes of steam exit his nostrils as he exhales.

Ennis works his watch out of his sleeve and looks at it. “I have to walk home. It’s getting dark.”

“I’ve seen you walking a lot. You’re looking real good. You look like you lost a lot of weight.”

“Well,” Ennis says. He shifts uncomfortably. “The face isn’t looking so good.”

“Swelling’s come down a lot. I saw you up by the post office last month. I was just driving by.”

Ennis looks at the ground and notices the pebbles of salt he is standing on. He scrapes a foot back and forth and listens to the gravelly crunch. “I guess the boys at the Tartan probably wonder what the hell happened to me.”

“I haven’t been back there much,” Allie says. “Anyway … Look, Ennis. I’m not really a family member here, Ennis, or anything. I’m here for the Combers.”

“I know that.”

“Anyway, Ennis. More than one person has asked me to talk to you. I know others have asked you already. There’s an executive committee you know, Ennis.”

Ennis shakes his head. “I’m not interested,” he says.

“We could use your help, Ennis.”

“Things are going fine as far as I can see.”

“Seems an awful waste, Ennis. A man with your experience.”

“That young lawyer the executive hired. He knows more than I ever will.”

“Anyway, Ennis. I don’t want to be harassing you or anything like that. There’s some people know I know you. They asked me to put a word in, is all.”

Ennis looks out at the bare branches of trees in the valley. The sun is long down beyond the horizon and the clouds there are streaked deep red. Over in the east, the blue of the sky where it shows through clouds is deepening. Behind him, somewhere beneath the white and grey landscape he looks out on, lies the body of his son, soot-soaked and damp, rotting. Up over the little hill in front of him, the bridge that will take him across the river glistens.

“I’ll see you later, Allie,” Ennis says. He picks up the canvas bag and heads for the bridge.

Ziv is slouched into the leatherette padding of the stand-up bar at Stumpy’s, which is right across the parking lot from Zellers. He’s come straight from work and is wearing his dress shirt, the tie and collar loosened now in the heat of the overcrowded room. The dance floor throbs with writhing bodies. He looks at it sideways, trying to make out individual people, but can only see darkness and anonymous shapes. He fumbles through a front pocket and extracts all the money he has left: two dollars and fourteen cents in quarters, nickels, and pennies. It’s enough to cover one more beer.

He raises his head slowly and squints out along the periphery of the room, reorienting himself, then steers in the direction of the dark hallway that leads to the washrooms, shifting and elbowing his way there. Even the hallway is packed, and he stands at the end of it for a few moments before he realizes that the crowd here is not a lineup, but merely overflow from the dance floor. Some people are actually dancing in the hallway. The cigarette
smoke is mixed with pot smoke. Ziv squeezes his way into the bathroom and empties his bladder into one of the urinals. He’s at the sink, washing his hands, gawking drunkenly at his own drunken face, when a firm hand claps him on the shoulder.