Great Cape Breton Storytelling Read online

  Some, like Mickey, he knew too well to avoid. They stopped him in the mall to shoot the breeze or tell a joke and, without missing a beat, Doc grinned and lapsed into the local vernacular.

  “How she goin, b’y? On the back shift again?”

  “Yeah, and can’t get a wink of decent sleep,” Mickey growled cheerfully. “And you, you got’er made, you old bastard.”

  Doc laughed shortly, not fully meeting Mickey’s eyes, but glancing there, where the affable ignorance of the role Doc had played on that fateful night reproached him more severely than if the man had placed his large hands about his throat and squeezed until relief came in the form of that other blackness.

  Yes, they thought he had it made, retired for seven years already, and only fifty-eight. He had used an old war injury as an excuse to accept a pre-retirement package, not entirely untrue. The doctor had warned him for a long time that his bad knee couldn’t take the punishment. In the last couple of years the Officia1’s cane he used to sound the stone roof provided an additional support on his rounds of the north wall, a necessary insurance against those times when the knee gave without warning.

  Mickey’s grin called him back to the reality of the mall. “Hey, b’y, you with me or against me?”

  “I was just thinking —”

  “I tried that once. Hurt like hell.” He chuckled. Doc was silent, watching the people pass. “Seven years today, Doc.”

  Mickey let the words slip out of him, natural as breathing, a soft echo of the phrase that had been passing through Doc’s mind all morning. He did not need a calendar to place the date. In his mind, a year was a circle starting and ending at this point. The cycle of his life revolved in sync with it.

  “He woulda been thirty-four next month, my boy.”

  Doc nodded. “I’m sorry, Mickey. Maybe I — if I could’ve done it different —”

  A tide whose period was twelve months, one that had come seven times now, surged against his throat, threatening to swallow him up and drown him.

  Mickey gave him a reassuring slap on his back. “Nobody coulda done nothin, Doc. But thanks.”

  Doc dampened a flare of anger at Mickey’s ignorant forgiveness. “It was my wall,” he said.

  Mickey shrugged uncomfortably. “How were you supposed to know?”

  “It was my job to know,” Doc snapped. “It was my job to —”

  The temperature was rising, the mall closing in. Above him a skylight admitted full, bright sun, but around the perimeter of his vision the light was failing. Figures who, a moment ago, were strolling the mall now seemed to be coming at him from all directions, bursting into the closing lens of consciousness, all with accusing faces, with eyes that knew what Mickey Porter did not.

  He made for a nearby bench protected from the glorious sunlight by a net of ficus branches. Embarrassed by his weakness, he fiddled with his cane. Through the roar in his ears he could clearly distinguish the unyielding tap of its copper tip sounding the terrazzo.

  The Deputy’s cane, his own, rapped the cement floor of the wash-house. Doc tripped up a ginger tabby, one of several cats that came every night looking for scraps. He flung it aside with his boot.

  The manager and clerk were waiting grim-faced, warned by the staccato click. When Doc had no time for the strays, something had to be up.

  Doc set down the Clanney — the lamp whose flame was an omen he read like a mystic reading an oracle. He knew what Frank thought, that it was about as accurate as a crystal ball. He felt the burn of ridicule along his back as he scratched his report into the book with a dull pencil, anticipating his defence, reviewing the facts in his mind.

  In the presence of methane gas, a slender yellow sheath encompasses the normal blue naphtha flame inside the Clanney’s glass case. The height of the sheath indicates the percentage of gas. But it is not merely the presence of gas that creates the danger. It is the ratio of methane to oxygen that is critical. There must be sufficient oxygen to feed the explosion, enough gas to fuel it. When seven to fifteen per cent of the air is composed of methane, an explosion that could be measured on the Richter scale might be initiated by something as incidental as the spark of metal on metal. A concentration as low as two per cent signalled conditions dangerous enough to evacuate the mine.

  Today, almost half an inch of yellow surged up from the burning blue bud. No, the measurement wasn’t scientific, not like the new electronic sensor they were coming out with. But Doc wasn’t sure he could trust a gadget that acted without an innate regard for human life.

  “You gotta shut ’er down, Frank,” he said with resolve as he turned around.

  Frank nudged Dannie, the clerk. “Get me that report, will you?”

  Dannie sidled away, reluctantly accepting the bogus dismissal.

  “I can’t do that, Doc, and you know it.”

  “One and three-quarters, Frank,” he stated solemnly, referring to the percentage of the lethal gas. It was as close to the limit as he had ever seen. It scared the hell out of him.

  Unmoved, Frank walked over, nudged the report book toward Doc. “Kenny’ll open a few traps, clear it out.” Doc tapped the pencil; staring him down.

  “We lost two days’ production last week from that pan-line breakdown,” Frank said. “You rather be responsible for four hundred men on the welfare when the company shuts ’er down for good? ’Cause that’s what they’re gonna do if we don’t keep production up.”

  They heard a file drawer close and Dannie shuffling restlessly about in the inner office.

  “Let’s keep that just between you and me, for now.” Frank nodded conspiratorially, with an affected look of concern for the common good.

  Doc could second-guess Frank, but he didn’t know for sure. Of four mines, this was the last left in this town. The others had closed not for lack of coal but when the proportion of work hours to travel time became unprofitable, when two hours or more were lost in transporting each shift of men from the surface to the workable coal face. But who knew what other criteria management used, what production quotas they required?

  Doc pictured the line of faces that had passed down the rake with him that morning: Sam, supporting both his mother and his mother-in-law; Reggie with nine kids under the age of eleven; John R. whose house burned to the ground last winter, and no insurance; every one of them with his own tale of woe. He reached for the pencil and swore to God this would be the last time he would give in to that bastard. Somehow, next time he would dig deeper, find that place in his heart where courage and youthful dreams were stored together.

  “So, are we shuttin down or what?” Dannie wanted to know.

  “Nah!” Frank guffawed. Taking the pencil from Doc’s hand, he pressed the lead firmly into a conspicuous dot, embedding the lie forever into the page. “Doc put the decimal point in the wrong place, is all.”

  Desperation saturated every pore as Doc scrubbed the coal dust off his body that day. More worn and raw than he’d been in years, he emerged from the wash-house a wounded animal and returned home to bleed anger into the family. Theresa, made over-sensitive by a separate issue with her sister, retaliated with such a vengeance that Doc slunk away ashamed, knowing she should have been the balm that soothed him, knowing it was his own fault that she had never been that to him.

  Later, he found her in bed, crying. She hadn’t done that since she went through the change. He turned to her, a darker form against a dark pillow, wanting to vent his rage, not at her, but with her. But how could he say the things he wanted to without making her party to the conspiracy?

  A rare torrent of emotion raged through him, a flash flood that filled him to bursting. He should have stood up for what he believed. He should have told them. He should have at least been able to tell her. He remembered a strong young man who had helped save the civilized world, who, if he had not always acted with courage, had returned from the war charged
with it. That was what he was feeling. Recognition of it spurred him to action. He cursed the hour that prevented it, and settled for resolution.

  By God, he would do it. Tomorrow. Walk into the office, right up to Frank’s ugly face and tell him he had endangered the lives of his buddies for the last time. He would take this action, be a buddy to all of them.

  Buddy. On the surface you might never give the man the time of day. Underground, he was your best pal. Your lifeline. Your saviour if the situation called for it. And you were his. Linked by danger and experience, you shared the darkest places imaginable, as if the tunnels you burrowed opened parallel passageways into your souls, as if in the sharing of your daily tasks you touched together something unspeakable, an ultimate truth that no outsider could ever hope to comprehend.

  He thought of Theresa lying beside him, cold and tense, and he smiled in the midnight gloom. She was his buddy too, his surface buddy.

  The burden on his heart eased. He reached for Theresa’s hand lying outside the blankets. He held on, tightly, expressing all the will of his heart in his touch. Her fingers warmed and relaxed and when she turned to come into his arms, he knew the apology was complete.

  Tomorrow, then.

  Doc was wide awake at the blare of the whistle, his chest pounding. He willed the long note to stop. Please, God, let it be the shift whistle or the double blow to announce that the shift would not work. But on and on it went, an unbearable wail riding the silent night, alerting the town to emergency.

  He pulled on a pair of pants over his pajama bottoms and was in the pit yard before he realized he was still wearing his corduroy slippers. He burst into the chaos of the crowded wash-house, grabbed the man nearest the door.

  “Where?” The single word was all he could get out.

  The man shrugged him off, not hearing over the din.

  He asked again, loudly: “Charlie! Where is it?”

  “Four north.” The informant eyed him cautiously. “Your wall, ain’t it, Doc?”

  He nodded weakly.

  “Musta built up pretty quick,” Charlie said, letting him off the hook even then.

  Again, the faint movement of his head, another acknowledgement of the conspiracy to which he was now, irrevocably, a full partner.

  Other miners, roused like Doc from their beds, waited alongside frantic families. They exchanged glances with Doc, with each other. A resolute shake of the head needed no explanation. Coulda been my shift.

  It was hours before anything happened. The first draegermen to come up were assailed by a dozen men in the same breath. “How many?”

  They were grim. “Don’t know,” said one. “Fifteen come up. The ambulance will take the worst, but we could use a hand if anybody knows first aid.”

  The word spread back through the milling throng until it reached Doc’s ears.

  Bent over an injured man, his medic experience was fresh as all those yesterdays ago. But there was an element missing, something he had once had in the grasp of his heart. He could work no miracles here, only wait helplessly with the others and, from time to time, hold a small paper cup of water to a dying man’s lips.

  “Come on, buddy, take a drink.”

  Mickey pressed a styrofoam ridge to Doc’s lips. He drank. It was lukewarm tap water, reeking of chlorine. What he needed was a good shot of black rum. He forced himself to swallow.

  “I gave them water like that. Just like that. In little paper cups.”

  Doc talked down the mall, and Mickey looked in that direction. “Who?” he asked, mystified.

  “Your boy. The others.”

  “Jesus, Doc. You still beatin yourself over the head with that? It was seven years ago, b’y. Let it go.”

  Doc shook his head. “I killed them all, Mickey,” he said hoarsely. “The five of them.”

  He took another swallow and looked up into Mickey’s silent, looming presence.

  “Get a grip, b’y. Nobody’s to blame.”

  Doc bent his head, slowly shook it, unabsolved. Now, as during the hours of vigil seven years before, he tried to imagine, to put himself underground when it happened. The explosion deep below the surface was not beyond his imagination. Surely it must compare to what happened inside him that night when he had imploded, when he had become what time made of some ancient forest on this very site eons ago, a shallow blackened thread that once was a man named Roddie MacSween.

  D.R. MacDonald

  Sailing

  I tell my father to watch his step. He is ascending the small deck that leads to the wooden tub of hot water. He is nearly eighty and it is dark here under the long redwood branches. “If I can’t climb this, I’d better turn in my ticket,” he says. He was a seaman on the Great Lakes for forty-one years, as long as I have been living. His ticket is his masters papers. A wet February wind gusts through the limbs above us and I think of all the weather he has had in his face, the storms and the ice.

  He hisses at the heat, but with a deep sigh settles slowly into the water where I am sitting. He told me his future is waking one morning at a time, he’s at that point in his life. Somewhere a cold, dark wave has been rising, he said without melancholy, and it will arrive probably by night and sweep him away. I said I didn’t know you were ill. I’m not, he said, it’s just a feeling. I want to ask him about this but we have no tradition of such asking.

  “More rain coming,” he says. “It won’t last.” He reads the weather easily. We had a storm recently that broke up a string of days he considered weatherless, a picture book of sun and blue sky. He believes, I think, there is a connection between such days and the way I live, with no course, no destination. He was amused at how people on the street looked harried, as if the storm were not a natural occurrence. By nightfall there was heavy wind and rain. Great wooshes rose up through the trees and some came down, their roots not used to such buffeting. My father paced the living room. “Look at that!” he’d say, his grin lit by lightning. The power went out. We played pinochle with two ten-cent candles burning between us while a half-cooked chicken sweated grease in the oven. “People around here never think about disaster,” he said, not smugly, but just to let me know he knew the truth.

  I too sailed on the Lakes. That was the closest my father and I have ever been, those years I worked my way through college decking and coalpassing on the big ore freighters. We were not such strangers then. I was moving away from him and closer to him at the same time. Because I had gone sailing we had, in the winter, things to talk about. But I left and came to live differently over the years. For him, routine is still the framework of life, a seaman’s sense of work and hours. My employment is sporadic and I wake late. He rises at six-thirty and could sleep no longer unless drugged — as unlikely for him as it is likely for me. What kind of dreams does he wake from? Does he always know they are dreams or does he sometimes, for a moment, feel he has sailed over the edge of the world?

  Over the Pacific in the west faint lightning trembles. I suggest we go back into the apartment but my father says no, nothing to fear from lightning like that. A soft drizzle works down through the redwood’s needles and cools our faces. The air is brighter now with reflected light, like that of an overcast winter afternoon. Ivy glistens through the warm mist. My body feels torpid, weightless. I can see trees towering nearly leafless above the house like bare hedges against the sky. Trees of Heaven. Here autumn and winter merge. A few leaves still cling like snared birds. “I read somewhere people have expired in these things,” my father says. I assure him we are far from danger. He shrugs, rubbing water over his shoulders like liniment. “I would not want to die here,” he says, “like a child in a bath.”

  One evening we happened upon some Cape Breton fiddle music on a small FM station. My father, who was a grown man before he left Cape Breton, got out of his chair and did a few soft steps, heel and toe. “Oh I used to step out with the best of th
em,” he said. He sat down and we listened to the host of this Celtic program — a woman with Irish affections and a mind full of political mist — interview a young man who was, apparently, versed in Cape Breton folk music. But, strangled either by ignorance or stage fright, he could not locate Cape Breton very precisely. “It’s west of Ireland, isn’t it?” the woman said helpfully. “And east of Quebec?” After a long delay, the man said, “yes,” which was true but not useful, and there Cape Breton remained. But my father enjoyed “Donald MacLean’s Farewell to Oban” and “Miss Lyle’s Reel.” He told me suddenly about having pneumonia when he was three years old, an illness often fatal in those days, especially in the country, and how his dad made him a small wooden mallet so he could rap the headboard when he needed anything or was afraid. For the rest of the evening he was quiet.

  I do things for him my mother once did, when he was home for the winter. I mix him a whisky in the afternoon and again in the evening when we talk. I bake Bisquick biscuits, cut cheese, cook, ask him if he’s comfortable. I do this because he can take care of himself, not because he cannot. Around the corner from us there is a convalescent home and his first day here my father saw a frail old man babystepping by our window with a walker. I had to smile when he said, with real sympathy, “Poor old fella,” as if there were years between them. Last night, halfway through his second whisky and feeling good, he remembered a country party (“Long before I was married”), a wedding reception back in Cape Breton. A lot of people came to this cold house on Cape Dauphin, stamping snow at the door, December be damned, and there was dancing and boozing, horses packed flank to flank in the barn. A pal of his got sick from drink, but before going upstairs to find a bed he searched around the yard in the dark, finally yanking out of the snow an enamel creamer to set by his bedside. Not until morning, after he’d thrown up in it twice, did he discover the bottom of the creamer was rusted out completely. My father likes reminiscences like this and laughs easily, shaking his head at how vivid they remain. But after the funny part he said, almost casually, “Your mother was there,” and the timbre of his voice changed, just slightly, just enough to notice.