Twenty-Six (45 page)

A short time later, he gets up to go downstairs, but stops in front of his father’s bedroom door. The canvas bag of news clippings is on the floor at the foot of the father’s bed. Ziv puts off going out to mail Meta’s letter a moment and steps into the room. With the slightest twinge of guilt, he plucks up the bag by the carry handles and takes it into his bedroom. He palms the bedspread flat on the top of his bed, then carefully spills the contents of the entire bag onto the spread. His father has organized everything carefully into labelled file folders.
Testimony, Political Promises, Company Claims, Legal Action
are the first of the labels he reads. He pulls out a folder at random from the stack.
Families’ Group
is written on the tab. He opens the folder, and clippings slide out onto his lap. Suddenly, he feels a wave of sadness. All this care his father has taken. All this care that has come to nothing.

Ziv wonders if it has taken Arvel’s dying for him to see that maybe his father is right – what has he done to change anything?

Ziv wakes suddenly when he hears a loud noise from downstairs. It’s Christmas morning, not yet light out.

He goes downstairs and sees his father sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in a flannel shirt and thick wool socks. There’s a pot of coffee on, and Ziv pours himself a cup without even
looking at his father, who is finishing up a piece of toast. They have exchanged only a bare minimum of words and have mostly managed to avoid each other since their fight several days back. He puts bread into the toaster and takes the jam out of the fridge.

“Look,” Ennis says abruptly. “There’s only the two of us here so we might as well act like we have something to say to each other. Why don’t you take those skis I got you last winter and come with me.”

“Skiing!” Ziv is surprised. He’s never skied in his life.

“I’ve got everything we need.” Ennis picks up an orange nylon backpack from the floor near the door. “You’d better put on some warm clothes.”

Ziv looks at the serious expression on his father’s face. “Fine. Fine, I’ll go, if it’s so important,” he mumbles awkwardly.

“Go on, get yourself ready.”

“I have to eat something. That is, if you don’t mind,” Ziv says, throwing his toast on a plate and taking it with him upstairs.

When he comes down a few minutes later he puts on his parka and boots. His father is already outside, clearing snow from the car with a broom. Ziv sees two sets of cross-country skis and poles strapped to the roof rack of Ennis’s car.

Snow has softened the backyard. His father has swept the step, but the driveway is unshovelled. A plough has gone by, but that could have been hours ago, and snow has fallen since, though now that it has stopped, there are clear patches of sky overhead, a dusting of stars over purple-black that will turn blue before long.

Ennis throws the backpack into the trunk and sits down in the driver’s seat. Ziv settles in beside him.

“So where are we going?” Ziv says.

“Out past MacLellan’s Brook,” Ennis says. “I saw a moose out
there not long ago.”

Ennis pulls the car out of the driveway and turns down Foster Avenue, steering between high banks of snow on either side. They pass the miner’s monument, towering over them like a figure from Greek mythology. The heater motor in the car hums noisily as they drive south and east.

When they get to a section of Bridge Avenue where the Eastyard site is visible, Ziv is almost surprised at the sight of the silos. The two pale columns of featureless concrete could not look more like a memorial if they were originally designed that way. Lit with floodlights, they are visible far above the roofs of houses.

Ziv is convinced the silos must be saved, preserved, made part of a larger display that memorializes the whole ugly history of coal mining in the county. The people in the families’ group who want the silos removed will come to see what a powerful symbol they’ve got, right there on the landscape.

He will call Willis and offer to help in the fight to preserve the site.

“The Eastyard Memorial,” he finds himself saying aloud.

“What?” Ennis says. He turns the car off Bridge Avenue and up the hill in Blue Acres, headed for MacLellan’s Brook, leaving Albion Mines behind them. Snow has clung in blankets to houses and cars, trees are heavy with it. The temperature has dropped overnight so that the earlier layers of snow, which were moist and sticky, have frozen into ice on the road, and the more recent layers, lighter and more powdery, have dusted the surface of the ice, making it even more slippery.

Ennis tells Ziv he has been skiing recently at the place where
the plough stops and turns around, but heavy snowfall has erased any traces of his visits. They pull up next to a snowbank and park the car. They untie their skis and stand them in the bank. Ennis throws the stick of blue wax into the snow next to them and opens the backpack. He takes out the Thermos and pours coffee into a small cup. He offers a larger cup to Ziv.

“My father took me out here when I was a kid,” Ennis says. “It’s so long ago now that I don’t even recall if we came here just once or if it was more than that. We were hunting. I’m pretty sure this is just about exactly the spot. I remember the way the road curves. He had his brother’s truck and we parked it over here.” He indicates a place in the woods to the left of the car. “This was all a field at the time, and there was an abandoned farmhouse right behind the field. I remember we took the old Winchester out of the box of the truck. I was too young to carry it. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven. And we walked over to a spot about here where the tops of those two hills almost line up.”

Ennis nods to the right. There is so little light yet that Ziv can just make out the two hills his father is indicating.

Ziv takes a drink of his coffee, which is rapidly cooling in the cup. He and his father are standing almost shoulder to shoulder. The snow squeaks under their ski boots as they shuffle their feet a little to stay warm.

Below them, to the east, there is a shallow valley that undulates under a thick blanket of snow.

The sky above the horizon is beginning to streak purple and red. Then an orange-yellow spire appears above the trees, pointing upward from the place where the sun will soon rise. Then an odd

The sky above the horizon is beginning to streak purple and red. Then an orange-yellow spire appears above the trees, pointing upward from the place where the sun will soon rise. Then an odd shape begins to form under the spire.

After a moment, a flat wedge of bright orange begins to lift out of the trees in the distance. It’s such an odd sight, Ziv finds himself holding his breath, as though waiting for something else momentous to accompany it. But the wedge rises, broad end first until it takes on the shape of a long flag or banner. Then, even more quickly than it arose, it sinks into the horizon again and immediately the sun itself begins creeping above the horizon, exactly the colour of the wedge that preceded it.

“What the hell was that?” Ziv says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“When the conditions are right, you can get this,” Ennis says. “False sunrise, my father used to call it. He showed it to me once a very long time ago. He died when I was eight. I’ve only seen it a couple of times since.”

In the half-light, with his back to the dark sky in the west, his father’s face is unreadable.

“Let’s go,” Ennis says, and they turn back to the car.

They look west now, out over the trees and down the first hundred metres of the trail they’re going to ski. It’s still dark enough that the snow acts as a light source, illuminating the ground beneath trees. The snow covers the trees thickly, but in the places where patches of evergreen needles are visible, they appear black in contrast to the snow.

Ziv notices some emotion on his father’s face. His eyes are glistening and Ziv wonders if he is about to cry. With a mittened hand, his father digs the blue wax out of the snow and begins rubbing his skis with it.

When the skis are waxed and ready, they clip the toes of their boots to the bindings.

Ziv hangs back and lets his father lead. He follows, nestling his skis into the grooves his father has made. It will take a few moments to adjust to the exact grip the wax has on the snow. His kicks are unsteady and off-balance. He is unable to pick up his heels. He looks ahead at his father in disbelief. His big shoulders are squared out, the arms working the poles like pistons. He looks frail somehow, despite his competence.

As light creeps into the sky, Ziv becomes more aware of the snow-laden trees around him. A few branches have cracked under their burdens, but most are arched gracefully in unaccustomed directions. Big spruces and firs stand over him, on either side of the trail. Under the weight of snow they bend toward the ground. Two white spruces, squared off on opposite sides of the trail, appear to be bowing to each other. The tips of their branches reach out across a lifetime’s distance toward the other, ready to shake hands or embrace. Even evergreens are dormant in the winter, Ziv knows, not dead but the next thing to it. After the coldness of a dark season, one that seems to go on forever, they manage somehow to rekindle, within themselves, a life.

For first-hand details about underground mining, I leaned heavily on Shaun Comish’s incredible
The Westray Tragedy: A Miner’s Story
(Fernwood Publishing, Halifax, 1993.
ISBN
1-895686-26-1), which I recommend every Canadian read.

For salient wisdom from the point of view of miners themselves, Judith Hoegg Ryan’s
Coal In Our Blood: 200 years of coal mining in Nova Scotia’s Pictou County
(Formac Publishing Company, Halifax, 1992.
ISBN
0-88780-215-x) was indispensable.

For political and economic insight into the Westray case,
Calculated Risk: Greed, Politics, and the Westray Tragedy
by Dean Jobb (Nimbus Publishing, Halifax, 1994.
ISBN
1-55109-070-8) was a valuable source.

For general background information on mining in Pictou County,
The Pictonian Colliers
by James M. Cameron (The Nova Scotia Museum, Halifax, 1974) is the old standby.

Finally,
The Westray Story: A Predicable Path to Disaster: Report of the Westray Mine Public Inquiry
, Justice K. Peter Richard, Commissioner (Province of Nova Scotia, 1997.
ISBN
0-88871-465-3), is a lucid, accessible, heart-rending account of the whole fiasco.

I wish to thank the following:

Ellen Seligman, my editor, for pushing me and this book to be the most we could be. Denise Bukowski, my agent, for getting excited and doing something about it. Kathy, Joel, Mairi, and Laura, for letting me disappear into the red room. Mum and Pop,
for a warm bed, some peace and quiet, and high-calorie meals. Friends, colleagues, and family members, for providing encouragement, writing space, coffee, babysitting, whatever. Students, past and present, for keeping me honest and reacquainting me with the beginner’s eye. Dale Saunders, for accounting acumen and patience.