Island (6 page)

As I move down the stairs there is still no movement from the two larger rooms across the hall and for this I am most grateful. I do not really know how to say good-bye as I have never before said it to anyone and, because I am uncertain, I wish to say it now to as few as possible. Who knows, though, perhaps I may even be rather good at it. I lay the packsack down on the second stair from the bottom where it is not awfully visible and walk into the kitchen. My mother is busy at her stove and my father is standing with his back to the room looking through the window over a view of slate-grey slag heaps and ruined skeletal mine tipples and out toward the rolling sea. They are not greatly surprised to see me as it is often like this, just the three of us in the quiet early morning. But today I cannot afford to be casual and I must say what must be said in the short space of time occupied by only the three of us. “I think I’ll go away today,” I say, trying to sound as offhand as possible. Only a slight change in the rhythm of my mother’s poking at the stove indicates that she has heard me, and my father still stands looking through the window out to sea. “I think I’ll go right now,” I add, my voice sort of
trailing off, “before the others get up. It will be easier that way.”

My mother moves the kettle, which has started to boil, toward the back of the stove, as if stalling for time, then she turns and says, “Where will you go? To Blind River?”

Her response is so little like that which I anticipated that I feel strangely numb. For I had somehow expected her to be greatly surprised, astounded, astonished, and she is none of these. And her mention of Blind River, the centre of Northern Ontario’s uranium mines, is something and someplace that I had never even thought of. It is as if my mother had not only known that I was to leave but had even planned my route and final destination. I am reminded of my reading in school of the way Charles Dickens felt about the blacking factory and his mother’s being so fully in favour of it. In favour of a life for him which he considered so terrible and so far beneath his imagined destiny.

My father turns from the window and says, “You are only eighteen today, perhaps you could wait awhile. Something might turn up.” But within his eyes I see no strong commitment to his words and I know he feels that waiting is at best weary and at worst hopeless. This also makes me somehow rather disappointed and angry as I had thought somehow my parents would cling to me in a kind of desperate fashion and I would have to be very firm and strong.

“What is there to wait for?” I say, asking a question that is useless and to which I know the all-too-obvious answer. “Why do you want me to stay here?”

“You misunderstand,” says my father, “you are free to go if you want to. We are not forcing you or asking you to do anything. I am only saying that you do not
have
to go now.”

But suddenly it becomes very important that I
do
go now, because it seems things cannot help but get worse. So I say, “Good-bye. I will write, but it will not be from Blind River.” I add the last as an almost unconscious little gibe at my mother.

I go and retrieve my packsack and then pass back through the house, out the door and even through the little gate. My parents follow me to the gate. My mother says, “I was planning a cake for today …” and then stops uncertainly, her sentence left hanging in the early morning air. She is trying to make amends for her earlier statement and rather desperately gropes her way back to the fact of my birthday. My father says, “Perhaps you should go over home. They may not be there if and when you come again.”

It is but a half block to “over home,” the house of my father’s parents, who have always been there as long as I can remember and who have always provided a sort of haven for all of us through all our little storms, and my father’s statement that they will not be there forever is an intimation of something that I have never really considered before. So now I move with a sort of apprehension over the ashes and cinder-filled potholes of the tired street toward the old house blackened with the coal dust of generations. It is as yet hardly seven
A.M.
and it is as if I am some early morning milkman moving from one house to another to leave good-byes instead of bottles beside such quiet doors.

Inside my grandparents’ house, my grandfather sits puffing his pipe by the window, while passing the beads of his rosary through fingers which are gnarled and have been broken more times than he can remember. He has been going deaf for some time and he does not turn his head when the door closes behind
me. I decide that I will not start with him because it will mean shouting and repetition and I am not sure I will be able to handle that. My grandmother, like my mother, is busy at her stove. She is tall and white-haired and although approaching eighty she is still physically imposing. She has powerful, almost masculine hands and has always been a big-boned person without ever having been heavy or ever having any difficulty with her legs. She still moves swiftly and easily and her eyesight and hearing are perfect.

“I am going away today,” I say as simply as I can.

She pokes with renewed energy at her stove and then answers: “It is just as well. There is nothing for one to do here anyway. There was never anything for one to do here.”

She has always spoken with the Gaelic inflection of her youth and in that detached third-person form which I had long ago suggested that she modernize.

“Come here, James,” she says and takes me into her pantry, where with surprising agility she climbs up on a chair and takes from the cupboard’s top shelf a huge cracked and ancient sugar bowl. Within it there are dusty picture postcards, some faded yellow payslips which seem ready to disintegrate at the touch, and two yellowed letters tied together with a shoelace. The locations on the payslips and on the postcards leap at me across a gulf of dust and years: Springhill, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Yellowknife, Britannia Beach, Butte, Virginia City, Escanaba, Sudbury, Whitehorse, Drumheller, Harlan, Ky., Elkins, W. Va., Fernie, B.C., Trinidad, Colo. – coal and gold, copper and lead, gold and iron, nickel and gold and coal. East and West and North
and South. Mementoes and messages from places that I so young and my grandmother so old have never seen.

“Your father was under the ground in all those places,” she says half-angrily, “the same way he was under the ground here before he left and under it after he came back. It seems we will be underground long enough when we are dead without seeking it out while we are still alive.”

“But still,” she says after a quiet pause and in a sober tone, “it was what he was good at and wanted to do. It was just not what I wanted him to do, or at least I did not want him to do it here.”

She unties the shoelace and shows me the two letters. The first is dated March 12, 1938, and addressed General Delivery, Kellogg, Idaho: “I am getting old now and I would like very much if you would come back and take my working place at the mine. The seam is good for years yet. No one has been killed for some time now. It is getting better. The weather is mild and we are all fine. Don’t bother writing. Just come. We will be waiting for you. Your fond father.”

The second bears the same date and is also addressed General Delivery, Kellogg, Idaho: “Don’t listen to him. If you return here you will never get out and this is no place to lead one’s life. They say the seam will be finished in another few years. Love, Mother.”

I have never seen my grandfather’s handwriting before and for some reason, although I knew he read, I had always thought him unable to write. Perhaps, I think now, it is because his hands have been so broken and misshapen; and, with increasing age, hard to control for such a fine task as writing.

The letters are written with the same broad-nibbed pen in an ink which is of a blackness that I have never seen and somehow these letters now seem like a strangely old and incompatible married couple, each cancelling out the other’s desires while bound together by a single worn and dusty lace.

I go out of the pantry and to the window where my grandfather sits. “I am going away today,” I shout, leaning over him.

“Oh yes,” he says in a neutral tone of voice, while continuing to look out the window and finger his rosary. He does not move and the pipe smoke curls upward from his pipe which is clenched between his worn and strongly stained teeth. Lately he has taken to saying, “Oh yes,” to almost everything as a means of concealing his deafness and now I do not know if he has really heard me or is merely giving what seems a standard and safe response to all of the things he hears but partially if at all. I do not feel that I can say it again without my voice breaking and so I turn away. At the door I find that he has shuffled behind me.

“Don’t forget to come back, James,” he says, “it’s the only way you’ll be content. Once you drink underground water it becomes a part of you like the blood a man puts into a woman. It changes her forever and never goes away. There’s always a part of him running there deep inside her. It’s what will wake you up at night and never ever leave you alone.”

Because he knows how much my grandmother is opposed to what he says he has tried to whisper to me. But he is so deaf that he can hardly hear his own voice and he has almost shouted in the way deaf people do; his voice seems to echo and bounce off the walls of his house and to escape out into the sunshot morning air. I offer him my hand to shake and find it almost
crushed in the crooked broken force of his. I can feel the awful power of his oddly misshapen fingers, his splayed and flattened too-broad thumb, the ridges of the toughened, blackened scars and the abnormally large knobs that are his twisted misplaced knuckles. And I have a feeling for a terrible moment that I may never ever get away or be again released. But he finally relaxes and I feel that I am free.

Even potholed streets are lonely ones when you think you may not see them again for a very long time or perhaps forever. And I travel now mostly the back streets because I am conspicuous with my packsack and I do not want any more conversations or attempted and failed and futile explanations. At the outskirts of the town a coal truck stops for me and we travel for twenty-five miles along the shoreline of the sea. The truck makes so much noise and rides so roughly that conversation with the driver is impossible and I am very grateful for the noisy silence in which we are encased.

By noon, after a succession of short rides in a series of oddly assorted vehicles, I am finally across the Strait of Canso, off Cape Breton Island and at last upon my way. It is only when I have left the Island that I can feel free to assume my new identity, which I don like carefully preserved new clothes taken from within their pristine wrappings. It assumes that I am from Vancouver, which is as far away as I can imagine.

I have been somehow apprehensive about even getting off Cape Breton Island, as if at the last moment it might extend gigantic tentacles, or huge monstrous hands like my grandfather’s to seize and hold me back. Now as I finally set foot on the mainland I look across at the heightened mount that is Cape
Breton now, rising mistily out of the greenness and the white-capped blueness of the sea.

My first ride on the mainland is offered by three Negroes in a battered blue Dodge pickup truck that bears the information “Rayfield Clyke, Lincolnville, N.S., Light Trucking” on its side. They say they are going the approximately eighty miles to New Glasgow and will take me if I wish. They will not go very fast, they say, because their truck is old and I might get a better ride if I choose to wait. On the other hand, the driver says, I will at least be moving and I will get there sooner or later. Any time I am sick of it and want to stop I can bang on the roof of the cab. They would take me in the cab but it is illegal to have four men in the cab of a commercial vehicle and they do not want any trouble with the police. I climb into the back and sit on the worn spare tire and the truck moves on. By now the sun is fairly high and when I remove the packsack from my shoulders I can feel, although I cannot see, the two broad bands of perspiration traced and crossing upon my back. I realize now that I am very hungry and have eaten nothing since last evening’s supper.

In New Glasgow I am let off at a small gas station and my Negro benefactors point out the shortest route to the western outskirts of the town. It leads through cluttered back streets where the scent of the greasy hamburgers reeks out of the doors of the little lunch-counters with their overloud juke-boxes; simultaneously pushing Elvis Presley and the rancid odours of the badly cooked food through the half open doors. I would like to stop but somehow there is a desperate sense of urgency now as if each of the cars on the one-way street is bound for a magical destination and I feel that should I stop for even a moment’s
hamburger I might miss the one ride that is worthwhile. The sweat is running down my forehead now and stings my eyes, and I know the two dark patches of perspiration upon my back and beneath the straps are very wide.

The sun seems at its highest when the heavy red car pulls over to the highway’s gravelled shoulder and its driver leans over to unlock the door on the passenger side. He is a very heavy man of about fifty with a red perspiring face and a brown cowlick of hair plastered down upon his damply glistening forehead. His coat is thrown across the back of the seat and his shirt pocket contains one of those plastic shields bristling with pens and pencils. The collar of the shirt is open and his tie is loosened and awry; his belt is also undone, as is the button at the waistband of his trousers. His pants are grey and although stretched tautly over his enormous thighs they still appear as damply wrinkled. Through his white shirt the sweat is showing darkly under his armpits and also in large blotches on his back which are visible when he leans forward. His hands seem very white and disproportionately small.

As we move off down the shimmering highway with its mesmerizing white line, he takes a soiled handkerchief that has been lying on the seat beside him and wipes the wet palms of his hands and also the glistening wet blackness of the steering wheel.