Saltwater Cowboys (2 page)

He emptied the tub, stood with one foot on the cracked toilet, and dried himself with a torn towel.

“Hello, my love,” Angela whispered and sidled up beside him. Her blue eyes sparkled as she slipped her arms around his long waist. Her black hair, tied in a loose chignon at the nape of her slender neck, gathered in tiny coils at her moist temples. Her milky white skin, with light pink splotches on plump cheeks, stretched easily as she smiled. Her mouth, offered to him to kiss, was as shapely and pretty as a coiled rosebud.

She was a Harrington before they married, and they weren't much different in ancestry; both of their families had come to the tiny town of Brighton, tucked amongst Newfoundland's green and granite Appalachians, from Southern Ireland and Northern England. They were miners and farmers, immigrants to Newfoundland in the nineteenth century in search of work. They'd run from generations of poverty in nations ruled by the prosperous. They had starved or gotten the typhoid fever from lice while travelling over the ocean, some of them landing and remaining in Boston, St. John's, and New York. The majority of the Harrington and McCarthy families chose St. John's, working their way inland in search of what little livestock they could farm, most of them finding their way underground and remaining there.

Both Jack and Angela's grandparents were in the first families to settle in the rural mining town of Brighton, in the 1930s, before it became a part of Canada. That was an exciting time for Newfoundland, Nanny Harrington would say; they were on the cusp of becoming Americans, Canadians, or remaining British citizens.

The McCarthys were those luckless Irish, descendants still sitting in the Irish pubs of contemporary Boston, men and women with pug noses, scarlet cheeks, flyaway fair hair, drunk and screeching on barstools in the mid-afternoon. They weren't the Kennedy type of Irish, filled with luck and brainpower and a certain cruel edge that forced others to work at a fraction of their worth. These were the Irish that came with nothing, worked for nothing, and generations later still felt like nothing.

Nanny Harrington, however, still considered herself a citizen of Britain, easily befriending the wealthy professors from England who came to spend summers hunting in and around Brighton, a kinship born purely of perception of shared heritage. She would make Northern English food for them: Yorkshire puddings, roast beef broiled with garlic cloves, and mashed potatoes with whipped butter.

Nanny Harrington despised Jack. She didn't think he was good enough for her daughter. She frowned upon him constantly, pointed out his faults, and second-guessed everything he said and did. He could have been a teacher, she thought, but instead he let his friends influence him; they told him teaching was for women and that he should become a miner like the rest of them, because mining was for men. They could have moved to St. John's, she thought, and gotten out of the rough business of mining altogether.

“I heard there were a bunch of layoffs today. Any news for us?” Angela asked gently.

“Nothing yet.”

Jack put down his towel and led Angela to the bedroom. He nuzzled her nose and stroked her hair. Despite his worries, he loved her, more than anyone else in the world. He'd been in love with her since she found him in the school library, putting a copy of the banned book
Beautiful Losers
between the pages of an old encyclopedia. He'd bought a copy on a school trip to St. John's and had to hide it before anyone saw that he liked to read books by a poet — a poet from Montreal at that.

“What?” she asked as he held her tightly, his mouth opening slowly as if he had something to say. She put her small hand on his face and asked him again. He shook his head, murmured and pulled her on the bed, kicking the door shut behind them.

The next morning Angela called out to Jack to come to the breakfast table.

“I've made your favourites,” she said cheerfully and held out his chair. Yellow foam hung out from the torn powder-blue plastic seam. A large loaf of steaming homemade bread, a square slab of creamy butter, a bottle of crisp red partridgeberry jam, bacon and fried eggs, and a pot of hot sugared tea covered the blue Formica table. She placed a steaming mug of milky tea in front of him. He sipped it slowly and blew cool air over the lip, the steam rolling away like early morning fog lifting at noon.

“Do you think you'll hear anything today?” Angela asked tersely and twisted a napkin over her delicate fingers so tightly, her veins looked as thick as purple velvet ropes.

Jack looked at her sharply through the wisps of steam. “No,” he said, his face flushed from lying.

“But we know it's only a matter of time.”

“We'll be safe and sound, my love, one way or the other; I won't let anything happen to any of ye —”

“But what about when exploration stops?”

“I told you I'll take care of you. All of you.”

Angela sighed and got up to get a napkin. She dutifully placed it beside him then watched him as he ate, kept her eye on him as he walked to work. Stood up by the window and looked at him as he disappeared into the folds of the mineshaft. She could hear it as it cranked and creaked ceaselessly through their half-open window. The weather-beaten iron shaft jutted out of the dirt, triple the size of the bunkhouses, little square shacks covered in aluminum siding surrounding the sloppy triangular tower. A classic “company town,” all housing meant to serve the purpose of work, with access to and from easy and uncomplicated. No excuses, rain or shine, for not making it to work on time or lasting throughout your shift. If you were hungry, you simply called your wife, and she walked the fifty feet to the mine site and gave you the packed lunch forgotten on the dining room table. If you were drunk or hungover, you simply rolled out of bed and trudged up the little hill to the mine site. If you were sick, other men carried you.

She couldn't imagine how they worked all day and all night, in dented hard hats, the flashlight a third eye prowling for minerals. Cold and damp in their torn yellow rubber suits and oversized mucking boots, riding on clanging trucks — they used to carry pick-axes but now explosives were slung over shoulders by the boxful — as layers of soot dried on their faces until the shift change whistle blew and they came home to their wives, patiently waiting by the windows.

After lunch Angela turned on the news. After only a few minutes she turned it off again.
Goodbye Mulroney, Reagan, and Thatcher and your mine strikes
, she thought as she sat back down again, somewhat defeated as she crossed and uncrossed her thin legs, the beige corduroy rubbing together softly. The situation in northern Manitoba's nickel belt looked no better than in Newfoundland — or across the Atlantic, for that matter. The miners' strike in England had been brutal, corporations making money and getting tax cuts, with devastating results for families living on a shoestring. Angela pondered her fate and that of her children.
Could we really stay here if the mine closed? Would it be at all possible?
The thought filled her with dread. No, better to head someplace where new development was taking place, better to take their chances with something new. A mine has a good long lifespan if it's rich. She pulled up the sleeves of her green turtleneck and peeled an orange. Bursts of juice exploded as she inched her thumb through the skin. She sucked on a segment. Katie, Maggie, and Lily were playing at her feet. Katie, the eldest, ashen blonde and frail, like her English grandmother Harrington, was tall for her five years. Her two younger siblings were dark Irish like Jack's family. Katie was quiet, colouring dutifully, worn out from a morning at school, while Maggie, three, and Lily, almost a year old, petite with big blue eyes and fiery tempers, were engaged in a tug of war with a rag doll.

“Maggie,” Angela said warningly and peered at them over the thick rims of her eyeglasses.

Lily cried loudly. Angela reached down from her chair, snatched the doll, and gave it to her. Maggie frowned, crossed her arms, and stamped her little feet.

“Maggie, Mommy's got a surprise for you behind her back,” Angela said coaxingly. Maggie stopped pouting and walked eagerly to her mother. “Guess which hand?”

“This one?” Maggie said and pointed to the right.

“Yes!”

Maggie clapped and took the orange in her delicate but animated hands.

As the children settled, Angela rose to make dinner. She stood in the kitchen rocking back and forth on her heels, humming along with a folk song on the radio, peeling potatoes, carrots, and turnips, dropping them in a scratched orange plastic bowl filled with cold water before she salted more water in a large yellow pot for boiling.

At five o' clock the pale blue sky turned a deep navy, looking like a smattering of squashed wild blackberries. Fat grey dustball clouds spilled in and clung to the dark sky. Angela fussed with the white kitchen curtains and peered out the window, looking for Jack. Her boiled dinner was finished: moist salt beef, potatoes, soft and steaming cabbage and turnips in brown sugar were ready to be served. Across the gravel lane she saw straight into Wanda Fifield's kitchen.

She was swathed in a baggy polka dot housedress, her hair in tight curls. She opened her fridge door, empty but for a carton of milk. She spooned sugar into her baby's milk bottle and then put a spoonful in her own mouth.

Angela put her hand over her mouth quickly.
Is that all she's been eating?

“Momma, I'm hungry,” Katie said and hovered around the kitchen table.

“Supper will be ready soon.”

A bolt of bone-white lightning, crooked as a crab leg, singed the sky. Angela glanced at her clothesline. Out the front door Angela called to Wanda, “Will you give me a hand with these clothes?”

Wanda opened her door. “Oh yes, sure my dear, no problem at all,” she said and waddled out with her baby on her hip. Circles of dappled flesh were bunched around the child's bucking wrists and ankles. Sculpted hair in a little finger wave crested on the peak of her small round forehead. Wanda pulled the wooden pins from the electric blue line. Angela asked about Pete.

“He's still out looking for work. He's been in town for most of the month.”

“Anything on the go in St. John's?”

“Not a thing. As soon as we get something — anything — we're gone. No use staying here out of sentimentality,” Wanda said resolutely.

Dense rain pelted their legs and pooled at the bottom of the clothesbasket.

“Help me get these inside,” Angela said.

Wanda hoisted a handful of facecloths and a bucket of pins on her other hip.

The girls were on the wooden storage box in the front porch, peering out the window. Inside the house, steam from the hot homemade food surrounded them like a shroud.

“I won't take no for an answer. Join us for supper. I got enough food here to feed an army. Katie, go back in the porch and get that extra chair for Mommy. Maggie, come sit down for dinner,” Angela said and buckled Lily into her plastic highchair, the cushion sagging from years of use, bits of dried cereal clumped in the crevices.

Wanda's brown eyes, transparent and light as almond skin, brightened as she sat down and lunged toward the big plate of food placed before her.

“Where's Daddy?” Maggie asked.

“He'll be home soon.”

Wanda spooned mounds of cabbage, thick carrots, and fluffy white mashed potatoes in her mouth. She tore at the salt beef and spooned bits of potato and carrot into Susie's mouth. After her third plateful she rose to put her plate in the sink.

“That was some good. Do you need help with the dishes?”

“No, go on home, your man might call.”

“It hasn't stopped raining,” Wanda said and pulled back the kitchen curtain. She flushed and lowered her head. “You can see right into my kitchen.”

Angela's fork stopped in midair. “Can you? I hadn't even noticed.”

“Well, I better go, thanks again for supper,” Wanda said and hurried out of the kitchen, head held high.

As Wanda crossed the yard, she cried for the shame of it, the shame of having nothing. Pete had been out of work for so long, she could no longer bear it. They once had everything, when the mine was prosperous. They were the envy of the province,
the
town to live in, and she was the happiest girl around with a man like Pete on her arm. “And now, look at the lot of us, in some state,” she whispered.
The nerve of Angela, pitying me like that, like this family is in some sort of habit of collecting the pogey,
she thought and hurried through her front door, avoiding the downpour. “We'll get a job, won't we love?” she said and hoisted Susie from her hip, held her in front of her face, cooed and kissed her cheeks. “We'll move far from here, far from anyone who knows what we've been through the last few months, yes, my love, guaranteed, all will be lovely grand.”

Long past supper, Angela's children were in the backyard playing contentedly in the rain: little yellow jackets, hats, and boots their sunlit armour protecting them from the spit of the wrenching clouds. Angela sat in the easy chair sipping tea, fingernails drumming nervously on the edge of her porcelain cup. The clock ticked loudly in the kitchen. Jack's limp supper was on the table, sealed with steam-filled aluminum foil. Angela went to the back door to check on the children. She tripped over the doormat, damp with the rain Maggie carried in on her ceaseless quest for cookies. A corner of a piece of paper caught her eye. She knelt down to retrieve it, certain it was merely a corner from a colouring book. She crumpled it and brought it to the trashcan. At the last second she saw the Azco Mining Company logo. Her heart constricted and her hands flew to her open mouth. In that second she knew it had happened. The girls at the hairdresser's were right. Her temples throbbed and a blaze of silver fired across the nerve in her eye. It pulsed and jumped, blurring her vision. A migraine. She was having a migraine. She cautiously opened the letter. Two weeks, it said, Record of Employment forthcoming, recommendation letter available if required.