wouldn’t be Grey McKelvey’s boy, would you?” the man finally asks.
And here it is. Forty years gone, save for a few short visits during his father’s final illness, and still they know the face and the surname, the history attached to it like a set of roots planted in this stubborn soil.
“Yes, sir. Charlie McKelvey.”
“Nick Jalonen,” the man says, and then nods to the man at his side. “And this here is George Fergus. ’Course you already met Duncan last night, Dunc Stewart. Hope you had a good trip in. What brings you back this way?”
McKelvey can see in the men’s eyes that they are sewing together memories, perhaps of his father in certain situations, or all of them together as young men, hard-bodied and full of life. How time slips away.
“Grey McKelvey, Jesus Murphy,” George Fergus says. “We had some times, didn’t we? Your dad was the toughest SOB ever ran the union.”
This stops McKelvey’s mind, for he recalls the late-night arguments in the kitchen below his bedroom as his mother and father debated the merits of union leadership and an impending strike. In the end, McKelvey believes his father turned down the nomination. He seems to recall that his father was somehow philosophically opposed to the notion of co-operatives and unions, believing each man was responsible for his own representation in this life.
“I always thought my dad shied away from the political stuff.”
This makes the trio of old-timers laugh. They eye one another in conspiracy.
“I never said he was president, or even on the executive,” Fergus says, “but make no mistake, your dad was the go-to guy. He was the balls behind the whole operation, that wildcat strike in ’54.”
The information hits McKelvey like a punch to the stomach, and for a moment he thinks he should sit down. He hasn’t eaten in eighteen hours, save for half a wilted ham sandwich bought at a gas station outside Sudbury, and this coffee has gone straight to his head. The inference that his father may have been involved, or more to the point, a leader in the strike and the ensuing violence of that historic year, it is akin to discovering the man had a second family holed up somewhere. McKelvey knows a scab was killed at the height of the strike. He knows, too, that no one was ever charged in the killing. The scab was a Native from the nearby reserve, just some guy looking to support his family. It was the 1950s and it was the North and times were different.
“He never talked about it,” McKelvey says. “I remember that year. A supply shed got blown up. A scab was killed.”
The men seem to lose themselves in private and collective memories. They look down at the floor and nod their heads. There are no smiles now, no laughter.
“Was a hard time in those days,” Duncan says. “They was goin’ to put us out of work, the way the management was running things, talk of that merger with INCO. We had families to think about. Your old man had been over in Korea, and let me tell you, his training came in handy. That scab was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
McKelvey doesn’t want to hear or learn anymore, not now, not standing here in the lobby of a one-star hotel less than twelve hours after arriving back in his home town. He drains the cup against his better judgment, tosses it in a wastebasket.
“I need a place to stay for a while,” he says. “Is there anybody in town that rents apartments or houses?”
The men shoot one another quick looks, and then Duncan smiles and moves to the desk. He opens a black address book and writes a number down on a piece of paper.
“How about your old homestead?” he says with a grin. “Carl Levesque bought up most of the Carver Company houses, including yours. He’s got some plan to tear them down and build a goddamned casino, if you can believe that. But I bet he’d take a few dollars in rent while you’re up here.”
George Fergus laughs. “The guy’d charge rent to his grandmother.”
“Welcome home,” Duncan says, and hands McKelvey the slip of paper.
Four
Carl Levesque answers on the third ring with some rehearsed tagline about business coming back to Ste. Bernadette, blowing in on a northern tailwind. He appears eager to meet McKelvey and discuss rental opportunities. He asks McKelvey to meet him at the Coffee Time on Main Street, three blocks down from the Station Hotel. McKelvey walks with the collar turned high on his too-thin trench coat, for the day is bone-chilling and he has forgotten how the cold works so quickly, how your back hurts from the strain of your body’s attempt to fold into itself. More than half of the storefronts are boarded up, and McKelvey finds himself slowing down, trying to remember the various incarnations of these places so long ago.
Murray’s Five and Dime, where he bought comic books and jawbreakers, the place always smelling of sawdust and those bricks of bright yellow soap that Murray kept stacked in pyramids on tables — so that McKelvey as a boy imagined they were gold bricks, probably dug from the mine where his father worked. And there had been Poulson Mercantile and Sundry, where you could buy rough underwear that had been manufactured by people whose primary goal was to punish small children, or sit at the small lunch counter in back and order a creamy malted milkshake if your mother was in a generous mood. McKelvey smiles now at the memory of asking his mother repeatedly what exactly “sundry” was supposed to mean. And how she tried unsuccessfully to explain the strange notion of dry goods and paper products and envelopes and, well, everything in the place that didn’t happen to be something you could wear.
He bought a package of Club chewing tobacco in there when he was sixteen. Kept a wad in his mouth for exactly fourteen seconds before spitting out the glistening tar-black gob behind his house. He had been aiming for toughness, these miners he saw with their cheeks full of the stuff like chipmunks storing food for winter.
He stops in front of a boarded-up unit with a sign that says VIDEO AND GAME SHACK, and steps into the alcove to read the paper posted to the inside of the glass door: a foreclosure for failure to pay rent. Almost eighteen months ago now. He catches the name Carl Levesque within the legal mumbo-jumbo. This place was, at one time, perhaps fifty years ago now, a barbershop called Bud’s. He closes his eyes and he can actually smell the inside of the barbershop …
He can see the multi-coloured bottles of aftershave and hair tonic, the neon blue disinfectant for the black combs, the lather creams, the strong, manly scent of sandalwood and alcohol, tobacco smoke, and sweat. How old Bud would set a board across the chair, heft him up, wrap a red apron around his neck, push his head forward, and begin to work with the scissors. The sound of stainless steel parts working in concert. McKelvey keeps his eyes closed, pretending not to follow the conversation between his father and Bud and the other men assembled in the barbershop, this sanctuary of all things male. They speak in loose code about local women, about their physical attributes, then on to hunting, drinking. When the haircut is done, Bud takes a hard-bristled brush and whisks away the hair trimmings from the back of his neck, and the brush hurts, but he doesn’t say anything, not ever. Bud with his big boxer’s face that reminds McKelvey of an old bulldog with sad, bloodshot eyes. Bud always gives him a lollipop from an old coffee tin he keeps under the cash.
McKelvey opens his eyes, stamps his feet against the cold, and moves on down the sidewalk, filled with a sense of loss for something that is gone both for himself and the rest of the world, all of the generations to come. And he thinks it might be something called innocence or perhaps the unspoiled pleasures of simplicity and gratitude for the small gestures
