the shareholder money in the world don’t know this rock like we do. We know what’s left in the mine and we know how many people they need to work it. And let me tell you, they’re making a big mistake letting too many go at once,” Jack said and slammed his fist into his palm.
“They’re not making a mistake,” Bernie said dully.
“But some of us will get five more years at least,” Jack said tightly.
“And some of us won’t,” Bernie added flatly, “and we’ll have to accept it, like men.”
“Well, I won’t accept it; I’ll fight this all the way. They won’t get rid of me and my family without a fight. Our grandfathers started this town, and my youngsters are going to enjoy it, that’s for sure,” Jack said.
“There won’t be anything left for the children. They’ll start with the pool, then the bowling alley, then the stadium and cinema. You gotta think about your children’s future,” Bernie said.
“We’ll stay in Newfoundland,” Jack said desperately. “There’s no way we’re going to the mainland. What’s losing a pool when you could lose the whole ocean?”
Several high-pitched whistles signalled the start of the shift. The men cleared out of the dry quickly. Jack stood alone in the change room, unbuttoning his jeans, slowly putting on his work boots, afraid to check his mailbox at the end of the hall, more worried now about the other men. What would they do? Some of them were single and would be fine to roam, but what about the men with children? Peter himself had been laid off five months ago and still hadn’t found work. Jack could only imagine what Pete’s wife Wanda was feeling. She must feel so alone, he thought. She looked so vacant lately, like she wasn’t even inside her own skin, missing Peter as he hunted for jobs in St. John’s. Jack was surprised at how easily she’d changed. She’d gotten so big after the baby was born. She was the prettiest girl in Brighton Catholic School and had married the captain of the hockey team, but now she looked like someone’s nanny in old housedresses and slippers as she carried her pudgy baby over her shoulder, all the while wiping drool and grainy white spit-up from her chest. What will come to pass, Jack thought, for us all, and he sighed heavily.
The mine site will be here longer than any of us. He cursed the loud, dangerous, rough mine, with its cantankerous moods and accidental rock slides that snuffed out human life in seconds, explosions gone awry, and toxic gases that scratched and tore at a man’s lungs. Jack never stopped worrying about making it home to his children. He rarely took risks at work, exhibited great care around heavy machinery, and settled disputes between the miners on shift calmly and fairly, but that didn’t stop the worry. The worry that someday this place, full of rock that loomed above his head like a thick, sharp guillotine, would snap him in half.
After dropping Katie off at school, Angela walked the hundred yards across town and opened the door to Moira Moriarty’s hair salon. The sharp smell of ammonia singed her nose. Dusty mirrors encased in gold filigree adorned the walls. Moira looked up and smiled vacantly at Angela. She was trimming Bernie’s wife Wavey’s mushroom cut. Nanny Harnum sat under the hair dryer, rollers squeezed tight against her plastic cap, a dark plastic cape draped over her rotund frame. She looked like a clay doll.
Moira’s wispy strawberry-blonde hair hung limply. Her face was grey and withdrawn. “Johnny came home from his shift this morning with a layoff notice,” she said.
“Bern, too,” Wavey said.
Angela’s face fell, and she shifted Lily to her other hip. “I’m so sorry.”
Nanny Harnum reached out to ruffle Maggie’s hair, and over the din of the hair dryer she yelled, “Your time will come, no use feeling sorry for anyone.”
Angela nodded glumly.
Moira brushed Wavey’s small face with a thick white brush. Her eyes were squeezed shut. “Bern figures Jack got his notice today.”
“He hasn’t called,” Angela said.
“Angela —” Wavey began to say as Moira wiped the brush forcefully over her mouth.
“Leave it between the two of them, Wave,” she whispered.
Wavey picked bits of hair from her lips and remained silent.
“He would tell me straight away,” Angela said to a room suddenly gone silent, save for the weak roar of the hair dryer and the crackle of Nanny Harnum’s newspaper. “Wouldn’t he?”
Later that evening, his crumpled lay-off slip lay tucked underneath the front door mat, the only place he could think to put it so Angela wouldn’t find it. He couldn’t tell her what had happened, not just yet. He couldn’t tell her about what made him feel so powerless, this situation that rendered him incapable of providing for his family. That was the worst, he thought, not being able to give his wife and children what they wanted.
After Angela had bathed and dressed the children for bed, Jack knelt beside his two daughters, Katherine and Maggie — Lily, the baby, was asleep in the crib beside them — wrapped in wool blankets and snug in bed, and told them a ghost story. “There’s a bright-light spirit, way deep down in the black rock, that lives underground. He keeps dark places full of light so men can find their way home.”
They shivered nervously under the brittle wool blankets as Jack rose to turn out the light. He whispered good night as Katherine, the eldest daughter, asked if the spirit would light up their room after their father turned out the light. Jack laughed and ruffled her hair.
Jack went to run a bath. As he sat in the tub, his knees bent to his waist, coils of brown and red chest hair were matted with suds. He ran a bar of cracked soap, streaked with grey dirt, over the curled slugs of dirt under his fingernails. His blue eyes were red-rimmed and glassy. What would he say to Angela? How could he tell her what had happened today? She would know exactly what she wanted to do — whether or not Jack agreed. As he sat in the tub, he had a strong sense of what she would do. He wanted to ignore it, this sense. He tried to stifle his instincts but the thoughts festered, throbbed like a cut covered with a tightly wound bandage — the point when the tear in the skin isn’t the problem anymore but the pressure of the solution is, because it’s worse, far worse than the original problem. He wasn’t ready for her to know yet. For her to have a solution before he had a chance to decipher what the problem meant for him. He knew he wouldn’t want to do what she said, but it didn’t matter what Jack wanted.
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,
