then, living in a town with some people from home?”
“Yes, it’ll be a comfort, that’s for sure.”
“But it won’t be home.”
“No, it won’t be. But I guess it’ll have to do. I mean, we don’t have a choice, do we?”
Peter sat at the back of the church in his usual spot. The Women’s League was tired of cleaning the dirt on the floor from the sneakers he wore in the summer and salt stains from his work boots in the winter. The other men in town wore their Sunday shoes to Mass, but not Peter. He wouldn’t bother with the charade if it weren’t for Wanda. She made him go. Said it had to do with giving Susie a sense of the world, a sense of service and goodness. So he complied.
He looked around the small room, a kaleidoscope of purple from the stained-glass windows, the large wooden crucifix draped with a purple cloth and the priest’s vestments. His father had hated purple, thought it was too bright for the sombre occasion of Mass. Peter could still remember his parents trying to stuff him and his two younger brothers into suits for a Sunday Mass and his mother dabbing iodine over the cut on her lip, his father gargling with minty mouthwash in an effort to hide the sour, yeasty smell of more than two days of drinking beer non-stop.
They’d looked presentable. The suits hid the bruises on the boys and all seemed well. When Mass was over, the whiskey would come out, and that’s when Peter’s father was at his roughest.
Peter nodded at Jack and Angela as they took their seats a few pews ahead. Angela looked at him sharply. Peter avoided eye contact. She could always see through him, and he knew that half the time she didn’t like what she saw.
The winter his father caught him having a draw off a cigarette and the trail of blood as he fled from the house. Angela had been trudging home with a few groceries for her mother, the winter after her father had died. She dropped the bag with the eggs in it when she saw his purple face and the blood from his nose and lip.
“You are coming with me,” she’d said.
“I’ll be alright.”
She took charge, stepping over the egg yolks, lying whole out of their shells, like dandelion heads snapped from their stems, and dragged him to her mother’s. The wind meowed and hissed in the bitter cold.
“Tea and a Purity biscuit for you,” her mother said.
Angela stood in front of him and patted the wounds with a warm, salty cloth.
“I can take care of myself,” he muttered. He sat stone-faced and flicked the cloth away like it was a tick.
“Give it up,” Angela said warningly and held his chin with her small hand.
The next day Peter wrote Angela Harrington gives good head on the bathroom wall, and she was shamed and mocked by the boys and girls alike.
“I know it was you,” she said in the playground after school as she wiped away tears with the tip of her pink frosted nail.
“Quit mothering me,” he said.
So Angela stopped. Not too many knew the truth about Peter’s home life, and if they did they handled the information awkwardly: laughed, made jokes, or turned a blind eye.
As Peter sat in Mass, watching his best friend take his seat, he still couldn’t look Angela in the eye. If she looked at him long enough she’d know how desperately he wanted to leave, contrary to all the senseless nostalgia and pining to stay that everyone else felt. He wasn’t sure about who would make it out of Brighton. Some stayed in towns like this long after the industry’s lifespan. Stayed and worked here and there, odd jobs in town or worked as scabs for striking mining companies. Some stayed on the dole for life.
Peter wouldn’t let that happen to his family. He’d been fighting to get out of Brighton, he would joke with Jack, since they took a trip to Montreal in 1976. What were they? Seventeen or eighteen and in love with the city that served drinks all night, the garish spectacle of the dancing girls, the smoked meat sandwiches at two in the morning, smothered with the best mustard Peter had ever tasted. Then they came back and Jack fell for Angela, watched her in her bikini at the swimming hole, diving off the rock cliff into the deep muddy water below, her long legs tapered to thin ankles, muscles taut under the swell of her heart-shaped bottom, and he’d never looked elsewhere. Shortly after Wanda was available — her boyfriend had died in a motorcycle accident — Peter ditched Sheila and made his move because he couldn’t very well let the prettiest girl in school get away on him.
Peter looked once again at Jack in the pew, praying intently while Maggie climbed over him, her yellow skirt flaring like a petal. Angela, gaunt and stern, shepherded Maggie to her seat and shifted Lily on her hip, while Katie prayed alongside her father.
He better make it out, Peter thought. He would do anything he could to make sure of it.
Jack didn’t look back when he came up from underground for the last time, the skip cage rickety, confining, and sour-smelling, but he shook everyone’s hands and put on a pleasant face. Inside he was angry and irritable. The other miners’ tongues were as busy as ants on his last night shift.
“I got a job in Alberta,” one said.
“Me too,” another three or four chorused.
All night, talking of successfully selling their homes, belongings sorted and packed, going-away parties planned. The only thing louder than the men who had found jobs were the angry ones who had yet to find work.
“My wife has threatened to go out and work. What do I know about taking care of babies?” someone said.
“My wife has threatened to move back in with her mother if I don’t find something,” someone else shouted miserably.
Jack was silent. Sad and still and silent with shock.
The din from the machinery was the last sound he heard when he came up from underground. It had never sounded so abrasive. It made him angry.
Above ground, it was a quiet morning. Mid-September mist clotted the air. A ribbon of sparrows trailed one after the other in jagged flight. The song of that bird — he never knew its name — with the high-pitched tweet followed by four notes, descending in pitch and key, always tore at his heart. It always sounded melancholy.
He’d told Angela not to wait for him or to worry. He was going to go for a walk after his last shift at work. He was going to sneak away to the swimming hole and spend the morning by himself.
The rising sun sizzled the mist off the rocks; it was a sudden sharp and direct light.
A swim might be just the thing, Jack thought.
He walked down the hill and dropped his lunch tin, hard hat, and bag of personals from his locker on his back step and then took off. He quickened his pace, reaching the well-worn skinny path to the swimming hole in minutes. The backwoods quickly swallowed him up. The balsam fir trees were so thick, they looked black. One was so big, its roots stuck up out of the earth like a dried brown parsnip, tapered at the end to form a spindly root, a wheezy tie to the soil. The blueberry bushes were swiped clean. The women in Brighton donned kerchiefs, shorts, tube tops, and sneakers to collect them in late August under the drowsy sun, squatting over the bushes picking bucketful after bucketful, leaving very little for the black bears. Jack passed the crop
