What I Want to Tell Goes Like This Read online

  IN WHAT I WANT TO TELL GOES LIKE THIS, Matt Rader braids tales of Vancouver Island’s turbulent labour history, including the Great Vancouver Island Coal Strike of 1912–14 and the shooting death of infamous union organizer Albert “Ginger Goodwin,” with present-day stories of people living in the same landscape, in the indeterminate echo of history.

  Winner of the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for Literature from the Canada Council for the Arts, Rader teaches in the Department of Creative Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. The final story in this collection, “All This Was a Long Time Ago,” about a ferry ride across the Salish Sea with the ghost of James Joyce, was awarded the Jack Hodgins Founders Award from the Malahat Review.

  Copyright © Matt Rader, 2014

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].

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  Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.

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  Printed and bound in Canada.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Rader, Matt, 1978-, author

  What I want to tell goes like this : stories / Matt Rader.

  ISBN 978-0-88971-306-2 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-88971-039-9 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8585.A2825W43 2014 C813’.6 C2014-904976-5

  Dear Mum,

  These are some of the things

  I know. I know too

  The Thunderbird is involved

  In what I know.

  Then we looked closelier at Time,

  And saw his ghostly arms revolving

  To sweep off woeful things with prime,

  Things sinister with things sublime

  Alike dissolving.

  —Thomas Hardy

  Hey shadow world when a thing comes back

  comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself

  what then

  what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses

  what fortune what fate

  —Peter Gizzi

  THE LAUREL WHALEN

  IT WAS THE SUMMER Sergeant Coté killed his only son by accident and we had to boil our drinking water. The drinking water was on account of E. coli which is a kind of bacteria that is everywhere all the time but can kill you if you are weak or young or get too much of it. The accident was on account of something much more sinister if you ask me though the cops determined that Sergeant Coté, who was an aircraft mechanic at 19 Wing, was not criminally at fault for backing over the two-year-old boy in his garage. No one wanted Coté to go to jail. But no one wanted to look at him either. Seeing him only reminded people of how cruel and evil the world really is. The village was grateful when he and his wife were transferred away later that year, but that’s another story. For a time that spring I worked in an auto body shop sand-blasting damaged vehicles but my heart wasn’t in it and one day I didn’t show and that was that. This was mid-June, just before the weather turned nice and Coté had his accident. I went into the garage two weeks after the day I didn’t show, after the boy was already dead and before the water turned bad, and my boss, who was a guy named Rusty, if you can believe that, didn’t even look at me. “It’s in the office, Shithead,” is what he said and I went into the grubby little office and there it was, a white envelope with my name on it in blue ballpoint tacked to the bare wall like a ribbon. But none of this is what I want to tell about. Not really. It was the summer these things happened is all and it is difficult to tell anything of what happened between me and Jimmy Whalen without thinking of those other things and the whole ugly season.

  What I want to tell goes like this.

  I’d come down out of the hills one evening to do a little drinking with Jimmy at his mother-in-law’s place by the sea. He lived there with his girl and their kid who was just walking that month. From the top of their driveway I could see across the harbour to the cadet base at the edge of the spit and the small white flags of the fishing village on the other side where the Indians had lived. The tide was out and the beach at the old log dump looked soft and brown. There’d been a time when a breakwater of abandoned square-riggers and tugs and World War I frigates hadn’t been considered an eyesore. But that time had passed. The rotting iron and wood lined up in the bay was only rotting iron and wood now.

  There was a big garage at the front of the house where Jimmy stowed the F150 he was working over. I remember feeling bad that night as I looked on through the windows thinking back to Rusty’s shop. I went through the gate at the side of the house and Jimmy’s big black dog whose name I could never remember bounded up to sniff my crotch. Jimmy was there in the shade underneath the deck with a tin of beer in his hand. He was a man with a wide nose and soft eyes and he always stood a little too far back on his heels like he wasn’t committed to where he stood but didn’t know it yet. The side of the house beneath the deck was crowded by free-standing shelves lined with tomato starts. Out in the yard were more pieces of cars and in the back was the white hump of a greenhouse.

  I could see Jimmy had just been talking to his mother-in-law, Josie, who was puttering among the plants. I’d been coming around evenings when Jimmy was in camp and had spent some time on the porch with Josie when Laurel was putting the kid down. I knew Josie couldn’t stand Jimmy. I’d known him a few years, and we’d been drinking a few times and twice I’d helped him move. Before that I’d known his brother, Harley, when we were in school. Jimmy was never going to make a good impression on any mother.

  Still, what me and Laurel were doing wasn’t very nice.

  “Jimmy’s home,” Josie said when I came through the gate. She was laughing but her face never moved when she laughed.

  “No shit,” I said in mock surprise, looking right at Jimmy. He was a few years older than me and for the first time I could see myself in him and just how old we were now with the grey in our stubble and the retiring hairlines. It was a sad thing to see really.

  “How you been?” I said to Jimmy, fighting off the dog’s snout, but he didn’t hear me or he didn’t answer and I guessed then what I’d walked into but I didn’t feel like turning back. Didn’t feel like I could or there was any good reason to no matter what I’d done. Jimmy was my friend.

  Laurel came out of the house holding the baby on her hip and came straight over and hugged me with one arm and kissed me on the cheek and I hugged her back with one arm, my hand on the back of the baby, trying not to squeeze him and make him cry. Laurel had been Laurel Oaks until she took up with Jimmy and she started calling herself Whalen even though they were never married. The Laurel Whalen, for true, was the first boat in the breakwater.

  “You hear about that boy?” Laurel said.

  We all shook our heads. Meaning we couldn’t believe it. A tragedy.

  “How the fuck?” she said.

  I had my ha
nd on Jimmy’s little boy and I knew I shouldn’t be touching him in front of Jimmy like this but I couldn’t help it now. We were all still shaking our heads and for a moment we all looked at each other and we felt tenderness for each one of us because we were alive and had to know about things like that little boy being run over by his father.

  Then Laurel took her arm back.

  “That was right by your place,” Jimmy said looking at me with those soft eyes.

  He was right. It was just around the corner. We’d sat around with beers at my place on more than one occasion and that got me thinking of those times which seemed like good times in my memory if not otherwise memorable. Sometimes we listened to music on the record player. Led Zeppelin. The Who. Shit we’re not old enough to remember.

  I nodded. “That’s right,” I said.

  It had happened only a block from where I lived and I didn’t know what to think of it yet. So I didn’t.

  But here we were and things were closing in on me.

  I felt calm. I was worried but I knew that worry was just part of the deal and it didn’t bother me much.

  “I’d have him killed,” Josie said but no one was paying attention to her.

  I wondered who had told Jimmy about me and Laurel or how he’d figured it out or if he had figured it out exactly or was just suspicious. I was pretty sure he knew but like everything with Jimmy, he wasn’t really committed to what he knew or what he should do about it and for this reason I had no idea what was going to happen.

  The baby was staring blankly at me and then at Josie who had two tomato plants in her hands.

  “I’d have someone take him out and shoot him,” she said.

  I wished the baby would cry or fuss or something to quicken the flow of things but he was always such an easy child. Even the dog had disappeared.

  “How much are the tomatoes?” I asked Josie as she put the two plants on a workbench someone had dragged out from the garage. I was betting it was Jimmy.

  “You don’t need tomatoes,” Josie said.

  She was right of course. I didn’t need tomatoes.

  “I’ll take care of them,” I said.

  They were heirlooms. I knew that. They were going to have yellow and orange and purple fruit and taste like no tomatoes I’d ever tasted before. That’s what Josie had said. They came from places like Ukraine and Finland and the Mississippi Delta. Josie had told me all about them just a few nights before. She’d also told me about the Laurel Whalen which had sailed at the turn of the century for Aussie wool and grain from Puget Sound and to India for jute and for rice from Burma. It was a big, iron-hulled, five-masted square-rigger. And it had been cursed. That’s what she told me. I don’t know how she knew this but I believed her. She was believable that way. The Laurel Whalen was almost underwater now.

  “I’m not selling you these tomatoes,” she said.

  She had a beer going on the table and when she picked it up I could see the dirt under her nails and in her cuticles and the small creases of her fingers. It made me think of something Laurel had told me in bed the night we heard about Coté and his boy. In Laurel’s story, when she was a kid, spring nights, around dusk, Josie would strap her and Laurel’s kid sister into the pickup and drive into the coal hills to dig for artifacts in the swamp just outside our village. That was the Chinese quarter back in the coal days. The last shack in that part of town had been razed fifty years before and the alders had leapt up the next day to fill in the space.

  The frogs, Laurel said, were outrageous in the spring twilight and I knew she was telling the truth about this because Laurel was ten years younger than me so had been a child not long enough ago for things to have changed that much and I lived on the hill above there the spring in which she told me this and I listened to those frogs every night and sometimes felt as though they were crushing me and other times like the edges of my body had expanded somehow to include the frogs and their voices and the darkness beyond the frogs, which was large and unknowable, but some nights I became, lying there in my bed above the swamp.

  They wore headlamps and rubber boots, Josie and the two girls, and with little garden shovels they prized strange oriental tins and tools and small glass vials from the roots of the trees. That was what I was seeing when Josie grabbed that bottle of beer from the bench and I noticed the dirt on her hands. I was seeing all that and Josie pulling something dark and mysterious from the unknown earth.

  Laurel put the kid down and we all watched him toddle over to Jimmy who offered his free hand so the kid could take it and steady himself. But instead the boy ignored the hand and clutched Jimmy’s leg and looked back at us like he’d just accomplished something we should all be proud of and remember the rest of our lives. I remember Jimmy with his head down looking at his little boy and then looking up at each one of us, reading our faces for what he might make of his kid and that moment.

  “A round of applause,” Laurel said and we all clapped quietly with enthusiastic faces and the boy grinned and hung on to his daddy who was looking down at the boy again.

  To be honest, I don’t know what happened.

  When the water turned a few weeks later, Jimmy’s boy got sick and I went down to the hospital in the next town over, the fishing village with the white flags, where they were keeping him. The Indians had a cemetery down there at the beach and out the window of the room where I found Laurel and Josie sitting by the boy’s bed I could see the wrecks across the harbour and somewhere among the trees the outlines of Josie’s house. I’d heard Jimmy had quit camp and taken a job with Rusty which he would have liked I believe and where, I’m guessing, he was that day I went to the hospital.

  I didn’t go into the room.

  Jimmy had been my friend.

  THE CHILDREN OF THE GREAT STRIKE, VANCOUVER ISLAND, 1912–14

  ON JUNE 15, 1912, in accordance with Section 87, Rules No. 8 & 37, of the Coal Mines Regulation Act of 1911, Oscar Mottishaw, a large-fisted Englishman, thirty-four years old, the father of none, reported gas in No. 2 Mine Extension south of Nanaimo, Vancouver Island. James Dunsmuir had purchased the mine in 1895 after the owner, Louis Clark, a black settler and a holdout against the Dunsmuir Coal Empire, fell mysteriously to his death. In the twenty-eight years prior to Mottishaw’s report, 373 miners had been killed in the coal mines of Vancouver Island by consequence of methane, or “fire damp” as it was known among miners. Workers could hear the gas sizzling in the rock and pushing the coal from the mine walls.

  Before the SS Mont-Blanc collided with the Norwegian ship Imo in Halifax Harbour in 1917, the 1887 Nanaimo Mine Explosion was considered the largest man-made explosion in the history of the world. As many as 150 men were killed instantly, while others survived for a time beneath the earth writing messages for their children in the coal dust on their shovels. Days after Mottishaw issued his report as representative of the workers’ gas committee, his place in the coal seam ran out and it was learned no other place could be found for him.

  No one is alive now who remembers those days or the long, crippling strike that followed, or the black miasma of starlings when the streets were full of horse shit.

  In 1910, James Dunsmuir sold his empire to the rail magnates MacKenzie and Mann and retired to the fifty-room mansion he called Hatley Park and his 218-foot yacht Delaura. He was fifty-nine years old. The empire, which MacKenzie and Mann operated under the auspices of Canadian Collieries Ltd., included the mines at Extension and Cumberland, seventy-nine miles north, where Mottishaw worked from September 13 to 15, 1912, before the boss—superintendent R. Henderson—recognized his name on the company blacklist and had him dismissed.

  This story is not about Oscar Mottishaw.

  On the evening of Mottishaw’s dismissal from No. 3 Mine Cumberland, the leaders of the United Mine Workers of America Local 2299 met in the basement of the Campbell Brothers Store on Dunsmuir Street. The Campbells—Alex and William and their sister Mary—were Quakers and sympathetic to the union because they belie
ved in the community of the Holy Ghost and in the beatitude of the weak and the poor. But neither Alex nor William, who were called—for reasons lost to history—Red and Black, nor their shy sister with the name of the virgin mother, were at the meeting.

  Mottishaw had been a union man since 1903 when the “radical” Western Federation of Miners made a first organizing effort on Vancouver Island before being outlawed for their affiliation with the Wobblies, an industrial union that advocated sabotage and direct action against the capitalist class. Mottishaw’s appearance in Cumberland was strategic. He signed up under contract with a fellow miner named Robert Coe who paid him three dollars and fifty cents per day, sixty-four cents more than the stipulated company wage for helpers. Mottishaw and the union were calling the company out.

  On Monday, September 16, 1912, the miners and the mule drivers, the pushers, the rope-riders, the drum runners and punks of the City of Cumberland declared a holiday in protest of Mottishaw’s dismissal. When the whistle blew just before dawn, some men got up and went into the lanes to bullshit in the new, coloured dark. Others stayed in bed with their wives. At daybreak, a few men gathered on the makeshift football pitch for a kick around. The parlours in Chinatown were full and the rounds of fan tan and pai gow spun on through the afternoon. That day the tipples were quiet and there were men in the streets who were unaccustomed to sunlight.

  THERESA MARIA BONAMICO WAS seven years old. Her sister, Ora, was not quite six. The only surviving photograph of the two together is dated 1929 and can be found in the Cumberland Village Archives under the catalogue entry C195-44: Portrait of two young women. In the photograph, Theresa is seated on Ora’s left, raised six inches above and leaning towards her. The sisters’ hair is dark and they’re dressed in white skirts and blouses with shawl collars on square-neck bodices. The skirts and the arms are cut slim in the style of the poor who could not afford the extra fabric. They are still young.