What I Want to Tell Goes Like This Read online

  In the top right-hand corner of the background is the image of a pillar, a photographer’s backdrop, which combines with their dark features and the unique mottling effect of the water damage that blackens the lower portion of the image to evoke, even in its falsity, an unmistakably Mediterranean air. In their looking out from the photograph, their off-centre gaze, the tenuous neutrality in their lips, as if suspicion were mixed equally with amusement and calculated to resemble passivity, it is possible to see the collusion and hilarity they began to discover in themselves during those early years before the First World War.

  When the miners returned to work on the morning of September 17, 1912, they were met with notices at the mine entrance. The notices demanded each worker sign a two-year contract under conditions imposed by the company or take their tools out of the mines. That morning, below a bluing September sky, sixteen hundred men carrying their picks and augers, their coal shovels and galvanized pails went walking, cheese butties untouched in their pockets, through the streets and alleys of Cumberland.

  When Theresa’s father, Italo, came home it was still early morning. His wife was in the yard with the chickens. Theresa and Ora, in their flour-sack dresses, were harvesting onions. He smiled at his wife who understood and his daughters who did not. His shorter, polio leg made his gait appear jaunty.

  “Buongiorno,” he said and looked at the sky. He raised his arms as if testing the weight of the blue above him. He’d been to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in May of 1900 and seen many things that had made the world seem bizarre and glorious such as a moving staircase and a human zoo called “Living in Madagascar.”

  The girls were loading onions into a pit along the back of the lean-to pantry. The pantry was built with alder poles and milled board and balanced against the kitchen wall of the boxy company home. The pit was five feet long and two feet deep and lined with maple leaves. Standing over it, Italo held its volume of potatoes and turnips and beets in his mind and rationed it into days and mouths and energy. The girls didn’t know what he was thinking. Then he went inside.

  All morning he sat at the kitchen table with a small book open on the tabletop. He rubbed his leg. The girls made him coffee. He was teaching himself to read English and he read slowly, making the shapes of the words with his lips. The book was by Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy who had died from pneumonia two years earlier at Astapovo train station after giving up his estate and his peerage and the copyright to his work. It was the same book that appears in the laps of Theresa and Ora in the only other known photographs of the two women.

  In those demure portraits (C195-045 & C195-046) the sisters are once again in their mid-twenties. They are each seated at an angle and look back slightly to the camera. Theresa holds the book close to her stomach. Ora holds it open on her lap. The detail in this pair of photographs is much greater than in the photograph C195-44: Portrait of two young women. One can see that they are in fact dressed in identical, finely knit bolero jackets over a dress of handkerchief cotton that falls softly over the breast, gathers at the waist, and falls again in an A-line down to the ankles. At the time of the photographs, seventeen years had passed since their father sat reading that September morning while Ora and Theresa swept the brown fir floor and later carried the hot water for the washing out to the yard.

  The girls slept in bunks on the sheltered porch. Their pillows were made of fifty-pound flour sacks filled with chicken down. Their mattresses were chicken down and four one-hundred-pound flour sacks sewn together with the Red Rose logos scrubbed off. That night, on September 17, 1912, neither Ora nor Theresa knew what was coming. They lay in bed and tried to remain quiet and let their little bodies forget the scrubbing of garments and the cranking of mangles.

  “Are you asleep?” Ora asked blinking up at the bunk where her sister was breathing.

  Theresa didn’t answer. Only a distant part of her had heard her sister speaking. Through a thin gap in the porch roof she could see the colourless sky and the infinitesimal stars and the outline of something wide and black beyond.

  ON THE TWENTY-THIRD OF September, when the strike was only six days old, Lee Yeun Loya, who was called Goo Goo and hated it, pulled his handcart of vegetables and dried things, his aura of exotic and revolting sea odours, down the bridle alley behind the Bonamicos’ house. There’d been rain that week and the earth had gone soft after the summer dryness. Lee Yeun’s wooden leg wounded the mud. He limped forward.

  From a distance it would have been impossible to know how Lee Yeun felt about the gauze of clouds or the water- jewelled trees. He was a man of big eyes and few teeth and he laughed always in a deep bass grumble that Theresa would one day hear again in an opera she’d remember as The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini but was in fact another bel canto that was never famous. He wore high-waisted pants with black braces and simple black boots like all the men in Cumberland except the doctor and the minister.

  The girls were terrified and titillated by Lee Yeun and hid behind the coal shed when they saw him coming. They loved the roundness of his face and his crevassed skin. They called his name, “Goo Goo! Goo Goo!”

  Lee Yeun wrenched the cart forward a few more feet. It was like he could not hear them. He was too far away in the effort of his progress. The girls could see him but they could not reach him where he was.

  “Goo Goo!” called Theresa, peaking around the shed. She waved her hand.

  They knew he hated that name.

  Ora waved her hands above her head. “Goo Goo!” she yelled.

  Lee Yeun Loya paid no mind.

  Then their mother came out of the house in her skirt and apron and round-toed shoes and the girls went quiet. The skirt came down just below her knees and kicked out slightly when she walked. Even in summer she wore high knit stockings that she changed with the skirt once a week on Saturday when they washed clothes and linens. The apron was cleaned and hung to dry every night. The girls straightened up and watched her come across the muddy yard with its trampled grasses. The whole place looked like a fading painting. She was a short woman with dark hair, wide hips and an ample bosom. Her name was Louisa but neither Theresa nor Ora knew this. They’d only ever heard her called Mamma or Signora or Mrs. Bonamico.

  She greeted Lee Yeun in the alley with a smile that transformed her face. It was as if there were a joke their mother and the peddler shared. The stony expression Louisa Bonamico carried with her from the Old World, and that she had worn every day until that moment had been a facade, the surface of a vessel that contained something the girls recognized immediately as Louisa’s real self though they had no memory of ever seeing it before.

  Ora would silently and unknowingly recall this look to her sister in the minutes before Theresa’s first disastrous wedding—the one to poor James McArthur. Ora was fastening a small white flower in Theresa’s bodice. Their faces were near each other and something in the concentration of Ora’s eyes reminded Theresa of her mother. Two nights later, after making love to Theresa for the third time, James McArthur fell from the balcony of the George Hotel on Granville Street in Vancouver.

  Louisa touched the Asian man’s hand. The girls were mortified.

  They squealed. All her life, Theresa would remember that squeal.

  Then Lee Yeun laughed his grumbly laugh and their mother, glancing at the girls, smiled again in a way that silenced them.

  A joke that must be explained isn’t funny.

  That morning Louisa purchased two heads of a fine butter lettuce that was said to have its origins on the Greek isle of Kos.

  “Lee Yeun had worked for a time as a topper in the coal holds of visiting freighters,” Theresa told a reporter in 1967, “before he lost his leg.” The story was to celebrate the century of the Dominion of Canada and the flying of a new flag. Everyone then was remembering what they could and telling stories. “No one knew how he’d lost it,” she’s quoted as saying. “He’d gone away one day aboard a long, four- masted freighter—I remember those ships
so clearly—and he returned with a wooden leg and the seeds to this lettuce.” The reporter describes Theresa drinking from her tea, slowly, as if he’d staged the scene for television. “They said he’d traded Wakefield Cabbage for the Kos seeds. An Australian captain was his victim,” she smiled, “if the stories are to be believed.”

  What Theresa didn’t say: hidden in the heart of the lettuce Louisa purchased that morning were two small packages of opium.

  The next day, September 24, twelve special police officers arrived in Cumberland and quarantined the oriental quarter. They forbid the white miners—including the Italians, who were not always considered white—access to Chinatown. Thus began the process of starving the Chinese back to work and rattling the miners who had long relied on opium to ease their exhausted and mangled bodies. By the end of the week, over a hundred plain-clothed special police were patrolling Cumberland on foot and on horseback.

  THE RAINS WERE COMING more often that last week of September 1912, and the alders and maples in the swamps and along the edges of the cutblocks were dropping their wet and heavy leaves. Even the young walnut tree on Penrith Avenue covered the ground around it in a patchwork of decaying green. Daylight looked rustier in the patty where the mine mules grazed and in the tufts of beach grass. But the monochrome dark of winter had not yet come. The United Mine Workers of America, the union that represented the striking miners of Cumberland, paid out four dollars a week strike pay and all white workers who observed the picket line, union or non-union, received the same.

  THEN, ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1912, Canadian Collieries Ltd. banished all striking miners and their families from the company homes.

  With a sick languor, a kind of shambolic disdain for haste, for speed as an aspect of profit, families loaded their belongings onto carts pulled by mules or livery horses or teams of men. There were trunks of clothes and blankets, tools, pots and pans. Some women had rugs they treasured which were loaded on top of everything else like one last, limp ancestor pride would not let them abandon. No one knew when they were coming back, but they were all immigrants: they knew how to leave things behind. Cabinets and buffets were remaindered in the alleys. It was triage for only the most important goods; tables and chairs and beds were relinquished to the rains and the hands of scabbing neighbours.

  Fifteen years later Ora would see her mother’s oak tabouret in the home of a man who had asked her to marry him. His name was Anson Hartman Cooper, a bookkeeper with thin eyes and small hands that tremored when he held a pen. He worked for his father who owned a shipping business and Ora knew from the way Cooper talked about him that Cooper feared his father. Or she sensed this. She rarely put words to what she felt or how she thought so what she felt and what she knew were often difficult to decipher and to distinguish from each other.

  Cooper wore clean clothes and he walked with a clean stride. At first, Ora and Cooper both felt this was an extension of his character, which was likewise clean, even of pride. He lived in a large house that had belonged to his father before Mr. Cooper had moved to Victoria to oversee the growing trade and be near the seat of influence. Anson paid his father a mortgage on the house directly from his wages.

  Ora, who worked as a scullery maid, didn’t understand how such a man could love her and find her beautiful and this mystery helped her feel that she was in love with Cooper in the same way he was in love with her. But she was not. She loved his love and the shallow redemption she believed it offered her. Her body knew this and she could not be happy around him.

  The tabouret was in the sitting room next to a Morris chair that might have belonged to someone she’d known once but she couldn’t be sure. Ora knew the tabouret was her mother’s by its grey-red patina and the shaped cross-stretchers that pinned it together. She was surprised at how immediately the details of that object connected to the object of her memory and she had the image of two shapes crashing through time to be reunited as a whole thing, this whole thing, the tabouret that had been lost. Even thinking back on the occasion, Ora was impressed with the clarity of the experience in her memory.

  In memory there are fires we do not know are burning.

  That night, Ora doused the trunk of a young Garry oak in her suitor’s backyard with lamp oil and put a match to it. From behind a neighbour’s fence, in the shadow of the house, she watched the tree toss its wild hair of flame into the darkness. She remembered her mother and Goo Goo and everything that happened after and many things that didn’t happen but might have—which is how we know finally what we feel about the past. She hoped the fire would burn down Cooper’s roof and his walls and the tabouret.

  In the morning Cooper came to the rooming house where Ora lived at 1532 Penrith Avenue. She watched him coming from behind the curtain in her bedroom window on the second floor. The half-light of morning with its long shadows reaching out over the street made his arrival feel long and hilariously sad. The matron called her down and Ora and Cooper stood together in the tiny foyer while the matron listened from the kitchen fifteen feet away. Cooper smelled of smoke and his eyes were red. He was dressed in a grey suit with a hat he held in his hands, which were grey-black and shaking. Men with hats in their hands always looked vaguely pathetic to Ora as if they had been cowed by something and forced to uncover their heads, as if they were beggars and there was something they wanted from her that she could never give, would never give. Cooper had a buzzing expression on his face, in the skin around his eyes and mouth, that was either shock or excitement, or both.

  “I’ve lost the house,” he said. He was looking at his shoes. It was an obvious thing to say. Then he looked at her. He had such poor brown eyes. The matron lifted a pot from the sink and water streamed off it.

  “But you’re alive,” she said hopefully. Then, more solemnly, “I’m sorry.” She did not have the right tone. There was no right tone.

  “So am I,” he said, but he was almost smiling and Ora didn’t know if she really believed him. “It is a funny thing,” Theresa wrote in her diary that night after Ora told her of the conversation, “how two people can tell each other more of the truth by speaking the untruth or half truth or the all together false.”

  “Have you heard from your father?”

  “Fires are loud,” he said. “I never understood how loud a large fire could be.”

  Ora waited.

  “They are breathing bodies,” Ora said.

  He looked at her.

  What was it they were sharing with each other? Loss? Hurt? Accusation? Or acceptance, recognition even, the admission of what was bigger than themselves but also within them, of what they were and were part of, how they knew themselves now in the morning with smoke and ashes and knew each other.

  He looked at a spot between them that was not his feet or hers but a middle zone where his eyes could rest. She kept watching him.

  “My father’s sending me to Australia.”

  Now, Ora looked down. She could see through a crack in the floorboards into the dark beneath the house. He said some other things about Pacific trade and business. He did not ask her to go with him.

  In late September 1912, when Theresa and Ora were still children, the Bonamicos took their bedding and as much food from the pantry and the makeshift root cellar as they could. Louisa slaughtered all the chickens and passed many to families with no meat of their own. Her apron was measled with blood. Some families went out to the lake and made camp on the shore beyond the log booms. The wet season was coming. Wind off the mountains lifted the lake into white chop. At three in the afternoon, in the first week of autumn, Italo sent his wife and daughters ahead on the slow four-mile shamble out of Cumberland towards the sea.

  THE WINTER OF 1912–13 was long in Cumberland. The snow stayed on the ground until April. In the dark early mornings, scavengers skulked across slag heaps digging through snow for coal large enough to burn. The police patrolled the streets in numbers. They escorted strikebreakers to and from work and it was no longer safe for women to be out after d
ark. All trains arriving with new workers from the Rockies or Nova Scotia or Great Britain were met by the union, who surrounded the train platform, while the police, armed with bayonets, checked under the seats for machine guns. Before Christmas two men attempted to blow up the trestle on the Trent River south of Cumberland but the dynamite did not explode. This attempt was reported in the papers as an effort of the strikers and the union called it slander. Knowing dynamite as they did, the miners were horrified at the accusation of failure.

  Nothing made sense anymore.

  Slowly, strikebreakers began to fill the vacant company homes.

  The Campbells extended credit to all the striking families and by February they were delivering a weekly crate of unrecorded foodstuffs to the Bonamicos’ camp at the edge of the mudflats in Royston Bay.

  The strikers and their families lived in canvas tents. On the beach, several communal pavilions were erected immediately, each with one cooking stove to service five or more families. Slowly, through the late fall and early winter, the tents were fortified with scavenged wood. Snow whitened the mountains and the foothills and slumped in the boughs of the fir trees. The canvas sagged with dampness. Darkness crowded the day. The mornings it did not rain, frost furred everything.

  Eventually, small stoves were installed in all the tents so families would not freeze to death and everyone set about collecting soggy fuel that burned only in seeping clouds of smoke. The miners built outhouses on stilts beyond the tide line with long narrow walkways made of boards reaching out over the rocks and tidal pools and high water. Twice that winter, storm waves ripped the structures from the mud and people were swept to sea.

  Theresa and Ora no longer went to school. They wandered the beach collecting driftwood for fires and harvesting kelp and dulce, geoducks and oysters. There were other children too on the beach, and adults with small boats and traps for crabs and prawns. Mostly what the children collected was turned into tasteless pastes and stews. They were always cold. Meals were often dried beans and rice, which the union procured in quantity for the camp. During this time Theresa and Ora thought of Lee Yuen and the sea things he sold from his cart. They tried to remember what those things were and what they looked like.