What I Want to Tell Goes Like This Read online

  Out on the sea, the moving light hypnotized on the jagged planes of water. Ducks bobbed up and down with the waves. The girls tried to imagine where those things in Lee Yeun’s cart could be found and what they could be turned into and how those things might feed them. But they’d never really known what Lee Yuen peddled in that cart and their search was hopeless.

  For Theresa it felt as though there was a great darkness in her memory compiled of all the things she’d seen or experienced but had no words for or could not remember sharply enough to separate into the light of knowing. They’d only known Lee Yeun’s goods by their scent and now that scent was all around them and they could distinguish nothing.

  “Do you remember,” Theresa once asked Ora while they stood on rise in the Irish midlands many years later, “licking the rocks and barnacles to see if we could eat them?” She was thinking of the Irish famine and the evictions. She adored history.

  “And the trees,” said Ora, whose eyes had fallen on an apple orchard lined with goldenrod. “Gnawing the bark. Sucking the sap.”

  The clouds were in a hurry overhead.

  That winter in the camp when they wanted to stay away from the tents, Theresa and Ora followed the river from the beach through the reeds and grasses. There were shorebirds neither girl could name that wintered in the tall cover. But they’d seen the swans pass overhead and they imagined finding one of the big white birds and killing it for supper.

  “Spear it,” Ora said, holding a rock-sharpened stick above her head.

  Theresa imagined its neck in her hands.

  They imagined things now that they had never imagined.

  They skulked in the grasses and followed the deer paths they believed were made by the birds.

  Near the train trestle that spanned the river canyon a kilometre from the shore, small silver fish circled in pools or waved back and forth in the ripples. They were not large enough to eat or catch. Fifteen years earlier the trestle had mysteriously collapsed and a locomotive had plunged fifty feet into the river. Many believed it was sabotage. The girls didn’t know this story but Theresa could tell by the way the riverbanks had been stripped of trees and the high canyon rocks spilled into the river that something had happened there. It seemed so obvious to her that it wasn’t worth comment and she never said anything about it to anyone, not even herself.

  When the train approached it called from down the track where the girls could not see it. The children huddled underneath the bridge and crouched low beside the water. As it gathered towards them, small rocks flowed down the canyon walls. The water trembled. Each girl held herself together and loved the rumble in her flesh as the train passed overhead. They were children. They learned everything then through their bodies.

  On December 5, 1912, the sun warmed the trestle and steam lifted off the pilings and trusses and off the rail ties. That afternoon, on the way back to the strikers’ camp, Theresa and Ora Bonamico climbed the deer trails that switchbacked the canyon wall into the forest. There was nothing dry now. The ground had turned to spongy mud and wind had scattered the branches in the salal and swordfern. The bushtits and juncos twittered and sparked between the trees then went silent as the girls passed.

  They followed a path along the edge of a pasture. The pasture belonged to the Campbells and reached nearly to the sea and let light and sky wash across its open space and weep through the trees where the girls walked. The gashes of interrupted light made the girls feel as though they were walking faster and faster. It was in a clearing where the light made a pool and everything stopped that they heard the red-haired man talking.

  There is a slightly blurry image of Albert Goodwin from the Public Archives of Canada (item C46568) that appears often enough in books and articles about the young English mule driver and union secretary who was martyred at the foot of Alone Mountain on the far shores of Comox Lake in the high summer of 1918. The image shows Goodwin in a long grey coat with a white, round-collared shirt—a style known as the Lincoln Collar after the emancipatory Republican leader, Abraham Lincoln—and a dark tie in a light fabric. In the photo, Goodwin’s pants are dark also, high-waisted and pressed. They fall in cuffs over his ankle and the tops of his simple leather shoes. It is about a year before his death and the sun comes at him from his right and washes out his pale skin and red hair and casts most of his body and legs in deep shadow.

  He is already a marked man owing to the labour disruption he led at the Trail Smelter. The smelter produced metals for the war effort in Europe and any willful disruption was an act of treason. Behind him in the photograph are bushes and shadow. His arms are outstretched as if laying something plain or welcoming an embrace. There is no one else in the photograph but it would be easy to imagine that just off to the right, where the image stops, there is an undocumented and uncaptured audience listening to the charismatic workingman orator. And this is how the girls saw him that December afternoon in the forest beyond the river: standing on a stump, arms outstretched, giving a speech to an invisible audience.

  “Wherever you go,” Goodwin declaimed, “you see the same revolt implanted into the workingmen. Wherever you go you see the same miserable conditions and the same competition for jobs in order that we may live. All this misery is the outcome of someone’s carelessness. Soon,” he exclaimed to the trees, “things will come to a climax.”

  Then he stopped and turned to address another part of the forest and began again. “Wherever you go you see the same revolt implanted into the workingman, the same miserable conditions, the same competition in order to survive. This misery is the outcome of carelessness and profit and parasites who live off the blood of the working class.” His voice was rising and quickening as he spoke. His arms opened gesturing for the trees to come forward, to join him. The birds were quiet and the sun captioned the clearing in a pale winter light.

  “All I know is this,” he said to the shadows, his eyes narrowing and his voice slowing to hold every word in its own wicked space. “All I know is that in every phase of society, whenever change cometh, it was force that determined the winning side.”

  THEN SEVEN DAYS BEFORE Christmas, on a dark windy morning that gave way to brightness with the cool winter sun, Italo awoke shivering and feverish. He spent most of that day in his cot reading Mark Twain, who was born into poverty as Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, but was buried a rich man at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York, the same year Tolstoy was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Yasnaya Polyana, where the penniless Russian nobleman had played as a child. Italo’s cheeks were sunken and he had dark tiny eyes.

  Twice that day Louisa stripped Italo’s sweat-soaked sheets. A wind cut through a gap in the canvas and the tent inhaled and exhaled with a flutter like a partially collapsed lung. By four it was dark and when his wife turned on the oil lamp, Italo could hear the flame shudder. Then for the next three days he pulled himself out of bed each morning and shuffled around the camp, following his girls out to the shore, or watching other men split wood and mend wagons. Perhaps he knew what was coming. He was ghostly and strange. People stopped what they were doing when he walked by.

  “Go to bed, Italo.”

  “You’re sick, man.”

  “Jesus Christ, don’t bring that around.”

  “Get him some water.”

  “Sto bene,” he said. “Tutto a posto.”

  He picked up one of the camp chickens. He held it upside down by the feet with its wings hammering the air around him. He stood there holding it up to his eye as if trying to see into the eye of the bird. White feathers floated in the air.

  “Gimme that,” said a woman Italo recognized. He’d known her name once, he was sure of it, but there was nothing there now.

  In bed he listened to his stomach.

  “There is something happening in there,” he said to no one. It amused and comforted him to think that things were happening with his body that would go on happening after he passed.

  “Come here,” he sai
d to Ora. “Put your ear on my belly.”

  Ora knelt at the cot and leaned into her father, head tilted sideways. He smelled bad and she didn’t want to touch him but he’d said to and she could hear as she lowered her head the grumbling turpitude of his stomach.

  “It’s amazing,” Italo said but he could not feel his daughter’s ear on his skin.

  On December 23, he fell in the snowy mud outside the tent and lay there for two hours in the dark before Theresa and Ora found him. Together they were not strong enough to lift him. Cas Walker and William Greaves, miners whose families were camped nearby, heard the girls struggling and came to help. When they dragged Italo’s body through the canvas curtains Louisa was at the stove warming her hands. Seeing her husband draped around the shoulders of Greaves and Walker, she pointed to his cot and went to him to remove his coat and his boots, which were covered in mud. Twice his eyelids opened but his pupils had rolled away in his head. By New Year’s Eve Italo was dead. He was thirty-four years old.

  The story of Italo Bonamico is incomplete. Too much was never recorded and everyone who knew him is dead now. What we know from an entry in Theresa’s diary made nearly ten years later: Italo lagged three days behind his family when they fled to the beach that late September day in 1912, but there’s no record of where he was while Louisa and the girls staked out their patch of mud and grass. Italo Bonamico came from the Piedmont region of northern Italy and grew up speaking Piedmontese which is not Italian at all but another Western Romance language like French or Catalan or Occitan which they speak in the Occitan Valley and in Monaco: among every group there are matters of status and important distinctions.

  In an untranscribed interview Theresa gave to a young researcher named John Carmichael from the University of British Columbia in 1978 when she was seventy-three years old, she claims Italo was the son of a military commander and part of a long line of officers, that he had polio as a child and that his right leg and hip remained in pain all his life.

  No one knows why he left Italy, but in that same interview, Theresa’s thin, indifferent voice confirms that he attended the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. There he saw a modest exhibit produced by the Canadian government and was convinced to emigrate on the assumption that Canadians spoke French as he did. Rare colour photographs of the Expo and of the Canadian pavilion made using a revolutionary Autochrome technique can be seen in the Musée Albert-Kahn at 14 rue du Port, Boulogne-billancourt, a western suburb of Paris.

  In Canada, Bonamico headed west by rail, stopping once in Thunder Bay for sixteen days and then continuing onto the Alberta–British Columbia border. There he joined other Italians working in the mines and became a rope-rider and later a miner’s assistant in the town of New Michelle in the British Columbia Rockies. After a year in the New World he sent for his wife, Louisa. She arrived five months and two days later via train from Calgary.

  Every life has secrets and every secret has a life. When Italo made it finally to the beach, his black beard had already filled in his face. His eyeballs appeared to sit deeper in his sockets and his pupils were pinned to his head.

  The coroner came from Cumberland in a black lorry driven by William Greaves, and carrying the union secretary and fight promoter, Alex Rowan, who had once been a promising runner but, like Lee Yeun Loya, had lost his leg in an industrial accident. Greaves and the coroner, a man called Annis Tambourn, collected the body. Rowan never stepped out of the cab.

  After they were gone, two other men from the union came to speak to Italo’s widow. They came with their hats in their hands and they waited in the mud outside the tent. One was called Joe Naylor, a stout, bulldog-faced man with no neck and fingers too thick for gloves. The other was the slight red-haired man with pale skin from the forest. They were both dressed in dungarees with long wool coats and bandanas tied around their necks.

  The girls watched the two men from the shoreline where they had gone to be away from their mother’s wailing, which was faint and only wailing for the tension in her voice. The sea was a dull, dark grey. The mountains girded with mist and the wet trees and the clouds sinking down the peaks—it all seemed boring and plain to the girls. They didn’t know what their mother was doing and even Louisa seemed unsure if her lament was called for anymore in the New World. They didn’t hear what was said between the men and their mother who didn’t look up or cease her moaning while the men talked, but they could tell that Naylor said most of the words and from that point on he was a regular visitor to Louisa and no other men came around. But that is another story.

  The coroner’s report called it death by “Typhoid Fever” resulting from “the sanitary conditions” of the camp.

  No one else died that winter.

  Italo was buried on December 20, 1912 in a small ceremony at the edge of the Cumberland graveyard a few hundred yards from Maple Lake. His headstone has been lost to the forest or vandals or forgetfulness but a small rectangular indentation marks the spot where he was laid to rest in the opposite corner from Goodwin and Naylor who are buried side by side and two decades apart.

  After, the men gathered at the beach and sang their songs, which were mostly work songs and had little to do with mourning.

  “I went to the doctor,” sang Walker, “couldn’t hardly catch my breath.”

  “I went to the doctor,” came the echo, “couldn’t hardly catch my breath.”

  “Said, Son, what you got will surely mean your death.”

  LATE AT NIGHT, ON the dark beach of Baynes Sound to the south, the company landed skiffs of strikebreakers from coaling ships anchored offshore. They were men from the city who knew nothing of mining but were in need of work or men from the old country who had come too far to do anything else. Often they knew nothing of the strike and those who did know knew better than to speak of it. They walked single file through the forest to where a locomotive attached to three boxcars huffed and hummed in the night. To protect them from the union, Canadian Colliers housed the single men in a guarded compound known as the Bull Pen. For every word the union passed to those inside the compound, the company had already spoken a hundred.

  Collusion was the greatest disease and it brought fear and accusations and division. A man didn’t know the words to the “The Red Flag” and walking down the street he was shoved into an officer to see if he would fight or flinch and what the beating he took might look like. Another accepted apples from a former neighbour who had agreed to the company’s terms and gone back to work—for generations his people were the untrusted and maligned. And there were many smaller injuries—a shade of the eyes, an unexpected hush, a turning of the back—that let men and women and children know they were suspect and other and apart.

  The union planned to barricade the railway on the 17 of February 1913. We know this from a notebook belonging to William Greaves and donated by his widow in 1968 to the University of British Columbia along with Greaves’ account books and papers addressing his service in the Siberian Expedition of 1919. But the train did not go that day in February and a whisper campaign that was reported in the Cumberland Islander on February 19, that same year, held that Mildred Sutton, the wife of a mule driver name Lonnie from Newcastle, England, a grandmother to five green-eyed boys, had tipped the company to the union plans while gossiping with an unknown woman beneath the bell tower at St. George’s Presbyterian on Penrith Avenue and First Street.

  According to documents in the archive of the United Mine Workers of America, 18354 Quantico Gateway Drive, Triangle, Virginia, a secret vote was held in the office of Alex Rowan, secretary for Local 2299, four days later. The vote aimed to determine if Lonnie Sutton would continue to receive his strike pay and other union benefits. There is no record of the results and Greaves never mentions it in his notebook. A mossy, grey stone marks the grave of Mildred Sutton, 1865–1932, in the northwest corner of the Cumberland cemetery but there is no further mention of Lonnie in the archives of the union or the village or the province of British Columbia aft
er February 21, 1913.

  Yes, paranoia.

  It was widely held that the coal on Vancouver Island was of higher quality than what was coming out of the mines in Utah and Colorado. This had helped Cumberland secure a wide international market. Ships made regular circuits around the Pacific carrying jute from Burma to Australia, rice from India to the Puget Sound and Cumberland coal from the colliery wharf at Union Bay to markets across the ocean. Among the striking Cumberland miners grew a suspicion that the American executive of the union bankrolled the strike to create a competitive advantage for their larger American membership.

  When Baron Gustav Konstantin von Alvensleben, real estate magnate and president of the Vancouver–Nanaimo Coal Company, signed the only agreement with striking workers of the Great Strike period to reopen his mine, word spread that von Alvensleben was a spy for Kaiser Wilhelm, buying up land in British Columbia to prepare for a German invasion via the Strait of Juan De Fuca. The Visigoth warships, they said, were already on hand in Panama to celebrate the opening of the canal. A year later, after Britain declared war against Germany on August 4, 1914, and British forces invaded the German protectorate of Togoland, all of von Alvensleben’s Canadian assets were seized by Premier McBride. The German national, whom history would absolve of espionage thanks in part to testimony from his arresting officer, was interned without trial until 1920 in a prison camp for enemy combatants at Fort Douglas in the great salt flats of Utah.

  “We’ve seen more than our share of needless suffering,” Naylor insisted in the tents by the sea. With a large cropped head—neckless, red, big-nosed—a deeply furrowed brow and a hoarse military bass, Naylor made the impression of a bully. But the impression would never last among those who spent an hour or more with him. He knew everyone’s name. Even before the strike he lived alone at the lake and walked the three miles to the pithead each morning. Now, weekly or more he came down to the beach camp to bring trout and game he’d trapped.