What I Want to Tell Goes Like This Read online

  What people feared in him was his capacity for violence, which they could see in his oversized hands. A room grew hotter with him in it. On the days he visited the camp he gathered what men he could in a tent and tried to hold their minds together. “I’m sick of condolences, letters and telegrams saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ We’ve seen more than our share of suffering but we’re finally in a position to do something about it.”

  “What’s that, Joe? What are we going to do?”

  “Stay strong.”

  “For how long, Joe?”

  “Forever.”

  The men did not move. They were still staring at him like he might go on, like there was more for him to say.

  “We’re going to die, Joe, and that… that’ll be forever.”

  “Well,” he said, “let’s have a song then before you go.”

  ON SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1886, Albert Parsons, who had served when he was fourteen years old as a powder monkey for the cannoneers of the Confederate Army, his wife, the former slave and founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World (also known as the Wobblies), Lucy Gonzalez, and their two half-breed children, lead a march of eighty thousand workers down Michigan Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. Their demand: an eight-hour workday. The march coincided with strikes throughout the city of Chicago and in New York, Milwaukee and Detroit. On that same date twenty- seven years later, the United Mine Workers of America held a strike vote in the Princess Theatre on Selby Street in Nanaimo. Back in Haymarket Square in the spring of 1886, after four days of strikes across the northeast and midwest of America, a demonstrator hurled a pipe bomb loaded with dynamite at a line of police. The explosion killed seven officers. Then the police opened fire.

  The Selby Street vote came two hundred and twenty-five days after the miners had been locked out in Cumberland. The union had been small in Nanaimo and was easily infiltrated by spies for the Western Fuel Company, which operated one of two Nanaimo collieries. Nevertheless, by May 4, 1913, the anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, every mine on Vancouver Island was under picket.

  LATE JUNE NOW IN the forty-sixth year of the Dominion of Canada. Lee Yeun Loya is encamped on the opposite side of a slurry pond among the young river willow and alder, those first takers of cleared land. Leviathan clouds of red and orange and black slide across the island mountains and the wide, insomniac sun in the west. They move in and out of each other and change shape like fire. The pond is grey and darker grey as the sky transforms. The methane from the deep island coal bed seeps up through the slurry and spring runoff in erratic bubbles. Crouched at the pond edge, Theresa and Ora watch mosquitoes hatching across the surface of the water, tiny black bodies, dormant and stunned, then shaking it off and rising, fleshed, into a new element.

  “How did we speak when we were children?” Theresa wrote her sister in an unsent letter dated December 5, 1952, the same date a great fog descended on London trapping the particles of coal in the atmosphere and killing eight thousand people in four days. “I mean,” she writes in a mannered cursive longhand, “what words did we use? What did we talk about? I can see that stupid smile on your face, the way your eyes get bigger when you are thinking. But I do not know if that is a memory of childhood or an extrapolation based on the sister I have known and remember well these last thirty-something years. I believe I can see you peeing in the bushes or throwing rocks at the chickens when you were six or seven. That seems clear enough. There we are sharpening sticks on the rocks along the river or spading out thistles in the cutblocks and peeling the roots with our fingernails. I can even feel the earth under our nails and mother holding all four of our hands in the scalding dishwater with only her two—she was so much stronger than us—but I cannot hear our voices, their timbre or pitch, or make out anything we are saying or hear even the content of our silences.”

  The girls are watching the mosquitoes.

  Then they are sitting at the edge of the fire with the man from China.

  Three faces are lit by the orange flames, while the sunlight is coming apart in the trees. The backs of the three bodies are growing darker and everything behind them is becoming one complete and ambivalent thing which they are half part of and half not. One face by the fire does not stop smiling as he carves a white-fleshed root that smells of aniseed and passes thin slices to the small, dark-haired girls who chew at the root and suck back the licorice taste. Then he sticks the knife in his wooden leg. A film of white light panes the pond and makes a deeper blackness in the water. Lee Yeun Loya, who has never struck a man in his life, who left two young daughters in Guangdong province on the South China Sea, has a pistol that sits beside him in a cloth and he picks it up now and unwraps it and holds it with two hands so its metal can be seen in the firelight.

  In the morning, the women of the UMWA Ladies Auxiliary will outfit their daughters in white dresses with red hair-ribbons and badges and will lead a parade of solidarity from the union headquarters on Commercial Street in Nanaimo to the cricket grounds two and a half miles away. The boys will follow with red badges on their chest, marching to the music of the Silver Cornet Band and the Ladysmith Miners’ Band. Families will attend from Cumberland and Extension and all the children will compete in races and jumps and ball-throwing events for small prizes of candy and the first juice many have tasted in months. There will be fiddlers and strings of blue and red and white bunting fluttering in the breeze and straw bales to sit on and when Reverend J.W. Hedley of the Haliburton Street Methodist Church begins to speak the crowd stands under the mixed sky and roars with approval.

  “The papers are against you. The government is against you. The capitalists are against you. All you have now are yourselves!” Hedley is a small man with round glasses and dark eyes. He’s dressed in a brown suit and he takes off his hat to wipe his bald head. There is a gallant tremor in his voice that has always made a crowd open their chests for him. “But this is not primarily a fight against coal companies or the government. This is a fight against the coroner and the morgue. This is a fight not for a living but for life.”

  Lee Yeun takes short alder pole from the flames and holds the red ember tip above his head like a torch. When he sets it on the water, and the bubbling methane, the whole pond lights up and the trees surrounding it and the camp.

  The water is on fire.

  THE SUMMER OF 1913 was the hottest on Vancouver Island in recorded history. On the sweltering evening of Saturday July 19, a tall, husky scab herder called Cave and fifteen other men employed by Canadian Collieries Ltd. marched from the company compound down Dunsmuir Street in Cumberland. According to a 1914 pamphlet written by Jack Kavanagh, a communist party member and President of the British Columbia Federation of Labour, Cave and his men shouted down the strikers who were gathered informally on the opposite side of the street. It was not quite evening and the sun was at its hottest. Strangely, the fragrance of a sweet and slightly rotten flower that everyone recognized infused the air and despite the yelling the whole scene felt quiet and slow. Finally, Kavanagh reports, a young strikebreaker named Reynolds, fifty pounds lighter and three inches shorter than Cave, crossed the street and a black miasma of starlings bolted for the sky.

  He stood toe to toe with the company man.

  “You got a gun?” Reynolds asked.

  Cave looked down at the young man and it seemed his gaze was heavy and travelled a long ways out of himself to see the freckled face and two-coloured eyes looking back at him. It was widely known that the strikebreakers at Extension and South Wellington, five miles from Nanaimo, had become possessed of firearms.

  “Son, I don’t need a gun to clean out—”

  When Reynolds dropped Cave with a blow to the gut, one striker said he could see the flesh in Cave’s neck quiver. Within seconds the police that had gathered on the corners to watch the affair descended and arrested Reynolds, dragging him by his wrists up the street behind the line of strikebreakers.

  Such are the moments.

  In Kavanagh’s acc
ount, the strikers drove Cave and his men back up the hill towards the company compound. They threw beer glasses from the porch of the King George Hotel. They hurled rocks and curses and when the police released Reynolds and sent him staggering back into the oncoming crowd, the crowd lifted him on their shoulders and he blew kisses to the retreating police and the strikebreakers and the shop owners who’d come out to watch the destruction. At the top of the hill where the government road left the townsite, in front of the house of Mr. Clinton, the company cashier and United States Consul, the special police were drawn up on foot and horseback.

  “Shoot them,” Clinton screamed, waving his stubby arms at the police and at the mob. “Ride them down! Drive them into the sea!”

  So commenced a summer of unprecedented heat.

  When night fell, flames were still issuing from Clinton’s house and three other houses beyond the police line.

  Three days later, Joe Naylor, President of the Union Local, was arrested in his cabin at Comox Lake and charged with “unlawful assembly” on the night of July 19. Five other strikers faced the same charge. He went peacefully. “The things you see,” he said to the two young officers who arrived at his door in the early evening before the crickets had even started, “when you don’t have a gun.”

  A week later in Ladysmith, an Extension striker was stabbed beneath the sixty-candlepower lamp outside the Temperance Hotel, 623 Edward Street, headquarters of the strikebreakers. The striker was on his way home. Shortly after that, the company erected a searchlight that played across the town and the sky and the dark hills around them. In the early morning of August 11, a group of strikers tossed a package of dynamite through the open window of the home of Alex McKinnon, a miner who had broken with the union and returned to work in order to keep up payments on his new $4,000 cottage. It was dark in McKinnon’s home and he saw the face of the man on the street lit by the fuse of the dynamite but he never revealed who it was he saw. As McKinnon tried to throw the dynamite back into the street it carried off his arm.

  Grasses were dry in the ditches and fields and flies drank from the water in the eyes of horses and mules and cows. Two large forest fires burning in Washington State flew long black banners of smoke across the water. It was too hot to breathe or sleep. Two days later, twenty-three special police arrived in Nanaimo and a miner named Griffiths stared down a pistol held by an officer called Taylor and dared him to shoot. That night the union sent a letter to Attorney- General Bowser asking that the police be removed and offering to undertake the peace themselves.

  Here is Bowser’s reply, dated August 15, 1913, for the record: “When day breaks there will be nearly a thousand men in the strike zone wearing the uniform of His Majesty. This is my answer to the proposition of the strikers that they will preserve the peace if they are left unmolested by the special police.”

  ON SUNDAY AUGUST 17, J.J. Taylor, Vice-president of District 28, United Mine Workers of America, was arrested by detectives when his train stopped in Duncan on his way to see the Minister of Mines in Victoria. The next evening at 7:30 p.m., the union met with von Alvensleben in the basement of the Nanaimo Athletic Club. Twelve hundred men were present in the club when troops under the command of one Colonel Hall formed a hollow square around the entrance and ordered the miners out. Facing the door was a British-made Lewis light machine gun on the back of a truck. The men were marched out in groups of ten by a guard of soldiers, single file, with bayonets fixed on either side. They were searched and their names were taken and those who were desired were marched to the jails.

  Theresa and Ora Bonamico swam in the saltwater every day. Their black hair held the light and their smooth, olive complexions grew smokier and impenetrable in the sun. They were eight and not quite seven years old. The swans had gone north months before but the girls did not miss them. The river ran low and the small silver fish swam smaller and smaller circles in the scummy shallow pools. At the edges of the fields, blackberries cooked on the vine and on the superintendent’s fifty-acre grounds, four blocks south of the Wilson Hotel, the Chinese gardeners tended the tomatoes hourly that grew sweeter and sweeter in the unthinkable heat.

  The floor of the Athletic Club was torn up in search of armouries. Hardware stores in Cumberland and Nanaimo were raided and their stock of rifles and sporting ammunition confiscated. In Vancouver, the newspapers reported bridges burned, railway engines dismantled and businesses bombed up and down the island. Shots had been fired from the pitheads in Cumberland and Extension and one striker had been killed. Trains carrying the women and children of the strikebreakers arrived in Victoria where there were no mines. The families who did not have friends or relations in the city were given sanctuary at the Metropolitan Methodist Church, 907 Pandora Avenue.

  The Seaforth Highlanders of Canada, a light infantry regiment formed two years earlier under the number 72 in the Canadian Militia list, were deployed to Cumberland from the Seaforth Armoury on Burrard Street, Vancouver, on August 16, 1913. Two days later, they lined both sides of Dunsmuir Avenue from Seventh Street to First with cannons on the corner of every block.

  So.

  Bulgaria had already turned on Serbia and Greece over the homelands of Alexander the Great and the Second Balkan War was setting the stage for the crisis of 1914. Theresa and Ora Bonamico walked in the dust along the wagon road between Cumberland and Royston. They had dust in their mouths and in their hair. In the gardens of Superintendent Robert Henderson, at the edge of city, the family prepared to marry their firstborn son, David Andrew Henderson, to Alison Rebecca Lesley of James Bay, Victoria. White canopies mushroomed the grounds and Chinese lanterns hung in the trees.

  In two years and nineteen days in a field in France, David would be struck by a bullet piercing his helmet just above his eyes, passing through his skull and his frontal lobe and coming to rest in his corpus callosum, causing him to fall first to his knees and then, in a second motion, to collapse face-first in the mud. The last thing he felt was a deep cold that passed through his chest and reminded him of the day he was married. The following night Alison, unaware of the bullet or the shout of cold in David’s chest, gave birth to a stillborn girl she did not name and buried in an unconsecrated grave below an oak tree near the confluence of two small rivers.

  In 1913 on the day of the wedding, the Bonamico sisters could see the lanterns in the fruit trees and smell the pig roasting in its pit. In six months the union would be broken and the last generation of Cumberland miners would be born into the imminent shadow of the war to end all wars.

  On the horizon, where the road dropped down towards the sea and air melted and wavered in the heat, a cloud of dust kicked into the sky. Then a horse head crested the hill and then a driver with his switch and behind them a cart carrying fruit and meat and spirits for the wedding. The sound of the horns and drums of the wedding band warming up in the garden—the horse, which was brown with white in its mane, heard it and the driver and the two sisters.

  Ora stood in the middle of the road, bare-shouldered, the thin cloth of her dress stuck with sweat to her slender back. She did not move as the cart approached. The driver waved, then tugged on the reins, and the clatter of the horse’s shoes slowed and came to a stop a few feet before the child. The horse moved its head from side to side in the bridle and snorted at the bit. There are things to be said about the weather and they have been said. Theresa climbed across the bench of the cart and held the gun to the driver’s head.

  YOU HAVE TO THINK OF ME WHAT YOU THINK OF ME

  WHAT I DIDN’T SAY: I was awakened later that night by your face, tender and humiliated in those moments after I hit you. When I pushed back the currents to see who was shouting in the front yard and what harm was happening between men and women in the neighbourhood, there you were in your cracked black boots and wool skirt about to cross the street going away from me. Even in the night it was day and the maples and the birch were losing their leaves in a party all over the sidewalk. I wanted to go to that party. You lo
oked up and down the street. Your bag sported colourful embroidery and I could tell the trees were jealous.

  I opened the window and called after you saying, “I’d like to read you a poem about fire and Billie Holiday and my life, which is another man’s life in the poem, but that doesn’t matter.”

  Then I said, “Please, wait up!”

  This wasn’t a dream. You were in bed next to me. I heard a woman shout and it brought me all the way out of my sleep and everything I am telling you happened in the moments after I hit you while we made love. I hit you in the face in a pique of surprise and passion.

  “Don’t hold back,” you’d said.

  After a tear peeked out the corner of your eye and frightened me, I turned away and covered myself in sleep.

  It was morning and I was reading you a poem. I’d had a shower and dressed and you were still in bed wearing your glasses so you could use your phone to message someone who was not there with us because this is the bias of phones which love people best who are at a distance. I didn’t say anything. I started reading you a poem about a man who had been banished, like Billie Holiday, from New York City, but whose life had been longer and somewhat less humiliating than hers.

  In the poem, the man is interrogated by fire. He’s a lot like me and the poem was a lot like us with the admission that he was in fact married to another woman at the time and how the woman who had banished him, who was not his wife, was wearing only an “apricot-tinted, fraying chemise” which is something I feel you must have owned and perhaps still do. “You have to think of me what you think of me,” is what he says to us, his silent interlocutors, but I couldn’t bring myself to say this to you. You’d had enough of me going on about me.