A brassy light streams through the window and fills the small kitchen of the bungalow where Constable Ed Nolan stands fixing a cup of tea. The hand stirring sugar in the steaming cup freezes there while he gets lost in memory, tripped or snagged. He seems to be doing this a lot lately, simply getting stuck in mid-thought or mid-stride, sitting there with a forkful of potatoes or a coffee cup hovering three inches from his lips. How long he stands here with the spoon in the cup, he has no idea — thirty seconds or six minutes, it is all the same. And then, as though released from the binds of a magical spell, his hand begins to work again. This condition is not the result of the recent concussion, he knows, for it dates back more than a year, to those long days when he straddled his job and tended to a mother dying in a hospital a hundred kilometres down the highway, all while watching his father slide into the void of dementia. The concussion, in addition to this newfound worry for the fate of his town, has likely only piled onto the tail end of a bad year. Ed Nolan knows that he needs a vacation, a break away from this place. If he is honest, he knows he must leave altogether one day, or face a life of loneliness and slow suffocation. The truth is, he can’t leave. Not while the kids in town are in danger from this new, dark stranger called methamphetamine.
Nolan stands now with his back against the counter and surveys the room — his mother’s needlepoint designs of deer and flowers in country fields, the framed religious verses, the dozens of spice and herb jars organized in alphabetical order. He brings the cup of tea and walks through the living room. Once cluttered with bric-a-brac of all varieties, clunky furniture picked up by his bargain-hunting father at yard sales and church fundraisers, awful oil paintings created by the wife of a mining friend, the room is now as sparse as a monastery. He is slowly, tediously working his way through the house one room at a time, a machine that cleans and clears. The walls are blank, the shag carpet has been rolled away. His father has no memory of these rooms, or this house even, except the odd and seemingly random blurting out of a snapshot, something shared here or there one Christmas, a Sunday in June of 1983. Nolan wonders now if the fog that has settled on his brain like a rag dosed in chloroform is similar to what happened to his father in those early months. The days when he sat across from this once seemingly omnipotent man with the tight biceps, the neck muscles taut and corded, and had to remind him what a knife and fork were for.
He taps softly three times at the bedroom, a habit and societal ritual that overrides the reality that his father likely can’t comprehend the notion of privacy. He slips inside the room and the stale air mugs him like a hand over his mouth and nose. The floor is planted with clumps of dirty clothes, old bedding, and he feels guilty and ashamed. The day is quickly approaching when he will need to make the call and have his father taken to a nursing home in Timmins or Sudbury, perhaps somewhere even farther away.
“I have your tea, Dad,” he says, and steps over some clothes to the night table.
Nolan can hardly breath, the air is so ripe. He moves to the window and opens it a few inches. He will take the risk of letting sub-zero air into the room, despite the fact his father now lies in bed and is at constant risk of developing pneumonia. A slice of cold winter air does in fact immediately change the temperature. He closes the window and turns back to his father.
“I have to go to work, Dad,” Nolan says. “We have problems … new problems here in Ste. Bernadette. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. The whole world has changed.”
His father doesn’t respond, and makes no move for the tea. Nolan listens for a moment, believing he may have heard his father make a sound, but there is nothing. The son can’t recall the last time the father spoke his name, or any word for that matter. Nolan nods, as though he is once again accepting that it is simply the right thing for a son to do, to make that call. Breaking the promise his father made him make when Nolan’s mother was sick — that he would never, under any circumstances, surrender him to a nursing home, that he would be afforded the simple luxury of passing away in his own bed — this is something Nolan will have to live with.
Six
S>te. Bernadette — or Saint B as she is known by the locals — is nestled in the thickest of the wild country of the Cambrian Shield, due north of Timmins and just west of the Quebec border. Unpolished, with the ragged and torn-open beauty that only the North can produce — a beauty born of adversity and stubbornness, this place where trees jut impossibly from grey sheer rock walls, wildflowers surviving in barely a dusting of soil. Ste. Bernadette for two generations has straddled a vein of gold — her luck and her curse. The community centre that thirty years ago rocked with Saturday night dances now rots in its place, leaning to one side, the whitewash faded, cracked, and peeling. The once-prosperous shops along Main Street now own boarded windows, except for those few whose owners refuse to let go.
A little more than twelve hundred people live there now, but at the height of the Carver Company mining operations located just outside the town, Ste. Bernadette was home to more than double that number. Ste. Bernadette never really figured in the mining news, not when stacked against the big players — Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Timmins, Red Lake, even Cobalt in its gravy days. Ste. Bernadette was that rare secret; a small operation, yes, but it was prosperous and stable. Most of the locals didn’t mind that outsiders never mentioned the place when they thought of mining; it was just as well to keep their ambitions away. Many worried aloud that a small boom would both invigorate and eventually destroy the town. Paranoia of the south and the cities down there was simply a part of the embedded culture in a remote northern town where sharing gossip and passing judgment were a part of daily life.
Unlike the Hollinger Gold Mine of Timmins, which was at one time the richest gold producer in the western hemisphere — or even the mines of Rouyn, which operate still — the vein deep beneath Ste. Bernadette was seemingly not infinite. Like many remote towns in northern Ontario — or northern Quebec or Manitoba or Saskatchewan — there was a Native reserve nearby, in this case half an hour northeast of Ste. Bernadette. A short trip up the two-lane highway, followed by a ten-minute drive down a gravel road would deliver you to a new universe: the Big Water First Nation.
It is surreal: McKelvey stands in the kitchen of the home where he was raised. It is silent. Sun streams through the window and warms the side of his face. He remembers standing just like this on cold winter mornings, eyes closed to the warmth, feet cold on the linoleum floor. Later, as he unpacks, the medical brochures once again poke him in the eye. He stands at the dresser and regards them like a fan of cards, the worst royal flush he’s ever drawn, and then he opens a drawer and tosses them in. He adds to the drawer the journal he has been keeping with no sense of regular dedication. Some of the entries simply record the date and a line or two about having nothing to say, dispatches from the front lines of mortality: Rain today. Fuck it.
Now McKelvey stands at the bathroom sink, the porcelain cold against his stomach, and he swallows the tablets with a backward snap of his head. He closes his eyes and imagines the chemical molecules dissolving, entering his bloodstream on their mission of salvation. This bathroom, this small place. Remembered smells, voices from down the hall. He forms a grainy vision of his father standing at this very sink, shaving cream slathered on his big handsome face, a cigarette propped between thin lips. In the vignette his father turns, notices him standing in the hallway with a foot stuck between the banister posts; and Grey McKelvey smiles and winks. It’s a good memory of a man who rarely let you know where you stood within his silence.
The warmth of the sun through the window feels good now, in the dead of winter, but at the height of summer the top floor of the old house will be stifling. McKelvey wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and puts the pill bottle in the medicine chest above the sink. His razor is in there, too, untouched for the third day now. The stubble is beginning to itch, especially at night with his face pressed against the pillow, but laziness wins out over discomfort. Seems to be a theme in his life these days. But it wasn’t always this way; for once he had a purpose, and drive. He can’t help but admit the waning of his energy, the slowing of that internal propeller. Is this getting old, he wonders, or is it giving up?
It is as though a parallel