“I heard there were a bunch of layoffs today. Any news for us?” Angela asked gently.
“Nothing yet.”
Jack put down his towel and led Angela to the bedroom. He nuzzled her nose and stroked her hair. Despite his worries, he loved her, more than anyone else in the world. He’d been in love with her since she found him in the school library, putting a copy of the banned book Beautiful Losers between the pages of an old encyclopedia. He’d bought a copy on a school trip to St. John’s and had to hide it before anyone saw that he liked to read books by a poet — a poet from Montreal at that.
“What?” she asked as he held her tightly, his mouth opening slowly as if he had something to say. She put her small hand on his face and asked him again. He shook his head, murmured and pulled her on the bed, kicking the door shut behind them.
The next morning Angela called out to Jack to come to the breakfast table.
“I’ve made your favourites,” she said cheerfully and held out his chair. Yellow foam hung out from the torn powder-blue plastic seam. A large loaf of steaming homemade bread, a square slab of creamy butter, a bottle of crisp red partridgeberry jam, bacon and fried eggs, and a pot of hot sugared tea covered the blue Formica table. She placed a steaming mug of milky tea in front of him. He sipped it slowly and blew cool air over the lip, the steam rolling away like early morning fog lifting at noon.
“Do you think you’ll hear anything today?” Angela asked tersely and twisted a napkin over her delicate fingers so tightly, her veins looked as thick as purple velvet ropes.
Jack looked at her sharply through the wisps of steam. “No,” he said, his face flushed from lying.
“But we know it’s only a matter of time.”
“We’ll be safe and sound, my love, one way or the other; I won’t let anything happen to any of ye —”
“But what about when exploration stops?”
“I told you I’ll take care of you. All of you.”
Angela sighed and got up to get a napkin. She dutifully placed it beside him then watched him as he ate, kept her eye on him as he walked to work. Stood up by the window and looked at him as he disappeared into the folds of the mineshaft. She could hear it as it cranked and creaked ceaselessly through their half-open window. The weather-beaten iron shaft jutted out of the dirt, triple the size of the bunkhouses, little square shacks covered in aluminum siding surrounding the sloppy triangular tower. A classic “company town,” all housing meant to serve the purpose of work, with access to and from easy and uncomplicated. No excuses, rain or shine, for not making it to work on time or lasting throughout your shift. If you were hungry, you simply called your wife, and she walked the fifty feet to the mine site and gave you the packed lunch forgotten on the dining room table. If you were drunk or hungover, you simply rolled out of bed and trudged up the little hill to the mine site. If you were sick, other men carried you.
She couldn’t imagine how they worked all day and all night, in dented hard hats, the flashlight a third eye prowling for minerals. Cold and damp in their torn yellow rubber suits and oversized mucking boots, riding on clanging trucks — they used to carry pick-axes but now explosives were slung over shoulders by the boxful — as layers of soot dried on their faces until the shift change whistle blew and they came home to their wives, patiently waiting by the windows.
After lunch Angela turned on the news. After only a few minutes she turned it off again. Goodbye Mulroney, Reagan, and Thatcher and your mine strikes, she thought as she sat back down again, somewhat defeated as she crossed and uncrossed her thin legs, the beige corduroy rubbing together softly. The situation in northern Manitoba’s nickel belt looked no better than in Newfoundland — or across the Atlantic, for that matter. The miners’ strike in England had been brutal, corporations making money and getting tax cuts, with devastating results for families living on a shoestring. Angela pondered her fate and that of her children. Could we really stay here if the mine closed? Would it be at all possible? The thought filled her with dread. No, better to head someplace where new development was taking place, better to take their chances with something new. A mine has a good long lifespan if it’s rich. She pulled up the sleeves of her green turtleneck and peeled an orange. Bursts of juice exploded as she inched her thumb through the skin. She sucked on a segment. Katie, Maggie, and Lily were playing at her feet. Katie, the eldest, ashen blonde and frail, like her English grandmother Harrington, was tall for her five years. Her two younger siblings were dark Irish like Jack’s family. Katie was quiet, colouring dutifully, worn out from a morning at school, while Maggie, three, and Lily, almost a year old, petite with big blue eyes and fiery tempers, were engaged in a tug of war with a rag doll.
“Maggie,” Angela said warningly and peered at them over the thick rims of her eyeglasses.
Lily cried loudly. Angela reached down from her chair, snatched the doll, and gave it to her. Maggie frowned, crossed her arms, and stamped her little feet.
“Maggie, Mommy’s got a surprise for you behind her back,” Angela said coaxingly. Maggie stopped pouting and walked eagerly to her mother. “Guess which hand?”
“This one?” Maggie said and pointed to the right.
“Yes!”
Maggie clapped and took the orange in her delicate but animated hands.
As the children settled, Angela rose to make dinner. She stood in the kitchen rocking back and forth on her heels, humming along with a folk song on the radio, peeling potatoes, carrots, and turnips, dropping them in a scratched orange plastic bowl filled with cold water before she salted more water in a large yellow pot for boiling.
At five o’ clock the pale blue sky turned a deep navy, looking like a smattering of squashed wild blackberries. Fat grey dustball clouds spilled in and clung to the dark sky. Angela fussed with the white kitchen curtains and peered out the window, looking for Jack. Her boiled dinner was finished: moist salt beef, potatoes, soft and steaming cabbage and turnips in brown sugar were ready to be served. Across the gravel lane she saw straight into Wanda Fifield’s kitchen.
She was swathed in a baggy polka dot housedress, her hair in tight curls. She opened her fridge door, empty but for a carton of milk. She spooned sugar into her baby’s milk bottle and then put a spoonful in her own mouth.
Angela put her hand over her mouth quickly. Is that all she’s been eating?
“Momma, I’m hungry,” Katie said and hovered around the kitchen table.
“Supper will be ready soon.”
A bolt of bone-white lightning, crooked as a crab leg, singed the sky. Angela glanced at her clothesline. Out the front door Angela called to Wanda, “Will you give me a hand with these clothes?”
Wanda opened her door. “Oh yes, sure my dear, no problem at all,” she said and waddled out with her baby on her hip. Circles of dappled flesh were bunched around the child’s bucking wrists and ankles. Sculpted hair in a little finger wave crested on the peak of her small round forehead. Wanda pulled the wooden pins from the electric blue line. Angela asked about Pete.
“He’s still out looking for work. He’s been in town for most of the month.”
“Anything on the go in St. John’s?”
“Not a thing. As soon as we get something — anything — we’re gone. No use staying here out of sentimentality,” Wanda said resolutely.
Dense rain pelted their legs and pooled at the bottom of the clothesbasket.
“Help