Peter looked once again at Jack in the pew, praying intently while Maggie climbed over him, her yellow skirt flaring like a petal. Angela, gaunt and stern, shepherded Maggie to her seat and shifted Lily on her hip, while Katie prayed alongside her father.
He better make it out, Peter thought. He would do anything he could to make sure of it.
Jack didn’t look back when he came up from underground for the last time, the skip cage rickety, confining, and sour-smelling, but he shook everyone’s hands and put on a pleasant face. Inside he was angry and irritable. The other miners’ tongues were as busy as ants on his last night shift.
“I got a job in Alberta,” one said.
“Me too,” another three or four chorused.
All night, talking of successfully selling their homes, belongings sorted and packed, going-away parties planned. The only thing louder than the men who had found jobs were the angry ones who had yet to find work.
“My wife has threatened to go out and work. What do I know about taking care of babies?” someone said.
“My wife has threatened to move back in with her mother if I don’t find something,” someone else shouted miserably.
Jack was silent. Sad and still and silent with shock.
The din from the machinery was the last sound he heard when he came up from underground. It had never sounded so abrasive. It made him angry.
Above ground, it was a quiet morning. Mid-September mist clotted the air. A ribbon of sparrows trailed one after the other in jagged flight. The song of that bird — he never knew its name — with the high-pitched tweet followed by four notes, descending in pitch and key, always tore at his heart. It always sounded melancholy.
He’d told Angela not to wait for him or to worry. He was going to go for a walk after his last shift at work. He was going to sneak away to the swimming hole and spend the morning by himself.
The rising sun sizzled the mist off the rocks; it was a sudden sharp and direct light.
A swim might be just the thing, Jack thought.
He walked down the hill and dropped his lunch tin, hard hat, and bag of personals from his locker on his back step and then took off. He quickened his pace, reaching the well-worn skinny path to the swimming hole in minutes. The backwoods quickly swallowed him up. The balsam fir trees were so thick, they looked black. One was so big, its roots stuck up out of the earth like a dried brown parsnip, tapered at the end to form a spindly root, a wheezy tie to the soil. The blueberry bushes were swiped clean. The women in Brighton donned kerchiefs, shorts, tube tops, and sneakers to collect them in late August under the drowsy sun, squatting over the bushes picking bucketful after bucketful, leaving very little for the black bears. Jack passed the crop of boulders and smiled. As kids they would hide behind the rocks with Peter’s binoculars and watch the women picking berries. When the women bent over in their tube tops, an inch of white skin, revealed alongside the caramel tan on their necks and arms, would convince the boys they’d seen chest.
One of the women, Mrs. Hynes, had gotten lost out here. She’d strayed from the group and spent three nights out here alone.
“It’s the senses that drive you mad,” she’d said for years afterwards while telling her story over a game of cards at the Union Hall. “First it’s your sight; you see things that aren’t there. I saw my son beckoning me to follow him. Then it’s your hearing. You hear things that aren’t there. I heard my grandchildren calling out to me, Nanny, supper’s ready, they’d called, confused as to why I wasn’t coming to the table to eat.”
Jack was on the path alone now, and it was silent. The sun had risen and he was nearing the falls. A few more feet to go.
Finally, no one here to tell me what to do.
Out here he couldn’t feel the swell of Angela’s will or the tether of Peter’s friendship.
I can’t hear my children, my parents, my wife, or my friends. Free from responsibilities. I could stay out here forever. Let them send out a search-and-rescue crowd.
They’d sent one out for Mrs. Hynes, found her covered in patches of moss she’d pulled from the ground to make a quilt to keep warm.
Angela had been unforgiving. “Why would anyone leave the group while out berry-picking? She must have wanted to get lost in the woods,” she’d said and rolled her eyes.
Angela would go out with her mother every year and fill ten buckets, and they had jam, scones, muffins, pancakes, pies, and cakes all year long. She’d give the girls bowlfuls swimming in milk and sugar for breakfast. She even made tea with dried berries and honey.
Of course, Angela wouldn’t have strayed from the group. She’d have shepherded them from bush to bush, inspected pails, and created an emergency plan in case of black bears or charging moose.
Jack’s mother had also been unforgiving. “It was the death of her father that did that to her, made Angela all funny,” she’d say and roll her eyes.
Jack quickened his pace along the trail. He only had a few hours before she’d come looking for him and drag him back home. He rounded the corner to the clearing. The rocks were thirty feet high, the falls pouring down in a single straight spurt and pooling at the bottom in a twenty-foot hole, fit for diving and swimming. Jack took off his clothes and climbed up the side of the rock wall, footrests smashed by hand a generation ago. His own father and grandfather before him had scaled these walls for the thrill of a dive.
At the top of the cliff he waded in the cold, silty water. His ankles turned a sudden sharp red. His feet were unsteady on the pebbles but he made it to the edge without slipping. He threw his arms up and jumped head-first. The moment of weightlessness before hitting the water; the sucking punch of the palm of water as it rushed to envelop him. Then the cocooned suspension as the water ballooned out around him. It was a pure joy.
Jack relaxed underwater for a few seconds. All he could hear was the waterfall hitting the rocks and the blood in his skull.
I could stay underwater forever, he thought. The minute the skip cage dropped him underground, he always panicked, worried he’d never see the sun again, but not here, not in the water. His was a family that loved swimming, especially in the ocean. They loved to pile in the car and drive to places like Corner Brook or Baie Verte, or the summer they drove even as far as Bonavista Bay. They’d spend the day at the ocean eating nothing but brown bags full of salty chips and chunks of battered cod. Peter and Wanda would follow behind them in their car. One time Peter goaded Jack into a drag race on the highway. Angela had put a stop to it before it even got started, raised a fist and stuck it out the window; Peter slunk back into his lane and slowed down.
This was before Susie was born, when Wanda, barely twenty-one, fed Maggie from her bottle, changed her diaper, cuddled and held her while Jack, Angela, and Katie cavorted in the waves. She must have been three, Jack thought, when I would slather ocean foam over my face and we’d play barbershop. He’d run his finger over his face in a straight line and ask her if she was next to have a shave. It made her laugh so much, Jack thought and smiled.
He came up and flopped from side to side like a fish. He treaded water and squinted under the glare of the sun.
I’ll miss this place the most. He couldn’t count how many times they’d come out here. The time when Angela was pregnant with Katie, she’d sat on a rock, belly swollen out over her black bikini, the reddish swell of a fireball-shaped clump of stretch marks already seizing the skin underneath her belly button. She’d wanted to do nothing except eat tinned peaches. Her long black hair stuck to her back and shoulders as she sweated happily in the sun.
Jack