MacIntyre - The wake: the deadly legacy of a Newfoundland tsunami

Contents

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F ICTION

The Only Caf

Punishment

Why Men Lie

The Bishops Man

The Long Stretch

N ON -F ICTION

Causeway: A Passage from Innocence

Who Killed Ty Conn? (with Theresa Burke)

The Wake

Copyright 2019 by Linden MacIntyre.

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Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Maps by Mary Rostad

COVER ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS CLOR/GETTY IMAGES

FIRST EDITION

EPub Edition August 2019 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-5204-5

Version 07242019

Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-5202-1

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LSC / H 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To

men and women

who work hard

and die

slowly

I N M EMORIAM

Peter Quirke

Alice MacIntyre

Patrick OFlaherty

Michael Uncle Mick Slaney

Roger Slaney

Kevin Pike

The difficulty is that the need is terrible and so unjust, and schemes of development take long to mature, and meanwhile a people are deteriorating and dying by inches.

L ADY M ARY J ANE H OPE S IMPSON , J ULY 25, 1935

Ive met a lot of old friends and theres a lot of them dead and gone.

D AN R ORY M AC I NTYRE , J ANUARY 27, 1961

All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story...

I SAK D INESEN , N OVEMBER 3, 1957

Contents

i.

Heres the beginning of a story. A conversation. Its late 1968.

We were talking about mining. My father had just given it up. Had a new surface job near home. I was visiting for a weekend. We were in a pub. It had a name that I forget, but it was called Billy Joes by everybody.

Hows that, the new job?

Good. I think Ill get a dog.

A dog.

I work alone now, and a lot of night shift. A dog would be company.

Good idea.

He talked a bit more about the dog and the new job, taking care of pumps for a water utility. And about the mining work hed done since he was around sixteen. He coughed a lot.

Hows the health?

He looked away, frowned.

We shared a room once, in a camp. Northern Quebec. Somewhere between Senneterre and Chibougamau. Id be awake half the night listening to him cough, breathing heavy when he wasnt coughing.

Health is great. Had a complete checkup before I left the last job. A hundred percent.

Really?

Its what the doctor said.

I wanted to ask more about the physical. Who was the doctor? But another man arrived and sat down at our table. Peter MacKay. The Glendale MacKays. Someone hed grown up with. Then the conversation was in Gaelic, spoken softly. I listened hard, struggling to follow.

A friend of mine came by the table. A friend from school. Dennis. I joined him for the afternoon. Id catch up with my father later. No problem. Resume the conversation. More about his health. About that doctor. Whenever.

Next day, my father drove me to the airport.

We didnt speak much on the drive. And the way things turned out, we never spoke again.

He was fifty years old when he died four months later.

ii.

Not so long ago, I had a dream.

We seem to be compelled to make sense of dreams by giving them a shape and meaning, even when, probably, theyre only fragments of illusions.

But some dreams have structure and their own memorable logic. The one I clearly remember happened to me on the morning of May 22, 2017. It was shortly before dawn. I know that because it woke me and I wasnt able to go back to sleep. I got up and wrote it down.

I was in a small room. And my father was in the room. It was as if he had been waiting for my arrival. He looked exactly as he had the last time I saw him. I saw him in the dream as I had seen him for the last time, alive, that day years ago, after Billy Joes.

I said,

I have to ask you something.

He nodded.

Do you remember August 1942?

He smiled.

Why does it matter?

There was a fatality in the Iron Springs mine on August 19. I was wondering if you were there.

Yes, he said. A fatality. A man fell down the shaft. There were two who fell.

And one survived...

His leg snagged in the timber. That saved him.

He shook his head and laughed a little.

So you were there.

No. I was away. Rennie Slaney told me all about it.

Then I remembered: he married my mother in August 1942. Maybe thats why he was away.

I said,

I understand they laid the dead man out in the lunchroom.

Yes. I heard that too. There was nowhere else.

If you had been there...

It would have been my job.

You were underground captain.

I was.

You were only twenty-four years old in August 1942.

He frowned, shrugged.

So?

That was young.

Not so young back then.

iii.

As will happen sometimes, a dream continues. A continuing conversation somewhere in the soul.

So why the sudden interest?

You had a lot of stories but never told them. Not to me.

I doubt if youd have listened.

But we never talked much anyway when you were living. You werent around much. It was after you died, I realized that you were, in many ways, a bit of a mystery.

A mystery, eh?

An enigma.

If you say so. But would it have been any different if I were around more?