Ann-Marie MacDonald - Fall on Your Knees

But nothing could convince the miners back to work. Not even a Royal Canadian machine-gun mounted on the steps of the Immaculate Conception Church over at Cadegan Brook — and though Father Charlie MacDonald claimed he was away at the time, the Catholic church did its bit all the same to end the needless suffering of the strike: the bishop sent a special envoy to the boom town to empty the convent, the school, the rectory and the church of the miners’ families that the parish priest, Father Jim Frazer, was sheltering there. Then the bishop transferred Father Frazer right off the island.

James acted fast. There was no money to board Kathleen at Holy Angels but money would be found. She’d not be kept here in the boom town to catch her death from the miners’ brats. Or wind up crippled, or scarred in the face, please God no. They’ve brought it on themselves, stubborn bastards, and that’s why I have to board my daughter at the school I already can’t afford to send her to, and who’s to help me do that? The piano teachers’ union? The Piano-Tuners-of-the-World-Unite Party? Jesus Christ on the cross, no. I’m on my own.

“Sweetheart, you’re going to live in at school for just a little while.”

She didn’t want to.

“No, I won’t be there, and it’ll be a while before I can visit.” He would observe strict quarantine. “It’ll be fun, you’ll see, you’ll make some buddies.”

She cried. He said, suddenly severe, “Giuditta Pasta was lame, and when she was asked how she was able to sing so beautifully and act so brilliantly night after night, yet give no sign of her affliction, she said what?”

“‘It hurts.’”

He patted her on the head, “That’s the stuff.”

It would be months before he saw her again. He thought to himself, it’s good training for the both of us.

He took the ill luck the strike had dealt him and turned it to his own purposes. Before dawn one winter morning he shouldered three sparkling new picks, an undented shovel and a length of rope. He filled a teapot-style lamp with whale oil, clipped it to his peaked cap, hooked a lunch can to his belt and walked with three Pinkerton guards to the Number 12 gate, where khaki-clad Tommies guarded the coal with fixed bayonets.

The soldiers who let him in were no friendlier than the gauntlet of striking miners he’d left outside, though the soldiers didn’t spit or rave and call him “scab,” and accuse him of murdering their children. Nor did they promise to throw his balls to the pigs.

He entered the mouth of the pit, following the trembling light of the open flame at his forehead and the shadows of the men ahead, down the sloping shaft of the main deep along the rail tracks, reaching out to touch the steel rope now and then. The airless smell of ponies, damp wood and earth, through trap doors that swung open magically, it seemed, until a child’s voice said, “Hey buddy, what’s the time?” Left turn, right turn, right, then left again, down, down, through the maze of hollow branches that blossomed into dark chambers. He heard a bird chirping.

Number 12 Mine was terribly wet and gassy but James had nothing to compare it to. He shovelled coal onto a cart in a dripping room he didn’t know was under the ocean. He worked alongside one other man who happened to be experienced. It was this man’s job to undercut the wall, then to bore and lay and light the charges without blowing up the mine. James couldn’t place the man’s accent and never realized he was black, from Barbados, just knew he was Albert who never got them killed. Barbados, Italy, Belgium, Eastern Europe, Quebec…. The Dominion Coal Company had reached far and wide to break the strike. Very few English voices in the darkness and those that there were were heavily accented. James drank cold tea and chewed tobacco to keep down the dust, and at first concealed, then shared, his meat sandwiches. The cart held just over a ton, and when it was full he and Albert pushed it from the coal face to the headway and hitched it onto a trip. At the end of ten hours they surfaced into more darkness.

The foreign men were escorted to their stockaded work camp nearby, called Fourteen Yard, to sing, sleep or gamble while the Royal Canadian Regiment stood guard. James walked home with the Pinkerton sons of bitches, passing between lines of mangy men who would have torn him limb from limb given half a chance — for as they saw it James had no excuse, he wasn’t starving and he wasn’t a foreigner — past women who stood on front stoops and gave him the evil eye, muttering, “May God forgive you.” One said a prayer for him, then hurled an iron door-stopper, missing him by a hair.

James was making many times what he’d made teaching piano. For the first few weeks he wept silently at the beginning of every shift, until his body got rebroken to the work. Every night at home, after he’d turned white again, he’d get on his knees, fold his hands and beg his mother’s forgiveness for going underground.

“You’ve got a bit thinner. That’s good,” James said to Materia over supper.

She shrugged.

“What are you day-dreaming about?” James used the term loosely, she was always gawping at everything and nothing.

“Houdini,” she said.

“Who?”

“Houdini.”

He didn’t bother to pursue it. Ask a silly question. He’d long ago given up on conversation and now merely thanked God that the idiocy and swarthiness had bypassed his daughter. And that his wife had learned to cook.

“What’s this?”

“Kibbeh nayeh.”

“This a Hebrew delicacy?”

“Lebanese.”

Benny had smuggled her the recipe.

Anyone can make kibbeh nayeh , anyone can make anything by following directions, but to make it right … that takes a blessed finger. Some say it’s in the length of the cook’s fingers, others claim it’s in the scent, as unique as a fingerprint, that every person carries. It is definitely a gift.

Kibbeh was the national dish of Syria and Lebanon, it had to be made from the most trustworthy meat, therefore the Mahmouds bought only from Luvovitz’s Kosher Canadian Butcher Shop. While Mrs Luvovitz and the boys minded the shop, Benny made his deliveries in Sydney, always going last to the Mahmoud house on the hill. There, a dark little round woman with a greying bun of black hair would open the kitchen door to him. Benny didn’t speak Gaelic and Mrs Mahmoud’s English was still halting, but they managed to chat. Benny would go along with the pretence that Mrs Mahmoud’s interest in the Piper family was purely casual.

“Oh sure I know the Pipers, she’s a nice lady Mrs Piper, Lebanese too, I guess you must know her — no? — ah well, yes they’ve got a lovely daughter, Kathleen, goes to Holy Angels, sings like a bird.”

And this morning, when Benny asked Mrs Mahmoud for the kibbeh recipe “for my wife,” she didn’t raise an eyebrow but went immediately to her cupboards and pointed out ingredients. Benny noted it all on brown butcher paper as Mrs Mahmoud mimed the whole process, including the imprinting of a cross on the prepared meat. Benny laughed and shook his head and drew a Star of David for her instead.

Mrs Mahmoud shrugged and said, “What you like,” and gave him the ritual first taste of the imaginary kibbeh .

“Delicious,” he said.

That evening, Mrs Mahmoud watched her husband eat and thought of her lost daughter, perhaps even now serving the same dish to her own husband. Would he appreciate it? Did he love her still?

Nine miles away, James took a forkful of kibbeh and ate.

“It’s delicious.”

“Eat with bread.”

He followed Materia’s example, drizzling oil over the spiced meat and soft cracked wheat, tearing off bits of flat bread, folding the meat into mouthfuls.