The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair MacLeod

mind resting my balls on the young one’s chin for the second round.”
    He has been looking at them quite closely and the car’s tires rattle in the roadside gravel before he pulls it back to the quiet of the pavement.
    The houses are closer together now and more blackened and the yards are filled with children and bicycles and dogs. As we move toward what seems to be the main intersection I am aware of the hurrying women in their kerchiefs, and the boys with their bags of papers and baseball gloves and the men sitting or squatting on theirheels in tight little compact knots. There are other men who neither sit nor squat but lean against the buildings or rest upon canes or crutches or stand awkwardly on artificial limbs. They are the old and the crippled. The faces of all of them are gaunt and sallow as if they had been allowed to see the sun only recently, when it was already too late for it to do them any good.
    “Springhill is a hell of a place,” says the man beside me, “unless you want to get laid. It’s one of the best there is for that. Lots of mine accidents here and the men killed off. Women used to getting it all the time. Mining towns are always like this. Look at all the kids. This here little province of Nova Scotia leads the country in illegitimacy. They don’t give a damn.”
    The mention of the name Springhill and the realization that this is where I have come is more of a shock than I would ever have imagined. As if in spite of signposts and geography and knowing it was “there,” I have never thought of it as ever being “here.”
    And I remember November 1956: the old cars, mud-splattered by the land and rusted by the moisture of the sea, parked outside our house with their motors running. Waiting for the all-night journey to Springhill which seemed to me then, in my fourteenth year, so very far away and more a name than even a place. Waiting for the lunches my mother packed in wax paper and in newspaper and the thermos bottles of coffee and tea, and waiting for my father and the same packsack which now on this sweating day accompanies me. Only then it was filled with the miners’ clothes he would need for the rescue that they hoped they might perform. The permanently blackened underwear, the heavy woollen socks, the boots with the steel-reinforced toes, the blackened, sweat-stained miner’s belt which sagged on the side that carried his lamp, the crescent wrench, the dried and dustied water-bag, trousers and gloves and the hard hat chipped and dented and broken by the years of falling rock.
    And all of that night my grandfather with his best earheld to the tiny radio for news of the buried men and of their rescuers. And at school the teachers taking up collections in all of the class-rooms and writing in large letters on the blackboard, “Springhill Miners’ Relief Fund, Springhill, N.S.” which was where we were sending the money, and I remember also my sisters’ reluctance at giving up their hoarded nickels, dimes and quarters because noble causes and death do not mean very much when you are eleven, ten and eight and it is difficult to comprehend how children you have never known may never see their fathers any more, not walking through the door nor perhaps even being carried through the door in the heavy coffins for the last and final look. Other people’s buried fathers are very strange and far away but licorice and movie matinees are very close and real.
    “Yeah,” says the voice beside me, “I was in here six months ago and got this little, round woman. Really giving it to her, pumping away and all of a sudden she starts kind of crying and calling me by this guy’s name I never heard of. Must have been her dead husband or something. Kind of scared the hell out of me. Felt like a goddamn ghost or something. Almost lost my rod. Might have too but I was almost ready to shoot it into her.”
    We are downtown now and it is late afternoon in the period before the coming of the