The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair MacLeod Page A

evening. The sun is no longer as fierce as it was earlier and it slants off the blackened buildings, many of which are shells bleak and fire-gutted and austere. A Negro woman with two light-skinned little boys crosses the street before us. She is carrying a bag of groceries and the little boys have each an opened sixteen-ounce bottle of Pepsi-Cola. They put their hands over the bottles’ mouths and shake them vigorously to make the contents fizz.
    “Lots of people around here marry niggers,” says the voice. “Guess they’re so black underground they can’t tell the difference in the light. All the same in the dark as the fellow says. Had an explosion here a few years ago and some guys trapped down there, I dunno how long. Eatenthe lunches of the dead guys and the bark off the timbers and drinking one another’s piss. Some guy in Georgia offered the ones they got out a trip down there but there was a nigger in the bunch so he said he couldn’t take him. Then the rest wouldn’t go. Damned if I’d lose a trip to Georgia because of a single nigger that worked for the same company. Like I say, I’m old enough to be your father or even your grandfather and I haven’t even been to Vancouver.”
    It is 1958 that he is talking about now and it is much clearer in my mind than 1956 which is perhaps the difference between being fourteen and sixteen when something happens in your life. A series of facts or near facts that I did not even realize I possessed flash now in succession upon my mind: the explosion in 1958 occurred on a Thursday as did the one in 1956; Cumberland No. 2 at the time of the explosion was the deepest coal mine in North America; in 1891, 125 men were killed in that same mine; that 174 men went down to work that 1958 evening; that most were feared lost; that 18 were found alive after being buried beneath 1,000 tons of rock for more than a week; that Cumberland No. 2 once employed 900 men and now employs none.
    And I remember again the cars before our house with their motors running, and the lunches and the equipment and the waiting of the week: the school collections, my grandfather with his radio, this time the added reality of a TV at a neighbour’s house; and the quietness of our muted lives, our footsteps without sound. And then the return of my father and the haunted greyness of his face and after the younger children were in bed the quiet and hushed conversations of seeping gas and lack of oxygen and the wild and belching smoke and flames of the subterranean fires nourished there by the everlasting seams of the dark and diamond coal. And also of the finding of the remains of men flattened and crushed if they had died beneath the downrushing roofs of rock or if they had been blown apart by the explosion itself, transformed intoforever lost and irredeemable pieces of themselves; hands and feet and blown-away faces and reproductive organs and severed ropes of intestines festooning the twisted pipes and spikes like grotesque Christmas-tree loops and chunks of hair-clinging flesh. Men transformed into grisly jig-saw puzzles that could never more be solved.
    “I don’t know what the people do around here now,” says the voice at my side. “They should get out and work like the rest of us. The Government tries to resettle them but they won’t stay in a place like Toronto. They always come back to their graveyards like dogs around a bitch in heat. They have no guts.”
    The red car has stopped now before what I am sure is this small town’s only drugstore. “Maybe we’ll stop here for a while,” he says. “I’ve just about had it and need something else. All work and no play, you know. I’m going in here for a minute first to try my luck. As the fellow says, an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.”
    As he closes the door he says, “Maybe later you’d like to come along. There’s always some left over.”
    The reality of where I am and of what I think he is going to do seems now to