Free After River by Donna Milner Page A

barking, the clatter of the falling gun, and finally the gun shot, the thunderous shot ricocheting, echoing, in the depths of the air shaft at your father’s feet.
    â€˜Then the ringing silence. A silence broken only when the blue healer raised his head to howl to the heavens.’
    She told us how, half blind with tears and shock, Dad raced, stumbled, and fell his way down the mountainside. Covered inblood and dirt he made his way home. Deafened by the pounding in his ears, gulping each breath as if it were his last, he could not hear his own voice as he told his parents the unbearable news.
    Mom said it took the rescue party, led by my shell-shocked father, until nightfall to retrieve his brother’s twisted, lifeless, body. My grandfather himself rappelled down the shaft to carry his son to the surface.
    Manny Ward stood in the clearing, apart from the rescue party, stiffening at any attempts of comfort. Her clutched fists bulged in her apron pockets; her thin mouth an expressionless line on her tearless face. She stared straight ahead as the afternoon sunlight passed over the scene; the moving shadows the only marking of time as she waited for her son’s body.
    â€˜Your father stood in shock and watched it all as if from underwater,’ Mom said, ‘from another world, a world of silence. He remembered seeing mouths open and close, but heard no words.’
    â€˜It took years for him to make his way to the surface,’ she added.
    â€˜Dad did it alone. His parents offered no words of comfort, no lifeline, so deeply were they drowning in their own sorrow.
    â€˜For months after, your grandfather spent every free moment of his time carting boulders and felled trees to throw down that mine shaft. He didn’t stop when it was full. He piled more on the top, creating this rock and wood memorial for his first-born son,’ my mother mused, then added, ‘a memorial that looks like a funeral pyre waiting for a match.’
    My grandfather continued to search for and fill, or board over, every mine shaft he could find on his land. When he had exhausted his four hundred acres he started on the neighbours’ land. Neither my grandfather, nor my father, ever picked up a shotgun again.
    I never heard my father speak of his brother, or say anything tous about mineshafts. Perhaps he felt that his father had taken care of them and there was no longer any danger. Still, our mother warned us that day, ‘Even your grandfather couldn’t be sure he’d found them all.’
    It’s hard to be certain now how much of the story was actually told by my mother, and how much is my memory filling in the blanks. I only know her words painted a picture so clear it was as if I were watching it play out before me. I saw and heard the tragedy of that long-ago autumn day. But I was only a child then, the sorrow and pain of broken hearts were concepts in fairytales. The sadness lasted as long as the telling. Suffering and grief were not part of that sunshine time of our lives. They were something that happened to others, not to our perfect family.

Chapter Eleven
    O N A S EPTEMBER afternoon, when I was eight, I came into the kitchen after digging potatoes to find my mother and father at the table with a young man I’d never seen before.
    I placed the bowl of dirt-covered spuds in the sink, rinsed my hands, then dried them while I stood behind my mother peering over her shoulder. An array of black-and-white photographs, all about the size of my school scribblers, was spread out on the table in front of her. The enlarged photographs were overhead shots of our farm, and one of the entire town of Atwood, taken from an airplane.
    As I looked closer at the pictures I experienced a twinge of vertigo. I sat down beside Mom and studied the photographs. I could make out the landmark stone and brick buildings: the post office, the courthouse, even Our Lady of Compassion, School for Girls, next door to the