Free Twenty-Six by Leo McKay Page A

a pair of work pants and a shirt, picks up a lunch can, and walks out into the streets of the Red Row. The backyards are dotted with outhouses and coal sheds. A plume of black smoke rises from every chimney. The unpaved streets are full of men dressed like him, each carrying a lunch pail under his arm. The year is 1928, thirty-four years before Arvel will be born
.
    At the bottom of Hudson Street, Arvel meets his grandfather, his mother’s father. He is the same age as Arvel, and even though he died at seventy, when Arvel was only ten, Arvel recognizes him immediately by the thick glasses that blur his eyes huge, and by the big forehead, a trait Arvel has inherited, that rises above his glasses
.
    “Good morning, Didu,” Arvel says
.
    “Good morning, boy,” says the grandfather. His accent is so heavy that Arvel can hardly understand. He has lived in Canada for less than ten years, Arvel realizes, and he came without a word of English
.
    “It’s a beautiful morning,” Arvel says. From the street, he looks in through the window of his grandfather’s kitchen and sees his grandmother, six months pregnant with his mother. In less than twenty-five years this woman will be dead from tuberculosis, but this morning she appears as vigorous as any woman her age. She is washing apples under the water pump at the sink, working the handle up and down
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    “All begin beautiful, boy,” Arvel’s grandfather says
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    As they walk together to the pit, their leather boots crunch the gravel of the unpaved streets. In the clear air of morning, they can hear the wheels and gears of the elevator working in the shaft
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    When they pass through the gates and into the mine yard, Arvel’s heart jumps. He has only seen this place in pictures. By the time he is born, the coal boom will have passed and most of the operations will be shut down. But these buildings before him, this smokestack, the wheelsthat turn on the big lift: these have been written on his mind by something stronger than memory
.
    “You’re frightened, boy,” his grandfather says. “I
won’t tell you not to be.”
    In the change house they don what they’ll need for work. The boots, the coveralls, the gloves. They check out their equipment from the tool room. The hard hats, the lamps, the shovels, the axes. They gather with the rest of the day-shift men at the mouth of the shaft, smoke final cigarettes. The sun splits down on them in rays between the beams and cables and pipes that run in all directions above their heads
.
    The wheels on the giant elevator turn. A dozen men before them walk onto the platform and drop from sight. Arvel and his grandfather move ahead, and twelve more descend. Cables quiver. A platform swings into view. “I wish this could be different,” the grandfather says. Two men remain. They step forward and disappear from the surface of the earth
.
    His grandfather Staciw had been a survivor of the mines. He’d worked his whole life in the pit and lived to see his retirement. The work had killed him nonetheless: he’d suffered chronic debilitating health problems in the time he’d survived after retirement, each year spending at least a month in the hospital, and suffering almost monthly from what Arvel’s mother called “turns,” violent convulsions that led to unconsciousness.
    His grandfather had probably counted himself lucky nonetheless. He’d been born into debt to a peasant family in southern Ukraine and had come to Canada before the Bolshevik Revolution to get a job and buy his family out of economic servitude. So however miserable his life in Canada, however dangerous the work, however meagre the pay, he’d always known he wasbetter-off than he would have been if he’d stayed in Ukraine. After the revolution, he’d lost contact with his family, only getting letters through again during and just after the Khrushchev era. One of Arvel’s earliest memories was of a photo his grandfather had received of his village in the Ukraine. It