I know I don’t look like much,” I tell Mr. Ash in the mine office. “But I’m strong as any mule. I pick up on things fast too, so I won’t take much training. You’ve just got to give me a chance to prove myself, that’s all.”
Mr. Edgar Ash leans back in his chair, waiting patiently as I rush through my words. When I’m finished, he smiles, but he shakes his head. “Well, lad, I would give you a chance if I could, but we aren’t hiring. All I can do is suggest that you try again in a few weeks. Are you planning to stay in town for a time?”
I nod. I mean to show that I’m serious, but I also haven’t thought of what else I might do.
“All right. The weather’s turned and I’m expecting to lose some fellows to the fields. Summer’s our busiest time, with the railroad stocking up on coal so they can move the harvest in the fall. Leave your name and check back with me at the end of the month.” He stands up. “Maybe I’ll have something for you by then.”
I tell him I’m grateful for his consideration and he won’t be sorry. I then write my name in the ledger. For my residence, I put the town of Frank.
Outside the office, I look over the property belonging to the Canadian American Coke and Coal Company. Across the Crow’s Nest River are piled heaps of coal, mounds of rock waste harvested from the picking tables, and stacks of timber to shore up the mine. The pit head is maybe thirty feet above the river at the base of Turtle Mountain. Men work around the towering mine tipple, where the hoisting, dumping and screening equipment is housed.
A train engine backs down the mine spur, headed toward the tipple across the bridge. Two miners stand next to the track, waiting to hook up the hoppers. The engine clangs along the track—brakes squeal as it backs up to the cars to be coupled. I turn and head toward Dominion Avenue.
After crossing Gold Creek, I pass a boarding house for men working at the mine. Perhaps I’ll have a chance of getting room and board there once I’m taken on. In the meantime, I have to find a way to live. My wages from the stopping house will not hold out for two weeks.
I then remember what Mr. Francis Rochette said about the hotels.
The Frank Hotel has no positions available. I continue down Dominion to the Imperial Hotel, where I speak to Mr. Ruben Steeves. I tell him I’ve heard he runs a booming business and suggest that he might need help. He looks at me skeptically, but he doesn’t say no right away, which gives me some hope. Folding his arms, he rocks back on his heels.
“Well, son, tell me what you can do.”
“Anything,” I quickly answer. “I can do whatever you’ve got that needs to be done. I can work in the kitchen, chopping, cleaning and washing dishes. Or I can wait on people if you have a need there. I can split wood and scrub floors. I’m most versatile.”
“Can you boil sheets and launder linen?”
“Yes,” I say, “I’m practiced at doing that too. I did all the laundry at my previous employers’.”
“And what about scouring basins and slopping cuspidors and chamber pots? Can you hold your stomach with those kinds of chores?”
“Yes,” I tell him, “I can.”
“Good. I’m afraid you wouldn’t be much use if you couldn’t—not in this business, anyway.” Mr. Steeves eyes me a little longer. “Well, I do need someone around at night to clean up after the men have left the bar, to mop the floor and such. If you’re willing, come back at seven o’clock tonight and I’ll try you out.”
I can hardly believe my good fortune. I want to rush forward and shake his hand. Instead, I thank him and leave the hotel to collect Cody. With a lightness in my chest I’m hardly used to, I walk to the end of Dominion Avenue. I wind around the stumps and rocks in the clearing, cross the footbridge and walk past the row of miners’ cabins along Alberta Avenue. Cody is wearing new shoes when I arrive at the livery. I pay Francis Rochette and thank him for the suggestion of applying at the hotels. He asks me where I’m planning on staying.
“’Cause if you don’t have a place, it’s common for fellows to set up camp in the valley across the trail, past those temporary shacks on the eastern flats next to the river. I’ve got some old tarps here you’re welcome to use. They’ve got a few tears in them, but for the most part they’ll keep the weather off. You can fashion them into a tent and you’ll be fine until your pay starts coming in.”
It’s a fine idea and will allow me to use what money I have to feed myself and stable Cody. I set off toward the eastern flats with the old brown tarps folded across Cody’s back. I balance an axe across my lap, also loaned to me by Mr. Rochette.
Once I leave the wagon trail, I head south across the valley directly toward the base of Turtle Mountain. Frank is expanding rapidly, and Francis Rochette had explained that the shacks I’d be skirting—ten in all—were thrown up to accommodate mine workers and their families until more substantial structures could be built. Once I’ve passed the shacks and am nearing the river, I come across the campsite. Tents of all manner and sizes are scattered through the valley and along the river’s edge. I search for a spot to set my own. I scout out a flat spot near the river, but bordering a wooded area where I can hunt for poles.
It takes me a good part of the afternoon to search out and cut the proper length of poles. I then have to figure the best way to fashion and attach the tarps. After tearing a narrow strip off one of the tarps, I rip it up further into long, thin strips for guy lines. I build a frame to position the tarps across. I’d acquired a couple of shirts from Roly, so I see no cause to keep the originals I’d got at the Home. They’re shrunk up to my elbows and scrubbed right through in places by lye. I put them to better use by tearing them up and using the scraps of fabric to lash the ends of the frame together.
When I’m done, I stand before my patchwork house, thinking it’s about the ugliest place a person could live. And not all that sturdy. One good wind and it’s likely to be carried off to end up fluttering from the mountain’s peak. But it’s mine. I can cut a window in the side if I wish and nobody can holler at me or tell me different. I can invite Cody in for a nip of oats if it strikes me as something I want to do. The final thing I do is dig a small pit for a campfire, the way the others have done.
Once I’m finished, I stand and survey my surroundings. My closest neighbor is about thirty yards away. His cook fire is cold and his new white canvas tent is tied shut. Mine looks like a weatherworn little dory next to his set of shining sails. I haven’t seen him about yet.
I look in the other direction. A Chinaman stoops outside the entrance to a very poor lean-to fashioned from branches and a tattered oilcloth. I glance at my own tent again. The Chinaman’s lodgings are even more humble than my own. He’s squatting in the dirt, scrubbing his clothes in a tin pan. He stands up. It’s when he turns sideways to hang a pair of trousers over a branch that I nearly gasp. He’s dressed all in black and he’s dreadfully thin, even thinner than I am. He moves in a very deliberate way. It appears to take him a great deal of effort just to lift the tin pan off the ground. I watch him carry it to the woods and dump the suds. By the time he’s walked back, sat next to his campfire again and got his pipe lit, he seems just about all tuckered out.
I decide to ride into town and see about boarding Cody at the public livery. I’m awfully hungry and I plan to also pick up some bacon, coffee and beans. I start down the wagon trail. On my way through the village of tents, I pass my Chinaman neighbor. I nod, tell him good day and introduce myself. His mind seems already occupied, but he does make the effort to look up, return the nod and tell me his name is Ling Yu. He drifts back to his thoughts and pipe again. I remind myself to be sure and offer him some bacon and beans when I get back.
If I have to be without friend or kin, I decide, this is the way life should be: looking after only me and my horse, nobody knowing who I am or accusing me of crimes I didn’t commit. Mr. Alex Leitch, proprietor of the mercantile exchange, is pleasant and doesn’t even blink at the way I speak when I ask for my salt pork. And because there’s all manner of strange costumes around, nobody turns to look at how ill-fitting my clothes are when I pass them on the street.
I leave Cody at Mr. A.P. McDonald’s Livery. After returning to my camp on foot, I get a fire going and fix my supper. I take my first mouthful and feel my stomach warm. It makes me think of skinny Mr. Ling Yu, who I remember must be starving. Looking across to his camp I see that his fire is out, and he doesn’t seem to be about. Maybe he’s gone into town in search of something to eat. I finish my meal, then have a smoke while I sit by the fire, running the day’s accomplishments through my mind.
The sun is beginning to settle behind the mountains. My neighbor in the white tent has returned to his campsite and he’s now setting about making his own supper. He waves to me as he stokes his fire. From a distance he doesn’t appear to be much older than me, but he walks with the weary gait of a chap who’s been doing physical labor, lifting and hauling weights much greater than his own. There is a great hiss and whoosh of smoke as I pour water on my campfire. I stir it up and set out for the hotel.
Mr. Steeves wants me to start my evening in the saloon. I’m to wash dishes, keep the stove stoked and make sure the dice and cards are on hand for those who want to play. Once the bar closes and I’ve scrubbed it clean, I’m to help in the laundry, boiling the sacks of sheets and linens. I’m also to assist the porter, when called upon, by carrying baggage and taking horses round to the livery. I’m to blacken boots left outside the doors and make sure that those leaving town are up in time to catch their train. My shift will be over once the fancy passenger train, the Spokane Flyer—the train that runs between Lethbridge and Spokane—has pulled out, about four or five in the morning. My wage is seventy-five cents a day.
The saloon is blue with smoke. Miners, navvies, lumbermen, trappers and ranchers are gathered along the length of the bar. The air is mighty pungent, a powerful brew of human and horse sweat, tobacco and beer, all tied up with the aroma of manure tracked in across the floor. Mud and coal dust from the miners’ boots also blacken the planks.
As I clean spills and pick up dirty and broken glasses, I’m aware that the language around me is coarser than what’s heard on the street. But it’s still not so coarse a preacher couldn’t listen in. It’s only as the night wears on and the fellows make a game of treating one another—buying shots of whiskey and tossing them back—that the talk grows rough, tempers rise and those inclined to griping get harping on whatever is weighing on their minds.
“Just step aside, Charlie,” Mr. Steeves warns me. “Don’t get in the way when the fellows get heated up or you’re liable to get your chin broke. They don’t always see who they’re swinging at when they’re full up with whiskey and mad at the companies they’re working for.”
He doesn’t need to warn me; I’m already keeping my head low. I’ve had plenty of practice at recognizing when fists are about to fly, many thanks to Albert Brooks. But I do ask Mr. Steeves what they could be so mad about.
“Oh, lots of things. The men in here have plenty to keep them on edge.” He sets the drinks he’s carrying in front of his customers before he stops to explain. “Now, let’s see, those over there are miners. Those men spend ten hours a day in a pit without seeing the light of day. Besides accidents with machinery, they’ve got to worry about getting crushed beneath the earth, flooded out or poisoned by gas. They work in a place where a fella just striking a match to see what’s before him could touch off an explosion.”
I nod toward another group across the room.
“Those boys—those are the navvies. Building the railroad is deadly work as well. They aren’t stuck underground, but they pay for the meager food the company feeds them by way of lost limbs and crushed bones. Their living quarters aren’t fit for humans; the men are packed twenty-five or more into a boxcar like they weren’t even people, but rats.”
Mr. Steeves is about to tell me more, but a game of pitch and toss is turning ugly. One fellow says the other won by stepping over the imaginary line.
“In a pig’s eye!” the fellow accused of cheating barks. “I won fair and square. And who are you to be calling me a cheater—you’re the dirtiest chiseler here in this room! There’s nothing lower than stealing from your own. Now give me what’s owing and rightly earned.”
The accuser refuses. He’s awfully offended at being called a chiseler, and he answers by curling his lip and cocking his fists. The men standing around do nothing to discourage the fight. Instead, they seem to do everything to encourage it. One group sides with the fellow who claims to have won—echoing his words that they are tired of being taken advantage of. There are plenty enough folks around wanting to swindle them—they should at least be able to trust their own kind. The other group supports the fellow who accused the other of crossing the imaginary line.
“Those boys aren’t from around here,” Sam, the barkeep, tells me.“They’re from one of the mines farther west. That fellow’s the check weighman. He’s responsible for making sure the company weighs the coal proper and the miners get their due. Some say he’s been taking bribes and the men aren’t getting their full amount. Obviously there’s some agreement with that belief.”
The chap accused of cheating his fellow miners takes the first swing. But the two get only a few blows in before Mr. Steeves calls for help. Between him and Sam and the porter, they manage to get the two brawling men out the door and into the street, where they are left to slug it out in the mud.
It isn’t the only fight that night—it’s just the first that breaks out. Some fellows come into the bar, toss back a couple of shots and are on their way again. Others arrive from their shift and stay all night. They’re the ones who get so full up with liquor they’re lying out on the slag heap of a floor by the end of the night. It’s my job to help rouse them and get them out the door at closing time. Sam doesn’t seem all that concerned about what happens to them once the door is closed.
“They’ll sleep it off out there in the road. At least until Constable Leard carts them off, or it starts raining and their nostrils fill up with mud. Or if they have a woman, she might come looking for him and haul him home. Not many do, though, or they wouldn’t be passing their time in here. There are three fellows to every woman out here in these territories. Now, Charlie, you get the floor scoured. I’m going to close up.”
I scrub the scum and ashes from the counter and tables. The floor is almost as disagreeable to clean as the old sow Lucy’s pen. Some of the railroaders had taken it upon themselves to play a game of kick-the-old-spittoon. At the same time, they’d continued to employ it for its intended use.
Once that’s done, I find the laundering room. The laundress, a woman by the name of Violet Love, is not much more than five feet in height, as plump as a barrel, with skin as pale as plaster. I guess her to be around about forty years old. She stands above a roiling pot, boiling linen in a room where the walls and windows drip with sweat. Her heavy black hair is pinned on top of her head. When I appear in the doorway, she looks up from her work as she pushes a strand of loose hair from her damp brow.
“So you’re Charlie.” She continues to plunge the linens in the pot with a paddle. More hair comes lose and falls forward into her eyes. “I was told to be expecting you. Mr. Steeves says you already know how to launder and press. I sure do hope so ’cause I don’t have the time to be training inexperienced ones and get my own work done too. Come over here, lad. You can take over what I’m doing while I wring that batch out over there.”
I step into the room. The rush of steam into my lungs momentarily stifles my breath. Violet hands me the wash paddle. I can’t help but notice that her bare arms are covered all over in raw patches of skin. Right up to her elbows. I guess it’s from having them always dipped in suds and lye.
She’s a hard worker, but her work doesn’t require that she pay it a lot of concentration, so at the same time as she works, she likes to talk. She asks where I’m from and what I’d done there. I tell her the same as I’ve told everyone in Frank—that I’d worked as a ranch hand at Mr. Richmond Longhurst’s ranch near High River. But owing to the fact that he’d lost a good part of his herd in the harshness of the winter, he didn’t need me anymore. I don’t like telling the fib over and over. Instead of getting easier, it is getting harder to tell. But I can’t be trusting everybody I come across. Not on first meeting them anyway, and not after my experience with Cyrus Jones.
Violet’s worked at the hotel for nearly a year. She has five children at home to care for, but she needs the wages; her husband is a miner who lost a foot when it was crushed beneath a runaway railcar.
“At least they kept him on,” she says, twisting a sheet, squeezing out the last few stubborn drops. “They took Peter out of the ground and put him on the picking table, where he makes a pittance compared to what he did setting off blasts. Still, I know I should be grateful.
Many fellows aren’t so fortunate. If they lose an eye or a hand, they’re done for. If they make it out alive, that is.
They’re told there’s nothing left for them, and they leave with nothing to show for their work but their crippledness. I tell myself it’s for the best anyway. What with all the strange goings-on, I can’t say I’m not glad he’s out of the pit.”
“What strange goings-on would those be?”
Violet is through all her squeezing and wringing and is now plunging the next batch of sheets I’d washed in the bluing kettle. “The fellas have been feeling bumps; they say the whole mine quivers and rocks like it’s been struck by a ship. Then there’s talk of the upraises where the coal’s been mined that have mysteriously closed overnight. It’s no secret that coal mines itself—the coal falls with little help from shovels and picks. Some fellows have quit, fearful the whole pit’s unstable and there’s a disaster building.”
“Do you think there is?”
Violet shrugs. “I can’t say. Peter says there’s always a disaster brewing if you really want to think about it.
Not only natural ones from mining, but ones the men brew up themselves. You just never know who’s sneaking matches and cigarettes into where they’re working. They hide them in their boots or behind their ears so’s the fellows searching them before they go into the pit can’t find them. I guess what he means is you can worry as much as you want about what the mine’s doing, but you really never know what direction the next catastrophe will be coming from. No sense wasting precious time worrying about it. I suppose he’s right. But it’s still no argument to prevent me from being concerned. He’s not the one that would be left with five gaping mouths to feed.” Violet wipes the suds from her hands on her apron. “Charlie, why don’t you run that bundle through the mangle and peg them on the line.”
I squeeze the last drops of water out of the sheets by feeding them through the two rollers of the mangle. I then load up a basket and carry the sheets outside. The air is cool on my face, most refreshing after that swampy room. When I return, it takes another two hours to get through the table linens and bath towels. As the night wears on, Violet begins to wilt from the heat until she finally loses her voice and just works. When we are done, she sends me to black the shoes while she dumps the soapy pots and finishes up.
The early morning air is chilly when I leave the hotel an hour later. The sun is not up yet, but there is a pink glow spreading across the eastern sky. I shiver in the cold; I miss John’s old mackinaw. Hiking up my collar, I burrow my hands deep in my pockets. Dominion Avenue is just beginning to stir. Hay wagons and ox carts clatter over the half-frozen ruts as men arrive from neighboring farms for supplies. Mr. Sam Ennis’s coal dray clambers past before turning down Second Street. The Graham’s dairy wagon is stopped outside the Palm Restaurant and Bakery.
Men and boys pass me on their way to the mine. They appear from different directions; they come from the miners’ cottages in the west part of town and they come from the eastern flats. They fall into a line once they are on Dominion, filing toward the base of Turtle Mountain. They walk with a slow but steady gait, some suffering from old injuries and pains, others stiff with muscles still half-asleep. Some wear canvas coats, while others shiver in lighter clothing, like me. They all wear patched trousers, boots and leather caps and carry their lunch tins strapped to their backs. I look after them, thinking how they look like a line of insects as they march toward the train bridge. After crossing the Crow’s Nest River, they’ll be swallowed up in the great clanging beast of a mouth.
Alberta Avenue is quiet as the miners’ families continue to sleep. Francis Rochette is outside the livery, brushing down a pit pony. Robert Watt is readying horses for the drivers on the way to the mine, fitting them with harnesses and helmets.
The smell of cook fires and coffee brewing is inviting as I walk across the eastern flats. The tents that are closed up must belong to the men who are already at work in the mine. But there are plenty of fellows sitting around eating breakfast, doing their washing or just having a smoke. These fellows are either looking or waiting for work.
I’m dead tired. I’ve been up nearly twenty-four hours, but I feel good as I fry myself some bacon before I turn in to sleep. The sun is rising, and I can feel that spring is about to stay. Once I’ve eaten, I roll a cigarette and finish my coffee. The warmth of the sun on my face and the freshness of the air remind me of walking behind Duke and Duchess, breaking up the earth after it has thawed. It was the one chore I would never have traded with Buck or Albert, even if one of them had insisted on taking it over. This is so fantastic a thought—that either of them would insist on taking over a chore—that I chuckle.
But I am sober again just as quickly when I realize Buck can’t possibly manage the plowing and planting on his own. Roly may have been right—Buck may have been forced to give up looking for a murderer—but with so much work ahead, he won’t give up looking for me and holding me to the contract of the Home.