THE ASBESTOS MINE, ITS GIANT WHITE PITS GLARING under large fluorescent lights, had stayed aloft because the federal government not only wanted it to be successful but convinced the brothers to stay the course. Why did the Canadian government want this? Because of Thetford Mines. That is what Byron had known. It was necessary to placate the Liberal government in Quebec because of their world dominance in asbestos. To slight Quebec might bleed away support for Canadian sovereignty itself.
Both Quebec and Canada knew this, and were silent. This in itself was the arrogance of the hauteur transplanted to our shores, the incomprehensible dissertation in departments and authorities that lapsed into posture with a flick of the hand of some signatory. So the Raskins’ little mine became the so-called legitimate counterbalance to Thetford—to show all was equal in this decision-making process. But from the late 1950s on, the two brothers were questioning the damned wisdom of it all.
Because it was then, one day—when they were more robust than now, one day when they were still taking acreage away from others to build their empire—a man stood at the door of their house—at the back door—or to be frank a ghost stood at their door.
Yes, he was a ghost—a shadow of what had once been a man, a shadow of a former form. He had not been to a doctor, he had been nowhere, he had withered away, he had travelled like a hobo, or a homeless man, across the country and back, thinking the air out west, or the air in the American Southwest would triumph over what ailed him. It did not. He had worked for them, and yet they hardly recognized to whom they were speaking, so shallow and weak was his voice.
He was Vince Toomey—Arlo and Arnie and Mary Lou Toomey’s father—and he had trusted the pit he had dug in, the asbestos they blasted, the rocks of it they shovelled: never realizing the fibres he breathed into his very lungs would metastasize. He had moved his family here to live in the apartment, and now it was as if his bones stuck out of his skull and he looked at them as if to say:
See—
See
See
They brought him in, they wrestled him into a pair of Dexter’s pyjamas, they called their doctor, they made him broth, and yet in a telltale way he ignored what they did—they were objects in a room and he was drifting to some other place. His wife and children were brought to him, little Arlo and Arnie as sweet and as white as ghosts themselves, and the daughter Mary Lou with her braided hair.
They all sat in hope thinking the doctor would do what was right. They were sitting in a room so large it echoed, on chairs they seemed unfit to sit upon. All little vagabonds in vagabond clothes, with hope-filled eyes, looking once more expectantly at the doctor, the next at their father.
The doctor could do nothing, and stated almost with tears in his eyes that he could not, and that evening, just before dark when the house lights were coming on, Vince Toomey died.
They wrote to the scientists, and after a lengthy delay the scientists wrote back.
Still the brothers, business-minded but unsophisticated, actually believed these government-hired scientists, for the scientists wore white coats and told white lies.
Now as we approach this story the government was backing away slowly but surely. The government in Quebec had changed and wanted out of Thetford, and everyone was leaving these two rustic brothers to deal with the horrendous onslaught to come on their own. That is, they had been used, finessed in a way, like a card player is finessed at cards by a cardsharp, into asbestos and now were left to the fallout. Their hand cobbers sick, the backhoe drivers ill, the grand conveyers coming to a slow halt.
Left to deal with both the hatred and the animosity, while the government would be silent. First Nations men had come to them with a plan to take control of all the land from the field just beyond their estate to the headwaters of Riley Brook, and miles beyond.
The two old men were too proud to be impolite, and too proud to make any response.
Some years before, on the night Albert was caught at the safe, they took him from the ornate room. If he had had his hands tied behind his back he would have smiled. He had the arrogance of some men going to the gallows. Like his ancestor in the carriage—that is, the father of the little boy earlier mentioned—his face had an impetuously aristocratic look, bordering on perplexity.
His uncles took him out of the upstairs office and back to the house. They took him to the big office, with its huge elk head on the wall above the large oak desk, the two phones, the Teletype on the counter.
Dexter put on his pants over his pyjama bottoms. Then Chester went and did the same. Then they stood before him, looking up at him, both of them shrunken a little by this time, their zippers half-undone and the pyjama bottoms sticking out the front.
Dexter put his hand in his pants pocket and hauled out a huge wad of money—twenties, fifties, hundreds—there must have been three thousand dollars in this wad—and took off three one-hundred-dollar bills and four fifty-dollar bills and stuffed them into Albert’s pocket.
“Go home and don’t come back for a month,” Dexter said.
“And mend your ways,” Chester said.
“Yes, do some mending,” Dexter said.
Then the both of them turned and went to bed.
They did not speak of him for a while.
The two Raskin brothers had their business structured around the mines of Good Friday Mountain. Each drove their giant half-ton trucks back and forth to the site. There was because of this mine an oil pipeline, tanks and mercury deposits in the soil, asbestos shards, zinc and copper drifts, and tailing ponds from those, and a white sky in the morning. They still brought in about a million a year. In the heady days back in the 1950s they earned about four million.
But the Canadian investors knew better than to invest in asbestos now. And though they wanted out of it, they still had obligations to fulfill.
So they were old and forgotten, and everything they had done for the community, everything they had wanted to do, now seemed to be heading toward inevitable failure. But they did not relent. They continued. And on their travels they would sometimes meet at certain economic meetings representatives from other industries who still desperately needed their product, as fire retardant and insulation, and kept urging the government to make asbestos more accessible. It was also in the interest of certain First Nations families who received money for a lease of a field near the head pond of Dawn Stream that emptied fifteen miles away into Riley Brook. Riley Brook was at the very outer border of the reserve. But in the months and years to come it would become the epicentre of the conflagration, where some First Nations band members supported the Raskin payouts to them, and many others, ruined by time and circumstance, did not.
The field where three sheds sat was used as ground zero for lime purifying the stream. Each year the First Nations were sceptical that this did not run foul into Riley Brook proper, or do any good whatsoever, and each three to five years the payment was increased. But the First Nations (they were not known as First Nations then, but, as the old men said, Indians) had suffered under debilitating neglect for many generations. They had had land and streams poisoned before and had a right to be suspicious. They had had dreams themselves unfulfilled and were desperately aware of it.
So now it did not matter to them that it was or was not Raskin’s fault. They needed someone to blame. What they said they wanted to happen, a complete shutdown of all activity, lumber and mining, in the entire area, would actually destroy or compromise the very economy they themselves had much depended on, the roads they travelled on, the skidoos and trucks they bought. Still, they were angry men and women. It had been too, too long a sacrifice for the Indigenous. So they were now demanding consultation.