Chapter 15: Shayne Corson - Asbestos

Friday, October 4, 1991

Daniel picks me up in front of my high school in his Nissan 300ZX. I guess I should be proud to have a big brother waiting for me in a shiny car, the first he’s ever bought new. It’s pouring rain, and students are running over to the buses with their backpacks covering their heads. On the wide sidewalk, boots and shoes splash as they jockey for space between puddles. No one cares about me, or my brother’s sports car. And the metal trailer with wooden sides isn’t helping the car’s aerodynamic sleekness.

Daniel’s much more excited than I am to pick up my dirt bike.

A dirt bike in October. I won’t even be able to try it out, it’s raining so hard. I slam the car door shut.

Hey, easy! Fall’s great for riding. Even in light snow, it’s superfun. And it’s supposed to be nice tomorrow anyway.

I like skateboarding better.

Yeah, well you’ve already got a skateboard. It was nice of Camille Poulin to buy you one.

Camille Fugère.

All right, all right. You okay? I thought you’d be mellowed out a bit, now that you’re all in love with Cindy Drouin.

I’m not in love. She’s just a friend. How’s Nathalie?

Nathalie’s fine. She freaked a little when she found out what I paid for the car, hehe. But it’s cool.

Daniel smiles. He’s tapping away at the wheel, keeping time to the Zeppelin in the tape deck. ‘Communication Breakdown.’ I’m happy to be here with him. I wonder how he always manages to stay so relaxed, taking life as it comes with a laugh, free of inhibitions.

The song fades out. Next up is ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby.’ Daniel hits fast-forward, his fingers expertly dancing across the FF, Stop, and Play buttons without taking his eyes off the road. He manages to land right in the silence before ‘How Many More Times.’

Seriously, there’s lots of stuff I’d rather do with four hundred bucks.

Come on, give it a rest. It’s a present from Dad, and the present isn’t cash. It’s a dirt bike.

You know he was about to lose his job, right?

Sure, everyone knows that. He did too. It’s game over for the mines.

What do you think he would have done?

I don’t know. But Mom’s going to have problems soon.

What kind of problems?

Well, the house, for starters. It doesn’t pay for itself, you know. And she’ll have to buy a car.

She just has to start working …

Come on, Steve, you know she can’t work. She’s sick.

Yeah, but what’s wrong with her?

It’s in her head. I mean, she really is sick … Like, in her head. The whole Robin family had it.

I frown: I didn’t know that part. One of my eyelids wants to blink five times. My brother keeps going.

She might have to sell the house, you know.

Five quick blinks betray my agitation. Ten.

She talked about maybe moving to Montreal. She has cousins there, Maureen’s five daughters. They were at the funeral.

I drum my fingertips as I process this new information. Montreal for my senior year of high school? Better than Repentigny, that’s for sure. And Cindy would be there in, what, two years?

Mom can’t be left alone.

Hey, I’m still here, you know! And I’d move to Montreal with her.

My brother doesn’t seem to hear me. We can’t let her end up like Uncle Andrew.

Wait, what? What happened to Uncle Andrew?

We stop at a red light. Daniel turns his head and stares at me for a long time, sizing me up. I stifle every flutter of my heart.

Uncle Andrew killed himself. Went out for a drive one night and crashed his car into a pillar on the highway. The car blew up. A Chevette, I think. We never knew if he was killed on impact, or if it was the fire.

It takes a minute to register this disaster. One more fire. How old was I when he died, five?

They told me it was an accident. Why’d he do it?

That’s what I’m telling you, Steve, he was sick. Daniel catches himself, weighs his words. Mom isn’t sick like that, that’s not what I’m saying.

The song comes to an end with a crescendo of drumming, leaving only the forlorn squelching of the windshield wipers. I’m speechless before the chasm that has opened before me, a white hole that drags me in, irresistibly drawing me away from the known world.

Suicide had seemed so theoretical just a second ago, like a neighbour you live next to for years without ever really noticing. I’d seen suicides in a few movies, I guess, and again recently in the novel It, when Stan couldn’t face the thought of Pennywise’s imminent return. I’d come across it in song lyrics whose meaning never fully sunk in. And I’d formed some kind of caricatured mental image, based on the moral panic around heavy metal – even my own mother had been taken in, though I now saw she may have had other reasons of her own. Her own brother died. Her brother took his own life. My mother lost her brother.

This revelation about my uncle transforms an undefined possibility into something real people can actually do.

My thoughts turn to the marks on Cindy’s forearm. Out of nowhere, a thousand questions: What was she looking for? What sparked the impulse? Where was she going with it? Ever ten steps ahead of me, Cindy could see further: beyond high school, beyond our shithole town, beyond life itself?

Did you watch the game yesterday?

I answered distractedly, no I hadn’t.

Shayne Corson got into a fight.

When I was five, my father took me to work with him one morning. He was still at the King-Beaver Mine, it was the Golden Age. He lifted me up into the cab of his huge yellow haul truck with a blue-striped bucket. In my overall pocket, I clutched my little Matchbox car like a comfort object: the black-and-flame Trans Am warming in my palm. I was sitting on my father’s lap, and I can still see him pressing the starter, drawing forth a massive roar that made me jump. I might have cried too, I don’t know. My father placed my little hand under his to help me pull the lever that set the forty-five-tonne vehicle in motion. This memory bubbles up now, exactly now, after years of lying dormant, with an immediate and undeniable intuition that my being there was somehow linked to Uncle Andrew’s death.

Did I see my mother cry that day? Could my father have been trying to get me away, distract me from my mother’s grief? A pain that would not leave her be, that must have stayed with her for days and months on end, filling her with an almost obscene guilt and plunging her into the dizzying depths of the unshakable idea that distance, that her being far away, might have played some part in her only brother’s death. By taking me to the mine, and letting me ride in his truck, making me part of what made up his life in this town, had my father been trying to force me, as he had forced my mother, to adopt his hometown and his mine and his life? Was he trying to mix me into this mortar?

* * *

The Hearth Fall 1981

At night, a ringing phone. My mother had cried out, and I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. In the morning, I’d fallen and hit my head on a stone. It bled a lot, and my eye swelled up, and then my father raised his voice and my mother shrieked even louder. A man with a red tattoo looked at me with calm eyes. I’d turned toward that man with my whole being, toward the sense of safety he represented, toward his bird. I had my back turned toward the hearth while my father yelled at me, blaming me for my injury.

We left, all of us but the unknown mason, for the hospital. I was afraid I’d be yelled at again there, punished for my disobedience. In the front passenger seat, my mother was panicking and hyperventilating, while in the back seat I sobbed in pain, and confusion, and fear: a darkness.

I don’t see Daniel in this memory. Daniel would have been twelve years old, off at boarding school a hundred miles away.

The next day, or maybe a few days later, the shrieking stopped. At this point in my memory, I no longer see my mother. Claire stayed behind at the hospital. I got brand-new stitches.

I hadn’t gone to kindergarten that day. I’d gone to the mine with my father instead.

He shoots me a smile that I struggle to return – in the stitched arch above my eye, pain flares like red lightning. Pierre nods toward me in the back seat and jokes with an inspector in a booth.

Oh, he sure can do that to himself, this kid!

In the change house, my father shows me off to his colleagues. He puts on his boots and helmet. A gaunt-faced miner with muddled speech hands me a junior-sized helmet. I can’t quite make out his words, it sounds like try this or typhus or maybe fireworks? My father puts the helmet on my head, neither roughly nor gently, neither one thing nor the other. It was meant to be normal.

We make our way down a wide gravel path. On either side of us, the rows of haul trucks roar to life, one after another, kicking up clouds of grey dust. It smells like gasoline and worn metal. My father’s truck is parked in with a bunch of others just like it. I don’t remember climbing up and in. The dashboard is minimal. A split in the black seat covering has exposed the ochre foam. The cab seems ridiculously small compared to the truck itself. We join in the chorus of grinding and screeching, as the gears clang and the engine makes our little spaceship thrum, lurching forward with staggering torque and speed. The sun hits the dusty windshield, refracting into beams of white light.

I no longer know whether I was scared – what I remember above all is a sharp, throbbing dizziness in my legs and the pit of my stomach as we rumble toward the vast open pit of the mine, which we are soon overlooking, a long ribbon of road snaking along the edge of the pit and its aquiferous bottom, a glossy darkness. That’s my very first memory of the mine, of its yawning open pit, vaster than anything I could have imagined. This is where Dad disappears every day. I’m galvanized, overtaken by a powerful, disturbing, ambivalent thrill, as if the whole city and the sky could be sucked into this black hole.

We corkscrew downward for a long time, wending our way closer and closer to the grey eye. Excavators are digging up earth at its periphery, digging down deeper and deeper still, and will keep digging as long as we desire white gold and as deep as the fibre can be found, as we get in line to receive our load of raw ore. My father turns the radio on full blast. It’s crackly. CKLD-AM, Voice of the Appalachians.

Can we go up to the top after this? Can you see our house from up there?

No, the trucks don’t go up. We drop our load at the conveyor next.

My father falls silent, the radio grates on. A bird’s shadow glides over the ground. From where we’re sitting, the basin to our left looks like nothing more than a big pond of grey water, devoid of magic or special powers, nothing fascinating about it. To our right, a rock face.

My father lights a smoke and tosses the match through the open window. The clamour of machinery fills the air. This is where my dad disappears every day.

I’m fidgety, not fully comfortable on my father’s lap. He seems antsy too. Just when I try to place my little sneakers in the rectangle of space next to the seat, the truck swerves and I’m thrown back and bump my head, lightly, against the rear partition. My father grabs me around the waist and sits me back down on his lap. It’s neither rough nor gentle – it’s meant to be authoritative. He tells me off in a slow, low, and restrained voice, holding me firmly as he hands down judgment and punishment in a single motion.

You never listen.

I’m not listening now. I’m afraid my stitches might have split open. I’m afraid, I’m just afraid. I need to be comforted, to be something other than a child who does nothing but whine and bleed. I just need a loving look. I just need a dad. But my father is shut away inside his habitual anger, straining not to explode on this special morning.

A sudden and deafening meteor shower rains down on us, shaking the truck – an avalanche of rock falling into the bucket. I jump and heave a first sob, and then a levee breaks at the bottom of the King-Beaver Mine.

I can’t fully recall what happened after that. I hear an improbable silence. We go home at lunchtime. I don’t know who stayed with me at home, I feel as if I may have been left alone all afternoon.

My father got home from the mine a few minutes after the 4 p.m. blast.

* * *

Did Dad hit you when you were little?

Come on, Steve. That’s what you’re thinking about? He’s dead. Seems like we could just …

The tape deck clicks and the auto-reverse kicks in with a whirring sound. Robert Plant sings a song about being told what it means to be a man.

You know, he wasn’t perfect but … Daniel lets out a long sigh. He was under a lot of stress. Trying to make a living, never knowing when it’d all come crashing down …

But it’s always been like that!

Come on, it was just a little whack once in a while.

Just a little whack – but I still feel the sting whenever something startles me. Those whacks still creep into my dreams and my desires.

Daniel pulls his 300ZX into the lot and turns off the ignition while the car is still rolling. My eyes widen.

Whoa, how’d you do that?

Hehe. I’ll show you next year. Now let’s go get your dirt bike. Come on!

He gives me a little punch on the shoulder. I flinch, not out of fear, but because he hit my tattoo, which still hasn’t healed. As he opens his door, I say, Wait. Look. I show him my red bird. It’s not bleeding.

Steve … Badass!

I beam with pride as my brother stares at me, half stunned, half admiring. I’ll go along with whatever Daniel thinks. I take a seat on a red, blue, and yellow Honda, a 1979 XR80. Daniel is pumped.

Beauty! Not quite as new as the one Dad had picked out. Great shape though.

Dad had picked out a bike for me?

Daniel hesitates for a second. Yeah.

A white gauze envelops my thoughts. I can’t hear very well. Later, in the car, with a helmet on my lap – Daniel’s gift for me – I ask the question.

Is that what he was doing in Trois-Rivières?

Daniel bites down on the insides of his cheeks.

Behind us, in the outside world, the trailer carrying my dirt bike jolts noisily at every bump in the road.