The Tar Pond

By John R. Waye

Born and raised near the notorious Tar Pond, Jack struggled through his turbulent childhood and teen years and now, having already made many poor choices, he is confronted by his biggest dilemma involving sex, drugs and revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John R. Waye
• Release date: Feb 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781988186696

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother:

Jessie (Jarvis) Waye

Disclaimer: The characters in this book are not intended to portray any actual persons, living or dead.

Introduction

"For about a century, coal-mining and the making of steel were the lifeblood of Cape Breton. The smoke that belched from the stacks of the Sydney Steel Corporation — later known as Sysco — meant jobs for the residents of Sydney.

It would also mean health and environmental problems.

The plant was bought by the Nova Scotia government after its previous owner shut it down in 1967. For the next three decades, Sydney Steel got by mostly on government subsidies.

The toxic byproducts of steel-making eventually created a pocket of sludge on the site known as the Sydney tar ponds.

At the heart of the tar ponds disaster was the coke-oven. A coke-oven is a large chamber where coal is heated. At a certain temperature undesired tar and gases are separated off from the desired coke.

These toxic wastes, which included benzene, kerosene, and naphthalene, were being poured off into a nearby brook and slowly collecting into an estuary that flows into Sydney Harbour.

The site contains 700,000 tonnes of soil contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), solvents and heavy metals. It’s the size of three city blocks.

It has long been considered one of Canada’s most toxic waste sites."

CBC News web site, 2010

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

— Picasso.

Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

— John 8:32

1

Come ‘ere Jackie Boy, he said.

Pa was sitting on a kitchen chair dressed in his work clothes – a blue plaid wool shirt, dirty pants and steel toed boots. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees as he smoked a plain end cigarette. The blue smoke curled up around the ceiling like a fog. He smoked makings or roll your owns at work but tailor made filterless cigarettes at home.

The kitchen was gloomy, lit only by a bare incandescent light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The floor was covered with oilcloth. There was a chrome table with six chairs, a coal stove, a fridge and a large sunken porcelain sink. Sitting on the stove constantly was a glass Pyrex teapot. The tea had a strong smell when it got too steep.

There were no built-in cupboards or counters. An old wooden table that had been the kitchen table before we upgraded to the chrome one served as a sort of counter stuck in the corner by the fridge. There was also a portable wooden cupboard about six feet high.

A clothesline was strung across the room. The only thing hanging from it that morning was Pa’s old army belt that was always there. When he wanted to threaten one of us kids he’d just look at it.

He had ruddy red hair and clipped his thick toenails with wire cutters. He wasn’t a big man but seemed threatening enough to young children. He yelled a lot at home but was probably pretty quiet outside the house. Willy was a laborer at the steel plant with enough seniority to be on the dayshift Monday to Friday. I told people he was a steelworker because that sounded better than laborer.

He wore long johns to work even in the summer and afterward, on hot days, took off his work shirt and opened and pulled down the top of his long johns. He sat on the front veranda like that drinking beer topless with the top part of his long johns hanging down around the legs of the kitchen chair he sat on.

Willy had grade 7 education. Like a lot of other young men during the Great Depression he rode the rails and he made it all the way out west to Vancouver, B.C. From there he went back to Regina, Saskatchewan for the protest demonstration that turned into the infamous riot but he never said anything about his role in it, if any. In fact he didn’t really say anything about that trip except to mention it once in a while when drinking.

He never left Cape Breton Island again. I don’t recall his ever listening to music and the only reading he did was Zane Grey western novels.

Pa seemed to be always angry and cursing. At night, as we kids chattered away in bed, he’d yell, Shut the fuck up!

I hated it when he called me Jackie Boy. But at least he got my name right. When he was mad, which was a lot, he went through several names before getting to mine.

That’s what happens when you’re stupid enough to have eleven kids. And I had the misfortune of being the second youngest. My brothers and sisters teased me calling me the baby boy of the family. I protested saying Ruth was the baby. They said, Yeah but you’re the baby boy.

I have to admit one good thing about it was I could hide when he was pissed off. Mostly it was Ma he was pissed at but it was a good idea to stay out of the way. You never knew what was gonna happen. My favorite hiding place was under the metal crib in the back room. That crib was used for all the kids and was stored there, I suppose, in case it was needed again.

I don’t remember much of my childhood. It’s like waking up from a long dream and only remembering fragments of it. My earliest fragment is of lying in that crib and feeling scared as a male figure approached. I pulled the blanket over my head to hide. We weren’t playing peek-a-boo.

I didn’t like being alone with Willy and could smell tobacco and beer off his breath. Fuck you Willy, I said… to myself but out loud I asked, Where’s Ma?

It was her I was looking for. I was six years old and had woken up early. The house was quiet, something that was unusual when Pa was home. I wonder if they ever talked like normal people in those early morning hours. My memory is of a lot of yelling and not much else.

Pa was always gone to work before we kids got up. Ma was up first though. She lit the kitchen coal stove with a wooden match that she put to the corners of the paper and then used it to light her cigarette. She put newspaper in the stove first with kindling on top of it. Then coal was shoveled in from the bucket next to the stove. She brought up the buckets of coal from the cellar after smashing the big clumps with a sledgehammer to break them up.

Sometimes she asked us kids to bring up the coal but she didn’t insist. She’d just get it herself. She never complained. Not about that or any of the other stuff, the more serious stuff.

Ma came into the kitchen saying, What are you doing up this early, Jackie Boy? The porridge isn’t even made yet.

I didn’t mind too much when she called me Jackie Boy. She had another black eye though and a bruise on her shin that I knew was from Willy’s boots. I gave him a nasty look with my fists clenched. He avoided eye contact.

Ma made a big pot of porridge every school morning even after we stopped eating it because we were tired of it.

She was thin and about 5’ feet tall with dark gray streaked shoulder length hair and green eyes. She was pretty once but was showing the effects of a hard life by the time I came along.

Her name was Flo, short for Florence, and she was born in a small Newfoundland fishing village. The youngest of six children, she was only three years old when her father died at sea. My grandfather and twelve other men perished when their fishing ship sank. I sometimes imagine them ending up in the frigid north Atlantic water on a cold dark winter night. They wouldn’t have lasted long but it must have been a harsh way to go.

My grandmother was left destitute. She remarried and they moved to Sydney where her new husband got a job at the steel plant.

Flo’s mother and stepfather had four more children. I never met my step grandfather and it was obvious that Flo didn’t like him because I don’t recall her ever once even mentioning him. Flo had to quit school before completing high school and so she taught us kids the importance of education.

I went back upstairs and crawled back into the single bed I shared with Calder who was 18 months older than me. I didn’t wake him or any of my three sisters who were in the double bed next to us. We were stacked in there like cordwood.

When the two oldest boys went away, Calder and I got their room and their bed with the metal springs sticking through the mattress. We’d wake up in the morning with scratches from the springs. Calder and I slept together until we finished high school.

I remember how fucking cold it was during those long winters. Ma went around at night covering us up with old coats or anything she could find. I’d wake up in the morning and lay there watching my breath rise to the slanted ceiling. The windowpane was covered with ice despite the storm window. Finally I’d jump out of bed and run down to the kitchen where it was warm.

I had my porridge and then brushed my teeth at the kitchen sink. With one bathroom in the house we couldn’t tie it up with tooth brushing. Or bathing for that matter.

Our house was 1 1/2 stories so all the upstairs rooms had slanted ceilings, The bathroom was the same size as the bedrooms. It had a claw foot bathtub and there was no shower. The wringer washer was also in there. On Saturdays Ma did the wash and then put the clothes through the wringer before hanging them on the backyard clothesline in the summer or in the kitchen during the winter.

We trudged off to Central School. Ma went to the PTA meetings for all of her kids and so was on a first name basis with all the teachers there.

Course we weren’t the only big family around. It was a Catholic neighborhood after all. But not us, we were Protestant. Well, we didn’t really go to church but anyone not Catholic was labeled generically Protestant. All my Catholic friends went to Sacred Heart School with nun teachers who told them Protestants went to hell.

Willy said the Catholics stored guns in the church basement and that there was a tunnel between the Glebe House and Holy Angels Convent so the priests and nuns could get together. I got the impression that was a bad thing.

He must have said that on the weekend because we didn’t see much of him during the week. He left early for work at the steel plant, walking because he didn’t have a car. When he got home after work we scavenged his black tin lunch can to see if there was any food left in it. He ate an early supper before heading off to Louie’s Tavern and didn’t return most nights until we were in bed.

We ate after he left. Whoever was home got to eat. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone anyway. Or food either. No one was concerned if any of the kids wasn’t home. We just figured they were lucky enough to be eating somewhere else and maybe sleeping there too. Sometimes I wouldn’t see one of my siblings for days at a time and no one seemed to question where they were.

My sister Katie called once and I answered. She said, Tell Ma I won’t be home for supper. I’m eating over at Arlene’s house.

Why are you calling? I asked.

She whispered into the phone that Arlene’s mother had insisted she call. I guessed they were probably having something better than we were anyway. I was raised mostly on bread and molasses when younger and then potatoes and turnip with codfish or baloney. We called baloney Cape Breton steak. Obesity wasn’t