The Devil's Dust by C.B. Forrest Read Free Book Online

surrender him to a nursing home, that he would be afforded the simple luxury of passing away in his own bed — this is something Nolan will have to live with.

Six

    S >te. Bernadette — or Saint B as she is known by the locals — is nestled in the thickest of the wild country of the Cambrian Shield, due north of Timmins and just west of the Quebec border. Unpolished, with the ragged and torn-open beauty that only the North can produce — a beauty born of adversity and stubbornness, this place where trees jut impossibly from grey sheer rock walls, wildflowers surviving in barely a dusting of soil. Ste. Bernadette for two generations has straddled a vein of gold — her luck and her curse. The community centre that thirty years ago rocked with Saturday night dances now rots in its place, leaning to one side, the whitewash faded, cracked, and peeling. The once-prosperous shops along Main Street now own boarded windows, except for those few whose owners refuse to let go.
    A little more than twelve hundred people live there now, but at the height of the Carver Company mining operations located just outside the town, Ste. Bernadette was home to more than double that number. Ste. Bernadette never really figured in the mining news, not when stacked against the big players — Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Timmins, Red Lake, even Cobalt in its gravy days. Ste. Bernadette was that rare secret; a small operation, yes, but it was prosperous and stable. Most of the locals didn’t mind that outsiders never mentioned the place when they thought of mining; it was just as well to keep their ambitions away. Many worried aloud that a small boom would both invigorate and eventually destroy the town. Paranoia of the south and the cities down there was simply a part of the embedded culture in a remote northern town where sharing gossip and passing judgment were a part of daily life.
    Unlike the Hollinger Gold Mine of Timmins, which was at one time the richest gold producer in the western hemisphere — or even the mines of Rouyn, which operate still — the vein deep beneath Ste. Bernadette was seemingly not infinite. Like many remote towns in northern Ontario — or northern Quebec or Manitoba or Saskatchewan — there was a Native reserve nearby, in this case half an hour northeast of Ste. Bernadette. A short trip up the two-lane highway, followed by a ten-minute drive down a gravel road would deliver you to a new universe: the Big Water First Nation.
    It is surreal : McKelvey stands in the kitchen of the home where he was raised. It is silent. Sun streams through the window and warms the side of his face. He remembers standing just like this on cold winter mornings, eyes closed to the warmth, feet cold on the linoleum floor. Later, as he unpacks, the medical brochures once again poke him in the eye. He stands at the dresser and regards them like a fan of cards, the worst royal flush he’s ever drawn, and then he opens a drawer and tosses them in. He adds to the drawer the journal he has been keeping with no sense of regular dedication. Some of the entries simply record the date and a line or two about having nothing to say, dispatches from the front lines of mortality: Rain today. Fuck it .
    Now McKelvey stands at the bathroom sink, the porcelain cold against his stomach, and he swallows the tablets with a backward snap of his head. He closes his eyes and imagines the chemical molecules dissolving, entering his bloodstream on their mission of salvation. This bathroom, this small place. Remembered smells, voices from down the hall. He forms a grainy vision of his father standing at this very sink, shaving cream slathered on his big handsome face, a cigarette propped between thin lips. In the vignette his father turns, notices him standing in the hallway with a foot stuck between the banister posts; and Grey McKelvey smiles and winks. It’s a good memory of a man who rarely let you know where you stood within