He wasn't there
It happened every year, for I don’t know how long, and I was happiest when he left, and just as happy when he came back, his departure brought happiness to the household, his arrival brought gifts, chocolate and beer from Germany… five years of hard labor… but lighter than the ten years he spent in the infernal Zwartberg coal mine, in Genk, Belgium, one kilometre below, the Flemish underworld with no room for metaphor, where if the mine didn’t kill you, as it did many, eight-hundred-and-sixty-seven to be exact - but no one was exact between nineteen-forty-six and nineteen-sixty-three, though his stint was between nineteen-fifty and nineteen-sixty, the peak years, coal wise and death wise - silicosis did, but he survived it, married an old maid of twenty, and he an old man at thirty-six, while shuttling back and forth, from a southern hell to a Belgium one, was not in the Marcinelle mine disaster, though many believed he was, including his young bride, where two-hundred-and sixty-three lost their lives of which one-hundred-and-thirty-six were Italian migrant workers, the cheapest of cheap labour, but just one of thirty-plus disasters in the dozens upon dozens of Belgium mines, where safety rules were elementary at best and imaginary at worst, making his construction work in Germany a club-med vacation, sent money home, and everybody else’s home, taking take of his siblings, even the older ones, like a father, leaving me to a household of eight women, where I learned how to sew and have fun and to trust women more than men, smoked till he was seventy-four, moved us to the almost America of America in 1965, hit the streets in 40 below working three straight eight-hour shifts, repairing gas leaks in and around Montreal, where on his bedroom commode lay the pictures of his buddies who didn’t make it, and till his death lamented not having had a pen, schooling, almost always being on the losing end of those who knew how to use one, and for all the years he wasn’t there, he was always there.
