Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

6

The earthquake woke me, late at night, the deep, rolling thunder from the depths of the earth that made all the windows shiver and the corrugated roof of the mine house creak. I cried and my father came to comfort me, took me in his arms in the dark and said that it was only the earth moving itself into a more comfortable position.

I had fallen asleep again when the telephone rang, an hour or so later. To call him out.

The rest of the tale was told to me by my mother, patched together from the official announcements, the stories of my father’s colleagues, and her own imagination.

He led one of the rescue teams that had to bring out the fourteen men trapped a kilometer underground after one of the tunnels had collapsed.

It was hot and confused down there. Other rescue teams were already at work when they got there, taken down the shaft in the rattling, shaking cage, carrying their shovels and their pickaxes, first-aid kits and bottles of water. No one wore the regulation hard hat; it only got in the way. They all, black and white, folded down the top half of their overalls to work in the heat with naked torsos that gleamed in the glaring electric spotlights, shining brightly in one place and casting deep shadows in another. The black men’s rhythmical singing provided the universal tempo to which everyone worked – the diggers, the soil removers, side by side, the usually rigid divisions drawn between races and trades suddenly forgotten because four of the trapped men were white and ten were black.

Hour after hour in the eternal dark to move a mountain.

On the surface, relatives of the white men had begun to gather, waiting for news with the usual support of the community, friends, and colleagues, as well as families of the rescue teams because they, too, weren’t safe.

My mother painted during those hours, Schubert’s lieder playing tinnily on the radiogram. Calm, she thought my father was invincible, while I knew nothing of the tension of an entire town.

Just before his team was due to return to the surface at the end of their shift, they heard muffled cries for help, exhausted moans of pain and fear, and he encouraged them, the thin edge of the wedge that bit by bit moved rock and stone and earth, to excavate a narrow tunnel, the opportunity for rest suddenly forgotten in the adrenaline high of success in sight. Emile van Heerden was in the lead, his lithe body drawing on the fitness of a lifetime to reach the trapped men.

His team had broken through to the small opening that the survivors had dug with bare hands and bleeding fingers.

The news that there were voices down there quickly spread to the surface, and the people in the small recreation hall clapped their hands and wept.

And then the earth shook again.

He had pulled out the first three on his own with muscled, sinewy arms and loaded them onto the wood-and-canvas stretchers. The fourth one was trapped up to his chest, a black man with smashed legs who suppressed the pain with superhuman effort, the only signs the sweat pouring off him and the shaking of his upper body. Emile van Heerden dug frantically, the soil around the man’s legs moving with the effort of my father’s own fingers because a shovel was too big and too clumsy. Then the earth, once again, moved into a more comfortable position.

He was one of twenty-four men they brought out of the shaft three days later wrapped in blankets.

My mother cried only when she pulled the blanket aside in the mortuary and saw what the pressure of a ton of rock had done to the beautiful body of her husband.