Do not fear what you are about to suffer.
Clouds have massed, doming in the small world of West Condon. The patches of old snow, crusted black with soot in full daylight, now appear to whiten as the sky dulls toward evening. The temperature descends. Slag smoke sours the air. Only eight days since the new year began, but the vague hope its advent traditionally engenders has already gone stale. It is true, there are births, deaths, injuries, rumors, jokes, matings, and conflicts as usual, but a wearisome monotony seems to inform even the best and worst of them.
Schools exhale the young. Not yet convinced they care to take on the hard work of the world, most of them gather and disperse around pool tables and pinball machines, in drugstores and down at the bus station, or simply on corners. Basketball games are got up in schoolyards and back alleys. The members of the high school varsity work out briefly in the gym, then go home to rest up for tonight’s game. Superboys wing cold-fingered through trees in the cause of justice while, below, slingshot wars are waged. Little girls play house or give injections to ailing dolls, while their older sisters pop gum, slam doors, gossip, suck at milkshakes, or merely sit in wonder at the odd age upon them. Gangs of youngsters fall upon the luckless eccentrics, those with big ears or short pants or restless egos, and sullen hates are nursed. Rebellious cigarette butts are lit, lipped, flicked, ground under heel.
Out at Deepwater No. 9 Coalmine, the day shift rise up out of the workings by the cagefuls, jostle like tough but tired ballplayers into the showers. Some will go to homes, some to hunt or talk about it, some to fill taverns, some to card tables; many will go to the night’s ball game against Tucker City. In town, the night shift severally eat, dress, bitch, wisecrack, wait for cars or warm up their own. A certain apprehension pesters them, but it’s a nightly commonplace. Some joke to cover it, others complain sourly about wages or the contents of their lunchbuckets.
On Main Street, shops close and soon highballs will be poured at kitchen sinks, cards dealt at the Elks or the Country Club. Business is in its usual post-Christmas slump. Inventories are underway. Taxes must be figured. Dull stuff. Time gets on, seems to run and drag at the same time. People put their minds on supper and the ball game, and talk, talk about anything, talk and listen to talk. Religion, sex, politics, toothpastes, food, movie stars and prizefighters. Fishing, horoscopes, women’s clothes, automobiles, human nature. Circles and squares, whores, virgins, wives, daughters, time and money. Boredom and good times. Putting on weight, going steady, cancer, evolution, parents, the good old days, Jesus, baseball trades. Sadists, saints, and eating places. Tick talk tick talk. Smoking cures. The job, better jobs, how dumb the kids are, television, coalmining, the hit parade. Indigestion cures. Jews, Arabs, Communists, Negroes, colleges. Impotence cures. The Holy Spirit. The state tournament, filters, West Condon, West Condoners — mostly that: West Condoners, what’s wrong with them, what dumb things they’ve done, what they’ve been talking about, what’s wrong with the way they talk, who’s putting out, jokes they’ve told, why they’re not happy, what’s wrong with their homelife.
Some of the talk, though not the best of it, gets into the town newspaper, the West Condon Chronicle, which now young carriers fold and pack militantly into canvas bags, soon to fan out over the community on bikes on their nightly delivery of the word, dreaming as they throw that they are aces of the Cardinal staff. Up front, publisher and editor Justin Miller, himself an ex-carrier, cradles the telephone, pivots wearily in his swivel chair, stares out the window, unwashed in fourteen years, on the leaden parking lot. It is scabby with dead weeds, gray ice patches. On the other side of the lot: colorless hind-side of the West Condon Hotel. His assistant, Lou Jones, hammers out copy for tomorrow at the other desk. He’d ask Jones to cover tonight’s basketball game, but he knows Jones resents assignments that have anything to do with adolescents. Doris the waitress emerges from the rear door of the hotel coffeshop with slops, empties them into the incinerator, pauses there a moment to pick her nose. Miller wonders why Fisher, the old guy who runs the hotel, manages to find only these blighted moldering dogs to work for him.
Behind the window of an old gray weatherbowed house in the town’s cheap housing development district, a former buddy and high school basketball teammate of Miller’s, Oxford Clemens, stands staring out. Children in the dirt street outside push their game of kick-the-can into the gathering dark, shrieking full-grown obscenities in shrill glee. Clemens yawns, scratches his crotch, chances to be looking when the streetlight goes on, grins at it. He turns and reaches for a pair of pants heaped up on a chair. There is a large rip in the seat of his jockey shorts; the khaki pants are war surplus, limp and long unlaundered. At 5:12, one hundred thirty-eight minutes before game time, a blowzy postwar Buick dappled with rust rattles up in front of the old place, sounds its deep-throated Model T horn. Oxford Clemens shambles out, buttoning a yellow silk shirt up against the skin, carrying a leather jacket and his bucket. He piles in back with Tub Puller, who is snoring. “Evenin’, ladies,” Clemens greets as he pulls the door to. Pooch Minicucci who is driving says nothing, but Angelo Moroni, Clemens’ faceboss at the mine, turns around and says, “Hey, Ferd, is that the only fucking shirt you got?” Clemens grins faintly, lets it go.
The short drive out to Deepwater No. 9 is dominated by Moroni who talks without cease. The subject matter is getting out of the mine, getting out of West Condon, getting out of this whole useless life, and getting into women. Oxford works his long arms into his leather jacket, accidentally jostling Tub Puller. Puller lashes out irritably with his stubby right arm, slams Clemens in the chest. Puller is an airdox shotfirer by trade, has a body and face the immensity and consistency of an iceboxful of bread dough, says next to nothing all day long. Moroni is a short muscular man with a cocky round face, wideset eyes that turn down smilingly at the corners, short upper lip, broad nose, and twenty-seven years in the mines. He wears a hat on the side of his head and has a habit of tipping it down toward his nose when having a drink or playing pinochle with his buddy Vince Bonali, or talking to women. Minicucci is thin, with a ridged Roman nose. He has a speech defect so that he cannot pronounce his “r’s” and in the mine he is a triprider. Clemens is a timberman, tall with tousled yellow hair and narrow bloodshot eyes. At this moment he is coughing, a smoker’s airy wheeze, doubled forward. “You cocksucker, Puller!” he rasps gamely through his teeth, leaning back. Puller unceremoniously whacks him again, squinting all the while out the window into the night, clearly disgusted to be awake. That’s what a man gets who’s born to be Ferd the Turd. Clemens lights a smoke. He’s used to it, but that doesn’t cheer him.
“They ain’t no place to pouk,” Minicucci complains, arriving at the mine.
“Go on up under the watertower,” Moroni says.
“Gee, Ange, it’s agin the wules. I don’t—”
“Fuck the ‘wules,’ Pooch! You go park there and anybody asks, you tell them Ange said for you to, hear?”
It is 5:28. There is only one light burning in the front office building, more lights on toward the portal. The tipple is barely visible against the starless sky. The watertower, silver-bellied above them, is of course not obscured at all.
In the washhouse, Clemens removes his leather jacket, his yellow silk shirt, his loafers, and his khaki pants. He bends over, exposing the rip in his shorts, and a broad-chested man, dark with yet darker heavy eyebrows, smiles, takes aim, cracks his butt with a wet towel. Clemens yelps, spins and throws himself savagely on the man with the towel. Angelo Moroni and Tuck Filbert pull them apart. “You fatass catlicker wop, Bonali! I done licked you wunst, I’ll lick you agin!” Clemens’ thin face is awry with his fury.
“Lick this, crybaby,” says Vince Bonali, clutching his genitals with one thick-wristed fist and thrusting his round belly forward. He is laughing, but without humor.
At the gym, they’ll be turning on the lights. Old Patch the janitor and a couple of the freshmen will be sweeping down the floor. Clemens can feel the polish, taste the hardwood, smell the sheer joy of it. He dresses and thinks about that, tries to forget about Bonali and Moroni and all the rest. He pulls on his stained bluish jacket, frayed at the cuffs, shoves heavy gloves into the pockets, picks up his bucket. For all his effort, tension still presses at his eyes and holds his jaws clamped. Bonali is dressed but is still horsing around, has just blistered the thin ass of a tall bony miner named Giovanni Bruno with his towel. Bruno says nothing, barely flinches, simply turns pale and stares coldly at Bonali. Several laugh. “Hit him agin!” cries Chester Johnson. “I think he likes it!” More laughter. Bruno’s buddy and sole protector, Preacher Collins, has already gone below and Bruno is left alone.
“Hey, listen, you guys!” Bonali bellows in his deep-chested baritone. He waves a scrap of yellow paper. “I gotta give you bums a little cool-chur! Boys, I got a poem!” Bruno claws for the paper, but Bonali shoves him away.
Clemens pauses, returns to his locker, fishes in the pockets of his pants hanging inside, as Bonali reads: “My Mother!”
Now everybody is laughing and shouting. “Give me that!” Bruno cries, his voice strained like a child hurt in play, but three grinning miners hold him back, Johnson grabbing him around the middle, Mario Juliano and Bill Lawson pinning his arms back.
“From out of thy immortal womb—”
There is a roar of hooting and laughter, and all the men crowd around to see and hear. Bruno, encircled, is crying. Johnson pumps his fist in front of Bruno as though masturbating him. Clemens gives no least damn about Bruno, but he can appreciate his position. He lights a small firecracker and tucks it into Bonali’s hip pocket, exits for the lamphouse, tag in hand.
The tag is brass. Stamped on its face is a small 9, a much larger 1213, and at the bottom the letters G.D.C.Co. All the tags have the 9 and the letters, but only Oxford Clemens’ bears 1213. Like the numbers on basketball jerseys, it tells you who the players are. At 6:03, he hands it over to old Pop Hendricks and receives in exchange his lamp and battery, similarly numbered. Pop hooks the brass tag on a large board which schematically describes the mine workings.
As Clemens is fitting the lamp into the groove in his helmet his faceboss, Angelo Moroni, stomps into the lamphouse, steel-toed boots sounding off the dry wooden floor. Moroni is laughing still about Bruno’s poem, but when he sees Clemens, he wipes away the laugh with a bunched flicker of his thick grimy fist, growls something about the cracker. “I oughta take away your fucking butts, Clemens,” he says, but low, not loud enough for Pop to hear. Moroni and Bonali are old wop buddies.
Oxford grins, exhibiting a missing eyetooth, changes the subject. “Ain’t seen Willie Hall?” Hall is Clemens’ assigned buddy in the mine.
“No. Whatsa matter? Ain’t he here?”
“Ain’t seen him.”
“Trouble is, he can’t stand working with you, Ferd.”
Clemens shrugs, grins again. Moroni hands his tag to Pop Hendricks. “Want me to wait for him, or—?’’
“No, wait a minute,” says Moroni. “There’s a new kid here tonight.” He takes his lamp and battery, clumps with them to the door of the lamphouse, cranes his head out. “Hey, Rosselli! C’mere!”
Unwanted dead or alive, that’s how it always was with Oxford Clemens. They called him Ferd, Ferd the Turd, and either let him alone or let him have it. He didn’t know his old man and his old lady wanted him croaked, wanted his Aunt Marge to kill him soon as he came out, but Aunt Marge never killed anything, not even cockroaches or chickens, for she believed in the peace everlasting and God’s infinite mercy and eating the bread. And the teachers cracked his head with rulers and the kids at school, all younger than he, called him Bully and Ferd and Hayseed and threw rocks at him, ganged up on him. Only way they’d ever beat him. And they threw iceballs at him and tore up his books and threw spitballs at him and busted his tooth once with a bottle. That’s how it was. He learned to take it easy and keep his eyes open. He stole himself a good gun, did a lot of hunting, caught squirrels on the run, then stomped their heads to stop them flopping around in the brush, but left them lie: people don’t eat squirrels anymore. And he stole him some good line and a couple hooks, used grasshoppers, worms, plain old houseflies, and pulled bluegills out of the fat muddy streams on humid afternoons, setting world records till his arms got tired, and he strung them up on a piece of wire hanger, stuck them back in the water to stop them flopping around in the weeds, and left them there: nobody likes to clean bluegills. And he stole him a basketball from the high school one night after a ball game and, being tall and rough, he could bully the young boys at Lincoln School of an evening. He got fancy with his hands and hooked them in from thirty feet, but nobody would stick around long with Ferd Clemens hogging the game, so he’d say to hell with them and go on popping long ones by himself, setting world records until the sun was long since gone, and then he’d have him a smoke and drop by the poolhall, shoot him some snooker, an ace from the age of eleven, and cuss like crazy, making those old guys split their sides.
Tony Rosselli introduces himself, and Oxford grunts in reply. They board the cage together, take hold of the rings. Clemens now wears gloves, but Rosselli, without, flinches, not having realized the rings would be cold. Joe Castiglione, Mike Strelchuk, and a couple greasers named Cooley and Wosznik get on with them. They switch their lamps on and Castiglione trains his on Rosselli’s new blue denims. “Hey, boys, who’s the dude?” he shouts, and the others put their lamps on him too as the cage hurtles through blackness some five or six hundred feet to the bottom.
There, a half dozen miners are waiting for the mantrip, sitting idly on their buckets, and the arrival of the new man enlivens them. Foregoing their usual accounts of the arts of Ferd Clemens’ sister, they turn instead on young Rosselli. Somebody suggests they maybe ought to initiate him. Rosselli grins awkwardly, full-faced brown-eyed boy of eighteen, maybe nineteen. Rare to see a young fellow like Rosselli starting in the mines these days: the assumption is that someone must have pulled strings to get him the job. Bill Lawson stares at the boy and stuffs a wad of tobacco in his cheeks. “Old Willie get fired, Ferd?” he asks, and spits through his teeth. Lawson pitches semipro ball in his off hours, and the tobacco is part of his style.
“Make room for the dude,” says Juliano.
Oxford Clemens sits on his bucket and gazes dully at a far wall, nibbling a matchstick.
“Hey, kid, whose ass did you suck?” asks Joe Castiglione, whose brother has been out of work almost two years. “Who’d your little buddy suck, Ferd?”
At the gym, they’ll be coming through the doors, filling it up with noise and color, waving, shaking hands, shouting at each other. Boys in aprons will be selling Cokes, and the cheerleaders, orange WCs on their black sweaters, will be bouncing up and down and clapping their hands, no matter what. Oxford can hear the buzzer and it makes his hands sweat and tingle. In that gym, one day his sophomore year, he was fooling around with a basketball when the team came in to practice. He was feeling hot, so he said to hell with them and just kept on shooting. A tall rangy kid with dark brows jogged up and caught the ball under the basket and pitched it back out to him. He popped another and the tall kid grinned and flipped the ball out to him again. It reached him going like ninety — that guy could really let go that ball. Oxford aimed and popped another. The kid pulled it out of the nets and walked out and said his name was Justin Miller, and he said his name was Oxford Clemens. Then Justin — well, his real name was Tiger, of course — Tiger introduced Oxford to Coach Bayles and he worked out every night with them after that. Tiger showed him how to rebound and tip in and jump shoot and bounce pass and they gave him a suit, and one day Tiger said, “Come on, Ox baby, pop one!” And after that they all called him Ox, he was skinny as a rail, but they called him Ox, Big Ox, and all year long he and Tiger Miller threw basketballs at each other and into nets. There was one night against Tucker City when Big Ox laid in 34 points and tied what was then Tiger Miller’s high school record. It was the last minutes of the game and he and Tiger broke away with the ball and ended up a mile in front of everybody under the basket all alone. Tiger passed the ball to shoot, but that meant the new all-time record, so Ox grinned and handed it back to Tiger, and Tiger grinned right back and said, “You tip, Ox!” and he laid it up on the rim and, everybody pounding down on them. Ox arched up like a tall bird and lifted the ball light as an egg into the hoop. And it was a new all-time record and they carried him around on their shoulders after and wrote him up in all the papers, and his sister Dinah, even though she couldn’t come, she read all about it.
Oxford and the others gathered at the bottom board a mantrip at 6:33 and ride toward their working places in the maze of black-walled rooms off New Main South, ninth to sixteenth entries. The light from bare bulbs glistens off the rough cracks in the roof as the iron box rocks and sways, rattles and shrieks, making too much noise for talk. In its urgent rhythms, Oxford can almost hear his old Aunt Marge, who raised him and Dinah, letting go at the Church of the Nazarene:
“… and oh God you have mercy on them children God (amen) show them the everlastin’ peace (in Jesus’ name) stop that boy acussin’ warsh his feet (oh yes amen) and God stop Dinah seekin’ men so as she might seek Thee (yes tell it Sister Marge) warsh her feet (amen amen) and God do stop Oxford asmokin’ and adrinkin’ You show him the way warsh his feet (hear her Lord) for the Day of His Judgment is at hand (yes God) and verily the Son of Man is acomin’ in the glorious light of God the Father (yes) with all His angels (they are comin’) and outa his mouth they comes a sharp sword (yes yes) and all these here sinners and false prophets shall be cast alive into the fire and brimstone (oh save us) and all things shall be made new and the poor and the true shall inherit (we shall inherit) and so for the love of Jesus Christ oh God save my Dinah and Oxford from their adulteratin’ ways warsh them clean in the blood of the Lamb (oh God) let the dove of Grace descend on them (warsh them white) lead them home oh God teach them the love and the everlastin’ glory oh God I’m callin’ to Ye kin Ye hear me God warsh ’em warsh ’em all over God warsh their feet (amen)!”
When the mantrip stops at the ninth entry and there is a moment of silence, Tony Rosselli turns to Clemens and asks, “Say, wait, ain’t you Ox Clemens? Didn’t you play on the team that went to State?”
Yes, and he wore silk shirts and stopped screwing his sister’s friends at Waterton, made out with all the fancypants high school girls instead. He’d still stop in for a round of snooker now and then, but just to let the old men clap him on the back and call him Big Ox. And he and Tiger took the team to State that year and only lost the final game, getting named, both of them, to the All-State All-Star team, and just sophomores. Only the next year it turned out Oxford was ineligible for being too old. He could hardly believe it, but when he found it was really true, he gave them all the royal digit and went down in the mines. Tiger had a new buddy he played ball with and Oxford almost never saw him, except when he went to see the games, had to put up instead with his bucktooth minebuddy Willie Hall, who went to church with his Aunt Marge and was too scared of the mines to work more than half the time. Oxford never got written up anymore and those fancypants girls hung up on him if he tried to call. His Aunt Marge went completely off her head and fell down in a froth in campmeeting one night and died of a stroke. He had the blues something rotten all the time. He went to Waterton every week, drank with Dinah till he was sick, and tumbled her girlfriends when they weren’t busy.
Clemens and Rosselli leave the mantrip at the eleventh entry because Clemens wants to speak to somebody in that area, a buggy runner named Eddie Wilson. Bill Lawson and his buddy Mike Strelchuk follow them off. They wait for Oxford to turn down the entry, and then they sidle up next to Rosselli. Each takes an elbow. “C’mon, Tony,” says Strelchuk with a toothy big-jowled grin. “We’ll walk you up toward the working area.”
A few feet away, Wilson is saying: “No, Ferd, goldarn it, I’m tellin’ ye, I ain’t lettin’ ye have the barry of my dog, and that’s it. I got me a hankerin’ to maybe take the pup and go huntin’ myself this weekend anyhow.” Clemens spits, gives it up.
Sitting there alone at a cracked creamy table one rainy week night, then, about midnight, and so desolate even Mrs. Dobie had waddled off to bed, the two of them sharing a sour beer, Oxford got to talking on about how he was feeling so very down, how his life was all used up, he might as well quit, and there weren’t even any girls in the place tonight. Dinah showed deep age scars cutting through her forehead and under her eyes and around her mouth, and it made Oxford feel miserable and sick. He wished to hell he had some money to give her, send her off on a vacation somewhere, out West maybe, or buy her a new silk dress, spruce her up — Jesus! he was very sad. And while he was staring at his sister very sad she said, “C’mon, Oxford, you might as well stay here with me tonight.” Nobody was around to notice, so they went upstairs, joking and feeling a little like dumb kids. In bed, she played with him a little, but he couldn’t get it up, it just wasn’t any good, so they laughed and dropped off to sleep, and then they both woke up in the middle of the night, humping away to beat hell….
When Clemens arrives at the fourteenth, he discovers Rosselli down on his stomach, Strelchuk and Castiglione sitting on him, pinning his arms. The boy’s face is smeared with blood and coal dust, and Strelchuk and Castiglione are rubbing coal dust into his new clothes. Jinx Pontormo kicks the stuff into his face. Tuck Filbert stands a few feet away with a big grin on his broad-jawed face. Strelchuck’s buddy Bill Lawson comes up with a compressed-air hose. “Pull down his britches, boys, and we’ll treat the baby dude to a little initiation goose!” he shouts, and lets fly a chaw of tobacco.
Ely Collins, the Nazarene preacher, emerges tall and gray from the entry, frowns, warns: “You boys oughtn’t to clown around like that. It ain’t right.”
Clemens essays a couple steps forward, but Filbert, Pontormo, and a couple other guys get in his way. Strelchuk and Castiglione try to roll Rosselli over, but in the effort lose their grip, and the boy breaks free of them. Lawson runs over to help, and Rosselli, lashing out wildly, catches him on the side of the head with his new steel-toed boot, sends the older miner sprawling. Strelchuk and Castiglione leap on Rosselli cursing, pin his arms and legs. On his back, the boy keeps twisting and jerking, but they have him good now.
“Okay, get his pants!” Strelchuk gasps.
“Little shit,” Lawson crabs, his hands trembling. He has a long bleeding gash on his face, and his false teeth are knocked awry. He and Pontormo unbuckle the kid’s pants and rip them down off him.
The boy’s struggling flesh, leaping like a chicken with its neck wrung, is a strange creamy white against the black earth. Strelchuk and Castiglione try to force the boy’s legs back — Strelchuk clips him in the belly with the side of his hand, and the boy doubles up. They force his knees up against his chest, Rosselli still not giving up.
Collins steps into it. “Now, stop it, boys! Somebody’s gonna get hurt! Please! In the name of Jesus Christ, I ask you to stop!”
But there is too big a sweat up. Collins gets elbowed aside. “Okay, Bill!” grunts Castiglione, “she’s looking at you—ram the tucker in!” Lawson, pale, almost white under the coal dust with hurt and rage, seizes the air hose.
“Hold it!” Oxford Clemens slams his way past the four or five guys in the way, his bare blade flashing in the wavery light of the dull bulbs and gleaming headlamps. “Bill, baby, you make one move with that there hose and I’ll dig me a hole in your fat belly so deep they kin dump six loads in there!” Lawson freezes, stares icily at the knife less than two feet from his face. Clemens’ hand is tense, controlled, inches forward as though hungry to perform. “Okay, you ladies have got your wad off, now git your fat fairy asses off’n my buddy before I gotta dock me a few balls.”
Castiglione and Strelchuk let go their grip, Strelchuk grinning and brushing himself off, but Castiglione stands half crouching, facing Clemens. “You think you’re pretty fucking smart, Ferd, with that blade,” says Castiglione, edging toward him.
Young Rosselli stands, pulls his pants up, buckles his belt. He moves over behind Castiglione.
Clemens smiles. “Jist regulatin’ the odds, fatso. Anytime you wanna go it alone—”
“Hey! What the fuck is going on here?” It is Angelo Moroni. All turn toward him except Clemens, who takes a sideways step to get the faceboss in the corner of his eye, while keeping his gaze locked warily on Lawson and Castiglione. There is a general relaxation. Moroni glances at the knife, at Rosselli, at Lawson, sizing things up. He has been in the mines for twenty-seven years. “Gimme that blade, Ferd,” he says quietly.
Clemens flicks it shut, drops it in his own pocket, turns his back. “C’mon, Rosselli,” he says, and puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder to lead him south, toward the fifteenth.
“Better get your face doctored, Bill,” Moroni is heard saying, and somebody lets a grumbling curse.
Well, shit, Oxford thinks, Moroni is right. He’s got to get out of the mines. He’s not the kind of guy to break his back down here. Better get out as soon as he can, time is running out on him, and if he doesn’t make the move quick, he never will. Figures maybe he ought to get him a car one way or another and go out East or out West and take Dinah, and anybody ask him his name, goddamn it, he’ll tell them it’s Bill or Jack or Danny.
He and Rosselli turn right out of New Main South into the fifteenth crosscut, then right again down the fifth north air course. At the sixth east stub entry, Rosselli sees the other men and starts to turn in, but Clemens nods: “C’mon.”
They angle left a few feet, then right, huddle up behind a pillar of coal. A cutter lies like a long-dead animal up near the abandoned face. Falls betray a slow squeeze. It is 7:32. At the gym, the game has probably begun. Clemens’ fingers itch for the tip. He leans back on the pillar, pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. Rosselli grins. “Gee, Ox, I wanna thank you for helping me out back there. I was in a bad spot, and, well, shit, I—”
Clemens shrugs it off, offers the pack to Rosselli. “Light up and fergit about it, buddy.”
Rosselli hesitates, looks around, his headlamp slicing through the unfamiliar blackness, bringing timbers and tunnels and strange equipment into momentary view. He accepts a cigarette, fits it in his mouth. His lips are puffy, cracked, and there is blood, crusted with black dust, on his chin and right cheek. The mine is silent except for the distant scrape of machinery and voices, and what seems to be a sound nearby somewhat like that of bees.
There was light and
post drill leaped smashed the
turned over whole goddamn car kicking
felt it in his ears, grabbed his bucket, and turned from the face, but then the second
“Hank! Hank Harlowe! I cain’t see nothin’! Hank?”
Vince Bonali knew what it was and knew they had to get out. He told Duncan to keep the boys from jumping the gun and went for the phone in
saw it coming and crouched but it
“Wet a rag there! Git it on your face!”
seemed like it bounced right off the
Red Baxter’s crew had hardly begun loading the first car when the power went off. Supposed the ventilator fan had stopped working, because the phone
“Jesus! Jesus! Help me! Oh dear God!”
came to still holding the shovel but his
looked like a locomotive coming
One of the firebosses was telling the night mine manager a story about a nun who sat on a crucifix, when the phone rang. “Wait a minute,” laughed the night mine manager, reaching for the phone, “I got a new one Lou Jones was telling about — Hello? Yeah, speaking.”
The voice from the tenth east shop stretched up pinched and attenuated and leaked out into his ear a copper whine: “Ain’t no power down here, and they’s a lotta dust. Seems like the air ain’t movin’. Can you check the—?”
“Okay, okay. Hang on.” The night mine manager leaned up from his desk and then again the phone
Mike Strelchuk had just clapped his buddy old Bill Lawson on the shoulders, reminding him it was just a gag, forget it, but Bill was hopping sore and swore he’d even it up with Rosselli and that goddamn hillbilly. Bill had walked over toward where the green light marked the first-aid gear, the gash on his cheek looking pretty mean, and Strelchuk had turned into fourteenth west. He had bumped into old Ely Collins, the holy-roller preacher lately given to seeing white birds winging around down here, and together they’d got right of way into the working area. At the stub entry they had come on Collins’ useless buddy Giovanni Bruno, leaning up next to a pillar mindlessly scratching his ass. “Christ, go play with yourself somewheres else! We got work to do!” Mike had shouted, and had just taken a grip on Bruno’s elbow to jostle him along when all of a sudden it felt like his ears would burst, but he didn’t hear a thing. He still had a grip on Bruno’s bony elbow when the second one hit — hard. Floor seemed to heave, threw him off his feet, top crashed down, chunk batted off his helmet, face bit into the cinders. Still had ahold on something and he cried, “Bruno! Hey — you okay?” But Bruno didn’t answer. Strelchuk was scared maybe he had yanked the guy’s elbow off … or maybe what he held was now just a piece of a dead man. He switched his light back on, didn’t know how it got switched off, maybe it wasn’t on before, and aimed it down on Bruno. His goddamn face was white as the Virgin’s behind with feathery black streaks on his cheekbones, but his eyes were open and blinking — his mouth gaped, but nothing came out. Strelchuk hauled him to his feet, though they both had to crouch because the roof was down aslant. It was hotter and smokier than the griddles of hell.
A ritual buzzer alerts the young athletes on the West Condon court and strikes a blurred roar from the two confronting masses of spectators. In a body, all stand. The mute patterns of run-pass-leap-thrust dissolve, congealing into two tight knots on either extremity of the court, each governed by a taut-faced dark-suited hierarch. Six young novices in black, breasts ablaze with the mark of their confession, discipline the brute roars into pulsing chants with soft loops of arm and skirt, while, at their backs, five acolytes of the invading persuasion pressed immodestly into sleek diabolic red, rattle talismans with red and white paper tails, seeking to neutralize the efficacy of the West Condon locomotive. Young peddlers circulate, selling condiments indiscriminately to all. A light oil of warm-up perspiration anoints the shoulders of the ten athletes chosen as they explode out of their respective rings to confront each other. Some of them cross themselves, some clap and cry oaths, others tweak their genitals.
Eddie Wilson didn’t know what it was hit him. He still couldn’t think. He was overseas again and the earth was alive with powder going off and he was scared to die. Then he thought it was a plain fall. Pain was a small hot stab behind him, but he knew it was worse because he couldn’t move. Couldn’t even move a finger. He tried to cry out. Couldn’t make a sound. Did the others know what had happened to him? Where was his buddy Tommy? Didn’t they care? He felt as though he had shrunk, now sat bunched inside his skull. He wanted his wife Betty. He opened his eyes. His lamp arrowed a cloudy ray out into the darkness—the lights were out!
Bonali had told them to stay put when he went for the phone, but with the power gone and the vent system off, air scorching with suspended dust that could flame up any second, the need for action grabbed at them. Duncan, left in charge, couldn’t hold it back, and they started to break away. Brevnik, choking with terror and screaming “It’s coming!” was the first to go, and Georgie Lucci followed on his heels. Pooch Minicucci couldn’t find his buddy Cravens and raced after Brevnik and Lucci, thinking he was getting left behind. “Lee! Lee!” he cried, and ran head on into a timber. He scrambled, screaming, to his feet, not knowing who or what was trying to kill him, sending Brevnik and Lucci off on a dead panicked run, and Lee Cravens, thinking Minicucci was hurt, went chasing after. By the time he had caught up with him, Lucci and Brevnik were gone. Back in fourteenth west, Duncan shouted but no one listened. He wanted to run too, but he stood in a swirl of beaconed dust as though rooted and shouted until his lungs ached.
All Strelchuk could see was smoke. “Bruno!” he cried, “we gotta make a run for it, man!” But he heard some voice back of him and he hollered out, “Who is it?” There was topcoal and rock down everywhere, timbers smashed like matchsticks and rails twisted up, power gone, a roiling scummy dark — and then he saw old Joe Castiglione with a piece of timber stove clean through him and Tuck Filbert smack up against the roof, his head upsidedown staring down at him, his eyes open, and blood dribbling out his big square jaw. “My God! who is it?” Strelchuk screamed, the goddamn smoke clawing his lungs to shreds.
“Here,” a wretched thin whisper said. “Collins.”
And there he was, the poor goddamn bastard, his right leg pinned between the floor and a dislodged timber. “Preach! Jesus, man, you — but don’t worry none! We’ll get you out okay!” he cried. “It’s me, Strelchuk, buddy! We’ll make it!” But God Almighty, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Collins’ whole leg must have been no more than a quarter-inch thick from the knee down. Terror gripped Strelchuk and made him shake.
Thrust up by a whistle burst, lifted by the taut jack of forced silence, the ball leans over its zenith, sinks briefly, then springs from a finger’s jar toward the Tucker City basket, into the hands of a black-jerseyed West Condoner. A roar. A bounce. A pass. Gyrating patterns as fingers trace spiraling fences around the black-trunked bodies. Drive. Retreat. Pass. Jump. Shot.
Parked in an unlit corner of the lot outside the West Condon High School auditorium, the two received the Word:
She is spreadin’ her wings for a journey,
And is goin’ to journey by and by,
And when the trumpet sounds in the mornin’,
She will meet her dear Lord in the sky!
They had switched the radio on to keep up with the ball game, underway not a hundred yards distant, but, waiting for the old coils to warm, had become distracted and failed to tune it in. Instead, American evangelist messages of love, death, and chiliasm, transmitted through the nose all the way over from Randolph Junction, leaked into the old Dodge and dribbled recklessly over their young Italian-Catholic lust. It reached their indrawn senses, now rendered in five ways tactile, as curtains of alien irrelevance, permissive because it constrained in the wrong inflections; the glow of the radio was a distant worm that warmed them….
When He comes descendin’ from Heaven
On the clouds that He writes in His Word,
I’ll be joyful, preparin’ to meet Him
On the wings of that Great Speckled Bird!
Their bodies formed a convoluted “X,” the figure of a Greek psi, he seated, boy’s unchastised legs pushed forward under the dash, she curled across his lap and facing him. By thrust and retreat, they advanced their investigations: the circuit established by their mouths, his hand prowled into the rustle of her skirt and petticoat, while her hand rubbed and clawed his neck, proxy for the stalk wedged against her underhip; parting to breathe, they fell motionless, only their eyes pursuing the game, keeping it alive. Yet, though their hands and mouths pressed forward, toppling old resistances, dispersing ancestral phantoms, they had no clear idea of what the next inch would bring. If Angela Bonali’s defloration was to be the consummation, neither of them guessed it.
For a long time, the smoke was so thick Eddie Wilson saw nothing else in the beam of his headlamp. He prayed into the radiant cloud for deliverance from despair. He tried to think of Brother Ely assuring him of his soul’s state of grace. He should have told Ferd Clemens he could use the dog. He didn’t mean to hunt this weekend. He prayed that he be saved from greed and covetousness. Then, slowly, grotesquely, a crushed human shape emerged on the floor at the ray’s end: Tommy Catter, his buddy, staring at him from under an overturned pit car. Tommy’s lamp was shattered. Eddie prayed that Tommy’s sins be forgiven and prayed for his own salvation, and, hoping only to see his wife Betty once more, closed his eyes.
Strelchuk had thrust all his weight onto the timber that pinned Ely Collins’ leg, but there was no budging it. That idiot Bruno was in a state of shock and no good to him at all, and Strelchuk cursed him. Then somebody coughed, deep thick old man’s cough, not like Bruno, and Strelchuk spun: saw two headlamps wavering through the smoke! “Hey! Who is it? Strelchuk here! Who’s there?” Jesus, he was damn near screaming!
“Juliano,” said one of the lamps, and the other, still gagging, said, “Jinx, Mike! What the goddamn is happened?”
“This wasn’t no plain fall!” Mario Juliano said.
“No, there was a shock before. Something went off.”
And Jinx Pontormo cried, “Hey! We got to get the hell out of here!”
“Wait!” Strelchuk shouted. Choking so he could hardly breathe. “What do we do with Collins? He’s pinned here by a timber!”
“Listen, if we don’ get out of this merda,” shouted Jinx, “it ain’t going to matter none who is pinned and who ain’t!” He flashed his headlamp all around and said: “It seem to me like it thins out toward the west! Maybe we can get out by old Main!”
“But we can’t leave Preach here!” Strelchuk yelled. He was miffed that Pontormo was making to leave him. “Come on, you two bastards give me a hand!”
“All right, goddamn it!” snapped Mario Juliano. “Where the hell is he?” They went back and turned their lamps down on him. “Jesus Christ, he’s in a bad way!”
Mario helped and they tried again to work the timber off Collins’ leg, but it couldn’t be done. It had all five hundred feet of mother earth piling down on it. Pontormo came and tried to help too, didn’t relish heading off by himself, the old man was scared, they were all scared.
“Barney? This is Dave Osborne out at the mine. You better come out. I think the southeast section blew up.”
The night mine manager, though pierced through with a dread that, oddly, made him want to giggle, reached out calmly, reached down calmly, brought them up, brought them out here.
“Something awful has hit down here!”
“I know. Little trouble. Come on up.” Told them how. But he didn’t tell them what. Didn’t want them to lose their goddamn heads.
“Bonali here. Been trying to get you. What the hell has happened?”
“Take your crew due north up Main, Vince. Due north. You hear? Bring them up the number two shaft.”
“Jesus, Osborne, that’s over five miles!”
Superintendent. Mine rescue crews. Sections north of the shaft. Radio station. Expanded, making the phone system one with his own, his messages throbbing through its channels with impulses of action. His mind mapped out the possibilities, and, as when a boy pulling the toy train switches, he synchronized the movements, then opened all the circuits.
Collins was moaning something horrible. His face was black and cut from smashing into the cinders, and it was all screwed up with pain. His hands clenched dirt. He was praying. Then he twisted his neck and looked, white-eyeballed, up at Strelchuk, and he said in a fragile faraway old voice, “Mike! Git a ax!”
Strelchuk gasped. Jesus, I can’t do it, Preach! he cried, but only to himself, and he went hobbling over the chunks of coal, banging his helmet on the broken roof, stumbling over the rails, and found his own hatchet just inside third north. He grabbed it up and came running back. Juliano and Pontormo had already started to move away, Bruno blindly following their lights. “Don’t you goddamn bastards go away and leave me!” he screamed, and he thought for God’s sake he was going to cry. They turned back, Pontormo swearing like a bishop, and Strelchuk said, “It’s the only thing. If we leave him, he’ll die. You and Bruno grab his arms and hold him so he don’t jump or get them in the way, Jinx. And, Mario, take a grip on his other leg there.” His voice was high and squawky; he didn’t recognize it himself.
“It’s okay, boys,” Collins whispered up at them. “I kin take it.” And he took to praying again.
Strelchuk lifted the ax in the air and thought: Jesus! what if I miss, I’ve never swung a goddamn ax much, what if I hit the wrong leg, or—?
“Goddamn you, Mike!” Jinx screamed, losing control. “Quit messing around! This gas is knocking me out, man! We got to get us out of here!”
And while he was screaming away like that, Strelchuk came down with the ax, caught the leg right where he aimed, true and clean, just below the knee, and the blood flew everywhere, and Juliano was crying like a goddamn baby, and Bruno, his face blood-sprayed, went dumb, mouth agape, and broke away in a silent fit, but the leg was still hooked on, they couldn’t get him free. Preach was still praying to beat hell and never even whimpered. Mike raised the ax again and drove down with all the goddamn strength he had, felt the bone this time, heard the crack, felt the sickening braking of the ax in tough tissue, and he turned and vomited. He was gagging and hacking and crying and the blood was everywhere, and still that goddamn leg was hooked on. Mario ripped away Collins’ pant leg, took the wedge he had in his pocket, pressed it up against Collins’ thigh. Strelchuk whipped off his leather belt and, using it as a tourniquet against the wedge, they stopped the heavy bleeding. Pontormo whined Italian. Strelchuk grabbed up the ax once more. His hands were greasy with blood and it was wet on his chest and face. He was afraid of missing or losing hold, and the shakes were rattling him, so he took short hacking strokes, and at last it broke off. They dragged him free. And Preacher Collins, that game old sonuvabitch, he was still praying.
There was a comforting fullness about the room. Elaine Collins, listening to the high school basketball game while she ironed, wished to be there, yet knew she was always frightened outside this house, and once out would wish to be back. Out there, with the others, she would sit alone, persecuted by noises and events she did not understand, afraid of — she didn’t know what. She knew Hell by her Pa’s portrayals of it, but understood it by her own isolation and the fearful sense of disintegration she suffered out in public. Just as she understood God’s peace by this house, by this room with its rich and harmonious variety of loved objects. Braided rugs her Ma had made lay like large soft flagstones over the polished floor, and out of them stemmed warm masses of stuffed furniture, tables stacked with her Pa’s reading materials, lamps with opaque shades that showed white in the daytime and a mottled gold at night, two silver radiators that knocked and sighed, bookshelves hammered together by her Pa and painted oxblood brown to hold more of his small books and pamphlets and the family Bible, her Pa’s straw-backed rocker and her Ma’s footpedal Singer, baskets of clothing, and the ironing board where Elaine worked. The stuffed furniture, nubbed and musty, now served mainly to hold the stacks of laundry her Ma took in for the house money, though Elaine could remember when her older brother Harold, killed in the war, sprawled long-legged over it and struck softly at a banjo, singing popular religious tunes for her. On the ivory-papered walls hung last year’s calendar still, with Christmas circled in red. Also a plastic crucifix, photographs, a gold star, two plaster of Paris plaques that said He loveth the smallest sparrow and Prepare the Way of the Lord!, a small corner shelf bearing small glass knickknacks, a kind of certificate or award her Pa had received once from the mining company during the war, and a number of prints framed in black, including Jesus preaching to the multitudes, alone at prayer in Gethsemane, lying dead in his Ma’s arms after being lowered from the cross, and — surrounded by blue and white birds and standing on a cloud — ascending into Heaven. Most of the knickknacks on the shelf were gifts over the years from Elaine to her Ma. Missing was this year’s Christmas present, a small porcelain statue of Jesus’ Ma with a bright red heart on the outside of her breast. Her Ma had explained that it was mainly a Catholic statue, though it was very nice, so she kept it on her dresser in the bedroom, rather than out here where visitors might see it and misunderstand.
The photos were of Elaine, of Harold as a boy and in his uniform, and of her folks at different times. One was a newspaper clipping of her Pa preaching at a campmeeting near Wilmer. He had received the call only a few years back, a little while after Harold got killed, but he had quickly become a great revivalist, for his talk was always simple and direct and powerful with conviction. If they heard him once, they always came back. He stood tall and calm and his clear steady voice spoke assuredly of salvation from our sins through Christ Jesus; in every sermon, he always said, “Grace is not something you die to get, it’s something you get to live!” Almost every Sunday for over four years now he had been preaching and baptizing at the Church of the Nazarene here in West Condon, where her Ma had become leader of the Evening Circle. Elaine liked it when her Pa preached, because it was the one occasion that placed her among people without fear. He was there and she was his. Especially the tented campmeetings she liked.
Tucker City made a basket, and the score was tied. The crowd, in response, made a strange kind of animal noise — maybe the announcer had cupped his hand over the microphone. Elaine kept the volume low. Below, in the basement, her Ma sang revival hymns while she ran the washing machine.
Duncan was glad when Bonali returned and took over again. He was hoarse from shouting, and though he didn’t have the goddamnedest notion what he had said, it had somehow worked, because after Brevnik, Lucci, Cravens, and Minicucci, nobody else had split off. Bonali was pissed to get the news about these four, but he wasted no time getting the show on the road. They took the intake air course but ran into smoke and dust, had to get back on the return air course. Against the rulebooks, but there was nothing they could do. They considered bratticing off, but then the air got better. They came across a little wooden propeller that told them the vent system was on again.
Masque: Exchange of roles as Blacks fade to enact static counterparts to Reds now bearing down in interstitched configurations. Red One crosses meridian, confronts tableau of Blacks, slows, signals placement: Red Two to his left, Red Three to center, Red Four and Five to the corners. Blacks dance lightly, buttocks oriented to netted eye. Red Three slaps thigh, shouts, and Black Three leaps, slashes meaninglessly at empty space. Chants instruct. Red One holds, weighs forward, keeping the pendular (down the corridor he comes) scissoring of Red Three in the corner of his eye, juts young jaw, hoots; cued, Black One strikes, misses, as Red One withdraws. Black One flails, presses: Red One, laughing, delivers out to Red Two. Red Two (and through the double doors into the auditorium like a bird bursting from its cage in alarm) dissembles a return to Red One, but it is Red Three, momentarily stationary on a central black cross intersecting a black circle, who receives (then down the aisle in flying leaps batting wildly against obstacles) off the gleaming floorboards. He shams bounce to Red Four in the right corner, drawing Black Three out of the circle toward the foil, and then, alone and lit on his varnished disc, assumes his role: the Hook. A semi circling sweep, chasse, fade (and white shirt aflutter leaps the rail to alight on the hardwood floor), stretch — but circle breaks as Black Two and Three puncture its rim in assault. Collision (past the players and pallid up to the scorekeeper’s table). Whistle. Roar. Buzzer, unexpectedly prolonged.
The throbbing paeans of the crowd within, seined but not trapped by the auditorium’s drafty walls, washed over the old Dodge in the parking lot like surf, gathering ascendancy over the Randolph Junction radio station which had begun to fade and grow fuzzy. For Angie Bonali, the shouting was both exotic and paternal, a distant tidal bath of freedom, and a proximate refuge if she needed it. …
I been gatherin’ flowers from the hillside,
To wreathe around your (ground?),
But you’ve (fade) (baby, I’m knockin’ on your …)
(The flowers?) have all withered down …
As they, chests heaving, leaned apart, she gazed up past his dark head, burred and ridged like a goat’s, to the tattered roof of the old car. Under the tatters, in daylight, there was rust; now, behind them, there seemed only cosmic space. She closed her eyes. A width, less than three inches, of damp fragile nylon was all that kept his fingers out, and even now threatened to become less her buckler than his gauntlet. “It’s nearly eight,” she guessed, gasped. “Don’t you think we’d better — better go — see the game?’’
He sighed and gazed, pleasantly pained, down at her lips, full and appealing, as she knew, and now slightly bruised. Their psi plunged shut once more, her fist snarling eagerly in his cropped hair, his pawing savagely in her bared thighs, butting her body against the spiny fish that wriggled and plunged in his lap …
(fade in) … were in bloom,
I shot and killt my darlin’
(static) be my doom (all of God’s children
seem to gather there) to wreathe around your …
“Please!” she sobbed.
“Angie!” he pleaded, freed his own hand a moment to tug hers down across his chest. She buried her face in his shirt, her hand at the buckle without strength. “Oh hell!” he snapped, and flicked her skirt down over her thighs.
She whirled away, sat up, stared out the fogged-up windows. “What is it!” Her heart pounded with the discovery of real place around her. The people were streaming out of the auditorium.
“What’s going on?” he asked irritably, hand clinging to her knee in rote strategy.
“Is the game over?” She couldn’t get her breath.
“Can’t be,” he said. “It just started.” He flipped the radio dial, looking for the West Condon station.
The crowd, protoplasmic, flooded through the double doors and inundated the parking lot. Lamps on poles and swerving car lights made the onrushing mass seem translucent, unbodied. As individuals, nearing, emerged from it, Angie rolled down the window and called out, “What is it?”
“Number Nine blew up!”
The radio crashed on, piercing her breast. “We repeat: All persons other than doctors, nurses, and members of mine rescue teams are urged to remain in their homes. Bulletins will be—”
“Hey! You got room?”
“Sure!” shouted the boy with Angie. “Get in!”
Angie slumped forward to let the three squeeze past her into the back seat. Her bruised lips against her knuckles cried sin! as her father’s loved presence invaded the Dodge.
“Hey, Angie! Was your Dad on tonight?”
“Yes,” she whispered, but she was already crying. Oh, Daddy! I’m sorry!
Parked at the outer edge of the lot, the advantage was all theirs, but even then they soon found themselves bumper to bumper on the old road out to the coalmine.
The three men jerryrigged a stretcher with brattice canvas and hustled Ely Collins into it. They’d been too long about it. The gas was so dense now, it felt like their goddamn clothes were floating free from their bodies. Strelchuk remembered Bruno, didn’t see him anywhere. “Hey Bruno!” he shouted, but got no answer.
“Come on, goddamn you, Strelchuk!” Jinx Pontormo cried, so nervous his old Italian voice squeaked like a boy’s. “I have enough of your jackass games!”
“Bruno, we’re going!” Mike called, but they were already on the move as he said it, Pontormo leading, fat round shoulders hulled forward in an anxious charge on the void ahead, Strelchuk and Juliano bearing the old mechanic on the cloth between them. With his buddy Collins nailed to the earth and maybe dying, Bruno had cut out to save his own skin — if he got in a hole, he goddamn well deserved it. “Jerk must have gone on,” Strelchuk muttered, covering his vague sense of guilt.
She felt, as in dreams, to be running without gaining ground, willing acts she could not perform. Iron to its metal stand. Plug out. Around the far thrust of the ironing board. Through the wilderness of looming chairs, stirring pamphlets, whipped laundry. Past the pleading eyes stuck on the walls. Over cracked linoleum to the wooden basement stairs. Down half of them, knees feathery. “Ma!” Basement was lit hollowly by unsmoked bulbs. Her Ma was singing and didn’t hear her. “Ma!” The washer churned like someone choking. “Mal”
Her Ma glanced up from the machine, thrust another armload in, and walked over to the stairs. “Cain’t hear nothing with that machine going,” she explained. Her arms were scabbed with suds.
“It’s the mine, Ma!” Elaine said. She didn’t know how to act. She feared what might happen when her Ma knew. “It’s blowed up, Ma! I jist heard it on the radio!”
But all her Ma said was, “Git your coat, child,” and turned back to unplug the washer. “And don’t fergit your boots!” she called back over her shoulder. But later, as they ran along together toward the Deepwater road, Elaine saw it was her Ma who forgot hers.
Like ravens fly the black messages. By radio, by telephone, by word of mouth. Over and through the night streets of the wooden town. Flitting, fluttering, faster than flight. Crisp January night, but none notice. Out hatless into the streets to ask, to answer, to confirm each other’s hearsay. Women shriek and neighbors vulture over them, press them back into shingled houses with solicitous quiverings. Three hundred are dead. They all escaped. God will save the good. All the good men died. Flapping. Flustering. Telephones choke up. Please get off the line! This is an emergency! Below the tangled branches of the gaunt winter elms, coatless they run, confirm each other’s presence. No one remains alone. Lights burn multifoldly, doors gape and slap. Radios fill living rooms and kitchens, leak into charged streets, guide cars. The road to the mine is jammed. A policeman tries to turn them back, but now they approach in a double column and there is no route back. Everything stops. All cars hear the heatless music, the urgent appeals, but nothing yet is known. Down roll windows and again the ravens flit.
After supper, Eleanor Norton had performed her usual exercises but received no messages. Wylie was out on a house call. She curled up on the living room sofa to wait for him, catch up on some back readings in the Phaedrus myth. She heard noises in the street but was so absorbed in her reading that she barely registered them. “He would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.” But the noises persisted. They entered and scratched their alarums on her emptying page, scraped on the nerve ends of her living tomb. She looked about her, put the book down, stepped out on the front porch. The temperature had dropped and the hard chill had a dampness to it. Cars were roaring and rumbling out of driveways. Everyone was out in the street, shouting at one another. Something about a shift. The noise of radios at full volume crackled into the restive street. The mine had exploded! Hundreds were dead or trapped!
Trembling, Eleanor groped behind her for the front door, fearful for one freezing moment it might not even be there, spun herself back into the house, pressed the door shut behind her. Even there, her shoulders to the door, the street havoc reached her, menacing. The radio! She turned it on. Boyish voice, taut and urgent. It was true! She felt weak, adrift, beset with a terrifying thought from some dark and uncleansed corner … betrayal! She had not been told! Oh no! no! she cried over and over, striking blows at her suddenly willful ego, a misunderstanding, must be! She turned on all the lights in the house, then took her journals to the kitchen. One essence! she cried, but was not reassured.
Strelchuk, taking the rear grip, had Collins in front of him, and each time his ducking headlamp grazed the stretcher, he was shaken afresh by the pulled gray face, scratched and sooted, of the old preacher, by the gaunt stretched knuckles of his fists and the white plastic gleam of brutalized thigh. Collins murmured ceaselessly, and stared moronically into the darkness behind Mike’s shoulder. That darkness, hot, rubbery, breathed like a ravening mouth on Mike’s back, and each time Collins’ awed face leaped up in front of him to stare at it, it damn near swallowed Mike up. Although he could almost touch Juliano’s broad young back ahead, and though Pontormo was no more than another four or five feet beyond, still the beams of their headlamps, licking ahead into the tunneled dark, seemed to spring them forward suddenly, leaving Strelchuk stranded, alone with the mutilated Collins, too far behind ever to catch up.
Strelchuk knew he was close to breaking, and he knew, too, that if he broke, they would go on without him. He tried to force his thoughts topside. But each attempt struck on a face that pitched him down in the mine again. Old Joe Castiglione literally spitted. And Tuck Filbert, that good old guy! Jesus! Lem and his Dad would take it rough. They had been trying for months to get Tuck to quit. And Strelchuk’s own buddy Bill Lawson: what had happened out there in the main haulageway? Not minutes before, he had clapped old Bill on the shoulders, and now—
Suddenly Collins said, “Wait, boys!” and Strelchuk started so violently he nearly lost his grip on the stretcher. His hands were awash with sweat.
“What did you say, Preach?” he asked, his voice strangled and raw. Realized he was getting winded, too.
“Smoke, Mike. Dust.”
“Yeah, I know, Preach. But nothing we can do.”
“Mike …” He was trying like hell to say something.
As Strelchuk dragged, Juliano and Pontormo spun on him irritably, their lamps batting fiercely into his eyes. “What the Jesus you waiting for now?” Pontormo demanded.
“If you don’t like it, Pontormo, take a grip,” snapped Juliano.
“It’s Preach,” Mike said weakly.
“So what?” growled Pontormo, and turned to move on.
“What is it, Ely?” Juliano asked. They eased him to the ground to rest their shoulders.
“Intake air,” Collins whispered.
“Hell, he’s right!” said Juliano. “Where’s our damn heads? We ought to be in the intake air course!”
So they located a trapdoor into the north air course, and, sure as hell, the air seemed cleaner, not much, but some — enough any way to lift the sodden weight of nameless fear off Strelchuk’s shoulders. “Thanks, Preach,” he said.
Vince Bonali kept his crew talking to make the long walk out seem shorter. For Duncan’s sake, and Duncan knew it and loved the sonuvabitch for it, Bonali called frequent halts. They sprawled around, drank water from their buckets, and Duncan took the weight off his swollen miner’s knees. They pushed forward, rested, pushed, rested, Bonali quarterbacking. It was going to be a long tough night, but, to keep cool, Duncan drew imaginary poker hands. When he felt threatened, he drew a pair of aces in the hole, with a loner showing, and goosed the ante with a frigid bluff, making old Lou Jones squint his beebee eyes. About a mile on, they crossed paths with Abner Baxter’s section, and that loosened them all up some. They numbered forty now, including Tub Puller, the biggest bastard in the mine, and they figured not much could stand between them and topside that they couldn’t push over.
The mayor of West Condon, pinned in traffic, fumed. All the way from the ball game he had cursed his cops and tried to believe the jam would work itself out. But they were stopped dead. In front of him, a carload of kids raised hell. Had half a mind to haul them out of there and throw them all in the jug. But he recognized one of them as Tommy Cavanaugh, the banker’s son, so he got out and slogged up to them. Ground was frozen, but the heavy traffic had warmed the dirt on the road to mud. He batted the window with a pudgy knuckle, and the kid driving was about to give him the finger when Tommy’s broad ball-playing hand swatted the guy on the back of the head and stretched over the seat to roll down the window. “H’lo, Mayor!” Tommy said.
“Tommy, would you do me a favor and drive my car the rest of the way out? I’m going on ahead to see what’s holding up the circus.”
“Sure, Mr. Whimple!” Tommy pushed out, still wearing his basketball suit and sweatshirt. A girl followed him. Goddamn, that’s all he’d need now. Mayor Pimps for Banker’s Boy. He didn’t tell them not to, though.
The mayor found he wasn’t the only one walking. It was like a damned parade. Some cars were locked up and standing square in the middle of traffic. Both lanes were full, so nothing could leave the mine if it wanted to. The farther he walked, the madder he got. At the end of it, he found Monk Wallace all by himself. “Where’s Romano and Willie?”
“I dunno, Mort,” said the cop. “Probably sitting at the other end of that shit.”
Whimple noticed Justin Miller, the Chronicle editor, shinnied halfway up the goddamn watertower shooting photographs of the jam. Oh man! Mayor Muffs It. Historic Mess Muddles Mayor. “I’ll go get a buncha guys to help.”
The air course was not a straight track; the four men kept running into falls, would have to backtrack, sometimes as much as a hundred or hundred fifty feet, locate another course, and travel down that one as far as they could before they struck another fall. No markings, no light, air laden with a torpid calm that argued with their own urgency — they kept flashing into stupid arguments about which way they were going, got confused, swore at each other. Strelchuk didn’t mind the blood or the thigh stub so much now, but carrying Ely Collins was hard work, and old Pontormo refused to help, said he’d wrenched his shoulder when the thing went off. “We better loosen the tourniquet again,” Juliano gasped, and Mike didn’t argue. They set him down, not so gently as at first. Didn’t matter. He was completely out. Strelchuk felt for Collins’ pulse: still there.
“He ain’t gonna make it.” Juliano sighed, breath husky.
Strelchuk knew what was on Juliano’s mind. It was on his mind, too. But they wrapped the corners of the batticecloth around their wrists again, hefted the old man up between them, and started off. “Come on, Pontormo!” Strelchuk cracked through his teeth. “We’re getting goddamn tired of always waiting around for you!”
* * *
By the washhouse, Mayor Whimple found three men and sent them back to help Wallace. The grounds were swarming with miners, women, kids. In the offices, he commandeered the phone and called the state highway police and the National Guard. Took him nearly a quarter of an hour just to get the operator. When he swore at her, he could hear her break down and cry. He told her he was sorry and to relax, but no matter what to keep this line open at all times. In the Iamphouse, he borrowed lights to guide the traffic. They told him about a hundred guys had come up already, so there were less than two hundred down there now. Pop Hendricks showed him the board full of tags. Most of the ones who had come up were waiting to go back down on rescue crews. One group was going down bareface now. Another hundred from the day shift had shown up. They said that mine rescue teams from five or six towns around were on the way, but they’d never make it through the traffic on time. One ambulance had arrived, beating the pack, bringing a doctor and some nurses. Then a Salvation Army woman in a uniform that reeked of mothballs got his ear and complained that they had a tent set up and food was on the way, but it was stalled somewhere in the jam. Miller’s assistant, Lou Jones, overheard a nurse tell him that the hospital panel bringing bandages and medications had not arrived, and the guy nodded significantly, asked him what he was doing about it. Whimple felt like telling that fat snoop to go to hell, he didn’t like him anyway because Jones always called him Pimple, but instead he replied, “Everything we can.”
They inched. And finally they stopped. Between gospel songs and Andre Kostelanetz, the radio told them there had been 307 men on the night shift and that the cause and extent of the disaster were unknown. Angela Bonali prayed fervently, counting on her fingers. The others in the car respected her private ceremony; they talked only to each other.
Then two woman ran past them, panting like horses. Angie recognized the girl, Elaine Collins from her freshman class at high school. Angie jumped out of the car, called out: “Elaine!” But the girl, whether she heard or not, did not turn around. Then, for the first time, it occurred to Angie that her Daddy might not be dead after all, that he might yet be saved. But she had to hurry. Ahead of her, the two women set the pace, but it was tempered by the longer distance they had had to cover. Angie could still pass them. She had to, to save her Daddy. She broke into a dead run.
While men heaped oxygen tanks, timber, shovels, and canvas alongside the cages, mine supervisor Barney Davis led the first crew down. Night mine manager Dave Osborne, two firebosses, and miners Pete Chigi, Sal Ferrero, Ben Wosznik, and Carlo Juliano. Juliano and Wosznik had brothers on the night shift, Ferrero was Angelo Moroni’s brother-in-law, and Big Pete Chigi was an old standby in emergencies. Pressed soaked rags against their faces. They had to get fresh air into the hit workings.
Mario Juliano said he thought he saw another light flick off a near wall. Strelchuk said that carrying the old preacher was turning him batty, referring of course to the birds. It was a trick the bounce of lights often played, but nobody ever expected an old vet like Ely Collins would ever be bugged by it. Juliano swore he’d seen it. And then, a couple minutes later, they all three saw it: a pair of headlamps bobbing toward them in the dark. Didn’t realize how dusty it was until they saw what was between them and those lights. “Hey!” they cried out. “Hey! Who’s there?” They lowered Collins and ran to meet the two coming. It was Lee Cravens and his triprider Pooch Minicucci. Jesus, was Mike glad to see those guys!
“Where you’uns headed?” Lee asked, soft Southern slide tilting his voice, though he was a West Condoner by birth. Little guy, angular, goodnatured, but not the brightest lad in the county.
“We thought we’d try to reach the old number one portal, or otherwise go south to the fifteenth and take Old Main out,” Strelchuk explained. It began crowding in on him then that these guys were coming from the way they were going.
“Ain’t no good thetaway,” said Lee, whipping his lamp momentarily back over his shoulder, then pausing to spit through his teeth. “We jist come from there. All fulla gas and we seen they was a lotta flame down toward the fifteenth. Doors all busted out and guys dead. Me’n Pooch is lucky even to be here.”
“It was a wough sonuvabitch,” confirmed Pooch.
“Well, we can’t go back neither,” said Mario Juliano. “It’s all caved in back there, and the gas is washing in in buckets.”
“It musta wipped out the whole mine!” whined Pooch.
“Where’s the rest of your outfit?” Juliano asked. “Bonali and the other guys?”
“I dunno,” said Cravens. “They was foolin’ around. I don’t reckon they made it.”
“If you damn bastards have only hurried!” Pontormo cried bitterly, and then he calmed down and said, “Well, it don’ make no difference.”
They led Cravens and Minicucci back to show them Ely Collins, and explained how they had lopped the leg and all. Cravens was pretty upset by it. He examined Collins’ leg carefully, eased the tourniquet, fussed with the bratticecloth. “I know you done what you could,” he said, as though apologizing.
“There wasn’t nothing else to do,” Strelchuk said. “I didn’t want to leave him back there.”
“No, you done good,” Cravens said softly. Seemed like he might be crying a little.
Air blast at the door into the main air course was so stiff, they had to shove and tug each other through it. Like crossing some terrible threshold. Even Tub Puller needed help. But from there on, they knew, it was a coast home. Cokie Duncan even thought his knobbed rheumatic knees felt better. Bonali informed him with mock sarcasm that there never was anything wrong with them, all they had needed all along was exercise.
Old Red Baxter, gravelly voice rumbling acidly out of his deep belly, agitated in the old style, waxing blistery on the lousy mine management, the absentee swindlers in the East who fattened themselves on the flesh of the workers, and that criminal Barney Davis — Baxter said they ought to march out in a body and straight into the offices, grab the first one of them they found, if it was that traitor Davis so much the better, and lynch the devil. Jowls atrernble, long red hair curling under the back of his helmet, small eyes lit with wrath. Antiquated fans, no dust down, not one piece of equipment that might not set the mine off, worse lighting and stupider timbering than they had thirty years ago.
Excited the young boys, and one of them even came on a piece of rope, threw it over his shoulder, but Duncan knew Baxter’s wind was nothing but gobpile oratory that blew feeble in the cleaner air topside. Anyway, Duncan hated the hot-eyed bastard since the day a quarter of a century ago, during the IWW riots, when Baxter punched his ribs with a rifle barrel and tried to make him kiss the ass of an old mule. In later years, Baxter tended to muddle his old political vocabulary with the saints-and-demons gloss of the local holy rollers, but the message was still fermented in the same tortured bowels. Duncan was glad when Bonali, cool for once, brought them down off that angry mountain by changing the topic to how they should celebrate getting out.
As Barney Davis and his rescue crew pushed deeper, they ran into worse damage and bad air. Where they could, they closed the blown-open airlock doors, adjusted the regulators. But they were bareface and it was getting too much for them. Ben Wosznik was getting sick. So they brought out the first two bodies they found. One was Lawson, the other looked like Moroni; check his battery number when they got him topside, if it was still readable. Both were burnt black and had suffered from impact.
The five men sat there around Ely Collins feeling pretty rotten. “Well, boys, I guess that’s about it,” Mike said. He felt very weak and tired. He thought about just stretching out there and dropping off, forget the whole fucking mess. Several times already he had thought it might only be a nightmare, and now the idea crept into him again. The sleepier he got, the more convinced he became that he was in the process of waking up.
Collins came to long enough to ask them if they had burlap up. “Yeah,” said Lee Cravens, standing, “we gotta string us up a brattice, boys. Keep the bad air from gittin’ to us an hour or two anyways, and maybe somebody’ll git through by then.”
The project enlivened them. They hunted around, found burlap, nailed it up on the timbers. They began taking turns burning their headlamps. They guessed they had between forty and fifty more battery hours among them, using one at a time, and that was ten times what they supposed they’d need. They sat around Collins as though sheltering him, or maybe it was they who were seeking shelter. He was awake more of the time now and was feeling the pain more. Strelchuk gave him all the aspirin he had, and the other boys chipped theirs in, too. Collins recognized Cravens now, and he asked Lee to help him sing religious songs to keep his mind off the leg.
Angela Bonali arrived alone, breathless, surprised to find so many she knew. She had never caught up with Elaine Collins and her mother. The closer she had got, the faster they had seemed to run. Now her chest hurt, and a troubling lonesome fear gnawed at her. People asked her about her Dad. She didn’t know. They didn’t know. She walked among the intent people, under strings of yellow lights. Her brother Charlie was there, acting bored and chewing a toothpick, but worry told on him because he couldn’t keep still. Snapped his fingers like always, but there was no rhythm in it.
Then her Daddy’s friend Mr. Ferrero came out of the mine, his black face crying, and Angie started to cry, and he came and told them that Uncle Ange was dead, that they had just brought his body up. Angela had been named for her Daddy’s other friend, Angelo Moroni, and she had always called him Uncle Ange, though he wasn’t an uncle. They always kidded her he looked more like her father than her own Daddy did, and until recently she had supposed his paternity reasonable and had half believed it. Uncle Ange’s sister was Mr. Ferrero’s wife.
Charlie came up and asked about their Dad, “the old man,” he called him, and Angie saw that Charlie had started to cry too. Mr. Ferrero didn’t know, but he said he believed he must be okay. Angie believed so, too. Uncle Ange had died, so she could keep her real Daddy. It made sense. There was food and coffee arriving at the Salvation Army canteen now, and they all went there together to have a doughnut.
They keep coming. Families, miners, officials, newsmen, police, civil defense, state cops, priests, Legion, Red Cross, television, psychiatric service. Fully equipped rescue teams now enter the mine methodically. Trucks arrive with oxygen tanks, stretchers, and tents. A bank president moves from group to group, bringing hope. At the city hospital, beds are cleared and nurses alerted. The West Condon radio station asks for and receives permission to stay on the air twenty-four hours a day. The high school gymnasium, still, is brightly floodlit. The electric scoreboard reads: WEST CONDON 14, VISITORS 11. Its clock is stopped. In a few hours, it will host a new activity: already the gym has been designated Temporary Morgue. The janitor, alone, spreads a tarpaulin on the floor.
He heard them coming, and then they went away. Eddie Wilson stared down the dusty beam at his dead buddy Tommy. It was awful. God’s fist had closed on the mine-hive and shook it. God hated him. God loved Eddie’s bird dog, and Eddie always kicked it. Sometimes, right in the nuts. The more God hated, the more Eddie grieved, the more he loved. Won’t kick it again, won’t! A foot materialized between his eyes and dead Tommy’s stare. Hadn’t heard it coming. Almost scared him. It turned toward Tommy, then back to Eddie. Approached.
“Hey, boys, come help! It’s Eddie Wilson! He’s still blinkin’!”
— I once was lost, but now I am found,
Was blind, but now I see!
They slumped in a group and listened. Sometimes they dozed. Lee Cravens’ voice, gentle and musical as a girl’s, flattening the vowels with the insertion of nasal a’s, glissandoed over them like a fluttery shield against the tons of black earth above their heads. Underneath, in short punched squawks of raw sound, Ely Collins followed painfully the principal beat. Pontormo muttered something once about saving breath, but Cravens asked for whom was breath if not for God? and Ely said, “Amen.”
Mike Strelchuk, who never attended church but always supposed he believed that something or somebody was out there, reacted ambivalently to the singing. It distracted him and gave him hope: they were connected by it somehow to the outside; on the other hand, there was something eerie about the way the sound floated off. They were pretty depressing songs, too, for the most part. He wished to suggest something more cheerful, but it was mainly for Collins’ benefit.
“Lee!” Collins whispered, when Cravens paused. “Agin!”
‘Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear,
And Grace my fear relieved—
What about it? Mike asked himself. If I die, what’s going to happen to me? He had no clear idea. He had always joked a lot about being hellbound, but he had never really doubted that God would take care of him when his time came. But what did he mean, “take care”? And what was grace? Did he have it? Who got it and how? Was it fair some didn’t? He wished to hell something would happen to take his mind off it.
— How precious did that Grace appear,
The hour I first believed!
And then Mike felt it coming. The grace. He didn’t know whether to resist it or not.
Up they came. Jesus, it felt good! On top, the air was cold, about sixty degrees colder than the air they had been breathing in the mine, but it tasted sweeter than honey in their welcoming lungs. Wives, brothers, fathers, kids, mothers piled on them, and, as Duncan had foreseen, most of them scattered immediately. Baxter the plotter himself wandered off peaceably, noosed by his wife and five children. Well, by God, they had made it! Duncan, without family, felt so weak suddenly he had to sit down. Just sank to the ground. Somebody gave him a smoke.
Beside him, standing, Bonali had just received his hysterical daughter. The kid was blubbering something about her Uncle Ange. Bonali’s boy swaggered up, apparently regretting his old man’s escape, and, around the cool stab of a toothpick that pricked out of his mouthful of flashy white teeth, dropped the tidings that Angelo Moroni had been killed. Sal Ferrero, smeared with soot, came up and confirmed it, half in tears, he and Bonali embracing like women. Bonali told his daughter to hurry in and inform her Mom that he was okay, and that she should go stay with Angelo’s wife tonight. “Mom’ll be at the church,” Bonali said. He gave the girl his handkerchief and she ran off, emptying her excited tears into it, made awkward by the big word she bore. The boy had already disappeared without another nod between him and his old man.
Bonali said to come on. Duncan stubbed out the butt, stood cautiously, unlocking his sore knees, and followed his faceboss to the Salvation Army canteen. They located Lucci and Brevnik there, munching apples. Bonali showed he was glad to see them, but gave them hell for losing their heads and bolting the section. They looked pretty sheepish but tried to cover by saying they were going back down soon on rescue crews. Bonali asked them where Cravens and Minicucci were, but they didn’t know, they had come out alone.
Outside the canteen, Bonali discovered Cravens’ wife, Wanda. First time Duncan had met her, frail and weary type with nothing between the bones. She said there was still no word.
Seven men more are retrieved, but this time four live yet: Martini, Wilson, Sicano, Cooley. Wives gather, cluck and weep. Two white ambulances receive them horizontally, under face cages that pump oxygen purely. It is all, really, that Sicano and Cooley, uninjured, require. Martini’s sleeve is empty below the elbow. Wilson’s spine is wrecked. He revives briefly. Does he recognize his wife’s quivering smile? It is hard to tell. He cannot move and can barely speak. “Dog,” he says. And then: “Ely.” With that, he loses consciousness once more. The dead, meanwhile, Catter, Wosznik, and Harlowe, join Lawson and Moroni inside a hastily thrown-up tent — already dubbed “the basket”—where they are officially identified and tagged by a company representative, union man, and the company doctor.
The ambulance doors snap shut, the drivers leap behind the wheels. Red fists on top wheeling and sirens howling, the two carriers ark down the mine road toward town. Traffic is still in a snarl in spite of an army of angry bellowing cops, but the appearance of the ambulances breathes an urgency that works miracles. Now people ditch their cars without even being asked: peeling quickly like playing cards into the cuts on each side of the road. But not quickly enough for Eddie Wilson.
“I see Him, boys!” said Ely Collins, though his eyes were closed. “He’s beautiful! And He’s gonna take good care of us!” Lee Cravens asked, “Who, Ely?”
“Why, the white bird! He’s spreadin’ His great wings over us, yes, I kin see it! and He’s smilin’ down!”
The other five looked at each other, but nobody laughed. Strelchuk saw Lee Cravens looking up, and he looked up too. The slabs of black rock still hovered there, but they seemed not so heavy somehow.
Collins’ breath started coming in short gasps. “Pray with me boys!” he pleaded.
Juliano glanced up at Pontormo. “You think it’s okay?” he asked.
“God’s a good God,” Cravens said. “It’s what Ely always said. He’s got room in His heart for everybody.”
“God, be with Clara tonight, and Wanda, and all our wives and loved ones,” the preacher said.
“He ought to take it easy,” Pontormo urged, but more gently than usual.
“Give them courage and strength and …” Collins’ voice faded. Mike and Lee edged toward the old man, Mike reaching for his wrist to check his pulse, but just then Collins’ eyes opened and fixed on Mike. The old man smiled feebly, closed his eyes once more. “And, God, whatever happens, take good care of Mike. He done more than any man need t’ve done for anybody.” Strelchuk felt a wash of pride and embarrassment pass through him. “He’s a good …”
“Now, you just better rest a little,” Strelchuk said awkwardly. Collins began to sing. “So I walk with him … and I talk …” Lee Cravens, eyes damp, picked it up:
“… And I talk with him,
And I tell him I am His own;
And the joys we share—”
“Boys!” gasped Collins. His breath was coming hard and his face was screwed up with pain. “Y’ got any more water?” Strelchuk gave him what he had, but giving up the last of it made him worry. He held it to Collins’ lips himself, careful not to waste any of it, since the old man’s hands were shaking badly. Collins licked his lips, then asked, “Where’s Giovanni?”
“Who?” asked Cravens.
“He means Bruno,” Strelchuk said. “I forgot all about him.”
“He’s running around down here somewhere,” Mario Juliano explained to Cravens and Minicucci. “He was with us at first, but he busted off while we was cutting Collins free.”
“Is that so?” said Cravens. “We never seen him.”
“Didn’t come ou’ way,” Pooch confirmed.
“Could’ve took a different course,” suggested Strelchuk.
“God, be with Giovanni …” Collins whispered.
“He’s a funny guy, that Bruno,” Juliano said.
Ten more bodies are recovered, and hope wanes for the remainder. Nearly two hundred night shift miners have surfaced, turning in their tags, or gone back below to seek survivors, leaving about a hundred still in the mine. Ministers and priests keep vigil. First National Bank president Ted Cavanaugh continues his restless rounds, huddling here with a team of sweating, sooted miners, there listening intently to the wranglings of state mine inspectors and UMW officials; now turning a heartening phrase or two for Greater Deepwater Coal Company people, then offering hope and consolation to waiting or grieving mining families. The surfeit of volunteer rescuers gather in the Salvation Army canteen, await their turn, speak in whispers. Many of the merely curious have, since there’s really nothing much to see, gone home. Rescuers, coming up, report greater and greater violence the farther south they push.
Dr. Wylie Norton, the veterinarian, arrived home from his house call to find his wife Eleanor in the brightly lit and silent house, poring through her logbooks. “Eleanor!” he said with alarm. “What is it? You’re pale!” He set his bag down, approached her tentatively.
“Not a trace.” She spoke gravely, evenly. ‘“I have been all the way through, Wylie, and … there is not a word.”
He sat down at the kitchen table across from her, adjusted the glasses on his narrow nose. “You mean about the mine?”
“Yes,” she said. “There’s no denying it, Wylie. I was not told a thing. Not one single word suggests it.”
“Well,” he said. His voice was hushed, his eyes, avoiding hers, fixed on the journals. He rubbed his hands, pressed together the fleshy tips of his supple tolerant thumbs. “Well.”
“Why do you suppose Domiron did not … did not enlighten me?” Her voice, against her will, slipped a pitch higher. “Do you think he’s … he’s leaving me? Wylie! What have I done? Have I—?”
“Oh, well, now,” cautioned Wylie, shifting in his chair.
“Wylie, the mine, this town’s life, its essence, our town, Wylie, it blew up, it all blew up!” Her voice was leaping and breaking and pitching like a wild animal. Lost!
“Yes, dear, but—”
“Men are down there! Hundreds! Dying! Perhaps beneath our very feet!” Tears sprang. She bit down on her lip. “Wylie, we have come here, found a pattern, and in one split second it has all been destroyed and we did not receive so much as a hint of it!”
“Eleanor,” said Wylie calmly, his eyes bending up to meet hers now. “I think maybe it’s a little too soon to jump to conclusions.” His damp blue eyes, holding hers, somehow took the edge off her panic. “I think, well, I don’t know, but there must be, there’s probably some purpose.”
“Do you? Oh, do you, Wylie?” She grasped at this, and found it held her. “Do you think so?” She paused. He smiled faintly. “Wylie, let us hope so! I don’t know what I’d do if … if I … stopped …” She couldn’t pronounce it.
“I feel pretty sure you’ll get a message soon,” her husband said. “You’ll receive a clarification soon enough.” He reached across the table and patted her slender hands.
And, true enough! Wylie was right! They went into the living room together. She sat on the sofa, Wylie in the easy chair. Through all the houses and furnishings they had passed, through all their trials and uprootings, always there seemed to be this situation: she on the sofa, he in an easy chair in front of her and slightly to her left, somewhat shadowed. They did not turn on the television. Loosed by her return from panic, her mind floated free. Images from her long life bubbled up and disappeared. Ten thousand years must elapse, how many had she known? Quietly they sat, Wylie glancing over at her from time to time. Her mind drew lots and passed through ageless epochs. Distantly came the street sounds, an occasional shout, radios, a car racing. And then, suddenly, she started up out of the sofa, grasped her journal, locked herself in the bedroom, and emerged about fifteen minutes later with the message.
Wylie was waiting for her in his armchair. He looked up at her questioningly. She nodded. She was exhausted, and her face felt damp with perspiration. He smiled, pushed the glasses up on his nose, and followed her into the kitchen, where she read the message to him:
“Do you hear? Do you see? Do you think? Then, why do you doubt still? Elan has lost discipline and moves darkly among alien forms. Cling in recollection to the abiding universals! Seek my light without seeking, guileless and true, do not resist! Domiron hails Womwom for his superior insight: all praise to him who shall be called a Saint! Let it be guarded in memories that false portents are sprung from too hasty knowledges. Time is for all events, all passages are brought to light. Cosmic purposes of enormous importance are to be illumined soon. Further direct contact between worldsouls and higher aspected beings may be anticipated to transpire very near future. Elan is to confront with courage and inward serenity the history that is to come and to comprehend with grace the bitter obligement of suffering. Levity has intruded upon your meditations and vanity distorts your actions! Awake! Beneath you, the earth has leapt in protest. Proceed henceforth in resolute accord with the duty of your enlightenment! You will comprehend more intensely soon. Domiron bids you!”
Wylie sat very heavily in his chair. He peered up at his wife over his spectacles. “Eleanor,” he began softly, “don’t you think perhaps …?” But then he stopped. He stared down at his square practical hands. He scratched some clay off one finger. After a moment, he looked up at her and smiled. “That‘s fine,” he said.
Her Ma led them all in prayer. They sang “Beulah Land,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “The Ninety and Nine” …
— Sick and helpless, and ready to die;
Sick and helpless, and ready to die!
The words made them cry. The cinders bit into their knees, and the cold air stung their wet faces. Elaine Collins wept shamelessly and prayed amen to all her Ma said, prayed to save poor Eddie Wilson in the hospital, and to be tonight with Tessie Lawson, who had lost her belovéd Bill, and Mary Harlowe, who’d lost her Hank. But Elaine wasn’t afraid now. Her Ma was here, they had run out here together, and she could tell from the look on her Ma’s face that her Pa was okay, that he was alive and would come back to them….
— Rejoice, for the Lord brings back His own!
Rejoice, for the Lord brings back His own.
The air worsened. They all noticed it. They knew the answer, but had been putting it off. They had to build a better brattice. Strelchuk and Juliano led them. They scouted around and discovered a room inside what looked to be about seventh south that was relatively clean and not hard to brattice off. They lifted Collins in there and set about the task of barricading themselves in. They erected temporary stoppings to hold the gases back as long as possible, collected all the tools and canvas and boards they could find. Collins, the veteran, came to from time to time and instructed them in short choppy gasps how to short-circuit the return vent system, and also reminded them to leave a bucket or something outside with a sign on it. Minicucci volunteered his undershirt and they wrote on it with a ballpoint pen: COME AND GET US! drew an arrow, and signed their names. It cheered them to pass the shirt around, yet there was the disconcerting quality of a tombstone about it. They tacked it up on a timber about a hundred yards away, chalked some large arrows on the roof and walls.
They had few boards, had to make do with coal and slate, but Collins said that was the best thing anyhow. He hauled himself up against a wall, he seemed improved, and pulled out a scrap of paper he had in his pocket. He tried to write something on it with a stub of pencil, but his old freckled hand was shaking terribly.
While Strelchuk was hunting for chunks of loose coal and whatever else he could find, his headlamp flashed over a body. “Jesus!” he squeaked. He was afraid to beam it that way again, but his head twitched back in a kind of reflex, and his lamp had to follow. He could hardly believe what he saw. “Bruno!” he cried. “Bruno, you sonuvabitch! How the hell did you get here?”
Bruno didn’t answer. He was stretched out on a sort of ledge or groove in a recess. His eyes were big as saucers and his white lips were pulled back, showing his clenched teeth. Dried blood on his face. Twitching all over. He reminded Strelchuk of rabbits he had shot and wounded, just before he finished them off.
“Hey, it’s okay, Bruno! It’s me, Strelchuk!”
But nothing; the guy just stared at Strelchuk with those buggy eyes. He was trembling like he might have a fever or something.
Strelchuk ran back and told the others, and they all went to have a look, but they couldn’t budge him either.
“Maybe we ought to drag him in here,” said Pontormo. Jinx enunciated with a peculiar precision, a careful thickening of the consonants that betrayed a shift of language somewhere in his past.
“Aw, let him be,” said Lee Cravens. His soft voice always took the edge off things. “He ain’t doin’ us no harm there, and he sure ain’t no kinder help.”
Together, the five of them built two walls, a couple inches apart, and filled the space between with shovelloads of fine stuff. They pissed to make clay and plastered up the chinks in the inner wall. They worked a long time. And when they were all done and feeling suddenly very beat down, they noticed two things: one, that they were all out of water, and two, that old Ely Collins was dead.
Tiger Miller on a Saturday night. Out at a coalmine, no place to be. Physically exhausted, otherwise restless. He’d planned, knowing he’d need to unwind after the disaster pressure, to make the usual roadhouse circuit tonight, but now he didn’t know. Three days and only about half the bodies recovered. The official toll was now ninety-eight dead or trapped, almost surely dead. Yet hope, the forgivable madness, kept the friends and families out here, doggedly waiting; kept the tired frightened rescue workers digging away.
Black bodies, burnt and gas bloated, had been his dismal fare since Thursday night. Had they moved him? He thought not, yet details were etched deeply. There was one without its head. Normal, except for the missing head and the body’s scorched nakedness — in one brief instant of flame, all the clothes, but for one shoe and a pant leg, had been burnt or blown off. There might have been some shirt fragments pasted to its shoulder, it was hard to tell. Peculiarly, part of the jaw was still intact. Body hair, hairs in the crotch, in the armpits, they were all carbonized, but stood rigid. He supposed they would crumble like cigarette ash if you touched them. Yet, he had discovered that the roots of the hair on one man’s head, one who still had his, were a soft blond. They removed the one remaining shoe from the headless one — the torso had seemed familiar to a woman who said she had dressed her husband’s right foot that afternoon with a corn plaster. The shoeless foot stuck out screaming nude on the end of the black leg, a blistery glowing pink vegetable thing attached to the charred leg stump like a mushroom. There was a corn plaster, too, but the woman didn’t think it was the same kind. Not exactly horrible finally. Ironic form of ultimate definition. Square corn plaster. Round corn plaster.
Miller sat in the Salvation Army canteen, drinking chlorine-scented coffee to keep warm, eating gummy packaged doughnuts and bruised apples to pacify if he could — and he couldn’t — his nervous stomach. Lou Jones was due to relieve him at midnight, and was already overdue. Maybe he wouldn’t show up. Miller couldn’t blame him if he didn’t. Except during the midday deadline hours, he and Jones had maintained a 24-hour watch out here. They weren’t alone. Some hundred and fifty newsmen and photographers on hand, though the number had fallen off considerably as the rescue dragged out. He sometimes joined them in the bar at Wally Fisher’s hotel, or wherever else they chanced to congregate, feeling a vague nostalgia for the old days. After graduating from West Condon High years ago and making the usual university/military cycle, Miller had turned wire service correspondent, and probably would still be one had he not returned to West Condon a few years ago for his mother’s funeral and found the Chronicle up for sale. He’d always wanted his own newspaper, had a lot of untried ideas for one, and here it was, a good buy and everyone anxious to make it easy for him, a working knowledge of the town, even his folks’ old house to live in. Why not? And so here he was, years later, the prince become a frog, living grimly ever after, drowned in debt, sick to death of the disenchanted forest, and knowing no way out.
Miller sipped the hot black coffee. Mere habit. He reached into his trench coat pocket, pulled out a pint flask, emptied what whiskey remained into the coffee, realizing as he did so he was being watched. One of the new widows, Mrs. Lee Cravens — still not technically a widow, actually, since Cravens’ body had not yet been recovered. She sat on a wooden folding chair in one corner of the tent. She smiled at him when he glanced over, but he pretended not to notice, let his gaze drift on past and out the door. Glanced at his watch impatiently, but paid no attention to what it said. Mrs. Cravens was a spindly nondescript young woman, but the tragedy had brought her bloom. Miller’s photographs chronicled the transformation from Thursday’s formless cotton print hung baggily, shabby loafers, and sparse hair limp over pale crabbed face to the present pert act: now, a nightly pressed indigo skirt swathed her rear in hooked silhouette, breasts arrowed up in a starched white blouse, color tipped faintly fingers, lips, and lashes, and her hair coiled instructed under a woolly cap. Ingeniously, to this caparison she had added her husband’s bunchy black and orange high school letter sweater. Three infants had whimpered this morning at the wind’s gnaw, augmenting that aura of mournful innocence that so attracted the foreign newsmen and photographers, but tonight she was without.
Though he had never seen her before this disaster, Miller knew her: she was the disconcerting epilogue to all his high school eroticism here, his fatuous taste then for the dumb poppy that ran to seed with the first tentative wound. In spite of the intoxicating touch of their taut adolescent bodies and the fragrant heat of the sweaty prefatory scramble, the conquest was always a comedown — in the end, they laid for want of imagination. Freeing himself was painful, but seldom difficult: curiously, they had usually led him to the next one. They married for the reason they laid, and when the famous bane of progeny poisoned it for them, there was nothing left — a few empty infantile motions and instincts, absently clung to. They peopled West Condon, these pricked flowers of his, and getting used to them was his first hard work on coming back here. Often they had recognized him, even those like this one he had never had, and something persistent in them had seemed to freshen briefly. It was illusory, of course; not even they knew what it was. He had blundered a few times before he had learned to see past that false rebudding — maybe the will to blunder had been part of what had brought him back here — and each indiscretion had punctured his privacy with the nuisance of mild scandal. He had learned to look elsewhere, out in East Condon generally; they watched him here.
Jones showed up, after all. Jones was his salvation: his dogged attending to the task made the silly game almost pleasurable. A slow copywriter, but a genius out in the field: always in the right place at the right time, and he always knew everything. A real find. But then, of course, Jones had found him. Blond stubble frosted the man’s pale jowls and his small creased eyes were marshy with blood vessels. The blond wiry hairs that fringed his upper face below the hat gave him a moronic look. “You look like an advertisement for the black death, buddy,” Miller told him. “Sure you don’t want to call it a night?”
“And miss all the fun and glory? I’m okay.” He patted a topcoat pocket that bulged with a fifth. “What’s the story?”
“Fifty-six cadavers up and tagged. Two rubberbag cases. Forty to go.”
“That makes ninety-eight, one down. They find somebody?”
“Yeah, they found Willie Hall working on a rescue crew. Turns out he didn’t show up for work Thursday night and nobody noticed.”
Jones grunted. Miller drank off the coffee and whiskey. Cold. Nearly made him gag. He crumpled the cup, took aim at a scrap barrel across the length of the tent, fired. Deadly. The Tiger. He turned to find Mrs. Cravens at his elbow. “You wouldn’t be goin’ inta town, wouldja, Mr. Miller?”
“Well, yes …”
“D’ye mind?”
Miller glanced up at Jones, attempted to suggest a shrug of total indifference, but saw it only added to Jones’ deadpan amusement. “I suppose not.”
Night’s damp had deposited fog and the drive in from the mine was painfully slow, cramped at his shoulders. The fog came at him in waves, curding into a dense bright mass, then suddenly tearing like tissue. The road’s dirt ruts were frozen hard and jagged. Occasional gray hulks in the ditches to the right and left reared as monuments to Thursday night’s crises.
The woman beside him, in a show of weariness, slumped against his shoulder. Of course. It disgusted him, yet in spite of himself, he started picking up messages from below, and there was a stirring there. She was too obvious and there was a cheap-soapiness about her, but he was oddly agitated by the cushiony feel of the thick sweater with its bright WC—“Water Closet,” said Lou Jones — and the yellow glow of her knobby adolescent knees in the light of the dashboard. He tried to put his principles in order and found, in short, he had none. He felt overworked and unrewarded, tired of the game he played, the masks he wore. West Condon, community of Christians and coalminers, and he its chronicler: if they were mad, how much more so was he? So, screw them; when in hell, do as the damned do. Besides, it was almost thirty miles to the nearest roadhouse, and what would he find? Maybe nothing at all, arriving so late; at best some pimpled telephone operator or listless store clerk. As for scandal, Jones would be sure to make something of it no matter what he did now, so what difference did it make? The Chevy plumped out of the ruts onto asphalt. As though jostled, Mrs. Cravens slipped down, tumbling her hands and face into his lap and deciding the issue once and for all, bringing a few curses of his own down upon his head.
Miller reached home about five, staggered into the shower. He was nearly blind with fatigue, eaten up with a vague sense of betrayal, though of whom or what (prudence?) he couldn’t remember, and drunk as a skunk to boot. “Let us all learn,” he said aloud in the shower, raising Montaigne from the dead, “from stupidity.” His next station was the bed, but, fallen there, he found that the room leaned and turned, and remorse troubled his imaginings. He decided he must be hungry, went to the kitchen to check the refrigerator. Not much there. Punched open a can of beer. Hair of the dog. Cockroach skittered out from under the refrigerator. He jumped to stamp on it and spilled the beer, got squashed cockroach all over the sole of his foot. “Do not despair,” he said drunkenly to the roach as he scraped it off on the edge of a cardboard box used as a wastebasket, “for our Lord Jesus has changed the shape of death.” He thought about maybe frying some bacon for a sandwich, but the fryingpan reeked of onions he’d burned in it several nights ago. So he had a peanut butter sandwich. Again. On stale goddamn bread. Took it to bed with him. He sank, forgetting everything, awoke moments later with a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich and an earful of telephone alarm. Nauseous, he crawled across the bed, dragged it off the hook. “The number you have just dialed has been disconnected—”
“You’re home.” It was Lou Jones. Something in the tone said that Jones had been calling for some time.
“West or east, home’s a beast.” Miller hung up, took a bite of sandwich. The phone rang again. He tried to figure out what the bastard’s angle might be. He picked it up: “Jones—”
“They’ve found some maybe live ones.”
“What!” Miller stirred, propped himself on an elbow. “Have they got them up?”
“Not yet, but they know where they are. Found a T-shirt tacked up with six names on it and arrows drawn.”
“What’s the matter they can’t—”
“Big fall in the way. They figure it must have come down after they bratticed themselves off.”
“Do they know who—”
“Well, besides Lee Cravens,” Jones said wryly, hesitating a moment to allow the blade to twist, “there’s Ely Collins, Mario Juliano, Paul Minicucci, Guido Pontormo, and Michael Strelchuk.”
Miller slumped back into the pillows. Oh man. “I’ll be out.”
The veterinarian Dr. Wylie Norton sat in the kitchen in his pajamas, sipping coffee and milk and waiting for Sunday to dawn. Upstairs, his wife Eleanor slept fitfully. Perhaps none in all West Condon had escaped suffering this raw January weekend, but this was little consolation to Wylie, who had hardly slept and saw worse times ahead. Others, after all, would sooner or later adjust, but not Eleanor. Therein lay her greatness, to be sure, yet … Wylie sighed and sipped. He hoped only that, whatever happened, they would not have to move again. They had had to change towns eight times now in the past fifteen years, and the frequency seemed to be accelerating. They had left Carlyle to come here to West Condon just a year ago, and they had only been in Carlyle fourteen months before that. Just long enough for him to get a small practice established, begin paying off debts, then — knock! knock! — the inevitable committee.
He had just dozed off in front of the television when they came to their door in Carlyle one year ago, and for a woozy moment he hadn’t even been able to remember, staring at the men under his porch light, what town he was in. There had been four of them, their pale mordant faces puddled blackly under the dull bulb. He had invited them in, but they had hesitated, frowned at one another. Eleanor had stepped up behind him, and knowing all too well why they were there, had asked, “What is it, Wylie?”
“These gentlemen …”
“What we got to say won’t take no time, Norton,” one of the men had said. A big man, over six feet tall, with a heavy stomach underbelted, wearing a sport coat with wide lapels, green checked shirt buttoned at the collar, and peering baggily down at them: Mr. Wild, young Larry’s father. A man much like this one had once blackened Wylie’s eye in another town, claiming a similar offense.
“In plain talk, we want you two to get out of Carlyle,” another had piped up, a man named Loomis who owned three beagles that he whipped with gun butts, or so Wylie who had had to treat them after had been convinced. Though much shorter, he had stood behind Mr. Wild, and all you could see were his little red wet eyes and thin blond eyebrows over the big man’s padded shoulder.
“I don’t rightly understand, fellows,” Wylie had said, drawling a little like he had learned to do, showing that he was just a quiet peaceful man … and he was. “We’ve always tried to be—”
“Norton,” Mr. Wild had said bluntly, “you know why.”
Wylie had turned to face his wife, becoming, as it were, their intercessor. “Eleanor …” She had stood pale but erect. The others perhaps had seen only the defiance. Wylie had seen the pain, the fortitude draining away, the higher she lifted her chin.
“But who are you gentlemen?” she had asked. “What is your authority?” A mere delaying tactic. They always had a way, ultimately. She had placed one hand on Wylie’s shoulder, and he had stood firm to support her.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Norton,” a third man had said, a man whom Wylie had recognized as the owner of one of the town drugstores, tall fellow with rimless glasses, a “mercurial” type, as Eleanor would say, oval and merchantlike in the face. “We are not a what you call, ah, legal body, Mrs. Norton, as I am sure you can appreciate.” He had chuckled abruptly, continuing soberly: “We are only you might say interested citizens of this — interested citizens and parents of this community. We have, well, we have been requested by our, ah, our good neighbors to speak briefly if you don’t mind for a few moments with you. Mrs. Norton, frankly, we — that is, all of us, have been frankly asking — have repeatedly asked you to terminate your, ah, your activities as regards all the — as regards the youth of Carlyle, and you have nevertheless persisted. Now, in view of—”
“We’re asking you two to get out of town!” Mr. Loomis had snapped.
“Now, now, take it easy, Loomis,” the druggist had scolded. “Dr. and Mrs. Norton are, that is, they are reasonable people. I am sure that we can be too.”
The short man had grunted, glaring schoolboyishly at the druggist. Mr. Wild had peered down on them all and had said, “I think they get the picture.”
The druggist, while apparently engaged in observing a lone unseasonal gnat knocking at the bulb overhead, had then coughed and dropped the phrase “certain, ah, medical procedures, which might be taken,” and Wylie, turning to Eleanor briefly, had seen that her fight was over. “All right, gentlemen,” he had said, looking at each of them in turn, though only Mr. Wild had returned his gaze. “We liked Carlyle. But we’ll go.”
And so they’d disposed of everything again, everything but what they could pack into the small luggage trailer he had wisely picked up at a country auction about five years before, and had driven out of Carlyle. Young Larry Wild, one of Eleanor’s pupils, had dropped by before they left, the only one in town to do so, admitting that he’d had to sneak away from home, his father having promised him a stiff belting if he turned up at the Nortons’. But he didn’t care, he’d said, he’d wanted to tell them how unfair it was and how he’d always believe in her and in Domiron and in all she had taught him, and that he’d practice all the exercises faithfully. He had showed them then, shyly, a word his hand had written the night before. It was SADNESS, but he’d said he didn’t really know for sure if it came from some other aspect of intensity or not. He had admitted that he felt like he had thought the word before writing it. Eleanor had encouraged the boy to continue to try, but to obey his parents whenever possible and to love the Good. She’d counseled him not to worry too much about his message, sometimes the spirits from other aspects of intensity did act through thoughts instead of, or prior to, writing, and Wylie had admitted he’d not even gotten that far. “Let thoughts pass through your mind,” Eleanor had said to the boy, quoting one of her own favorite messages, one Wylie had heard countless times, “like fluffs of dandelion afloat on an errant breeze, like migrating birds, like purposeless foam appearing and disappearing, but let your mind dwell on none of them. The surface must be barren, the page white, the water placid, the room of the mind empty.” Larry had helped with the last part of the loading, had walked them out to the car to say good-bye. He’d said it didn’t matter if people did see him, they would all find out someday anyway, wouldn’t they?
And now: Was it about to happen all over again? Wylie shuddered, walked to the window. Dark still, and a fog had rolled in. He wondered what Eleanor would make of that. In one thing, they were lucky: there were no kids involved this time, not yet. Or virtually none: it was true, she did have one pupil at the high school, a senior named Colin Meredith, who was now designated a Chosen One and receiving other-aspected instruction, but it was a relaxed and natural sort of relationship, with none of the strain of seeking converts or educating young men from scratch, and luckily he was an orphan. And there was still hope that Domiron would define the disaster as insignificant; after all, he’d said nothing about it before it happened. And certainly she was getting tired of moving around, too, would think twice before carrying things too far again.
On the other hand, the disaster at the mine was anything but a promising sign. Eleanor had not been forewarned, and had been badly shocked. She had hardly slept or eaten since Thursday night, and vivid cacaphonic messages now vibrated from her fingertips almost hourly — as though the disaster might have set off shock waves that were buffeting the entire universe, rebounding through Eleanor’s fingers. And just here it had to happen, where things had been working out so well.
They’d liked West Condon. They’d found inexpensive housing and easy credit, enough clients to keep Wylie busy, and Eleanor had been able to obtain substitute teaching assignments at the high school. In fact, she was teaching practically full time, and they had told her only her lack of a State teaching certificate prevented her from being named permanently to the staff — toward which end she was now taking correspondence courses. Domiron, for his part, had urged caution and continued striving for inner self-knowing, and both of them had been greatly relieved. Eleanor’s long life as a communicant with the higher forces had taken its toll on her, Wylie felt. “It’s the price of the intensity of a Scorpion’s passage,” she always said — and it gave them both great consolation that her voices were at last permitting her this much-needed rest. As Domiron counseled:
Fly with birds as a bird, swim in the sea as a fish, behave in the world as the world would have you, for all is illusion but illusion itself, and only the wise can exist in it with tranquillity.
And then the mine blew up.
It made Wylie recall something Eleanor had said on their way here to West Condon a year ago. As usual, they had stayed in inexpensive motels on the edges of towns, while seeking a settling place. Wylie would check the telephone directories to count the number of veterinarians in the area, would make inquiries about the extent of farming, animal husbandry, and so on. He had, in the past, worked as a lab assistant in hospitals, as a salesman and store clerk, and even, during one depressing period, as a janitor in the high school where Eleanor was substitute teaching. Usually though, he had been able to find work in his chosen field, especially in small and otherwise unattractive Midwestern towns.
They had made several stops before coming on West Condon. In Springer, for example, there had seemed to be too few vets for the amount of farming that was around, but they hadn’t liked the community somehow. A taste of degeneracy, a crabbed and wounded look about the citizens. More stops and then in Wickham they’d stayed a week, liked it, had even begun the house search, but Eleanor had chanced to see on the street, of all persons, the tall Carlyle druggist. They had left hurriedly (eventually to arrive and remain here), Eleanor biting her lip and breathing heavily. Maybe the druggist had had relatives in Wickham. Or maybe, as Eleanor had insisted, there had been more to it. But it had in any event been enough to awaken a worry in Eleanor that had apparently been lurking just under the surface. “Wylie,” she’d asked, as the car licked and snapped at the blacktop beneath them, “how many men came to see us that night in Carlyle?”
“Four, I think. Or three. No, four.”
“The druggist and—”
“The Wild boy’s father, Mr. Loomis, and—”
“And who, Wylie?”
“Funny. I can’t remember.”
“Nor can I, Wylie, but the fourth was there, there all the time!”
“Yes, but—”
“Wylie, I don’t think now that was the real person of the Carlyle druggist who appeared to me on the street in Wickham.” She’d paused, placed her hand on his arm, sending goosebumps to bis flesh. “It was a sign, Wylie … we’re being sent!”
The wind’s edged lick badgers the shifting thickening crowd, provokes from it a chronic babble of muted Sunday morning curses. Marcella, at the mine, blows her nose. Her reflections are pierced from beneath by omens of sickness: tomorrow, maybe even today. But these omens do not undermine her thoughts so much as provide a setting for them. It is as though once-disparate things are fusing, coalescing into a new whole, a whole that requires her sickness no less than the explosion that set the parts in motion. A puzzle oddly revolving into its own solution. The huddled round-shouldered figures, their bleak white faces of disaster, the pale fog of morning crawling sluggishly like a wet beast out of the yellow-bulbed night, the measured raddling of helmeted men, the toothed patterns chewed in the sky by the once-whitewashed buildings and the rust-red machinery — the both laminated with ages of soot, the raw shreds of gray slate masking the earth: all of it — each pain, each cry, each gesture — is somehow conjoined to describe a dream she has already dreamt. She knows first the curse, then hears the passing miner utter it; recognizes the platinum disc of the emerging sun behind the water-tower, then observes it there. If one among the present looks over at her, it is clearly a look of recognition — not of her, but of what is happening. The Salvation Army lady who has countless times already offered her a blanket now passes dutifully with another, and this time Marcella accepts it — but no, not from the cold. And, as she reaches for it, she feels her hand write an arc through the air, like a word without letters, yet for that all the more real — feels suddenly wrenched apart from herself, staring down, observing that act, that arc, that bold single sign in an otherwise stark and motionless tableau … she trembles slightly. The Salvation Army lady hesitates, observes her silently with heavylidded eyes. Although the woman has before been extravagant in her pity, the three gray dawns have humbled her. “Poor child,” is all she says, and then she turns away. The olivedrab blanket is thin and coarse, chafes Marcella’s skin, but it dulls some the wind’s hunger. She drapes it over her head and shoulders like a shawl, and waits.
Miller, the rash and intemperate, woke from acid dreams crying “Mercy!” and wallowing in peanut butter and bread crumbs, half strangled by the phone cord. He lay there, trying to recall who and where he was — then Jones’ phone call came to mind and he leapt from the bed, phone, crumbs, and all. Dressing, he telephoned his front-office chief Annie Pompa — their Girl Fried Egg, as Jones called her when he wasn’t calling her worse — and asked her to go down and open up the office, put the backshop force on alert.
In the front seat of the Chevy he found Wanda Cravens’ woolly cap, authenticating his folly. He pushed it into one of his trenchcoat pockets. Word was out and the mine road was alive with traffic. Fog gone, Miller pushed the Chevy up to ninety and stayed in the left lane. Twice, other cars lurched out in front of him to pass creepers, and, braking, he nearly spun to the ditch. He swore, lay on the horn, and gunned past them when they ducked sheepishly back in line. He was past caring.
He swung into the yard, parked in the restricted area, leaped out, speedgraphic in hand, locked the car. Checked his pockets, on the run, for film, notebooks, pencils, felt the woolly cap there. Grisly vision of Wanda Cravens throwing herself, sobbing, into his arms in front of all the popping shutters, haggard husband, fresh from the pits, staring incredulously on. Miller supposed Jones would be up at the Salvation Army tent, but didn’t want to face the man cold. Maybe it was all over. He paused to get a photo or two as he crossed the yard — gray sooty day: perfect tone — and exchanged words with those who waved or called out to him. He learned: Not there yet, but hope was gone. They had driven pipes through to the different rooms behind the fall, and had got no response. Miller calmed, photographed. Children keeping vigil. The dark stoic mother of a boy named Rosselli whose first night it had been to work in the mine. Tuck Filbert’s old father, refusing to give up hope, fighting to get on every rescue crew. He saw Wanda Cravens. She seemed undone by the news: in spite of the renewed attention given her, she had faded back into the baggy cotton print and run-down loafers. He stayed clear.
Circling wide to avoid her, Miller came across a prayer meeting. A clique of West Condon Nazarenes, powered by a squat ebullient man with thick red-maned head, and including several women widowed overnight, had seized the temporary Red Cross shelter pitched near the portal for the miners’ families, and from it now issued hymned plaints, remorseful cries, and bristling execrations upon the community’s sinful damned. Miller floated experimentally at their outer edge, but sensed his presence bedeviling them; even those who knew him seemed to resent his curiosity, or, at best, stared back at him apathetically. The jowly man leading them, he learned, was Abner Baxter, a faceboss who had led his section out Thursday night standing up. Though men prayed among them, most of his group were women, pale lumpy sorts with sacklike bodies draped blackly, kneeling in cinders and ashes. Baxter lacked eloquence and subtlety, but he had a compact bullying style of his own and a volcanic delivery. “Serve the Lord with fear!” he cried. “With trembling kiss his feet!” Their prayers defined the disaster as a judgment upon West Condon and a trial for God’s faithful. What massed them up and charged them, apparently, was the expectation that Ely Collins — their man of tested faith — would emerge with messages, and it was with no small awe that they now awaited him. Miller knew of Collins. A seasoned mechanic within the mine, he was a locally celebrated evangelist without. He’d run the guy’s photo a few times. Mrs. Collins was not among the group, he learned, but her daughter was: a plain gangly girl — pubescent gangliness — named Elaine. She wouldn’t speak to him. Then Baxter suddenly interrupted the meeting, roared at Miller to kneel with them or be damned. Miller rose and, holding Baxter’s raging gaze, slowly lifted the speedgraphic before his face and popped a photo, exiting casually before Baxter could get his wind back.
He saw Jones bulge out of the Salvation Army canteen up to his left, hulking face expressionless except for the eyes, falling away with their familiar as-though-pained squint. Miller waved; Jones nodded. Miller stopped to shake a miner’s hand, wish him luck, offer a smoke — and caught sight of something off to his right. Stared a moment, strangely moved, then thought to get a photo.
Up at the canteen, Jones stood waiting, looking like a great stone Buddha that had just stood up for the first time in eighteen thousand years and felt like hell for doing so. “What do you think?” Jones asked. “Gonna put the old bitch to work tonight?” Jones had a professional greed for special editions.
“Maybe. If something happens.” Miller, feeling guilt for having turned out so late, meant that remark to imply coming any sooner would have been a waste of time. “I’ve alerted Carl and the boys, put Annie to the task of digging up what bios she can on the six.”
Jones grunted, sipped coffee, thin brows arching up away from the brown heat. “We’ll know soon. Chigi’s team is down there. Is twenty-five bucks okay?”
“For what?” Miller’s mind was on doughnuts and coffee and the girl he’d seen. He reached in his trenchcoat pocket for a pack of smokes, absently pulled the woolly cap out instead. Looked at it, blanched, stuffed it back.
Jones, fighting back a grin, drank down his coffee, spat out the last mouthful, crushed the paper cup in his squabby hand and pitched it at a scrap barrel, missing it by a yard. “I offered it to Chigi for a firsthand story, if there’s one worth telling.”
“Sure, cheap at twice the price.” Miller lit a cigarette, dropped the match to his feet, stood on it. “Who’s the girl with the shawl?”
“The one you been taking pictures off?” Jones shook his head and sighed, grinned. “Hang tight.” He padded a few yards away, hands rammed into his broad misshapen topcoat, conferred briefly with a miner, padded back. “The name is Bruno. She had a brother on this shift. One of the rubber bag cases the FBI had to identify. But, apparently, she doesn’t buy it.”
“Bruno,” Miller repeated mechanically. He stared off toward where the girl stood, darkly turned into herself, yet somehow radiant, some distance away from anyone else, a young girl, probably not much more than nineteen or twenty, under an olive-colored shawl — well, not a shawl, of course: a blanket.
The watertower—“DEEP” is what she reads of the familiar eponym — beats its silvery breast against the lightening sky like a proud but headless colossus. The cast of the sky is constant, immaculate, innocent of any raincloud blemishes: sober homochrome white, except for the singular phosphorescent eye of the sun, a cutout cemented to this side of the sky. It is a soft sky, a papyrus sky, on which, at this moment, a single black bird, a crow, inscribes silent indecipherable messages, erasing them as he goes, flapping his ragged wings in an occasional fury of punctuation. Thin efforts of gray soot struggle upwards from dying slag heaps — the earth striving to keep back light — but they disappear into the vastness of the arching overwhite. The infinite absorbing the finite, and, mercifully, without ridicule. Below: all is gray. The color of: transition. Marcella watches the woman running toward her, clutching her broad skirts with one hand, waving wildly the other, watches the multitude of expanding faces pivot toward her as though a button has been pressed, watches the sudden crushing mass against the portal, watches them fall back as the door swings open, watches the woman gasp for breath — yes! how she wishes to tell! “It’s your brother!” the woman cries when she is able. “Yes, I know,” says Marcella.
Big Pete Chigi emerged, blinking, trailing a smoky dust, ahead of the stretcher and let fall the bolt: “Bruno. We were too late for the others.”
Bodies mashed at the portal. No one seemed to understand. “Who is it?” they cried. “How many?”
Miller, in the press, held the speedgraphic high over his head, sighted by guess, caught the prostrate figure of Giovanni Bruno being carried out, Father Baglione, the Catholic priest, coal-smudged and helmeted, following. Mine supervisor Barney Davis. The company doctor.
“Collins?” they cried.
“Juliano?”
“Dead. Dead. Dead,” said the exiting miners.
Miller saw a white face amid the blackened: Jones. Good man! Saw Chigi turn aside, glance over at Miller, then slip away with Jones. Bruno! Not even on the list!
Bruno! Miller changed film over his head, pivoted just in time to see the girl, her head still covered, standing isolated and as though unaware, about thirty feet away. Miller elbowed free of the mob, sighted hastily, but just as he fired, a Salvation Army woman thrust her broad ass in the way. He cursed aloud, sidestepped toward the waiting ambulance. They were easing Bruno into it. The girl started forward and he raised his hand.
“Pardon me, miss!” he said, and punched the shutter, just as the blanket settled to her narrow shoulders. He reloaded and said, “My name is—”
“I already know it, Mr. Miller.”
“Can you—?”
“I’ll be at the hospital with my brother.” She spoke briefly with the ambulance driver, and he jumped out to clear a way for her. Inside, in the back, Giovanni Bruno stretched unconscious. Father Baglione and a couple miners had crowded in. The miners clambered out, let the girl replace them. And they were gone. Miller had forgot to get a second photo.
Someone jostled him hard, nearly knocked the camera from his hand, and a voice said, “I seen Tuck, Paw!” Miller lifted the speedgraphic steadily, focused, recorded the tall silent grief of the two men, Lem Filbert and his Dad, both in miner’s clothes though both had left the mines, both with damp black faces.
Miller got Barney Davis aside, asked about Bruno.
“I don’t know, Miller. We found him knocked out, up on a ledge, away from the others. Like they didn’t know he was there or something.”
“What shape is he in?”
“Terrible. Should be dead of afterdamp like the others.” Davis eased off his helmet. His burry white hair was black from just above the ears down. Miller offered him a cigarette, lit it for him. Davis had a way of gazing off like a movie hero contemplating the sunset as the curtain falls.
“What do you figure?”
“Luck.”
“What about the others?”
“They’d been dead awhile.” Davis gazed off.
“You going to reopen, Barney?”
“Can’t say. Probably. Haven’t thought about that yet.” He flicked his smoke’s ash with one finger nervously. “Oh, by the way, you seen any of the Collins people out here?”
“His daughter.” Miller glanced around, spied the Nazarene group at prayer, but Elaine was not among them. “Looks like she’s gone.”
Davis stuffed his fingers into his shirt pocket, came out with a small scrap of paper. “I picked something up down there. Maybe you’d like to deliver it.” He handed it to Miller. “Found it by Ely Collins’ hand. One of Collins’ legs was gone, apparently something had fell on it and broke it off. Looked like he’d been dead for some time.”
Miller read the scrap, pocketed it, smiled. “Thanks, Barney, that’s great.” Took a couple informal shots of Davis.
“Fair shake on the coverage, Miller.”
“Sure, Barney. As always.” Davis meant the company was not to be blamed for the disaster and he was not to be blamed for the delay in reaching the trapped men, but Miller played no sides, took favors like Collins’ note in stride and let the chips drop. “Come by the office tomorrow or Tuesday, we’ll have a talk.”
Davis nodded and gazed off.
On the way back to the Chevy, Miller was stopped by the correspondent from UP, just arriving. “Hey, there, Scoop!” he shouted, virtually in Miller’s ear. “Jesus! What’s up, buddy? I just heard—” His eyes were red-rimmed, still baggy with sleep. Cigarette trembled in his fingers. Miller knew just how he felt.
“Brought one up alive, just took him to the hospital.”
“Yeah, shit, I know that, Chief. But who was it?”
“Guy named … guy named Lou Jones.”
“Lou Jones? Where’ve I heard that—?”
“Out here probably. You maybe met his wife, fat old—”
“Oh yeah! I know the one! Big fat one. They had some kids or something, didn’t they?”
“Eight, I think. No, nine. I’m not sure. Better say nine.”
“Yeah! Nine! Great! Jesus, these fucking mining families, eh? What’s their address?”
“I don’t know, but they’re at the hospital. Press conference first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Not till tomorrow.”
“Right. Jones is in sick shape.”
“I’ll bet. I couldn’t live through a conference now anyway.” He laughed and, because he was expected to, Miller joined him. Miller turned to go, but the UP rep grabbed his arm. “Hey, wait, Chief! I forgot! Was he conscious?”
“Who — Jones? Hell, no!”
“Jesus, thanks, scooper! You don’t know how I appreciate it!” He pounded Miller cheerily on the back, turned to run back to his car. Miller had seen the portable phone hookup in it.
“Hey! Hold on!” Miller called. The slap on the back had pissed him off. The UP guy braked, swung around, staggering like a wounded pigeon. “I forgot to mention that Jones was apparently reading his prayerbook when he fell unconscious. They found it beside him when—”
“Oh yeah? Hey, shit! That’s a helluva great angle! Thanks, Chief! Come on over to the town flophouse tonight, I’ll buy a round!” And he ran off at full gallop toward his car.
Gray trees wail flying by, cars blink. Inside the ambulance, all is white, preamble to the race’s object. Only her brother is black, his long gentle fingers black, his fragile eyelids black, his distant breath comes: blackly. His face is spattered with dried blood. Whose—? Then West Condon bursts upon them with a thump and a scream. Out the back window, she sees a small scrap of white paper lifted in the wake of the ambulance — suspended, it flies away from them and turns a corner. Does it fly still? It is impossible to know.
Big Pete was standing like a mountain, still in greasy work denims, still reeking of underground sweat, just inside the door of the Chronicle, when Miller arrived. Miller greeted him warmly, shook his thick hand. Jones bumped through the swinging door from the back shop, lit with one of his uncommon smiles. Changed his whole goddamn face. “Four columns,” he announced.
“Terrific!” Miller said. He asked fat Annie, who bulked by her frontoffice desk like an obedient recruit, to make out a check for twenty-five dollars to Chigi, and, waiting for it, made an impatient moment’s small talk with the man. Enormous guy with black curly hair and big Mediterranean eyes, his face minstrel-black with coal soot, and when he blinked, as he just did, his eyelids looked starkly white. The digging out of mashed and rotting bodies made most men sick, but Chigi was a stoic down there and much admired for it.
As soon as he had left, Miller hurried to the back, found Jones there, standing over the linotypist’s shoulder. Miller scanned the opening lines of the story in a hot galley that sat on a stone about four feet away, counted the galleys already set, gave Carl and John makeup instructions. Carl’s fat back protested with shouldered silence. “No paper next Saturday,” Miller said. “Long weekend.” Carl, enlivened, commenced a round of whore stories, and his hands woke.
Miller, en route to the newsroom, pulled a Coke from the machine, dumped his exposed film in the darkroom. Driving himself now. Front page forming up. No time to ready the photos. Just as well: need them during the collapse next couple days. Put Annie on getting sandwiches and beer sent over from Mick’s, setting up distribution of the Extra. She had already obtained notes on Bruno and his family, following Jones’ arrival with the news, and her information on the other six was longwinded but useful. Good goddamn girl, he had to admit it.
Jones wheezed in and together they worked out a front-page layout. Jones dug up a pile of old cuts, including a couple Miller had shot down in No. 9 about two months ago that they hadn’t used yet, and wrote up a rough summary of Big Pete’s version of the rescue for Miller to polish. Decided to banner it with MIRACLE IN WEST CONDON just to wow the homefolks. Jones seemed to be carrying his belly a foot lower than usual, so Miller told him he could do the rest alone; a moment later, the jobroom sofa received Jones’ hulk with a sigh that was no doubt meant to strike envy into the benefactor’s heart — Jones never took a favor with grace.
Miller called the hospital, learned from Dr. Lewis that Bruno, in a coma, was still hanging on, but that complications, as expected, had set in. In short: “critical.” Read Annie’s notes. Parents born in Italy, old man a retired coalminer. Five children, two sons killed in the mines and a daughter dead of diphtheria, Giovanni and Marcella remaining. Marcella. He printed the letters on his desk blotter, lit a cigarette, and stared down at them. Marcella Bruno. Agreeable images roamed randomly through his forebrain. Eyelids weighted. He smoked. She knew his name. Turns — Christ! Blinked at his watch: nearly two! Attacked the old Underwood. Cursed, typed, cursed. Stubbed out smokes, lit new ones. Food came. Slowly, the bog of his mind hardened and the way became easier. On the jobroom sofa, Jones snored.
When she calls, Rosalia from next door answers. Marcella hears threats and intermittent gunfire. Rosalia says Mama is in bed and resting peacefully after praying at the church all day. Papa watches the television like usual. “I got plenty company here and don’ worry about nothing.” Sure, she knows all about Papa, she has changed him once already, no trouble. More gunfire. “He don’ even know they’s been a accident, child.”
On his way to the Collins house, Miller kept the car radio on to make sure they announced his special and the pickup points. Heard it three times on the short run. Most of their musical library inapt for the funereal occasion, they apparently appreciated anything out there that would eat up time. He found the Collins place, sturdy old yellow frame, broad porch bellying out, big trees in the yard.
He was met at the door by the girl Elaine. Miller introduced himself, asked if he could speak with her mother. The girl was reluctant, but finally pushed the screen door open for him. Her eyes looked clawed and her hair hung loose. Inside, there was a stale vegetable scent that reminded him of his carrier days, those wrecked Saturday mornings when he had to collect for the week’s newspapers, had to step inside cabbage houses and choke while the wide housecoated women searched absently for their purses and fifteen cents and old men in undershirts scratched their beards and glared. While Elaine went for her mother, Miller roamed the room. Not much choice, for the furniture was buried under stacks of laundry. A sentimental religiosity prevailed: evangelist pamphlets, dimestore plaques, cheap Biblical prints. A gold star tokened a war death, and from the pictures Miller gathered it was an only son.
Elaine returned, said her mother was coming. They stood awkwardly to wait. The girl’s front teeth were crooked; she covered her mouth when she talked. She said almost nothing and could hardly be heard, just stared mournfully into corners. She was frankly homely, strawlike hair, patch of freckles on her nose, sallow unhealthy pallor about her skin — her hands were coarsely pink, hands of a woman of forty. A simple print dress hung on her slight frame limply.
Mrs. Collins, dry-eyed, stepped broad-shouldered into the room, put her hand on her daughter’s frail back, said she didn’t want any publicity.
“My reason for coming, Mrs. Collins, was only to bring you this.” He handed her the note. “It was found in your husband’s hand.”
Mrs. Collins accepted the note, faint tremor in her roughly reddened hand, studied it. “Child,” she said, “go get my glasses.” She shifted a stack of laundry — Miller noticed now it was tagged with people’s names — and sat on the couch, squinting at the note. She was gangly like her daughter, but large-boned, stouter. Same straw hair, even more freckles, but her skull was larger, her neck thicker, her body more massive, her hands tougher. She, too, wore a print dress, but unlike Elaine’s, it was dominated by her form. She had quick nervous eyes, wider set, more determined and aggressive than her daughter’s. And she spoke with the absolute authority of a longtime matriarch. “I cain’t understand it,” she said. “It don’t make sense that Ely should die.”
Elaine returned with the glasses, fragile rimless spectacles with thin gold bridge and earpieces. The woman hooked them on cautiously, unused to the feeble claws, and struggled with her husband‘s dying hand. Collins must have been very weak when he wrote it; the scrawl staggered almost illegibly and fell away at the end.
“‘Abide in Grace,’” the woman read. She looked up at Miller. “If they was any man alive a saint,” she told him firmly, though her eyes had misted and contracted behind the lenses, “it was that man! — He walked amongst the blessèd, Mr. Miller!”
Miller, on his feet still, found himself nodding in agreement. “Mrs. Collins, I wonder if you—”
“Ely Collins did not deserve to die like that, Mr. Miller!”
“No, I believe you. I’m truly sorry.” Miller ventured on, aware he might be trespassing family ground. “But can you tell me what you think he means about having disobeyed?”
“They was a bird in the mine.”
“A bird?”
“A white bird, like a dove. He seen it.” She paused, eyes testing his sincerity in asking. “He knowed he was maybe jist seein’ things, like you ofttimes do down there, but he was afeerd too as how God might be tryin’ to tell him somethin’. He was afeerd God was tellin’ him to git outa the mines and go preach.” Tears rolled down her broad cheeks and her voice quavered, but she held on.
“You mean he was afraid there would be a disaster?”
“No, I don’t think he thought of it like that. He only thought as how he might be sinnin’ agin the Lord, might be committin’ greed and avarice, to go on workin’ for money when the Lord was callin’ him to go do His work.” She swallowed. Her hands shook. “We wanted to git Elaine growed first,” she said, and now the tears were streaming. “He was a good man, Mr. Miller!” she cried in sudden protest. “He done no wrong! He didn’t deserve to git killt like that!” Swallowed sobs shook her. Miller felt her grief, but was helpless. “Ifn he died like that, they must be a reason! The Good Lord would not take Ely away ifn they weren’t no reason! Would he, Mr. Miller? Would he?” Her wide tortured bespectacled face seemed to be accusing him. “Why did Ely die and his partner live? What is God tryin’ to tell me, Mr. Miller?” Tears flowed; she didn’t even see him now. “Why?” she screamed.
Miller stammered something about being sorry. Elaine, weeping, begged, “Ma! please don’t cry! Ma!”
The woman, clutching her husband’s note, slumped from the couch to her knees on the floor. She wept so huskily, so brokenly, that Miller was certain that, though perhaps she prayed often, she wept seldom. “Oh God! help me! help me!” she cried. Her great body quaked with wailing, and her red hands clawed in the braided rug. Elaine wept hysterically, her face buried in her mother’s armpit. Miller took the moment to step over the two women and get to the door. He had already photographed the note, and he’d call later by phone to ask about publishing the damned thing.
It was after nine before he reached the hospital. Stopped short at the entrance: realized he was still running. Hadn’t slowed since the rescue. Paused to calm himself. Flicked his cigarette into the bushes, wiped the sweat off his upper lip: coarse growth of stubble scraped his hand. Pocketed his hands and shouldered through the door. He knew the girl at the desk. She told him: “Third floor. Dr. Lewis.”
On third, he was barred by the floor nurse, narrow-waisted girl with an award-winning hind end. Must be new. Dr. Lewis stepped out of the small lab nearby and his greeting cleared the way. Short even-tempered man in late middle-age, thick gray moustache, heavy brow, white jacket. Miller gave him and the nurse copies of the special, asked about Bruno.
“We’re not encouraged, Miller, but that’s not a quote. The man absorbed what should be a fatal quantity of carbon monoxide. It tends to accumulate, you know, doesn’t get passed off like most gases. Hemoglobin sponges up carbon monoxide two hundred and fifty times as fast as it does oxygen, so what happens, the CO prevents the blood from taking in the oxygen it needs, even if there is plenty present. The other six men in the same space with him obviously died earlier from just this cause.”
“Have you made autopsies, or is there—?”
“Blood samples have already told us the story.”
“How is it you think Bruno survived?”
“Frankly, I don’t know. Maybe your headline makes a … valid diagnosis.” Lewis smiled faintly: fellow skeptic’s gentle prod of hypocrisy. The nurse winked. “One thing, he was separated from the others, though no one knows why, and he may have received a much more gradual dosage. The others could have spread out more, there was room, but fright probably closed their circle. Important to stir the air, too, and they may not have moved around much, especially after their light gave out.”
“But if they knew the gas was there, couldn’t they—?”
The nurse stood, smoothed her white skirt down over the pubic knoll, and switched into the small lab nearby.
“Probably didn’t know. Hard to detect. They just dropped off to sleep as they normally would and didn’t wake up after. Or, if they did, they probably lacked the strength in their limbs to move or were too groggy to think things out.” The nurse lacked nothing in her limbs, which, beyond the door of the lab, she stretched for him to see. “Peculiar reversal of the dream process: meant to serve us by protecting our sleep, it more likely than not kept these men confused about reality, might well have convinced their vertiginous minds that the disaster was a dream.”
“Served them after all, then,” Miller said. The nurse was loading medicines on a tray.
Lewis smiled. “In a way. But if Bruno lived, then maybe they all could have.”
“Can I see him?”
“Nothing to see. He’s still in a coma.”
“Is that a bad sign?”
The nurse reached for medicines high on a shelf: made her skirt ruck up and her fanny bobble. She glanced back over her shoulder and saw him looking. He smiled.
“I’m afraid it is. His chances of recovery diminish the longer he remains in it. Usually they come around within the first couple hours, once they’ve got into fresh air or are fed oxygen, if they do at all. If he does come around, the delay increases the likelihood of pulmonary complications. He is still getting transfusions, respiratory stimulants.”
“Can he have any other troubles?”
“Asthenia.” Lewis paused. “Temporary stupor or maybe amnesia. This isn’t for print, of course.”
“No.”
“Carbon monoxide poisoning, Miller, amounts to oxygen lack. And oxygen is the one thing — it and glucose — that the brain cannot do without, even for short periods of time. So some damage is conceivable, and there have been cases of permanent mental illness, although almost always, I should say, in cases where there was a predisposition for it.”
Miller pushed: “Bruno has some of that in his background?”
Lewis hesitated, then replied, “I don’t know, Miller.”
“Is he alone?” The question he’d been saving.
“No, there’s a young girl here. His sister.”
“Can I see her?”
“Rather you didn’t. She’s exhausted and pretty frightened. She has been out at the mine, almost without sleep, these entire three days, and I’m having to keep a close eye on her as well as her brother.” The nurse was doing phallic things, though maybe unintentionally, with a syringe and needle. “We have her on a spare bed in a room that adjoins his, and I was just preparing a light sedative when you came. I’ve kept everyone away from her, of course, and will do so tomorrow, too. However, if you want to drop around, you might call me first, and—”
“Thanks, I will.” Miller gave them spare copies of the special edition for the girl and her brother, as well as for the other patients, stopped in a moment to visit Bert Martini, the guy who’d lost an arm Thursday night. Martini caught on Miller’s semipro baseball team. Used to. Martini was in good-enough spirits, but Miller felt his smile cracking, and left depressed. He wondered what he could do for the guy. Make him the coach maybe.
When he went out, the nurse was gone, busy apparently, and he missed seeing her. Too bad. She was something worth seeing. He thought about the miner’s sister, pajama’d and small in the hospital bed. Tomorrow. Felt the woolly cap in his pocket. He laughed, and the girl at the downstairs desk smiled back.
And the fatherly man with the gray moustache pats her head and wears a white jacket starchy and dark brows a turned-up trenchcoat collar though his face is black dear God! black! and he can’t breathe but smiles dark eyes and wears silk bright shorts silk shirt with a number on it — can’t breathe! oh please! and runs like the wind white jacket number fourteen soothes but soot in his hair and can’t white eyes face like the wind silk mouth and turned-up can’t breathe! the number on it can’t breathe! she screams and he holds her wrist brows with a gray jacket needle fatherly white pats her head and a nurse
This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate thereon day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein…. Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of good courage; be not affrighted, neither be thou dismayed: for Jehovah thy God is with thee whithersoever….
The Baxters’ family worship Sunday evening was interrupted by an unexpected visit from Sister Clara Collins and her daughter Elaine. Abner frowned in concern; Sarah too was surprised: they had brought up Brother Ely’s body only that morning. The simplicities of Sarah’s recent life were fragmenting this weekend, changes had touched her that she could not yet cope with, so she now felt something excessively intrusive — if not improper — about Sister Clara’s unannounced call. Still, no sooner had she arrived than Sarah, almost against her will, began to weep for the other woman. So hard to believe so good a man was gone. Sister Clara clutched a note; she was terribly agitated.
From the day’s commencement, Sarah Baxter had been sorely tried. Abner had slept but poorly, rose early. He had kept to himself, bellowing alone in the closed front room in preparation for the early-morning service, could not even help her with the children. Now that the five were grown so, they all trod over her, especially the three boys, she couldn’t help it, and when Abner withheld his hand they blew their disobedience into open malice. Their oldest girl, Frances, usually some help, had had to pass the last three nights on the canvas cot in the shed, and so had waked sore and sniffly, poor child. It was too cold and damp out there and the mice made a fright of sleep — Sarah dreaded the week to come. Abner’s austere insistence on the practice vexed her, but the Good Book guided him and he was not to be moved. And as the girls grew, the problems mounted. Already, she and Franny had crossed dates a few times, and it would not be long before little Amanda, already ten, would be complicating the sorry matter even further.
But, although breakfast had been a persecution for her, curiosity to see their father preach for the first time had finally chased the five into their Sunday clothes and had cowed them to unwonted silence in the church. The Nazarenes had grown accustomed over the recent years to Brother Ely Collins’ tall eloquence in the Sunday pulpit, and Sarah had feared this morning that her husband’s blunt red wrath would whip them with too alien a chill. Brother Ely had saved their church, had built a roaring fire here and tended it with devotion. Although his message, no less than Abner’s, had been of the Lord’s awesome plans for sinners, his voice had been comfortingly paternal, and he had offered wonderful salvation in Christ Jesus. He had baptized all the Baxters, though they had been baptized before, and Abner himself had always agreed: Brother Ely was a saint.
Abner had stood, round and glowering, behind the rostrum this morning — it had surprised Sarah how stocky and aged he had seemed there, blunt hands gripping the rostrum, red-shocked face with its wide down-drawn mouth just visible above his knuckles — and after they had sung the fearsomely appropriate “Ninety and Nine,” which Abner had selected just for its relevance, he had raged forth astonishingly: “Belovèd! Think it not strange concerning the fiery trial among you, which cometh upon you to prove you, as though a strange thing happened unto you!” The congregation, almost as a body, had started. Some had snickered in embarrassment afterward, and Sarah had seen with horror that her two oldest boys, Junior and Nat, were giggling furtively into their songbooks. How she had hated them then! She herself had felt near to tears: poor Abner! But, suddenly, the cry had become a prophecy! A boy had burst into the auditorium with the announcement that Brother Ely Collins might still be alive! Sister Clara and Elaine had rushed out and the congregation had bolted up to chase after. There had been a scattering, a rude disorder. “Hold!” Abner had thundered. “Have you forgotten that this is the House of the Lord?” They had hesitated, lashed to a respectful hush. “Let us all pause before departing,” her husband had commanded them, “for one minute of silent prayer that our beloved brother Ely Collins might soon be among us again!” The minute, abided by, had passed like an eternal judgment upon them, Abner’s final “Grace be with all of you! Amen,” releasing them somehow miraculously blessed.
Sarah had taken four of the children home, while Abner, a terrible and inexplicable tension crowding his red brows, had with Junior followed the others out to the mine. She had telephoned the Collins place, and Sister Mary Harlowe, poor woman, answering, had confirmed that Sister Clara was waiting at home. She had left Franny with the three younger children and had gone to sit a spell with Sister Clara. Many had come: poor Tessie Lawson, Mabel Hall, Betty Wilson, whose Eddie had died in the hospital, almost all the women from Sister Clara’s Evening Circle. She had learned then that Sister Wanda Cravens’ husband might also have survived. They had cried together a great deal there. Worried finally that Abner might return out of temper and find the children untended, Sarah had left before any word had come.
Arriving home, she had overheard from the front porch the two youngest, Amanda and Paul, taunting Frances in the kitchen with the hateful chant Junior and Nat had started last summer:
“Fran — ny! Fran — ny!
She’s got red hairs on her fan — ny!
Sarah had slammed in and upbraided them unmercifully, shouting at them that they would hear from their father on that score that very night. Franny had insisted shyly that she didn’t mind the teasing, and had begged her not to tell their father, but Sarah had replied she was anyway mad at both of them still for the way they had carried on at breakfast. Then Franny had told her that Nat had run off, presumably to the mine. Franny was less charitable toward Nathan. They all were. Sarah had heard before Nathan even came about the curse of the third child, and certainly that boy was the devil’s own. Well. She was wearied of whipping the child, and now he was so grown, husky for an eleven-year-old, it usually took both her and Franny holding for Abner to manage it. And Lord, it did no good. Abner would not admit it, but that was the plain truth of it. Nathan could not be saved.
Franny had dragged about all faint and teary, so Sarah had told her to go lie down until her father came home, she would finish the kitchen and get Sunday dinner. The girl hadn’t argued; behind her glasses, her eyes had been red-rimmed, her round cheeks flushed and feverish. Poor Franny! Such a good girl, and to suffer so! And then the other children humiliating to make it worse. Franny was fifteen, she shouldn’t have had to endure that trial, but what more could Sarah have done to stop it? It had been Abner that hot summer night who had judged the girl’s refusal to tattle on the little ones an act of disobedience, and all Sarah’s wailing had not constrained him. Abner had not thrashed Franny for a long time, so he had laid the razor strop to her. Tears had spilled and Abner had sweated, but the girl had not complained. And the others, witnessing the scourging, had discovered what now they sang about. How could they be so dreadful, those children? It grieved Sarah. Junior, who had started it, no longer mocked, of course: Sarah had noticed, giving him his baths recently, that he must sooner or later fall prey to his own malevolence. Her poor white goose, he was such a soft one. They were all redheads, all but Amanda, and that was probably why she was her father’s favorite.
Abner and Junior had come home shortly after noon, Abner somber and uncommonly gentle. Ely Collins was dead, he had told her softly: horribly dead. She had wished to weep then, but had been unable. Now, he had said, much work lay ahead. Had he meant for her, too? The vague foreboding of ordeal had dismayed her. They had eaten Sunday dinner in virtual silence, all but Nat who had not returned home and who had not been seen by Junior at the mine. When Abner had retired to the front room, Junior’s plump white face had turned to her and he said, “He was frightening out there! Everybody cried! He made them!”
More omens of disruption had touched her during family worship. Abner had passed the afternoon studying the Holy Bible, and by evening he had fallen strangely meditative. He had listened with curious patience as the children had recounted their evil doings, and instead of administering the usual castigations, had spoken solemnly with each of them about duty and led them, individually, in prayer. “The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge,” he had told Franny, “but the foolish despise wisdom and instruction.” To Junior, he had explained proverbially: “He hath made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made; his mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violence shall come down upon his own pate.” And he had instructed Junior how the ruthless avarice of the mine owners would bring disaster upon their pates, just as vice and waywardness had brought retributive death to many miners. Nathan, typically, had refused to say where he had been all day, or what it was he had brought home in a paper sack, would not even answer his father. Abner’s face had contracted darkly. “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother,” he had rumbled ominously, and for a moment the familiar thunderheads had seemed to be forming and Sarah had breathed easier, “the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young vultures shall eat it!” But he had pursued the matter no further, had turned to little Amanda to receive her admission of mocking her sister Franny that day and disobeying her mother, and had, with alarming tenderness, lectured the confused child on love, admonishing her to make love her aim, and to “desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy!” What had he meant by that? Unnerving portents everywhere! Praying with Amanda, Abner had cried upwards to the Lord: “Oh deliver not the soul of thy turtle-dove unto the wild beast! forget not the life of thy poor forever!”
The children, disoriented by their father’s altered manner, had gradually grown more unruly, testing the new limits, and Sarah had feared for them. Only little Paul, whose turn was last, had remained wanly mute, apparently too young to perceive the shift. Once Nathan had whispered something in the boy’s ear, and he had begun to cry softly. That Nathan! She could have beat him herself! Abner had turned then to Paul, and whimpering, the boy had repeated what Amanda had revealed just before him. And then the doorbell had rung, bringing Sister Clara Collins and her tagtail daughter into the awry room, and Sarah had commenced to weep.
Abner invited Sister Clara to join them in prayer, but she impatiently thrust her note into his hands, saying, “I need your guidance, Abner! It’s from Ely!” Sarah wished to see it, but feared Abner’s rebuke if she asked; Sister Clara determined the matter by snapping it out of Abner’s hand the moment he glanced up and planting it in Sarah’s. In tortured script, it read:
DEAR CLARA AND ALL:
I dissobayed and I know I must Die. Listen allways to the Holy Spirit in your Harts Abide in Grace. We will stand Together befor Our Lord the 8th of
Even before Sarah finished it, Sister Clara was demanding: “But what can it mean? What do you take it to mean?” Sarah was too confused even to hook the words of it together sensibly. She waited anxiously, staring hard at the note, for Abner to remove the burden of that response from her, and at last he did: “I think it means that it’s better, if the will of God should so will, that ye suffer for well-doing than for evil-doing.” The words touched Sarah familiarly: she had awakened to them. They were to have been a part of Abner’s sermon this morning.
“Maybe, Abner, but it ain’t all of it, it cain’t be. I know, God was tellin’ him to leave the mine and go preach, and Ely he didn’t do it, and so in a way he done wrong. Maybe. But what is troublin’ me so, Abner, is what does he mean about listenin’ to the Holy Spirit and standin’ together—”
Abner, interrupting, growing nervous, explained that the Holy Spirit was the inspired word of the Holy Gospel; we must study it in our hearts and abide in Christ Jesus, so that our consciences will be clear when we must stand before Him “that is ready to judge the living and the dead—” The children were growing restless and noisy, but fell silent instantly before Abner’s sudden buffeting glare. “The living and the dead,” he repeated, then added, though his mind seemed to be on the children: “For the end of all things is at hand—”
“That’s it, Abner!” Clara cried and Abner’s white face spun toward her, pinched inward in consternation. “The end of all things is at hand! Don’t you see—?”
“Now, Sister Clara—”
But the woman was in a frenzy and wouldn’t be hushed, though Sarah saw that Abner’s temper would not long be contained. “We will stand together before the Lord the eighth of — the eighth of when? Of when, Abner? That’s the point of it, don’t you see? Ely was tryin’ to tell us that God’s final judgment is near upon us!”
A tremor of dread convulsed Sarah’s heavy body, iced her spine: the end! “Oh, Abner!” she cried, and reached for him. He shrugged her off sternly. The children had stood, stirred, and tears floated now in Franny’s eyes.
Abner calmed them. He reminded Sister Clara that the accident had happened on the eighth of the month, that Ely had probably only meant to date his note to her.
“Maybe,” Sister Clara said, clearly not convinced. “But ifn he died today, why did he put the eighth? And they ain’t a period there before. God’s signs to Ely seem terrible urgent to me, and I — Well, anyhow, I wanted both you folks to read it and meditate on it. Me and Elaine, we been showin’ it around tonight to all the friends. I mean to bring it with me to Evenin’ Circle next Sunday night, so’s we can all talk it over together. I hope I kin count on you two bein’ there.”
Sarah nodded, of course, she always went, but glimpsed Abner’s sudden reprehensive glower — and understood then what it was he had been demanding of her all day — and why he must hate her, knowing she wasn’t able. “Yes,” he said, for them both.
Sarah thought, as Sister Clara and her daughter departed, that the family worship would be considered ended for that night, but Abner shoved shut the door and spun enflamed on little Paul. “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass,” he recited thunderingly into the now-recognizable terror-riven room, “and a rod for the back of fools!” His freckled white hand, pinked with fine red hairs, grasped the razor strop and cracked it across his thigh.
“No, Abner!” whispered Sarah. “Please!”
With frightened fingers, Paul dutifully unbuttoned his pants. Abner, twitching with impatience, reached to tear them from him just as, in terror, the boy made water. It sprayed out in frantic spurts on Abner’s hands and knees — reflexively, Abner’s right hand whipped and the razor strop cracked like a rifle shot into the child’s wee fork. Paul screamed. Sarah cried, “No! Abner!”
Abner, implacable, gripped the boy’s frail shoulder. “If thou beat a child with the rod,” he blustered, “he will not die!”
But Franny, sobbing, covered Paul’s body with her own like a mother hen. “Beat me!” she cried.
Abner was in a froth. Paul shrieked insanely under Franny’s shield. Sarah saw a horrible smile flirt at the corner of Junior’s mouth. She stood. Though terrified, she would not allow it again!
But then Abner did a wonderful thing: he ordered them all out of the room but for Franny. Sarah wouldn’t even let them hear the flogging, she sent them straight to bed. Paul’s peewee was strangely flushed, but he had quieted at least, and she could hear him talking with Nathan in their room. Alone, outside the door, Sarah listened to the blows fall.
When Abner came to bed, his anger had abated. She was fearfully disturbed, but he was disinterested in her explications. She lay awake hopelessly, not knowing what it would all come to. In spite of Abner, Sarah had been cruelly penetrated by the prophetic vision in Brother Ely’s deathnote, and only one sinister mystery still vexed her: Why had the Lord chosen to take Brother Ely just the second before he would have completed the terrible message?
Until the lightness passes off, she sits on the edge of the bed, as though at a beginning place. Then she slides to the marble floor and pads in bare feet into her brother’s room. Withdrawn he lies, absorbed into the bed, one with it, dark etching on the immaculate sheets. “Giovanni!” she whispers. No sign is given her but the determined pulsing of a vein in his neck. His skin has shrunk taut over his high skull, exaggerating the recession of his hairline. His black hair is long on the neck, feathers dark and wild on the pillow. He is … somehow … changed: yes, a new brother must come of it. She fears for him. So white! The dried blood she’d seen on his face seems to have sunk beneath the surface, now mottles with rose the flesh’s pallor. For the first time since the night of the disaster, black doubts peck at her.
Miller was met on Monday midmorning arrival by an officeful of comedy and the miner Willie Hall, who’d been waiting there since eight, Lou Jones having left for “Mick’s Dispensary,” leaving the message that the doctors advised complete rest and not to expect him for a week or two. His prank had been a complete success, and the wirecopy which he retrieved from the wastecan testified to UP’s subsequent panic. Someone had run over to the bus station to buy up the early morning editions from the city, and all but one carried it, one of them happily subheading the prayerbook episode. Miller equipped his ad force with copies to entertain the businessmen they called on that morning, and wrote up a boldface box for that night’s front page on “this strange and inexplicable lapse in East Condon journalism.” He wondered if the UP rep was still in town — man! the dumb bastard had even embellished his cribbed account with praise of Jones’“long and worthy experience” in the mines and his “model Christian fatherhood”! Such are history’s documents! He laughed. Miller had been seeking this vendetta ever since Jones had jockeyed through his latest typo a couple months ago on “the new Chronicle subscription rates, announced this week by publisher and editor Justin Milker,” which eventually made The New Yorker. He’d been burned more than once by Jones’ propensity for the rigged typo, his worst being when Mrs. Ted Cavanaugh, wife of the banker, was named “Lay of the Year at the Presbyterian Church”—Only by the grace of Ted’s fear of court publicity had they escaped being sued. Now he had squared it and had twitted the sloppy East Condoners as well.
But, pleased as he was, he had little chance to enjoy it. His Monday edition lay blank before him, plugged only in part by the two full-page ads of condolence from businessmen, professionals, and organizations, and the uphill ritual of his newsday now had to be compressed into half the time. Yesterday’s special had devoured all his standing copy on the mine, leaving him at best some eighty or ninety column inches of unused miscellany lying idle. Yesterday’s photos were not printed, but there were a few old ones he could use a second time. Hastily, he plotted a six-page layout and sent back a pageful of wirecopy. He asked Willie Hall, seated stoically deadpan in the vortex of a pandemonium he didn’t understand, to give him five minutes more and raced over to Mickey DeMar’s Bar and Grill to deposit copies of the UP story with the morning klatchers. Found Jones in there with Ted Cavanaugh, dimestore owner Burt Robbins, and the Chamber of Commerce secretary, Jim Elliott, town’s tireless prince of gossips. Miller had a rushed coffee, while Mick and the others enjoyed the tale. It was a great entertainment, and others who arrived joined the laughter. Robbins, dependably acidic, tagged Jones with “Father” and the rest delightedly picked it up, all but Cavanaugh, who almost always excepted himself in the banter and who in any case had been cool toward Jones since the typo that had humiliated his wife. To escape the worsening consequences, Jones agreed to return to the stable, and that eased some the day’s increasing stress.
While Jones issued wearily forth like a jaded elephant to collect the routine tidings, Miller hurried back to the waiting Willie Hall, and Hall had no sooner left than in came mine supervisor Barney Davis, and he was followed by Vince Bonali, one of the facebosses on at Number Nine Thursday night near the blast in the southeast section. It was after noon before he got his breath and ate the doughnut Annie had bought for him.
From Hall, he picked up a small feature on the events that kept him home from the mine Thursday night and away from death. Spare stunted man in his early fifties, married but childless, with a long record of absenteeism in the mine, Hall explained that he had “had a hunch” about that night: it was on the eighth of the month, and one of his cousins had been hurt by a fall on the eighth of July some years back, and his bird dog had died the eighth of last December, just a month ago.
“Now, I ain’t superstitious, Mr. Miller, I don’t hold no truck with black cats and suchlike, I ain’t no old woman. But, see, them mines they is always dangerous in the winter, now I’m fatalistic about it, I figger when the Good Lord He says my day is up, well, it’s up, but then in the summer they’s always these here falls. The roofs, why, they jis fall in. You kin usually hear them, they’s a kinder stretchin’ sound, a kinder crackle, oh, it ain’t near so bad in the winter. I don’t mind workin’ in the — but, see, in the winter then, everthing it gits all dried out and they’s a powerful lot of dust, and, you know, that dadblamed mine, they don’t lay enough rock dust, Mr. Miller, I’m tellin’ you the Lord’s own truth, they don’t give a care about us miners, they don’t give a care about nothin’ except makin’ money. Why, the coal dust gits so bad you cain’t even see them machines, them big machines, you jis trip right over them, your lights right on them and all. And that’s how it is that it’s winter when all these here explosions takes place. I don’t mind it in the summer so terrible much. But, you know, I don’t think I’m gonna work no more down in the mines. No, sir, I don’t think so.”
Hall squirmed buglike in his chair, twisted his visored cap in his slender hands, pale mapped with blue veins. He refused the cigarette Miller offered him. “No, thanks, Mr. Miller. It’s right kind, but I don’t smoke none. No, listen, I got all this here coal dust down in my lungs, see, cause once you breathe it in, why, it don’t never come out again, and I’m afeered that smokin’ might touch off a kinder explosion right there in my lungs and, you know, smokin’ causes TB and this here dust it sticks to the wet part of the lungs, now a doctor told me this, Mr. Miller, it’s the Lord’s truth, and the lung it gits as tough as the backside of an old mule, and you start coughin’ and ifn you smoke, you git TB. Oxford, he smoked all the dadblamed time, and I always says to him, I says, Oxford, dadblame it — Oxford, he’s my buddy, he was my buddy, he got killt down there, Oxford Clemens, they all called him Ferd, but I called him Oxford, oh, he weren’t worth a hill a beans, he come from pretty poor stock, and that man he cussed and smoked all the time, but I ain’t one to use nicknames, see, I think it’s downright unfriendly, and, why, nobody called Jesus by no nickname, did they? But Oxford, he didn’t pay me no mind, he went right on smokin’. He had a cough, too, I weren’t surprised none. He even smoked down there in the mine, oh, it was agin the rules and all, but he never gave no care about no rules, when he wanted him a dadblamed smoke, he was gonna have it. Shoot, everbody else done the same, it weren’t jis Oxford. But our faceboss, that’s Angelo Moroni, Mr. Miller, he got killt, too, well, he didn’t like the idea none, and he always said, don’t lemme catch none a you guys smokin’ down here or I’ll have you outa here on your tail fast as scat, that’s more or less how he put it, but he never took the cigarettes away, so what happened is all these guys’d duck off in some room where they’d stopped working and sneak them a smoke now and agin, and, well, Mr. Miller, ifn they’da smoked out in the haulageways in the open, it wouldn’ta been dangerous at all, but these here abandoned rooms, they’s plumb fulla gas, and everbody told Angelo that, but he jis said, dadblame it! I don’t want none a you guys to smoke at all and that’s period! That’s pretty much how he put it.”
“How many years have you been a miner, Mr. Hall?”
“Thirty-six years, Mr. Miller, thirty-six years, off and on.” The man had small eyes circled with worry lines, an overbite, very little chin. A light gray grizzle furred his cheeks.
“Do you know Bruno well?”
“No, I seen a lot of him, he was on my shift and all, but, no, I cain’t say as how I really know him. Always I felt sorry on account of the others they all picked on him a lot down there, but you couldn’t never git friendly with him, he was a kinder inter-verted type, ifn you know what I mean. Like you’d say it was a nice day, and he’d jis stare back at you. He was a funny bird.” Hall tilted his head to one side a moment as though listening, himself resembling for that instant a “funny bird,” and then he continued: “Knowed his buddy well. Wasn’t it a pity, Mr. Miller, how Ely Collins had to suffer? Don’t seem right somehow, man like that, he was our preacher, you know, how his leg got chopped off and how …” Hall’s voice trailed away as, gazing off, he suffered Collins’ mutilations. “He took a lotta trouble with Bruno, he was always tryin’ to save him, build him up.”
“You mean he was trying to convert him from Catholicism?”
“Not exactly, on account of he weren’t no Catholic, or leastways none a them other Roman fellers cared to claim him. They said he’d split off or somethin’ and I guess he’s sort of nothin’ at all.”
“Did Collins talk to you about leaving the mine?”
“No.”
“Or seeing white birds in the workings?”
“Seein’ birds? No, not Ely, musta been somebody else.”
“And now you’re thinking of retiring, Mr. Hall?”
“Well, now, I won’t exactly say that, Mr. Miller, but I’m gonna be lookin’ around. I ain’t too old to learn a new trade. My wife Mabel she thinks I oughter start over in somethin’ where I kin work out in the open. I ain’t afeerd none a the mines, a miner he ain’t skeered about goin’ down, else he’d never go, you git fatalistic, but it’s jis they’s so dadblamed unhealthy. Besides, that there bed is playin’ out, and now they’s this mess down there to clean up — you know, they don’t give no care at all about the poor miner what gits throwed outa his job, they jis only reckon up what it’s gonna cost them to fix up all the damage, and they reckon up how much they kin make off the coal that’s left, and they add and subtract, and it all depends on the number they end up with, see, no, it’s the Lord’s own truth, Mr. Miller. It don’t come to their minds none about us poor miners, outa work and too dadblamed old to start over again. Why, I don’t know what I’d do now, see, I’m over fifty, and you cain’t learn an old dog, as the feller says, why, they’re jis leavin’ us to rot!”
“That pansy!” Davis grinned later, when Miller described the interview. “Why sometimes right in the middle of a shift, he’d start bellyaching about the smoke and cry around there was going to be an accident and he’d refuse to work. He hasn’t got the nerve for the job.”
“Maybe,” said Miller, “but, still, there he was, right afterwards, volunteering for rescue crews and taking twice the risk of usual work.”
“Feeling guilty probably,” said Davis.
“Here, Barney, before I forget. I saved you a couple extra copies of the special. Your ugly mug made it again.”
“What the hell! Two nights running! I’m getting famous!” Davis opened the paper, searched out his photograph, studied it a moment, then tossed it down on the desk with an effort at indifference, handsome square jaw set in disdain. “Think you’ll win some more prizes with it?”
“Maybe. If your picture doesn’t stop them.” Barney laughed and Miller asked, “What caused it, Barney? Have you figured it out?”
“Smoking, Tiger. I’d bet my last buck on it. We located two or three possible areas where it might have been touched off. Trouble is, the first blast set off secondary ones, so you can’t always be sure which is the first one. But we’re pretty convinced one of those guys or more was smoking.”
“Who’s ‘we,’ Barney? You mean the operators?”
“Well,” said Davis with a loose laugh, touching the bridge of his rimless glasses, “you don’t figure the union’s gonna volunteer that, do you? Anyhow, we already found some cigarettes.”
“Whose were they?”
“I don’t want you to print any of this now, Miller, it would only prejudice the inspections, but we found them next to a new kid, his first night down there, kid named Tony Rosselli, by him and a timberman, Oxford Clemens.” Clemens was out of Miller’s own generation, and his violent death, like a breath of his own approaching doom, had preyed on Miller more than any of the other ninety-six. Ox had been his adolescent effort at rehabilitation of the downtrodden, and though Clemens as hero had disconcerted him, the emotions and indistinct yearnings of that sophomoric time had their claws in him yet. “We didn’t find any matches, but they may have got blown up or maybe one of the rescuers snuck them out.”
“Why was there so much fire, Barney?”
“You’re getting at we didn’t have enough rock dust down,” Davis said defensively, adjusting again the glasses on his small sharp nose. “I know, that’s what the union propaganda’s trying to establish. Sure, it could have been better, it always could have been better, it’s one of those things you can never do enough. But we passed all the inspections, Miller, and we’d just ordered some more, figured to lay it down in February, but, well, it just didn’t work out the best possible way — we didn’t want those guys to die, Miller.”
“No, I know, Barney, but—”
“I wish to hell we had had more rock dust down, I can tell you that, I’m goddamn sorry how it has turned out. But that’s a small thing, you don’t need any rock dust at all if you don’t have fire in the first place. Why, we hold safety meetings every month, and do you think it does one goddamn bit of good? Those bastards go right on smoking — what can you do? — and not taking care of their machinery, just asking for trouble. Sometimes, it’s just like they’re daring the goddamn mines to fall on their heads and half hoping it will, like that’s gonna prove something or something.”
Miller asked the question he supposed he’d be asking for weeks to come: “What about it, Barney: think you’ll reopen?”
“Can’t say yet, Miller. I hope so. It’s my job, too, after all. After the official inspections, we’ll survey the mine, consider its potential, and if there’s any goddamn chance at all it can be profitably reopened, why, we’ll do it. There’s too many people around here depend on that mine, Miller, and we don’t want to let them down. We’re not a charity, but we’re not pigs either. If you’re gonna print anything, I’d suggest you say that at this time the company has no intention of closing the mine. I think you can say that.” Davis got up to go. “And, say, I just want to mention, we didn’t think too much of that story by Chigi. He was just one guy of hundreds out there working their asses off and it seemed like his story made it out he went down there single-handed and carried Bruno out on his goddamn back.”
“Really? I thought it was pretty fair, Barney—”
“Well, I’m exaggerating. But I just wanted you to know — and it didn’t exactly paint the mine as the prettiest place in the country to work, either, if you know what I mean.”
“Well,” Miller laughed, “it isn’t.”
They stood, and while they were shaking hands, Vince Bonali walked in. Greetings were exchanged. Bonali wallowed a cheap fat cigar around in his mouth. “You got a real parade today, Miller,” Davis said.
“Hell, you can’t hog it all,” Bonali said.
Davis laughed unconvincingly and, with good-byes, left.
Miller took down Bonali’s account of the night of the disaster. Bonali was faceboss over eighteen men in twelfth west off old Main South, not too distant from where Bruno and the other six had entombed themselves up in fourteenth east; he had been in the zone of impact and only yards out of the sections where the fire had reached. With the habit of all facebosses Miller had ever known, he provided an extensive preamble on his own merits as a miner, punctuating with stabs of his mutilated cigar. As he talked he grew excited, nearly shouting. No longer looking at Miller, he seemed to be concentrating on some point about five or six feet out in front of him. Big barrel-chested guy with a voice that filled the office. Impressive man. Probably a good faceboss, all right. “So I run back and already the shit’s so thick you can’t see. I find out there’s four guys have bugged out. Two of them, Lucci and Brevnik, they got out okay, though I gave them a royal chewing afterwards for jumping the goddamn gun. The other two who left was Cravens and Minicucci. They must have gone the wrong way.” He paused to consider them, then went on to describe enthusiastically exactly how they had used the ninth east air course, crossed over on the overcast to the New Main South air course, running into Abner Baxter’s section, and exited the mine about two and a half hours after the explosion.
“What kind of guy is Baxter, by the way?” Miller asked. “I called him for a routine interview and he flapped into a rage on the wealth of the wicked and the sanctity of the poor, but refused to come down for an interview and wouldn’t let me quote him.”
Bonali hesitated, bit down on his cigar. “To tell you the truth, Tiger, that guy’s been a pain in my ass since the day I was born. Nothing was ever enough for him. He and his buddies nearly wrecked the union movement through these parts. Every time we organized, he’d disorganize, and then holler at us for lack of guts. Stirred up a lot of bad feeling toward … toward our people, too. For awhile, it was like one union for Italians, one for Americans. And he made a lot of noise but he was scared of fighting himself and he always packed a gun. Guys got killed in those days, and it wasn’t only the scabs. Of course, I don’t need to tell you that, Tiger. Your Dad was a great guy. A buddy of mine got it, right in the brains, one of the toughest union men we ever had, and just about everybody knows it was Baxter shot him, but there was no way of proving it. Back then, we blamed it on the operators because we needed evidence against them, and we was afraid of busting up our own ranks, but everybody knew. Now he’s grown him a fat belly and has got religion and lets his steam off on the holy rollers. We brought our sections out together Thursday night, and this is just between you and me, but he wanted to drag Davis out of his office and lynch him. He’s a nut.”
Miller asked him what he thought caused the blast.
“Gas, Tiger. Only thing that can cause one like that. Damn mine is full of it.” Bonali squashed his cigar murderously into an ashtray, thick dark brows crossed into an angry frown. “Needed better control, better ventilation. All those abandoned workings up in fifteenth and sixteenth were full of caves, pumping out methane by the tankfuls. Should have either ventilated better in there, or closed it off. Spark off some motor, maybe even just the goddamn friction of one piece of machinery rubbing up against some other one — and then, there wasn’t any rock dust down in that firetrap, Tiger. It’s a wonder we didn’t all of us get killed.”
“Barney said they’d passed all inspections.”
“I don’t give a shit what Barney Davis says, there wasn’t any goddamn dusting done. Listen, sometimes those inspectors don’t even trouble their asses to come down into the mine. They just have them a big fancy dinner somewhere and lots of drinks with Davis and the rest of those bastards, and the next day they file their report, hell, I’ve seen it!”
“Pretty serious charges, Vince.”
“Yeah, and there’s ninety-seven dead buddies of mine to make then more serious, Tiger, including one of the greatest facebosses that mine ever saw.” A tear came to that strong man’s eye, and he brushed it away. “But, hell, don’t quote me, I’d never get another job in this country.”
“Say, somebody said something about some horseplay in the washhouse Thursday night, something that had to do with Bruno.”
Bonali flushed. “Well, there wasn’t nothing, it was — no, there wasn’t any horseplay.”
Miller laughed. “Hell, I’m not running court, Vince. What I want to find out is about that poem.”
“Oh, that.” Bonali grinned, shifted heavily in his chair. He rubbed his jaw with his hand, the little finger of which was missing. “Yeah. Bruno wrote a poem.”
“Do you still have it?”
“The poem? Naw, I gave it back to him. What would I want with the goddamn thing? Poem about his Mother.” Bonali laughed loosely. “That silly bastard!”
Rosalia brings Mama. The veil she wears to funerals she is wearing and her feet are compressed into the old black shoes too small for her. Sia fatta la vostra volontà. Stands so darkly singular, small hurt blemish in this sterile white. Tears glinting like prisms tumble out and wet with light her crinkly brown cheeks. “My boy!” she says to the nurses who enter. “My boy! my Chonny!” Her Mama, whom English frightens, is the only person to Marcella’s knowledge who has called Giovanni by the English equivalent of his name. Mumbles, rootlike fingers rattling the rosary. Curved light ekes out of radiators, bending perception. Adesso e nell’ ora della nostra morte. Marcella repeats the words. Giovanni, the tall boy whose shy protective love has brought her safely to womanhood, lies suspended in a mechanism of light and steel, generated by his own indecisive pulse. “My boy! povero Chonny!” The old black shoes melt into the marble floor. Boots, really, with hooks instead of holes for the laces. Brittle and black and cracked. Reflecting the white room, condensing it into a minute pattern of glitter deep in the hard black polish. Nonna’s shoes. Cosí sia. Her Mama thinks Giovanni is already dead.
Shaved and lightly barbered, the Monday edition sandbagged with everything short of leftover Christmas carols and put to bed, Miller drove to the hospital. Over the phone, Lewis had told him Bruno was still in a coma, no change in his condition, but that Miller could speak this afternoon with the man’s sister if he wished. Bright cold day — prinked faintly with a widely scattered dazzle of frost crystals — chiseled the town’s usual tumble of casual boxes into planes of rare precision. He drove through these hard streets feeling himself peculiarly distinct, as though watching the processes of animation that slid him, white outlined cartoon figure, past the fixed drop of white outlined cartoon town. The speedgraphic lay, as always, on the seat beside him, but it was unlikely he would use it. Formulated questions, but images of her fragmented them. He was surprised to discover that his hands were sweating on the wheel.
The hospital, usually a dead white inside, was today somehow blurred and hopeful, a contrast to the frozen clarity he had just driven through. Uncommonly, neither the blood of birth nor the knock of death jolted his mind this afternoon as he entered, but rather a flush of pleasure in visible human progress warmed him. We move on. Things can be better. There are goals.
This bud of wellbeing was threatened momentarily by a near-encounter with Wesley Edwards, the Presbyterian minister, out dispensing his crinkly-smile consolations, but luckily Edwards didn’t see him, turned into somebody’s room. Actually, the man Edwards, while unimaginative and soft-souled, was no worse than the rest of the West Condoners — no, what rankled was his goddamn presumption. All his breed galled Miller, but especially the complacently doubtful types like Edwards — he blanked out this town’s small mind with his codified hand-me-down messages, and when you pushed him he would slyly hint he didn’t believe it himself, goddamn ethical parable or some crap of the sort. Well, you’re still the old fundamentalist at heart, Miller accused himself. Miller had noticed that Edwards, awkward among ailing men, spent most of his time giggling with the hospitalized women. They were prone and all but naked, yet safe, and so was he. Maybe the bastard got a buzz out of their bedpans. The thought made Miller smile, and it was this smile he carried into the third-floor convalescent lounge, where Marcella Bruno awaited him.
He arrives, in crushed light, bringing with him the air of old storybooks, things wanted, things with a buried value in them. As a child, she watched him run, a man to her, though they called him a boy, a man with long legs and strong shoulders. He ran for them and was praised, he leapt and was loved. And now it is for her he comes smiling, a man to her still, long and strong, with something about him of forest greenness and church masonry and northern stars. They speak of her brother, of her family, he asks about her. A man to be praised, yes, a man to be loved.
Back in, the cartoon town had fuzzed once more into lumpy solids, and the cartoon man was singing. A healing was happening. Sore, worn, he had found a young girl’s affection and had plunged in wholly. Where would it end? He didn’t care, he would see her again. The lumps glided recognizably by, and he found he hated them less. “You arrogant shit!” he said out loud, and laughed.
Still high, he left the Chevy in the plant lot and went straight to Mick’s. Hadn’t had anything but Cokes and a doughnut. He found Lou Jones at the big round table near the bar, apparently into some story, and he thought of some Jones could be telling that put him ill at ease. With Jones were the hotelman Wally Fisher, the lawyer Ralph Himebaugh, and Maury Castle, who had a shoestore in town, three of Mick’s most dependable klatchers. Although Fisher had a coffeeshop and bar in his own hotel, he was always in here afternoons. “Two with onions, Mick, and a beer,” Miller said, and damn if it didn’t sound like a feast to him.
Jones, disgruntled at having his story interrupted, leaned back and lit a cigar. The others cheered, reluctantly but sincerely, yesterday’s special edition, and exulted once more in the Father Jones escapade. Castle rattled tonight’s paper and read Miller’s “inexplicable lapse” box aloud for laughs, then Wally Fisher rumbled, “So, come on, Father, tell us what the sonuvabitch did.”
“Lou was just describing one of the gentlemen at your newspaper,” Himebaugh said by way of explanation. His quaint precision tinkled discordantly in the dark plain bar. “He has a rather, shall we say, individual manner of demonstrating his passions.”
Castle heehawed.
“Who’s that?” asked Miller.
“Carl,” said Jones.
The pressman. Miller grinned. “I should have guessed. Schwartz is the world’s most disturbed cocksman. What now?” Mick passed a glass of beer over the counter and Castle slid it across the formica tabletop to Miller. It was well after lunchtime, and the place was quiet. Only the sizzle of hamburgers in the yard-square kitchen off the bar. Mick had the television on as always, but the volume was off. Grand gestures of a bigmouthed guy pushing deodorant.
Jones drank off his beer, nodded at Mick for another. “Says he was worldweary after his unusual Sunday labors yesterday, so to restore the spirit he toted body and soul over to Waterton to Mrs. Dooley’s. He meets with this—”
“Mrs. Dobie’s,” interrupted Miller. “You can see how often Jones gets over there!”
Jones didn’t share in the laughter, chose to relight his cigar instead. His eyelids slowly drooped the table to silence. “He meets with this pigeon he has in the past plucked, and he flaps over to bicker with her the tariff. But this birdie is grounded. Very down in the beak. Just slopping up a drink or two, she says. Carl inquires what can the matter be, and she informs him tearily she has lost a brother in the mine accident.” Miller glanced up, winced inwardly. That bitter breath again. Had to be her. “She has decided she is gonna take a week off from the ranch, fly the scene, try to forget. She’s sniffling blowsily, and Carl is afraid she’s gonna break into some noisy lament and ruin his whole fucking night. He scans the club, but the others are all paired, have eggs aplenty.”
“You would think they would do less business on such a night,” Himebaugh interposed softly, but they ignored him.
“So finally he says to her, let’s go to your room, have a quiet drink there, you can tell me all about it, I’ll buy the bottle. She’s a sorry-looking red-eyed droop, but, as I say, he has no choice. She shrugs and says okay. She leads the way, and at this juncture in the narration, Carl consecrates a quarter hour or so to the immortalizing of her butt as it joggles up the stairs a few inches in front of his face, her skirt rucking and rippling, and bringing on, in Carl, a certain agitated enlargement.”
While Castle hollered about that, Miller asked, “Hey, Mick, what about those hamburgers?”
“Hunh? Oh, Jesus, Tiger! Hold on!” Mick ran to the kitchen, called out, “Just in time!” Which meant they were black, not white, ash.
“Round of beers, too, Mick.” The bigmouth guy on television, who had earlier been urging fragrant armpits, now spun a large wheel, while a muss of little mousy women stood by mockbreathless, clutching their handbags. Whole goddamn American populace was becoming a bunch of actors.
Mick handed the hamburgers, fresh from cremation, over the bar to Castle and went to work on the beers. Jones puffed on the cigar, took a long swallow of beer, continued: “So they get to the room. He, she, and her prize wazoo. Carl pours out two tumblers. There’s only one chair in the room, and, just his luck, while he’s dispensing whiskey, she’s planting her buns on it. Carl seeks a scheme to decoy her off the chair and onto the bed. He puts her drink on the dresser, thinking she’ll come and get it. No. She sits there looking run-over and commences to stare at her feet. He suggests she go lie down, as she looks a mite peakèd. She hears nothing. He finally concludes he will have to use force, and that is just the which he does not care yet to do.” Jones drinks to the rapt silence.
Mick hung over the bar with a big foolish grin on his broad Italian face, finally came around and joined the others at the table. “What do you mean?” he asked incredulously, without dropping the grin. “You mean he aims to lay this miserable broad?” Mick was a large guy, but he had a funny high nasal voice.
“Well, so he’s thinking about this and he is just about to screw the gentility act and go heave her off, when the goddamn whore herself gets blithely up and humps off to weewee. Carl hastily claps her whiskey down on the night table aside the famous scene of action and appropriates the chair for himself. And, true to form, she staggers back in, still out of the plot, and plumps down on the bed. She picks up the glass, drinks it off like it was water, sets it down again. Still, she hasn’t looked once at our hero, hasn’t let a peep.”
Himebaugh was giggling softly, eyes squinting slightly under his bushy black eyebrows. There was a prudery in him that usually drove him from such gatherings as this — he was a common visitor to this table, but seldom stayed long. Now he tittered and stared at his hands, nervous on the tabletop. Fisher, a flabby old man, sat leaning back on two legs of his chair, chin tucked in the soft fleshfolds of his neck, a smile on his poker face — he frankly enjoyed the story, rarely interpolated. Castle guffawed abruptly from time to time, but not in strict cadence with the tale. He had round leathery cheeks that ballooned when he laughed. Castle could tell at a glance where a man bought his shoes, and, if they weren’t from his place, it didn’t pacify him to explain you had to spread your business around.
“Meanwhile, our man in Waterton is taking it easy with the alcohol. He pumps in a couple stiff swallows, avers it prolongs the action, but too much and he might not fire off at all—”
“Yes, that’s true!” Mick sang, then flushed when everyone roared. Fisher even had to ease his chair down on all four legs momentarily for fear his convulsions would spill him.
Jones smiled around his dead cigar, continued: “Patience pays its way. The whore spreads on the bed and commences to chatter. Carl learns who her brother was and some miscellany about him. She kicks off her shoes. Carl, coolly denying still his throbbing rod, pumps her more about the brother. She tells all. Tears. Very touching scene. Carl waxes sympathetic. It is very sad indeed. He even works up a kind of tear and rubs his eye red. Advises her she ought to turn in for the night, forget all about it, head off tomorrow on that trip she’s been thinking about. She’s grateful. Says by Jesus he understands her. She tells him nighty-night and flops over to the wardrobe, stopping by the dresser to puddle out another tumblerful. Sets the tumbler on the floor by the wardrobe, hauls off her blouse, skirt, and bra, drops her drawers, wriggles into a traditional scrap of lingerie.” Jones paused to light the cigar again, while the others exchanged commentary. Lou could never keep a cigar going and tell a story at the same time.
Miller had finished the hamburgers, delicious in spite of the charring, and wanted another beer, but Mick was hunched over the table in such unabashed absorption, he didn’t have the heart to break the spell. Fisher smoked and chuckled drily, leaning back. Castle brayed and shouted, “Come on!” and beat the table. Himebaugh giggled to himself and stared at his glass, still full of beer.
“She squats for the tumbler and is surprised to discover our boy still in the picture. Look, she says, I’m going to bed. Like you said. Good night. Thanks, but good night. Carl shrugs, tells her don’t mind him, he’s just finishing his drink, and before she can object he switches back to the belovèd brother, jaws on like he has known the poor bastard all his life. So she doesn’t complain now, just quaffs the rye, then nests into the sheets, her famous bun to the breezes, and listens to him. Carl says she holds her goddamn hand curled up against her mouth and reminds him of how his little daughter sucks her thumb at night.”
“A detail only a doting father could provide,” Miller interposed. Fisher laughed drily, but the others seemed not to have noticed there had been an interruption. Jones downed his beer. Himebaugh’s glass sat untouched in front of him. The man’s soft flabby titter was nearly inaudible. Seemed in some world of his own. On the screen above, pain pills were Bigmouth’s product now. Disturbingly graphic.
Jones said, “Carl’s knob, caught wrong in his pants somehow, is paining him, so he decides the time is come. She is gazing placidly and weepily through the far wall, so he quietly slips his pants off and, talking all the time, hooks them on the foot of her bed. Then, just as the whore seems about to emerge from her distant focus, he jumps her, pins her arms behind her, and says: Your brother was the biggest shit I ever knew, he deserved to die!”
“Jesus Christ!” cried Castle, slamming the table, half out of his chair.
Mick was stunned, jaw slack, and even old Fisher lowered his chair, smile sliding to frown.
“Mad!” whispered Himebaugh, glancing at the others. “The man is a psychopath, a lust murderer!” But, strangely, it was as though he were still giggling.
“That cocksucker!” Castle thundered, as always the most vocal. “Why, he’s a damn, a damn, a goddamn — what did you say, Himebaugh?” With that, they started to laugh again.
While Jones relit his cigar a fourth time, Miller ducked behind the bar and pulled five more beers, omitting Ralph. Castle, Fisher, DeMars, and Himebaugh stared at each other with astonished half grins and exchanged condemnations. “No, what I mean, that sonuvabitch oughta hang!” Mick declared in summation.
“Well, the hapless lady is too shocked even to fart,” Jones resumed. “She starts a fierce struggle to break loose, but Carl is twice her size, and, besides, she’s at a real disadvantage there on her belly with two hundred and fifty pounds of hot raging beef saddling her, pinning her wings. And all the time he keeps rubbing it in what a cheap rotten punk her goddamn brother was.” Castle banged. Fisher was over the table. “Only trouble is, Carl complains, he can’t get his reamer in the slot from behind, nice inspirational view of these great nates butting and flushing, but from the style he has her pinned, he can’t jack her up enough to bore in without losing his hold. He tries to tap the devil’s porthole, but there’s too much angry muscle there.” Himebaugh, wide-eyed, watched it in his beer glass. Mick gaped. On the screen, Bigmouth was panned offcamera and a sniveling grandmother admired her new prizes. “Carl clamps both her wrists in one hand, perforates and diddles her with the thumb of the other. She screams and bawls and then suddenly she twists out of his grip and they punch and wrestle and peck and claw, but Carl downs her finally and plunges it in and she shrieks like she’s been stabbed for the first time. Carl’s getting edgy about the cops or Mrs. Dopey, it’s a scene like that, figures you can hear her all the way to West Condon, but he has locked the door and the time it’ll take them to break it down he reckons will be time enough and he doesn’t give a damn. He digs her how her brother was queer and about the fruity silk shirts he always wore in all kinds of nigger colors, she’d just cut him in, see, on how she had bought the boy all these silk shirts, and that the brother sucked everybody at the mine, and on and on, and she’s screeching and flapping and belting the shit out of him, and now he says there’s a real sweet stink rising, and she tries to pitch him out, but he’s got his talons deep in her tail and doesn’t let go no matter what, and she twists and doubles and sweats and even somehow gets her feet once against his chest, and, boy, he says he is flying blind but there is nothing like it!”
Jones drank beer to let Castle and Mick get a few choice pent-up expletives off their chests. Himebaugh was pale. “I’ll be goddamned!” muttered Fisher, now smiling broadly.
“So they’re crashing around on that bed, blood and feathers flying, she clawing at his eyes, him grabbing a fistful of her hair and arching her head back so she can’t take good aim, and first thing you know they’re whamming away in rhythm and she’s clutching him in the ass and warbling his goddamn name and they both come in a tremendous simultaneous explosion and collapse in a tremor of secondary spasms.”
Castle whapped the table and Mick, in his peculiar twitter, cried out the name of the Savior over and over. Beer was spilled. Jones calmly examined his mutilated cigar. Himebaugh’s eyes lacked focus. “I’ll be goddamned!” Fisher rumbled again, reaching for a wet pack of cigarettes on the table.
“But, Jesus, Lou! Do you mean to say — did she—?” Mick lacked the words for it.
“Yeah,” said Jones. “She liked it.”
“Goddamn!” boomed Castle. “It’s too much!”
“They both admit it was the greatest fuck they’ve ever had, if not indeed the greatest in world history. The rookery is a wreck, all whipped and shredded, blood here and there. Carl is nearly blind, but he can see that those flawless haunches are brilliantly striped and maybe for good. He apologizes about what he’d said, explains he really never knew her brother, he was just trying to snap her out of her doldrums. She says never mind, doesn’t matter. He says he is sure he was a great guy, the greatest, had to be: brother of a woman like her. And silk shirts were his favorite kind. She agrees and cuddles up in Carl’s arms and he ends up passing the night there. They couple three or four more times during the night and this morning. No comparison to the first round, but it is warm and satisfying, quoth our hero. He adds that his old lady really has her feathers up when he appears for breakfast this morning, clawed and bloodied and reeking of strange persons, but he’s feeling so afloat he doesn’t even take the bother to apologize, just eats his Wheaties in blissful silence, and wafts on down to the shop, advising everybody it is spring.” Jones pulled Himebaugh’s untapped beer toward him, leaned back and drained it, turned his attention to relighting the cigar: all signs that the tale was told.
It was too much for Castle’s restricted vocabulary. There was no expletive to do it justice. Finally, he just shook his tanned jowls and said, “What a story, man!”
“If it don’t beat all!” chirped Mick, mopping up the beer on the table with his apron. “Sometimes I think most of us poor bastards just don’t know how to live. This corrupt lunatic is — really! — ” He paused for effect and looked around at the others: “He’s a goddamn genius!”
“Yeah, you said it!” laughed Wally Fisher. He propped back on two legs again. “Goddamn genius!”
“It’s a fucking outrage, that’s what it is!” Castle laughed, relocating words. His voice banged in the still room. On the television, somebody won $33. Camera panned on the audience. Pasty sheep-faced smiles. Hands silently and dutifully slapping each other. “But goddamn if it ain’t true to life!”
“And twice as beautiful!” added Mick over his sopped apron, and they all laughed. He still sat, but now Miller’s interest in another beer had passed. He couldn’t help but keep Himebaugh in the edge of his eye: the man sat silently, shaking his bony head, his thin old legs crossed, hunched in such a way that his elbow was pressed into his groin.
“Miller,” said Fisher, “you oughta publish this!” The thought delighted them all.
“What’ll we call it?” Miller asked drily. “A Child’s Visit to a Whorehouse?”
“Now don’t take the fun out of it!” said Castle.
“What if this sort of animal madness were set up as a precept for humanity?” Himebaugh asked earnestly. He cleared his throat, shifted his position, straightened up. “What would we all turn into? It’s ghastly!”
“Aw, shit, Ralph,” Castle protested, “that’s stupid!” Himebaugh glared at the shoe salesman from across the round table, soft underlip turned in. “That’s goddamn plain stupid!” Castle repeated, rankled to have had such a good story tainted.
“Stupid! But this is grotesque! This disaster — I mean, in the middle of all this horror, this tragedy — that, that man — that beast — you’re all beasts!” Himebaugh was losing control.
“I thought it was pretty funny,” said Fisher.
“You’re a beast,” Jones said to him.
Himebaugh glanced darkly at their laughter.
Mick butted in: “Who do you suppose that’d be, Tiger? Reckon that’d be Oxford Clemens’ sister?”
“Sure,” said Miller. Bigmouth had given way on the screen to a smoking hunter. Miller lit one. “Dinah. I always wondered where Ox got those fancy shirts. I thought he stole them.”
“You used to get a little of that, didn’t you, Tiger?” Castle asked.
Miller smiled. For several days, he had felt his past sticking to him here like shreds of flypaper. “Well, she wasn’t the toughest teacher we had in high school,” he said, “but she was the sincerest.”
Mick stretched himself through the loose laughter to his feet and gathered up the beer glasses, lining them up on the bar. He got a bar rag to finish mopping the table. “That was sure one goddamn story,” he coda’d.
“Beasts!” bleated Himebaugh insistently and wiped his mouth nervously with a clean handkerchief. Castle snorted, and they started in again.
For an instant something seems to hover … enters him: his eyes open. They turn to her, blink in recognition. A hand faces its pale palm to her and she takes it. She assures him.
The phone rang. Everyone was gone. Miller, dozing upright in his swivel chair, listened to it jangle. Wouldn’t answer it. Looked at his watch. Seven. Home was an empty icebox and an unmade bed, didn’t feel like going there. Too bushed to go elsewhere. Still it rang, jarring him. He looked at it. Angry black fish, eyeing him with one gleam of reflection. He took it off the spit. “Hello?” He’d tell them it was a wrong number. But it was Marcella. He awoke. Giovanni was conscious and his condition was satisfactory. He listened to her voice, dreamed up questions to keep her talking, knew now there was a better place to go. But there was little more she could tell him. Except that Giovanni had been visited in the mine by the Virgin, a vision, so to speak. Yes, he could publish that. She had come to him in the form of a white bird.