Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  The Mallenders had their house decorated. They had the wood-work varnished, the floor tiles cleaned and polished. They had the lawns cut and tidied by a man from Serpentine older than Ted himself. Lily, for her part, back in the fold, and forgiven, had more jewellery, more dresses, and more shoes. She went into Sylvie’s and had colour added to her hair. Not just a lightening, or a darkening, not something on the same spectrum, but streaked, in Lily’s case, and in numerous cases to follow, a lustrous pink, the same shade as her venturesome nails.

  And they started to dream, those people. Even though they were only workforce, paid to begin with for panning and digging and mauling, though they were not those grizzled and hardy men who’d carried their lives on their backs all those years ago, still they dreamed of being the one who was one minute burrowing and sifting through soil and silt and the next seeing it right there in front of them. They dreamed of it under their nails, in their hair and on their scalp, inside their shoes and shirts. They dreamed of washing themselves at night and watching it drift off their skin like glitter.

  “We’ve come a long way, Lester,” he said and held the steak on the end of his knife. “We’ve worked it until it’s wrung out. And tomorrow it starts.”

  He bit the steak, chewed and swallowed it and sat back in the chair. He put the knife down, drummed his fingers on the table.

  “What is it?” Lester said.

  He paused, looked around the place. It was nine-thirty. Most of the people in Steve’s had gone.

  “This is almost all we have here. We are the financial backers. We are the men from the east. Carpe Diem Enterprises. We are the ones buying up the sections of land, paying for the machinery, the equipment, the surveyors, the wages of the men, et cetera. We are the takers of the risks, Lester. What did he say? Life is nothing without risk. You learn nothing. You gain nothing.” He took a breath in. “And if the maps and the locations are right, if the documents are real and the volume is what the volume says, if it’s the same north-westerly pattern, if there’s the carbon and the quartz in all the right places and it’s been right there on the Cassidy land all those years and just not reachable, then men from the east or no men from the east, Lester, we’re in the fucking money.”

  He closed his eyes, pushed at the handle of the knife. “But I’ve asked myself the same question over and over again. You asked it when we first got here and I’ve asked it most days since. You said ‘if it’s for real’. And my question has always been this: if it’s not for real, if it’s a trick or a ruse of some kind, then what does he gain, this mystery man? I still have the land. I leave town. I move on. So, where does he gain?”

  He picked up the knife again and dug it into the meat, watched the sap run out. “And I have no answer. I don’t see it. I’ve looked at it from all sides and I still don’t see anything. What did he say? You play what you see.”

  He bit into the flesh, licked the juices from his lips. “What did he say? I dare any man on earth to cross me.”

  And, on that historic day, when mid-scale, independent gold-prospecting came back to the town of Mission for the first time since the dregs of the nineteenth century, as the convoy of multi-purpose trucks made its way west from beyond the prairies to become components in a series of camps, as town-based caterers set up to keep those camps fed and watered and the workforce themselves, the diggers, the panners and the drivers, walked across the rickety bridge or over Coronation Point or on the long road round to the rough terrain, so Madeline Clay packed her bags and prepared to leave.

  Having tipped the bell-boy handsomely, there was only the walk from the hotel to the station left, one last couple of hundred yards of pretence; the measured gait, the relaxed mouth, the eyes alert and the head aloft at the precise angle that suggested self-assurance but fell short of hauteur. It was a role she’d gotten used to, the loyal wife with a healthy independence, the good cause lady, the honorary Missionite who spoke kindly to passers-by as she walked, who smiled, and said, yes, she did have to leave, for a while at least. She had things to do, places to go, those people to see back east. But, she said, and waved over her shoulder, she’d be back.

  It was late September, a skittish breeze that ruffled her hair or brushed at the hand that held the packed bag. The clouds were high and puff-balled. She had ten minutes to wait. She checked her clutch-bag, blinked at the blown dust and grit and adjusted the lambswool shawl around her shoulders. She held her peace, stepped onto the train when it came, lifting the bag behind her. She found a seat, settled herself, the twitch around the mouth kicking in, the muttered curse as a nail chipped, the first signs the pretence was beginning to slip.

  And she would not be back. This was, and would be, the last time that Madeline Clay, previously Dolores, Nancy and plain Jane, the authority on race-tracks, five-card stud and palmistry, and once the provider of a home-cooked stew for Jack Cassidy, would see the town of Mission where she was, and had been, close to regal.

  And one of the reasons was that the woman who moved quickly from the waiting room, across the platform and onto the train just as Madeline was chipping her nail on the clasp of the clutch-bag, was Delilah Morris.

  The whole thing was just as Vincent had planned it; a mid-sized operation somewhere between a draggle of lone prospectors heading out with hand-drawn maps and the fully-equipped efficiency of a registered mining company with its own logo. He’d accounted for it. And, with enough research and advice, he’d graded it so that the first findings, along with Ted’s investment and the ‘money from the east’, would bankroll any later investment in more heavy and intensive machinery.

  He’d done the same with the layout of the land, marking it out in sections, paying Doug Sketchings good money to draw its lines and limits. Vincent was always thorough. He was not prone to acts of randomness or impetuosity. Every risk he made was a calculated one, and once those calculations were done, he was, just like his father before him, meticulous in their execution.

  So, the camps were separated, according to function and need. The one that governed the panning and dealt with all things wash-planted and cradled was on a flat, shingly stretch close to where the river forked north-west. The basic diggers were set up near the bluffs and outcrops of the rough terrain, next to land quartered by Doug’s ranks and divisions, and the flatbed trucks and the transport used primarily to move the freight that couldn’t be carried or lifted by hand lay somewhere in between. The caterers made choices on the hoof. The larger numbers of men were panning along the river’s edge, but the more physical and exhausting work was done by the fewer in amongst the rocks and bluffs. The first group could work for longer but when they stopped, they stopped in bulk. The second needed more breaks. They needed drinks bedded in ice, and by mid-afternoon, they needed the ice itself, scooped and sold in see-through bags.

  If the panners were the pioneers and scouts, the diggers, made up mostly of ex-mill workers, were the bedrock. The work was harder, no doubt. It was the non-stop ridding of debris and rock, the pummelling and battering, hour after hour, of granite shelves, of chalk and mudstone and shale. Hands and feet would blister, repeatedly. Lungs would strain to gather in breath and sweat would sting the eyes. Lips would dry and crack open and every break, whether they ate or drank or sizzled ice onto some part of their bodies, they took it in turns to kneel on each other’s backs and knead out, with elbows, knuckles and thumbs, the knotted wires of muscles and flesh.

  For the panners, mostly men from the neighbourhood blocks, men whose lives until then had been largely without zeal or shine, the days from the onset were long. They set out at first light and didn’t get back until dusk at least. They spent every waking moment swinging a pan or rocking a cradle from side to side or sifting through the gravel on the riverbed like pearl-fishers. They watched for nothing else. Their heads and their eyes trained to no other thing, their lives, even in sleep, even in the wrap of home-life, saturated.

  But none of that mattered, not the hardship or the length of days or
their inability to function at home when, in the late afternoon at the end of the first week, one of the panners, an unemployed, single man in his late twenties working the shallow gulley at the river’s curve, looked down at his tray of black sand and there, in its midst, were those solid pieces of shimmer and glint.

  News got round quickly. The men gathered in from the rough terrain. The caterers came. Everything changed from that moment on. Every single one of those men paid to look for the gold in one way or another felt different. The panners, the diggers, the drivers. All of them. They felt like the men they’d dreamt of being, felt it in the rise and fall of their chests and the firmer jawlines. They felt like men who counted for something.

  The following week there was more. Every day, something. Every day a whoop and a yelp from somewhere along the river, and every time the same sense of success, the swell of pride, of optimism and hope. The men, whether they were panners or diggers or drivers, went from homespun hunches and guesswork to experts overnight, to aficionados on methods and techniques, on how best to hold the rocker-box, how to work the jig-plant and gin-wheel, on the lie and the run of the river, the qualities of silt, the proximity and likelihood of other sign-posting elements, on the silver, quartz and calcite from which the routes of those placer deposits might be traced. They sat in Harry’s bar and discussed such things at length, and then they left, to get some sustenance and rest, because, almost overnight, there was purpose and reason in abundance to head out when it was still dark and stand knee-deep in river-flow for twelve hours to root down some more.

  Vincent was at the helm, well and truly. Whenever and wherever news of the findings came in, he was there. His was the first handshake, the nodding of the head, keen for every detail of where and how much. His was the smile and the slap on the back. His were the figures kept, the notes made, and the directions drawn. People stopped him on the sidewalks. The women thanked him for giving their men their lives back. They thanked him for what he’d done, for dragging the town off its knees and making it boom time again. The panners thanked him, the diggers thanked him, the drivers and the caterers thanked him. The store-holders and store-workers thanked him. Harry and Steve and old Mr Parker thanked him, and, in those first few weeks, he became so synonymous with success and good fortune that he hardly had to pay for anything anymore. Not a beer in Harry’s, nor a steak in Steve’s. He bought no coffee or pastries. His flat tyre got fixed. He could park anywhere he liked. Even the Station Hotel reduced its rates for him and his adjoining rooms. If he wanted a haircut or a cut-throat shave, Ike would do it for nothing, and for nothing he’d tell him about the history and the people and the what was what, there and then. Two of the conceptions wanted Vincent for a boy and Madeline for a girl. The pumpkins were larger this year, the cattle were breeding, and the wedding plans were nascent but bold.

  And if he’d had the need for a manicure, a pedicure, a facial or a wax, then he’d’ve heard in Sylvie’s fresh-painted, flesh-flowered parlour with its gold bunting and its glittered mirrors all about Sophie Li’s disappearance, about her resignation from the meat factory one day and her departure the next. He’d’ve kept up to date with Lily’s latest fashion extravagancies, with the modes inspired, it was true, by the early fall collection of Madeline, his queen. He’d’ve heard of Rita’s various beaux, of Ruth Anderson missing from church, and of Delilah Morris not seen for the last couple of weeks, gone looking, so they said, for he who made them shuffle and squirm still in ways they would not care to explain, who was, if you believed it, deported, destitute, or drowned, who was wanted state to state for felonies too many to mention, who was speaking voodoo of some kind, who was cultish up in the mountains somewhere, mumbling nonsensical and repetitive prayers to a bug-eyed guru five times a day until he was raptured.

  He could’ve heard all the other talk in there, the same talk as on every street and sidewalk and in every store; the gold, the gold, and the gold. What it looked like, no, what it actually looked like, this close. What the panning men said it was like to see it for the first time in amongst the gravel and the silt. Like a vision, they said, like something they were in the presence of and not something they mastered. They spoke of moments when God had moved into their lives, whether He’d stayed or not, when their lives had felt something other, something beyond who they were and what they did.

  Vincent and Lester drove past where the homestead turn used to be, and on, up to the edge of the rough terrain. It was the first Sunday in November, mid-morning. Vincent got out first and walked over to the fence-posts that held the southern belly of his land. He looked up ahead, saw how the path had been worn into by the panners’ use, how its route cut across to get to the river, and further on, the thinner, less-worn track, used by the diggers on their way up to the ravines and bluffs.

  Lester stayed in the car. He leant forward, let the fleshy back of his hands take the weight and the tack of his forehead. He breathed heavily, moved only when Vincent summoned him, and then eased himself, a good twenty pounds heavier than when he first came, out onto the gravelled road. He shambled over, his shoulders slumped, as Vincent turned once again to face the land.

  “Our mystery man is not letting us down, Lester,” he said. “The locations are right. The patterns are right. The volume is what the volume says and what he gains is his twenty per cent. We doubted him wrongly. He’s a man of his word.”

  Lester blinked out, took a half-finished cigar from his pocket, and lit it.

  “There’s an estimation of at least four or five seams that lead out from the river. We trace them, Lester. We follow them across to the Cassidy land. We match them up with those from the rough land and the rocks and any there might be coming down from Coronation Point, and we dig. And if we can’t dig, we drill. And if we can’t drill, we blast. Now, Doug figures the land is shallow land, mostly vegetation and dirt. He figures we don’t have to go down more than fifty feet to get to the hard rock. We have enough made already to rent the dozers and trucks, but it’s how many. So, I need you to go and ask Ted for measurements, and pass them on to Doug. Then we can figure how many and what size.”

  Lester tried to lick the dryness from his lips. “I’ve done some digging myself,” he said.

  “And get me a duration if you can.”

  “There are three possibilities.” Lester felt a tingle in his hand, enough of a sudden numbness to make him drop the cigar to the ground. He could only watch it, didn’t bend to pick it up nor move his foot to tread it out. He saw the soft breathing of its burn, the ululations of orange and ash.

  “And the panners split, some further north as far as they can get along the river, the rest back towards the town, up to the mill and the woods behind it. And keep an eye on them, Lester. I know the scales are here, the checkpoint’s here, the trucks are here, but some of those fuckers I don’t trust. This is more than just gold here, more than the nuggets and the flakes and the shine of the stuff. This is where people lose their heads. This is where they step off the treadmill and don’t come back. What were you saying?”

  Lester moved his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  “What possibilities?”

  The light of the cigar began to dwindle.

  A pale Lester Hoops walked into the basking glow of Ted Mallender’s office two days later and picked up the measurements. He drove out and took them to Doug who, after Lester had gone, unrolled them and splayed them out over the clean surface of the kitchen table. The boys were at kindergarten, Viola at the shopping mall. They had money for the first time since he’d left the LMA. The bills were paid up, the savings healthier. The car was fixed, the ants gone, the breakages repaired, and Viola, free since the delivery of her children of Dr Stone’s prescriptive medication, put a brush through her hair once in a while and bought shoes she didn’t shuffle like a drunkard in. Everything in Doug’s life was going swimmingly. Except for two things; those allegiances of his. On the one hand, Vincent had given him the kind of opportunity it looked like he m
ight never see again. He paid him well. He trusted him. They played golf together. But then there was John. And when he sat with those measurements in front of him, he felt like every line he drew, every route he geometrically traced over the contours of the land, was cutting into him, A to crooked Z.

  Once the measurements were done, Lester could figure the number and the size of the dozers and trucks. He could go along and order their arrival five weeks down the line while they waited for the diggers to finish up with the mauling of the boulders and stones and to take those few days extra to prepare for the Cassidy land. And while they soaked those bones and sealed those gashes, the panners, on Vincent’s instruction, split. Most followed the river back towards the town, building pontoon bridges so they could work either side, but a smaller, single-figured group, hand-picked and bonussed by Vincent, including the Snipe brothers, carried on up-river to the north-west, edging into the wilder foothills where even to get to the river was perilous, and when they did there was little shale or silt to work with, only ice-cold water that hurtled and boomed its way past on the way down.

  They set up makeshift camps, skinny tents exposed to animals and wind, and slept there instead of going home, their cradles and pans and boots at their heads. They took what whisky they could and drank what survived the clashes and falls of the trek. They took cartons of cigarettes and smoked them grim-faced in the dark, talking of silver they’d seen, of calcite under the water and quartz in the veins beneath their feet, of places they figured might be better, easier to drag their pans through. They listened out for carrion, and the shuffle of hooved feet.