Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  Sholto was terrified, his arms and legs stiff and reluctant, but he followed the man. The picks were dripping and cold, but sharp, and Sholto was glad of his gloves. But once he was perched up by the fissure, Mews made him remove one glove. Mews pressed Sholto’s fingers to the fissure. “That’s a blower,” he said.

  Sholto felt the warm, silky pressure of the gas against his palm. He nodded to Mews to show he felt it, and they climbed down again.

  Mews checked the three gasometers. Everyone stood about in the silence, Sholto watching the glowing filaments of the electric lightbulbs—a source of fire behind a shell of fragile glass. He was grateful for the light, and afraid of it. His heart was pounding. The only sound was the ventilation, and the hiss and splash of the hoses. Mews sat Sholto down on the conveyor and got settled himself. “When it starts up again we can ride it out,” he said.

  “Won’t they need you here?”

  “Once they can start up again they won’t want me breathing down their necks. The blower will exhaust itself. The gas will dissipate. There is much less already. I can scarcely smell it.”

  “I could smell it up there.”

  “Yes. Gas gathers against the roof. The week before the explosion in ’29 the mine definitely smelled of gas. But it wasn’t one leak. It wasn’t just the breakthrough to the gassy void, no matter what you hear said. Look, there were things we didn’t know then that we know now. Now we have barometers in mines. Did you know that coal leaks gas when the barometric pressure goes down? Bet you didn’t. In ’29 there was a storm, a nasty one. It hung over the western arm of the Palisades for three days. We miners were quite glad to be underground and out of it. It was mostly wind, not rain, or we’d have been worried about flooding. But the whole mine was bleeding methane.”

  “I’d never heard any of that before,” Sholto said.

  “Look it up, kid. The meteorological records. The county council road reports. There was a huge slip in the Lazuli Gorge. The scar has grown over, but it’s still visible.”

  Sholto realized he’d come for eyewitness stories—not scientific analysis. For his father, the Bull Mine disaster was the story of the inquiry and the labor law changes. It was the story of the disaster’s impact on the growth of the unions. How it changed all the government’s plans for the southwest. And how all that related to the stock market crash. The Professor was always talking about material realities, but Sholto was beginning to see that the Professor’s view of what was material, and real, was perhaps a little limited.

  Mews was sitting on the still conveyor, picking up lumps of coal, looking at them and putting them back like someone holding up eggs to a bright light to check for the shadowy patch that would show they were fertilized (and unsalable. City people didn’t like to find the red spots or little blobs of dark fiber that reminded them that eggs came from chickens and might sometimes contain the beginnings of an embryo). As he studied the coal, Mews said, “Of course at Bull we had rail tracks and horse carts instead of a conveyor. The horses were unshod. Had to be. Horseshoes can cause sparks. They had leather bits and tackle too. The Bull had a narrow point on its gateway, what’s called a convergence, where the walls are forced inward, because of rock pressure. The engineers kept reinforcing it, and it kept closing very gradually. The afternoon of the explosion the horses wouldn’t go past the convergence. One of the chain runners took note of that and went all the way down to the working face to pull his son out in the middle of his shift. They were both sacked for it. They went off home, and five hours later their teacups rattled. The explosion was at six p.m. and most of the town was sitting down to eat. Everyone knew what it meant when their crockery rattled.”

  Sholto’s family had dinner at eight. Dinner at eight—and an imperfect grasp of material reality. Sholto was feeling ashamed of himself and his comfortable, white-collar life.

  The conveyor started up again abruptly and began to carry them away from the coal face. The continuous miner started too and resumed its shrieking rattle when its picks touched the coal seam. Sholto looked back and watched the bright nexus of the inbye recede. After the sound of the continuous miner the conveyor seemed quiet. Still, Sholto had to lean close to Mews when the man started to talk again.

  “That man I was telling you about, the one who was all for going back into the mine after the explosion—you’re going to want to talk to him. Lealand Zarene. Nine of the thirty-one who died were Zarenes. The Zarenes weren’t a mining family, though. Lealand, his father, Colvin, and uncle Talbot had been in the Bull for a good six years, but the rest of them were newbies. The family had land, but not much else, and they were trying to raise money to pay lawyers to fight the Lazuli Dam project. You will have heard about the Lazuli Dam?”

  “Yes,” Sholto said. He knew that the dam was first planned in the mid-1920s. If it had been built it would have flooded the Zarene Valley and drowned all the orchards. The plans were shelved after the stock market crash, resurrected in 1938, and shelved again when Southland went to war in 1941.

  Mews said, “The road up the gorge to the Zarene Valley was built for the dam. It’s not exactly a country road. And had the Zarenes ever wanted it a road would have been built through the valley to join the road across the Palisades at Fort Rock.”

  “They didn’t want a road?”

  “Not a proper one. There was a narrow dirt road from Fort Rock, but they let that grow over. Anyway, the Zarenes would tell people that they were down the mine to raise money for legal fees. But there’s the matter of the life insurance policies.”

  “Life insurance policies?”

  “You should ask the Zarenes about that. Anyway—as I understand it, the whole Lazuli Dam idea is back on the table. This government is very big on hydroelectricity.”

  Sholto was tired of trying to hear over the sound of the machinery. Also, since he was safely on his way out of the mine he felt he should take a good look around and get impressions, make the most of the experience. He hated the place. Hated the bolted roof over his head. Hated the timber brickwork behind which the gas lay like a sleeping dragon. And the moment the white slot of the mine’s mouth appeared, he had to suppress the urge to jump off the conveyor and run up the incline and back into the light.

  They dismounted from the conveyor at the portal. Mews stopped to talk to some workers. Sholto walked out under the open sky. He wanted to remove his helmet, but knew that it wasn’t permitted till he was back on the far side of the colliery gates.

  Mews joined him. “I’m afraid I’ve complicated your story.”

  He had. Sholto’s story was to have been all eyewitness accounts. The ordeal. The sorrow. The words of the men who’d had to front up to newspapers and the government inquiry. Sholto had loved all the color of the tale and appreciated the politics. But from Mews he’d gotten geology and engineering and economics. Plus a storm, insurance policies, and two fires. He was being asked to consider—actually, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was being asked to consider. He said, “Is there anyone I can talk to about the plans to dam the Lazuli?”

  “The historical plans, or the recent ones? Your girlfriend will have found things in the newspaper archive in the Massenfer library.”

  “She’s not researching this.”

  “But she is researching?”

  “Folklore. Stories about witchcraft.”

  “Oh,” said Mews. He looked hard at Sholto. A moment passed, and then he said, “I’ve been working in coal mines for thirty-five years now. I know what is and isn’t possible. When there are accidents in mines, there are always people wanting a miracle. And when a miracle happens, they thank God and don’t think too hard about the odds. One man walked out of Bull Mine after the explosion in ’29, and one was carried out. The man who was carried out was a chain runner working the shift opposite Lealand Zarene—his cousin Cyrus. Cyrus Zarene was with his horse team, riding a car near the top of the gate. He was blown up the gateway, and when we went in we found him almost straightaway, unconscious, and
with a busted leg. The other survivor claimed he was around the corner of the crosscut at South Main, having a cup of tea. He said the fire went right on past him, up the shaft. But that isn’t possible. Fire goes anywhere there’s air. Some people will tell you that the pattern of burns on the debris showed that a fire had gone down the shaft from the crosscut at South Main. It came up from the working face where the explosion was, flamed out at the wet patch, then a second fire came down from the crosscut at South Main. A second fire that started there. People will tell you that. Of course I think the reason the other survivor—Ghislain Zarene—walked out of the mine with scarcely any soot on him, when everyone else was dead, was because he hadn’t been down the shaft at all when it happened. He can’t have been. The only possible explanation is that he clocked on, then climbed out the Bull’s downcast—except I can’t say why he would have, except that he knew the mine would explode. So there’s that. And there’s the life insurance policies, of which he was one of the beneficiaries—though he couldn’t have set them up himself because he was only seventeen and too young to sign a legal document. But there are those who will tell you that of course it was a Zarene who survived. And of course it was that one.”

  Sholto frowned at the mine safety manager, who had spent the last hours challenging his ignorance, but who had been otherwise very helpful. Why was Mews now spinning this strange story?

  Mews caught Sholto’s look of skepticism, and his face cooled. He looked away. He said, “The barbershop in Massenfer has local historical photos on its walls. Go in and have a look. There’s a photograph there that people say is of that Zarene lad, taken about four years before he went down the mine. It was taken at a school picnic in the Zarene Valley. The Zarene children used to ride over on their horses to go to the school in Massenfer. I had a couple in my class. Anyway, have a look at that picture and make up your own mind.”

  * * *

  THE BARBER TOLD Sholto he’d be with him shortly. There was a man already in the chair. The barber gestured with his scissors at a bench by the door.

  Sholto said he’d amuse himself by having a look at the historical photographs.

  “All my uncle Jim’s,” said the barber. “He worked for the Messenger, 1907 to 1927.”

  “An institution in himself,” said the man in the chair. “Jim Bindle.”

  “He opened a studio after that and photographed just about every wedding on the Peninsula for the next fifteen years.”

  “My wedding too,” said the man in the chair.

  “That’s him as a young fellow,” the barber said, and pointed with his scissors again.

  Sholto had been so busy attending to the history of Jim Bindle that his perusal of the photos had stuck at a panoramic picture of the massed employees of the timber mill. He crossed the room to give Bindle’s portrait a few moments of polite inspection. It showed a thin, tanned young man in a white duster coat, leaning on a small cairn. “He was a dreamhunter!” said Sholto.

  “Ranger,” said the barber. “He was making photographic landmark maps for the Dream Regulatory Body.”

  The silence of loss came into the room.

  As an undergraduate Sholto had once tried to write an essay about this. The Professor said that it was very interesting, but was Sholto trying to invent a new kind of history? One without historical references and facts? Sholto’s essay argued something like this: Southland was a big country, with a population that was sufficiently large but not too large; with industry and a wealth of minerals; with scientifically developed agriculture, good roads and rail, three deepwater harbors, some fine universities—so why wasn’t it more of a player on the world stage? Sholto’s answer to his essay’s question was that Southlanders were in a sense a sad and defeated people. They were people who had once lived in a beautiful house, which had burned down. They had a way of life that vanished overnight. There were remnants—like Massenfer’s oddly shaped hotel, once a dream palace. But all the remnants were reminders. Of the great twenty-year boom, a boom that had elevated ordinary people into great wealth and fame, nothing remained. Southlanders had had something irreplaceable—the Place, a mysterious territory where some could go and catch dreams that they could perform for others—they had that miraculous thing, and they lost it.

  Sholto’s father’s generation were raised by parents baffled by loss and defeated by grief. The Professor said that Sholto’s essay’s conclusion—that Southlanders were people who had everything going for them, but were spoiled—was the kind of thesis that only a glib young man could come up with. Susan had read that essay too. She and Sholto had only just met. Susan admired it, which had made Sholto warm to her. She said it was brilliant and quite right. “People get over things,” she said, “even families do. But cultures don’t. Or maybe cultures are made up of the things that people don’t get over.”

  Sholto gazed at the energetic young Bindle and sighed. He moved on to a picture of the Massenfer road rail bridge under construction. A picture of a school theatrical performance, the boys wearing beards drawn on with burnt cork. A picture of a landslide, and one of loggers crowded on the stump of a vast tree. Then he came to a series of pictures of the school picnic, 1925, with women in striped cotton frocks sitting in cars or pony traps stuffed with picnic baskets and holding infants in sailor suits. Men in shirtsleeves having a tug of war with three times their number of boys. There was the usual rag tied on the rope between them. It was a humorous photo. It looked like a woman had dashed forward to move the long ruler that marked the place the rag must not cross. She was helping the boys to win. Sholto took a closer look. She was beautiful, with sleek dark hair and the smooth brow and half-circle eyelids of an Italian Madonna. Sholto was sure it was Iris Zarene.

  The last photo in the series was a great surprise. Its background was the same field spread with picnic rugs and baskets. It was late in the day. The well-dressed children were now barefoot and sunburned. The shadows were long and low—including the shadows of the stones floating above the boy’s head, one that looked as if it was a bird about to alight on his shoulder and one hanging by his face and throwing a slash of shadow across his smiling mouth. The boy was kneeling, one hand on the grass. His other hand was about to touch down too, and the blades of grass beneath it seemed to bristle up toward his fingers. There were seven rocks in the air. The boy’s pose was not a juggler’s—hands up, having tossed something and waiting for something else to come down—he seemed not to be looking at what he was up to. Sholto knew that pictures like this had been contrived. There was a famous one of the artist Salvador Dalí, apparently suspended in the air, his brush and easel suspended too, and a black cat, a chair, a glassy arc of water. Of course Dalí had lifted his easel, jumped, let go easel and brush and—at the same time—some unseen people out of the photo’s frame had tossed a chair, a cat, a pitcher full of water, all on cue, and the photographer had snapped off his shot. That’s what this must be. It was Jim Bindle’s arty surrealist photograph, circa 1925. That’s how it must have been done. But still, Sholto felt uneasy. The trick didn’t explain the energetic bristle of grass on that tired picnic ground, or the look on the boy’s face. It was the expression of someone too proud to be proud of what he was doing. Sholto read the expression because he’d seen it before. It was how Canny had looked when her team was in the finals of the junior section of the National Mathematics Competition, her first, before her teachers began trying to hide who in Castlereagh Tech’s team was answering most of the questions. Sholto had been in the audience. He hadn’t understood any of the math, so instead of listening, he watched everyone’s faces. Canny kept pressing her bell and producing answers. She looked embarrassed and formidably patient. Sholto was reminded of a cart horse he’d seen standing in its stall with a whole litter of puppies around its still hooves—the stupid mother dog had gone and given birth and left them there, and the horse hadn’t dared move his feet for fear of crushing a puppy. Canny had looked like that—patient, proud, irritable, restrained. And so d
id the boy in the photo.

  “Who is this?” Sholto asked the barber.

  “Hmmm,” said the barber.

  Sholto waited.

  “People usually ask me how my uncle did it.”

  “Well, yes, it’s very cleverly done,” Sholto said, to get that out of the way.

  “That is Ghislain Zarene,” the barber said.

  “One of the two survivors of the Bull Mine disaster?”

  The barber was silent. But after a moment the man in the chair said, “He may have survived, but after the memorial service he wasn’t seen again.”

  Sholto turned back to the picture. He saw it had a caption, in Jim Bindle’s neat printing. The caption read: “Boy levitating rocks.”

  * * *

  IN THE CAR ON THE WAY BACK from Massenfer, Sholto told Susan about his visit to the mine. He decided to leave the story of his visit to the barbershop for later, after dinner. But after dinner he and Susan were looking for Canny, who hadn’t been seen that day by anyone.

  11

  WHEN CANNY GOT to the bottom of the hill her feet were muddy, her ankles and calves were covered in scratches, and she was impossibly tired. The only thing that kept her from lying down in a field and falling asleep was the thought that someone might find her. She didn’t want to be carried back to Orchard House and its telltale wind chimes. She knew she’d have to explain her overnight absence, and that her explanation would have to include how she’d come to lose her sandals, which were still where she’d left them, under a rosebush beside the lawn of the hidden house. She needed a plausible story, and Sholto should be the first to hear it. Sholto had to believe her story, and then keep telling it for her.

  She must get to the guesthouse without being seen and wait near it till Sholto appeared.

  There was a game Canny used to play with Marli and Marli’s little brothers when she’d stay over. The kids had to make their way around the streets of their suburb at night avoiding the lights of passing cars. They were pretending to be escaped prisoners of war. They’d spent a lot of time pressed into hedges.