She wanted to escape the earth, but she didn’t want to die, so she was going to San Francisco, to sit beside an ocean she had never seen before, and to be far from those she loved.
* * *
—
In San Francisco you have to take off your sweater and put it on again twenty times a day. What else is there to say about it? Something about the fog? It’s crawling with assholes. It would be a beautiful place to live if you had a time machine.
I am trying to date again. It’s been a while, and the modes of courtship have changed. My phone shows me the faces of women who are physically near me, and I decide whether I like these faces. The owners of the faces decide whether they like my face. If we like each other’s faces, we type messages to each other. I try to think of things to say to the owners of these beautiful faces that will be different from the things everyone else is saying. I tell them that I grew up in New Jersey, that I’ve seen the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens. It was late at night, and I was eating a hamburger with a friend at a diner, on this long stretch of empty road where there was nothing else around but the dark woods growing out of the sandy soil. I looked up from my hamburger and saw him through the window, but he was pretty far away. He was naked, covered in short, stiff hair like the hair of a dog, but shaped otherwise more or less like a man. He was standing at the edge of a beam of light from a streetlamp, at the border between the woods and the parking lot, just staring in at us. I could tell by the way he held his tail in his hands that he’d been alone a long time.
Jo Lloyd
The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies
The companions
HM HAS BEEN DECEIVED by the dainty manners of first acquaintance, when Cassandra nibbled his fingers and blew nose kisses into his palm. Now she flattens her ears, twitches at the reins. Every hoof she sucks from the ground aims another clot of water at her rider. HM happens to know that horses, like all creatures intended to run for their lives, can observe their full compass round, so when she turns her head back, it is not to look but to make by-our-lady sure he sees her look. Raindrops have beaded on her lashes and whiskers, transforming her into some frosted basilisk of the great northern ocean, risen to recite the charges against him.
Behind HM rides Shiers, also sulking, on a cow-hocked bay. Shiers has tunneled deep into his habitual melancholy to uncover a seam of stygian gloom. With every new set of accounts or assay report, his head has sunk further between his shoulders, threatening to reduce him to one of those nipple-eyed monsters of Ethiop. He may not even have understood the fine details. His mind is blunt, a maul at best, or a crowbar. For this reason, he has been HM’s most trusted employee yet tedious companion, the more so right now for his rheumatic affliction. He sniffled and sneezed through a passable supper at the inn and then again through a more doubtful breakfast. Aeolian fanfares accompany their progress along the puddled track.
At the front of this small cavalcade rides the man who calls himself Tall John, his feet dangling past the belly of a gray pony that is first cousin to a sheep. Tall John wears a short hood or perhaps a long hat of coney fur, which covers his neck and his ears and merges around his face into a grizzled ruff where, HM surmises, the coney stops and the man begins.
Since leaving the highway, they have slithered up and down and around so many hills that every six yards ridden marks one gained. Each ascent reveals more hills—bare, treeless wastes of sorrel and mauve, rain clouds tumbling down their slopes like the smoke of burnt villages.
The bay slips, and Shiers curses. “How much longer must we wade through this by-our-lady swamp?”
“Pish!” says HM, to assure anyone listening that in him, at least, dwells the true spirit of an Adventurer. “Pash!” he adds, more quietly, because perhaps Tall John, with his fur-coddled ears, has not heard.
But Tall John looks back at them, with an expression that suggests their exchange has disturbed the grasshoppers in his head.
“A journey is as long as it is long.”
“Indeed,” agrees HM, noting that once again this could be the wisdom of a rustic savant, the subtlety of a cozener, or the rambling of a lunatic.
It was Shiers whom Tall John approached first, with a tale that he could not be persuaded to elaborate or even repeat. When Shiers explained the finder’s fee and its conditions, Tall John stipulated that HM must be of the preliminary party, plus Shiers, and no one else.
So here is HM, founding director and deputy governor of the Company of Mine Adventurers, former comptroller of the Middle Temple, former member of Parliament, knighted by His Royal Majesty King Charles II, in sodden garb on a sodden horse trailing through the sodden by-our-lady wilderness after either a simpleton or a crook.
It is clear to HM that Tall John belongs to that most disagreeable class of humanity, those who refuse honest employment, choosing instead to scrape a living off the land, like animals. They take anything they can eat or burn or sell: berries, acorns, bracken, scraps of fleece, leaves, peat, sand. They trap and fish, empty birds’ nests, pull the very stones from the ground. And with all this, account themselves a second Adam, more free than a freeborn gentleman.
This morning, in the stable yard of the inn, Tall John observed the preparations in silence. HM still prickles from the smirk he recognized as he took up his reins. A look-at-you-fine-sir-in-your-fancy-sleeves-and-neckcloth smirk.
Smirk while you can, Mr. Coneyhead, HM thought, we’ll see who is fine in the end.
Tall John looks back again, and HM sits up straighter, like one who has studied not only horsemanship but also fencing and archery (has Tall John studied fencing and archery? HM thinks not), and reminds himself that before getting mixed up with the Mine Adventurers he had single-handedly restored the fortunes of his wife’s family and hauled the estate into the modern age. He has put occupation into the hands of the poor and gruel into the mouths of their young, even provided them with ministers and teachers at his own expense (that is, at the expense of the Company, yet is that not the same thing, almost?).
He brings to mind, as he is wont to do in moments of doubt, his favorite poem, a lengthy ode on the subject of HM and his mineral pursuits (is there an ode to Tall John? again, HM thinks not), certain flattering lines of which he has committed to memory: “a genius richer than the mines below,” “with virtues bless’d and happy counsels wise,” “commanding arts yet still acquiring more.”
It is comforting to remember, as the rain pools in the toes of his boots, that he is “with virtues bless’d.” For it is common knowledge, among Adventurers as among rustics, that the signs they seek are reserved for the righteous.
HM wishes, above all, to be seen as righteous. Everything he has ever done has been for the good of his children, the nation, the deserving poor. It wounds him when his altruism is not acknowledged. When, instead of “Thank you very much, HM” or “HM has done a fine job,” he must suffer, “Where are the receipts?” “Where are the accounts, the evidence?”
But if today’s expedition finds nothing, then he has been cheated, and will look a fool. And there is nothing he hates more than to look a fool.
* * *
—
An unwelcome apprehension teases at the edge of HM’s vision—a familiarity in the shape of the hills, in the contours of the valley through which their horses wind, and now a row of hovels, thatched like sties. With consternation, he realizes they are approaching one of the Company’s sites.
He has passed here once before, on a tour of inspection with Waller. It is among the smaller mines, not greatly different, at casual glance, from the surrounding dents and hollows and tumbles of rock. The entrance resembles a crude lair, clawed out by some night-skulking beast to evade a fiercer one.
A number of men and women and children are lolling about on the surface. They have the yellowed skin of subterranean creatures, and when they rai
se their heads it is with the single movement of a startled herd. HM tries to adopt a deputy-governorial posture but is conscious of how he must appear—mud spattered, squelching, his entourage a blemmye, a sheep, and a coney-headed clown. The opportunity to retreat has passed.
Yet again he is to be tested. Not Hercules, not even Job himself, has had to overcome more obstacles.
Hardships of his early life—he achieves success
When his mother died, he mourned a shade that had moved now and then across his sight, seeming always to be attending to someone more important. Four years later, he lost his sister, Louisa, who had petted him and carried him and played with him, teaching him his letters, helping him to fashion shiplets of paper and muskets of blackthorn.
“What a blessing it wasn’t one of the boys,” said Aunt Verity, shaking dust from her little-used head, and HM said that he would happily trade, for Louisa’s life, that of his elder brother Richard, whose preferred pastimes included kicking, smacking, tripping, pinching, and twisting.
He was beaten for this sentiment yet did not recant.
HM’s role was to be audience to the parade of his brother’s talents. Richard was quick and strong and courageous. Richard was accomplished in Greek, Latin, rhetoric, ancient history, and the use of arms. Richard went up to university with a princely allowance and a small household to attend him.
HM, meanwhile, had to scrimp his way through Oxford and the Middle Temple on £80 a year. And it was not enough that he had to live like a pauper—his father denied requests for loans or expenses, even the necessities required to secure a royal appointment and thereby HM’s legal career (not to mention pay off a number of debts).
In the end, however, he didn’t need his father or his aunt or his brother or any of his weak-livered relatives, only his own industry and excellent judgment.
Mary was very young when he met her, pale and thin like her mother, with the same prominent bones. The family had made its money initially in salt, which might account for a certain redness, as if from crying, about all their eyes. Still, wise investors are tempted not by the sparkle of an object, yet rather by its use. In her hair was the black of coal, in her irises, the gray of ore. She was the wealth of nature in the shape of a girl.
Mary was the sole heir to the mineral leases her grandfathers had bought up a century before and earlier, times so primitive that a man scratched what he could off the surface and then scrabbled to the next seam to repeat the process. HM’s new family, despite their tenuous claim to nobility, had shown uncanny foresight, first in acquiring the leases, then in holding on to them as proceeds fell, and finally in preserving this girl, alone of all her dead sisters, for him, the most fitting man in the kingdom to exploit the opportunities of her inheritance. (What had HM’s own grandfather left? His treasonous bones to be, at the Restoration, removed from Westminster Abbey and thrown into a common grave.)
In the span it took Mary to produce three boys so very like their father that her part in the matter seemed negligible, and then pass away, HM had revived the neglected mines, turning £60 annually into £500. He toured the northern coalfields, where the latest technology was squeezing profit from land otherwise useless, and came back eager to introduce the ingenious new ideas he’d discovered—gunpowder, devices of fire and water, systems of draining and ventilating.
But he found himself obstructed again, this time by his mother-in-law’s new husband, one of those doddering curmudgeons stuck in the fifteenth century who thought gentlemen should not dirty their hands with commerce or anything else that he did not understand. Jealous of HM’s success, he blocked plans for expansion, even further investment in the current facilities.
HM was in London when the news of the man’s death arrived. In the privacy of his chamber, he danced a little jig (for the sake of his dear children). And when his mother-in-law wrote, begging him to return and take control of the estate, he allowed himself a hornpipe.
* * *
—
HM had seen, by then, that his ambitions had been too small and local—even a peasant could dig and sell. It was transformation and manufacture that generated real advantage. He set about creating what he liked to think of as a vast, modern machine of industry, his sundry projects like its cogs and levers, each fulfilling its own purpose while contributing to the functioning of the others, every part more profitable for its communication with the whole.
He blasted adits and sank shafts. He constructed horse gins. He renovated the abandoned smelting works, employing artists from the Continent to prepare ponds and dams and engines of iron. He cut a dock and built floodgates, established battery mills, rolling mills, brickworks, manufactories.
Taking a lesson from the plantations, he imported men from other regions and bonded them to his service, conscripted convicts to work out their sentences. He was able to move labor between his concerns as required, so that no man need ever stand idle. Day and night, in shifts of eight hours, he mined and smelted and swadered and lantered and shined. While the farmers still lazed in their beds, before even the rooster opened his eyes, HM worked.
Deep in the earth, he carved shining black streets of coal, lit with candles and drained of much of the water, ensuring his laborers were almost as comfortable belowground as above. He lined these streets with wooden rails, so that trained men could haul the coal to the shaft in great wagons bearing eighteen hundredweight. He laid more tracks between his mines and his works, his works and his docks, over highland and lowland, over (for all the squawking of envious neighbors) common land and public highways. To these surface wagons, he fitted sails. A horse could replace ten men, but a sail could replace even the horse. His terranauts skimmed over the skin of the earth, merry as a flock of small birds put to harness.
Master of the elements, HM schemed once again for expansion. The royal monopoly on silver had been lifted, and in the next county were rumors of rich ores—the wealth of three kingdoms.
That was when it all started. Waller pouring poppy and poison in his ear. The founding of the Mine Adventurers. His present troubles.
An unpleasant encounter
HM recognizes the foreman yet is unable to recall his name. He prides himself on knowing such things, likes to think of his men as a kind of extended family, akin to lesser relations or servants, who roost and thrive in the spreading shelter of his generosity. (It is true that it is easier to think of them this way when they are at a distance.)
The foreman’s memory proves quicker, and he greets HM with accurate deference. He seems unsurprised by the party’s arrival, and reports, as if it were expected, on the progress of the work (“Very good,” says HM), the length of the drift (“Very good”), the quantity of ore raised (so little?), the days of rain and the days of frost, the injured and the sick.
“Very good, very good,” says HM, nodding, as if he has ridden all this way in this foul by-our-lady weather to learn about Samuel David’s leg or Edward Morgan’s burns. He gathers the reins to move on, but the foreman stops him.
“If I may, sir,” he says.
HM cannot think of anything in this wasteland so urgent as to give plausible excuse to leave.
“The men, you understand, sir, are anxious. If there is anything you could tell us, sir.”
“There is no reason for anxiety.”
“We have heard talk, sir. Of closure.” At this point the foreman—is his name Jennings?—looks at Tall John. “Or sale.”
Can he think that the coneyhead is here to invest? Are all these people simple?
“Nothing runs faster than false rumor,” says HM, with a memory of Latin and all the authority he can retrieve from beneath his dripping hat.
The yellow people, without seeming to move, have somehow crept closer.
Jennings is closer, too. “So there is no truth in it?”
It can be hard, H
M has found, to determine the sentiments of common men, lacking, as they do, the gestures and expressions of gentlefolk. At this moment, however, he has no difficulty in interpreting the glinting eyes and parted lips of the miners. This is the face of the mob at a dogfight or a baiting.
But they are on the ground and shoeless, and he is in the air and booted.
“Look at me,” he says to Jennings. “Do I look like someone who needs to sell?”
Jennings drops his eyes and murmurs something that HM decides to take for an apology.
“Perhaps,” he says, “you would be better served working than spreading gossip.”
And with that, he jabs Cassandra in the ribs. Startled from a dream of carrots, she springs forward, all four feet leaving the ground at once, almost unseating HM, who hangs on by reins and mane and jabs her again for good measure. Summoning to his face the expression of a man who has studied horsemanship and fencing, he rides past the crowd, past Tall John, and on up the track. A trot, he decides, is an acceptable pace. A righteous man rarely needs to canter, but the importance of his affairs justifies a trot.
Soon enough Tall John catches up and jogs beside him (the gray pony judging its distance from Cassandra’s bite), looking at HM like a schoolmaster expecting the square of the hypotenuse.
“Lead on, man,” says HM. “You know the path.”
“We all follow the path we have chosen,” says Tall John, like a sage of Bedlam. And he leers, showing all five teeth.
HM can conjure no reply, and would give half his purse to put a wall between himself and his appraiser at that moment.
This whole unfortunate incident, he adds to the list of things for which Waller is to blame.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 31