Clay Hand

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Saying I’m a poor stranger, and far from my own.

  Nichols was studying the film that had formed on his milk. Phil emptied his glass and poured a second drink.

  And as I drew nigh her I made a low jee,

  I asked her for pardon for making so free;

  My heart, it relented to hear her moan

  Saying I’m a poor stranger and far from my home.

  The eyes upon him were not cruel. In most of them there was no more than mischief. But they were daring him to stay. He sipped his drink and stayed.

  Then gently I asked her if she would be mine,

  And help me to tend to my goats and my kine;

  She blushed as she answered in sorrowful tone,

  Be kind to the stranger, so far from her own.

  Even McNamara was looking at him now, the sharp blue eyes prodding him. He lit a cigaret.

  I’ll build my love a cottage at the end of this town,

  Where the lords, dukes and earls shall not pull it down;

  If the boys they should ask you why you live alone,

  You can tell them you’re a stranger, and far from your own.

  The singer repeated the last chorus, all the men joining in. Phil emptied his drink and turned to face them, leaning his elbow on the bar. When the last chord was struck he laid fifty cents on the bar, pulled up his coat collar and went out.

  He was past Lavery’s corner before the sound of the singing left him, and even then it seemed to play on in his head—the warnings of restless men being stirred to further unrest. Dick had been kicked out of McNamara’s the last night of his life. He kept forgetting that. Was it only a matter of time until it happened to all strangers, whatever the provocation or excuse?… “Tell them you’re a stranger and far from your home.”

  He could see the lights of the widow’s house above the weblike mist along the ground, and he could hear his own footsteps crunching in the gravel, and the sound of the song still in his head, suddenly thrust out with the wild jangling of the bell on Mrs. O’Grady’s gate. It was a moment before he recognized it. Then he started running. The bell persisted. When he was almost there, he made out that it was Anna. The ringing stopped and the girl hurried down the road toward him. He caught her arm. “Why all the noise, Anna?”

  “The gate was stuck. Let go of me.”

  “Were you warning them I was coming?”

  “You’re nuts,” she said. “Let go of me or I’ll get my father after you.”

  He let her go and she ran down the road from him. He hurried through the gate, which gave easily beneath his hand, and into the house.

  Only Mrs. O’Grady was in the living room, but it was heavy with hanging cigaret smoke. The old lady looked up from her crochet work. “What’s the matter with you?”

  He looked at his watch. The boarders had been in bed for more than an hour. “Since when do you smoke, Mrs. O’Grady?”

  “She smokes, doesn’t she? She’s gone up the stairs five minutes ago. Sitting here the night through, smoking like a bad flue.”

  “Who was with you?”

  “What are you talking, who was with us? Anna went down the hill a minute ago. Come here to me, Philip.”

  She looked up into his face. “You’re not jealous on account of that one upstairs, are you?” She jerked her head with the question.

  “When I was coming up the hill I heard that bell ringing out there like she was tolling it. She was letting you know I was coming.”

  “You’re daft, man. That giddy one puts me out of my mind with her swinging on the gate like an infant.”

  “At ten o’clock at night?”

  “Go upstairs and ask her then. She’s pining to see you, sitting here listening the night for the sound of your step on the back porch. Go up!”

  Phil took off his coat and sat down on the sofa opposite her. He lit a cigaret. The old lady fanned the smoke of it from between them. “I never mind a good pipe, but them things smell like the back of a barn. My unfortunate plants’ll be choked with them.”

  “That African violet has a new flower,” he said. “It looks to be thriving.”

  “Did you notice that? My, you’re the observing one. It came out this morning when we were all out of the house to the funeral. Do you know, I think they like to be left to themselves now and then. They’re almost like people.”

  Phil studied the end of his cigaret and then brushed the ash into the coal bucket. “Why did you ask Margaret here, Mrs. O’Grady?”

  “Och, the poor, lorn creature. I felt sorry for her, seeing her up there yesterday. And trying so hard to make him out doing some good in the world.” She snapped the crochet thread between her teeth.

  “The poor lorn creature can take care of herself and you know it,” Phil said. “Tell me the truth.”

  The old lady’s eyes narrowed to the size of two little pearls. “I’ll tell it to you when I know it. Now go and fetch us the medicine bottle from the cubby. My bones are rusted with the chill of the night.”

  Chapter 23

  ONCE MORE PHIL AWAKENED to the sound of the regular boarders rising. They got up like thunder, he thought, and turned his face toward the window. The bed creaked beneath his weight. It was strange to lie there and hear the sound of the wind, the shaking of the kitchen grate, the rattle of the pump, the heavy steps of the men in the hall, and the gruff voice of one as he called for the other. Sleep would not return, but the warmth of the bed held him, and he thought a moment of his room at home—the dash he would make to the thermostat in the hall, and the quick rush of heat through the ventilators. No thermostats in Winston.

  The men were downstairs now at their silent breakfast of porridge with syrup, eggs and salt pork—dispensed from the Lenten fasts. They went into Number Two. He wondered if the men were going down in Number Three that morning. A sound, like the branch of a tree brushing against the window, disturbed the quiet, so acute when the heavy footsteps had gone down the stairs. There was no tree that high outside the window—mice probably. They would be in the walls of this old house and in the attic. O’Grady had built it fifty years before, thinking to raise a family in it, and all that had ever grown in it were flowers and mice, and the wife he left three weeks after taking her growing old.

  He groped for the string to the ceiling light fixture. Catching it, he was reminded of the string Fields had picked up in the mine room where Laughlin died. What had he made of it? He was not saying that. There were many things he did not say until the well chosen moment. He thought of Margaret Coffee then—for the first time since waking—and with detachment, or at least, without the sting of wanting, of knowing that she lay in the room next to his. He got out of bed and dressed, feeling extraordinarily good. The closest comparison he could find for the feeling was a good confession, or the further vigor he would enjoy having sluiced himself with water in the widow’s back kitchen.

  The men were leaving when he went downstairs, and he got a civil greeting from them—because he had put heart into his greeting, he realized. The widow watched him through the first decent meal he had eaten in her house.

  “There,” she said, pulling a napkin from the glass and giving it to him, “that’ll stay the morning with you. I never knew a one could put a decent face on him with an empty stomach.”

  Phil emptied his coffee cup and permitted her to fill it. She half refilled her own. “I’ve often thought to myself, the reason we get hell and chastisement of a Sunday morning is the unfortunate priest having to preach without a morsel between him and salvation. You don’t hear the Protestants preaching hell and damnation in the morning, do you now?”

  “I haven’t listened very often,” Phil said.

  She shook her head. “I remember my mother saying at home, it’s the easy religion to live in, but the hard one to die in.” She thought about that a moment. “They’ve the queer sayings, for my own notion is when you’re ready to die, it’s small matter the one seeing you out. It’s the one seeing you in that counts. Do
you know I was thinking of my Tim the whole night?”

  She rubbed at the marks left by dirty sleeves on the oilcloth, and then looked up at him. “Do you think when my time’s come he’ll recognize me at all?”

  “You’ll stand out in a hundred million souls, old lady,” he said, getting up.

  She grinned at him gratefully. “I’ve done a few good things in my day along with the bad, although there’s times I’m hard put to account them. Where are you off to?”

  He got his coat from the living room. “I don’t know for sure. I’m going back up that hill first—just to look again, and to think.”

  She pulled herself up and followed him to the door. “And listen, Philip. Just listen. There’s things you hear listening, you’d never hear talking.”

  “Speaking of hearing things, you’ve mice in the attic. I heard them this morning.”

  “What?”

  “Mice,” he repeated. “I think they’re in the attic.”

  “Will you stop by Lavery’s then and have him save me a kitten? He’s having them round the store every week or so. And throw open the door to the chicken coop there on your way out.”

  He stopped first at Lavery’s. On the porch, the milk cans were lined up, and beside them a wired bundle of newspapers. Through the front window he could see Lavery stoking the stove. He picked up the papers and carried them in. “Can I have one of these?”

  “Help yourself. There’s a clipper there on the counter for the wire.”

  Phil opened the bundle and then paged the Cincinnati paper. Nichols’ wire story was on page two. Tomorrow, page sixteen, he thought.

  Lavery wiped his hands on his trousers and took one of the papers himself.

  “Page two,” Phil said. “‘Sheriff orders search of inactive coal mine in journalist’s death.’”

  “Bad business,” Lavery said. “The men are nervous as wild birds in a cage. Fields ought not have done that.”

  “Even if it means solving Coffee’s death?”

  “I’ll lay you ten to one it don’t solve it. And I say: even so, if it means the men are going out again and the closing of the whole mine in the end. There’s people who’ll starve over that, and all it is is a slower way of dying. It’s all very well for outsiders like yourself to come down here crying for justice over a man. There’s some of them down here crying for justice fifty years or more, and they’re miserable when they’ve got it in their hands.” Lavery folded the paper and put it back with the stack. “Life ain’t so damned expensive around here as it is some places.”

  “What the devil kind of logic is that?” Phil said. “If Coffee was doing a job down here it was for the men’s good. He wasn’t the sort to come here to exploit them.”

  Lavery aimed at the spittoon, missed it, and rubbed his foot viciously on the floor. “Didn’t he? Don’t tell me about Naperville. I know all about it. He went in there when the explosion was done. He did up a fine story on it and got a medal for it. Congressmen went down and shook their heads over it, John L. Lewis shouted himself hoarse and proclaimed a mourning. A hundred high mucky-mucks beat their breasts in front of the world, and donated enough money to keep the families alive for the year. There were seventy-seven men died. Four hundred and seventy-seven lived. What happened to them? Did they go back to a better, safer place to work? They did not. The mine was closed. So don’t talk to me about Naperville.”

  “It was you who brought it up,” Phil said. “Give me a package of cigarets.”

  Lavery went round the counter and gave him the brand he pointed to. “Do you see the sense of what I’m saying, man?”

  “The sense but not the solution,” Phil said. It was the old two-headed monster: progress and obsoleteness. Men didn’t change skills the way they changed shirts. Nor did industries convert themselves, although their chance was better. He opened the cigaret package. “Mrs. O’Grady wants a kitten from your next batch.”

  “I can give her choice now of five generations.”

  Chapter 24

  HE SAT ATOP THE CLIFF a long time, watching the rise of smoke above Number Two and along the tracks. He heard the trains rattle as cars coupled and uncoupled, and the occasional shouts of men. All the sounds seemed to come to him in twos. The sun was trying to break through a barrage of clouds. He saw Rebecca Glasgow come out of the house far below him, and flattened himself to the ground lest she look up and see him, and decide not to graze the goats that day. He heard the thin bleat of the animals at the sight of her, and saw them prance around her as she threw the gate open. She herded them out toward the valley. Waiting, he rolled over on his back on the hard frosty ground. A flight of sparrows rose into the sky, moving soundlessly above him.

  Listen, the widow had told him. He had listened and watched for over an hour. He closed his eyes. Sound was a little different when sight did not locate it. He heard a crow, two crows, and mentally traced their flight. Opening his eyes, he was amazed not to see them where he expected. There was only one crow flying, and it was at the opposite end of the valley from where he had expected it to be.

  He stood up then and called out to Rebecca Glasgow. His voice rode round the hills. She looked at him, her hand flying up to wave and then falling away. He had startled her. Dick had called to her in this fashion, perhaps. He called again, sending the words “Answer me,” after her name.

  She cupped her hands and called “Hello.” Her voice came, thin and strident, without echo.

  He waved her toward him between the end of the cliff and the low slope that ran to the railroad sidings. Catching something of his excitement, she hurried the goats before her. One of them leaped over the first rise of the rocks and fled toward the track. Rebecca followed him and turned him back.

  “Call me from there,” Phil shouted.

  He heard his own voice coming back, apparently before she heard it at all. Then she called out, “Hello, up there.”

  He saw her cup her hands, but it was several seconds before her voice reached him. He turned to the direction from which it seemed to come—the hill opposite the mine drift mouth. The experience was like seeing a sound film that was inaccurately synchronized. A moment’s wariness froze him where he stood. No one could have known these hills, the sound, the smell and the feel of them better than Rebecca Glasgow. But seeing her eager haste that he had awakened, he ran down the hill to meet her. The goats eyed him a moment and then skipped off.

  “Let them go,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Have you ever heard the echoes up there?”

  “Many times.”

  “Your voice came from the hill over there, not from where you were at all. I want to find out if the same thing happens calling out from there.”

  “I’ll go,” she said. “Tell me where you want me to call from.”

  “We’ll try it several places, both of us.”

  He watched her long, sure strides down the slope. The goats bleated and trotted after her a way, and then settled in the valley near the drift mouth to munch their meager grazings. The echoes of their exchanges from different points varied in intensity. They moved along the hills, parallel to each other, and then zigzag. Several times he saw her draw a sight on him, lining him up with some familiar object. He did not know the landscape that well. It would only add confusion if he were to try it. Finally they met near the abandoned mouth. Her eyes upon him were intense. He wondered if his own were as wild.

  “Could there be another entry to this section, Rebecca?”

  “More than one. There’s one between our place and the face of the cliff.”

  “That wouldn’t do. There’s no echo reaches the top there from your place. They’re all back here.”

  Without speaking, she led the way through the valley. For a time Phil traced in his mind the mine entry beneath him. That, too, was confusion. He could not begin to be accurate in his recollection of the course they had taken underground. After several hundred yards, they came upon another entry, this one almost obscured by the
shaggy overgrowth. A rabbit darted out from it. Phil jumped. For an instant a quick, nervous smile played across the woman’s face. It was the first time he had seen a trace of one in her.

  “Did you ever see Laughlin around here?”

  “No. Your friend was never here, either, that I know of. I had forgotten about it.”

  Phil examined the rotting boards without touching them. They looked to have been undisturbed for many years. It was Rebecca who hunted through the scrub around it and broke off a good-sized stick. She brought it back and pried it between one of the boards and the frame. The board gave before the stick did.

  Phil nodded. “It’s been used lately, all right. I don’t think we’d better go any further without the sheriff.”

  Already the dankness from within the mine escaped to them. “Will you go up toward the cliff… No, I’ll go. You stay here and listen.”

  “I’ll go,” she said. “I’m used to climbing.”

  No word had passed between them yet as to the meaning of their exploration. But Phil was well aware of it the moment he heard her voice bounce back from the opposite hill, where she was standing near the cliff from which Dick had fallen. He waved with both hands, a signal of satisfaction, and went to meet her.

  He offered her a cigaret. “Do you smoke, Rebecca?” He realized then he had used her first name before without thinking about it.

  “I’d like a cigaret now, if you please.” The fingers in which she took it trembled.

  As he cupped the match for her and held it, he saw that she was crying. She could not cry easily, he thought. Nor would her tears come from some transient emotion…because she would not permit herself such emotional indulgence in his presence. He did not meet her eyes when they rose to his above the match. He lighted his own cigaret and then pointed to the hill opposite the cliff. “What’s over behind there, Rebecca?”

  “Another hill.”

  “But between them are the railroad tracks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does this hill have as abrupt a drop as the one Dick fell from?”