The Trials of Solomon Parker

by Eric Scott Fischl

  “Fire, Sol.” His voice wary, tense.

  Just then Owen comes running back down the drift, the light of his helmet candle bobbing crazily. “Fire! Sol, shaft’s on fire!” From the end of the drift they can now hear the buzzer going insistently.

  – 7 and repeat. 7 and repeat.

  Accident. Accident.

  The crew goes still, eyes widen. They each have the same thought: the shaft, the way out, is on fire and they are thirteen hundred feet underground. The thought of burning or suffocating deep underground comes a close second in the long list of terrifying miners’ deaths, after being buried alive in a cave-in; neither are prospects to relish. After a long, drawn-out second they all start in at once.

  – “Oh, Jesus.”

  – “Fuck, fuck.”

  – “Sweet Jesus.”

  – “Sol, what do we do?”

  – “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  – “Sol, what do we do?”

  “Goddammit shut the fuck up!” Sol yells. “Calm down, just calm down!” He reaches over and shakes a wide-eyed Dan by the front of the shirt, slaps Michael on the chest. For a crazy second he thinks he hears laughter, a voice he doesn’t recognize. He looks around for a moment but no one else is there, just his boys. “All right,” he says, turning back, “just calm down and we’ll be fine.”

  Flame and smoke.

  They can all smell it now, the acrid reek of burning timbers, smoke beginning to thicken the air. “Owen, did Torsten know where the burn is? Owen!”

  “I don’t know, it’s in the shaft, though. It’s in the fuckin shaft!”

  “What level, boy?”

  “I don’t know, Sol, I don’t know!” Owen’s eyes are wild, too much white showing. Thirteen hundred feet underground and the way out is on fire. He looks to be having a hard time breathing.

  “It’s OK, we’ll be OK. All right?” Sol looks around. “All right, boys. All right. We’re going to get to the cage and Torsten will pull us up to a safe level, get us out another way. I’m sure Quinn’s already got things going on that front, right? He knows his stuff. Now let’s just be calm and make sure to keep your fucking lights lit, hey? OK?” Sol meets each man’s eyes, trying to display a confidence he isn’t sure he feels. His heart is pounding in his chest. Flame and fucking smoke, again.

  They only make it about halfway down the drift when Rob Quinn and a number of other men, including the old Swede, Torsten, come stumbling out of the billowing haze, hunched over, coughing, eyes round in their dirty faces. “Fire’s just a level up, men,” Quinn says, when he can draw a breath. “Cage ain’t going nowhere for now. We got to work our way up the manways, climb ’em up a level or two, away from the shaft, get above the burn and then we can get out. Crew bosses, get your fuckin men organized and follow me. Gonna be crowded getting up there so we got to be careful.”

  The men push forward, Sol’s crew going back the way they’ve already come, working their way along the drift until they get to the first manway, the ladders that run perpendicular to the drifts, where the drillers can follow the seam of ore. From the manways, the stepped stope tunnels move out laterally where the rock is drilled and mucked out, to be brought down to the drift and eventually up and out via the shaft cages. Now, dozens of men, and who knew how many more in the other levels, were going to have to climb out these narrow passages, only slightly wider than a man’s shoulders, some of them. Crawl a couple of hundred or more feet up, get above the fire and hope there’s a working cage. In the dark, and smoke, and wet, caustic heat that only will get worse as the fire grows.

  Quinn stands at the base of the manway, sending the miners up one at a time. “Don’t fuckin crowd up, goddammit!” he yells. “Don’t fuckin rush, just get up slow and steady.” The men are already bunching, pushing and shoving one another, yelling and cursing.

  Sol watches for a minute, before pulling Quinn aside. “It’s too fucking slow, Rob. If it’s taking this long to get up this first bit, there’s no way we’re all going to get up there in time. No fucking way. We need to split up, it’ll go faster. Because we need to get out, quick.” Before the air burns out, they both know. That’s the real danger.

  Sol thinks for a moment. “I’ma take my boys out the Tramway.”

  “Tramway’s half a fuckin mile away, Sol… you sure?”

  “Course I’m not sure, Rob. Best idea I got, is all. My boys are young and spry, though, hey?” Unlike me. “We’ll be all right.” He nods at the manway. “You think you can get them all up there, quick enough? Why don’t you come with us?”

  “Nah, I’ll get them up there, if I have to kick all their fuckin asses up the goddamn fuckin ladders my own fuckin self.”

  They shake hands, quickly, and then Sol grabs the arms of his boys and they stumble away.

  The Tramway mine is connected to the Pennsylvania, its shaft rising out of the ground a half-mile or so to the east. Sol’s thought is that, instead of trying to fight their way upwards along with all the other men trying to get out, they’ll go down a couple of levels, via the manways, work their way across the drift to the Tramway and ride its cage up. All this while in the dark, before the fire catches up with them and roasts them or, more likely, burns out all the air and they suffocate a quarter-mile or so underground.

  Easy.

  They run. Down the drift a ways they reach another of the manways but there are crates and tools and timber and debris stacked all over in the little notch in front of it; miners being miners, various crews have just moved this detritus out of the main flow of the drift tunnel so that they can continue working – war production, right – rather than clear it out properly and stack it in one of the storage areas. The boys frantically start to pull the boxes and heavy timbers free until Sol stops them. “No fucking time for that, go! We’ll use the next one. Go, go!”

  Back down the drift to the next manway, only a little distance away and mercifully clear, the ladder open but, when they get down a few feet the stope is full damn near all the way through with more rubbish, a big pile of timber that bisects the path of the ladder. Fucking lazy fucking goddamn fuckers, Sol silently shouts as they pile their way back upwards again. He vows that, if he makes it out, he is going to find and kick some fucking asses, and that’s for goddamn sure. The smoke has gotten noticeably thicker already and he’s coughing more than even he is used to. They all are.

  There’s only one last manway, down at the very end of the drift. It’s the perfect kind of place for lazy crews to pile more shit up and block the way, he knows. Killed by sloppy fucking laziness, Sol tells himself, and whose fucking fault is that. Put that on my headstone. Killed by lazy fucking shitbird miners.

  When they get to the end of the drift, though, the ladder is clear, and down they go, Sol pushing the boys down in front of him, counting to keep track. Seven men, plus himself. Before Billy starts to descend, somewhere near the middle of the pack, Sol grabs his arm. “Eight of us, all together, right?” he yells. “Help me get them out. Eight of us. You keep an eye on these boys, Bill.”

  Billy looks back at him, eyes white in his dark, dirty face. “Jesus, Sol.” He starts down the ladder, looking back up. “Fucking shit.”

  Owen is the last to go down the ladder, aside from Sol himself. The boy’s nearly frantic by now, coughing and gasping and quite possibly crying around it, though he tries to hide it from the others. Sol knows the boy has always had a terror of fire, Ag had told him that much. That Owen knows the story of his mother, has the puckered scars down one arm and leg in lieu of a memory of it. The boy hasn’t even been on the job two months yet; he’d spent most of that time as a crowfoot, prodding the rock overhead with a long pole, waiting for a rotten ceiling to fall in on him, before Sol had taken pity and added him to this crew when he was short a man. Now, Owen can’t breathe and he can barely stand up for coughing. They’re going down, not up, and Sol knows the boy won’t understand. Down, down, down into the dark where they might never come out. He’d just wanted a job, O
wen.

  Sol grabs him for a second, squeezing him hard around the biceps, giving him a quick shake. “Hey! Hey! We’ll be all right, son, huh? Look at me!” Gives him another shake, tries to fashion something close to a smile, something that resembles confidence. Sol realizes yet again that he doesn’t know this boy, his own son, that he’d mostly let his brother Ag raise up. Given how the boy had jumped at the first opportunity to head out on his own, though, Sol thinks that maybe Owen has something of himself in him after all, that maybe all that time with solid, reliable Ag and his quiet, godly family hadn’t quite stuck. He’s done not a goddamn thing for the boy until now, unless it’s just giving him a job, but Sol vows that he’s going to make up for lost time. The lot of it. Once they’re out of this fucking mine.

  “We’ll be fine,” he says. “Just down this ladder a smidge and then a quick jaunt over to the Tramway and up and out, good story at the end of it, hey? Drinks are on me tonight, so you need to try to stay awake for once, OK?”

  “I’m scared, Sol.”

  “Hell, Owen, that’s how you know you’re alive. I’m damn near shitting my pants, but we’re going to get out, don’t you worry. Hey, right? Don’t worry. You just keep Billy in front of you and I’ll be right behind, OK? If you don’t see Billy you’ll damn sure see Nancy banging his head on the ceiling every other step. Worst case, you just listen for fucking Michael because you know his gums will be flapping, right?” He slaps his son’s shoulders again. “You’re doing fine. I’m proud of you, boy.” When he says it, it feels wrong in his mouth, like he doesn’t have the right to say it, not yet anyway, but chooses to ignore it. He gives Owen a little push. “I’m right behind you. Now, go!”

  Down the manway ladder and the drift, having to backtrack once because of another pile of timber – fucking lazy bastard timber fucks – onto another manway and then, finally, the drift of the 1400-level, full of smoke but ominously quiet, aside from the hacking coughs of the boys gathered around the base of the ladder. Sol makes another quick count: seven plus me. Eight. OK. The Tramway connects to the Penn, far as he remembers anyway, on 1500, which means one more descent, which this time passes mercifully quickly, unblocked and a straight shot down. On 1500, he counts again – eight – and takes a moment to orient himself, checking the wall signs before heading them off in a direction that had to be east.

  Half a mile, give or take. 2,500 feet or so. Easy.

  They run, gasping through the smoke. Sure enough, Nancy and Flynn spend a goodly amount of time banging into things, given their height and the fact that they can see fuck-all in the dust and haze. After the first few minutes, Sol can barely stand, he’s coughing so hard. More than once he slips in the muck and has to be dragged upright by one of the boys. His headlamp has gone out, as have those of several of the others. Billy, always careful, has kept his alight, at least. It’s hard enough to see now, but running from a fire in the absolute dark of the deep is something too fearsome to contemplate.

  The minutes drag, stretched long and tight with fear. The mine is empty, quiet over the gasping of Sol’s breath, the coughing of the boys. Someone is muttering nonsense, someone is cursing fuck fuck fuck over and over again. Tunnels that always feel tight seem to be closing in, the smoke and dust wrapping around them in an embrace no one wants. Sol concentrates on the bobbing of Billy’s light in the middle of the pack. Finally, they reach the end of the drift where the bulkhead that connects to the Tramway intersects.

  “Oh you motherfuckers! Sweet Christ’s cunt you cunting lazy motherfuckers!” Michael is screaming at the blocked door as Sol staggers up. Already Nancy and Flynn are attacking the stack of crates and timbers, hurling them to the side as fast as they can, hacking and coughing all the while. “Jesus fuckin shite fuck you sheepfuckin timber cunts!” Not pausing in his nonsensical cursing, Michael joins them. In a moment, the rest are at the pile, digging out the door so they can get it open. Sol pauses to make another count. Eight. For a moment, Billy’s eye catches his and they share something akin to a smile, a kind of panicked, mindless thing that flashes bright and crazy for a second.

  The smoke is as thick as a wall by the time they get the door open, so dense and airless that Sol weaves for a moment, having to bend over and hack into his shoulder, his vision going hazy, ready to just pass out and stay there. At least Sean fucking Harrity won’t get paid now, he thinks for one wild instant. Let him come down here and threaten his money out of my goddamn corpse. Forcing air into his lungs, he hollers at the boys to get down the tunnel to the Tramway, shaking off someone’s arm – Billy’s, no doubt, but it’s too dark to see – as he coughs into his shirt again. “Just goddamn go! All of you, move! I’m right behind you.”

  He looks back at the mass of smoke behind him, which parts for a second. An old Indian man steps out of the gloom, singing something hoarse and breathy and wordless. There are small bones tied into his hair and in one palm burns a black fire. The old man is smiling around his song, his teeth white as new china, gleaming through the smoke.

  Sol heels over, gasping for air, knowing that the old man isn’t there, that he’s just an artifact of his own oxygen-deprived brain, the smoke and dust in his chest, a product of the terror that’s knuckled his asshole shut. A hallucination, that’s all, just a memory of a bad dream that he’ll forget soon enough. The old Indian isn’t there, so Sol steps into the tunnel and drags the door shut behind him. He won’t look back; he doesn’t need to. The Pennsylvania is burning but he’s gotten his boys out, and that’s the thing.

  Later, Sol doesn’t know just where Owen was lost. How, even. When the Tramway hoistman finally responds to their frantic signaling and pulls them up, they come piling out of the cage at the top of the Tramway and the count is seven.

  ***

  The old sorcerer smiles in the dark and smoke, warming the carved bones in his hand, tracing the outlines of their marks with the tip of a bony finger. They are pregnant with possibility, these bones. He sits and casts them to the ground, listening.

  A boy, burning.

  The echoes of that act are building, moving. It will be soon, now that he has set things in motion. He has pushed the stone and the mountain of time begins to slide, rumbling and slipping, inexorable, pushing all before it, towards another boy and a new angle of repose at the end.

  After the long years, it comes fast now. As these things are measured, it will be soon. He must prepare.

  The Above Ones have spoken and the power to end this thing has been given to him. Because of the strength of his medicine and depths of his sins, it belongs to him, until it must be given to the other. The pouch where his medicine lives is hot against the skin of his chest, hidden under his shirt.

  Memory

  – 1902 –

  Warm Springs, Montana

  It lingers on her skin, her hair, even after all this time.

  Her over-washed clothes, fabric scrubbed thin as gossamer over the tight spots at elbow and knee, still contain the hint of it. Smoke, the whisper of burned wood, charred cloth, the meaty slick of melted fat. It covers her, clings to her, memory made substance.

  Those memories, the smell of them, they twist and change, blow away on the dead wind. First one thing, then another. Things that happened and didn’t happen and will happen or won’t. Strange things that make no sense until they do.

  She’s not sure what she knows any more.

  Sometimes it’s hard for her to breathe. There are times when she wakes up at night, sweating and gasping for breath, feeling the press of burning air on her eyelids, flame sucked down her throat, into her lungs, scalding them into collapse. She remembers the small hairs on her arms crisping, her eyelashes singed to powder. During the day, when she feels the fire thoughts coming, she can usually fend them off: slow her breathing, shut her eyes and think cold cold cold until it passes.

  But not always, and the smell and touch of smoke never leaves her, day or night. It has marked her like some sister of Cain: murderess.

  O
wen, my son.

  For a time, in the beginning, her husband visits. Alone at first, and then, for some unknown reason, in the company of a skinny Indian boy she doesn’t know. The boy hesitates outside the room, shuffles his feet, frets his hands around the edges of a ratty hat. She can tell the boy doesn’t want to be there but perhaps he feels obligated. Her husband has the habit of taking people under his wing, making them feel beholden to him. As he did with her, she knows, rescuing her from some imagined peril, years ago, and then never letting her loose.

  She thinks she loved him, once. Now, nothing is clear because the smoke covers everything.

  He talks to her about the child, as if Owen was still a living thing. He says the boy is a handful – full of vinegar, now that he’s walking – he’s running poor Mrs Malloy ragged. You remember Mrs Malloy, he says. Of course she remembers the old lady. She remembers everything.

  The fire bursting upwards. The shrieking of the child in her hand. The pork smell of burning flesh. The screams of the bird at the window.

  She still sees the bird. It’s there so often, as if it knows her. As if it’s waiting for her to let it in. Or, if not that one, another. Watching her, tapping at the window. Trying to get inside.

  They catch her with a knife again, cutting her arms. They take it from her – where do you keep getting them, girl – and submerge her in an icy bath. When the attendants are alone with her, they hit her, do other things. It doesn’t matter. She always heals. Once, as a younger woman, she was very sick, dying, but now she is an unnatural thing, tight and swollen with life. Overfull with something noxious.

  In the freezing bath, submerged in water that smells like smoke, she screams for her boy, for Owen, for forgiveness.

  GET YOUR HANDS UP

  – 1917 –

  Warm Springs, Montana / Butte, Montana