The air was heavy with that morning's blasting and the smell of decaying timber. And it was hot. As hot as the belly of a cookstove and as humid as a Chinese laundry. The brothers shucked their shirts as they went along. Still, when they got off shift they would be pouring the sweat out of their boots as if they were buckets.
Rolfe Davies, their nipper, was waiting for them at the face, sitting on a box of drills. It was the nipper's job to take loving care of their tools, keeping the drills—or bull pricks, as the miners called them—sharp, and the grips of their hammers smooth and free of splinters, the heads on tight. He greeted Drew with a big grin all over his cinnamon freckled face.
"It is true you told the gaffer to get fucked?"
Drew shook his head and laughed, wondering how the gossip could have gotten out to the far reaches of the mine so quickly.
Jere ruffled the boy's carrot-top head with his big hand. "Have a care if you're going to go patterning yourself after my little brother, then. Don't you know he's destined to hang before he's twenty? 'Tes true," he said, laughing at Rolfe's incredulous snort. "Cross me heart and spit to die."
"Go on with you!" Rolfe aimed a mock punch at Jere's hard belly, then turned a worshipful face up to Drew. "Would you teach me sometime, sir, how to tamp a charge? Sometime when O'Brian ain't about?"
"Aye, sure," Drew said, shrugging, embarrassed at what he saw in the boy's eyes. He felt especially foolish to be called "sir" by one not all that much younger than he was. Drew was only nineteen, but he knew the hard, sharp edges of his face made him look older. And deep down, he thought, deep in his craven, churning guts, he'd never been young.
He remembered being a little tacker back in Cornwall, half the age of Rolfe, and his da talking about the copper mine of an evening, and how much he hated it. Yet back down the shaft he would go the next day to hate the same thing all over again. Drew had sworn then that, for him, life would be different.
And he had tried to make it different. He had gotten it into his head that the way to make it different was to better himself. Knowing things was what kept a man out of the mines. When he'd announced to the family that he was going to take lessons at the vicarage, the da had called him a sniveling coward and a lazy do-nothing. But his fear of spending his life in the mines was greater than his fear of the da's strap. To the vicarage he had gone until the da was killed when the seventh level of Wheal Ruthe caved in.
He was twelve and Jere fifteen, and they were the only boys of working age in the large and hungry Scully family. And so by dying the da had gotten Drew down the shafts after all, to blast rock and muck ore.
They had lived for a time after the cave-in—-the da and the other tut-workers caught in the Wheal Ruthe fall. The rescuers could hear the ping-pang signal of a hammer striking rock during the first two days of trying to dig through the rubble. Then the hammering had stopped.
Drew had often wondered if the da had felt afraid at the end, afraid of the suffocating darkness and the earth pressing in, strangling him. But he thought not. His father had probably died cursing the mine, not choking on the screams that made a man less than a man.
In the smoking, flickering light of the oil lanterns, Jere's bulging muscles glistened as he struck the drill head with the sledge, finishing off the last hole. The din of metal slamming on metal shivered through the heavy air to be smothered by the earth. In the silence that followed, Drew's ringing ears picked up the drip and trickle of water, the creaking of timbers, and his own harsh breathing. But it was the breathing of hard work now, not fear.
He was almost jaunty as he finished packing wet mud around the rattail fuse of the last stick of dynamite. "Lighting up!" he yelled as a warning that everyone should start moving away from the stope and down the drift. Rolfe Davies scooted around, gathering up drill bits and hammers.
Drew snipped off and lit a spitter, a length of fuse that was cut shorter than the shortest rattail in the face. He would use the spitter to light the fuses and to serve as a warning: when it burned down to his hand it was time to run like hell.
The brothers lit off the fuses together, working with practiced skill, doing twenty-five in under twenty seconds. As Drew touched his spitter to the last rattail, Jere boomed out, "Fire in the hole!"
Jere grabbed the lanterns and set off at a brisk pace back down the drift. "What's your hurry, then, my handsome?" Drew called after him, laughing and walking more slowly, deliberately cutting it too fine. "We've swacks of time."
The drift made a couple of oxbow turns before ending at the shaft. They rounded the corner of the last one and saw the candles of the other miners ahead of them. Just as they stepped into the circle of light they covered their ears with their hands, and a split second later came the muffled booms of the exploding charges. The air shivered, pressing against their bodies. The too-sweet smell of dynamite wafted down the drift, and smoke clouded the candles and lanterns.
Only the shaft boss hadn't covered his ears, because he was counting. "How many?" he asked when the explosions had ended.
"Twenty-five," Jere said.
"Easy as scratch," Drew added with a cocky grin.
O'Brian nodded. They had all blown. But then, the Scully brothers were too good at what they did to leave any sleepers behind them—holes drilled and packed with powder that never went off... until some other miner came along with a pick and blew himself into hell.
O'Brian left without another word, moving down the tram tracks in his skittering ratlike walk. Drew made a rude gesture at his back. "That was a proper shot, lads," he said, mimicking the shaft boss's squeaky ratlike voice. He bowed, scraping the floor with his hand. "Why, thank ye kindly, yer lordship."
The other miners all laughed, and Jere grinned at him, shaking his head. "I'll get the tea hotted up."
Drew waited until all the men, including his brother, had disappeared into the darkness, heading for the end of the worked-out stope where they gathered every day for supper.
When he was alone he fished out the twist of tobacco he carried in his boot.
He called her Pansy. She was one of the mules who pulled a train of six hopper cars, each filled with a ton of ore, from where it was dug out of the stope to the cages where it was lifted to the surface. The miners joked that the mules were treated better than they were, with their underground stables and the finest fodder and fresh water twice a day. But Drew never laughed. The mules hadn't been asked if they wouldn't rather be up in the sunlight and clean air. At least a man had the illusion of a choice.
Pansy had been down in the shaft for so long her hide had turned green. She loved chewing tobacco, did Pansy. Drew brought her some every day, and he scratched her ears while she chewed it. He was tempted to talk to her sometimes, but he never did.
Jere handed him a cup of tea as he rejoined the others, using a roll of fuse cord for a seat. "Where you been?" Jere asked too casually.
"Taking a piss," he lied. He bit into his letter-from-home, a Cornish pie made of beef, onion, and potatoes. "I didn't think I needed you to be holding my hand whilst I did it."
The brothers sat apart from the others, eating by the flickering light of a single candle set into a niche hacked out of the rock. Drew thought of Pansy the mule, who would probably die down here without ever seeing the sun again or feeling the wind ruffle her tail. He thought of the way the mountains had looked earlier, where silence and loneliness were the creation not of the darkness and heavy earth but of the light and the sun and the wind. He wondered what it would be like to get on a horse and ride out into the hills and the plains and keep on riding until he reached the edge of the sky.
He wished he didn't have these hankerings and frets. He wished he were more like Jere, who worked hard, drank hard, fought hard, and laughed hard, and looked for nothing else out of life.
He felt his brother's eyes on him and he looked up. "I've been thinking..." Jere said, the last word breaking as he coughed up the rock dust he'd been breathing all afternoon.
"Yo
u've been thinking, have you?" he said, forcing a smile. "And should I be worrying now?"
"I've been thinking we should try our hand at homesteading. There's all that free land here just for the taking. We should get ourselves out of the mines and become farmers."
Drew wondered where his brother thought they would get the money to work a homestead. They made three dollars a day in the shafts. A dollar of it went for room and board at the flophouse, and they kept out a few bits for themselves for whiskey and whores. The rest went back to Cornwall for Mam and the girls. Every month they got a letter from her—written by the vicar, although the words were her own—calling the blessings of God down upon their heads for saving the Scully family from the poorhouse.
And besides, they knew damn all about farming.
"You really have gone daft," Drew said harshly. "First you get a notion in your noggin to court a Celestial and now you're makin' clack about being a sodbuster. Where's the blunt going to come for seed and a plow and a harrow and a team and a stoneboat and a seeder and a binder, huh?"
"Since when do you know so much about it? 'Less you've been thinking on it same as I have."
Drew slammed the lid down on their supper pail with a loud clatter. "When a man goes down into the mines, he stays there."
"You sound like the da."
Drew's lip curled into a mean smile. "I reckon the da knew what he was talking about, because where is he now, my handsome? Buried under a ton of rubble in the seventh level of Wheal Ruthe."
A silence settled over the stope as the others stretched out on a timber pile for a half hour's nap. Jere pulled a penknife and a block of wood out of his pocket and began to whittles— he was always making little toys that he gave away to the other miners' kids. Drew sat and watched blisters of grease follow each other down the side of the candle. Above his head the cribbing creaked. The eyes of the rats gleamed in the dusky penumbra of the candlelight.
When a man goes down into the mines, he stays there.
The Scully brothers put on dry shirts against the chill of a Montana summer night as they waited their turn to go up the shaft. The other men were all laughing and making loud talk about the beer they were going to put away at the Gandy Dancer. But all Drew Scully could think of was that he'd made it through another shift without any of the others glomming on to what a coward he really was.
Rolfe Davies sat on top of a load of rock in the hoisting cage, a box of dull drill bits in his lap. Drew caught the boy's worshipful gaze on him and they shared a smile just as the cage jerked into motion—
And the hoist cable broke with a crack like a rifle shot.
The loose cable whipped at the rock and timber as it went up the shaft, and the loose car smacked against the rock and timber as it went down. The nipper screamed and went on screaming until he hit the boiling hot sump with a splash. And then there were only the echoes of his screams, going on and on and on until they were swallowed at last by the thick black earth.
The white-faced hoistman jerked nine times on the bell rope. Above ground the disaster whistle would be piercing the night.
Tears burned in Drew's eyes. His chest jerked hard as he drew at the thin air. Ashamed, he turned his face toward the earth and rocks where only the darkness was there to see his weakness.
CHAPTER 18
Earlier that afternoon a thick, warm wind had caressed Erlan's face as she stepped out of the hotel's double doors at the side of the merchant Sam Woo, who was now her husband.
She took mincing steps on the warped and spit-slimed boardwalk. One of her tiny carved wooden shoes caught on an uneven board, and she stumbled. The merchant Woo steadied her with a hand beneath her elbow, then withdrew it.
He had yet to speak a single word to her.
She thought he was probably taking her to his house. She had no expectations. The buildings of this Rainbow Springs were all of gray and weathered logs or freshly peeled ones. Certainly there would be no green tiled roofs and scarlet pillars to remind her of her lao chia and all that she had lost.
The road they walked along led straight and flat as a rice mat out into the wide land and big sky. She wondered if perhaps the evil spirits were less powerful here than in China, so that the roads didn't have to be laid crooked to fool them. She wanted to ask the merchant Woo about this and many other things. But until her husband opened his mouth to her, she wasn't allowed to speak to him.
The merchant Woo stopped before a squat log building with a tin roof, but Erlan barely glanced at it. a group of Chinese men had gathered in a tight, tense knot in the street. a few were barefoot and others wore only straw sandals on their dusty feet. Their baggy schmo were rolled up to their knees, and their legs were sun-browned and as skinny as chopsticks.
None was so rude as to stare directly, but they all cast furtive looks, hungry looks, at her from beneath their conical straw hats. They shifted on their feet and whispered behind their hands, making a sound like mice feeding in a rice bin. "A beauty! A beauty! A beauty with lily feet!"
"Better I sell you outright to a mining camp, ma?" the slave trader had said. "Those whore-cunts are so desperate for wives they will take anything, even a dishonored old woman with bullock feet."
She stood in utter stillness, her hands stuffed up her sleeves, gripping her arms. The ping-pang of a hammer on steel echoed from a large, cavernous building across the street. The pounding seemed to resound in the pit of her stomach. She trapped a moan of fear behind her teeth.
The door behind her creaked open, setting off a jangle of bells. The merchant Woo stepped back for her to cross the threshold first. She had to hop on her golden lilies to climb the two sagging steps. She entered a room filled with so many things that it made her dizzy just looking at the jumble.
Candlesticks and boxes of candles. A barrel filled with straw brooms and another one full of onions. Tobacco twists and twisted coils of rope. Tin buckets and tin spoons. Familiar things, like a set of mah-jongg tiles and a red silk lantern. And things she'd never seen before, such as a coat made out of a slick yellow material and a box of something called toothache gum.
Shelves sagged under precariously stacked tin cans. The warped floor was covered with wooden kegs and bales of animal furs. The small-paned window cast bars of dusty sunlight over the front of the shop. But the back corners were shrouded in darkness and looked as if they hadn't been explored in years.
A rank odor came from one of the barrels just inside the door. Erlan leaned over for a closer look. It appeared to be filled with great bloody chunks of meat packed in brine. A hand-lettered sign pasted on the outside of the barrel identified it: Bear Shot Fresh Last Week.
The merchant Woo cleared his throat. Startled, Erlan whirled so quickly she swayed on her golden lilies. He held aside a tattered brown blanket that hung over the doorway into another room. She passed by him into darkness.
A match whisked and flared. He put the flame to a lamp and adjusted the wick, then nearly dropped the chimney when he went to put it back on its base.
They were in a kitchen with a table, two chairs, and a round iron stove with a vent pipe that ran out through a circle of tin in the roof. The room, which had no window, was close and crowded and smelled of boiled cabbage. Flies stuck to a strip of paper that dangled from the ceiling.
The merchant Woo hung the lamp on a wall hook and came to stand before her, so close that if he had breathed deeply his chest would have brushed hers. She thought of the wedding and the way his lips had felt on her mouth, and it was all she could do not to shudder.
"Have you eaten today?" he said. It was the appropriate Chinese greeting, but spoken in the harsh, guttural Yueh dialect of Canton.
She gave the traditional response in high-class Mandarin. "I am well."
He frowned at her, and his next words were in English. "Mrs. Yorke said you savvy how to talk American. What a big wonderful surprise this is. Good for business. From now on you talk only American, even with me. That way you can practice."
&n
bsp; And that way your peasant ears won't have to struggle to understand my Chinese, she thought. But she only nodded in obedience.
He took a step back, sweeping his hand through the air. "Sit down, please. Your golden lilies must ache."
Erlan slowly lowered herself into one of the chairs. If she had been alone, she would have groaned aloud. Her feet were indeed sore. And all those days and nights in that rocking, jouncing coach had left her as stiff as an old woman.
The merchant began to lay out an array of wonderful food before her on the table, and to her shame her mouth began to water. Thanks be to the merciful Kwan Yin that her husband's embracing of the barbarian ways did not extend to what he ate.
She thought of the swing stations where the stagecoach had stopped along her journey, those crude wooden shacks where the horses were changed and the passengers were given a piece of tough meat thrust between the two halves of a soggy, bitter biscuit, and tin cups of coffee thick enough to lacquer a chest. Once they had been treated to a platter of rancid pork and something called corn dodgers, which resembled fried millet cakes. Inedible food served under conditions of indescribable filth, as nourishing as a beggar's soup made of nothing but bones.
But this... aiya, this was truly a feast fit for the gods. Bowls of pickled cabbage, ginger, and lotus root. Steamed buns and duck coated with plum sauce. A cool custard of green beans and a saucer of melon seeds. Steaming meat dumplings, lo mein and snow-white rice. Erlan's belly made a loud gurgling noise.
She was saved from embarrassment by the clatter of a stove lid. The merchant Woo tossed more sticks on the fire. He had to move aside a wok and a bamboo steamer to set a kettle on to boil. The lantern light gleamed off a razor-sharp cleaver that lay atop a chopping block. He must have prepared this wedding banquet himself, for she doubted he had a servant to do it for him. If he had need of her in the kitchen as well as in his bed, the jest was on him. She could embroider cranes finer than the ones on the robe he had given her, and she could coax pretty music from a pi-pa, but she was an abysmal cook. She couldn't prepare so much as a bowl of soggy rice.
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