He took the two steps necessary to bring himself up next to her. For a moment he just looked at her. Then slowly he lifted his hand and brought it to her mouth. He rubbed his fingers over her lips. She tightened every muscle in her body to keep those lips from trembling.
"I'm not stepping out with Luly," he said.
Carve that one in marble, she thought. And it didn't matter anyway what he said. She was out there waiting for him—if not Luly Maine, then some other girl. This girl who would be young and pretty, and as sweet as a sugar-tit. This girl he would fall in love with and marry and have babies with, make a family and happily-ever-after with. And he would be happy with this girl. In the way that men could be happy with young and pretty and sweet.
He set his whiskey glass down and began to shed his clothes. He stretched, flexing a back strapped with muscle. The lamplight bronzed his skin with a soft, warm glow. He crossed the room to the tub, his stride long and rangy.
He was so young and strong and beautiful.
And she was a fool.
She followed him behind the peacock screen. She knelt before the tub and took the soap from his scarred hands. She rubbed her palms over the planes of his chest, across the ridges of muscle and the soft dark hair that narrowed down to a flat, taut belly. His skin was soft, yet the muscle beneath was so hard. If she balled up her fists and beat against the muscle that encased his heart, she would only end up breaking her hands.
She hadn't even realized she was crying until her tears began to pock the soapsuds. They kept coming one after the other, and she couldn't stop them from falling any more than she could have stopped breathing.
He touched her face, gathering up the tears with his fingers. "What're these for?"
She turned her face away. "They're nothing. Just dismals in the mind is all."
He slid his hand beneath the fall of her hair, pressing the heel of his palm into the side of her neck and forcing her head back around until she was looking into his eyes. His eyes that for once were not flat and hard but soft and deep. Deep as wells, and she felt herself drowning in them, losing her will and her pride, being washed away by the tears that wouldn't stop. "Drew... don't leave me."
"Ah, Hannah love, I'll not be leaving you. I love you."
She squeezed her eyes shut. In the silence of the room, she could hear the soft tick of the ormolu mantel clock. The sound of time passing between them. He would leave her, tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. But he would leave her one day, she knew.
There was talk that year in the RainDance country, as summer ended and the days grew shorter and the nights got colder-talk of how the beavers were piling up huge quantities of willow saplings for their winter food. Of how the muskrats were building their lodges twice as thick as usual. And how the snow-shoe rabbits had all turned white weeks before time. Talk about how it was fixing to be a long, cold winter.
The first big snowstorm arrived before October did, a regular blue norther.
It had already been snowing for ten hours when the Scully brothers took the elevator cage down into the Four Jacks for the afternoon shift. Drew stepped out into the drift and shuddered. But it was only his body's reaction to the blast-furnace intensity of the heat. He could tell within the first few moments that the smooth, thick, smothering blackness of the earth wouldn't swallow up his manhood this day. It would be a day when he wouldn't spew up his food or sweat through his shirt before he'd even stepped off the cage.
Oh, the fear was there, of course, as always, but it was only a dull ache beneath the surface of his thoughts, and he could control it. It was an odd thing, but ever since Hannah had given him the polished claw of a grizzly bear as a safekeeper, he'd mostly been able to keep the terror at bay.
He thought of her during most of every shift, although he didn't always go to her afterward. Sometimes what he felt for her was so intense he made himself stay away. Some nights, after they made love, the words would push up against his lips, words of marriage. But he always let them die unspoken. He had nothing to offer her. She was rich and a property owner, and he made three dollars a day digging holes in the ground like a bloody mole. It was true she had a tarnished past, but he knew her to be all that was fine in a woman. Generous and loving, honorable and true. And she was the bravest person he'd ever met. Whereas Drew himself... he wasn't even half of a man. A bloody coward, scared of the dark.
"Still snowing up there?" The voice came at them from the edge of the lantern light. It was one of the muckers just coming off shift. The man tossed his stick into a toolbox and stretched, reaching for air and cracking his knuckles.
"Coming down thick enough to smother a duck," Jere said, laughter in his voice, and Drew smiled. His brother had been a happy man ever since fate had removed poor Sam Woo from his beloved Lily's life. At least she smiled at him now and traded words with him from time to time. But he hadn't gotten any closer to her bed than the coyote was to the moon it bayed at every night. She had given Jere a good-luck talisman, though, a jade disk with Chinese chicken scratches carved into it.
"Shit, I'd almost rather stay down here," the mucker said as he stepped into the cage. "A man can get pneumonia coming up from the broiling hot shafts into a fucking blizzard."
The cage was snatched up into the blackness of the shaft with a clang of bells and a clatter of metal. The drift was filled with the roar of ore sliding down the chutes and the crank of the windlass, the air heavy with the too-sweet smoke from the morning shift's blasting.
They walked bow-backed like gnomes down a narrow winze that after fifty yards spilled into a big cavern. A half-dozen muckers were already at work there, shoveling freshly blasted rubble into a short train of hopper cars.
Drew lifted a hand in greeting to an Irishman and fellow blaster by the name of Collins, who sat high on a scaffold in the cavern, drilling into the rock face up near the ceiling. The rim of the man's head lamp shone above them like a new moon in a black night. Most of the bigger mines had brought in compressed-air drills, machines that made blasting holes at a prodigious rate, faster than any double-jack drilling team could ever manage. Such progress hadn't reached the Four Jacks yet, but when those drills did arrive, Drew thought he would hate the mine even more. At least there was some pride in being a faceman and master blaster. There was none in being a mucker or car pusher.
The man on the scaffold called something down to them, but Drew couldn't hear it over the din made by the muckers.
They left the excavation by way of a newly cut drift. The walls were water-slimed here, the air faintly fetid, like a long-empty grave. Cold sweat broke out on Drew's scalp and a flutter of the old familiar panic stirred in his guts, but he beat it down. Hannah, he thought, conjuring up her image. He rubbed his finger once lightly over the grizzly's claw that hung from the cord around his neck.
When they reached a split in the drift, Jere bore to the left, saying, "The gaffer told me we're to blast that new crosscut off the west stope today."
Drew touched his brother on the shoulder. "You go on, then, I need to take a piss."
While Jere continued toward the left, Drew went off to the right, beyond the protection of the new shoring timbers. He felt his way to the portal of a freshly blasted shaft, stepping over the muck that had yet to be cleared. As he urinated into the hole, a rank smell came up out of the deep earth, of stagnant air and dead things, and the fear surged into his throat like hot vomit. He swallowed it down, but his head bobbed with the effort and the light from his carbide lamp struck off the quartz crystal in the newly exposed rock, making it glitter.
He noticed a large patch of soft, pale green among the quartz. He turned his head slowly. The rock glowed iridescently as it caught the beam of his lamp.
He went out into the drift and fetched an oil lantern, then came back. He held the lantern close to the face, moving it back and forth over the patch of iridescent green. He leaned closer, his boot knocking an avalanche of gravel into the shaft.
He hung the la
ntern on a protruding lip of stone and pulled his hammer and drill out of his belt. He set the bit of the drill into the rock face and tapped it with the sledge, using just enough force to knock a piece loose. The rock was hot, but not so hot that it burned his hand, although a stream of steamy water trickled out the fresh scar he'd left in the face.
He heard a step behind him and he whirled, dropping the rock into his gum boot. It was the Irishman Collins, down off his scaffold, and if the man had seen what Drew had done, he didn't let on. More than a few of the miners did a bit of high-grading—bringing up a pound or two of silver ore in their dinner pails and boots every day.
"Where's your brother?" Collins said.
"He's drilling the face of that new crosscut. Why?"
Even in the dim light, Drew saw the miner's eyes suddenly widen. "Didn't you hear what I said, man? There's a sleeper on that face. The last shift left a missed hole that's yet to be picked out."
"Jere!" Drew screamed and began to run.
He scrambled over the rough rock, his shouts of warning bouncing down the drift. His shadow lurched ahead of him as Collins followed behind, so close he could feel the man's hot breath on his neck. The earth began to close in on him, squeezing, crushing, smothering him. He wanted to fall to the ground and curl up into a tight ball to keep the thick and heavy darkness from strangling the life out of him. But he kept running.
At last he saw Jere, the sweating muscles of his brother's bare back glistening in the lantern light. Jere must have heard the noise he was making, for he turned his head just as he pulled back his arm to strike the drill head, and his smile glimmered in the dark oval of his face.
"Jere, no!" Drew screamed. He watched with horror as his brother swung his face back around to the rock and the hammer began its downward descent. It seemed to move with a strange slowness, as if it were being pushed through air as thick as treacle. It moved so slowly that Drew thought he could stop it if he could just get there in time, and he tried to lunge across the space that still separated him from his brother. He stumbled over a pile of muck, twisting his knee violently and falling onto his side with a bone-rattling jar.
He saw Collins run past him, and in the next instant he saw Jere's sledge strike home. A tongue of flame shot out of the rock face, followed by a flash of brilliant white light. Shards of rock came hurtling out of a black hole in the earth, and a blast smacked against his ears like a sharp clap of thunder.
He opened his eyes onto a darkness that was as thick and absolute as the darkness on the other side of hell, and he would have screamed if he'd had the breath. He felt a shifting in the piles of shattered rock around him, and then the darkness was pushed away by the spill of a half-dozen carbide lamps and oil lanterns. Smoke clouded the air, and an unearthly stillness smothered his ears. He turned his head and saw a ragged bone thrusting through the bloody flesh of his arm, but strangely he felt no pain. He could feel nothing at all except the wild thumping of his own heart. And a screaming. He could feel the screaming, as if it were a fine wire that someone was plucking.
He sucked at the foul air. The gauzy film began to melt away from his eyes. He saw red spongy wet pieces of something splattered all over the rock and earth around him, and in the next instant he realized he was looking at what was left of a man. Collins... Please God, let it be Collins.
Someone bent over him. He blinked and brought into focus the ratlike features of Casey O'Brian, their shaft boss.
"My brother?" Drew gasped, choking on the smoke.
The gaffer said something, but Drew couldn't hear. He made himself look over to the place where he'd last seen Jere, and he was still there. Not smeared in bloody bits and pieces all over the drift. He was hurt, though, for Drew could see his brother's legs thrashing. But he was still living, thank God. Still living...
A hand touched his forehead. He watched O'Brian's mouth move, although he still couldn't hear anything.
"Fucking mine," Drew croaked. He reached up with his good arm and grabbed the shirt of the man who should have warned them about the sleeper, jerking O'Brian's face down to his until he was sure the gaffer could see his eyes. "We'll be wanting a full day's pay for this, you bloody bastard."
CHAPTER 28
Sam Woo's widow teetered as she lifted the heavy yoke onto her shoulders. The baskets of laundry swung wildly on their chains off the ends of the pine pole, causing it to bite deep into her shoulders.
She set off down the road in the teeth of the wind, her eyes narrowed against the snow flurries that stung her face The short quilted jacket and cotton pants she wore were the same birch-bark white as the snow and the sky. White, the color of mourning, the color she would wear for the next three years.
She carried her two-month-old son, Samuel, in a sling of woven straw that hung over her chest from a strap around her neck. She struggled over the ridges of mud and snow. Once, she slipped and the yoke became unbalanced, slipping off her shoulders and nearly driving her to her knees.
She made her slow, clumsy way among the shacks where all the Chinese lived, a town within the town of Rainbow Springs. She smelled roast pork as she passed the chop suey house and heard the clatter of gaming tiles from the mah-jongg room. She saw steam wafting from a crack in the window of the tea shop. Its signboard, painted in gilt and vermilion, banged loudly in the wind. She passed the herbalist's shop and nodded respectfully to Peter Ling, the golden needle man, who stood in the window. He was the latest to ask her to marry him.
Although she was a widow, and thus bad joss, Erlan had received many proposals in the four months since Sam Woo's death. And not all her suitors were bachelors. Many had wives back in China. But the immigration laws prevented wives and loved ones from joining the men, and so they looked for concubines to bring them comfort in their exile.
She stopped before the black lacquered doors of the joss house. She set down her yoke in the shelter of the eaves, although the laundry was already well protected from the elements by scraps of oilskin tarpaulin. She shook the snow off her pant legs, straightened her straw hat, then slipped inside the temple.
The rush of cold air made the wicks flicker in the round blue silk lanterns and fluttered the red scrolls that hung on the walls. With her head respectfully lowered, she approached the altar with its five deities carved of wood and dressed in vermilion silk robes and gilt headdresses. Sacrificial bowls of rice and burning incense lay at the feet of the gods.
Samuel whimpered, thrusting his tiny feet against her chest, and she patted his head to soothe him. She bowed to the gods and lit a stick of incense.
"Please," she prayed. "Please ease the torment of my anjing juren. Teach him the wisdom of virtuous patience and bring him peace."
The deities stared back at her with blank, unseeing eyes. But then, why would Chinese gods interfere in the life of a fon-kwei? She should go into the temple of his Jesus god and pray there. But the thought of entering that white-painted building with its pointed roof frightened her. Who knew what demons resided in such a place?
A soothsayer had set up his table inside the temple doors. As she passed him on her way out, he shook his box of sticks at her, trying to entice her to have her fortune told. But she already knew her destiny: she was going home.
Erlan struggled against the snow and the wind for another block and then stopped again. A set of wind-bells hung next to the door of this house and they jangled wildly, filling the air with a joyful sound. Which was appropriate, Erlan thought, since this was a joy girl's house.
Before Erlan could knock, the door was flung open. Ah Toy opened her mouth and struck her cheeks with her palms in mock surprise. "Aiya! What a pleasure this is to have visitors just when I was feeling so lonely!"
Ah Toy frequently watched Samuel for Erlan while she made her deliveries, especially when the weather was bad. But to ask anything of consequence from a friend who could not refuse was uncivilized, so the joy girl was saving her from embarrassment by pretending it was Erlan who was doing her a favor.
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"It is our pleasure to come," Erlan responded, following the ritual of politeness. "But are you certain you aren't busy this afternoon, Elder Sister?"
"Not at all, not at all," Ah Toy said, bowing Erlan inside. "That Ah Foock—he wanted to come today, but I told him to stay away. He makes me work too hard for my three dollars. He has testicles the size of a gnat's and a withered old root that no amount of flogging can stiffen."
Ah Toy helped to lift the yoke off Erlan's shoulders. Erlan removed Samuel from his sling, and both women fussed over him for a moment before she put him down in a white wicker bassinet that stood near the parlor stove. The bassinet looked strange among the Oriental lacquer and brocade furnishings.
Ah Toy pulled a red-lacquered chair away from a red lacquered table and gestured for Erlan to sit. "I was so anxious for you to visit this worthless self that I already poured the tea. Stupid me, I hope it isn't cold."
Erlan took a sip of the tea and assured her it was just perfect.
She enjoyed coming to Ah Toy's house, for it was as richly furnished as a tomb. Bronzes and porcelains and carvings of jade, ivory vases, cloisonne boxes, and scroll paintings. And the smells: sandalwood and incense, and occasionally a sickly sweet hint of opium smoke.
Ah Toy had much status in the Chinese community because one of the gentlemen she entertained was One-Eyed Jack, who many said was the richest man in Rainbow Springs. In China such a wealthy, powerful man was often the local warlord and a man to be feared. A man who was feared was a man who was respected, and all who served him were respected as well.
Ah Toy was not a first-rate beauty, but she had a delicate face that was always wreathed with smiles. Today she was dressed like a Mandarin princess in a robe of midnight blue embroidered with peonies, and she wore abalone shell combs in her hair.
She was laughing now as she leaned over the bassinet to dangle a string of jade worry beads before Samuel's face. "So you have brought this worthless little flea to spend the afternoon with me, have you?" she exclaimed loudly, in the exaggerated tone of voice used for compliments. Samuel gurgled as he tried to grasp the beads. "What an ugly little worm you are!"
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