Heart of the West (41 page)

Drew Scully smiled at the challenge. He would have Hannah Yorke. He would see her in his bed, or he'd see her in hell. But there would come a day, and soon, when she would have to look him in the eye and reckon with him.

His smile faded, though, a moment later when he looked up and saw the gallus frame of the Four Jacks looming before him—the black skeletal headframe where the ore was hauled up from the shafts, and where the miners were sent down.

The slope of the butte was rutted with the streams of ore tailings and lumpy with black slag heaps and mounds of waste rock. But beyond the butte the sky was a limpid blue that made the mountains look close enough to touch. He wished he had a reason to go riding up in those mountains today. A reason to do anything but what he had to do.

They moved to the side of the road as a wagon pulling a load of crushed ore rolled by going down the hill while one bearing a stack of shoring timbers passed them going up. Jere raised his hand to the skinners in greeting. The curses they hurled back at him showed such inventiveness that he turned to his brother, beaming a smile, and caught the look on the younger man's face.

"Drew, are you—"

"I'm all right. So hold your clack." He wasn't all right, though.

The rhythmical thud of the stamp mill thrummed in Drew's head. He could feel the first quivers of tension deep in his belly. He could also feel Jere watching him, and he tried to put a spring into his step. But he couldn't fool his brother any more than he could fool himself. The rank fear lay always deep inside him like a mortal sickness.

By the time they had gone to the foreman's shack and gotten their work assignments, the muscles cording his throat had drawn as taut as bowstrings. In the changing house, as he put on a pair of filthy trousers and tied them at the waist with a piece of rope, his throat was so tight he could barely swallow. He shrugged into a shirt, which he would take off as soon as he was down in the shaft, and sweat immediately began to crawl all over his body. He put on a felt fedora made stiff with tree sap, and the blood began to roar in his head.

He walked with Jere to the collar of the Four Jacks shaft. As they stood under the headframe on the metal sheets, he could feel the vibration of the pumps and hoisting engine. Iron cages descended into the earth in clouds of steam as if they were descending into the bowels of hell. And fear burned a hot path up his chest, choking him.

He went behind a timber car and vomited up the stack of flapjacks he'd had for breakfast. He knelt in the dirt, his head pressed into the rough wood of the car, his chest heaving. Sometimes when he was sick like that, he would spew up all the fear along with the food sitting heavy in his belly. But not this time.

He came out from behind the car and returned Jere's look with a grimace that just about passed for a smile. But he knew he was as white as cornstarch. He stuffed his hands in his pockets to hide their trembling.

Runnels of sweat coursed down his sides as he watched the red arrow on the dial spin around as the cage came back up, watched the hoisting cable wind around the enormous grooved spool. And then he was stepping into the iron cage, he and Jere, and the hoistman was pulling the bell to signal their descent.

And blackness swallowed them.

The fear was now a scream in his mind. He gasped for breath, and the sound of it filled the rattling cage like the slithering hiss of a steam pump. Light flared as Jere scraped a match and put it to the candle on his hat. It helped some to see the upward-fleeing sides of the shaft instead of nothing but impenetrable blackness.

He tried to breathe through his nose, but it felt as if his lungs had shrunk. The air was as thick as black wool and smelled of the deep earth. Maybe the bloody cage will crash going down, he thought, and put me out of my misery.

He'd heard of that happening. Of bodies ricocheting against the rocky walls until they hit the sump, the pit full of hot water that lay at the bottom of every shaft. They kept small grappling hooks on hand to pick up pieces of whatever was left of a man when that happened. They rolled the pieces in canvas and put them in wooden candle boxes to be taken above, where they were put into caskets and laid back into the earth that had killed them.

The odd thing was, he didn't fear death, not even a hideous, horrible death like that one. It wasn't the ways a man could die in a mine that frightened him, it was the mine itself. The thick and heavy darkness and the earth closing in on him, pressing and squeezing, trapping him, smothering him...

The cage jolted to a stop, and Drew stepped out into the main drift at the sixth level, his jaw rigid and his knees loose. And his heart working like a bellows in his chest.

Jere greeted the shaft boss with the easy smile that was his way. "How's she going, gaffer?"

"You're late," the boss snapped back. Casey O'Brian had a face like a rat's, his nose and mouth and chin all coming to a point below his small, close-set eyes. He studied the Scully brothers out of those eyes now, and the whole lower half of his face twitched as if he had whiskers. "And since you're late, sure you lads'll be advancing the face of the west stope today."

Yesterday Drew had told the boss the cribbing was going rotten on the west stope—that web of massive timbers that shored up the tons of rock above their heads. It had been groaning and creaking for days now, and the rats had been skittering about. Rats could always sense when the cribbing was about to go.

Drew knew the shaft boss was daring him to say something about the weak cribbing so that he could crack wise and nasty about Drew's courage and his manhood. Hard-rock miners were supposed to take pride in the bone-wrenching way they made a living and worked on the edge of danger, as if it were worthy of a bloody knighthood.

"You got something stuck in your craw, boy?" O'Brian said. "Spit it out."

Drew pulled his mouth into a hard smile. "I was going to suggest you go and get buggered, sir. But then I thought you'd not be finding anyone willing to put it to an arsehole like yourself."

O'Brian's jaw bunched along with his fists, but he said nothing. The Scully brothers were not only big men, they were the best double-jack team on the whole butte, and a shaft boss would put up with a lot to have them on his crew. They could drill more holes faster than any other team, one holding the drill and the other pounding it with a heavy sledgehammer, driving the drill point into the hard rock face to prepare the hole for the blasting powder.

Most times Drew was the blaster, the man who loaded and tamped the volatile sticks of dynamite into the holes, set the fuses, and fired off the blasts. The other miners all thought Drew was nerveless when it came to handling the giant powder. Nobody but his brother knew that he was already so scared spit-less, just being down in the smothering earth and rock, that being blown to smithereens held little fear for him.

They walked in silence down the drift to the west face. Drew focused on the candle on his brother's hat, at the way it drew smoke patterns in the air. He pictured tamping down the fear within him the way he tamped down the charges of dynamite, and that helped some, but the slime of sweat was still cold on his face and the scream was still locked high in his throat.

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.