Rose (11 page)

The safety lamps were eight inches tall, with brass caps and bases and, in between, a cylinder of brass gauze to cool the heat of the flame below the ignition point of explosive gas. The lampman lit and locked lamps for Leveret and Blair. Within the safety gauze, the flames were murky embers. Scratched into each lamp base was a different number that the lampman wrote into a ledger that he turned for Blair and Leveret. “That’s how we know who went down pit and who come up. Just in case. I should warn you, gentlemen, the Hannay pit’s a mile down, the deepest pit in Lancashire. If closets make you uncomfortable, best to think twice.”

They went back into the dark to join men waiting
under the tower at the pit head. The miners wore dirty wool jackets and moleskin pants; moleskin had no nap to rub the wrong way underground. Cloth caps and clogs, of course. Tommy tins of food hung on straps over their shoulders. The men lounged against one another with an ease particular to soldiers, athletes, miners. In spite of himself, Blair felt at home among them, just as Leveret showed signs of middle-class unease. Air whistled down the shaft—it was the ventilation intake for eight miles of workings underground—and the wind set the flames in the safety lamps trembling. Blair could just see the white warning fence around a ventilation upshaft fifty yards away; at the bottom was a furnace that drove foul air from the pit and drew in good—at least, that was the theory.

The wind subsided at the same time as the improbable sound of a freight train approached from beneath the ground. Blair watched the winding wheel slow, the vertical line of cable shake as the load lessened, a hook emerge, followed by a cage—an iron square with two wooden sides and ends open except for two loose chains. Immediately the chains were unhooked and tubs of glossy coal were rolled from the cage to the scale. Just as quickly, the miners pushed into the cage, taking the place of the tubs, putting their feet around the rails, and Blair and Leveret joined them.

Everyone crowded in; miners were paid by coal they produced, not the time they spent waiting for a ride. They didn’t force Blair or Leveret to the open ends, and that was courtesy enough, Blair thought. In the glow of the lamps, fainter than candles, he saw coal dust on Leveret’s collar and knew the same inescapable smudges were on him.

“Last chance. You’ll look like a pipe cleaner when we come back,” Blair said. He liked Rose’s expression. Another woman would have said “chimney sweep.” Leveret was tall, so “pipe cleaner” fit him.

Leveret’s bravado was lost in the deafening clatter of a bell. One ring: going down.

The cage started slowly, down through the round, brick-lined upper mouth of the shaft, past round garlands of Yorkshire iron, good as steel, into a crosshatched well of stone and timber, and then simply down. Down into an unlit abyss. Down at twenty, thirty, forty miles per hour. Down faster than any men anywhere else on earth could travel. So fast that breath flew from the lungs and pressed against the ears. So fast that nothing could be seen at the open end of the cage except a blur that could whip away an inattentive hand or leg. Down seemingly forever.

Past the lamplight of an older landing. It could have been a firefly. Blair caught Leveret crossing himself and shook his head; the less movement the better. At its fastest, the cage dropped so smoothly that the men almost floated. In a shaft it was always the moment of greatest danger and greatest bliss. Blair thought that with their massed lamps they might resemble a meteor to a spectator, to a dazzled worm.

Brunei, the great railroad engineer, claimed that the drivers of trains should be illiterate because only the unlettered man
paid attention
. Miners paid attention, Blair thought. The faces in the cage were more concentrated than the School of Plato for the way they listened to the unraveling of round steel cable, the slightest yawing of the cage, the growing pressure on the wooden soles of their clogs.

They were slowing. At two minutes by Blair’s watch at an estimated average speed of thirty miles per hour, a mile down, the cage settled into a subterranean well of lights and stopped. At once the miners poured out, followed by Blair and Leveret, the latter in a state of confusion.

For good reason. There was the converging traffic of underground roads, out of which emerged ponies in heavy harness and boys in caps and jackets, both beasts
and tenders even more stunted by dim lamps hanging from the timbers. Behind each pony followed a row of loaded tubs on rails.

There was the smell emanating from a long row of low pony stalls. Underground stables were always placed by the downshaft and built on planks, but they never totally dried out; instead, the pungent aroma of horse manure and urine seemed both ancient and distilled.

There was the gale-force wind that whistled down the shaft, fresh air now tainted by the stable it passed through.

There was the heat, the opposite of a dank cave. A stifling heat ripe with sweat, muck, carbon dust. A reminder that the earth was a living organism with a burning core.

All these were sensory evidence that a visitor took notice of, sorted through, made order of. It took a minute for a visitor to comprehend that the pit eye was a hundred yards across. What the visitor had to simply ignore was the subtler, stronger report of his senses that a mile of earth stood over him, or that he was that far from escape. Blair checked his compass anyway.

Just as there was a manager’s office on the surface, there was an underlooker’s office below, a square and simple room of brick. The underlooker was named Battie, a happy Vulcan in shirtsleeves, bowler and braces.

Battie was expecting them; he had cleared his desk, spread a map and weighted the corners with lamps. On the north end of the map were the cage and furnace shafts. The south was a gridiron of large and small tunnels that ran to an irregular border.

Battie registered with a noncommittal glance the different fashions of his visitors’ dress. “Mr. Leveret, Mr. Blair, will you please turn your pockets inside out?”

Blair pulled out his watch, compass, handkerchief, penknife and loose change; Leveret produced a more substantial pile of watch, change purse, billfold, locket,
comb, visiting cards, briar pipe, tobacco, matches. Battie locked the pipe, tobacco and matches in his desk.

“No smoking, Mr. Leveret. I wouldn’t want you to even think about it.”

The map was dated the day of the explosion and bore circles with numbers ranging from one to three digits. Lamp numbers, Blair realized. There were seventy-six victims in the fire and that was the total he counted. It wasn’t difficult because so many were clustered in a central tunnel, while others were evenly spaced along the coal face. One number, however, was right outside the underlooker’s office.

“What happened here?” he asked.

“The cage was up. The shaft itself goes farther down, you know. A boy had just come with his pony and tubs. When the smoke reached here, the pony backed over the edge. The boy tried to save it. That’s how they went— pony, tubs and then the boy.” Battie paused. He lifted the lamps and let the map roll up, and put it in a leather satchel along with a ledger. He replaced his bowler with a red bandanna tied around his forehead. In a second, he had regained his poise, as if he were about to stroll through a park. “Well, gentlemen, I have to make my rounds. If you still want to, we have a long way to go.”

“You can wait here or go up in the cage,” Blair offered Leveret again.

“I’m with you,” Leveret said.

“ ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’?” Blair asked.

“I won’t hold you back,” Leveret promised.

Swinging his satchel, Battie led the way around the shaft and darted into the right-hand tunnel. “Tunnels we call ‘roads,’ ” he said over his shoulder. “When they’re as wide as this, it’s a ‘Main Road.’ ”

There was nothing high about it, however, and as soon as they entered, Leveret was in trouble. The only light was the safety lamps, three flames so obscured by wire gauze that they barely lit the rails on the floor or the
timbers on the ceiling, and when Leveret tried to avoid one he stumbled into the other, and he didn’t know when to step and when to duck.

Battie slowed but didn’t stop. “When you want to turn around, Mr. Leveret, look for a sign saying, ‘Out.’ If you don’t find one, just follow the air in your face. If the wind’s at your back, you’re going farther in. Mr. Blair, you’ve done this before.”

Blair hadn’t even realized he’d slipped into the miner’s stride: a half-crouch with the head up, steps unconsciously measuring the ties of the track.

“When do we reach the coal?” Leveret asked.

“We’re in it now. You’re in the middle of the Hannay Seam, one of the richest coal seams in England,” Battie said. “That’s what’s holding up the roof.”

Black walls. Black roof, too, Blair thought, because coal cushioned timbers better than stone. The irises of his eyes had dilated so that dark became shadow, and shadow took on form. Ahead of Battie a shaggy outline and lamp came from the opposite direction.

“Pony,” Battie said and stepped into a refuge hole that not even Blair had seen. Blair followed and they pulled in a startled Leveret the moment before a pony passed, a Shetland with sooty locks tended by a boy with a lamp and trailed by four full tubs. Leveret looked a little shorter.

“Lost your hat?” Blair asked.

“Actually, yes.” Mournfully Leveret watched the tubs roll by.

Blair asked Battie, “You can tell when someone’s been in mines before no matter how they’re dressed?”

“With their first step. And whether they’re drunk or not. If they are, I send them up. You’re only as safe as the stupidest man in the mine.”

To join the conversation, Leveret asked, “Why do the men wear clogs? I understand that most people in Wigan
do, but I’d think that down in a mine they would be clumsy.”

Battie said, “Rockfalls, sir. When the roof comes down on you it doesn’t crush a clog’s wooden sole the way it does a shoe. Then they’re easier to squirm and get your foot out of, too.”

Leveret fell silent.

Walking underground was called traveling. They traveled twenty minutes, encountering only ponies and tub trains. The road became lower and narrower and began to slant down, and the sound of the trains was muffled by the constricted breath of the wind and the press of weight on wooden timbers. Battie halted regularly to hold his lamp where stones packed into dry walls or timbers propped up the roof.

He explained to Leveret, “When we cut the coal, we let out firedamp. A funny word, isn’t it, gentlemen?”

“It is a funny word,” Leveret agreed.

“As if it would put out fire.” Battie poked into a niche.

“And it does?”

“From the German
Dampf
. Meaning vapor. Explosive gas.”

“Oh,” said Leveret.

“Methane. It likes to hide in cracks and along the roof. The point of a safety lamp is that the gauze dissipates enough of the heat so that you won’t set the gas off. Still, the best way to find it is with a flame.” Battie lifted the lamp by a rough column of rock and studied the light wavering behind the screen of the gauze. “See how it’s a little longer, a little bluer? That’s methane that’s burning.”

“Should we evacuate?” Leveret asked.

The flame lit Battie’s grin as he pulled off his vest and fanned the rock. He went back in the tunnel and returned a minute later with a folded frame of canvas and wood that he opened into a standing panel that redirected the flow of air at the rock.

“Mr. Leveret, if we closed a pit every time we found a whiff of firedamp, England would freeze.” He took the ledger from his pack and noted the time, location and amount of gas. “We watch the firedamp, we chase the firedamp, and we don’t let it blow us to kingdom come.”

From here the road got worse, which didn’t slow Battie in the least. “This is a ‘sit,’ ” he said at a place where the ceiling buckled, and made a note in his book. “This is a ‘creep,’ ” he said where the floor rose, lifting the track. “There’s pressure up and down. We have limestone above and gritstone below. We haven’t lost the coal yet, though.”

The farther they walked the more Blair understood that Battie didn’t need the map. The man knew the Hannay Seam the way a riverman knew a river. Probably his father and grandfather had worked the same coal. A man like Battie knew where the black banks twisted left, right, up and down, or plunged from sight at a geologic fault. He knew the Hannay Seam’s density, cohesion, water content, luster, lighting point and ash. He could follow it in the dark.

Leveret was falling behind. Blair was about to ask Battie to relent when the underlooker stopped on his own and set his lamp by a coal pillar. He spread his map across the floor and pointed to two lamp numbers. “This is where we found these two lads. They were the nearest casualties to the cage except for the boy and pony.”

A trail of numbers led to the west coal face, still twice as far as they had gone so far. The victims on the Main Road had fallen in groups, some huddled in refuge holes.

Leveret arrived, gasping and covered in coal dust as if he’d been dragged behind a pony.

“I’m … fine,” he said and sank to his knees.

Blair and Battie returned to the map.

“Were they burned?” Blair asked.

“No. No one was burned until we get to the end of the
Main Road, close to the face. The lads here were stretched out like they’d gone to sleep.”

“But facing the air? Running when they’d dropped?”

“Right.” Battie seemed darkly satisfied. “Mr. Leveret, your friend here knows something about coal.”

“They were crushed?” Leveret asked.

“No,” Battie said. “When firedamp explodes it turns to afterdamp. Carbon monoxide. The strongest man in the world could be running through here at top speed, but two breaths of that and he’ll drop to the floor. Unless you drag him out, he’ll die. In fact, I’ve seen rescue attempts where one, two, three men will drop trying to pull one man out.”

The floor jumped, followed by a roar that rolled through one end of the tunnel to the other. Pebbles rained in the dark.

Leveret was on his feet. “Fire!”

“Just blasting, Mr. Leveret. There’s a difference. When there’s an explosion you can feel it in Wigan. I’ll let you know.” Battie rolled up the map and added, “There won’t be any more demonstrations like that, I hope, Mr. Leveret. Around the men, I mean.”