The Dutch Wife (26 page)

Will had no idea what time of day it was, but the hours soon passed and the miners began the long walk back to the elevator. All the apprentices dreaded that. Will had stiffened up during the day and thought he wouldn’t be able to do it. But the knowledge that they were going home helped, and he was able to put up with the pain. The foreman said it would take a week or two for the newcomers to get used to that crouched walk.

When they got to the elevator at last, they shot to the surface like a rocket. It was great to stand up straight and breathe in the fresh air. Will’s father met him and was as pleased as punch.

WILL WORKED IN THE TARBRAE MINE
six days a week for five years. The seasons didn’t matter, for there was only one season underground—a dark, hot summer. Even when he slept, there was no escape—he would dream he was down that mine. Generally, Will’s life seemed nothing but darkness and sweat and coal dust and itching throat and bruised limbs. Sometimes they laughed and kidded around at work, but at the back of their minds was the worry about gas and explosions and maybe being buried alive. Will supposed all the miners felt the same way he did, but they never talked about it, even when there was an accident. What choice did ordinary working men have?

Anyway, he found out that terrible things could happen above ground in the fresh air, too.

One rainy Friday, Will and his father left for the mine at half past four in the morning, as usual. His mother was upset about something—she often was, they never knew why—and his father patted her arm as they were leaving just to cheer her up. She stood at the window with the curtain pulled back, watching their departure. Her black-and-white cat, Mindy, was sitting on her shoulder.

At three-thirty in the afternoon, father and son came home from work. The rain had stopped but it was a dull day, one of those days that didn’t seem much brighter than a tunnel ten thousand feet underground. When Will’s father opened the door, he knew something was wrong, for he couldn’t smell any cooking. They had a quick look inside. Mindy was asleep on the chair, but there was no sign of Will’s mother. They tried the neighbours, but they hadn’t seen her either.

They split up and looked all over the town, then Will went up into the moors. He met Hayworth, a bow-legged shepherd with two collies. Hayworth said hours before he’d seen a woman walking up in the moors near where he was herding.

“It was up by Tibby’s Bridge,” he said.

Will knew what that meant.

He went back for his father and they both went up into the moors. They couldn’t go fast, because of his father’s bad lungs. The old bridge was about a mile east, among the hills. It crossed a deep ravine with a fast stream at the bottom—a great place for trout fishermen from all the little mining towns in the hills. But as far back as anyone could remember, it had always been a great place for suicides, too.

Will got to the bridge and looked over and saw his mother right away. She was lying on the rocks and the moorbirds were pecking at her. He climbed down and chased the birds away. Then he hauled her back up over his shoulder. She wasn’t nearly as heavy as a sack of coal. His father was in an awful state, wheezing and trying to wipe the blood off her face with his handkerchief.

Will carried her back down to Tarbrae, and three days later she was buried, without much fuss. She’d always kept the house in good order and cooked nice meals, his father said. He said she used to be very lively before Will was born.

TARBRAE WAS JUST LIKE
all the other mining towns in the region—it had no shortage of widows. So within a year, Will’s father was walking out with another woman. She was a waitress at The Stag and was energetic and talkative. Her own husband had been crushed, along with three other men, in a cave-in years before. Her children were grown.

Will knew his father wanted to marry her, so he thought he might as well get married himself. He asked Jenny Stewart, a girl from his class at school he’d gone out with a few times, and she said yes. They got married and set up house in one of the miners’ rows, and it wasn’t long before she had a baby. It was a boy, and they called him Will, too.

So, Will Drummond was set for life.

THAT FIRST DECEMBER
after he got married was a cold one—snow every day and a north wind. Will didn’t mind too much having to go underground; at least it was warm down there. His father had married his waitress by then, but he would come by Will’s house in the mornings and they’d walk to work together, as usual.

One morning in the middle of the month, his father said he’d be going underground with Will, instead of staying on the surface. That was because they’d reached a fresh seam of coal and he had to come down to classify it.

So they went down in the elevator together, then walked the two miles to the coal face. It was hard for his father, with those bad lungs, and they’d stop every five minutes and let him wheeze and cough for a while. They stopped once beside the opening of an old tunnel and he told Will that was where he used to work, years ago, before the bad lungs.

They eventually got to the coal face and all the men took a break while he examined the coal.

He’d only been at it five minutes when they heard a thud from a long way back up the tunnel. They knew it was an explosion from where there shouldn’t have been an explosion. The foreman told them all to keep very quiet and listen. At first Will thought maybe everything was going to be all right, then he heard a kind of popping noise in the distance, the kind of pop they’d hear from the local gamekeeper’s guns when he was out shooting the grouse.

“It’s the props! They’re snapping!” one of the older miners said.

They all knew what that meant. The roof of the main tunnel was caving in and it was coming their way. The popping was getting louder and faster. There was no place to go: only the coal face was behind them.

Will’s father grabbed his arm.

“Run for it, Will!” he said. “Run for that tunnel I showed you. It goes through granite. Maybe it won’t collapse!”

Will didn’t like the idea of leaving him there. Nor did he like the idea of running back towards that popping noise. But it was either that, or just wait to be crushed. So he started to run, and some of the others ran behind him. The popping got louder and louder, and now he could hear the rumble of the roof caving in up ahead. He was bent over double and scared and running into a wind caused by the collapse. His ears were bursting with the pressure and he thought he was done for, then he saw the opening of the cave a few yards away and dived in. Some of the others tumbled in behind him just in time. A noise like an express train went past them in the main tunnel and they were left lying in the dark and the dust. All they could hear was a rumbling that got fainter and fainter till it sudddenly stopped. The props in this side tunnel were creaking as though they were ready to collapse too. They were all coughing from the dust they couldn’t see. Then, after a while, everything was quiet except for the sound of their breathing.

THERE WERE SIX MEN
in that side tunnel for three days before they reached them by boring in from a tunnel in a disused mine that ran parallel. They were hauled up to the surface through an old shaft. Jenny was waiting for Will. The waitress from The Stag was waiting for his father. Will told her how they were saved because of him, even though he couldn’t run himself with his bad lungs.

She looked at him as if she hated him.

THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR
closed the Tarbrae mine forever. Forty-nine men and boys had died in the tunnel and he said that was enough. There was too much gas and the ground was too unstable for any more mining in the area. That was a death sentence for Tarbrae—it would be a ghost town before long, like a lot of places that had run out of coal.

Most of the men started looking for jobs right away in other mining towns in the Uplands. But Will had had enough of the mines. Leaving Jenny and the baby with her parents, he went to Glasgow to find work.

THAT WAS THE FIRST TIME
he’d ever been in a city. He couldn’t believe how dirty the fogs were and how dead the river was and how so many people could live so close together. It was strange, after living all his life in a place where everybody knew everybody else, not to know anybody at all. The only lodging he could afford was in a room shared with four other men at the top of a tenement. It was on the south side of the river where there were street gangs and knife fights and robberies. The police were seldom seen.

Jobs were hard to find and usually only temporary. Will took anything he could get. For a while, he hauled bags of coal, but the owner paid so little he could hardly afford the food to give him the strength to carry the bags. Then he worked at a cooperage where they made whisky barrels. He could drink as much whisky as he liked, but he didn’t get much money. He thought he’d struck it lucky at last when he got a full-time job at an iron foundry, cleaning out the gas furnaces. He soon found out why the job had been so easy to get: he’d only been there a week when his whole crew was overcome by gas fumes and had to be dragged out unconscious. When he woke up, he was as sick as a dog for three days. But the foreman liked him and said he’d take him on as a tender of the vats of molten ore to replace a man who had carelessly fallen in. Because the job was so dangerous, the wages were good, and Will stuck at it for three months, saving up money to send to Jenny. Then came a strike at the shipping yards. Ore wasn’t needed any more and the foundry was shut down.

THINGS WERE TOUGH
after that. Will was hungry most of the time. Then he found a few hours’ work cleaning up at Duffy’s Travelling Fair while it was in a park at the east end of the city. The very day the Fair was about to move to another town, one of the regular men quit and Duffy asked Will if he wanted the job. There wasn’t much money in it, but he’d have a bunk in a trailer and plenty to eat. Sometimes there were women. And he’d see the country.

Will accepted.

HE SOON GOT USED TO LIFE
with the Fair, cleaning up after the horses, swabbing out the beer tents, mopping the fortuneteller’s booth, stoking the brazier in the fire-eater’s booth. Sometimes, indeed, there were women. All in all, he was kept busy.

Occasionally, whenever he had time at the end of a day’s work, he’d go to the boxing tent and watch the fights. It was the usual thing: Challenge The Champions For Two Rounds—Win Five Pounds. Duffy himself looked after it and didn’t mind if Will came in to watch so long as he didn’t take up one of the seats. Duffy acted as referee at the bouts and always dressed up in a white shirt with a black bow tie. He’d been a boxer himself. His nose was bent and his left eye was dead.

The “Champions” weren’t really champions, just good enough boxers in their day. They were both big men in their late thirties. Gentleman Jaco Acker was black—a rare sight for that time—and on the flabby side. Crusher Jones was white and also on the flabby side. Aside from the difference in colour, they could have been brothers with their flat noses, cauliflower ears and scarred eyebrows. Even when they talked they sounded alike, for their words didn’t come out right from all the punches they’d taken. On top of that, they’d both been married and left by their wives.

Duffy told Will he wished they would act more ferocious in public. In private they were both easygoing and even-tempered. Crusher was forever reading, and Jaco’s hobby was house plants—his trailer was full of them.

WHILE THE TENT WAS FILLING UP
for the bouts each night, the Champions would get into the ring and spar with each other. Seeing men their size move around like dancers and the easy way they’d slip punches should have been enough to put any challengers off. But there were always enough drunks or show-offs to volunteer. Will never saw any of them last the two rounds.

He’d been working a month when the Fair set up in Bellsvale, an industrial town on the edge of Glasgow. There, Duffy made him a proposition. He said it was good for business if a challenger occasionally won a bout. Will looked big enough to be convincing, so he wanted him, from time to time, to act as the challenger.

Will was worried someone might realize it was a fix.

Duffy assured him that was unlikely. And anyway, it was really just show-biz and there wasn’t anything wrong with it. He’d let Will have time off work to do a bit of rehearsing with the Champions. And he’d give him a pound each time he went in the ring.

Will needed the money, so he agreed.

ON THE THIRD NIGHT
in Bellsvale, Will went into the ring for the first time. The tent was packed and he had to wait, for there were two legitimate challengers before him.

The first of them was a thin man covered in tattoos who got in to face Gentleman Jaco. He was wiry and fast and tried to keep out of Jaco’s way. Though the crowd booed him for being a coward, he almost got through the first round. Then, just before the bell, Gentleman Jaco got him in a corner and gave him an uppercut and that was that.

The second challenger looked the part. He was a big, ginger-haired Irishman, flushed with drink. He came running straight at Crusher and threw some heavy punches. Crusher took them on the gloves and let him keep on charging all through the first round. The Irishman was breathing heavily at the end of it. At the beginning of the second round, he rushed at Crusher again. But Crusher just stepped out of the way and gave him a short punch to the belly. The Irishman dropped to the floor, vomiting, and couldn’t get back up.

Now it was Will’s turn against plant-loving Jaco.

The first few seconds of the first round, Will thought he’d forgotten the rehearsals, for Jaco hit him in the face, making his nose bleed. Will put his hands up over his face, so Jaco punched him a few times in the chest almost stopping Will’s breathing. The crowd was shouting for more but Jaco backed off then, let Will get a few shots in and winced as though they hurt.

The second round went much the same way. Near the end of it, just the way they’d rehearsed, Will punched Jaco in the face and he fell back against the ropes, looking really stunned. Will was exhausted but kept his feet and arms moving till the welcome final bell. The audience seemed convinced and cheered loudly when Duffy made a big deal of handing Will five pounds.