Chapter 7
Over the week that followed there was a lot of work that went on around the mine.
Andrew wanted answers. Lizzy couldn’t fault him for it.
After all, he was the leader, the one who had put this ragtag community together, and so it was only proper that he wanted to know what had imperiled his people’s safety.
But she could only think of one way to determine what had happened, once and for all, and no one seemed interested in hearing it.
Troy, who usually listened to her as an equal, was busy spending time with Emily.
It wasn’t easy to watch him talking to her, even though Lizzy had been the one to urge him to give her a chance.
She couldn’t help but feel the claws of jealousy rake across her heart every time she glanced their way at mealtimes.
Emily smiled in such a pretty way, and she carried herself well, wore pretty clothes, and, all in all, seemed so much better that Lizzy began to feel quite inferior in ways she’d never before even considered she needed to improve upon.
But she had to make friends with the woman, or at least try her best, because that had been part of her deal with Troy.
She thought of how gently he’d held her injured hands that night outside the air shaft.
No man had ever before treated her both as an equal and as someone whom he might still see as womanly in spite of her interest in engineering.
At first it had been difficult. Lizzy hadn’t been able to see past Emily’s finesse, but as the days passed and she had a few conversations with her, Lizzy began to see the newcomer in a different light.
It was Saturday now, and the weather was starting to turn cold as September marched to its end. The sky was covered with clouds so high that they looked like a gray carpet had been laid over the blue.
The mine hadn’t reopened yet, so most folks worked in the fields. Lizzy and Emily worked the same row, picking the large pumpkins and rolling them to the cart that waited at the edge of the field.
“Had I known I would spend my days doing this, I might not have come,” Emily said with a chuckle.
“Not one for working with your hands?” Carl’s mother asked dryly.
“No, it’s rolling pumpkins that I draw the line at,” Emily said sweetly. “You do it well though.”
Meredith scowled and rolled her pumpkin faster to the edge of the field. Perhaps to get away from her.
Lizzy had to chuckle. “You’re going to turn her into an enemy for life.”
Emily shrugged. “I don’t care. She seems to be an all-around unhappy person. I can only imagine what she’ll say if I give her son a bad mark on his schoolwork.” She sighed. “Assuming we ever build a school.”
“What did Andrew say about that?” Lizzy asked.
Emily seemed to deflate. “He said that I would have to start with what I have. The most he can give me is a tent. There are ten children who need to start school. How do I fit ten into a tent?”
Lizzy considered this. “Do you mind if it doesn’t have sides? Or maybe I could make sides, depending on what we find.”
“Find where?” Emily asked. “What are you talking about?”
Lizzy smiled. “I think between us, Troy and I might be able to build something a little better than a small tent. There’s some debris from a storm a while back that might do the trick.
Plus, we might be able to use some of the wood from the collapsed elevator scaffolding. How are you with a needle?”
“I’m pretty good,” Emily said. “Why? What will I be sewing?”
“I’ll show you,” Lizzy said. Clearing a space in the dirt, she picked up a sharp stone and began to draw a picture.
As it was in her head, she drew it on the ground.
As she did, Emily nodded. “Oh, I see. We’ll be making a tent using what we have but making it bigger by adding some material to the roof. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Lizzy nodded. “That’s the general idea. We can see if there are other bits we can use. A lot of stuff from a flood washed up on the other side of the creek, and people have been taking from the pile to build the foundations of the town. Have you been over there?”
Emily shook her head.
“When we’re done here, I’ll take you,” Lizzy said. “It’s quite fun to go there and walk through what will be our town when we finally get it built.”
Emily nodded. “That does sound wonderful.” She put a hand on Lizzy’s arm. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
That took Lizzy by surprise. “What for?”
“For coming here and messing up what is obviously a deep-rooted and wholeheartedly shared love between you and Troy,” Emily said.
Lizzy’s cheeks were instantly on fire. She looked away.
“Oh, don’t be embarrassed,” Emily pleaded. “Love should never be embarrassing.”
“Why did you come here?” Lizzy mumbled, trying to pull herself together. She wasn’t one to be shy, but she also wasn’t one for whom love had ever before happened. “It wasn’t for Troy, was it?”
“Are you two going to talk or work?” Meredith demanded. She had taken her pumpkin to the cart and returned for another.
“Oh, I guess we’d better get them to the cart,” Emily said and began to half lift, half roll her own large pumpkin.
It took them several minutes to get their pumpkins to the edge of the field, and by then the cart was laden with produce from all four fields.
There were potatoes, summer squash, onions, carrots, sweet potatoes, and of course, many pumpkins.
Large red tomatoes sat in shallow baskets so that their collective weight didn’t squash them.
There were cucumbers and radishes and turnips.
It was a good harvest, and all because Julie and Kyle had decided to fill the fields with horse manure and compost made from the kitchen scraps.
As the cart rode off to the pantry where folks would store the vegetables, Lizzy took Emily by the arm and led her to the creek. There was a place where it was shallow enough to cross, and they walked over to the other side.
Through a clump of trees, they came to the town.
The houses, all four of them that were being built at once, were in varying stages of development.
One was just a hole in the ground where the cold cellar would be, and another was not much more than that.
Another had posts for walls, and one had three walls so far.
“Andrew split the men into four teams, and each has a house,” Lizzy said.
“They’re building when they get time off from the mine or the smelter.
It’s slow-going. I’ve spent a shift or two on the houses.
We all have. It makes things go a little faster.
Of course, with growing our own food and everything, it can become a challenge to find the time to come over here and work. ”
“I’ll believe it,” Emily said, looking at the space with awe. “When Troy wrote that the town was starting up, I don’t think I had an inkling of what that meant. What it really meant.” She gestured to the buildings in their unfinished state. “I wasn’t expecting this. Or the tents. Or the scorpions.”
Lizzy nodded. “It takes some getting used to. So why did you come here? I’m sure there were other places you could have gone.”
“Want to get rid of me?” Emily asked with a suspicious look on her face.
“No,” Lizzy said. “Just curious. Tim and I and the others, like Andrea and Carl, all left our homes when bandits came to our town. Andrew and Troy and the others saved us all. They brought us here. Gave us a home. Julie nursed me back to health after I was terribly ill. And Troy … Troy has just been so welcoming and kind. Most other men look at me like I’m touched in the head.
” She hadn’t wanted to tell Emily all of this, but it only seemed fair.
If she wanted Emily to share, she would have to offer something too.
Emily looked at her feet. She still wore Lizzy’s boots with an extra pair of socks. She bit her lip. “Please don’t tell anyone,” Emily said, looking stricken. “The reason I left my home is because of my uncle.”
“Your uncle?” Lizzy asked. “Gosh, what did he do?” She was worried that Emily was going to tell her something depraved or desperate. Instead, she said something that made Lizzy frown.
“He gambled,” she said.
“He gambled?” Lizzy repeated.
“I know it sounds like it shouldn’t mean anything, like it should be a trivial thing,” Emily said, finding a log and taking a seat on it.
Lizzy moved to sit beside her.
“The problem with my uncle is that he is very inconsistent,” Emily said.
“One day he will win a fortune, and the next he’ll lose one.
One day we have furniture in the house, and the next it’s all been taken to pay his debt.
His legs have been broken twice, his nose five times.
The only reason we didn’t lose the house was that it’s my inheritance from my father and is in my name.
” She sighed. “I simply couldn’t stand it anymore.
I just couldn’t. Not ever knowing what I would come home to was terrible.
How many thugs would be waiting for me to pay them when I got my wages from teaching?
How long could I do nothing but pay and pay and pay and pay for him? ” She was sounding angry now.
“So, I decided that enough was enough and I would leave,” Emily said.
“I had some savings, so money to travel wasn’t too much of a problem.
The only question was where to go, and Troy’s letters were fine.
He seemed like a decent man … and I thought I would escape.
I didn’t really think about marriage or how I might upset things here.
I just wanted to get away from the constant uncertainty. ”
Despite her best efforts, Lizzy felt sorry for Emily. It wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened, but it wasn’t a good thing either. Not knowing if she would have a home to come back to or if she would have a bed to sleep in couldn’t have been easy.
She put a hand on Emily’s and patted it. “Well, you’re here now, and things are turning out fine, aren’t they?” she asked.
Emily nodded. “It seems so.”
They spent a little longer walking over the ground that would become their town. It was lovely on that side of the creek, and Lizzy liked going there.
“It reminds me a bit of the town where Tim and I were born,” Lizzy said, looking out over the land where it dipped and rose. There was a copse of trees not far away, and with the long grass waving in the breeze, it looked idyllic. “We had a lovely home before the bandits came.”
“Did they force you out?” Emily asked.
“In a manner of speaking. They kept coming back again and again, scaring people, taking whatever we had and never really giving anyone time to recover in between each attack,” Lizzy said.
“You just couldn’t get back on your feet no matter what because the moment you looked like you might be okay, they came back and did it all again.
So, we packed up and left … and they followed. ”
Emily’s expression was dour. “I’m sorry. That sounds positively dreadful. How did you make the bandits leave you alone here?”
“Troy and the others left more than a few of them dead, so I don’t think they’re too keen to come back.”
Emily nodded. “Good. I don’t really want to add tangling with bandits to my list of new experiences.” She sighed. “We’d better be getting back before anyone wonders where we are.”
They went back to camp and found Kyle supervising the storing of some of the produce. They had turned a little shack into something like a barn, and the pumpkins and potatoes were being carefully placed inside.
“Kyle, do you know if there’s a spare tent that Andrew won’t mind us altering?” Lizzy asked.
He looked thoughtful. “Not an intact one,” he said. “We have a few that were torn apart in the flood. Why?”
She told him what she and Emily had planned to make room for the students. Kyle nodded. “I think Michael is over there now. You can ask him to help you.”
Michael was at the lean-to that worked as a storeroom for all things nonperishable. He seemed to be taking inventory.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
Between them, Lizzy and Emily explained what they wanted to do, and Michael listened carefully. His eyes kept seeking out Emily, and he wore a faint smile as he spoke to her. Lizzy could feel the attraction between them. She wondered if Troy had noticed and, if he had, if it bothered him at all.
In the end, all Michael could do was give them their choice of four somewhat salvageable tents. They looked them over and chose a couple of two-man tents to sew together. Then they went to Emily’s tent to get her sewing kit and set to work.
By dinnertime, they were still unpicking stitches and hadn’t even started on the sewing.
Lizzy went to her tent to call Tim for dinner. He had been working in the fields, and when she found him, he was fast asleep on his bed. She woke him.
“You need your strength,” she insisted when he protested. “Go eat something.”
He grumbled and groaned, scowling at her, but he went.
“What’s wrong with Tim?” Troy asked, taking a seat beside her.
“Nothing, just being a sleepy grump,” she said. “How was your day? I saw you were down in the mine all day with Andrew and Ethan. How did that go?”
Troy had clearly washed rather hastily. His face and hands were clean, but there was a layer of dirt around his face, especially his neck, that indicated he must have been a lot grimier until recently. He held his plate of food with hands with dirt-stained nails.
“As near as we can figure, it was a mine gas explosion,” he said. “It brought a lot of the rock down and sealed up the old entrance. We can work to clear it, but it also opened up a new cavern.”
“So that’s good news,” Lizzy said.
He nodded. “Assuming we can clear the gas before it builds up and blows us all to …” he paused. “Well, before we have any more trouble.”