Chapter 18
Charles reached the mine with the first wagons.
He did not remember the road. He remembered the whistle, which did not stop.
Men running past him up the gulch with picks and shovels.
And the dust. There was dust in the air above the hoist house, a brown cloud standing in the bright cold where no cloud should be.
It was coming out of the adit like smoke.
The wheel was not turning.
He went through the crowd at the mouth with his bag. Men gave way for him. He was in the hoist house before he had decided to be. It was a big, bare room with the engine at one end and benches along the walls. One glance, and he began to clear the benches.
"Blankets. Every blanket in the camp. Hot water, all of it, and keep it coming. Lamps. You two, get that table over here and scrub it. I want a man at the door to let in nobody but the hurt and the men carrying them." He was rolling his sleeves. "Where's Hollis?"
"Here."
Hollis came in from the adit side with dust on him to the eyebrows. There was a lamp in his hand, and his face was the color of the dust. Without a word, he went past Charles to the board on the wall, where the brass lamp checks hung on their hooks, one for each man underground.
He counted. Charles watched him count.
Then he counted again.
"Seven," Hollis said. "Seven short. Six of the east crew.
" He touched the hooks one by one, and said the names as he touched them, low.
"Purdy. Tolliver. Kessler's brother. The two Dunne boys.
Mott." He stopped at the last hook. "And the Griggs boy.
Toby. I sent him down at ten to run cars because Mott's trammer was sick. He's twelve."
"Where are they?"
"Behind the fall. Or under it." Hollis turned around. "The east drift's gone from the crosscut to the face. Forty feet of it, near enough, choked to the roof. I've had a man at the edge of it with his ear to the rock. There's tapping. Somebody's alive in there. I don't know how many."
Charles stood in front of the seven hooks.
Ned Purdy was Ada Purdy's nephew. Jack Tolliver was the man on the day shift whose wife had taken Olivia's bread and held it as if it might go off.
The Dunne boys were the brothers of the child whose fever he had broken in January with his wife's hands on the basin.
He knew every name on that board. Eleven years he had known them.
He had set their bones, dosed their children, buried their fathers.
Now they were under the mountain, and he was standing in a hoist house with his sleeves rolled, nothing to do.
"Dig," he said.
"We're digging."
Hollis went out. Charles stood a moment longer at the board.
Seven brass checks on seven hooks, each one stamped with a number.
Each one hung there that morning by a man who meant to take it down at the end of his shift.
He had watched Ned Purdy hang his once, in October, on the day of the crushed hand. The boy had whistled while he did it.
Then the first of the hurt came through the door, and he turned to the table.
* * *
The word started before the first shovel was in the fall.
Charles missed the start of it. He was inside, with the hurt.
There was hurt, even from the men who had got out.
A crushed foot from the crosscut. A man who had been knocked flat by the air of it and could not hear.
He worked on them at the scrubbed table.
The whistle stopped at last. In the quiet after it, he heard the crowd outside, and heard that it had changed.
It had been shouting. Now it was talking.
He went to the door for more water and stood in it a moment.
There were two hundred people on the trampled snow between the hoist house and the adit.
Women with shawls over their heads. Old men.
Children who had run up from the schoolhouse.
And in the middle of them, being passed from mouth to mouth the way a bucket goes down a line, a sentence.
"...the doctor's girl was up here this morning. At the mouth. Brandt saw her."
"Brandt ran her off. Said she was standing right at the timbers."
"Right at the timbers. Not two hours before."
"With that hair."
A woman he knew said it louder than the rest. She was a widow from the cabins. Her man had died in a fall at Caribou before she ever came to Galena Springs. She said it with her hands twisted in her apron and her eyes on the adit.
"I said it in September. I said it in the church hall. You don't bring a fire-jinx into a camp. I said it. Nobody listened, and now look. Now look."
Two more women took it up. Then a man.
Charles stood in the hoist house door with a bucket in his hand and understood that there was nothing he could say. Not now. Not to two hundred frightened people with their men under the mountain. Anything he said would be the doctor defending his own house. He went back in and shut the door.
Once, in Philadelphia, he had set a bone in a man who was screaming that the surgeon had done it to him on purpose. What he had learned then was that you did not argue with the pain. You set the bone.
* * *
Eugenia Pemberton came up the mine road at two, in her husband's carriage, with the seat piled high.
She had blankets. Coffee in stone jars wrapped in straw.
Bread, and a ham. She had come herself, in her dark green, with the brooch at her throat.
She got down from the carriage without waiting for the driver and began handing blankets to the nearest hands.
Charles saw her through the hoist house window.
He thought, for one moment, that she had come as the mine owner's wife ought to come, and he was glad of it.
Then somebody told her.
Who it was, he did not hear. But he saw it. A woman in a shawl went to Eugenia's elbow and spoke, close. It was the way people speak when they pass on a rumor they are ashamed of but cannot help. Eugenia's hands stopped on the blanket she was holding.
Her face went white. Not pale. White, the way a sheet is white, all at once and everywhere.
Then it went calm.
That was what he would remember. There was no cry.
She never turned to look for the child, or for him.
Standing on the trampled snow with the blanket in her hands, she let her face go smooth, quiet, terribly composed.
Like a woman who has been handed at last the proof of a belief she has held for three years.
She folded the blanket and set it on the pile. Then she said a word to the driver, got back into the carriage, and sat in it, very straight, looking at the adit.
All afternoon she sat there.
Hollis, coming out of the adit at three with a fresh crew, saw the carriage and stopped. He stood there a good while. Then he took off his hat, which he had not done for anyone that day, and went past it to the hoist house without a word.
* * *
At four, Hollis came in from the fall and did not go to the board.
He came to Charles at the table, where there was nothing left to do. He stood with his lamp in his hand and his eyes on the floor. His hands were bleeding at the knuckles. He had been digging himself.
"Forty feet," he said. "I paced it. It's choked solid from rail to roof, and it's not loose rock. It's the whole hanging wall come down in slabs the size of a wagon. We can't blast it. If we blast it, we bring the rest. We can dig it. Every man in the camp on shifts, and we can dig it."
"How long?"
"Three days. Maybe four. If the roof holds over us while we do it."
Charles said nothing.
"And the tapping." Hollis's voice dropped.
"I've had my ear on the rock for an hour.
It's steady. It's four men at least, by the sound.
Maybe more. They've got air, because the rat hole runs down to that end and it's still breathing.
But it's cold in there, Doc. It's cold. There's water in the east drift; always has been.
And I don't know who's hurt or how bad." He looked up.
"Three days. They don't have three days.
I don't know what they have. A night. Two. Not three."
Behind Hollis, the hoist house was full of men, and every one of them had heard.
Nobody spoke.
Then a hand pulled at Charles's coat.
He looked down. He had not seen her come in.
The man at the door had let in nobody but the hurt and the men carrying them.
She was neither. Yet here she was, at his elbow, in her coat with the cap Olivia had knitted pulled down over her hair.
Her face was smudged with dust. She must have come up the gulch alone, through all of them, through the crowd and the sentence being passed from mouth to mouth.
Now she was looking up at him with her gray-green eyes, and she was not frightened.
"I know another way in," Antonia said.
The hoist house was silent.
"The rat hole. Mr. Hollis showed me in December.
It goes down from above the east drift and comes out near the face, where the tapping is.
Sixty feet, crooked, with a pinch in the middle.
" She said it the way she said the bones of the hand.
Plainly, in order. "He said a man can't get through the pinch.
He said a boy can't. He's right. It's too narrow for any man in this room. "
She looked around the hoist house. Then she looked back at Charles.
"But it's exactly wide enough for me."