Chapter 19
"No," Charles said.
He said it before she had finished. He said it the way he had said it on the porch in September, to the reverend, the agent, the paper.
"No. Absolutely not. It is sixty feet of loose rock in the dark, in ground that has just come down, and you are eight years old. I will not send a child into that mountain. I will not."
"I'm not asking to be sent."
"Antonia..."
"The men down there have no other doctor.
" Her voice did not rise. It never rose.
"You can't get to them. Mr. Hollis can't. Nobody in this room can, for three days, and they don't have three days.
You said so. He said so." She looked at Hollis.
"I heard you. I'm the only one who can get to them.
And I know what to look for when I do, because I've watched you do it since October.
Every dose. Every doorstep. I remember all of them. You said that."
Charles could not speak.
He looked around the hoist house for help. Hollis was looking at the floor. The men along the walls were looking at the child, and their faces were not the faces from the crowd outside. Something had gone out of them. Something else was coming in.
Then the door opened, and Olivia came through it.
She had run. He saw that. Her shawl was off her head. Her hair was down on one side, and she was breathing hard. She stopped just inside the door with her eyes going from the child to him and back. She had heard from the doorway. He saw it go through her, and he saw her face go gray.
Gray. Not white.
She did not say no.
Without a word, she came across the hoist house, past him, and knelt in front of the child on the dirty boards. She took the knitted cap off. She looked at her, hard, the way she had looked on the porch in December. Then she took off her own shawl.
It was the gray wool one. Her mother's. She wrapped it twice around the child's waist, over the coat. She tied it in front with a knot Charles did not know, and pulled the knot to test it.
"Hollis," she said, without looking up. "Your rope."
Hollis brought it. She took the end from him and passed it through the shawl at the child's back.
She brought it around and tied it. Then she tried the knot.
Then she tied it again, a different way, and tried that.
Her hands were perfectly steady. Charles had seen them steady on a thrashing man's arm, on a dying child's forehead, on his own ledger.
For the first time he understood what it cost her to keep them so.
"There," Olivia said. She sat back on her heels. "Now it will hold."
She looked up at him then. Her face was still gray. Her eyes were dry. There was nothing in them that asked his permission.
"She's right, Charles. God forgive us both. She's right."
* * *
They lowered her at dusk.
The whole camp had come around the shoulder of the hill to the grating. Two hundred people on the trampled snow in the last of the light, and not one of them speaking. Eugenia Pemberton's carriage stood at the edge of the crowd with the horses blowing. Antonia did not look at any of them.
Hollis had the grating off. He had rigged a beam across the mouth of the hole, with the rope over it, and four men on the rope. He knelt at the edge with the child and talked to her, low and slow, the way he talked about ore.
"It goes straight for twenty feet. Then it bends left, sharp.
That's where it pinches. Go feet first and keep your arms up over your head.
When you get to the narrow, breathe out, all the way out, so your chest is small.
Don't be afraid of the rock touching you.
It's been there fifty years. It's not going anywhere tonight. "
He put a candle-lamp in her hand, a small one with a tin hood.
"Keep this in front of your face. If it goes blue, you call up, and we haul. No arguing. Below the pinch it opens out. You'll feel air coming up past you. That's the drift. Follow the air."
"And the tapping."
"And the tapping. When you're down, tap three times on the rock with this." He gave her a small hammer. "Then wait. They'll tap back. Go toward it."
He hung a water can on her belt beside the hammer. Then he stood up. He looked at the four men on the rope, at the beam, at the sky, which was going green over the peaks.
"Right," he said. "Sit on the edge, miss. Feet in."
Antonia sat on the edge.
Charles was three feet from her and could not move. Olivia stood beside him. Her hand had found his arm. It was holding so hard that he would find the marks in the morning. Neither spoke. There was nothing to say that would not be a lie, and the child would know it.
She looked at them once. At Olivia. At him.
"I'll come back up," she said.
Then she put her feet into the dark and let go of the edge. The rope took her weight. She went down into the mountain with the lamp in her hand, and the red of her hair was the last of her the light touched.
* * *
The rock was cold and close. It smelled of wet iron.
Antonia went down feet first with her arms over her head, the way Mr. Hollis had said.
The rope creaked. The lamp swung in front of her face and threw the shadow of her own hand on the rock, huge, going down with her.
Above, the mouth of the hole was a gray coin.
Then it was a gray dot. Then it was nothing, and there was only the lamp.
She was not afraid. The rock was touching her on every side. The dark was total. Five months, she had been afraid of a stove door. This was not a stove door. This was only a place where nobody could see her, and nothing was on fire.
The hole bent.
She felt it before she saw it. The rope pulled her against the wall. Her feet went sideways, then down. Then the rock closed.
The pinch.
It was worse than a stovepipe. It was a crack. Her feet went through it, and her knees. Then her hips stopped. She hung there with the lamp against her chest and the rock pressing on her, back and front at once. She could feel her heart against the stone.
Breathe out. All the way out.
She breathed out. Her chest went small. The rock took the space.
Her hips went through with a scrape that tore her coat.
Then her chest, with the lamp scraping. Then her arms last of all, pulled straight up over her head like a diver going in.
For one moment her shoulders stuck. The lamp went dim against the stone.
She thought, quite clearly, this is where a boy would stop.
Then she was through.
The hole opened. She swung free in it, turning slowly on the rope, and cold air came up past her face from below. Air with a smell in it. Powder, wet, men.
The lamp burned yellow. Not blue. She watched it for three breaths to be sure.
Then she took the hammer off her belt, tapped the rock three times, and waited.
Nothing. The rope creaked. Her own breath.
Then, from below and to the left, so faint she felt it in the rope more than heard it, three taps came back.
* * *
She came out over the drift into a pocket the size of the doctor's parlor. The roof was so low that the men in it could not stand.
There were seven of them. They sat in the dark against the rock with their lamps out to save the air.
When her light came down through the hole in the roof, every face turned up at once.
Seven faces, black with dust, with the whites of the eyes showing.
She hung above them on the rope with the candle-lamp in her hand and her hair coming loose from the cap. For a moment nobody moved.
Then a man said, in a cracked voice, "Sweet Lord. It's an angel."
"It's the jinx," said another.
"I don't care what it is. It's got a lamp."
Antonia let herself down the last six feet. The rope went slack. She was standing in the Pemberton east drift with the mountain over her head and the water can on her belt.
What the surgery had taught her, she did.
She went to nobody at first. She stood still and looked, the way the doctor looked when a wagonload came in.
From one end of the room to the other, before she touched a man.
Seven men. Four sitting up. Two lying down.
One in the corner with his arm across his chest and his face turned to the wall.
That one was Toby Griggs, and he was crying without any sound.
Then she went to the nearest and gave him water, a mouthful, no more. She asked him where he was hurt.
All of them, she went to. Each one got water. Each one was asked, looked at, and touched where they let her.
Ned Purdy had a leg under a slab and could not feel it.
Jack Tolliver had a cut on his head that had stopped bleeding and a cough that had not.
Kessler's brother had two broken fingers and said it was nothing.
The Dunne boys were whole but cold, so cold their teeth chattered when they spoke.
Mott had ribs. She did not know how many. He would not let her near them.
Toby had his arm. It was broken above the wrist. He held it against his chest and would not look at her. When she knelt beside him with the water can, he turned his face farther into the rock.
"Drink," she said.
He drank.
She said nothing else to him. There was nothing to say that would fit in a hole under a mountain. She gave him the water. Then she went back to the rope and pulled it, twice, the way Mr. Hollis had told her.
Then she put her face up into the crooked dark and called, as loud as she could.
"Seven. All alive. Tell the doctor."
* * *
The rat hole carried sound the way a stovepipe carries heat.
Charles knelt at the grating with his head in the mouth of the hole and Olivia's hand still on his arm. The child's voice came up to him out of the mountain, thin, clear, steady, sixty feet of crooked rock away.
He asked. She answered.
Purdy's leg. Was there blood? Was it cold to touch above the slab?
Could he move the toes? She went to look, then came back to the rope and told him.
Tolliver's cough. Was it wet? Pink or dark?
Mott's ribs. Was his breathing fast? She counted his breaths against her own, because she had no watch, and told him the number.
He knew it was wrong before she had finished saying it.
No man with his ribs stove in breathed that slowly.
It was her own breath she had counted against, going like a rabbit's, and she did not know it.
He told her so, level, the way he would have said it across the surgery table.
She was to put her hand on Mott's chest and count nothing until he said now. He took out his watch.
"Now," he said down the hole. He watched the hand go around. "Stop."
She told him the number. It was a smaller number. That one he wrote down.
The Dunne boys were cold, she said. He told her to put them in the middle with the others and make them talk.
Question by question, name by name, he built the pocket in his mind until he could see it. Every hurt in the dark. Every man. What he would do for each of them when they came out, and in what order, he knew. He told Hollis. Hollis told the crews.
By nine, the crews had stopped digging the fall.
They had gone instead into the west drift, which ran level with the east, thirty feet off through solid rock.
Nobody could cut thirty feet of that in a night.
But the old crew had cut most of it already, in the years before Hollis.
They had quit with eight feet of rock still standing between the two drifts.
Hollis had walked past that dead end a hundred times without a thought.
Now he put his drillers into it. Eight feet of hard ground, not loose.
Three rounds of powder, if the roof held.
And they had an advantage no rescue had ever had before.
A child at the far end of it with a hammer, tapping on the rock between one round and the next, so that they knew the pocket still stood.
Three taps. A pause. Three taps.
All night the mountain rang with it.
* * *
They broke through at first light.
Charles missed it. He was in the hoist house with the table scrubbed, the lamps lit, every blanket in the camp piled by the stove, waiting.
But he heard it. The crowd outside had not gone home.
It had stood on the snow all night in the cold with its shawls over its heads, and now it drew a breath all together.
Then a shout from the adit. Then another.
Then Hollis in the door, black to the eyes, grinning.
"They're coming out. All of them. All seven."
The first man out of the mountain was Jack Tolliver.
He came up the adit on his own feet, held up on either side, with his head bound in somebody's shirt and his cough rattling. Out into the gray morning light he came, with the whole of Galena Springs standing on the snow in front of him. He stopped. He swayed, and took them in.
Then he looked behind him.
She was there. She had come through the cut with the crews, the last one, with the lamp out in her hand and the gray shawl still tied around her waist. Her face was black, her coat torn. The cap was gone, and her hair stood up around her head in the light like kindling catching.
Tolliver put out his arm. He took hold of her shoulder with a hand that shook.
"This one," he said. His voice was cracked.
He made it carry anyway, over the whole silent crowd, up to the hoist house door where Charles stood with Olivia gone still beside him.
"You hear me? All of you. This one came down that hole in the dark for us when there wasn't a man in this camp could.
She gave me water. Held my head. Sat in that hole all night, tapping so the boys could find us. "
He drew a breath that rattled.
"You want to call her something, you call her that. She's a blessing. She's the only blessing this mine ever had. And if I hear the other word out of anyone in this gulch again, I'll answer for it myself."
Nobody said the other word.
Two hundred people stood on the trampled snow in the first light and looked at the smudged red-haired girl in the doctor's wife's shawl.
Then Olivia went down the steps and across the snow. She picked her up, torn coat, dust, and all, and carried her home.