Chapter Thirteen Donny
If he fossicked his memory, Donny could dredge up the pictures of Kenton Hill before his sight left him.
It was dull there, in that rendering of Kenton. Shades of brown and gray. Dry grass and soot and tea-colored canals. The cobbles caked over in horse shit. This was what his sight had left him with before it evaporated completely.
As a child, Donny had been most afraid of that moment, when the black edges of the world finally closed in on itself and he was pitched into permanent darkness. What he didn’t know was that blindness wasn’t dark. It was color.
Kenton Hill wasn’t brown and gray. It was gold. It was yellow and bronze and copper. It was the sharp tang of steel and reflecting onyx. It was constantly morphing, prisms of light bursting into kaleidoscopes. Eventually, he’d come to see his memories as dull interpretations.
Donny walked down Main Street and thought Kenton was now pockmarked in gray once more. The smell of burning houses wouldn’t leave the air even now, long after the fires had been smothered. He imagined the cobbles, beneath the salt and ice, still tacky with blood.
Beside him, Otto exhaled smoke into the air, chewing, as he always did, on the end of his cigarette.
He was restless, the mechanics of his body giving him away.
His hands couldn’t seem to settle in his pockets or at his sides or even clasped around a lighter and smoke.
Donny gripped his sleeve at his elbow and felt him thrum beneath his clothing, like a swarm of hornets.
“What kind of man am I?” he’d asked Donny the night before, holed up in a sorry corner of the pub. “What kind of man falls for a woman like that?”
But they’d all fallen for it. Every one of them. They were each as red-handed and stupid as the next.
And now Kenton had lost its color.
They were on their way to the infirmary, the only place left in Kenton that still bustled.
The streets were eerily silent, the bodies cleared away.
The remaining clutch of Colsons and their employees left to burn them, or if they wore navy blue, throw back down the hole in Margarite’s in a mash of limbs and buried.
Scottie and Briggs were, at that moment, in Dorser, giving the all-clear to the Kenton refugees to come home. They’d return with food supplies, too. Kenton would rebuild, and its color would return.
Donny clapped Otto on the shoulder. “Don’t pout, old boy,” he said. “You and I are gonna eat like lords tonight. I’ve told Briggs to sneak us some Dorser brandy.”
“Scottie’ll drink the whole lot before it comes topside,” Otto muttered.
“Aye, well that’s why I asked Briggs, didn’t I?”
“Don’t feel much like celebratin’, Donny.” He took his cap off his head to pull at the hair beneath. “Just leave me to my misery, would you? Stop tryin’ to cheer me up.”
But Donny had his own miseries. He could think of nothing worse than yielding to them.
Underfoot, the cobbles turned to brick pavers. The lip of a threshold reared up, and the wails of the infirmary curled in his ear.
The smell of too many bodies in too close a space came over Donny like a wave. The sting of antiseptic, of hot flesh carved open. Donny saw it in shades of vicious red.
The only remaining Kenton doctor was listing off an inventory of medicines.
“Laudanum, meadowsweet, opium,” he was saying.
He heard the scratch of a pencil, the shallow breaths of the orderlies and their clipped steps.
They’d filled the clinic with as many beds as could be pilfered from nearby houses, and Donny imagined them lined up as though the wounded men were laid out on a conveyer belt, moaning or snoring or spitting curses through their teeth.
But none were so loud as the man braying from the back corner. “—swear to almighty God I’ll have the lot of you lynched!” he said, and Donny imagined the spittle flying from his lips.
“A fuckin’ break is all I ask for,” Otto muttered at Donny’s side.
“Ain’t none on the horizon,” Donny said, throat stricken. “Come on.”
Otto led Donny right to the epicenter. A cart crashed, and its items scattered over the floor. An orderly named Delta swore. “Lord, give me patience,” she grunted, setting about picking up the items. “I ain’t got the fortitude, Donny! Speak some sense into him, would you?”
Donny clicked his tongue, felt something angular beneath his boot, and bent to retrieve it. A pair of scissors. He held it out to her.
“It’s your lucky day, darlin’. I’ve come to relieve you of him.”
“Don!” called Gunner, a hand reaching forward and fisting his shirt, bending him nearly in two. “Don, they won’t give me nothin’ for the pain. I’m dyin’!”
He could hear the titanic breaths of Gunner’s lungs, smell the sweat coating him. The wound in his side had been stitched and bandaged. The pain he spoke of was more in his mind than outside it.
Their mother called it withdrawal.
“Ain’t nothin’ left, brother,” Donny told him, prying Gunner’s fingers free. “The swank’s dogs took it all.”
“I’m dyin’,” Gunner whimpered, pulling at the clothes on his own body as though they were strangling him. “I’ll be dead by mornin’.”
“Well,” Otto said thoughtfully. “It’d save us draggin’ your sorry arse back.”
“Doctor says you’re fit as a fiddle,” Donny told Gunner, already reefing the big man off his back. “Come on, brother,” he grunted, swinging one of Gunner’s arms over his shoulder. “And you’d better sharpen up ’fore Ma sees you.”
“Ma,” Gunner said, as though just now remembering her. “Fuck it, Donny. We need Pat.”
“Well,” Donny said. “We ain’t got him. There’s you and there’s me.” And we hardly make up a whole man between us.
“But there ain’t any bluff,” Gunner whined, allowing Otto to take his weight on his other side. “What’ll we do?”
“Business as usual,” Donny said with far more confidence than he felt. “Just business as usual, brother. I need you back on your feet.”
They half carried him from the infirmary.
He howled and bucked and shivered. He threatened Donny, then apologized in quick course.
“If I ever see that fuckin’ Charmer again,” he said, as though his hands were already throttled around her throat, “or that Scribbler, I’ll rip their fuckin’ heads off! ”
Donny was of much the same sentiment. All of Kenton’s light stolen.
But they’d get it back. He’d make sure of it.
And Patty would return… He had to. Containing him would be like lassoing a storm.
Right. Patty would return at any moment, and all Kenton’s problems would feel lighter.
They dumped Gunner unceremoniously in his childhood bed on the second floor of the house behind Colson & Sons. He groaned soundly, then sobbed. A man the size of a giant reduced to the whimpers of a boy.
Their mother was pacing about the kitchen. Donny could hear her prayers from where he stood on the landing. When he passed her again, she snatched his fingers up and squeezed them, not saying a word.
“He’ll be all right, Ma,” Donny told her, kissing the crown of her head. Every year she seemed shorter. “Let him clean himself up.”
She said nothing, her breath hitching as though she might cry. She patted his cheek.
Donny and Otto left to the sound of Gunner’s shouted pleas.
They walked to Kenton’s edge in silence. They let the panic and anguish rise and fall between them but did not speak of it. Tomorrow would be better, Donny thought.
It was nightfall when at long last, Scottie and Briggs returned down the eastern tunnel. He and Otto were waiting on a wooden horse fence, just outside of town, the fillies behind them nuzzling their pockets for food.
Otto climbed down to his feet when the lantern lights finally came over the hill, Kenton’s residents returning. “Looks like stars,” he told Donny in a voice that cracked: a dam punched with leaks, emotion toppling through. “Like a hundred stars running over the ground.”
Donny felt their feet pound over the earth like a drum, an ensemble welcoming them home.
He laughed. Rockets of light detonated behind his eyes.
They convened in the pub—Donny, Otto, Scottie, Briggs, and Tess—where Gunner’s wails couldn’t reach them.
A sorry collection of crates meant for the kitchen sat instead atop the bar: vegetables, kerosene, machine oil, flour, and salt.
Tess picked through each, her voice shot through with exhaustion.
“It ain’t half the agreed amount,” she said. “Not a quarter of it.”
Scottie grunted. “Dunnitch bluff stores are low. They’re demandin’ more before they trade anythin’ else.”
Donny sighed. “Well now, you can waltz back down the line and tell ’em we got none.”
“No,” Tess said abruptly. “No. In fact, none of you breathe a word of it.” She paced the length of the pub. Isaiah whined from the corner. He’d done so endlessly in Patrick’s absence.
Tess’s tongue clicked. “You’ll tell ’em the bluff is needed here for our wounded, and in Dorser after their raid.
Tell ’em it’s a matter of duty between us now.
We’re Union. Remind them of the fuckin’ creed, if you have to.
It’s a favor we’re askin’,” Tess said. “And doin’ the leader of the Miners Union a favor ought to be motivation enough. ”
Scottie sighed. “They know Patty’s been taken, Mrs. Colson. It’s in the newspaper. They named Kenton Hill.”
The news sounded to Donny like a siren. A warning.
“It’s more delicate now,” Scottie continued. “They know where we are, that we’re vulnerable.”
“If we don’t promise ’em somethin’, Ma, they’ll soon come lookin’ for it themselves.”
“Fuckin’ Dunnitch,” Tess muttered darkly. “Always with one fuckin’ hand out.”
“Dorser is another story,” Briggs added. “It seems Patrick promised them a whole lot o’ bluff after their raid. Told ’em if he didn’t show up with it, then he was dead.”
There was a strangled kind of silence. No one voiced the possibility that Patrick might indeed be dead.
“We told ’em it was business as usual, but I’m not sure we left ’em with much confidence,” Briggs said. “And their toll was much greater than ours.”
Donny felt a tiredness come over him. He imagined Dorser and Dunnitch on the fringes, closing in. Gunner in his bunk, crying for bluff, the infirmary stacked with wounded fighters, the kitchen behind the bar with not a single vial of bluff.
At that moment, Tess’s coughs racked the air.
Donny stood. “Remind the Dunnitch members of the time Patrick ran their coppers out of town,” he said. “And if they still have their hand out, cut it off.” He took his coat up, wrapped it around his shoulders.
“There’s the cows and the chickens that can be brought to market,” he continued. “It’ll hold us over until Patty gets back. Until then, its business as usual, boys,” he said. “Plenty that needs doin’. Otherwise, he’ll have our heads.”