Chapter Forty-Three Donny
Dusk was swallowing Kenton Hill.
Donny imagined the jaws of the earth opening, cradling them in the hollows of its mouth. Light petered out of his mind. He could smell the night frost on the air, feel the collapse of the day. It was orange and pearlescent and then suddenly leaden.
Half of Kenton stood in Main Street, armed to holy hell in whatever they’d drudged from the drains and their wardrobes. A baker threw a bandolier of ammunition over his shoulder.
One of the miner boys, just sixteen, held only a pickaxe and the arrogance of youth. Steam bled from his nose like a horse behind the starting gate.
There were women in their housecoats, in their aprons and church wear alike. They’d run the last time Kenton had been invaded, and they were loath to do so again.
Briggs shifted at Donny’s side, leaned in to speak into his ear. “Here they come,” he said. “Armed.”
“How many?”
“Six.”
“Lord,” Gunner sniggered. “Almost feel bad for ’em, don’t you? It ain’t hardly fair.”
“Don’t shoot unless you have to, boys,” Donny reiterated, a silver bullet pinched between his fingers. The hum he felt at its touch was muted, as though the ink in his blood was dulling by the second.
Patrick, where are you? a near-constant refrain.
“Ah, where’s the sport in it?” Gunner bit. Violence leaked out into the air.
“This ain’t war,” Tess said, subdued now. The brigade must be drawing close. “It’s familial discord.”
Gunner scoffed. “My family’s here beside me,” he said, and Donny heard the rack of the hammer.
“Please, Ma,” Donny said to her. “Go inside.”
But she wouldn’t. She put a hand on his shoulder, there for a brief moment and then gone. “You speak, Donny,” she said to him, her voice cracking. “Go on.” She sounded to Donny these days as though she were vanishing.
Donny stepped forward and wondered if he looked the way Patrick looked, the way his father had looked. Behind him, a hundred or so chests inflated.
He heard the unsure footing come to a standstill ahead, the snow spraying off the toes of their boots.
“Comrades,” Donny called in greeting. “Welcome to Kenton Hill.”
The six had come, it seemed, in some last spasm of futility, with naught but one gun apiece, and Donny imagined the slow recoil of their bravado, chins just now, at the sight of Kenton Hill’s response, beginning to quiver.
“We—we ain’t here to fight,” one said. He did a poor job at diplomacy with that voice, grated at its edges.
“Haven’t you?” Donny turned the bullet over in his fingers. “Perhaps you came to return the guns, then? Union property, I presume.” Bold of them, Donny thought, to come toting the weapons Kenton Hill had provided them with.
“Perhaps they came to see the sights,” Gunner growled loudly, and the Kenton brigade laughed in their cruel way.
“No vacancy, I’m afraid,” Donny said. “You should have sent a note. We could have saved you the walk.”
“We came to… see,” another voice said, this one female, no less trepid. “To see for ourselves.”
“See what, darlin’?” asked Gunner.
“The bluff,” the voice answered, stronger now. “We want to see it with our own eyes.”
There was a damning, expounding silence.
“And from which sorry corner do you hail?” Donny asked, but not quick enough to absorb the disquiet, not quick enough to conceal their hand.
“We’re representatives from Dunnitch, Dorser, and Scurry,” said the gruff voice.
“Representatives, eh? Ambassadors. You got a name, O Ambassador?”
“Burgess. The surrounding parishes had a meeting, night afore last.”
“Did they?” Donny sniffed, pulling a cigarette into his mouth.
“Everyone’s scared. Seems like each way you look at it, the Union’s finished. Only no one’s sayin’ so.”
“Only ones who can say so are the Colsons,” Gunner answered. “And we ain’t sayin’ so till the fight is won.”
“Accordin’ to the papers, there are two Colsons currently sittin’ in the House of Lords, drinkin’ fuckin’ tea with the ministers and makin’ their bargains on our behalf,” said Burgess. “For all we know, they’re sellin’ us down the river as we speak.”
Gunner’s rifle clacked as it lifted, and Donny held his hand out in warning. “Put it down, brother.”
“If Patrick Colson is makin’ agreements with the House, we ought to know what they are,” said Burgess. “We ought to have a fuckin’ say!”
From Donny’s side, Tess’s voice rose. “You’re a fool,” she said, then after two stilted breaths, “You’re more fool than you are a man.
At this moment, my son and husband are in the brink, evadin’ the fuckin’ infantry, makin’ their way back home.
And you’re sittin’ in your parishes, warmed by the coal we send, readin’ your fuckin’ papers, and blowin’ smoke up each other’s arses!
” The words turned ragged at their ends, and she struggled to catch her breath.
A stream of wrenching coughs ensued. It was too cold out here, the air thin and difficult to breathe.
“Please, Ma,” he murmured to her. “Go inside.”
“How quick you are to shed your loyalty!” she continued. “Couple of lies from the House, and you’re runnin’ scared!”
The Kenton brigade hollered their agreement.
“Then show us the bluff,” said the woman’s voice.
“You say you have it, but we ain’t seen a pinch.
And those of us in Dorser…” Here, her voice cracked.
“Those of us in Dorser have someone at home who needs it. Husbands with limbs blown off, kids with burns… The Union is supposed to be about givin’ to each other what the House won’t. That’s what it’s always been about!”
“Aye,” said Gunner. “And Kenton’s given more than its fair share.”
“And we’ve come to rely on it,” said another man. “You Colsons made it that way. You made it so’s we were beholden to you. Well, you can keep your fuckin’ coal and your fuckin’ tunnels. It don’t mean squat if your Alchemist is gone, and the bluff with him!”
“Show us the bluff,” the woman repeated. “We won’t take none. We won’t stir bad blood between our parishes if it’s the truth. But we want to see it with our own eyes and know that we ain’t fightin’ a war already lost.”
“And if we refuse?” Donny asked, it was a trial to keep his voice cocky. To grin around his cigarette as though it were all a lark.
“Then the Northeast parishes withdraw their oath to the Union,” said Burgess, and it was said with a great heaviness.
“We end our strikes, and you leave us at the mercy of the House, and the thin hope we’ll find them forgivin’.
” This last came out slowly, as though the man could hardly believe he was uttering the words.
“You’ll leave us no choice. We have our own parishes to pull through this winter. ”
In Donny’s center, a rupture widened, all his hope spilling into it, and he thought of his father speaking in the pub, in the marketplace, standing on the podium he’d built himself, out of wood and nails and sheer thought, preaching to his widening congregation about the walls of community, and how tall they could stand, how quickly they could fall.
One fissure… the smallest wavering, and the entire thing collapses.
Like the walls of a mine, like mud sliding.
Donny felt it coming now, the ripples growing quicker than he knew how to stop them. Soon it would be a wave, a great tidal breaker seething overhead.
He sighed seismically and said, “I’m afraid we can’t have that.”
One by one, Gunner and Briggs took the guns of those six men and women, the bullets trapping in the barrels before they could fire.
One by one, the ambassadors from Dorser, Dunnitch, and Scurry went to their knees.
Donny turned over the silver bullet, loaded it.
One by one, the six shots discharged, and he felt them as though he pointed the revolver to his own chest. Felt them, because he couldn’t see them.
The sound thundered down the lanes and into the sky, loud enough to reach all of Kenton. High enough to reach the heavens, to make sure that even God, wherever he slumbered, looked down at Donny and saw the smoking barrel.