Chapter 11
The bell rang on the sixth day, three quick pulls and then a fourth. Olivia knew from the fourth that it was bad.
She was in the kitchen with her hands in dough. Charles was in the surgery. She heard his door open, then his boots in the hall. By the time she had wiped her hands, he was on the porch with his bag, looking down the gulch.
"Timber wagon," he said. "On the grade."
She saw it then. A knot of men coming up Silver Street at a run, with a burden carried between them. Behind them another, and a wagon with a horse being led. Somebody was shouting. It was the kind of shouting that has no words in it.
"How many?"
"Three. Maybe four." He was already going down the steps. "Keep the child in the kitchen."
She kept the child in the kitchen exactly as long as it took to get the men through the surgery door.
There were three. One walked, held up on either side, with his arm hanging wrong from the shoulder.
One was carried on a door, gray in the face and not making any sound.
The third was carried on a blanket, and he was making all the sound the other two were not.
His leg was broken below the knee. She could see that from the hall. She could see the bone.
Charles was already bent over the one on the door. The men who had carried them in stood about the surgery in their wet boots. They held their hats, took up room, and did not know what to do.
Olivia rolled up her sleeves.
"You, and you. Out. Wait in the kitchen. There's coffee on the stove. You with the beard, stay and hold his shoulders when the doctor says. Not before." She was through the door before she had decided to go through it. "Where are the splints?"
Charles looked up.
It was one look. She saw him take her in. Sleeves to the elbow, hair coming down, standing in the surgery he had told her nothing about but the bell. She saw him open his mouth to forbid it.
Then the man on the blanket screamed. Charles said, "Second drawer. The long ones," and bent back to his work.
* * *
She had never been in this room. She had been married six days and had not once crossed its threshold. The door was always shut, and she did not go where she was not asked.
Now she was in it, and she found that she knew it.
Not the room. The kind of room. Carbolic, and a row of bottles.
Instruments laid out on a cloth, and the cloth not quite straight.
Ten years had taught her where instruments lived in a room like this, and her hands went to them before her head did.
The splints. The lint. A basin, which wanted hot water.
She fetched it from her own stove without being told and set it at his elbow.
"That one first," Charles said, not looking up. "The shoulder. It's out, not broken. It wants to go back before the muscle sets. Can you hold him?"
"Yes."
"He'll fight you."
"They always do."
She held him. She had held her mother through worse, in the last year, when the pain had made her mother into a stranger who bit.
This man was only big and frightened. She got behind him on the bench, took his good arm across his chest, and put her weight on it.
Then she talked to him, low and steady, nonsense about the weather.
Charles took the bad arm, turned it, and pulled.
The man roared. The arm went home with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Then he was sobbing, and she was still talking to him about the snow.
"Next," Charles said.
The leg was worse. It took the two of them with the man with the beard, and it took a long time. She set out the instruments as he called for them. When he stopped calling, she set them out anyway, because she could see what he would want next.
Somewhere in the middle of it, she realized that he had stopped explaining. He had explained the shoulder. He had said what it was and what it wanted. Now he said only, "Now," and she pulled. "Hold," and she held. "Next," and the next instrument was already in her hand.
He was talking to her as if she were a pair of hands he could count on.
The gray man on the door was the last. Charles bent over him a long while. Olivia stood by with the basin and did not ask, because she could see. Ribs. Something under the ribs. There was nothing in the second drawer for that.
"Will he live?"
"If he does not bleed inside. I cannot tell yet. He stays here tonight." He straightened up. His back cracked. "They all stay here tonight."
"Then I'll make up the beds."
She went. Behind her, she heard him tell the man with the beard that his brother would keep the arm. The leg would mend crooked, but it would mend. Then she heard him sit down, all at once, the way a man sits when his knees have decided for him.
* * *
The men were settled by dark. In the parlor was a broken leg, in the spare room a shoulder. The gray man lay in the surgery itself, where Charles could hear him breathe.
Olivia came back to scrub the table.
It wanted scrubbing. It wanted it badly, and it was not a job for the morning. She brought hot water, the brush, and the yellow soap. She pushed her sleeves up again and began. After a while, she became aware that he was standing in the doorway watching her.
"You needn't do that."
"Somebody must."
"I have always done it myself."
"I know." She kept the brush moving. "The cloth was crooked. You've been laying out your own instruments and scrubbing your own table for three years. It's no wonder the cloth was crooked."
He was quiet for a while. She scrubbed.
"Maggie never came in here."
It came out awkwardly. He had said the name aloud, in this room, to another woman, and he did not know what he had meant by it.
"She never once came through that door. Not in six years. She said it was my room, and the smell made her ill. I was glad of it. I was glad there was one door in the house she was on the other side of." He stopped. "I do not know why I am telling you this."
Olivia dipped the brush.
"I am not Maggie," she said.
She said it plainly, without looking up, and went on scrubbing. It was not a rebuke. It was only a fact, set on the table between them like a supper plate.
"I know that," he said.
"Good." She reached the far corner of the table and started back. "Then you'll know that when this door is shut, and the bell rings three times, I will be on the other side of it with the splints. You can shout at me for it afterward. That is not in the contract either. I'm adding it."
There was a silence. Then, from the doorway, a sound that might have been a breath let out.
"Very well," said Charles Aldridge. "It's added."
She scrubbed the table until it was white. She scrubbed it like a woman who meant to scrub it again next week, the week after, and every week after that. He stood in the doorway until she was done.
* * *
Dan Hollis came up two days later with the doctor's fee in an envelope and a side of bacon under his arm.
He was a broad, deliberate man with rope scars on his hands. He had a way of looking at the ground before he looked at people. First the porch boards, then the doorframe, then Antonia, who had answered the door.
"Miss," he said, and took off his hat.
Nobody in Galena Springs had taken off his hat to her before. Antonia had no idea what to do with it. She stood back and let him in.
He gave the envelope to the doctor and the bacon to Mrs. Aldridge.
Then he said his thanks, all of them, slowly and in order.
The gray man had lived. The company was grateful.
Then he stood in the hall turning his hat around by the brim.
If the family cared to see the workings, he said, he was going up now. He'd be glad to show them.
The doctor glanced at Antonia. Her eyes were on the door.
"The calls will keep an hour," he said, and took his hat off the peg.
So they went up the gulch, the four of them. It was the path Antonia had watched the doctor take every morning since September. It was steep, and the snow was packed hard on it. Mr. Hollis went first, with his hands behind his back, and did not offer to help any of them, which Antonia liked.
He talked as he climbed. He talked about the mine the way the doctor talked about bones. As if it were the most interesting subject in the world and he could not think why everyone did not see it.
At the top was the hoist house, with the wheel in it, and the noise.
She had heard the noise from the town since September and had not known what it was.
Now she stood under it. The wheel turned.
The cable ran. Somewhere under her feet, a cage was going down into the dark with men in it.
Ore cars came out of the adit on rails, one after another, pushed by boys not much older than herself.
They tipped into a bin with a crash that she felt in her teeth.
She counted the cars. Nine. Then she counted again to be sure.
"How much is in one?" she asked.
Hollis eyed her.
"Ton and a quarter, near enough."
"How much silver?"
"Depends on the ground. That lot, maybe forty ounces to the ton."
"How much is an ounce?"
"Ninety-five cents this month."
She did the sum. It took her a moment, because there were a great many parts to it. Then she said, "So that's forty-seven dollars and a half a car. Nine cars is four hundred and twenty-seven dollars and a half. How many cars come out in a day?"
Hollis stared at her. Then he put his head back and laughed, a big, slow laugh that made two of the boys at the bin look around.
"Mrs. Aldridge," he said, "your girl's asking the questions Mr. Pemberton pays a clerk to ask. Come here, miss. I'll show you something."
* * *
He took them around the shoulder of the hill above the adit. The snow was trampled there, and the rock came up bare.
There was a hole in the ground.
It was not a mine hole. There were no timbers, no rails. Only a crooked black mouth in the rock, hardly wider than a stovepipe, with a rusted iron grating laid over it. Old snow had drifted on the grating.
"Ventilation raise," Hollis said. "From the old days, before my time.
They cut it up from the east drift to let the bad air out.
Runs down crooked, sixty feet or so, and comes out over the drift near the face.
The men call it the rat hole. Same crew started a crosscut from the west drift toward the east, near where the raise comes down, and quit a few feet short when the money ran out.
What they started, they left half done."
"Why?"
"Because rats use it. Nothing else can. The ground shifted in there, oh, eight or nine years back, and pinched it.
There's a place about halfway down where a grown man can't get his shoulders through.
Can't get a boy through either; we tried when the drift was first cut.
So we grated it and forgot it. It still lets the air move. That's all it's good for."
Antonia went to the edge of the grating and looked down.
Black. Cold air came up out of it, steady, like the breath of a beast asleep. She could hear, very faint and very far down, the sound of picks.
"Does it go all the way?" she asked.
"To the east drift. Where the doctor set that hand in October."
She looked a moment longer. Then she stepped back. Mrs. Aldridge put a hand on her shoulder. The doctor stayed at the grating, looking down. Then he followed them around the hill to where the wheel was turning.
But she had measured it with her eyes, as she measured every door and window. And she thought, going down the gulch in the last of the light, that Mr. Hollis was wrong on one point.
A grown man could not get through. A boy could not.
But she was not a boy.