Chapter 17
The last week of February came in bright and hard, with a wind off the peaks that stripped the snow to ice.
Charles had a call at the camp. A man on the night shift had run a splinter of timber under his thumbnail a week before and said nothing.
Now the hand was twice its size and the color of a plum.
Charles took the wagon, because the bag was heavy.
He took Antonia because it was a Saturday, and there was no school.
It was the first time he had taken her since the anniversary. He noticed that, helping her up. She sat on the seat beside him with her hands folded and her notebook in her coat. Neither of them mentioned it.
The road went up past the hoist house. The wheel was turning. Ore cars came out of the adit, one after another, into the bright cold. The sorting boys shouted at each other over the crash of the bin.
"Wait here," he said, at the bunkhouse door. "This will take some time. Stay in sight of the hoist house, and don't go near the cars."
"Yes."
He went in. The man was on his bunk with his hand held up like a lantern. The smell told Charles, before he had the bandage off, that this was going to be an hour's work. He rolled his sleeves and sent for hot water.
After that he did not think about the child again for some time. Afterward, that was what he could not forgive.
* * *
Antonia stood where she had been told, in sight of the hoist house, and watched the mine.
It was the first time she had been near it since December.
Mr. Hollis was not there. A thin gray-stubbled man with a chew of tobacco in his cheek was shouting at the boys by the bin.
She knew from the waiting room that this was Mr. Brandt, the shift boss on the east side.
He had a slate in his hand. He kept looking at it, then at the cars, then at the slate again.
Behind on his count. She remembered that.
The adit was a square black mouth in the rock with timbers around it, and a set of rails going in. Out of it, every minute or so, came a car. In between the cars, nothing came. The dark inside was the dark of the rat hole, cold and steady, breathing out.
Then, between two cars, a shape came.
It was small and brown. It ran along the rail between the sleepers and out into the snow. A rat. She watched it go. It went fast, low to the ground, not the way a rat goes when it is looking for food. The way a rat goes when it is leaving.
Another came after it. Then two more.
Antonia stood very still.
She had heard it said forty times on the bench in the waiting room. It was on a prescription slip, and copied into the notebook in her best hand. But she had never seen it.
Now she stood in the bright cold and watched rats come out of the Pemberton east adit.
One after another after another, until they were not coming one at a time any longer.
They were a stream. They ran along the rails, over the rails, out across the trampled snow toward the timber stacks.
None of them stopped. None of them looked back.
The sorting boys saw. One of them laughed and threw a rock. Mr. Brandt kept his eyes on his slate.
Antonia went to the adit.
It was not a decision. Her feet did it, the way they had not done it on the train when the coals were on the floor.
She went past the last car and the last boy.
At the side of the mouth was the big square post that held the rock up.
She put her hand flat on it, and pressed her ear to it the way the doctor pressed his ear to a chest.
The wood was cold. It smelled of pine and wet.
She waited.
Deep in it, so deep she felt it more than heard it, a timber ticked. A slow tick, like a clock with a long pendulum. Then a pause. Then a groan, long and low. It came up through the post into the bone of her cheek, and went down her back like water.
Timbers talk before they break.
She took her ear off the post. Her heart was going the way it had gone in the Society office when the stove door clanged. But this time there was no running. She walked, fast, with her hands closed, across the trampled snow to the man with the slate.
"Mr. Brandt."
He looked down. He saw the red hair, and she saw him see it.
"The rats are leaving the east drift. All of them. And the timber at the mouth is talking. I put my ear to it. There's a tick and then a groan, deep down, the way the old men say it does before it comes. You have to bring the men up."
Brandt stared at her.
For a moment she thought he would go and listen. His eyes went to the adit, then to the rats, which were still coming. Something in his face moved.
Then it shut.
"Who let you up here?"
"The doctor's inside with Mr. Kessler's hand. I'm waiting. Mr. Brandt, the timber..."
"I know what the timber's doing. I've got ears." He spat tobacco into the snow. "I've got a count to make and a shift that's four cars behind. I have not got time for a jinx to come and put the fear of God into my crew on a Saturday morning. Get off the works."
"But the rats..."
"Rats leave when they smell powder. There's a blast going in at noon. That's all it is." He raised his voice, so that the sorting boys turned. "Get her off. Now. I'll not have that hair anywhere near my drift. It's bad enough she's in the county."
One of the boys came and took her arm. He was not rough about it. He was frightened, she saw, and not of her. At the wagon he left her, and went back to the bin without looking around.
Antonia stood by the wheel of the wagon with her hands closed and watched the rats.
They were thinning now. The last few came out singly, the way the first had, and ran for the timber stacks. Then the adit breathed cold, dark, empty. A car came out of it on the rails, pushed by a boy, and tipped into the bin with a crash.
* * *
Charles came out at eleven with his sleeves still rolled and his mind on the hand.
He had saved it. He thought he had saved it. The man would lose the nail and perhaps the top joint, but he would keep the hand. He was young. Charles washed in the bunkhouse basin, dried, and put on his coat. Then he climbed up onto the wagon seat.
The child was already there.
"You're cold," he said. "You should have gone into the hoist house."
"I wasn't allowed."
It went past him. He had taken the reins. The horse was turning, and he was already somewhere else.
He had been somewhere else for five days.
Since the night of the packed bag, he had sat in the surgery each evening, with the photograph on one side and nothing on the other.
Trying to find words. Some he had found.
Then he had lost them again. In his head he had drafted a dozen speeches he might make to the woman upstairs.
Every one of them, when he tried it over, sounded like the advertisement.
Plain, complete, cold. A man reading from a list.
He did not want to read from a list. He wanted, for once, to say one true word to her without writing it down first, and he did not know how it was done.
The wagon went down past the hoist house. The wheel turned. Behind them the sorting boys shouted.
"Doctor."
"Mm."
"The rats came out of the east drift. All of them. While you were inside. And I put my ear to the timber at the mouth, and it was talking. The tick, and the groan. I told Mr. Brandt. He said it was the powder, and he sent me off."
Charles was composing a sentence. It began, I have been a coward, and he could not find the end of it.
"Brandt's a fool," he said. "But the mine is Hollis's worry, not ours. Hollis knows his ground. Sit back. The road's icy here."
"But he wasn't there. Mr. Hollis wasn't there. It was only Mr. Brandt, and he..."
"Antonia."
She stopped.
He heard the stop. Some part of him heard it, marked it, and set it aside for later, the way he set aside a symptom that did not fit. He would remember exactly where the wagon was, at the bend above the church, when she stopped talking and folded her hands.
At the house he handed her down. She went in without a word. Olivia was in the kitchen and did not come to the door.
He stood on the porch a moment, with the words still not found, and looked back up the gulch at the wheel turning.
* * *
The blast went in at noon.
Olivia heard it from the kitchen. It was the ordinary sound, the one she had heard every day since December, a flat thump through the ground that made the plates hum. Her head stayed down. Nobody in Galena Springs looked up for the noon blast.
Then the ground moved.
It was not a thump. It was a long, slow shudder that came up through the floorboards and into her feet, as if the whole gulch had shrugged.
The plates did not hum. They walked along the shelf.
A cup went over. Somewhere in the house, a window cracked with a sound like a pistol.
Outside, very faint, there was a roar that went on and on, like a wagonload of stone tipped down an endless stair.
The kitchen was quite still. Olivia stood with a spoon in her hand.
In the hall, Antonia said, "The timber," in a small, flat voice.
Then the whistle began.
It was the mine whistle. Olivia had heard it at shift change, a short blast morning and evening.
This was not that. This went up and did not come down.
It screamed across the gulch, high and steady, without any breath in it.
Every door on Silver Street opened at once. The roar under it was still going.
It did not stop.
The whistle Galena Springs dreaded more than judgment screamed on and on over the roofs. Olivia dropped the spoon. She heard the surgery door bang open, and her husband's boots go down the steps three at a time.