Chapter 21
Reverend Bowen called the meeting for the last Thursday in March. He called it from the pulpit, which he had never done before.
"There is a letter gone to New York," he said, "and a letter come back.
Some of you know what is in them. The rest of you have heard, and heard wrong.
On Thursday night, this hall will be open.
Every soul in Galena Springs who has an opinion on the Jenkins child may come and give it, out loud, to her face and to mine.
I will not have this town decide a child's life in parlors and at fences.
If it is to be decided, it will be decided where everyone must hear. "
He put on his spectacles. They slid.
"Thursday. Seven o'clock. Bring your own lamps."
* * *
They brought their lamps. Olivia had never seen so many.
The hall was the long room with the stove at each end.
Antonia had stood in it at the end of a line of one, six months before.
Now it was full to the walls. Miners on the benches with their hats on their knees.
Wives standing at the back. The old men from the waiting room, all three, on the front bench with their sticks.
Hollis by the stove. Brandt by the door, with his chew, looking at nothing. And in a chair at the front, brought from her own parlor by her own driver, Eugenia Pemberton in her dark green. Her husband stood behind her.
Olivia sat on the left with the child beside her. Charles sat on the child's other side.
Antonia did not look at her boots. Olivia noticed that. She sat with her hands in her lap and her notebook in her coat. She looked at the room one face at a time, as she looked at a page of bones.
The reverend stood up.
"I'll say the rules, and then I'll say nothing. Anyone may speak. Nobody may shout. What is said here is said to the child. She is eight years old. I would ask you to remember it." He sat down. "Mrs. Pemberton. You asked to be first."
Eugenia rose.
She did not need to raise her voice. It had been raised for her, all her life, by the rooms it was used in. With her gloved hands folded and the brooch at her throat, she spoke to the hall as if it were her own table.
"I will be brief, because the facts are brief.
In September, a child came to this camp with a story.
A fire in New York that took her family and left her.
A stove that came open on a train. A lamp that burst. A barn in Nebraska that burned the night a family offered for her.
I did not invent these things. The child's own companions on that train reported them, and the Society's agent did not deny them. "
She let that sit.
"In February, that child stood at the mouth of the Pemberton east drift.
Two hours later the drift came down. Seven men were under it.
By the mercy of God, they came out, and I thank Him for it.
But I am not a fool, and I will not be spoken to as one.
Fire after fire. A burned hand. A barn. And now a mountain. "
Nobody in the hall moved.
"I do not say the child wished it. I say that Providence does not send such things by chance, in a line like a row of stitches.
A mining camp cannot afford to pretend otherwise.
I have written to the Society and asked them to take her somewhere safer.
Somewhere with no mine. That is all I have asked. I do not think it cruel."
She sat down. The hall was silent.
Then Charles stood up.
* * *
He had not told Olivia he would speak. She had not asked. She looked up at him now, standing at the end of the bench with his hat in his hand. He was not reading from a list.
"Most of you know me," he said. "I have set your bones for eleven years. I buried my wife in the ground behind this hall, in the typhoid winter, in the same week Mrs. Pemberton buried her son, and I have not spoken of it in this town since. I will speak of it now."
His voice was not loud. It did not need to be.
"Maggie did not die of luck. She died of a fever that came up the gulch from a camp where two hundred men drank from a creek below their own privy. I told the company that would happen. I told them in writing. It happened."
He let that stand a moment.
"Teddy Pemberton died of the same fever, from the same creek.
So did thirty-nine others. Not one of them died because a bird got into a house or a picture fell.
They died because the water was foul. I know it.
Mrs. Pemberton knows it. Every soul in this hall who drank from a barrel that winter instead of the creek knows it. "
Horace Pemberton, behind his wife's chair, did not move.
"And the east drift did not come down because a child stood at the mouth of it. It came down because the ground was heavy. The ground had been heavy for two months. There are men in this hall who said so on the bench in my waiting room, while that child sat in the corner and listened."
He looked at the old men on the front bench. Two of them looked at the floor. One did not.
"Fever and falling rock are not luck. They are not signs. They are what happens when men are careless with water, or with timber. I will not stand by and watch this town hang its dead on an eight-year-old girl because it is easier than hanging them where they belong."
He sat down.
Nobody spoke. The stove ticked. Then Hollis, by the other stove, cleared his throat.
* * *
"I'll say my piece," Hollis said, "since the doctor's said his."
He stayed where he was, with his hat in his hands, and looked at the floor first, the way he did.
"East drift ground ran heavy from the middle of December.
I logged it. It's in the company book, which the clerk has.
Brandt's crew was behind on the count, and the timbering was due to be renewed in March, when the ore was out.
It's in the book. The blast that went in on the twenty-fifth was a routine blast, six holes, same as any day.
The ground would have come down that week on any blast, or on none.
I'd stake my job on it. I am staking it. "
He put his hat back on, which meant he was done.
Then Brandt stood up.
Olivia had not expected it. Nobody had. He came away from the door with his chew in his cheek. His face was the gray of the dust that was still on his coat. He stood in the middle of the aisle. For a while he said nothing at all.
"She came to me," he said.
The hall went still in a different way.
"That morning. The girl. She came across the works to me with her hands shut.
The rats were leaving the east drift, she said.
The timber at the mouth was talking, tick and groan.
I had to bring the men up." He was looking at the floor.
"I told her it was the powder. I told her to get off the works.
I had a count to make. I'd no wish to be the shift boss that stopped a drift on the word of a jinx. So I sent her off. Two hours before."
His voice cracked on the last word.
"Then it came down, and I said nothing. I let the camp say she'd cursed it. I let the clerk write nothing I recall. I was afraid for my post. I was ashamed. I've been ashamed every day since, and I'll not be ashamed one more. She warned me. She was right. I'm the one that didn't listen."
He turned around. He looked at Antonia, on the bench, for the first time.
"I'm sorry, miss," Karl Brandt said. "That's all. I'm sorry."
He went back to the door. Nobody stopped him.
* * *
Toby Griggs stood up before anyone had recovered from Brandt.
He was at the back with the Sloats, with his arm still in its sling. He had to push past two men to get into the aisle. His ears were red. His sandy hair stood up. He looked twelve years old, which he was.
"I made it up," he said.
His voice came out too high. He swallowed and tried again.
"Jinx Jenkins. On the train. I made it up. There wasn't any jinx. There was a stove with a bad catch. There was a lamp with a bad wick. Pete burned his hand on a kettle because he was a fool. The barn in Nebraska was a barn. Barns burn."
He was crying now, and he did not stop for it.
"I made it up because she'd lost her folks and never said anything back.
That made her easy. She was easy to hurt.
That's all it ever was. I told it thirty times.
Every one of you believed me, because I was twelve and I said it loud.
Then I was under the mountain. She came down a hole in the dark and gave me water, and never said a word. "
He stood in the aisle with his good hand over his face.
"She could have said plenty," Toby said. "Not one word. Not then, and not since."
The hall was so quiet that Olivia could hear the stove tick. Both stoves. She could hear the lamp on the wall beside her hiss. A child somewhere at the back drew breath to speak, and was hushed. The wind came around the corner of the building and tried the door.
Then a chair went over.
* * *
Eugenia Pemberton was on her feet. Her face was not white, and it was not calm.
"Then somebody must be to blame."
She said it to the whole hall, and it was not a mine owner's wife's voice any longer. It was a woman's. It was a voice Olivia had heard in a sickroom on Chambers Street, in the last year, at three in the morning.
"Somebody must be. Do you understand me?
If it is not luck, if it is not signs, if it is not the child, then there is nothing.
Then he died of water. Then my Teddy died for nothing at all.
For a creek, a privy, a letter nobody read.
I have stood at that grave for three years and looked for a reason, and there is not one.
There is not one. I cannot have that. I cannot. Somebody must..."
She stopped, because she could not go on. Her gloved hands were closed at her sides. Behind her, her chair lay on its back on the boards.
Horace Pemberton came around it.
He was a heavy, weathered man who had come up through the diggings.
For three years he had let his wife rule the parlor, because he did not know what else to do with her grief.
Olivia had seen him once, at the mercantile, holding a door.
Now he came around the fallen chair in front of the whole camp.
He took his wife's closed hand in both of his, and held it.
"Then blame me," he said.
His voice was low. It carried anyway.
"Blame me for the mine, Genie. Not the child.
It's my mine. My creek, my timber, my count.
Whatever comes down in that gulch comes down on my name, and I've let you carry it three years because I hadn't the stomach to carry it myself.
" He held her hand against his chest. "It's not the girl.
It was never the girl. Blame me. I can bear it. I've been waiting for you to."
Eugenia stared at him.
For a long moment she stood in the middle of the hall with her hand in her husband's, as if she had never seen him before. Then her face did what Olivia had watched a hundred faces do at the end of a long fever. It let go.
No tears came. Not then. She sat down, slowly, on the chair her husband set upright for her. She put her gloved hands over her face, and was still.
Nobody in the hall moved.
Then the reverend stood up. He pushed his spectacles back up his nose and said, in his gentle, worn voice, "I think that will do. I think we have heard enough. Go home, all of you. Go home and put your lamps out."
They went. Slowly, without talking, out into the March night with their lamps swinging. The campaign against Antonia Jenkins went out of Galena Springs with them. What was left of it went quietly, in twos, and had no leader.