Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  The only thing he didn’t pay attention to during this period was his mine, by which I mean that he ignored his geologists’ increasingly panicked reports that the Magic Mountain’s reserves of copper weren’t nearly as extensive as had been previously thought, and that beneath them lay nothing but more of the feldspathic sandstone (a.k.a. graywacke, a.k.a. bluestone) that made up most of the range. The hardest sandstone is still softer than granite as well as more durable than limestone, which makes it nice for building but still difficult to bore through in a mining operation, particularly hundreds of feet underground. Oblivious, impervious, or perhaps just imperious, Marcus ordered the stone be cut in blocks and used to face the mansion atop the hill. When his engineers told him he could build a thousand mansions from the stone they were excavating, he doubled the footprint of the house (that’s why the pilasters were added—to cover the seams where the extensions were tacked on), threw in a third story, then an attic, drew up plans for stables on one flank of the mansion and, solely for the sake of visual harmony, a “cottage” on the other, which today house, respectively, the Academy’s gymnasium (including Olympic-sized swimming pool) and rectory, whose gabled main dining room can seat all 444 novices and masters. He directed, first, that the entire length of High Street be paved in cobblestones of the aforementioned cubed cubits, for which measurement he supplied his own forearm and hand (this from a man who, even after his accident, boasted that he would have to kneel down to look President Lincoln in the eye), later extending the decree to all its arteries—nearly sixteen miles of roadway paved with blocks of stone that weigh more than four hundred pounds each (which is why Marcuse’s rain gutters, like medieval European cities’, lie above ground, and its houses are connected to septic tanks buried beneath their kitchen gardens rather than a municipal sewage system: those blocks aren’t going anywhere).

  Things continued in this manner until the day Marcus woke to a silence so deafening that the only sound he could hear was the pain of his lower back shrieking like an electrical charge in his inner ear. He fumbled for the laudanum he kept on his bedside table only to find that he’d depleted his supply during the night, or during whatever period of time had passed since his last moment of lucidity. All that remained were a half-dozen empty phials, a spotted syringe and a dozen blunt, bent needles, a bloodied tourniquet of India rubber. He rang the bell but no one came. The house servants had been sold the year before, replaced with (under-) paid employees who were motivated by neither the discipline of Old World domestics nor the fear of slaves—and who had, at any rate, cleared out several weeks earlier—so he struggled to his feet on sticks newly arrived from the Bahamas and staggered out of his bedroom with his peculiar tentpole walk, eventually making his way to the massive paved patio (only later, after he added the even larger lower level, would it come to be called the upper terrace) in front of his half-finished mansion. The entire north side of Inverna was visible below him. High Street, half made, half mud, flowed down to the half-filled lake as though he, Marcus Stammers, laird of the manor, were the source of its waters, not the sinuous stream that hung off its far end like the vestigial tail of an homunculus. The yellow-brick houses, many still skirted in scaffolding, lined the streets like bars of gold, and hundreds of ginkgo saplings in burlap-wrapped balls of soil leaned and lay in the plaza at the bottom of the street like so many Continental irregulars, but somehow it looked less like a new town than an old one, an Uruk or Pompeii being pulled from the encrustations of time, because no matter where Marcus looked—and he’d situated his house so he could see everything—he couldn’t spy a single living soul. His crews had abandoned him. They hadn’t been paid in three months, which fact Marcus was aware of but disregarded, because it never occurred to him that his men might not believe in his vision with the same fervor he did.

  It was 1848 by then. Of the two hundred or so houses Marcus had built, more than three-quarters stood empty. Undaunted, he told his remaining miners to dig deeper, and he ordered truly terrifying amounts of dynamite to blast through millions of tons of rock. His workforce was down to fewer than fifty men by the early months of 1849, and he’d been forced to sell his cotton and tobacco farms to keep his creditors at bay; at one point the entire family sheltered in (rather ornate, it must be said) Bedouin tents in the ballroom of a half-completed Stammers Hall. The charge that was planted at a depth of 3,116 feet on March 15, 1849, wasn’t exactly “Marcus’s last stick of dynamite” as one local (but not Academy) historian put it, but it was pretty damn close. Nor is it true that Marcus’s miners didn’t recognize the shiny black rock they unearthed until one of their slag heaps caught fire—by that point Marcus’s geologists were analyzing virtually every pebble that came out of the ground. But neither of these caveats takes away from the magnitude of the discovery. At its peak Stammers Coal produced nearly half a million tons of bituminous coal per year, and estimates of the total amount of recoverable ore in the Magic Mountains Seam range from 800 million to over two billion tons. stammers coal makes the nation burn was the rather ill-thought-out slogan painted on the side of the three hundred coal cars that ran on six hundred miles of private rail line before connecting with the Baltimore and Ohio at Pittsburgh (an avowed anti-abolitionist, Marcus also thought secession was a doomed, not to mention foolhardy, endeavor, although that didn’t prevent six of his sons and grandsons from enlisting in the Confederate Army). The depth of the ore made the mines less profitable than they would have been had the coal lain near the surface (hence the adage about the depth of his pockets versus the depth of his mines), which is one of the reasons why Marcus took the unusual step of replacing most of his white laborers with slaves in 1853. Contrary to later reports, Marcus did not himself own “more than 3,000 slaves,” as 90 percent of his workforce was leased from local farmers (many of whom also sought work in the mines after pepper-colored clouds of coal dust rendered their land as barren as if it had been salted). As a consequence, he wasn’t legally culpable for the deaths of more than 1,109 black men between 1853 and 1865, since by law the slaves’ owners were responsible for the health of their property. These distinctions meant more to Marcus’s lawyers than they did to Marcus himself, who referred to all the black men who worked in his mines, whether they were his slaves or someone else’s, as “Stammers boys.” Nevertheless, he was fond of pointing out that he treated his own property with more “care for his investment” than did most of the people from whom he leased his work force, which is to say that a “mere” seventeen of his own slaves died in the same twelve-year span, and of them only eight from black lung; five of the others died in accidents, and one was hung after his fourth attempt at escape. The latter was the only person ever strung up from the wych elm in the plaza (or the only one who’s acknowledged anyway), but though his body was left on the rope for three days as a lesson to any other slave who might harbor fantasies of freedom, his name has been completely expunged from the official record. At any rate it’s unclear how effective a deterrent his rotting body could have been, since only a few dozen slaves, domestics in Stammers Hall or the homes of Marcus’s top managers, were allowed to set foot in Marcuse; all the rest lived on their owners’ property, or in the purpose-built shanties of Wye, which was sited on the same sooty slopes from which Marcus had chased his white employees just eight years earlier. Though many accounts refer to this reversal as “ironic,” I’m pretty sure it’s just sad.

  After the failure of the rebellion, of course, things changed. Marcus made a point of hiring any former slave who’d worked in the mines (and who didn’t set off for parts north as soon as the war ended). He paid some of the best wages available to black workers in the South (although still three times less than what white miners were receiving), and he cut down the wych elm and replaced it with a state-of-the-art hospital for his employees in the building that now houses the Foundlings Nursery. After the explosion in ’81 he tried to make the hospital seem like a philanthropic rather than practical gesture, but a letter
of 1878, in which he argued that “High Street needs an Anchor lest Stammers Hall drift away like a Chinaman’s Box-Kite” didn’t do much to bolster his credibility, nor the fact that the hospital’s front facade was built of the same bluestone as the mansion up the hill (though rusticated, so as not to compete with the house’s polished magnificence) even as the other three sides of the building were made of bricks left over from the workers’ houses—the white workers’ houses, I should say, since black workers still weren’t allowed to live in town: hence Wye, which less than a decade after its founding had five times as many residents as Marcuse, though not one brick or stone building, not a single ginkgo or strand of bluegrass or cubed cubit—no paved streets at all, in fact, save for the one that led to and from the mine, because Marcus didn’t want his workers “inconvenienced” by a muddy road in the spring. Then, too, there was the fact that employees’ visits to the hospital were mandatory, and like their rent and the cost of the food, clothing, and tools they purchased at the commissary, paid for through an “insurance” program whose premiums were deducted from their pay. All things considered, however, it was as close to honest labor as was available to black men during Reconstruction, and much was made of the fact that 66 percent of Marcus’s four thousand employees had sons who also worked in the mines, and 28 percent had grandsons as well.

  But none of this was able to stave off the two disasters that ultimately brought down Stammers Coal: the explosion beneath the Quirinal in 1881 that killed 239 workers, and the lawsuit brought by “a Pack of Northern Wolves” that shuttered the company permanently in 1883. No one’s exactly sure what caused the explosion (it was a Sunday, and though the mines ran two twelve-hour shifts seven days a week, no blasting was done on the Sabbath), nor why it was so large. The most persuasive theory is that thirty years of mining had filled an undiscovered cavern with large quantities of fire damp, a.k.a., methane, which was ignited by a spark from the pickaxe of some unsung John Henry breaking through a wall, resulting in an explosion estimated at about eight kilotons—the shockwave blew out the front and back windows in Stammers Hall, fourteen miles away. Judging from remains recovered from the mine, fewer than a dozen people were killed outright by the explosion, but more than four hundred others were trapped underground, and, over the course of the next three months, 216 bodies were recovered, with twenty-three more people missing and presumed buried or obliterated. Most of the victims appeared to have succumbed fairly quickly to injury or toxic gas, but twenty-eight of them lingered for somewhere between thirty-one and thirty-five days in one of the mine’s waystations (the hatchmarks on the timber trusses offered confusing evidence, not least because no one was sure how the miners, not one of whom was in possession of a watch, had determined the passing of days). The chamber’s water barrels were still half full when the bodies were discovered forty-eight days after the explosion, but three of the bodies had been partially cannibalized, and one of these (a white foreman, as it happened) had been strangled.

  But the event that damned Great Grandpa Marcus to permanent ignominy was nothing so macabre—although it was, in its own way, more shocking. The explosion occurred on May 6, 1881, and Marcus didn’t show up at the mine until the morning of May 9. Even then his visit had nothing to do with the three hundred workers still unaccounted for. No, he had seen something “Truely Tragic and Unbearable” from his study window (in which the glass broken by the explosion had already been replaced, the watered-silk curtains repaired and rehung) in the now-completed mansion at the top of the hill: the White Woman Creek and the lightning-bolt lake he had excavated at its terminus had disappeared overnight, leaving behind nothing but a slug’s winding trail and a damp brown gash that looked like a massive uncovered latrine in which the shimmering ten-foot-long balloons of his exotic catfish and sturgeon twitched in the mud like shat-out intestinal parasites. Marcus looked down on the world he’d made and saw that it was not good. “Like Xerxes Bridgeing the Hellespont, my Hubris has Offended the Gods,” he wrote in his diary. “I am Ashamed. I am Undone. I am—Eclips’d.” Though he hadn’t been on horseback in more than three decades, he commanded that a mount be prepared and rode to the scene of the disaster as swiftly as his inosculated pelvis would allow, where he demanded that his engineers find out what had dammed the White Woman’s waters and correct it immediately. When his men protested that they were needed for the rescue effort—that there was every reason to believe hundreds of miners were still alive beneath the rubble—Marcus thundered his now-infamous epithet, which very nearly became his epitaph: “Let the Coal have ’Em!” Unfortunately for him, journalists from the New York Tribune and Sun and Herald were on the scene by that time. There were journalists from the Atlanta papers as well, from Memphis, Louisville, Columbia, Charlotte, Mobile, and St. Louis, but it was the New York journalists that did Marcus in: the journalists, and the sketch artists, and what they showed the world.

  The conventional method of extracting coal at the extreme depth of the Magic Mountain Seam—blasting, pickaxing, and chiseling through billions of tons of rock and carting it out one mule-drawn trolleyload at a time—was, to employ anachronistic corporate jargon, cost-ineffective, and even if there had been some notion of environmental consciousness a decade before The Origin of Species it’s doubtful a man who saw the world the way Marcus saw it—as, if I can use a pointed metaphor, malleable clay upon which to impress his will—would have paid any heed. Instead he blew the top off the renamed Palatine and four successive mountains, filling in the spaces between them with rubble so that, by the time of the explosion, the variform Tsistuyi of the Cherokee had been reduced to a twelve-mile-long cairn of blackened stone and soot. In contrast to the voluptuous sculpted gardens on the sunny side of Inverna, no tree, no shrub, no flower or blade of grass grew for an area of almost ten square miles, and a shivering cloud of coal dust three times that size (by comparison, the island of Manhattan is only about twenty-two square miles) darkened everything animal, vegetable or mineral that had the misfortune to fall within it. “The land is blasted black as far as the eye can see,” one of the newspaper accounts ran, “which is not very far, because the air is black too—the black of coal, of smoke, of Negroes both living and dead. But the blackest thing of all is the conscience of the grand personage who believes he owns them all, man as well as mineral, landscape as well as land.” The black-and-white drawings that appeared in the weeks and months following the explosion are as stark as Dürer woodblocks, their monochromatic palette uncannily suited to a landscape as completely colorless as any that ever existed on this planet—even Marcus’s horse, said to have been a cremello stallion, was depicted in almost every drawing as an ash-colored gelding, and in the most famous of the drawings, by Thomas Nast, Great Grandpa Marcus’s staves have multiplied from two to four and migrated from his hands to his back so that he appeared an eight-legged black spider, the lone pale spot on his body an hourglass-shaped patch that glowed on his gaunt abdomen like a lantern, and cemented in the national consciousness his transformation to black widow (apparently, like Marcus and like my mother, journalists of the era only knew what they knew, or their editors were content to bank on their readers’ ignorance of latrodectus’s more deadly sex, despite the species’ rather pointed common name).

  But the newspapers were less content to allow other facts to fall by the wayside. Nineteen years earlier, they reminded readers, Abraham Lincoln had written, “If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them.” Lincoln wrote these words to Horace Greeley, whose New York Tribune led the call for the Stammers family to be stripped of the possessions of which its members had shown themselves unworthy. Greeley had been dead for almost a decade by the time Stammers Coal exploded, the Tribune had begun its long slide into the yellow journalism of its competitors, but its editors were still consc
ientious enough—which is to say cynical enough, or racist enough—to remind its readers why President Lincoln had led the country into the bloodiest war of its history: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” Stammers family lore claims that the word “moonscape” was used in one of the descriptions of the mines to describe a terrestrial environment for the first time, and it’s the inventiveness of the term that finally gives away the target of the articles’ outrage, and their authors’ and editors’: not 239 dead men “who, though they be largely Negroes, do deserve better than this rude treatment,” but, rather, the despoiling of a land that 150,000 soldiers had given their lives to ensure remained within the borders of a single Union. It wasn’t the land the newspapers cared about, in other words, let alone the men who lived on its fruited plains or died beneath them: it was the myth of the New World pastoral, this second Eden God had provided for a new race of men, and it was the violation of this most American of compacts that prompted one writer to declare: “If the moon were black it could not be any more barren than Marcus Stammers’s soul.”