“It’s Tommy Sutton,” one man said. He peered up at me. “You’re Darby’s Devil!”
“Is that what they’re calling me?”
“That and more. You’ll find out on top.” He pointed to my shoulder. At some point the bandage had fallen off. The open wound was ugly. “The doctor’s arrived,” the man said. “Get that dressed when you bring the boy up.”
They pushed the cart back to the lift for me while I held the child in the crook of my arm, his head on my shoulder. The farther we walked, the more his breathing eased. At last his hand stole round my neck as if he were home asleep, pulling his pillow close. From time to time we passed other rescuers, each of whom asked who the boy was.
The lift was not there when we arrived, but its low growl echoed in the shaft. Safety lamps had been hung on the wooden supports, lighting up this room where the main tunnels intersected. One of the men brought me a dipperful of water from a barrel.
“No need for us to wait with you,” he said. “Just ring the bell when you’re in the cage and ready to go.” He followed the other man back down the tunnel.
When the cage came to a stop, the two men inside it pushed out an empty cart. They looked at mine with its heap of bodies, nodded, and pushed it into the cage without speaking. I squeezed in behind it, still holding the boy, and rang the bell.
How much time had passed since I had made the journey down with Darby? I could not guess. The lift moved at a dizzying rate, suggesting that the winding gear had been repaired. I held the boy close and waited for the light.
When I reached the top, dozens of women cried aloud at the sight of the child and reached out. Only one of them found comfort.
With a fearful glance, she seized her son as if I meant him harm, then immediately faltered. “I never thought to be blessin’ the Devil,” she said. “Thank you.” She hurried off. Someone led me in the same direction to the doctor.
The crowd parted before me. From both sides and behind, the whispering began: “Darby’s Devil,” then hushed murmurs. I was too exhausted to be angry. I followed my guide to the doctor. Only the boy I had brought up needed to be treated before me; no other survivors had yet been found. I let the doctor change my bandage, refused to answer his astonished questions about “my condition,” then rode with an empty cart back into the hole.
I worked for hours, sometimes alone, sometimes not, unburying the dead and trying to make the breathless breathe. I carried the bleeding till their blood soaked my wounds. I carried the burned till I wore their ashes like penance. The worst: to sit with a miner as he wept over the body he had just found, his own son or daughter.
While I was making another trip to the shaft, Darby passed by, stopping to clap me on my back. I did not know his sooty face until he spoke: “’Tis the work of three men you’re doin’, Victor Hartmann, but you haven’t the sense of one. I hear you’re diggin’ out bodies where the coal is still fallin’.”
Not answering, I pushed the cart into the lift, stepped in beside it, and rang the bell.
“Grief can make a man careless,” he said. “Do not make me feel guilty for havin’ asked you down here. Don’t forget that you’re a father.”
He reached between the bars of the cage. I took his hand and pressed it. The lift jerked once, then ascended. With a wave, he disappeared down the tunnel.
Up top, I was amazed to see the sun when I had come from such dark work. I blinked hard against its brilliance, but it was still night in the hearts of everyone here. Seventy-eight bodies had been brought up thus far, I was told. I had thought to have my bandage changed again while I was here, but the line for the doctor was long, all of them men injured during the rescue. Not wanting to delay while there was work to do, I returned to the shaft. When the cage came up, it was Darby pushing a cart this time. A long, swelling gash along his hairline bled down the side of his face. I half-carried him to the doctor. When I returned, the cart had already been emptied. I rode down alone.
After the harsh sunlight, the dark, quiet shaft would have been a comfort had I not known I was being lowered into a tomb. I leaned my head against the bars. I could not recall the last time I had rested or the last time my shoulder did not burn as if it held live coals within. Weeks and months and years seemed to have passed.
And yet, just a day ago, Lily had still been alive.
The grisly work had numbed my mind. What would happen when all the bodies had been brought up? What would I do when I had the time to think?
When the cage hit bottom, I walked across the rails to the farthest tunnel. I meant to go back to work, but pain and fatigue at last overwhelmed me. I leaned against the rocky wall, slid down, and sat. From far away a rescuer called over and over, his voice fainter each time. The sump murmured as gently as a brook. The supports creaked once, twice. At last it was so quiet I thought I could hear the whisper of coal dust as it fell.
“They are calling you a widower. So, she’s dead.”
Walton.
He had come upon me while I dozed, although I should have heard his scraping limp as he dragged one bent leg behind the other, using a pick like a cane, leaning heavily on its head for support. How many injured men had he passed by searching for me?
I thought I would be enraged seeing him again. After such a night as this, I felt only weary recognition.
“What did you do with your spawn?” he asked.
“The child isn’t mine,” I answered.
“Where is it?” He limped closer. “I will find it anyway in the end.”
“As you found your niece?”
“My niece?” A smile cracked the scabs on his lips. “I did not spare my own daughter to see you dead.” With demonic speed, he yanked up the pick and slammed the point into the bullet hole in my shoulder. “My own daughter!”
Lily.
I screamed—body and soul shattered in the same instant.
Agony ripped through every muscle, thought, feeling. Who Walton was, what he had done, hammered at me. I barred my mind against him. I had a monster’s strength. I would not let the horror in!
But it burst in anyway. And the screams became tears.
Poor, poor Lily. To have had such a father—a madman, at a distance, but still a madman. Such a mother—who swung between love and shame. And such as me—whatever I was to her.
I was right. Death stalked her, and it had done so from her very conception.
Walton watched me suffer through the revelation.
“Say I’m mad and I’ll not deny it. I am all madness now,” he said softly. “Only Margaret would say otherwise, but she is dead.” He pressed the pick harder into my shoulder and twisted it. “Where is the child? Tell me!”
“You’re its grandfather. Would you also be its killer? But then, that would be the same for you.”
His laughter was immediate and hearty, and in laughing he unwittingly eased the pressure on the pick by a fraction. I knocked him backward and the pick to the ground. At once he leapt forward and wrapped his fingers round my throat. The choking sensation incited in me a strange joy, the teacher recognizing his influence upon the student. Walton’s fingers tightened. He had a strength born of insanity while I was at my weakest. I staggered to my feet, though still stooped beneath the low ceiling.
Like a dog I shook back and forth, and like a dog he held on. I rushed forward and rammed him up against a wall to knock him loose. He would not let go. Over and over I slammed him till coal dust rained like black snow. The fight exhausted me. When I finally broke free, I slipped to my knees, whereas he at once attacked again. He jabbed at the bloody bandage. Still on my knees, I seized his fists and thus locked we pushed and pulled, swaying absurdly, foolish children playing at a game.
Walton’s face, cracked and scarred and twisted, had become a mirror to mine. He was my brother, my twin, closest kin to my soul: it was he and I who were inexorably linked, not he and my father as he so passionately believed. He was the horror that lay beneath the mere scars and deformities of my bo
dy, a creature whose violence had grown to match my own. And so I fought with myself, wanting both to kill the monster and to let it live.
Unable to break loose from my grip by tugging backward, Walton instead rushed forward and butted his head into my shoulder. With a howl, I let him go and doubled over, one hand limp, the other clutching my battered arm.
As soon as he was free, he grabbed the pick and, tottering, raised it high over his head as I knelt before him, my head low, a condemned man before the executioner. Just when the pick began its descent, my good hand shot out and shoved him. He tripped backward over the tunnel’s rails even as he swung the pick down and forward with the last of his maddened strength. The pick point pierced his own shin, shattered the bone, and struck the metal rail beneath with a crack whose echo was drowned by his sudden wild scream.
At my feet, the poor demented man writhed, his twisted leg now ruined forever, the bottom part nearly hacked off. Even if he survived the shock and blood loss of this amputation, he would never be able to hunt me again. Yet had I not thought as much at other times?
My whole body shook. I could no longer tolerate the uncertainty of the past ten years. I burned with the desire to snap his neck and be done with him.
But what did my desires matter? Had I not seen enough death this night?
Slowly I pulled myself up, holding on to the timber supports.
Walton’s eyes were half-closed, and his face was slack and graying. If I left him here like this, he would not survive. Yet neither would he survive if I had to carry him into the lift and hold him in my arms and feel the filth of his hate against my skin.
I used the pick to tear a hole into my grainsack tunic, then ripped off a long strip. I tied a tourniquet around his thigh, avoiding touching him as much as I could while pulling the strip of cloth as tight as it needed to be.
Suddenly hatred returned to his eyes and he threw out his hands to claw at me. I had done all I could and now began to back away down the tunnel. Walton grew still, his eyes on me so penetrating I wished he would lose consciousness or that the lamps hung along the wall would extinguish so that I would not have to see his stare.
Impossibly, he rolled over onto his stomach, hoisted himself up onto his elbows, and began to drag himself after me.
By the dim safety lamps set along the supports, I saw when the bottom part of his leg flopped loosely over the rail; when the bare shred of skin gave way, leaving the foot behind; when the blood streamed over his chin as he bit down against the effort.
“Lie quietly,” I said. “I will go up top and fetch the doctor.” I should carry him into the lift with me right now, I thought again, but knew that my resolution not to kill him could not withstand his hatred for as long as the journey to the surface.
Like an awful crawling reptile, he continued to advance, following me slowly.
At last I reached the lift. I rang the bell and stepped inside.
“You’re not going to kill me?” he asked. “Why? Because you still hear Winterbourne’s voice whispering in your ear?”
“No … I have been a monster of my own making,” I said wearily. “It has taken me far too long to see it. I will be a man of my own making instead. I have decided to be a man.”
“Well, you’re a fool as well as a monster,” Walton said, and he drew the pistol from his shirt, “for men kill, too. This time I will kill us both.”
“No!” I cried, but too late.
The crack of the pistol was followed by a great whoosh and a thunderous roar, as the spark of the shot ignited a huge fireball. The hellish globe surrounded Walton and consumed him, then rushed down the tunnel toward me. Gases burned, coal dust exploded, each propelling the fireball faster and faster till the great force shot under the rising lift and hurled the cage upward. Thrown to my back, I lay helplessly as the lift ricocheted up the shaft. The metal beneath me grew red hot. It burnt through my clothes and into my skin and branded me with the mine’s own mark. Above me the light swelled from a pinpoint, to a flame, to an all-engulfing sun, as I was thrown clear, up into the sky.
March 15
It has taken me a week to set this all down, recounting everything from the time I first met Walton on the road till the final explosion in the mine. For days after the blast I lay in darkness, Darby said, and for days after awakening I did naught else but write, till he was convinced I had gone mad. There was not ink and paper enough in his house, and he had to fetch it in town wherever he could: sheets of brown wrapping, backs of old letters, endpapers of family Bibles, and such. Even now, cushioned by pillows, I lie on my stomach on the floor of Darby’s row house and write. As always, what was chaos when lived has order when written down.
What can I do otherwise? The burns across my back and legs thus far prevent me from walking more than a few yards. I will be scarred for life, the doctor said solemnly. In the silence that followed I began to laugh. I laughed until the tears flowed, and then I laughed some more, until Darby understood the absurdity and joined in.
The greater danger had come from my shoulder. When Walton jabbed the pick into the bullet hole, the bone fractured and the doctor had to dig out the splinters. The wound then became infected, and they expected me to die, or at the least to need amputation almost to the collarbone. But I lived. I will always have a “bad arm,” the doctor said. Somehow, that makes it more mine. Despite this, I am thankful I do not write with the hand on that side, or else I would be wild.
I have not yet been able to visit Lily’s grave, though Darby’s wife says the view is a pleasant one, facing away from the colliery and the ironworks and west toward the hills. At night, when Darby and his wife and children are asleep, I think of Lily in her grave and wonder if everything I have done since first seeing her on the cliffs has been meaningless. Then the dawn breaks and Darby’s children gather and play about me, pretending I am an elephant or a pirate ship or an unclimbable mountain (unclimbable because the burns on my back are still raw). More people have shown me kindness than I ever allowed myself to believe; and many others gave begrudging tolerance. Despite it, Walton or my own violence always forced me to leave, and I never discovered what might have happened if I had stayed where I had been accepted and tried to live peaceably. Now my injuries force me to stay—at least for a while—and a child on one side of me stares transfixed at every word I write, a child on the other side weeps piteously because I have not yet told him today’s story, and Mrs. Darby is enough at ease to yell at me for dropping crumbs on her newly swept floor.
And what of Lily? Must I discount our days together as meaningless because she was mad? I never knew happiness with her, but I glimpsed its possibility. And, in the end as she lay dying and later as I worked in the mine, I felt pity. I felt forgiveness. I felt … even love?
For a monster, such emotion is itself a prize to be treasured.
EPILOGUE
April 10, 1839
Letter from Anne Todd to
Lizzie Beacham
My dearest Lizzie,
I should have given you news before this, I know, but the rector, who usually writes my letters for me and is so kind as to correct my grammar besides, has been too busy with his duties to spare the time. By now you’ve heard about the dreadful accident in the mine last month, one hundred forty-nine lost and only twenty-one brought up alive. The rector has gone from burying the dead to comforting the living to helping the widows and orphans. His work is not yet done, but he is sitting with me now over a cup of tea and has consented to put up with my talkative tongue and write down my words. He says he would teach me to write myself but then I wouldn’t have such a chance to visit with him and gossip.
Again I’m thankful I’m the wife of a baker and mother of his own apprentices, for it is dreadful enough just to watch such tragedy without having one’s husband go down below. George’s cousin, whose shift had just come up, was badly hurt when he’d gone back down to help, for a final explosion killed almost as many rescuers as men working the shift. George’s
cousin will be out of the mine for several weeks, the doctor has told him, which I say is more blessing than curse. At least there will always be bread for him and his family.
Though you may have heard about the accident, you have not heard, I wager, about my part in it, for I did help in a way. The very night it happened, just a few hours before, who should come to my door but John Darby, carrying the most pathetic infant I have ever seen. It was tiny and weak and had a leg that looked like a thin twist of dough. It didn’t cry. Later, when it was hungry, it gave a faint squeak like a mouse caught in a trap.
“Its mother is dead, poor thing,” Darby said, “and the father’s been shot and is lying up in the tavern. Can you nurse it till we know what to do?”
I felt peculiar to be given a stranger’s babe to nurse, and not someone from town I’ve known all my life, but how could I not take it in with its little wrinkled cheeks and crippled leg? Later I found out the father recovered enough to go below and help. He was a wonder to see, they told me, as big as a giant in a fairy tale and working a fairy tale’s deeds, but with so ugly a face they were calling him Darby’s Devil by night’s end. Of the twenty-one survivors, he alone brought up seventeen, going into the most dreadful and dangerous places to find them. The last explosion hurt him badly. As he lay at Darby’s house for days without talking, the stories of what he’d done spread through the town and so excited everyone they wanted to see him. Little Tommy Sutton, Peggy’s youngest, was for staking a claim on him, saying the man should be called Tommy’s Devil, for it was Tommy what he brought up first. As everything became known, the miners started calling the man the Black Angel instead, for all that he did, but not even an angel could stay white down in the mines.
The rector says we must stop calling the giant so many things, as we will confuse him as well as ourselves, and at every name, strange or not, we will all run out into the square and bump into one another.
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