The rock-walled chimney slid downward, she floated toward the surface with her head tilted back, impatient for the upper world. She felt the air grow cooler on her skin, the walls grew yellow-gray with daylight, they floated, lifted, were borne upward and rocked to a stop in the shaft house, looking out into squinting, brilliant afternoon. Tregoning’s toothless smile extracted an answering smile from her, she had rarely been happier to see anyone.
She found that she was perspiring, the cool wind contracted her skin. And she had hardly put her feet on solid earth when the earth quivered, seemed to shake itself like a horse twitching off a fly. Again, and again, and again, and after a pause two more.
“The mountain is still talking to you,” Prager said.
“Are they—have they set off the blasts down where we were?”
“Not till the end of this shift,” Oliver said. “Those were probably in the Bush tunnel.”
“And some prisoners in there are shoveling up money,” said Mr. Kendall.
7
“You won’t get much sketching done in this,” Oliver said.
“If it doesn’t clear I’ll just take a walk.”
The trail was half lost in fog, the overcast squatted on the mountain. Stranger, padding ahead, disappeared within fifteen yards. From somewhere, all around, above, below, came the tinkle of moving bells, and in a few minutes the aguador materialized below them—big sombrero, goatskin chaps, pinto horse. Leading his three mules, each with two kegs of water balanced on the pack saddle, he came picking uphill at an inhumane pace, his spurs digging rhythmically into the pinto’s flanks. Broadly smiling, he saluted them: Susan had drawn him a few days before and made him famous. One, two, three, the hurrying mules passed, leaving the smell of dung diffused in the gray air.
There was no one at the watertank, the boxes hung crooked and empty on the meatbox tree. Across the gully Cornish Camp poked roofs and smoking chimneys into the fog, revealing a gable here, a comer there, like a quick suggestive sketch left deliberately incomplete. “You coming down?” Oliver said.
“I might as well.”
Going down, they walked into a clear pocket under the fog. Main Street lay glumly exposed up the opposite slope—post office and company store, Mother Fall’s, employment office, a raggle taggle of cottages set every which way, at every distance from the street. There was no one in sight, though smoke dove groundward from every stovepipe. In the gully eroded along the street side by last winter’s rains, a dog backed up, dragging a bone that might have come from a mammoth, and growled at Stranger, who stood above him and watched. Not a breath stirred the dry grass, dry thistles, dry mustard stalks, scattered papers.
“She’s a tough-looking place,” Oliver said. “I like your pictures better than the real thing.”
“Since I started to draw it I don’t seem to mind it so much.”
“Ready to follow Mary’s advice and settle down here for life?”
She laughed. “Not quite.” But then she added, “Certainly for a while, if your job was here.”
“You’d starve for talk.”
“Boykins is a pretty good substitute.” She took his arm, climbing up the steep street in the fog, swinging the packet of drawing materials; and at the top she turned sideways and skipped beside him, watching him. “And I like having commissions,” she said. “Altogether, it’s not the dullest life you brought me to. I can stand it for quite a while yet.”
He gave her an odd, dry look. “You may not have the chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said.”
“Have you been talking to someone about another job?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t own the mine,” Oliver said. “I only work here.”
They were going along the crest of the knoll, on Shakerag Street (Susan had put it in her sketch as a bit of local picturesqueness). The engineers’ office stood alone in the midst of high weeds. When Oliver unlocked the door, stale indoor smells rushed out to join the taint of garbage and woodsmoke that filled the air outside. She inhaled unaired pipe smoke, dust, art gum, India ink, the neatsfoot-oil odor of boots, and stood flapping the door back and forth to freshen the place.
Oliver stood before the long drafting table and stared down at the map tacked there. Absently he filled his pipe, interrupted his hands to lean and follow with one finger a line on the map, straightened again, tamping the tobacco into the bowl with his thumb. It was as if he had become invisible the moment he entered the office. His mind had gone away and left her. In the same way, in the evening, he would lock the door behind him and turn his attention back to her, the baby, the household. She had some of that single-mindedness herself, and respected it, but it exasperated her to be totally forgotten, standing there idiotically waving up a breeze with the door. A hundred times she had tried to get him to talk about things that had happened at work, and got only grunts and monosyllables.
His match flame drew down, flared, drew down, flared, drew down, as he sucked the pipe alight, still with his eyes on the map. He flapped the match out and threw it in the wastebasket. That was when she saw the sign on the wall: No SMOKING IN THIS OFFICE. BY ORDER OF THE MANAGER.
“Oliver!”
He raised his eyes, noted what she was pointing at, nodded, and looked down at the map again. “Yeah, Kendall had that put up the other day.”
“But why? You’ve always smoked in here.”
“Yes.”
“Is he afraid of fire?”
“No,” Oliver said. “I doubt that he’s very much afraid of fire.”
“Well what is he afraid of? It seems the strangest ...”
“Seeing how far I’ll be pushed, I guess,” Oliver said.
“You mean ... ? Oliver, is he against you, is that what you mean?”
Now he finally faced her, shrugging, defensive, getting mulish. “It would look that way.”
“What have you done? I thought everything was going so well.”
“Ahhhh.”
“Tell me.”
“What have I done, you say.”
“Yes. Why should he turn against you?”
“What have I done,” he said, tapping his teeth with the pipestem, elaborately trying to remember. “Well, I made him a more accurate survey than the mine’s ever had, I saved him from making a big mistake with that hoist machinery, and redesigned it so it works, I improved the pump station in Bush tunnel.”
“Please!” she said. “How can he be your enemy just all of a sudden? He’s been perfectly pleasant, as pleasant as he has the capacity for being. He sent his carriage around only the other day.”
“I expect that was Mrs. Kendall.”
“She would hardly do it if he didn’t want her to.”
“Look,” Oliver said, “you’ve got enough to do without worrying about this. I’ll work it out. You run along and draw some pictures and get famous.”
“But I must worry about it! Good heavens, it’s your job, it’s our life!”
“It isn’t that important. If you’re afraid he’ll fire me, forget it. He can’t fire me as long as Smith approves of my work. Maybe he thinks if he makes life unpleasant enough I’ll quit.”
“I just don’t understand,” Susan said. “I thought you were doing just splendidly, and you are, too. But now you say he’d like to fire you if he dared.”
“I was never his choice,” Oliver said. “I was more or less forced on him by Smith and Conrad. We chose to live up on the hill rather than down at the Hacienda. They chose to think we thought ourselves too good for them. I know Ewing, at the store, has always felt that way, and he’s Kendall’s chief spy and toady. Maybe that’s why I got stuck with the cost of renovating the cottage. You begin to see?”
“It’s been from the beginning, then,” Susan said. “Oh, it’s so small!”
“Yes, I guess it is. Then I rejected his Austrian, your cultivated friend. I think Mrs. Kendall had sort of looked forward to havin
g a tame baron around, just the way she gets some kind of satisfaction out of having an artist, even if the artist is stand-offish. And also I questioned Kendall’s judgment on that hoist, and proved he was wrong.”
“But he raised your salary.”
“Smith told him to.”
“Ah,” she said, “I might have known. What a mean, petty little tyrant that man is!”
“I could hardly agree with you more completely.”
“Do you think it was a mistake for me to go down in the mine last week? I knew he didn’t want me to.”
“I don’t think he much liked your remark about the men being prisoners.”
“But they are prisoners!”
“You bet they are,” Oliver said. “I suppose that’s one reason he doesn’t want any sympathetic women around, especially if they write things for magazines.”
“But you feel the same way.”
“Yes, sure, and he knows it. He thinks I’m too chummy with the men. They talk to me and I listen. What he’d like is that whenever I hear anybody grousing or muttering I’d run to him and blab. Then he could fire the troublemakers off the mountain. He knows there’s a lot of grumbling.”
“You never told me. Is there? A lot?”
“All the time.”
“And they talk to you but not to the others.”
“That’s about it. Not to the Hacienda crowd.”
“Then the men didn’t really blame you when you had to stop their work to run your survey.”
“Not especially, no.”
“I’m glad. I don’t want them blaming you.”
“They know who to blame. They know who the spies are, too. The whole place is wormy with fear and hate. Kendall’s way of handling that is to fire anybody who opens his mouth or gets the slightest out of line. He makes examples of a few to scare the rest. Last week he fired two Mexican construction workers for walking a hundred feet off the job to hang their lunch pails in the shade. Day before yesterday he fired Tregoning, the hoist man at the Kendall shaft.”
“Tregoning? That nice toothless fellow? I thought he was an absolute fixture.”
“So did everybody else. Fourteen years he’s worked here. Maybe he thought he was a fixture too, but nobody’s a fixture with Kendall. If he’s going to make an example of somebody, he doesn’t care if there isn’t a competent replacement in camp. There isn’t, in fact. Tregoning was a good one. But he came home from San Jose on the stage the other day with some lengths of stovepipe he’d bought, and Ewing spotted him. You know the rule about buying only at the company store. Kendall gave him forty-eight hours to get off the mountain. That means by this afternoon.”
“Oh,” she said, “that’s despicable!”
“You’re damned right it’s despicable.”
The warning whistle blew, so harsh and peremptory it seemed some extension of Kendall himself, not simply of the company’s power. Before it had stopped, doors were opening on Shakerag Street; within two minutes there were men in the street with lunch pails. Through the open door she could hear their glottal talk like a gabbling of geese. She said, “Couldn’t you have done something?”
“I went to him and protested,” Oliver said. “He told me my job was to keep the Santa Isabel tunnel going in, he’d take care of the men. I think he lit on poor old Tregoning so hard because he knows I like him. ”
“Oliver, you must expose that man to Mr. Prager and Mr. Smith!”
“Yes?” said Oliver, with a sidelong glance. “They all belong to the same clubs.”
“But surely they wouldn’t allow this sort of thing.”
“Kendall’s the manager,” Oliver said. “From the point of the view of the stockholders, he’s a good one. He’s got the mine paying good dividends. They’re not going to jeopardize their profits just because he fires a Cornish hoist man.”
“But you said he’d like to fire you, too, and that could hurt the company. Look what you saved them on that machinery.”
“He won’t fire me,” Oliver said. “He’ll just try to make me quit. The day after I went and talked to him about Tregoning he had Hernandez hang that sign in here. He doesn’t mean ‘No Smoking.’ He means, You’d better watch your step, young fellow.’”
“But you stand right in front of it and smoke!”
“Yep.”
“What if he sees you?”
“I expect he will.”
“But what if he calls you down?”
“He’ll only do it once.”
“Oliver,” she said earnestly, “why do we even try to stay?”
“Because I’m still learning something,” he said. “I’m getting a lot of good experience, and an engineer’s capital is his experience. Also I haven’t got any other job lined up. Also you like it here, and you’ve still got some drawings to do.”
“I wouldn’t have liked it if I’d known about all this. I can’t, ever again.”
“Oh, it’s nothing new,” he said. “There’s just this sort of crisis right now.
“I hate to think of you having to submit to that man.”
“Submit?” he said mildly. “Is that what I’m doing?”
The seven o’clock whistle cut loose, screaming across the gulch. Just on its dying wail Mr. Hernandez came in. Susan saw that the street outside had a woman or two in it, but not a single man. Not a straggler was hurrying to tunnel or shaft house or tramway. This morning everybody was on time. She supposed the spies would report that the object lesson taught through Tregoning and the two Mexicans had been taken to heart. When she first arrived, she had thought the place as orderly as a military post. Now she understood how it was done.
“Buenos dias,” she said in response to Hernandez’s soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.
Oliver laid a hand on her back. “You’d better get. No loitering in this office, eh, Chepe?”
Hernandez made a small sound with his tongue against his teeth. “Did you hear that he promised to fire anybody who bought any of Tregoning’s furniture?”
For a moment Oliver said nothing, he only looked steadily at Hernandez. “What’s Tregoning going to do?”
“What could he do?” Hernandez said. “He’s giving it away.”
For a musing time Oliver stood looking out into Shakerag Street through the dirty window. “How long have you been here, Chepe?” he said finally.
“Six years.”
“Never had any run-ins with the Hacienda crowd?”
“No,” said Hernandez, faintly smiling.
“Good,” Oliver said. “Eight more years of faithful service and you can look forward to what Tregoning got.”
“I am careful,” Hernandez said. “I have a mother and two sisters.”
Standing outside of this casual revelation of how deep and violent were the divisions in the camp, Susan felt as a woman running an orderly quiet household might feel if she looked out the window and saw men fighting in the street. She had been wrapped in cottonwool. Every glance between these two was loaded with meanings she had been protected from. She saw them only when they had put the mine and the manager behind them. She knew her husband not as an engineer but as a companion, lover, audience, household fixer. Her drawings of Hemandez’s two sisters for Mr. Howells and the Atlantic had shown them languid, slim, domestic, offering figs and native wine to a visitor, herself. She had dwelt not on the harsh life at whose insecure edge they lived, but on their grace, their dark and speaking eyes, the elegance of their dancing, the attractiveness of rebozo or mantilla over their hair, the feminine gentleness of their gestures and postures. In her indignation she almost wished those blocks back, so that she could send in their place something closer to the truth of mining camp lives. Yet how would she get close to those lives to draw them? She had lived in New Almaden nearly a year and had seen only its picturesque surface.
“You run along, Susan,” Oliver said. “No use to get upset. This
is what you might call run of the mine.”
“All right.” But she laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes went to Hernandez, she smiled. “¿Con permiso?” she said. He lifted his eyebrows in admiration of her linguistic gifts and turned away, making himself deaf. To Oliver at the door she said, “Don’t consider Boy or me for one second. Don’t compromise your principles.”
“Sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right, we’ll see. Maybe by now he’s demonstrated his authority.”
She did not linger in Cornish Camp, and she did not try to sketch, though the fog was already beginning to burn away. She went straight home past the watertank where teamsters and boys had gathered, and where the aguador, already down from his first trip upmountain, was refilling his kegs. It always bothered her to walk through the stares, even when she had Stranger along and had no reason to feel unsafe. Now, having had a glimpse of how rotten a string their lives were tied together with, she walked through them smiling a bright smile of fellowship and sympathy, a smile so rigid that her face hurt when she was finally past.
Tell a story like this to any twentieth-century American and he will demand to know how authority got away with that sort of arrogance. Why didn’t the men strike? Try that kind of business nowadays and the UMW would tie the place up as tight as a wet knot. I remember once when they tied up the Zodiac, when my father was superintendent, because of the mine’s policy of carrying the men’s lunch boxes up and down, to prevent the stealing of highgrade. “No spies in the dryhouse,” that sort of slogan. Fleabites, by comparison, irritations rather than injustices. Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like. When Kendall was running the New Almaden the United Mine Workers were a half century away, the Western Federation of Miners a generation off, the IWW wouldn’t be founded until 1905.
The West of my grandparents, I have to keep reminding others and myself, is the early West, the last home of the freeborn American. It is all owned in Boston and Philadelphia and New York and London. The freeborn American who works for one of those corporations is lucky if he does not have a family, for then he has an added option: he can afford to quit if he feels like it. If you are a Tregoning, you are lucky to be fired without having your head broken as well. Beyond question, once fired, you will be blacklisted. Tregoning will never operate a hoist again, not in California. He will end up on some valley ranch doing unfamiliar labor for a few dollars a month and a shack to live in.
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