by Chris Cander
She twisted and stamped her foot into her soggy boot. Ran her fingers through her bed-mussed hair. They were farther apart than they’d ever been. “Someday, he’ll … pass on. And then, I can marry you. But not before,” she said. “I couldn’t live with myself if I broke Walter’s heart. He’s a good man, a good father. He lost his mother young and if I left him, too …” She shook her head. “My heart belongs to you, but I can’t do it. It would be too cruel.”
John sprang from the bed. “Damn it, Alta! Why’s it all right for you to be cruel to me? Wait till he’s dead? That’s what you want me to do? Well, I don’t know if I can wait that long!” Then he picked up the rocking chair that he’d fallen asleep on — fallen in love with her on — raised it above his head, and hurled it down with such force that it didn’t even send splinters in all directions. It just collapsed into itself right there on the floor.
With her hand on the yanked-open door, she looked at him with her lips parted as though she were about to say something else, but thought better of it. Then she just walked away, letting the door groan to a close behind her.
He’d been stunned at them both, too stunned to move until she was long gone, but by the time he realized he wanted to run after her, beg her forgiveness until she agreed to come back, it was too late. She would be already too far down the well-worn path through Whisper Hollow and across the creek and up toward the home she shared with her family. He had to let her go, couldn’t risk raised voices or any ado that might inform any gossips on witness this late at night. There’d be no explaining such a scene. So he spent the rest of the night lying awake on her side of the bed, thinking about how to make it up to her.
Asking Walter to take his shift was the first part of his plan, because it would mean she’d be left home alone. Walter had said he’d take Abel on the shift with him, a bonus, so he knew there’d be no disturbing them. He could paint the picture of her morning routine in his mind. Even though he’d never eaten a meal in her kitchen, never partaken of her domesticity, he knew Alta as well as he knew himself — unlike Myrthen, who had remained an unsolved mystery for the fourteen years they were married. Alta always stayed home in the mornings, he knew, to roll out dough for the next meal, tend her garden, clean and set her home to right, do the wash. Only after her chores were done, her house and husband and son taken care of, would she allow herself some time to take a walk, or paint, or — at least three times a week while Walter and Abel worked the second shift — slip out her back door and make her stealthy way up the mountain to the cabin where John lived alone and which he considered theirs equally.
John quickly shaved and dressed, and almost ran down the hill toward the Polish bakery on Main Street. There was a chance that he’d be seen, and his sudden return to health might get back to Walter, but the odds were slight, and anyway, it was worth the risk. She was worth it. The long night had assured him of one thing: he would wait for her as long as he had to.
The scent of hot-oven yeast collided into him at the door. The butler’s bell rang above his head and Callie Kaminsky, the dimpled wife of the second-best Polish baker in town, as she would say of her husband, met him at the counter, wiping her hands on her apron. No doubt she’d been up since the wee hours making walnut tortes and gingerbread with candied orange peels, potato and cheese pierogies, thick spinach quiches. It smelled so good that he smiled in spite of the night that splayed out behind him like a cooling corpse.
He asked for a half dozen of Alta’s favorite pastries — rogale świętomarcińskie — rolls filled with white poppy seeds, walnuts, and cream that were available throughout autumn and winter but were traditionally eaten on November 11, St. Martin’s Day. November 11, 1944, was the day they’d met in the woods, just shy of six years ago. Maybe the fresh Martinmas rolls, if not the pleading apology he’d rehearsed, would warm her heart to him again.
“Dziękuję!” he said to Callie when she handed him a folded paper sack filled with the rolls. He and Alta had traded their second-generation knowledge of their parents’ native languages over a bottle of wine one night shortly after they’d first started meeting with predictable regularity at the cabin. Callie laughed out loud at his thanks, pleased by his effort and entertained by his mispronunciation.
John laughed along, too, feeling optimistic. The butter from the rolls had already stained the brown paper sack, which, even though folded, could not contain its yeasty steam. He imagined Alta in her kitchen with her hair pulled back in a kerchief, chopping carrots and onions, peeling potatoes. He would pick some wildflowers on the way, he decided. She loved blue vervain and aster, evening primrose and moss pink and wild live-forever. There were plenty of places between downtown and Alta’s house to pick a handful. He imagined himself stealing through her garden, glancing left and right for the watch of female neighbors. She would accept his gifts, place the flowers into a jar or a vase, then pull out a chair at her table. He would insist that she be the one to sit down in it while he found the plates, the napkins and forks. She’d laugh at his fumbling in the kitchen, would lean forward with her chin resting on threaded fingers, waiting. Her smile would herald his second chance.
Nodding goodbye to Callie on his way out, he closed the door behind him. The sun was already coming up orange-pink behind the ridges of Trist Mountain. All the world was quiet and calm, except for somebody’s dry-heaving cough. John looked over and saw Pudge Bellini slumped against the door of the barbershop. Pudge’s bald, inflated head rested on his chest at what looked like an uncomfortable angle, and his thick legs were splayed wide apart out in front of him. The back of one hand rested on the pavement, and the other clutched a bottle inside a wet paper bag.
“Pudge,” John said in a low voice. He didn’t want to disturb the peace of the day rising around them. “Pudge!” John shoved lightly at his thigh with the side of his shoe. “Pudge, wake up.” Nothing. John knelt down and lifted Pudge’s chin.
His eyebrows lifted but his eyelids did not. “Wha.”
“Pudge, you gotta get up. You can’t be sittin’ here like this. It doesn’t look right. People will be coming soon. You gotta get out of here.”
Pudge lifted one brow high enough to open the corresponding eye, then the other, and tried to focus. “Dat you, Johnny?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” He extended a hand. “Come on, you gotta get up. Let’s get you up.”
“Who’s comin’?”
John leaned down and picked up a limp, meaty hand. “People. Doesn’t matter who. Come on, let’s get you up.”
“God?”
“What?”
“ ’S God who’s comin’?”
“Hell, Pudge, you must’ve had some kind of drink.” John unfolded the bag of rogale and put one in Pudge’s unmoving, upturned palm. “Eat something, you’ll feel better.” Pudge smacked his lips and closed his eyes again. “Come on, Pudge, you can’t just lie here like this. Mr. Campbell ain’t gonna want to come open up his shop and see you lying here all spread out on his stoop like this.”
Pudge rolled his head and squinted at John. “Didn’t think they’d have no barbers up in Heaven.”
John bent down and put his hands under Pudge’s arms and tried to heave him up.
“How’d I die?”
“What in foolishness are you talking about?” John’s strength was no match for Pudge’s drunken weight.
Pudge looked around, blinking. He tried to push himself into a straighter sitting position against the barbershop door. “Heaven ain’t no better-looking than Verra. What kind of joke is that? Live your life in a dump and then spend all eternity in it, too.” He widened and then narrowed his eyes again. “So, how’d I die?”
“Pudge, you are a half-cut fool if I ever saw one. You’re not dead. You’re just drunk. As usual,” John said. “Now get up.”
“I musta died falling down or something. I can’t get up.”
“That’s cause you’re fat and soused and you’re not listening to me. I told you, you’re not dead and you
’re sure as hell not in Heaven. Why are you talking like that?”
“ ’Cause if you’re dead, then I must be dead, too,” Pudge said, looking at him for the first time with steady eyes.
“I’m not dead.”
“You sure as hell are.”
John sighed. “Stop this infernal bullshit, Pudge. What makes you think I’m dead?”
“Sparky said so. Told me last night.” Pudge bobbed his round head. “Said you was gonna die underground today. So I figure, you’re dead and I’m talking to you, so I must be dead, too.”
John straightened up and looked down at Pudge’s body, which spilled onto the sidewalk at too many slovenly angles. “What exactly did Sparky say?”
“Said you and some others was going down today, work a dead shift or something. I don’t know what that means, never did go underground myself. Swore to my mommy I wouldn’t after my daddy died from black lung back in twenty-four. I’s only twelve years old at the time — ”
“Pudge, what do you mean, Sparky said I was going to die today?”
“Hey now, that kind of tone don’t seem too heavenly, you ask me.”
John reached down and grabbed him by the arm. He could barely get his hand around all that flesh. “I’m not kidding you now, Bellini. What did Magee say to you?”
Pudge tried to wrench his arm out of John’s grip. “Now you don’t mind letting me go, I’ll tell you.” John released his arm and Pudge rubbed the aching spot. “I can’t say I remember ’xactly. Just something that today some people were gonna meet their maker underground. Something about bein’ passed up for a promotion a while back. And his girlfriend … wait, maybe that’s his cousin or his sister, I can’t remember which … anyway, she said God spoke up to her recently and said it was His will or some such that Sparky clear up the mess that those Blackstone bosses had gone and made.”
“You mean Myrthen?”
“Myrthen. Myrthen, yeah, that’s her. Funny name. Kraut, I think. Nice-lookin’, though. Oh wait, shit. She’s your wife, ain’t she?” He swatted at a fly near his face. “Well, think of that.”
John let his arms drop to his sides. He’d barely spoken to Myrthen since she moved out six years before. Hadn’t spoken much to her at all before then. Not ever, really.
“And Magee said I was going to die today?”
“Yep. He said he rigged it up last night. He’s pretty proud of himself for it. Had it all figured out. Came and got me afterwards, brought a couple jugs with him. Don’t know where he went off to. Think he’s dead, too?”
“We’re not dead, goddamn it!”
“Your shift ain’t started, then. Supposed to go boom sometime right after you get underground, according to what Sparky said.”
John felt a rush of ice through his veins and he shuddered. “Where’s Magee now?”
“Dead, too, I guess.” He looked round again. “Ain’t so bad, seems like. Got any more of them rolls?”
John looked at his watch. It was 7:14 a.m. Walter. Abel. He hurled the butter-soaked sack of rolls at Pudge and took off running before it even landed.
The mantrip carried them all in, Fossil up ahead, and darkness swallowed them whole. It was steadily cool underground, always around fifty-five degrees. The electric engine lit up the track only a few feet at a time and rumbled and rocked through the shafts of the mine, deeper and deeper into the dark. Their voices bounced oddly off the slick rock walls as they passed through.
It might seem logical that there would be silence underground, so far away from the cacophony and euphony of the surface world. But there was always an eerie jangle of noises. The hum of the enormous ventilation fan that pulled clean air from the main entrance through the working areas and diluted the odorless but dangerous buildup of methane gas. The heavy, clanging machinery that clawed out and scooped up and loaded the coal. Then there were the sounds of the mountain itself, what being inside the body of a very old man might be like: creaking joints and groaning shifts of position, something trying to get comfortable even while being methodically eviscerated in three eight-hour shifts every day.
Fossil stopped the mantrip at the power station to let Walter off. As the fire boss on this shift, he was responsible for running the electricity that charged the batteries and controlled the machinery, the lights, the phones. He took his jacket and dinner bucket and climbed off the car. “I’ll be up to do the track with you, just a minute here, after I power up,” Walter said to Abel and patted him on the shoulder. Abel nodded. The mantrip pulled away again, heading to the end of the line a dozen breaks away, where they would unload the equipment and begin the hard work that lay ahead.
In the distance behind him, Walter thought he could hear a voice above the underground din. A shout from somewhere, he couldn’t tell where. Then another. It sounded urgent, but indistinct, and traveled through the chambers and shafts of the section indirectly, one shout sounding vague and far away, the next as though the caller were no more than a few feet from him.
Walter turned around, trying to orient himself. “Who’s that?” he called.
“… got to get … don’t …” The voice traveled closer. The mountain yawned around them, its cavernous gullet grinding the speaker’s words.
“What?” Walter shouted back, spinning around again. “I can’t hear you!”
“… have to … come on!” It went faint again.
“What!” He heard running, but couldn’t tell from where it came. It must have been one of the guys on crew.
“… the switch!”
“All right!” He walked over to the lever that electrified the lights and machinery. Guys must be needing extra light to unload the equipment. Walter grabbed the throttle in his fist, then John appeared, wildness in his eyes, rushing toward him with his hands outstretched.
“No!” John yelled, lunging at Walter, who reacted by jerking the throttle into the upright position.
In an instant, there was a sense of all the air being sucked backward through the shaft, a holding of breath, a swell of something unspeakable. And then …
BOOM.
It sounded like the old man mountain falling down and breaking a hip. No, worse. Like a shotgun had blown off his head and the bits of bone and flesh were falling down inside his own body, splinter and dust. The power of it knocked Walter and John together to the ground, Walter hitting the floor first and softening the landing for John.
A few seconds later, a second blast concussed through the waffle cone maze of rooms and pillars, shafts and tunnels. The walls, those brittle bones, began to collapse under the force, rolling in on themselves, claiming timber supports and machinery and rail cars and track … and men. A giant slate slab ripped away from the other strata and fell down upon them, the same slate that had only moments before been suspended by the grace of God above Walter and John. The only things that spared them then were the enormous batteries housed at the power station, four-foot-high things big and strong enough to catch the slab at just the right angle so that it didn’t crush them where they lay in a blind heap on the floor. Instead, it canted to one side and formed a triangular space about as large as a kitchen pantry.
Walter, who always spoke in a low, even tone, let out a shriek as loud and shrill as a woman in labor, and from the depth where there were no words, no thoughts, just air-stealing, mind-numbing pain.
The air was smoke-filled and dark. Their helmets with carbide lamps had been knocked off, so nothing lit the black coal dust suspended all around them. Walter went still and silent after the one scream. John, without moving much, reached tentatively up to feel for a pulse. It was there, and fast.
“Walter?”
No answer. John, whose heart was also pounding hard, did a check of his own body. He moved slowly, wiggling his ankles, testing his knees and hips, shoulders and elbows, tightening his stomach muscles. All this while lying sprawled across Walter’s unmoving body, gently, lest he cause more damage to the other man. He didn’t want to hurt him, hadn’t wanted to hurt
him. Alta, he knew, in spite of her love for John, loved her husband. And so no matter how badly he wanted her for his own, after seeing the pleading in her eyes and hearing it in her voice the night before, he couldn’t bear now to cause her the pain of losing anything — or anyone, even his rival — that she loved.
“Abel!” John shouted at the darkness. “Anybody!”
The mountain groaned in reply. His own voice rang out too loud in the tiny space that pinned them. He groped around to find the helmet he’d slapped onto his head just before he dove underground only, what, hours, minutes, seconds before? Finding it, he felt for the light switch. It was like driving through thick mountain fog, the edges of the road and the horizon all but gone. He shined it around, taking stock. The space they were in was maybe eight feet wide by ten or eleven feet long, the two triangular ends sealed with smoking piles of coal, packed all the way up the pitch of the slab. It was impossible for John to measure how much of the mountain was pressing down upon their lean- to shelter. Then he felt a stab of panic. The air, he realized, unless he could move those rocks, and maybe even then, was in limited supply.
John shifted his focus to Walter. He shined the light on his face, which was cut across the forehead and bleeding. Pushing himself carefully off, he rolled to the side and sat up against the warm face of the battery. His thigh hurt when he moved it, but not miserably. He inspected the rest of Walter’s body, moving the light quickly up and down — nothing was bent or bleeding too badly — then more slowly, looking for the source of his pain. He wondered if it was internal — his heart, maybe, or some other organ. Then he followed his light down the length of Walter’s left arm. It ended at his wrist. The slab had fallen just there and either buried or severed his hand. John swallowed hard at that, the coppery undertones of nausea instantly rising.
“Anybody!” He waited in the settling, swirling dust, the sound of his own voice hurting his ears. “Who’s out there? Anybody?”
Walter stirred next to him, groaned as though rising up from a troubled sleep.
