THE TRIALS OF
SOLOMON PARKER
ERIC SCOTT FISCHL
This book is for my mom.
“The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it.”
– W Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
“But ye should say, Why persecute we him, seeing the root of the matter is found in me?”
– Job, 19:28
The old sorcerer breathes in, his medicine hot in his chest. He sits atop a mountain shaped like an ear, listening to the dreams that cross from the west when Sun goes to his sleep.
A child burns and is saved and burns again.
A man dices with gods.
A hollow mountain is aflame.
The old sorcerer is tired, but he knows an end finally comes. He has been called many names during his long life. Black names, evil deeds clinging to them with sharp fingers. Names bright with fire. Names wet with tears. But the name of a thing is not important, and he must do what he must do. He is ready for this end, whatever it will be. He is ready.
He breathes in, smells the smoke. Hears these things:
The wailing of an infant.
The rattle of bones.
The prayers of burning men.
The laughter of spirits.
The cry of lovers.
The drums, the stomp of feet.
The sorcerer holds the cut bones in his hands, feeling their warmth. They are a powerful part of his medicine, given to him in the long-ago, kept next to his skin. He casts them upon the ground, three times.
He knows that, just past the end of things, there is a beginning. That is the way of the Above Ones.
It is I who sings you this tale.
Breathe in, then.
Listen.
Release
– 1900 –
Stevensville, Montana
Flame and smoke. It’s all she can think about, most days.
It’s always so hot and the room is so close. A fiery summer the likes of which she’s never felt. Smoke from the wildfires to the west floats lazily in air that feels like treacle in her lungs. She can’t breathe. Always the smell of it in her nose. With the back of a sleeve she rubs the sweat from her forehead, blinking in the dim light that seeps under and between the curtains. He hates that she keeps the room dark, the drapes shut, but it’s just so hot and the light so bright. The air so thick. When he comes home from the tavern, the first thing he’ll do is throw the windows open, pull the curtains aside, yell about fresh air. He’ll push past her, reach down into the crib, pick the baby up, swinging it around and making sounds like everything is normal. Nibble a belly, tickle toes. Like everything is fine.
She feels hollow, wrung out. Filling up with smoke, burning up from the inside out. So hot all the time. So tired. This isn’t right, she isn’t the way she should be, but some days she just can’t stop crying. It’s hard to think. Sometimes, some days, she just doesn’t think she can do this, can’t continue.
She stands over the baby, listens to it wail. A sharp keening of need. She breathes in its milky, musty smell. Night after night, she pushes the pillow down over her ears, tries to hide from the baby’s constant screaming, until her husband forces her to get up, to tend to it. I’ll get you some more help, soon, he says, but you need to feed him now. He’s just hungry.
The baby leeched to her, like a coal at her breast. Night after sleepless night.
At first, her husband found a woman to help, but she’d chased the old bitch out for the knowing looks, the snide remarks. That woman, all sweetness and light when he was here, sure, sure, but, as soon as the door closed, the bitch stared dagger eyes at her, sharp and judging. You poor thing, she’d said. You sad, weak fool, what she meant. Crazy girl, crying all the time. Curled up in the dark. The woman would hold the baby, coo at it. There, there, she’d say. There, there. The two of them looking at her with big, blue eyes.
Her husband came running when the neighbors found them. Pinned her arms, took the knife away from her. The old bitch crying as hysterically as the baby in her arms. Sad, weak fool. Is that right?
She rubs her wrists, feels where the old hurt was, long gone now. The tears are wet on her face as she looks down into the crib where her son sleeps, the child that she and her husband made. The red, squalling thing. Whimpering, feverish. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
They’d tried for so long, she and her husband, years and years that started sweet and then soured like bad water. She learned that whatever was inside her wasn’t right, and each new child would dissolve and fall out of her in a hot rush of blood. Her body was poison, toxic ground in which nothing wholesome could grow. But they tried and tried and tried. They’d both wanted a child so badly, and now they had it.
The women at the birth, pushing the baby out towards her, pressing it hot and slick to her. Insistent. Take your son, they said. She barely felt the doctor’s fingers between her legs, checking her for damage. Take your son. Her husband, half drunk, holding the child, refusing to believe. Even now, he refuses to stop pretending. Take your son.
She stares into the crib. In one hand she holds the unlit lantern, feels its weight, the sloshing of the fuel inside. It’s so hot in the room and she can barely breathe and it’s hard to see through her tears. He won’t be home for hours yet.
A clatter at the window, scratching. That raven is outside on the ledge again. A big, ratty black thing with flat, shiny eyes. It’s been coming around for days. Gone crazy from the fires, blown in on the smoke, maybe. Trying to get inside, cawing, a rough, almost human sound. No, no, no. But it’s just a bird, that’s all. Its noise quieter, now. So quiet she can barely even hear it over the pounding of blood in her ears.
The baby squirms, red-faced, looks up at her with wide eyes.
As she swings it by the wire handle, the lantern’s weight stretches at the ends of her fingers, as if seeking release, so she lets it go. There’s the crack of glass, the bite of kerosene. A thin puddle slops across the dry wooden floor towards her feet, pooling around a leg of the crib. Hazy waves shimmer in the air, climb up her legs, or maybe she just imagines it. Watching the child, she pulls the matches from the pocket of her apron.
Flame and smoke, she thinks.
The matches scratch against the wood of the crib and there’s another sound, the bird again, something else. She ignores it, one last thought blistering through her brain.
Burning.
Flame and Smoke
– 1916 –
Pennsylvania Mine: Butte, Montana
1.
Sol stamps down on the abandoned candle stub that’s burning dangerously near one of the timber shorings, squashes it under a heavy boot until he’s sure it’s out, rubbing his sole against the smoldering patch of timber to smear mud and wet, just in case. Flame and fucking smoke, seven hundred goddamn feet under the goddamn ground. If it isn’t one thing, it’s something the fuck else.
“Goddamn it, who left this here?” Sol Parker shouts back towards his boys, trying to be heard over the crash of the rocks into the ore car and the ratcheting of the drillers down the other end of the drift. “Who left this fucking candle?” He kicks it towards Michael, who’s nearest, liberally spattering him with mud and muck.
“Aw, Sol, it weren’t me,” the boy yells back.
“Who was it?” He looks around balefully, pointing a gloved finger from man to man, coughing through the dust.
“Aw, Sol.” Michael, always the loudmouth.
More mouth than fucking sense, that one. He kicks more muck at him. “I don’t care if it’s wet in here,” he says. “I don’t care if there’s the goddamn fucking Columbia river running under our go
ddamn feet. You put out your fucking candles.” He gives them another glare. They’re a young crew, stupid at times. Sol is old enough to be their grandfather, most of them. He turns back to work, disgusted, knowing they’ll follow.
More mouth than sense, some of these boys.
The dust is ever present, even wet as it is, down in the dark. Water seeps down from the drift ceilings, up from the depths as the aquifers battle the pumps; it puffs out from their mouths, damp and steaming in the hot air, with every labored breath. The wet – laden with chemicals, caustic, skin-burning – slops down the dust some, but it’s never enough. Every inhale feels thick and sharp in lungs which never seem quite full. The drillers at the widowmakers raise the dust a hole at a time, clouds of pulverized rock billowing out over the racket of the bit against the drift face. When the powder monkey blows the face at shift end, the whole level will fill with yet more fine, particulate silica and whatever else is in the rock. Short break between shifts so the monkeys can double-check any bad blow and the crowfoot boys poke and prod the ceilings to see if they’re going to collapse; thirty minutes to give the dust time to settle, but when the muckers start shift, the air will still be thick with the stuff.
Sol hacks, spits between his feet. His teeth feel gritty and there’s a pain under his ribs. He’s an old fucking man. Some things you just have to admit. Ancient, really, for a miner who’s been down the hole more than a few years. It’s a job that uses you up quick. Wrings you out, breaks you. He spits again, coughing into the crook of his elbow even as he tosses a rock the size of his head into the cart, slapping Michael on the shoulder with his free hand in passing. Some days Sol’s back hurts so bad he can barely stand up in the mornings, the arthritis in his knees and shoulders crying out, badly healed broken fingers gnarled like roots. More than once Quinn has offered him a spot as station tender, but Sol always refuses, out of stiff-necked pride, old fucking man or not. He could damn well use the extra bit of money and, at times like these, which come more and more often, his busted-up body certainly calls out for the break. Feels like giving up, though. Let the other old men and the injured stand there all shift, sending the ore up. Packing the boys when needed into three cages at a time, seven per cage. Pull the bell-cord, send them up and down the shaft, level by level, telling the hoistman up the top of the headframe where to put the cage, ring by ring.
– 2 rings and 2: five hundred level.
– 4 and 2: a thousand feet.
The two long buzzes back from up top: didn’t catch that, repeat.
– 4 and 2, slow and sarcastic. Fucking pay attention, you lazy bastard, sat up on your ass up the top of the world. 4 and 2, it ain’t hard.
Confirmed from up top and the cage goes down, too fast, stopping too sharp, dropping the boys hard so they’re pissed off when next you see them.
– 13 rings, sharp and bitter: you motherfucker. Maybe see you later, after shift.
Let some other brokedown old bastard do that work. Stand there all shift, by yourself during the middle hours more often than not, when most of the boys were where they needed to be, bored and lonesome and to hell with the extra fifty cents an hour. Sol’s proud to be a mucker, crew boss of a good goddamn group of boys and he’ll be damned if he’ll let a bit of soreness and a hack of a cough and lungs that are damn near fucked keep him from it.
They’re the lowest of the low, the muckers – barring the crowfoot boys, who are usually just getting started down the hole, auditioning as it were for one crew or another – lowest in the eyes of the miners if not by official ACM policy. The timber boys look down on the muckers and the drillers look down on the timber boys and the powder monkeys look down on them all, because they, the dynamite layers, they’re the specialists. And then there are the engineers and geologists and cartographers and every other bastard that helps get metal out of this hill. Over all of them are the bosses and managers and, above all of them, the big-shot fuckers in their gilded offices and the rest of the rich political cunts on the board, lording it up from their mansions, lining their pockets with gold grown from the copper pulled out of the mines.
After the dynamite blows, twice a day, the lowly muckers are the ones who bring that copper-thick rock out, though, fill cart after cart, roll it down drift rails and into the cages to be pulled up out the hole to the headframe – 2 and 1: rock coming up – and loaded on railcars. The drillers and dynamite boys think themselves swells, the timber boys fancy themselves as keeping the whole place together, but that ore isn’t going fucking nowhere without crews like Sol and his men pulling that rock out. To Sol’s mind, that’s something to be proud of, no matter how hard the work is, no matter the dirt and mud seamed deeper into your face every day and the constant, hacking cough that’s going to kill you before too long.
Silicosis. Everyone – everyone but the Company, that is – everyone knows that miner’s consumption, the miner’s con, is caused by that ever-present dust settling in your lungs, hollowing you out as it fills you. The big drills are called widowmakers not because they’re dangerous in and of themselves but because they raise so much fucking dust. If a man saw fifty years, after a few down the hole, he was elderly. At sixty-two, Sol is as old as Methuselah.
For a miner, if a cage doesn’t cut loose and drop you into a wet squidge from a thousand feet, a fire burn you out, or a blast accident bring a drift down on you, the dust will kill you. It’s that simple. That your job will kill you, sure enough, slow or quick: that’s the real miner’s con.
Later, crammed into the cage at shift end with six other men, Sol rolls his head on his neck, trying not to cough at the same time. He’s so tired he can barely stand upright; the fact that they’re packed in so tight is a help. He’s able to subtly lean on Big Nancy to one side, using the boy’s bulk as a bulwark of sorts. Sol runs his hand down the greasy wet metal of the cage wall, scrapes his boots on the grating to cut loose some of the mud and muck, ignoring the cursing from the car below. The car drops down to allow the one above to load, the three cages hung like beads on a chain, each dripping grime and wet down on the men in the car beneath, swaying on the cable.
– 3 and 1: run slowly, men to be hoisted.
The buzzer loud in the tunnel: ack-ack-ack, ACK. Up top, at the headframe, it’s a sharply ringing bell, the better to cut through the racket of ore clattering into railcars and the whine of spinning machinery. Down here, though, in the dim, the buzzer’s always startling to Sol, even after long familiarity. The red light affixed to the tender’s station winks in and out in time with the signal.
– 1 and 2: up and out.
Per usual, there’s that first quick jerk when the cage gets started and Sol’s heart falls into his belly, wondering if this will be the time when the cable will break, drop them to the bottom of the shaft, splash them down hard into the seeping water, the car above crushing them into the one below, down into the sump.
– 7 and repeat.
– 7 and repeat.
Accident. Accident.
But no, not this time, and they slowly make their way up from the 700 level, out into the cold, clear, February air. The wind is whipping across the hill, as it usually does, scraping across Sol’s wet, muddy face as he and his boys make their way to the lockers to wipe down and change into clothes more resembling clean. Michael is running his mouth about something or other, as he generally does, speech more akin to the function of breathing for the boy; the two Dans, Young and Old, are pretending to listen to him although, really, it doesn’t matter if he has an audience or not, as far as Michael Conroy is concerned. Big Nancy and Flynn plod along silently, no doubt thinking of the first drink of the night. Owen, Sol’s boy, new to the crew and otherwise wet about the ears, sticks close to Sol. He’s young at sixteen and the newest member of the crew so, his parentage notwithstanding, Owen is already something of a mascot. This enables Young Dan, at eighteen, to assume an air of fatherly wisdom, seasoned old salt that he is. Old Dan, nineteen, watches the youngsters with the tolerant amusem
ent of the aged.
Billy Morgan brings up the rear and Sol gives him a wink. He and Billy have been friends for fifteen years but Billy looks like he hasn’t aged a day, to Sol’s eye. Maybe, like a lot of his kind, he’ll look young and a little weathered until one day he just looks weathered, going to ancient overnight, face seamed and shrunken like a winter apple. Sol knows that he himself looks about eighty, or at least feels that way now, at the end of twelve hours mucking ore down the hole.
Without the press of rock overhead, it’s easier to stand upright, easier to breathe without the clouds of dust and the drip of burning water. As they walk from Finntown towards the East Side, though, the press of worry pushes upward from the depths of Sol’s thoughts like the steam rising off of his body and his wet clothes, which threaten to freeze him in the winter air. One thing about working down the hole is that it’s easy not to think, or fret and mull and pick at the problems a stupid, reckless man – like Sol – has brought down onto himself. The kind of problems that can get a man killed just as fast as a dropped hoist cage, but not likely as cleanly. The kinds of problems that live, as he does, not far from the East Side.
2.
Marked Face squats with the rabbit under the little overhang of rock, trying to get himself farther out of the wind. His fire, a small and feeble thing, snaps and dances, whipping over from side to side in the gusts and threatening to blow itself out. He pauses in his skinning to feed it more sticks, trying to coax more life out of it, build up enough heat so he can cook the scrawny jack that found his snare earlier. He cuts around the back feet, works his fingers under the hide and, with smooth tugs, the rabbit’s fur comes off like a wet glove, hanging loose from the neck and dangling head. He cuts the head and feet off, wraps them in the hide and throws it all as far away from his camp as he can manage. Stepping farther away from the fire, Marked Face opens the belly and guts the animal, hurling the offal after the head. He rubs his bloody hands clean in the snow and returns to hunker under the rock, spitting the carcass on a stick and waiting on the fire. Even though he’s hungry and cold, there’s a pleasure in these simple tasks, done so many thousands of times during his long life, and pleasures are few and far between in this world.
The Trials of Solomon Parker Page 1
