The Trials of Solomon Parker

by Eric Scott Fischl

  He himself is just trying to make the best of a bad game. That’s really all you can do. He’s mostly content with his lot. He’s a miner, no worse off than the impoverished immigrants that wash up in Butte looking for steady work and a better life. The job is hard, dangerous, will kill him sooner rather than later but, for now, he has food in his belly, friends, a place to live – mansion that it is – and a little money for a drink or a woman when the urge for either takes him. That’s about all there is to ask for in life. All the rest is just extra. And you don’t really need it, the extras, not when it comes right down to it.

  Still, he remembers the old stories that his father sang, his uncle, night after night, before he, Billy, was taken off to the government school to learn to be white. He’s been dreaming about them, lately, almost every night; strange, vivid dreams that seem to stretch the night too long. The dreams exist somewhere in a place just shy of nightmare, at times. When he wakes in the morning they stick to him for hours, they taint the flavor of what he does. Now, as he fights his way towards sleep, his mind finally starting to drift loose from the day, Billy can hear the drum and a low, breathy voice, singing.

  4.

  I remember the East Wind was howling, pushing Maatakssi and his brother Siinatssi across the great water on a skin boat. They were coming to the place of the People, they were coming to our lands. This I remember: on a skin boat they came, fleeing the wrath of Old Man, for what I do not know. The People were not here, then, but these were their lands.

  I remember the wind and the raging water. I remember the fear of Maatakssi and Siinatssi, who were sure their skin boat would sink beneath the dark sea. They cried and prayed to the Above Ones for succor; they cried and prayed to Old Man for forgiveness. “Let us come home,” they cried, “take us from these waters.”

  Old Man turned his ears from his sons and instead the brothers came to this place, battered and wet, tired and sore. They pulled their boat to shore and kissed the land; they gave thanks to the Above Ones for saving them even as they cursed Old Man for abandoning them. I remember this too.

  But some say Old Man did not turn his ears from his sons Maatakssi and Siinatssi at all, that he himself came to the lands of the People, in another form, searching for his lost children. Some say that he made the People his new children when he could not find his lost sons. The old women say this is not so, but some say it is true.

  Maatakssi and Siinatssi came to the lands of the People then, and, for a time, it was good. Game was plentiful and the weather still. They talked to Raven in the trees and Beaver in his lodge. Particularly, at that time, they reverenced Siyakohah, Black Bear, who reminded them of the place from which they had come.

  For a time, yes, it was good, but Maatakssi and Siinatssi became lonely, for they were the only two in the lands of the People, and the brothers longed for wives. They asked Siyakohah where they could find wives to give them sons and daughters, but Black Bear did not know, nor did Beaver in his lodge. Raven, though, had seen many places in his travels.

  “I have seen a people,” he said, “east along the great river. They are traders from the north lands. Maybe they will have wives for you.”

  “Are their women strong?” asked Siinatssi.

  “Are they beautiful?” asked Maatakssi.

  Raven shrugged. “Truly, it is difficult for me to tell you two-leg walkers apart, but look east. Now, I myself must get back to my own wives, who will be missing me.” And with that he flew off.

  Maatakssi and Siinatssi headed east along the gorge of the great river. They decided to race, that the first to reach the northern traders would have first choosing of their women. They ran, racing towards their new wives. Maatakssi was the faster and took a great lead, but he lacked the stamina of his brother Siinatssi, who gradually made up the distance between them. Neck and neck they were for a long time, but Maatakssi’s strength started to fade, and his brother pulled ahead. Sure that he would lose the race, Maatakssi became full of anger, from which he suffered at times, and struck his brother before Siinatssi could outdistance him, driving the point of his spear into Siinatssi’s hipbone.

  Siinatssi fell, and hit his head on a stone. The life fled from him, seeking the Other Lands, and his brother Maatakssi wept.

  “Father,” he cried, “I have murdered your son.”

  The Above Ones heard Maatakssi’s cries and saw his tears. They came down to the gorge of the great river and said to Maatakssi, “Lay your brother to rest in the proper way, so that his spirit can go free to the Other Lands. When this is done, you will be given one boon, for easing your brother’s spirit, but you must also be given one punishment, for releasing it before its time. Do not worry, Maatakssi,” they said, “you will always be beloved of the Above Ones, if you reverence us in the proper way. We will watch over you, in this life and the next and the next. You will find wives and have many sons and daughters to carry your name. You will live many years. This we promise.”

  Sharp-eyed Raven saw this pass from his perch atop a tall pine, where he could look across all of the land and see its workings. He saw the smile of the Above Ones and felt a grief, knowing that mischief was afoot. He was a wise bird, and knew the nature of those people.

  Maatakssi wept, but did as he was told, placing Siinatssi’s head to the east and saying words over him. Precious things he gave his brother to ease the journey, and Maatakssi cut his own hair and sliced his arms in his grief. “Goodbye, my brother,” he said. “Would that I could take your place. Would that my own place had been taken by a better man, so that things had not passed this way.”

  The Above Ones saw that Maatakssi had done well, and eased his grief. They led him to his new wives, who gave him many sons and daughters. Maatakssi lived many, many years, as the Above Ones had promised, surrounded by his sons and sons’ sons, his daughters and daughters’ daughters.

  But first, the Above Ones gave Maatakssi, the murderer of his brother, one boon and one punishment, as they had promised they would do.

  The old women say that these things were one and the same.

  5.

  Sol is dreaming again of Lizzie and fire and smoke, monsters and cut wrists and shouting, empty bottles and gunfire. The scene shifts and there’s an Indian crying over a body in a hole. Another shift, another Indian, then, an old one with bones tied into his hair, standing on a mountain; the man is singing something wordless and in one bloody hand are two shining white things, like plucked eyes. The other palm is held out as if in offering and burning, in the middle of it is a flame that’s black and twisting. The old man’s gaze bores into Sol, his face looms close and Sol thinks maybe he himself is shouting when Billy shakes him awake, although that could have been in the dream. Sol isn’t much of a dreamer, but lately they’re coming hard and fast; they cleave to him for a while after he wakes up. He can still smell smoke, hear the echo of that song.

  Giving his head a shake, he opens his gluey eyes for a moment before wearily closing them again; he swings around on his cot, the blanket draped over his shoulders. He rests his bare feet on the cold, dirty wooden floor of the shack, taking a deep breath before straightening his back. The morning inventory of his myriad aches and pains takes longer and longer these days, his various poorly healed injuries and bodily insults draped over his innards in an accretion that thickens with every passing year. Pulling his spine straight and his shoulders back is a jagged, crackling, muscle-stretching process that requires some time; rolling his head around his neck produces ominous chattering pops from the base of his skull down to his clavicles, which at least provides some relief from stiffness.

  All of this is accomplished with his eyes closed and he can smell the kerosene lantern Billy’s fired up. Without needing to look over, Sol reaches out for the tin cup of cold water that he knows Billy has left on the table between their cots, as he does every morning. As he swallows, Sol can feel the icy water spreading out inside him, refilling needy cells desiccated by whiskey and overwork and exhaustion.
Billy, who seems to need little sleep, is already gone; Sol himself struggles with the desire to just lie back down for a minute or two, to put off the stabbing, cracking pangs that will come to his knees when he stands upright. Bright, sharp pain to welcome in another day.

  He still sits there when Billy comes back a little later with two steaming mugs of coffee and a bag of sandwiches. He wordlessly passes a cup to Sol and sits on his own cot to pack up their lunch pails. The smell of the coffee brings Sol’s eyes open but he doesn’t need to look over and catch Billy’s pointed glance at the rusty little clock that sits on the table between them to know what the man is thinking.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m getting up, goddamn it.” They’re like an old married couple sometimes, Sol thinks, with their tired routines and – mostly one-sided, to be fair to Billy – squabbles.

  Billy says nothing, merely sips his coffee. They have plenty of time; Billy well knows by now exactly how early to get Sol up, to give him time enough to grumble his way to vertical, get dressed, thunderously shit at the privy out back, do all the other little chores it takes to get awake and to the mine before the start of their shift. Billy is the sort of man to whom sleep clings lightly, who merely opens his eyes and gets on with the business of the day, rather than having to peel and shrug out of bleariness. A lucky gift that Sol tries not to resent as he mutters and struggles into something resembling human every morning.

  A short while later they leave the cabin, Sol pausing in the doorway as he always does to look around for Mickey or Faraday or one of Sean Harrity’s other men. Sean’s taken to sending them out to find Sol at odd hours, to remind him of his obligations. The reminders are coming thicker and sharper, and Sol knows it will one day end with him dead in some messy way, if he can’t figure out a way around it before Sean’s patience finally runs out. It’s a thought that occupies much of Sol’s mind when it’s not pushed out by work or drink or exhausted sleep. His carcass slumped in a shit-strewn Patch alley somewhere, neck open, hole in the skull, what have you, left there to rot like a dead cat, swollen belly nuzzled by the rats and the flies.

  It’s still dark as they make their way through the frozen muck and stink, lunch pails in hand. Heading north to the Penn, flowing along with the crowds of men going to one mine or another for the start of shift. By the time they come back out, twelve hours later, it will be night again, this time of year. From dark to dark they work, deep down in the earth. As they walk along with the others, Sol looks up; there are no stars and the moon is only the faintest gleam through the press of stinking clouds hanging low over the hill.

  From the shadows of an alley, a man watches them.

  The buzzer rings in the day.

  The hoistman rattles the cages down, seven men per cage, three cages stacked like beads on a wire.

  – 3 and 2: men on, to be lowered.

  – 4 and 5: 13th level.

  Picking up their tools, eyes squinting through the rock dust that has yet to settle from the blast at the end of the last shift. Down the drift, ore cart rattling along beside them.

  – 2 and 1: hoist rock.

  – 2 and 1.

  – 2 and 1.

  As sore and beat-up as he is, once Sol is going, the work wakes his body up. Muscles loosen. Some of his old strength comes back. Low and squat, with strong shoulders, he fits well to the work, like the Cousin Jacks who, over generations of mining in Cornwall, have been bred to the job. Sol fares better than Big Nancy, who’s always cracking his head into things, as is lanky John Flynn. The Dans and Owen are still growing; Young Dan in particular looks to be the kind of boy who still has a ways to go, who might grow to an awkward size for mine work. Billy isn’t a large man but even after their years down the mine has never entirely shucked himself of a wide-eyed fear of close spaces. Though he never complains, just gets on with the work. Sol himself doesn’t enjoy the work, as such, no one does – no one entirely sane, anyway – but he’s good at it and it fits his strengths, physical and otherwise.

  Just get on with the work, that’s what they do.

  Coughing and cursing, griping and hollering at one another over the racket of the drillers and rattling cars, they push through the dust and muck and stink to get the ore out, down the drift to the vertical shaft, to be sent up the cages so the copper can be bashed and sucked out of the rock. They burrow through the ground of the Richest Hill on Earth, so it’s called, hollowing out under the city like ants, digging for the metal that makes the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company rich, the swells and shareholders anyway. The Company owns Butte and, if men want to work, the Company owns them too.

  Michaels, Johns, Antons, Olafs. Amads and Peters and Svens and Jacks. Pauls and Alvars and Davids and Hirams. Men from a dozen countries, more, drawn up to the Montana mountains and down into the mine shafts. Brothers in Labor, the lot of them: Butte is the Gibraltar of Unionism, it’s said, a place where a man can do honest work for an honest wage. In reality, they suck rock dust and chemical residue twelve hours a day, the mine getting inside of them over the years as they do to the mine, day after day, giving their health and, eventually, their lives, to line the pockets of the likes of that fucker William Clark and his rich cronies. Now, with the war in Europe, the men are being pushed even harder to expand productivity, safety be damned, and the fight of Labor against the ACM is heating up once more. Rumor has it that Frank Little, a bigshot with the IWW, is coming out to Butte to help organize the men against the depredations of the Company.

  Sol shakes off the rest of his morning aches, focuses on the job to hand. Thirteen hundred feet underground, today, in a drift tunnel barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast, in spots, wet, dark, and reeking of rock dust and dynamite residue, is no place to lose concentration. Just do the work. Get the rock in the cars, rattle down the drift to the cages at the shaft, have old Torsten – whose age, younger than his own, Sol tries to ignore – send the cages up.

  – 2 and 1: hoist rock.

  Rock in the cars, down the drift, up the shaft.

  Again, again, again.

  – 2 and 1: hoist rock.

  Coughing and hollering, bashing knuckles on stone, scraping skin. A back that, after a while, doesn’t want to straighten, knees that feel frozen, iron spikes jammed up under their caps. Wet muck everywhere, sweat streaming stinging down into eyes. Air so damp and thick it’s like breathing underwater, if it weren’t for the constant dust scratching its way down your throat to roost in your lungs. Head pounding, ears humming from the noise of the drills and the cars and your own hoarse shouting.

  But laughter, too, from time to time. Jokes, a mucky finger jammed into an unsuspecting ear, the time they’d convinced Owen that each car had to have exactly fifty pieces of rock, no more, no less. Goddamn it, Owen! Get that fuckin rock counted so we can send the car up! After, they’d laughed so hard that Flynn claimed he’d pissed himself, just a little bit. Although it’s too wet to tell for sure, boys, he’d said, which had started them off again. Michael’s nonstop chatter about this or that, often irritating but sometimes hilarious, intentional or not. Did’ya know, boys, that your Chinese fella eats birds’ nests? Some kinda fuckin soup, if you can believe it. Sparrow fuckin soup, hey? From time to time Young Dan can be prevailed upon to sing a bit for them, when the racket will allow, the boy having the kind of voice that one came upon but rarely. Are you sure you’re not fuckin Irish? Michael would ask, every time.

  – 2 and 1: hoist rock.

  Rock in the cars, down the drift, up the shaft.

  – 2 and 1: hoist rock.

  Hour after hour, day after day. Just get on with the work.

  “I saw a thing once, boys,” Michael is saying, now. “Was in Denver, I think it was, if I’m remembering rightly. There was this workin gal who would put her whole fuckin fist up herself, like. No, no, I’m not kidding. I saw it myself. Whole fuckin fist!”

  Clatter of rock into the car. Rattle of the metal wheels on the rail as Owen pushes it back down the drift towards th
e shaft.

  “Right up her cunny, I swear, to the wrist, and I’m thinking now why the fuck would you want to do something like that, girl?”

  “So she can get ready for me, son,” Flynn says, pausing from where he’s loosening up a spill of rock with a bar to grip his crotch suggestively.

  “Nah, I seen that little thing, John,” Nancy chimes in, “looks like a wee carrot from what I remember.”

  Sol coughs around a laugh, helps Young Dan shift a heavier stone, while Flynn makes a trenchant, however accurate, remark about Nancy’s predilection for lithe boys.

  Down the drift, Sol can faintly hear the buzz of the cage signal. The dim bulbs on their string overhead flicker, once, twice.

  – 2 and 1: hoist rock.

  “I’m serious, boys,” Michael continues, “what kind of woman can get her whole fuckin hand up there–”

  – Repeat, 2 and 1: hoist rock.

  “–and could you even feel anything, if you got yourself in her, like? I mean, I’m no carrot-cock like your man Flynn here, but I’m not a giant neither–”

  – Repeat, 2 and 1: hoist rock. A bit slower, more insistently. The lights flicker again, longer this time, making Sol pause and look up.

  “–so I thought, this is something I need to settle for myself, for science, right? Anyways, so I ask this girl, when she’s got her hand back out, mind–”

  – Repeat, 2 and 1: hoist rock. Repeat. There’s a longer pause this time, and then the overhead lights go out entirely.

  “Shut up, Michael,” Sol says. “Just shut up for a second.” He lifts his head, sniffing, but Billy is already ahead of him.