The Long November

by James Benson Nablo

  But what did you know in ‘38, Joe? I knew my dreams were no closer to facts than they’d ever been. I wasn’t sure any more they’d ever be anything but dreams; the dreams of Steffie, of a home, of kids, or the chance of an even break for me and millions like me in the same world.

  And in ‘38 we were belly-sick of the name of the depression. God knows we were tired of the depression, but we couldn’t seem to change it, so we tried to change its name. We even called it the “recession” for a while, but it wasn’t either for our Joe. I couldn’t call it anything but Joe Mack. It was a personal affair and I couldn’t seem to change it. Change it, Joe? You couldn’t even change your shirt...and you’d been on your own for almost eight years. Yes, I knew that. I knew it every time I stepped into the musty smell of the shack. I knew I’d accomplished “sweet-bugger-all.”

  I wasn’t the only one who knew the town had died; we all knew it. But it wasn’t until we saw Bill Berigan’s old Paige come wheezing down the street, loaded to the axles, that it hit us. Four Berigan kids and their dog hung out the back windows, and Bill’s woman was nursing another one in the front seat. Bill pulled the jalopy up to say good-by and I saw the fat, red-faced baby pumping its tiny hands against the full breast.

  “We figure we better get out before the snow, Joe,” Bill said.

  “Maybe we all should, Bill,” I answered, “but I’ll stick around for a while yet.”

  He just inclined his head toward the back seat, as if to say the kids needed more than relief beans to grow on. The car wheezed on; I never saw him again. He was a good man, Berigan, and a damned good miner, who asked nothing more than to work for a fair wage, and you could make it as tough as you wanted. He’s up there somewhere, in some mine, never missing a shift, and filling Canada with a bunch of healthy Berigan kids.

  After that it was a steady procession of cars all day, every day, until in October the Nugget published the figures. In less than three months Moreland Lake lost eighty per cent of its population. They pulled up their freshly started roots and headed on. It didn’t matter that it might have been the third, or fourth, or even tenth time they’d done it. Like they’ve always believed in their God, they believed in the law, and the right of a man to close his property to them, to their families, even to the stomachs of their children. They are honest men. Not consciously honest men, just honest men because, like everyone else, they’ve never had time to stop and figure whether it paid off better that way. Jerry Koro was an honest man, too. And as good a man at his work as Bill Berigan, but somewhere in his brooding, Balkan mind, he knew he’d been pushed around. He knew he’d slugged for twenty years in a hole in the ground, and lived in a hovel just to save his money, and he’d invested it in real estate. He just grew more and more silent as the days passed, and he waited like the breathless pause in the skies before a flash of chain lightning. Then he reached for the can of gasoline and the box of matches, and he built the best damned bonfire the north country has ever seen.

  He waited, decently, until as many had gone as were going, and he picked his night carefully. A dark night with a strong wind, and he stole around to the windward side of the mine buildings where the oil hut stood. What does it matter if they give you “five-to-ten,” or “ten-to-twenty,” or “life” at hard labor, eh, Jerry? What else have you ever known? You weren’t a firebug, but you sure started a hell of a fire. Someone was so concerned with a sandbar in the Caribbean that he forgot about you, Jerry, and you’ll “do” every day of your life because you’re marked in the book as a “dangerous firebug.” Careful with those dogs, careful how you train them, careful what you tell them.

  So you sat in an old musty shack, and watched September move slowly into October, watched winter come, and other than cutting a little wood, you did nothing. No, it wasn’t that bad. I did a hell of a lot of thinking until Curly came. I knew my days in the north were ended; I knew I didn’t want to try it again in some other camp...Sudbury or Kirkland Lake or Porcupine. I wanted to see some brick homes, sitting with a lawn around them, and I wanted a white shirt and a bed with four legs. I didn’t want a 40 below winter, and a black fly summer. I wanted to go home, but the home had to be where Steffie was. I seemed to be trapped. Like I was on an island, and the toll back to land was just enough money to keep me till I got a job and some clothes. I had neither, so it looked like another part of the north country for our Joe. Instead of buying clothes, I’d gone on sending dough to the hotel in Toronto where my wardrobe was tied up. I couldn’t leave the shack until I was sure there was no way I could help beat Moreland Consolidated, so I was still lousing up the town when Curly came back.

  I think I smelled Curly for weeks before I met him, and he didn’t smell too good. It wasn’t just that “oldman” smell. Curly had something wrong with him, and he knew it was killing him. But he was a very old man, so old he couldn’t remember how many years. He figured it was around eighty, but he still could throw a hundred and fifty pound pack on his back and walk fifteen or twenty miles. There had been a time when he could carry twice that. He was sitting on his pack in the shack when I came home one evening. It was starting to get cold and Curly had a fire going in the stove. In the firelight he looked ten years older than God, and I knew where the musty smell came from. Curly used the shack in the winters, and the smell remained pretty solid through the summer till Curly returned in the fall.

  “You Mack?” he asked toothlessly.

  “Yeah, what’s your name?”

  “Curly Durant...I prospect north a’ here...“Nothing up that way, is there?”

  “Nope.”

  He looked into the fire for a time, then turned to me again.

  “How long you bin livin’ in my shack?”

  “I didn’t know it was your shack, Curly. I’ll get out in the morning.”

  “Tain’t mine...belongs to M-C...O’Sullivan leaves me use it fur winterin’...yuh can share it if yuh want.”

  “Thanks, Curly, but I’ll get out in the morning.”

  “Welcome to share it if yuh want, an’ I got some grub left somewhere...”

  He started to undo his pack, then he turned again. “O’Sullivan in town?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, he was last week.”

  “I gotta git some money...he grubstakes me. Purty good fella, O’Sullivan. I split anything I find with him...hain’t found nothin’ in fifteen years.”

  “What’s it cost O’Sullivan to stake you, Curly?” I asked. “Seven-eight hunnert a year, I guess.”

  You big-hearted bastard, O’Sullivan. Sure you’d stake him. Why not? He might turn up another Moreland Consolidated like he did before. He wasn’t very smart then, and he mightn’t be again; then you could he on your ample backside on another banana island, and play king too. Seven-eight hundred a year and you could knock it off your income tax, you big-hearted bastard.

  I listened all night to Curly’s tales of the north country, of the great mines that had been found, of those that had almost been great mines, and those that merely broke hearts. He told of stumbling on the M-C outcropping, and the year’s work he put in driving the first shaft by hand-steel. Of the lean-to he lived in when there wasn’t even a trail near what became Moreland Lake. How he called it “Curly Durant’s Lucky Lode Gold Mine, Ltd.,” but Moreland changed that. He was a little sad about it; not about the money he’d been clipped for, but because they’d changed die name. I got used to the smell and it didn’t bother me. It bothered me a hell of a lot, though, to think of Curly, packing the drills for fifty miles from the railhead and doing the rest of that backbreaking job, only to be taken for it by a pig like Moreland.

  It’s musty, very musty. Like an old man dying from an old reason. Musty, like old crimes and old wounds and old skeletons permitted to live in old shacks in case they might be used again. It’s musty, Moreland, like the harpies around your bones, that pick and snarl and pick again.

  Old men are musty, whether they die in a shack from an old running sore, or in a mansio
n from a rap on the head. Old men are musty, but there wasn’t the smell of crime around Curly Durant, he just died like any old man; he didn’t have to be killed.

  I didn’t leave the next day. I stayed on. I was still waiting, as though I knew somehow that something would happen and I hated to miss it. Curly put the bite on O’Sullivan for some money, and laid in some groceries. And so we lived. I kept the bunk, and Curly slept on the earth floor; he hadn’t slept in a bed in years. He came to like me. It was probably the deep loneliness he felt, for like many old men, he had no one to whom he could turn, and the approach of death is a frightening thing even at eighty. I knew he had something on his mind, something he wanted to tell me, but I had to let it come in his own time, and he took lots of it. One day he sat very quietly for a long time, then he turned and spoke. It was like a little kid telling of something he’s done, something he’s ashamed of.

  “Joe, I guess I’m getting purty old...an’ one a’ these days I guess I’m gonna die.”

  “You’ll go on for years, Curly....”

  “No, not much more, Joe, it’s harder an’ harder to make it...”

  “What’s on your mind, Curly?”

  “I might put you onto a purty good thing...I don’t give ‘em all to O’Sullivan.”

  “Haven’t you any kids anywhere, Curly?”

  He cackled, “Guess mebbe I got dozens...but I always left in the spring so I never seed ‘em.”

  Then he grew serious again. “Look, Joe, I wanta good deep hole...down deep so’s the frost can’t heave me up...a good, deep hole an’ a good, strong box.”

  “If I’m still around Curly, I’ll see you get it...but I’m going to blow out of here pretty soon.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know, Curly, somewhere...but O’Sullivan will look after you.”

  Curly snorted, “Only as long as I can make it tuh the bush an’ keep a-lookin’, that’s all...when I cash in I’ll be no more use tuh him. It won’t be long, Joe, an’ I know a purty good thing not too fur from here.”

  “Have you staked it, Curly?”

  “Naw, but I bin a-goin’ over her fur two years...if I staked her I’d hafta give half to O’Sullivan.”

  He looked at me, a long steady look. “Ill show her to yuh, Joe, an’ you can stake her fur the full length a’ th’ strike...only yuh gotta promise tuh bury me. She’s a beauty, Joe, a sleepin’, golden beauty...an’ she’s purtier than M-C.”

  Then he grew excited, he’d kept it bottled up inside him for two years and now he could tell it. He sucked his mouth in over his gums, and then it came out.

  “Jesus, Joel The strike’s like a fat-assed squaw. She starts in the north, an’ fattens out in the middle, an’ then tapers...I’ve scraped her in a hundred places, an’ yuh could drop a drill diagonal’ on the fattest part of her ass, an’ cut twenty dollar ore all the way tuh hell.”

  I sat up. I’d heard lots of the beer parlor prospectors talk of the big strikes they’d made here and there, only to chisel a few beers. But Curly didn’t sound like that. “Wait’ll I show yuh a few samples, Joe.”

  And he tore his packs open. We walked to the door of the shack, and I held some of the gray-green hunks of ore up to the light. I could see nothing. Curly snorted and took the sample from me and dunked it in a pail of water.

  “Now look at it, Joe.”

  Infinite needlepoints of gold danced through the ore. It was the real McCoy.

  “Ain’t it purty, Joe?” Curly asked.

  “Sure looks good, Curly.”

  “Ain’t seed nothin’ like it since the M-C outcropping...figure it’s kinda’ parta’ the same lode like.”

  His eyes were shining like diamonds set in old wallpaper. “Gold’s like a whore, Joe, she wiggles it at yuh, an’ when yuh reach for it, she pulls it back an’ keeps yuh comin’ on. But sometimes...sometimes, she lets yuh feel it...an’ sometimes she gives it to yuh all the way...She’s a big mine, Joe...a hell of a big mine.”

  “Where is it, Curly?”

  He looked at me again, a long, straight look. “About thirty miles north an’ a mite easty. Start in the mornin’, Joe?”

  “In the morning, Curly.”

  And so you agreed to bury an old man, and for that he paid you in claims worth more millions than Midas ever dreamed; worth so many millions they ceased having an understandable value. Millions that grow while you’re lying here, and millions you can never use unless you’re awfully damned lucky, Joe. Numbers, like the numbers on the sides of boxcars, figures so long they don’t seem to be real, and all so an old man could be sure of getting down where the frost couldn’t heave him up. Money you never had when you could use it. But maybe it’s just as well, because you aren’t sure you could do any better with it than Moreland did. Remember the country north and a mite easty? Remember Curly carrying his half of the pack for fifteen miles, without turning once to see if you were behind? Remember how tired you were the first night in the trapper’s shack? And, Joe, remember at sunset on the second day when you first saw the Sleeping Squaw claims? How the sun caught in the iron pyrites and reflected a paradise of fool’s gold? How you dreamed of what you’d do with your millions...all those things Moreland didn’t do...and instead you’re lying in a darkening room in Italy remembering an old dead man who once chased gold like she was a whore.

  We staked twenty claims on the strike, and then did two weeks’ of assessment work, stripping, clearing, trenching, and tracing. We stripped the stunted growth and earth back, and laid the veins open on the surface, then traced them to where the dip carried them back down into the earth. Curly was right, the surface showings formed the shape of a fat squaw, and the richest part seemed to be at the thickest part of her body, or as Curly said, “That’s where they’re always best, Joe.” The work was too much for Curly, and he was pretty weak when we were ready to leave, but he insisted on his half of the load. The load was much heavier now for we’d cut fifty pounds of channel samples. He even seemed to look older, and he hated to leave his sleeping golden woman, because he knew he’d never see her again. When we did leave, he walked straight away and never looked back. He’d traded his beauty for a grave.

  We made the trappers’ shack, the halfway point, that night, and Curly was very tired. He sat silently in front of the fire, while I crawled into my blankets.

  “Get into your bedroll, Curly,” I said.

  He turned and smiled. “Sure, go on t’ sleep, Joe...Then he paused, and asked in that little kid voice, “It’s gotta be deep, Joe, an’ a good strong box?”

  “Yes, Curly, seven feet deep and an oak box. Good night.”

  He was still sitting there in the morning, but the fire had been out for hours. It was several minutes before I realized Curly had gone to meet his golden woman, and all that was left in front of the cold fire were some old rags around a tired old body.

  I left the packs and put Curly over my shoulder. He hadn’t started to stiffen yet, and when he did, it was in a curved position that fitted my back. It was a damned tough fifteen miles, and it was well after dark when I topped the last rise before town. I could see the flames leaping up the shaft-head of M-C, and I knew what had been making the reddish glow in the sky. It was a beautiful fire, and as it spread its hot tongue around the buildings, licking up one after another, I thought of a smug bastard on a sandbar in the Caribbean. You can’t burn the underground of a mine with a fire on the surface, but you can set them back plenty. I put Curly down and stood watching it. The strong wind fanned it like a blast furnace, and I could see the town was going, too.

  That’s the trouble with physical things, Moreland, they sweat or rot or burn away. They can’t last. And your beautiful mine disappeared in shoots of bursting stars. Maybe it will live again and maybe it won’t. But you won’t,

  Moreland, you’re done. You learned about crazy Jerry Koro who got tired of being pushed around and reached for the gasoline and matches, didn’t you? Well, he cooked up a swell fire. Your mine was
a good mine, Moreland, but it was a better fire, and somewhere in that heat I knew Freddie Miller had won.

  Dig a grave for an old man. Dig it deep, so the frost can’t bite through to him. Leave a sump, so it can drain and he’ll be dry. Take an old bent thing, a tired and withered old thing, an old thing that cannot be used any more, and put it in a strong oak box. Put the oak box in the bottom of the deep grave, and pound the earth tightly on it. Let him rest, he’s so damned old and so tired. He’s musty, and he’s got a bad sore, and he hasn’t been used too good. Dig it deep, put him away down, let the grass grow over him, and let the years grow over the mound he built and had stolen from him. And one day, all that will be left of Moreland Lake will be millions of acres of snow, and stunted firs, and cool, green smells. An old man will be sleeping with an old whore, an old man who was once Curly Durant, and an old whore who was once golden. And over them will drift a cool, green smell, that smells like evergreen looks.

  CHAPTER 7

  It’s crept into every corner and shadow, and it’s filling me; oh God, it’s lovely. It’s a smell, too, the smell of clover or clover hay. Somewhere in this cesspool life is starting once more; some poor, half-whipped Dago is trying to cut a field of clover hay. How many times have they done it? How many times in every corner of this rotten world have they huddled in holes and watched their work being destroyed, and then crawled out to try once more. Out and back to the only things they know and believe in, God and the earth. You do give them one thing, God, you give them hope, and it’ll be a frosty Friday when that goes, too. Hay and clover, manure and rich earth, cordite and rotting bodies, and out of it all comes life. Why? Surely, God, not to do it again? There must be another way to fertilize the earth?

  Men are what they believe, and too often they believe what they are told, so the big sin must be to lie to them. Why can’t this lying be stopped, God? And who is the liar? Tell me, God, tell me and I’ll know why I’m here. Yes, here, the last lousy place our Joe wants to be. Why are you here, Joe? Why aren’t you home with Steffie and the kids? What kids? You know, Joe, those kids you’ve dreamed about, those funny little kids sitting somewhere on a star, with their little behinds getting colder and colder, with more and more wonder in their big eyes. Pretty soon they’ll come to think you don’t want them, and they’ll go back to wherever dreams come from, and then, Joe, you’ll never have them. Why aren’t you home? Why? I’m damned if I know. Somebody lied somewhere and I can’t find out who or where. Somebody lied, and because of it I’ll probably never get home. Maybe this is the end of the line, eh Joe? Maybe the next stop is yours? The last one was Phil’s, remember? Jesus, we aren’t ten miles from where we buried him and that was a month ago.