Angle of Repose (22 page)

She wished she could like Mr. Kendall better, for he and his wife had gone out of their way to be friendly, and he had given Oliver every chance to prove himself. Only last week he had taken Oliver off the survey, which he was tired of, and put him on construction, where his inventiveness had a chance to show. Nothing but kindness, really, for nearly a year. Yet she couldn’t quite like him, and she knew no one who did. So nearly a gentleman, Mr. Kendall was, so fatally not one.

Mr. Prager was tucking her hair up under the edges of the hat. “It wouldn’t do to set you afire. You wouldn’t be half so attractive bald.”

Feeling with her hands around the rim of the unfamiliar headgear with its candle socket on the front, she had a dismayed thought. “The baby! How long will we be?”

“No more than an hour,” Oliver said. “Unless we’re going to look at more than this
labor
on the four hundred.”

“That’s all,” Prager said. Kendall nodded without comment. “You may take him home, then,” Susan said to Marian Prouse, and let Prager help her aboard the skip. It moved under her with a thin iron groan. A birdcage on a string, it hung by its cable over unimaginable depths–six hundred feet this shaft went down; there were others twice as deep.

The manager lighted his candle and replaced the hat on his head. “All right, Tregoning.” The bell clinked, steam sighed, the bottom caved away, slowly the light went gray, grayer, dusky, dark. Hanging to Oliver’s arm, Susan turned her face upward, staring up along the cable at the shrinking square from which daylight peered blindly down after them. She was looking for stars, knowing that stars were visible in daylight from deep wells, but she saw none. It took her a few seconds to realize that she was looking not into sky but into the roof of the shaft house.

The square of light was dim and small now, the air was warm and damp and smelled of creosote. She found herself breathing through her mouth. The candle on the manager’s hat flickered along a sluggish upward flow of yellowish rock. As they sank, the shaft appeared to narrow, the walls pinched and squeezed together. If anything should slump or cave they would all be pressed into the rock like fossils.

“All right?” Oliver said. A solid shadow, he might have been looking down at her; somehow she felt he was smiling. His arm squeezed her hand against his side.

“Of course she’s all right,” said Prager. “This is a thoroughbred. Not one lady-like scream.”

“I wouldn’t dare scream,” Susan said shakily. “If I started I couldn’t stop.”

Their laughter reassured her. They took this descent into Hades as casually as she would go down a flight of stairs.

The single candle wavered, their shadows slid on the upward-flowing rock. Then the rock became plank, the skip snagged for an instant that stopped her heart, shook free, rattled past some obstruction. A hole gaped, hollowed by dim light out of utter blackness, and in the hollow she saw a loaded ore car, a man beside it, both of them already sliding up out of sight before they had been more than half seen. “Hello, Tommy,” Oliver said to the vanishing apparition. “Going down to the four hundred. You’ll have a little wait.”

The hole had already squeezed shut, wiping him out from the head downward. Smudged face, white eyes, yellow pocket of light, obscure body and legs and ore car, were gone. Plank was wet rock again. “There was a picture for you,” said Conrad Prager.

“For Rembrandt, you mean.”

Her heart was thudding from the momentary alarm of the snag ging skip; she quivered from the unexpectedness of that encounter. It was as if a shutter had opened and a wild face looked in for an awful moment and then been shut back into its blackness. It terrified her to think that the whole riddled mountain crawled with men like that one. Under her feet as she walked in sunshine, under her stool and umbrella as she sat sketching, under the piazza as she rocked the baby in his cradle, creatures like that one were swinging picks, drilling holes, shoveling, pushing ore cars, sinking in cages to ever deeper levels, groping along black tunnels with the energy of ants. It raised the gooseflesh on her arms; it was as if she had suddenly discovered that the conduits of her blood teemed with tiny, busy, visible vermin.

Another plank wall, another tunnel, empty this time, with only a pair of rails leading into it, incomplete radii cut off in darkness, disappearing long before whatever center it was they were drawn toward. The opening closed, they sank deeper, groaning. The rock that had once been yellowish now threw gleams of greenish black from its wet surfaces. “We’re into the serpentine here,” Oliver said to Prager.

Down, down. The air was more oppressive. With its lingering taint of creosote it reminded her of breathing tincture of benzoin from a croup kettle.

“Next level,” Oliver said. “Anything wrong?”

“No. Oh no.” But she was glad when the constricted shaft opened out into another tunnel. Mr. Kendall, watching the floor come up, yanked on the bell wire and the skip shuddered and rattled to a halt. The groaning died; there was a lonely sound of dripping water. When they had helped her out onto the uneven floor, Oliver scratched a lucifer match on his seat and lit her candle, Mr. Prager’s, his own. In the enlarged bloom of light she could see for some distance down the timbered drift with its toy rails converging toward a vanishing point that was simultaneous with total blackness. Down this drift, with Kendall walking ahead and the others steering her by the elbows, they made their way. Inevitably she thought of Dante, Virgil, and Beatrice, and up on top Tregoning, Charon of this vertical Styx; but the thought of how silly it would sound to speak that thought made her blot it out. About used up, I should think, Oliver might say.

Their shadows climbed the walls and bent across timbers, spread, folded, disappeared, reappeared. Kendall and his shadow blotted the tunnel ahead. Her feet were already wet, she had difficulty walking on the ties, she slipped on wet wood and twisted her ankles among uneven stones.

How far? As if she had spoken aloud, Oliver said, “It’s only a little way on. Listen, maybe we can hear them.”

The three of them stopped, but Kendall’s boots went on clattering. Then he too stopped, his candle turned back on them. “What is it?”

“Listening to the voices of the mine,” Mr. Prager said. “Hold it a minute.”

They stood. The candles grew almost steady, the tunnel enlarged around them. Stillness,
drip
, stillness,
drip drip
, then “Hear them?” Oliver said.

“No.”

“Put your ear against the wall.”

She pushed her hat askew and leaned her cheek against wet rock. “I don’t . . . oh, yes! Yes, plainly!”

Tak,
said the stone against her straining ear.
Tak ... tak ... tak
. . .
tak.
Then it stopped. She held her breath until the sound resumed.
Tak . . . tak . . . tak.

“Understand their language?” Mr. Prager said.

“Is it a language? It’s more like a pulse. It’s like the stone heart of the mountain beating.”

Mr. Kendall laughed, but Prager said, “Capital, capital. Put it in your sketch. Actually, you know, it’s the Tommyknockers.”

“The who?”

“Tommyknockers. Little people who go through the mine tapping at the timbering to make sure it’s sound. Ask any Cornishman.”

“You’re teasing me. What is it really?”

Oliver leaned so that she felt his warm breath as he started her forward again. “Drillers’ hammers. They’re drilling blast holes.”

A new sound was growing in the tunnel, a distant rumble. Through Mr. Kendall’s scissoring legs she saw the rails light up as if fire were in them. A double, widening streak of red gleamed toward her and was blotted. The sound came on. Mr. Kendall turned, and Oliver and Prager pulled Susan to one side. “Car coming,” Oliver said. “Stand against the wall.”

The sound swelled, bounced from wall to wall, was projected down at her from the roof. She had a panicky feeling that the mere vibration of wheels on rails might shake the timbering down, and she understood instantly and completely why a race of men who lived their lives in mines would have to invent such helpful creatures as Tommyknockers. A drop of water fell on her bare arm and she jerked, with a little bitten-off exclamation. “Plenty of room,” Oliver said, misunderstanding.

Noise and light approached, the hollow mountain hummed, the light resolved itself into a candle on a hat, another on the front of the heaped square ore car. It approached, was there, rumbled past, and the leaning man pushing it turned his curious face and she recognized him: a Mexican boy she had seen numerous times, the brother of the crippled carpenter Rodriguez. Rumble, glow, glimpse, and gone, the dim luminousness moving along the roof timbers, the sound diminishing.

“So,” Oliver said, and pulled at her arm. But she held back for a moment, laying her ear to the wall, half convinced that the sound she had heard there was phantasmal, that this lonely boy with his loaded car was all there was, that her vision of busy little men swarming through the dark was the product of her overheated imagination. She was oppressed and made strangely afraid by the sight of the straining boy, and by the fact that he wore a face she recognized, and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to hear the patient Morse of the drillers or whether she hoped to hear only the reassuring silence of stone.

Tak
. . . the mountain said to her.
Tak . . . tak . . . tak . . . tak
. She let herself be led forward. Ahead, darkness opened to dim radiance; behind, dim radiance was swiftly overtaken by black. Shaken, dependent, nearly abject, she stumbled along thinking how for months Oliver had been surveying this honeycombed hell, how the black hole that so oppressed her was only one of dozens, a few hundred feet out of twenty-seven miles. And he knew it all, he had groped through all of it by candlelight, through parts of it scores of times. Down in this oppressive darkness and oppressive air he had stayed for fifteen, twenty, twenty-four hours at a stretch, while she sat in the cottage and felt how lonely she was. Even as she hopped and stumbled beside him, laughing a little at her own clumsiness, she felt gratitude for the big warm hand on her arm, and she knew an appalled pride in what he could do.

Then ahead the low roof lifted, the right hand wall opened into a roomlike vault, the sound of hammers came plainly through air instead of secretly through the rock. Across the opening, figures that had been bending to work on the face rose and turned; their candles stared. Behind them three fixed candles like the candles on an altar shone on a wall of living red.

While the men talked, stooping to follow something from low on one side to high on the other, looking over samples of rock that the captain picked out and handed them, Susan stood back out of the way. It seemed to her that the intent group were like priests at a ceremony. She did not try to understand what they were talking about, beyond her vague comprehension that the vein was not acting as it should, or going where it ought to, and that Mr. Kendall was ready to blame someone for something. Whether it was Oliver he blamed, she couldn’t tell, and she was too fascinated by the pictures they made, the gleams and reflections that came off planes and facets of rock, the way shadows swallowed whole corners and pockets of the
labor
, to worry about it now.

How living the faces were, and how eloquent the postures, of the miners who stood or sat waiting for the bosses to get through. What things the vagrant inadequate light did to a brown cheek, a mustache, the whiteness of teeth, the shine of eyes looking out their corners at her. It was like nothing she had ever drawn, a world away from the cider presses and sheepfolds and quiet lanes and farmyard scenes and pensive maidens of her published drawings, yet this scene, lurid and dimly fearful, spoke to her. She felt it as a painting of saints in a grotto, or drinkers in a dark Dutch cellar. The curve of a shovel had the pewterish gleam of a Ten Eyck tankard, the very buttons on overalls had life.

She made an effort to see the Mexican crew as the strengthless dead flocking around visitors who had just brought word of the living world, but they did not really suggest shades. If they had been tallow-faced Cornishmen they would have served that fancy better. These dark-skinned ones could not grow pale even underground; they might be buried but they were fiercely alive. She stood memorizing them, hoping to draw them later.

“Well, why didn’t you?” she heard Mr. Kendall say to the Mexican captain. “You should have come to Ward or me the minute you suspected it, instead of fooling around guessing. Now we won’t know till we shoot these holes. So let’s get ahead with it.”

The cluster of miners stirred, one or two squatting ones stood up, a standing one reached for the hammer he had leaned against the wall. Though their eyes had kept wandering to Susan, about as common a sight down that mine as a unicorn would have been, they had obviously kept their ears tuned to the bosses. It was clear to Susan that Kendall made them uneasy. She believed that if Oliver were examining that face, and made a decision, and gave an order, they would have moved no less promptly, but with more relaxation in their muscles, and perhaps with words in their mouths, or jokes, or humorous complaints. For Mr. Kendall they said nothing, but they moved very promptly.

But now Conrad Prager was pulling something from the vast pocket of his shooting coat. “Maybe we should pour a little libation, for luck,” he said.

He had a bottle in his hand. A laugh went around the miners, an alertness had come over them all. “Kendall?” Mr. Prager said, and of fered the bottle.

“Not for me,” Kendall said, and waved it away. Prager offered it to Oliver, who passed it to the captain. The captain took it, but before he drank he turned his dark, heavy-mustached face toward Susan and dropped his head in a grave, short bow. “
A su
salud,
señora,
” he said, and tipped the bottle. The next man, taking his cue, did the same, and the next. She was toasted by all of them, one after the other, seriously and without embarrassment, without even smiles. The only smiles came when the bottle had made its way back to Oliver, and he followed their example, toasting his wife. Then Prager, who bowed like a prince and put his mouth where all those mouths had been–How could he? How could Oliver?–yet it was more right than Mr. Kendall’s refusing–and drained the bottle and corked it and set it on the floor.