Angle of Repose (23 page)

He said something in Spanish. The men laughed. Briefly Oliver compared his watch with that of the captain. “All right,” he said, “we should have the answer in the morning.” He and Mr. Prager both offered her an arm. On the way back toward the hoist she paused once to lay her ear against the wall and hear the hopeless talk of hammers like the signaling of entombed men.

At the shaft Mr. Kendall yanked the signal wire twice. They waited. “Well, Susan,” said Mr. Prager, “what’s your impression of life in the mines?”

“How can I say?” Susan said. “There are wonderful pictures, if one had the skill. I’m afraid they’re beyond me. But I wouldn’t have missed it, not for anything. Oh, those men with candlelight shining off their eyeballs, and that awful cavern of a place where they work, and that tapping through the rock as if men buried alive were trying to make others hear! I suppose I shouldn’t find it so picturesque. It’s awful, really-isn’t it? They seem so like prisoners.”

“Prisoners?” said Mr. Kendall rather sharply. They hire out for wages, they get paid according to what they produce, they get their pay every Saturday.” He laughed a short laugh. ”And drink it up before Sunday.”

He made her afraid that somehow, indulging her sensibility, she had put Oliver in the wrong. “I didn’t mean they were enslaved,” she said. “I only meant . . . working underground, in the dark . . .”

“Some of the Cousin Jacks in this mine have been underground for four generations,” Kendall said. “Your husband is underground a good deal himself. We all are. Don’t let your sympathies get so enlarged you tie him to the porch.”

Offended, she kept still. So did Oliver and Mr. Prager, evidently unwilling to stir up Mr. Kendall when he was in a bad mood. The skip’s faint groaning came down the shaft, it arrived, they stepped aboard, Mr. Kendall pulled the wire, the floor pushed against the soles of her feet. Offended or not, she told herself, she must thank him excessively for his indulgence in letting her go down. But she would work into her New Almaden sketch some of the terror of that black labyrinth, and she might even ask outright what sort of life it was, what sort of promise the New World gave, when a miner who emerged from a deep hole in Cornwall could do no better than dive down another in California, and when his children were carrying water to the mine at ten and pushing an ore car at fifteen.

The rock-walled chimney slid downward, she floated toward the surface with her head tilted back, impatient for the upper world. She felt the air grow cooler on her skin, the walls grew yellow-gray with daylight, they floated, lifted, were borne upward and rocked to a stop in the shaft house, looking out into squinting, brilliant afternoon. Tregoning’s toothless smile extracted an answering smile from her, she had rarely been happier to see anyone.

She found that she was perspiring, the cool wind contracted her skin. And she had hardly put her feet on solid earth when the earth quivered, seemed to shake itself like a horse twitching off a fly. Again, and again, and again, and after a pause two more.

“The mountain is still talking to you,” Prager said.

“Are they–have they set off the blasts down where we were?”

“Not till the end of this shift,” Oliver said. “Those were probably in the Bush tunnel.”

“And some prisoners in there are shoveling up money,” said Mr. Kendall.

“You won’t get much sketching done in this,” Oliver said.

“If it doesn’t clear I’ll just take a walk.”

The trail was half lost in fog, the overcast squatted on the mountain. Stranger, padding ahead, disappeared within fifteen yards. From somewhere, all around, above, below, came the tinkle of moving bells, and in a few minutes the
aguador
materialized below them–big sombrero, goatskin chaps, pinto horse. Leading his three mules, each with two kegs of water balanced on the pack saddle, he came picking uphill at an inhumane pace, his spurs digging rhythmically into the pinto’s flanks. Broadly smiling, he saluted them: Susan had drawn him a few days before and made him famous. One, two, three, the hurrying mules passed, leaving the smell of dung diffused in the gray air.

There was no one at the watertank, the boxes hung crooked and empty on the meatbox tree. Across the gully Cornish Camp poked roofs and smoking chimneys into the fog, revealing a gable here, a corner there, like a quick suggestive sketch left deliberately incomplete. “You coming down?” Oliver said.

“I might as well.”

Going down, they walked into a clear pocket under the fog. Main Street lay glumly exposed up the opposite slope–post office and company store, Mother Fall’s, employment office, a raggle taggle of cottages set every which way, at every distance from the street. There was no one in sight, though smoke dove groundward from every stovepipe. In the gully eroded along the street side by last winter’s rains, a dog backed up, dragging a bone that might have come from a mammoth, and growled at Stranger, who stood above him and watched. Not a breath stirred the dry grass, dry thistles, dry mustard stalks, scattered papers.

“She’s a tough-looking place,” Oliver said. “I like your pictures better than the real thing.”

“Since I started to draw it I don’t seem to mind it so much.”

“Ready to follow Mary’s advice and settle down here for life?”

She laughed. “Not quite.” But then she added, “Certainly for a while, if your job was here.”

“You’d starve for talk.”

“Boykins is a pretty good substitute.” She took his arm, climbing up the steep street in the fog, swinging the packet of drawing materials; and at the top she turned sideways and skipped beside him, watching him. “And I like having commissions,” she said. “Altogether, it’s not the dullest life you brought me to. I can stand it for quite a while yet.”

He gave her an odd, dry look. “You may not have the chance.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said.”

“Have you been talking to someone about another job?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t own the mine,” Oliver said. “I only work here.”

They were going along the crest of the knoll, on Shakerag Street (Susan had put it in her sketch as a bit of local picturesqueness). The engineers’ office stood alone in the midst of high weeds. When Oliver unlocked the door, stale indoor smells rushed out to join the taint of garbage and woodsmoke that filled the air outside. She inhaled unaired pipe smoke, dust, art gum, India ink, the neatsfoot-oil odor of boots, and stood flapping the door back and forth to freshen the place.

Oliver stood before the long drafting table and stared down at the map tacked there. Absently he filled his pipe, interrupted his hands to lean and follow with one finger a line on the map, straightened again, tamping the tobacco into the bowl with his thumb. It was as if he had become invisible the moment he entered the office. His mind had gone away and left her. In the same way, in the evening, he would lock the door behind him and turn his attention back to her, the baby, the household. She had some of that single-mindedness herself, and respected it, but it exasperated her to be totally forgotten, standing there idiotically waving up a breeze with the door. A hundred times she had tried to get him to talk about things that had happened at work, and got only grunts and monosyllables.

His match flame drew down, flared, drew down, flared, drew down, as he sucked the pipe alight, still with his eyes on the map. He flapped the match out and threw it in the wastebasket. That was when she saw the sign on the wall: NO SMOKING IN THIS OFFICE. BY ORDER OF THE MANAGER.

“Oliver!”

He raised his eyes, noted what she was pointing at, nodded, and looked down at the map again. “Yeah, Kendall had that put up the other day.”

“But why? You’ve always smoked in here.”

“Yes.”

“Is he afraid of fire?”

“No,” Oliver said. “I doubt that he’s very much afraid of fire.”

“Well what is he afraid of? It seems the strangest . . .”

“Seeing how far I’ll be pushed, I guess,” Oliver said.

“You mean . . . ? Oliver, is he
against
you, is that what you mean?”

Now he finally faced her, shrugging, defensive, getting mulish. “It would look that way.”

“What have you done? I thought everything was going so well.”

“Ahhhh.”

“Tell me.”

“What have I done, you say.”

“Yes. Why should he turn against you?”

“What have I done,” he said, tapping his teeth with the pipestem, elaborately trying to remember. “Well, I made him a more accurate survey than the mine’s ever had, I saved him from making a big mistake with that hoist machinery, and redesigned it so it works, I improved the pump station in Bush tunnel.”

“Please!” she said. “How can he be your enemy just all of a sudden? He’s been perfectly pleasant, as pleasant as he has the capacity for being. He sent his carriage around only the other day.”

“I expect that was Mrs. Kendall.”

“She would hardly do it if he didn’t want her to.”

“Look,” Oliver said, “you’ve got enough to do without worrying about this. I’ll work it out. You run along and draw some pictures and get famous.”

“But I must worry about it! Good heavens, it’s your job, it’s our life!”

“It isn’t that important. If you’re afraid he’ll fire me, forget it. He can’t fire me as long as Smith approves of my work. Maybe he thinks if he makes life unpleasant enough I’ll quit.”

“I just don’t understand,” Susan said. “I thought you were doing just splendidly, and you are, too. But now you say he’d like to fire you if he dared.”

“I was never his choice,” Oliver said. “I was more or less forced on him by Smith and Conrad. We chose to live up on the hill rather than down at the Hacienda. They chose to think we thought ourselves too good for them. I know Ewing, at the store, has always felt that way, and he’s Kendall’s chief spy and toady. Maybe that’s why I got stuck with the cost of renovating the cottage. You begin to see?”

“It’s been from the beginning, then,” Susan said. “Oh, it’s so
small!”

“Yes, I guess it is. Then I rejected his Austrian, your cultivated friend. I think Mrs. Kendall had sort of looked forward to having a tame baron around, just the way she gets some kind of satisfaction out of having an artist, even if the artist is stand-offish. And also I questioned Kendall’s judgment on that hoist, and proved he was wrong.”

“But he raised your salary.”

“Smith told him to.”

“Ah,” she said, “I might have known. What a mean, petty little tyrant that man is!”

“I could hardly agree with you more completely.”

“Do you think it was a mistake for me to go down in the mine last week? I knew he didn’t want me to.”

“I don’t think he much liked your remark about the men being prisoners.”

“But they
are
prisoners!”

“You bet they are,” Oliver said. “I suppose that’s one reason he doesn’t want any sympathetic women around, especially if they write things for magazines.”

“But you feel the same way.”

“Yes, sure, and he knows it. He thinks I’m too chummy with the men. They talk to me and I listen. What he’d like is that whenever I hear anybody grousing or muttering I’d run to him and blab. Then he could fire the troublemakers off the mountain. He knows there’s a lot of grumbling.”

“You never told me. Is there? A lot?”

“All the time.”

“And they talk to you but not to the others.”

“That’s about it. Not to the Hacienda crowd.”

“Then the men didn’t really blame you when you had to stop their work to run your survey.”

“Not especially, no.”

“I’m glad. I don’t want them blaming you.”

“They know who to blame. They know who the spies are, too. The whole place is wormy with fear and hate. Kendall’s way of handling that is to fire anybody who opens his mouth or gets the slightest out of line. He makes examples of a few to scare the rest. Last week he fired two Mexican construction workers for walking a hundred feet off the job to hang their lunch pails in the shade. Day before yesterday he fired Tregoning, the hoist man at the Kendall shaft.”

“Tregoning? That nice toothless fellow? I thought he was an absolute fixture.”

“So did everybody else. Fourteen years he’s worked here. Maybe he thought he was a fixture too, but nobody’s a fixture with Kendall. If he’s going to make an example of somebody, he doesn’t care if there isn’t a competent replacement in camp. There isn’t, in fact. Tregoning was a good one. But he came home from San Jose on the stage the other day with some lengths of stovepipe he’d bought, and Ewing spotted him. You know the rule about buying only at the company store. Kendall gave him forty-eight hours to get off the mountain. That means by this afternoon.”

“Oh,” she said, “that’s despicable!”

“You’re damned right it’s despicable.”

The warning whistle blew, so harsh and peremptory it seemed some extension of Kendall himself, not simply of the company’s power. Before it had stopped, doors were opening on Shakerag Street; within two minutes there were men in the street with lunch pails. Through the open door she could hear their glottal talk like a gabbling of geese. She said, “Couldn’t you have done something?”

“I went to him and protested,” Oliver said. “He told me my job was to keep the Santa Isabel tunnel going in, he’d take care of the men. I think he lit on poor old Tregoning so hard because he knows I like him. ”

“Oliver, you must expose that man to Mr. Prager and Mr. Smith!”

“Yes?” said Oliver, with a sidelong glance. “They all belong to the same clubs.”

“But surely they wouldn’t allow this sort of thing.”

“Kendall’s the manager,” Oliver said. “From the point of the view of the stockholders, he’s a good one. He’s got the mine paying good dividends. They’re not going to jeopardize their profits just because he fires a Cornish hoist man.”