The Boy Orator (9 page)

Andrew's cane sank several inches into the ground. He tripped, muddying his pants. Stale sweat and cigarette smoke nearly smothered Harry as soon as he opened the door, along with something else—dust and ash, bitter clay. He couldn't be sure. Faces turned his way, scratchy and dim like the old, sepia-tinted photographs his mother kept of her Irish family. Glimpses of whiskers, flat brown eyes. Bruises and scars, purple burns on bony cheeks. Women danced around the room, dropped into laps, raising dust from the miners' grubby clothes. Perfume and liquor, dizzying, sweet. Kohl stained the singer's cheeks.

Andrew ordered scrambled eggs for Harry and himself, let a buddy buy him a drink. Harry sat on a stool in a corner by a black upright piano, listening to the talk. These were the ruggedest, weariest men he'd ever seen but they certainly knew their politics. They cursed Governor Haskell for stealing state funds; damned the Democrats, who wanted all voters to pass a literacy test—a blatant attempt to exclude most Negroes.

One man wondered aloud in lilting, heavily accented English, “How can the party betray its own ideals?”

His listeners shook their heads. Harry said, “Simple. Standard Oil.” He'd heard his father say this dozens of times, usually when they practiced speeches in the barn, or read aloud together from Oscar Ameringer's pamphlets.

The man who had spoken looked at him with one eye closed and a twitching mustache.

“Campaign contributions in exchange for looser drilling regulations.” Harry stood and stuffed his hands in his pockets. The singer's voice cracked on a throaty lament. “And that, gentlemen, is just one in a long series of Democratic compromises. The Republicans, of course, have never been a viable alternative.”

The men laughed to hear such serious conversation from a boy, but nodded gravely. “I like-a this kid,” said the mustached Italian. He slid a bottle of corn whiskey across the table to Harry. He shook his head but happily joined the discussion. The men were lively and smart. He thought it might be good to be a miner.

A short man in a gray suit and bowler hat entered the hall. Quickly, people tried to hide their liquor, under tables or behind the bar. The man saw them but didn't say anything. He walked straight up to Andrew. “How-do. Name's Dugan,” he said, planting his feet like a gunfighter in the dime novels Harry sometimes read. “I assume you've heard by now we've got a new manager here. Lester Fawkes. I'm his assistant. You're Andrew Shaughnessy?”

“That I am. How'd you know me?”

“Oh, I know things, Mr. Shaughnessy. For example, I understand you have an arrangement with Mr. Gibson and Mr. Lechman.”

“I do.”

“Fine. I'm not here to interfere. But I also understand you have a reputation for agitation.”

Everyone listened, frowning, tense. A cook brought Harry an egg on a warped tin plate.

“The owners make their deals in clean, comfy rooms,” Dugan said. “They don't have to worry about on-site operations. They don't hear the stories. Me—my bloody ears ache, end of the day. Work's disrupted for any reason—any reason whatsoever—Fawkes and I have to answer for it.” He spat a brown stream into a cuspidor by the bar. “The Osage mines produce the finest steam coal west of Pennsylvania and I aim to see it stays that way, understand?”

Andrew slipped a protective arm around Harry's shoulders. “I've never hidden my inclinations from your bosses, Mr. Dugan. Whatever my disagreements with them, I can be trusted in business. They know that.”

“Good.” Dugan smiled. “Glad to hear it. Welcome back, then. Just wanted to introduce myself. You'll find I'm a prince as long as we maintain our production schedule. You have a pleasant evening now.” He tipped his hat. Before he left the hall he yelled, “You boys better not be drinking
alcohol
in here!” Harry knew he'd seen the whiskey; so did everyone else. Clearly, Dugan allowed them this little rebellion to head off bigger trouble. Harry was both abashed and impressed by this show of power.

When Dugan had gone, several of the miners slapped Andrew's back or shook his hand. Swedes, Russians, Italians, Lithuanians. The men's clashing accents formed a rousing, dissonant music in the air.

As Andrew was exchanging money for company scrip the singer slipped into his lap. She wore a dress as red as her hair. Lip rouge smeared her dimpled chin, making little X's. “How ‘bout a friend tonight?”

“No, thanks,” Andrew said.

“What about him?” She poked Harry's chest. He stumbled backwards.

“He's twelve.”

The woman stood and pulled Harry toward the peach-scented cleft at the top of her dress. “Twelve's old enough, right?”

“Yes,” Harry stammered, not sure what he was agreeing to. The softness and warmth of the woman's skin paralyzed him.

“Finish your supper, Harry,” Andrew said. The singer stuck out her tongue, danced toward the bar with a laugh.

They finished eating, unloaded the wagon, fed and secured the mules. In the doorway of the boardinghouse Andrew gave a guard two Osage certificates worth fifty cents. It was dark inside. Harry tripped over half a dozen grumbling men as he groped for vacant floor space. A man lit a cigarette; in the brief flare Harry saw yellowed newspapers on the walls. The place smelled of dirty feet, damp wool. He heard what must have been a rat skittering over gritty boards in a corner. Coughing and snores. Sloshing whiskey.

Andrew stretched out beside him in a narrow nest between saddle bags, boots, and men. He whispered, “I don't think your mother needs to know the kind of conditions—”

“Shhh!” someone said.

“All right, all right!”

Harry lay awake listening to the owls in the hills; they were high-pitched, catlike in their calling, not like the deep, rolling hoots of the Great Horneds he was used to hearing on the banks of the Red River. An unknown bird
peer-peer-peered
in a tree just outside the door, huffed a great wind with its wings, and splashed the surface of the pond.

He recalled the singer's smell, the delicate swell of her breasts against his cheek, but it was Bob Cochran's companion, Sue-Sue, prettier than the singer, he kept seeing: her straight dark hair, her copper skin.

He got cold in the night, woke with sore bones and a crick in his neck. He heard a man praying in a language he didn't understand.

Mist seeped between boards in the walls, through rips in the newspaper strips, when his father whispered it was time to get up. The sun wasn't out. The birds were still. Harry followed Andrew next door to the dining hall. Their boots crunched acorns and frost-rimed pine needles in gravel. True summer was still a week or so away. They ordered eggs again and toast and buttered grits. The place was full of breath-clouds, tobacco smoke.

They loaded the wagon and drove to the Number Nine Mine.

At the shaft house, a square wooden structure no bigger than an outhouse, Andrew shook hands with a man in a long canvas coat. He wore a round metal hat with a little candle stuck in front. “Light me up, Andrew. I'm the gasman this morning.” Andrew struck a match and held it to the candle. The man grabbed a kerosene lamp, stepped onto a platform—it reminded Harry of a washtub. Several fellows, including Andrew, tugged greasy ropes; the platform disappeared into the ground.

The gasman had to probe each cavity, Andrew told Harry, check the air circulation, locate leaking gas. “He makes it safe for the rest of us.”

The fellows smoked, rubbed their arms for warmth. The sun still wasn't up. Occasionally a bell sounded from below, signaling the men to drop the ropes some more. They talked softly about friends they'd lost in other mines, suffocated by afterdamp or buried in rockslides after misfired windy shots.

An hour later they hauled the gasman up. A flaky black film chalked his cheeks. When he grinned, his teeth were as straight as piano keys. He said, “Safe as a baby's crib down there.”

Andrew snatched a measuring stick, his level, and drafting tools from the wagon. He assured the others Harry was a mature, responsible boy who'd do as he was told.

“He don't bother me,” one said. “There's younger'n him in some of these drifts.”

Another gave Harry a canvas coat, too large, and a hard hat. He struggled to keep his hands and eyes uncovered. Andrew lit the candle on his head. They stood beside two young miners on the platform. It jerked, started to sink. Harry watched the men's muscles as they worked the ropes around him, saw the first sunlight on the hills. Stars began to fade. Then he was traveling through earth.

He couldn't breathe. The smell of creosote and sputtering paraffin torches singed his nostrils. Water trickled over and across the yellow walls around him. The rope pulleys squeaked; the platform rocked against wet stone. The shaft became narrower, darker, black and shimmering green. A wooden pallet appeared, floating in the light of their torches. “Here,” Andrew said. One of their companions tugged something Harry couldn't see. A bell rang, hurting his ears, echoing endlessly. The platform stopped with a violent jump. He lost his balance, reached for the walls. His hands slipped on moist brown clods thick with roots. His father gripped his arm.

“Hand me that pickax,” Andrew said to one of the men. With the blunt end he tapped each board in the pallet, wedged into rock. Then Andrew thumped the thin oak supports on either side of the tunnel's opening. The wood was wet and soft. “Is this a busy drift?” he asked.

The miners nodded.

“Harry, step on out into the room. I can't get back there with my leg.”

Harry left the platform, moving cautiously onto the pallet. His candle flickered. He was standing in a tunnel that spiraled as far as he could see into the earth. He imagined himself a bee in a vast, dank honeycomb.

“Take this ax,” Andrew said. “Gently, gently now, tap those boards above your head. What kind of sound do they make?”

“Sort of hollow,” Harry said, hoisting the ax. Dust scratched his eyes.

“You sure?”

“Yessir.”

“Have to replace ‘em,” Andrew said. “One more time, Harry, double-check. Listen closely now. Don't let the echo throw you.”

He blinked, raised the ax. With his eyes closed he smashed the boards harder than he wanted. A chunk of rotted wood the size of a milk bucket tore from the ceiling with a
crack
, thunked his shoulder, jolting the ax from his hand. It flew past the lip of the pallet. “Jesus!” said one of the miners, leaping back. His arm hit a rope attached to the platform's railing. Harry slipped, lost his hat. His candle went out. Dust and splinters and pebbles showered his head and back. He heard the ax bouncing off rocks in the dark. The platform made a scraping sound; his father yelled. “Whoa, whoa!” the miners screamed. The bell clanged once, twice.

“Harry, Harry you all right?” Andrew said. His voice drifted up from below with a cloud of dirt. The platform had tottered several feet.

“I'm fine. I can't see.” He felt the edge of the pallet, empty space beyond. A sudden, rushing dizziness. He coughed, couldn't get air.

“Don't move,” Andrew said. The words, echoing, seemed to come from three different places at once. Harry crawled back, away from the edge, rested his aching shoulder against rough, jutting stone. He'd never experienced darkness so complete. It had weight and a shape, big enough to swallow a man. Though the tunnel was warm, his pain made him shiver.

The men rang a series of bell-signals, managed to get the platform level with the pallet again. Andrew pulled Harry to safety. Their dirty grins in the candlelight dissipated anger and fear. “They'll take that ax out of our pay,” said one of the miners but he was smiling, relieved that no one was hurt.

“I'm sorry,” Harry said. “I didn't mean to—”

“It was about to go anyway, kid. Don't worry. We've all had our share of close shaves down here.”

Swaying there on the platform, wheezing in the dark, Harry saw how physical danger could be a kind of intimacy. It could make a stranger a friend. The shared panic and animal joy of survival sparked a deeper recognition of frailty and chance, the sense that together you'd cheated death—or life?—a little. Harry began to understand why men huddled in hills brewing potions—boiling away the ghosts of not-knowing—or sat in barbershops playing games they could win, with a little luck.

His father patted his back. He wondered if he could ever feel this kind of warmth with his mother. Was the threat of bodily harm always crucial for a bond like this?

He spent the rest of the day underground, helping Andrew test and measure timber. By midafternoon the drifts were crawling with men. He heard the clack of gondola cars on rails in twisting tunnels above and below him, the
tik-tik
of hammers on coal, the hiss of kerosene lanterns. The two young miners kidded him. “That tapping you hear—it's the Tommyknockers. Little people of the earth clomping around in their thick wooden shoes, looking for a good game of cards.”

The truth was,
they
were the little people of the earth—Harry and his father, the miners. As the platform moved up and down the main shaft Harry caught glimpses of arms and legs, dirty faces peering out of holes. Phantoms digging, squatting, pulling at the heart of the planet. Visible in flickers, then lost again in foul, dry blackness.

Above them all in warm grass, he thought, children batted balls, mothers went to market, unaware of the desperation beneath them, the indignities, the camaraderie, the insect motions that built their communities.

“This new manager?” Andrew asked the miners while Harry hammered an I-beam. “He raise your pay?”

“Naw. Still a pittance per ton.”

The other man spat over the edge of the platform into the hot bottomless pit. “Helping you is dead time for us. We won't see a dime today. No scrip if we don't haul coal.”

“It's worthless anyway. The company store's raised its prices twice in the last month. Poor Frank over in the supply tent, they're pressuring him to move. Then the company'll take all the supplies we need out of our checks.”