The Power of One (76 page)

The roar of the rock breaking free reached my ears before I was knocked unconscious through the bars to fall sixty feet down the almost empty shaft.

The fall should have killed me. The ten tons of rock that followed me through the bars should also have done so. I had been unconscious the moment the rock struck me and had fallen through the bars like a sack of potatoes, bouncing against one wall of the down shaft. My hard hat had miraculously stayed on and prevented my head from being smashed in as I landed in about three feet of fine shale at the bottom of the grizzly, the result of the huge rock I had blasted through the bars with the running fuse. I had been conscious at the time of using too much gelignite, but the grizzly shaft below the bars had been empty and a good grizzly man tries to put a buffer of fine shale against the pneumatic steel doors to protect them from the effect of bigger rocks smashing against them. I had landed in this soft bed of shale and sand, my body rolling and finally wedging under a narrow shelf of rock where the side of the shaft had been carelessly blasted. Ten tons of rock from the hang-up had followed me through the bars, covering my body and building up over me though, miraculously, in pieces big enough to allow some air to reach me.

I lay unconscious under the shelf, covered by several tons of rock. What happened over the next seven hours I have pieced together from talking with my gang and the rescue team.

Elijah was shocked beyond belief. His elation of a few minutes before had turned to complete dismay. Yet he hadn't panicked and had sounded the blast warning hooter—five prolonged blasts each followed by fifteen seconds of silence, then a minute's break and a repeat of the same pattern three times. There was no mistaking the disaster message. The rest of the gang huddled together in the safety shaft, too shocked to respond, their lives suddenly shattered by the certainty in their minds of their own deaths should they remain even to help with the rescue. For them their luck had run out, their white talisman was dead. It was time to get to the surface, hand in the copper discs that hung around their necks, and get back to the jungle where in the bright tropical sunlight it was more difficult for death, who saw better in the dark, to find them.

Rasputin, working on the main haulage half a mile away, was the first white man to hear the disaster warning. He sent his number one boy to alert the underground shift boss, and he headed for my grizzly. Frantic with concern, he nevertheless loaded an empty truck with bulkhead timber and instructed his gang to push it to the area of the accident. If it was a grizzly disaster, Rasputin knew the huge slabs of native timber would be needed for any rescue attempt.

News of a disaster in the mines spreads seemingly by osmosis. Grizzly men who were working the sixteen hundred feet level with me would close down their grizzlies and bring their gangs in to help. I'd done it myself on three occasions, and I knew what it was like when the rescue crews finally pulled the smashed and broken, even sometimes separated, parts of a body from the blood-splattered rock and placed it in a canvas body bag. I had even seen blood leaking from the pneumatic doors closing the bottom of a grizzly shaft and had waited the six hours it had taken finally to get to the body, which lay only a few feet away, as I did now.

It was an unspoken rule that the grizzly men helped in any rescue attempt. They were the personal witnesses to the death with which they had learned to live every time they climbed the sixty feet of vertical ladder shaft to a grizzly level. The generally unsuccessful rescue attempt was a grim ritual they felt forced to play a part in, out of respect for a dead brother.

Rescue procedure is dictated by the environment. A stope and the grizzly below it are a live thing and have to be silenced before a rescue attempt can be made. The shaft directly above the grizzly bars has to be timbered up, the old bitch silenced. Huge bulk end timbers, capable of holding back rocks crashing from the stope, were used for this task. Shoring up the grizzly shaft was in itself a dangerous task, particularly as timber men are not adept at reading a grizzly. The job was complicated by the twenty tons or so of rock that had rested on the bars when the hang-up had come down. This would need to be manhandled into the air escape and safety shaft, while the pieces too large to lift would remain on the bars, where they would act as some sort of protection should the bulk end timbers give way.

It was Rasputin's task to build the bulkhead that shored up the shaft above the grizzly. The ten-foot-by-ten-inch raw native timber slabs, known as “ten-be-tens,” weighed well over three hundred pounds each and had to be manually pulled up the sixty-foot entry shaft to the grizzly level. By the time the rescue crew arrived from the surface, the giant Georgian had already exhausted his own crew, and the crews from the three other grizzlies were working turnabout to haul the heavy timber. Rasputin worked in a cold, controlled fury, with no unnecessary movement or wasted energy, speaking quietly to the blacks to keep them from panic. He'd even managed to get my crew back to work. He knew that rescue was a long process made dangerous by hastily contrived directions and the terrible infection of fear. From the grizzly level he directed the removal of the manageable rock that lay on the tungsten bars. When the rescue captain arrived on the grizzly level, panting from the exertion of climbing the ladders up the entry shaft, Rasputin was waiting for him at the top.

“No come here, Peekay he mine, I fix!” He glared at the rescue captain, opening and closing his huge fists.

The light from the captain's white hat shone into Rasputin's eyes and held the fury and cold determination in them. Rasputin was taking no chances; handing the rescue operation over to the mine captain wasn't going to happen. “Okay, Russki, I'll send a rigger and an electrician up to give you lights and a rock hoist. You just carry on.”

“You send Zoran. He Croat, I work him.” He turned back to the grizzly. Later the rescue captain, a man named McCormack, a decent sort of guy and a very experienced miner, would tell how he knew, looking into the crazed eyes of the Russian, that the giant would have snapped his neck like a chicken bone and thrown him back down the entry shaft had he taken a step toward the grizzly. He felt a lot better about not examining the accident site when the electrician returned after setting up the lights to report that the rescue was futile and there was absolutely no chance of my having survived.

Rasputin had allowed the rigger, a Yugoslav simply known as Zoran, to remain and had demanded that his own gang, only just rested from hauling timbers, be sent up to him. Maintaining his furious though measured pace, he timbered up the shaft above the grizzly. Three hours passed before it was safe to enter the shelf where I lay buried.

Rasputin, his woolen miner's vest and the shirt over it soaked with perspiration, paused only briefly to drink a canteen of water before allowing himself to be lowered by the hoist the Yugo had rigged to the rock covering me nearly fifty feet below. Working with great grunts, he started to fill the hoist basket, giving a short, sharp whistle each time the basket was ready to be hauled up.

With Rasputin safely down the shaft, McCormack and the remainder of the rescue crew, together with the three grizzly men, had crowded into the grizzly area. The white men worked with the blacks to empty the basket and pass the rock along firebucket style to the air escape shaft. The Russian's work proved to be a model rescue operation, and McCormack set up the oxygen tent and the transfusion apparatus he knew the mine medic would want when eventually he arrived.

McCormack would have liked to have sent an African down every ten minutes, about the time it took to exhaust a man lifting rocks, some of which weighed as much as fifty pounds. He knew Rasputin would not allow this. An African careless or inexperienced might cause a rock slide, impacting the rock that lay over me even further. Until he actually lifted my body and held my chest to his ear, Rasputin was not going to accept my death.

Men, especially miners, who live in the constant shadow of death do not stand mute-voiced and solemn for hours at the scene of an accident. The look one sees on the gawking faces of people surrounding a road accident victim is not the same as the one worn by miners. Miners carry their grief in an outwardly matter-of-fact way, each man a silent repository of his own feelings, each grizzly man knowing his name may well be on the next card in a stacked deck.

Mick Spilleen, known, of course, as Mickey Spillane, an illiterate Irishman who had been in the school of mines with me and who had only just volunteered to come back onto grizzlies in an attempt to pay his gambling debts, was the first to start the betting. “The Russki won't make it, I'm tellin' you now, lads.”

“I reckon he will, man,” someone else said, probably Van Wyck the Afrikaner. Suddenly everyone was in on the betting. Even Elijah, who had refused to leave the grizzly level when my gang had been relieved, was allowed to put five pounds, a week's wages, on the Russian getting to my body before he collapsed. Mickey then offered odds of fifty to one on my being alive and this time only the little African took the bet, putting another week's wages on the talisman who had kept them all alive over almost nine months. Most of the men bet against Rasputin lasting the distance, and the bets among the dozen or so whites present amounted to nearly two thousand pounds. When, years later, I told Morrie of the incident, asking him how he would have bet, he had laughed. “The Irishman was right, only I'd have offered two hundred to one against your making it. But I would have shortened the odds somewhat on the Russian.”

Rasputin's tremendous energy was beginning to give out. He was digging deep for the strength to keep going, his breathing labored and rasping. When the basket was filled, he could no longer summon up the breath to whistle. Zoran, watching from the top, would start to lift the basket, whereupon the giant would stoop down, his huge hands raw and bleeding, clasping his knees. Once he threw up, and once he removed his torn shirt and miner's vest and, tearing strips from the shirt, bound his bloody hands. But always as the bucket lowered he was ready to start loading again. Several of the men offered to replace him but he'd simply shake his head.
“Nyet, nyet!”
he gasped. Soon the flinted edges of the broken rock he was lifting cut into his chest and stomach. His dirt-covered torso, caught in the light from the single electric bulb burning directly above him, glistened with blood and raw exposed flesh, his stomach muscles pumping red. The men above watched fascinated, waiting for the moment when the giant would collapse.

“He's done for, I'm tellin' you now, half a ton more and he's history,” Mickey whispered, even though there was no chance of the Russian hearing him or even understanding his heavy brogue. What they were witnessing was a great feat of strength, and they told each other they would one day tell their grandchildren of this night.

It must have been about this time Rasputin heard me groan, though how he would have done so over his rasping breath was a miracle. He gave a sharp, agonized cry and threw himself at the rock in the area from which the sound had come. No longer bothering about the basket, he tore the rock aside, frantically stacking it behind him. He worked “possessed by the divil himself,” Mickey later claimed. Rasputin was finding strength to continue from beyond the realm of normal human consciousness, his breath coming in short animal snorts, like a pig sniffing for truffles. The blood streamed from his chest and stomach, soaking the top of his pants down to the knees while the ragged bandages were ripped from hands reduced to raw slabs of meat.

When he finally reached me, wedged miraculously under the

narrow though protective ledge, my body was soaked in blood, as it turned out from large sections of skin that had been removed in the fall. Rasputin lifted my unconscious body to his chest and placed his ear to my heart.

“Peekay, he live!” he wailed. Slowly he sunk to the ground, his legs no longer able to hold him.

We sat in a nest of rock like the one the loneliness bird had laid deep inside me, my head resting in the giant's blood-soaked lap. He'd severed his index finger at the first knuckle, and as he tenderly stroked my forehead the blood from the stump ran down my brow and filled the cups made by my closed eyes. The hollows soon filled, then ran from the overflowing bowls down my cheeks. Rasputin tried to stop the flow, wiping at it with the stump of his severed finger, unaware of the real source of the blood. “Peekay! Rasputin find Peekay, Rasputin make rabbit stew,” he sobbed.

Later Mickey Spillane claimed that when they got to us there were tears of real blood coming from the giant's eyes, but by that time he was already dead.

I spent a week in hospital, most of it being treated for shock. The skin had been scraped from a large part of my body and I was badly bruised, but not a single bone was broken. When I regained consciousness and heard of Rasputin's death, I wept and then begged that they delay the burial until I could attend his funeral. In a hot climate in a town without a mortuary it wasn't possible, and the huge Georgian had been buried for three days when they released me from the cottage hospital. While I looked a mess with both eyes blackened and the skin on each side of my face purple with scabs, I was in excellent shape. My first task was to go to the general store in Luanshya and order a tombstone for Rasputin, a black granite slab that would have to come from Bulawayo, more than six hundred miles to the south, and would take several weeks to arrive. On it would be written simply
RASPUTIN, MAKER OF
EXCELLENT RABBIT STEW, WHO GAVE HIS LIFE FOR HIS FRIEND.
I then went to the small cemetery, where he lay under a mound of red clay. On top of the clay was a single wreath of battered gladioli. We were almost at the beginning of the rainy season, and it had rained a little the previous night. The heavy drops of tropical rain had kicked up the red clay so that the pink and orange petals, opaque from being wet, were stained with mud. Rasputin loved wild flowers as Doc had loved aloe: why is it that the ubiquitous gladiolus always crowds everything else out? I dropped painfully