Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [75]
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,