Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [77]
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.
7
“You won’t get much sketching done in this,” Oliver said.
“If