In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [34]
As the muckers move forward with their picks and shovels, the gunnite crew sprays a mixture of concrete and sand onto the walls, which would otherwise crumble after a few hours of exposure to the air. And if they are digging incorrectly – just one degree up, burrowing too close to the weight of Lake Ontario during this mad scheme by Commissioner Harris to collect lake water 3,300 yards out in the lake? They have all imagined the water heaving in, shouldering them aside in a fast death.
Whenever the tunnellers reach large walls of rock or shale beds the foreman clears the tunnel and the transportation mules are herded back. Then Patrick separates himself from the others. He removes his belt that has the buckle, pats his wet clothes for any other sign of metal, and hoists the box of dynamite onto his shoulder. With a lamp he walks towards the far reaches of the tunnel alone. There is no sound here – no wind, no noise of work. He hears only the slosh of his feet tromping through water, his own breathing in the darkness.
At the end of the tunnel he holds the lamp up against the dark wall, trying to imagine the structure of the rock in front of him, the shape, its possible fissures. He puts the lamp down and augers out holes for the sticks of dynamite. Only at these times are his eyes close to what he digs into all day. The burn of the lamp spills against the wet earth as he works. Once it revealed the pale history of a fossil, a cone-shaped cephalopod, which he sheared free and dropped into his pocket.
Although he dynamites for the foreman, most of the time Patrick works with the muckers in the manual digging. He is paid extra for each of the charges laid. Nobody else wants the claustrophobic uncertainty of this work, but for Patrick this part is the only ease in this terrible place where he feels banished from the world. He carries out the old skill he learned from his father – although then it had been in sunlight, in rivers, logs tumbling over themselves slowly in the air.
He sidewinds the powder fuse, which will burn at two minutes to the yard, and ignites it. He picks up the lamp, and begins his walk back to the others. There is no hurry, there is no other light in the tunnel but this one lamp and as he moves his shadow shifts like a giant alongside him. When he reaches the others at the shaft he hears with them the crumple of noise as the shale displaces and the rock splinters into shards and flints in the far darkness under the lake.
As the day progresses heat rises in the tunnel. The men remove their shirts and hammer them into the hard walls with spikes. Patrick can recognize other tunnellers on the way home by the ragged hole in the back of their shirts. It is a code among them, like the path of a familiar thick bullet in the left shoulder blade. At the end of the day they climb from the tunnel into the desert of construction which had been Victoria Park Forest, where the waterworks is now being built. They see each other’s bodies steaming in the air.
Patrick embraces the last of the light on the walk home. In the dry air the clay hardens on clothing, whitens his arms and hair. He takes a knife and cuts free the mud between his boots and trouser cuffs, brushes the blade over the laces to loosen them. In his Wyatt Avenue room he drops all his clothes in a corner, feeds the iguana, and crawls into bed. He picks the clothes up again at six in the morning hard as armour and bangs them against the wall of the fire escape till they crack apart and soften, the dust in the air around him. At the Thompson Grill he eats breakfast in ten minutes. He reads no paper, just watches the hands of the waitress break open the eggs. As he goes underground the humidity will fall back into his clothes quick as rain.
Carrying three lanterns, the crew of nine men walks towards the end of the tunnel. Already they can smell each other and the sweat from