Work Song - Ivan Doig [77]
“Nice work. When we get in the lamp room, stay at the back”—he was addressing me—“and keep your head down. Griff, you know what to do.”
The lamp room, jam-packed with men and equipment, was where we were to outfit ourselves with helmets with a small headlamp atop like a bright Cyclops eye. Finding one that more or less fit, I plopped it on, hoping it would help to hide me. No sooner was it down around my brow than the night supervisor stepped into the room, a list of names in his hand.
“Hooper and Griffith on the extra gang,” he sang out. “Oldtimers’ night, is this?”
“Don’t fret yourself, Delaney,” Griff bridled. “We can still turn out the work.”
“We’ll see about that.” The mine overseer peered to the right and left of Griffith. “Where’s Hoop?”
“Taking a leak against the office.”
“He would be.” Comparing the rest of the names on his list to the crowded roomful of faces, now the supervisor craned to see to the back, where I was keeping my head down. “Who else we got here, anybody I don’t know?”
Jared broke in on that. “Just so you have it in mind, Delaney—we voted not to go on the twenty-hundred level until more shoring gets put in.”
“Nobody’s asked you to yet,” the mine boss said sourly. “Don’t push it, Evans.”
“You call that pushing, when it’s our necks at risk?” Jared harped on the matter to create a distraction. “I’m just saying, that shoring better go in before any of us set foot onto that level or—” During this, Griff and I slipped out.
The open air of the mine yard chilled me. With the helmet weighing on me, I felt even more like a blockhead for agreeing to this scheme. Happy as if he had good sense, Griff gimped along ahead of me, carrying on about the old days on the Hill and this rare chance to have a look at the workings of the Muckaroo. “So, all we need to do,” he chatted over his shoulder as if we were out for a stroll, “is get ourselves down to the thirty-hundred level.”
That snatch of enthusiasm sounded reassuring. Wait, though; multiply those offhand numbers and the result is—
“Three thousand feet?” I jammed to a halt as if an abyss of that depth had cracked open beneath the toes of my shoes. “I just can’t. You’ll have to tell Jared.”
Without saying a word, Griff circled back and clamped a sinewy old hand on my shoulder, steering me toward the mineshaft.
The Muckaroo’s headframe stood over us, black metal casting blacker shadows in the glare of the night lights, as we approached. Griff headed us straight in under the girders toward a narrow plate-metal box hung from a steel cable. “Here we go, Morrie, I mean Hoop. Hop in the cage.”
Rust-spotted and dented, the thing looked like some torture chamber left over from the Spanish Inquisition. Rationally I knew it was simply an elevator, a way to travel to work the same way an accountant in a celluloid collar would step into wood-paneled circumstances downtown and pleasantly tell the operator, “Fourth floor, please.” Except that this express traveled more than half a mile between stops, straight down. With Griff’s firm aid I edged in and stood rigid against the back plating, as far away from the flimsy accordion gate across the doorway as possible. He shouldered in next to me as other miners packed in with us.
The hoistman peeked in, counting heads, then snicked the gate closed. He called out, “Everybody ready for China?”
“Let ’er drop,” the miner nearest the front called back.
No sooner were the words out than the cage plunged like a shot, for about a dozen feet. Then stopped with the kind of yank that comes at the end of a scaffold rope.
Everything dangled there, shuddering wildly; I include myself in that. The walls of the mineshaft had closed in around us and overhead there was a terrific clatter and continuing commotion. I believe I would have whimpered if the power of voice hadn’t been scared out of me.
“It’s okey-doke,” Griff tried to soothe me with a whisper. “They’re loading a couple more cages over us, is all.”
Oh, was that all. Merely piling people on top of our heads, to make sure of calamity if anything went wrong in the descent.