The Stubborn Season. Lauren B. Davis
again. “In a minute. I’d do it in a minute.”
“Margaret . . .”
She laughed then, shrilly. “Don’t pay me any mind. I’m just a little depressed, is all. I need a good night’s sleep. I can’t seem to sleep. But Douglas gives me these pills. They help.”
“Things bad between you and Douglas?”
“Bad? No. Not bad, I suppose. They’re just not anything. He’s simply someone who lives in the house. I want to be a better wife to him. I’ve made my bed, after all. I have to learn to lie in it. But there are days when I look at him and see him more like an annoying lodger than a husband.”
“I’m sorry, Peggy.”
“Things didn’t turn out like I’d planned. I’d planned so many big things.”
“Be patient. Times are hard right now. Give it a few years.”
“Now you sound like him.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”
Irene crept upstairs after her uncle. She didn’t want to sit with her father pretending nothing was wrong. She stood in her bedroom, listening. At first she had tried not to listen. She even closed the door so that she wouldn’t hear the things her mother said, but the words slithered through the thin walls and the heating vents and found her even there.
She heard them opening the door, going downstairs.
“Irene,” her mother called, knowing exactly where she was. “Come down and say goodbye to your uncle Rory.”
“Coming,” said Irene. And so she did as she was told. She ran down to the kitchen to get the parcel of sandwiches and tins of coffee and sardines she’d wrapped up. She gave them to her uncle and he thanked her and hugged her and she hugged him back. Mother and father and daughter stood on the porch and waved goodbye and watched him walk away. Irene couldn’t help thinking that all three of them were making an effort not to run after him.
1930
There is always the fear of cave-in, even though the men say methane is more dangerous. It makes him hunch his shoulders, and every few seconds he turns his eyes upward, scanning the malevolent weight above him for signs of instability. Water splashes all around and makes footing uncertain. Shadows fall on faces, and the dim gleam from helmet-lamps flickers on glistening stone. David feels as though he has stumbled into some circle of Hell reserved for those who squandered the pleasures of sun and space and solitude and silence. Riding down on the “man trip” every evening at the beginning of his shift, his knees and shoulders pressed against the fellows on each side of him, the contraption like a perverse version of a midway roller-coaster, is an exercise in self-control. He keeps his eyes glued to the retreating entranceway as long as he can, until the small rail takes him into the belly of the Alberta foothills. They are only 250 feet down, but it might just as well be a thousand.
He works next to an Icelander named Ingvarsson, whose hands are hammer-heavy, hanging at the end of his arms. They share a tiny shack made of straw, mud and manure with two other men, sleeping in shifts on two bug-infested cots. The big Icelander has taken him under his muscular wing.
He looks down at the water, nearly at mid-calf.
“Don’t usually go any higher,” says the Icelander, but David doesn’t find this information consoling. A squib blows from down the line somewhere and he jumps as the percussion hits his eardrum with a thick pop. He coughs, tries to take a lungful of air and coughs again.
“Fans shut down again, I guess,” says Ingvarsson.
“Kinda hard to breathe,” David says, holding a filthy rag up to his mouth.
“Long as you’re breathing, you’re doing okay,” says a voice behind him.
He swings his pick, chipping away the coal as best he can. The blisters on his hands have broken and the wooden handle is slippery. The muscles in his back and shoulders burn. David has been down in the mine for seven days. He knows he’s taken a job away from another man, probably one with a family to support, but he had been hungry and taken it anyway. They’d hired him because they could pay him nine dollars a week, four dollars less than a full-grown man. He’d asked to be paid by tonnage, at twenty-five cents a ton. The more experienced men said if he worked fourteen to sixteen hours that maybe he’d do better. Now he wishes he’d stuck to the wage. David bought his used, too-large boots from a guy who’d broken his leg, saving himself three of the five dollars the company charged, but he still had to pay them a dollar and a half for the doctor, and another fee if he actually visited him. He’d borrowed a pick and shovel from the same injured guy but had to pay to get it sharpened and for squibs and lamp carbon. Already he’s in debt to the company for six bucks. For as long as he can stand it, he’ll skip the fifty cents for a bath, but has paid the three-quarters of a cent for a gallon of water. Only halfway through his shift and he’s drunk it all.
“Look out!” The Icelander pulls him back from the mine wall. A live electrical wire swings perilously close.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Don’t mention.” Ingvarsson’s face looks ghoulish, covered in black except for his eyes.
David works another two shifts before a muscle in his shoulder tears. The night after, he lies on the floor of the miners’ shack, his arm bound to his chest with an old shirt, trying not to scratch at the bug bites when the siren goes off. The two men sleeping in the cots before their next shift spring up, grabbing their picks and shovels.
David pushes himself up on his elbow. “What is it? What’s happening?” He hopes it is not what he knows it is.
“Accident,” mutters one of the men, stepping over him.
He hauls himself up and goes to the open door. Everywhere he looks men run to the shaft entrance. He seizes his pick and runs with them.
They stand around the opening in the earth, waiting for the first trips to bring the men out.
“Anybody know what the hell happened?” someone asks. “Cave-in? I didn’t hear no explosion.”
“Naw, the lamps went out’s what I heard,” says someone else.
“Fucking fans been out for days,” a man growls and throws his pick in frustration.
The air is always bad down below, thick with smoke from blasting, and then there is the black damp, air dense with carbon dioxide from old shafts. There are no alarms in the mines. When the lights snuff out it means there isn’t enough oxygen to keep them burning.
They hear the rumble of the trip and the first men appear. Some are vomiting. He looks for Ingvarsson, but he isn’t among them. Most of the men get out this time. Five don’t. The Icelander is among them. His body, water-bloated and black, is brought up the next day, after the air is cleared out.
David waits until night falls again, then slips out of the camp, crawling on his belly until he reaches the fence that runs around the limits of the compound, then digs under with his bare hands. He tries not to cry out when his shoulder snags on the wire, afraid the company’s security guards will hear him and drag him back. He still owes them the six bucks.
9
October 1930
It was Wednesday evening and Douglas sat listening to the Palmolive Hour on the radio with his vest unbuttoned and a cup of tea on the small table by his chair. He looked so smug and content, Margaret wanted to smack him.
Margaret had shooed Irene off to bed early. All through dinner her nerves were so on edge she feared she’d bite through the fork. Douglas thought he was hiding the extent of their money problems from her, but he wasn’t. The first hints had come a few weeks back, when