John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The shooters are on their way into the drift by the time Hod and Cap come out on the tracks.

“Got some holes need packin,” says Cap to Greek Steve as he passes with a box of blasting powder and a spool of fuse cord. “And you might ought to shore the roof up some before you set anything off.”

“Fockeen guys,” says Greek Steve, his usual greeting and the only English he’s ever been heard to utter. They step out into the gallery to join the others coming off shift, Hod’s arms floating slightly without the bulky widowmaker in them. Flem Hurley is honking into his crumpled bandanna, trying to muffle the echo in the stone chamber. The other men look away. Miners’ con is carried as a dirty secret, something shameful. A weakness in a tough business.

Me in six months, thinks Hod. He only smiles and nods as the others swap reports from their different drives, each ore face a more grievous affront to the human body, darker, narrower, dustier, the timbers bent with stress, the sides unstable and the top threatening to come down.

“Damn roof make more noise than a Chinaman in a fish market,” says old Arlie Bogle through cheeks bulging with tobacco. “The more you wedge it the more it complains.”

“The sides where I’m at is all crumbling,” mutters Dog Dietrich. “Got so many hay bales piled up you got to walk sideways to get through, but it aint but sand holdin the whole deal up.”

“Leastways it’s dry, down this level.”

“Hell, you don’t ever know,” says Cap. “She be dry as a bone and one day some mucker pokes his shovel into the wrong crack—”

“Seen a couple fellas blowed straight out of a hole down Idaho Springs once, long with a half-ton ore car and a quarter-mile of track. Busted through to a whole underground lake—”

“All that pressure built up, waitin there centuries for some dumb hunkie—”

Fell down shaft

Hod was on the Grievance Committee in Butte, had memorized the litany of Cause of Fatality they had stolen from the coroner’s office—

Fall of ore

Crushed in machinery

It was all in the same handwriting, and he imagined the functionary, poker-faced as he listened to the shift boss’s explanation, trying to compress each man’s grisly end into a one-line epitaph—

Rock fall

Suffocated by carbonic-acid gas

Shot of dynamite

Struck by cage

Explosion of powder

Bucket fell down shaft

Hod has been on rescue crews, has helped dig the flattened remains of a half-dozen miners out from a collapse, bodies spread and pressed to the thickness of a floor plank—

Car tipped on man

Returned to blast area too soon

Caught between loaded ore cars

Rope broke on cage

Pinned against post

Cave of dirt while timbering

Fell into ore bin

Caught between trippers, bled to death

Refiring missed hole

Killed by gas in bag house

There were quick deaths and slow deaths, deaths that blew out the lights in the drive and deaths not discovered till the next shift stumbled on the scene—

Picking out missed shot

Caught between timbers and cage

Pinned under a motor

There were deaths caused by stupidity—

Thawing powder in open fire

— greenhorns fed to the mines, men from desperate countries who nodded with incomprehension when instructions were given and marched into the drives armed with every tool they needed to murder themselves and the man next to them. There were deaths caused by the inescapable nature of the job—

Bad air

There were mines that rumbled and growled and warned you not to challenge them, and sneaking mines, mines that invited you deeper and killed you with gases invisible and odorless. The truth was that the air was always bad and the roof always unstable and the laws of gravity without pity. Hod has them all in his head, the jacks and the shooters, the muckers and timbermen, the chute-loaders and motormen and cagers and jigger bosses and whistlepunks, the seasoned miners and the hapless immigrants, and knows they are a scant fraction of those dead or dying from what he already carries in his lungs.

“A mine has got more ways to kill a man than Carter got liver pills,” says Cap as they step into the elevator. “You can’t take it personal.”

Grimes comes then to count heads and the men grow silent. He fired a boy the other day, a little nervous Dago kid, accusing him of high-grading. The boy had turned his pockets inside out, dropped his pants and opened the flap of his long johns and not so much as a lead pebble fell out, but Grimes chased him anyway.

Hod and the shift boss face each other, nose to nose in the press of miners as the man-skip hoists them up through the levels, Grimes chewing tobacco and avoiding Hod’s eyes. Hod is one of the few who passed on shitting in Grimes’s lunchpail this morning when the muckers got hold of it. They had not been short on volunteers.

The cables shriek, cage shuddering as they jolt to a stop. The bar is drawn and the miners crowd out through the split-log shafthouse and into the late sun filtering through the refinery smoke.

The mine dick who pinched Hod and Big Ten stands at the side of the tramway with another company gun, a pimple-faced kid with a worried look on his face. The dick points at Hod.

“You.”

Hod can feel Grimes shifting behind him as he steps away from the others who cross to pull their tags off the shift board, brassing out, and don’t look back.

“Say your name was?”

“Metoxen. Henry.” Hod has recognized two or three other jacks on the job from his Butte days, men also digging under bogus handles. They usually don’t much care who you are if the ore keeps rolling out.

The mine dick steps up to look him in the eye. He can feel Grimes’s breath on his neck.

“There’s somebody got you pegged as a fella name Brackenridge. Officer in the Federation.”

There’d been a riot in Leadville in ’96, and the Federation led a strike just last year, shut most of the works down and had the owners worried some till the Colorado Guard was brought in to keep the workers starving and away from the driftmouths. One hothead had snuck through the sentries and sabotaged the pumps up on Carbonate Hill, flooding some of the mines beyond repair.

“That aint me,” says Hod.

“Somebody says it is.”

“Who would that be?”

They keep a blacklist, he knows, but he’s never been kodaked by the bulls or sat for a police artist. Not yet.

“Don’t matter who it is.”

“Well it’s not true.”

“That don’t matter neither,” says the mine dick. “You’re done.”

The nervous kid puts his hand on the butt of his gun. “That means out of company lodgings. Tonight.”

“He knows what it means.”

This is where you always have to be careful, Hod thinks, not admit to anything but not give them an excuse to unload on you.

“I worked three days already this week,” he says.

Grimes speaks up behind him. “That’s your lookout.” Grimes who a year ago was just another rock donkey like Hod, Grimes who for another fifty cents a day drives them and curses them, hollers cause they’re going through drill bits like green corn through a goose then hollers louder cause the jacking is going too slow, Grimes who missed his lunch because the day shift left their opinion of him steaming in it.

“We don’t pay off no Reds,” he says.

Hod smells apricots, acid and thick in the air, the separation plant upwind running their cyanide process, and the ball mill rumbling louder than thunder even a half mile away, and everywhere around them smoke, black smoke hanging over the tailing dumps and the smelters and the ore trains and over the hodgepodge shitpile of a town itself, hanging like a bad mood from Ball Mountain to Pawnee Gulch.