Брайс Куртенэ - The Power of One

Black miners did not understand or believe in the concept of increasing odds and would have been quite unable to grasp the simple logic which dictated that the longer I remained working grizzlies the more likely I was to come unstuck. The superstition which held them to me is understandable in a simple mind; the fact that I began to half believe it was not.

With the exception of a week’s break after my first three months on grizzlies, I had been working for nine months. While I knew that simply by requesting to do so I could be relieved, I hung on. Botha’s two cases of the best South African brandy continued to arrive for Rasputin at the end of every month and the fact that the ore tally pulled from my grizzly almost always headed the night’s tally list did important things for my ego, though I would probably not have admitted this even to myself. Even in this unlikely environment I still hadn’t conquered the need to be the best. Though the odds had grown well beyond simple foolishness, I convinced myself that my brains (ha-ha) were the difference, that I knew how to survive a grizzly because I could read it better and was less likely to make emotional decisions under pressure. Which was, of course, a load of codswallop.

I had reached the point were Fats Greer, who drove the number seven shaft hoist and who also acted as the mine’s part-time insurance agent refused to give me cover. ‘For fuck’s sake, Peekay, the all-time record for a grizzly stand is eleven months and the bastard who had it is pushing up daisies. Stop being a smartarse.’

But I was through doing what other people wanted and I told myself that if the copper bonus held and I could stay on grizzlies for a year I would have earned enough to put myself through Oxford. No more emotional handouts for me. I could pay my own way! My whole life had been a testament to using the human resources around me, to winning against the odds. If I understood the system as I felt I did, I was no longer willing to pay the emotional price it demanded from me. If this was only in my own mind, well, every man is an island and at the same time also Robinson Crusoe, you’re on your own and must learn to fend for yourself. The year of despair I had spent as a five-year-old, in the hands of the Judge, had tainted everything I had subsequently done. My childlike notion of camouflage to avoid being emotionally besieged had persisted. In my mind, although I’m certain at the time I would not have been able to articulate the idea, the mines represented a return to fear of that first boarding school. But this time it was I who would win. The grizzly I worked would be the Judge, but this time I would not be broken. I had come to the mines to find out who the hell I really was.

It is curious that in the retelling of a dangerous situation the explanation is often made to include a premonition of the disaster. Whereas, in truth, most accidents strike like a viper of lightning from an apparently clear blue sky. It is as though human beings like to pump up the importance of a near escape or even a catastrophe by placing the hand of destiny at the helm of calamity.

The day before the grizzly got me I dreamed I was bent over a routine charge to light the fuse. A normal length of fuse is designed to take two minutes to reach the dynamite charge but for a routine explosion of rock resting on the grizzly bars a good grizzly man will cut the fuse to a burn-through of thirty seconds, which is enough time to get into the safety shaft. During a single underground shift on a hard night when the muck refuses to run, a grizzly man can make forty or fifty separate rock blasts. With a saving of ninety seconds for most of these he can easily cull an extra hour’s tally from the shift. In ore terms this can make a considerable difference to the night’s final tally.

In my dream I held the lighted cheesa stick to the fuse, waiting for the familiar kick of sparks to indicate that it was alight. But the fuse turned instead into the black mamba of the crystal cave of Africa: it rose as it had done outside the cave, its head weaving and its darting tongue becoming the spluttering sparks of the lighted fuse. Mesmerised, I was unable to move until I realised it was too late. I jabbed the cheesa stick at the head of the snake as it struck. The lighted stick of sulphur blended with the explosion as I was blown to smithereens.

I awoke, my heart pounding furiously. Grizzly men often talked of the dreams: ‘When the dreams come it’s time to quit.’ I had not dreamed before and now I was afraid: the grizzlies had started to invade my subconscious. That night I told the shift boss I wanted off and gave him a week’s notice. He didn’t question me but simply nodded and said, ‘You earned it, Peekay, we’ll give you a soft option, maybe lashing on a main haulage hey?’ I thanked him but he suddenly looked alarmed. ‘Shit! Who’s going to tell Botha, he thinks you’re Jesus Christ.’ He grinned. ‘Someone else can tell the sonovabitch, that’s the day shift’s job.’ While I had received two cases of brandy regularly for the past five months, I had not met Botha. As I mentioned, it was a tradition that a diamond driller and his grizzly man didn’t meet. Nobody seemed to know quite why this was, but like most time-worn behaviour it had turned into a superstition and both men would go to some pains never to meet while they worked in conjunction with each other.

‘Rasputin will miss the brandy,’ I said, conscious that now that I had made the decision to quit, a weight had lifted from my mind.

The shift boss laughed. ‘You can bloody well tell him that!’ Rasputin was the best timber man in the mine, but the scourge of shift bosses whom he wouldn’t allow near his work site when he was building a bulkend or timbering a new haulage. But they had all come to accept Rasputin: what he did, he did well, without taking unnecessary chances with his gang. That was the first rule of mining, the rest was simply the niceties of deferring to authority, a concept the huge Georgian seemed not to understand.

There was nothing exceptional about the first part of the shift following my talk with the shift boss. I stopped to rest my gang as usual between three and four in the morning, the time known everywhere men work underground as ‘dead man’s hour’. It is the time when the human pulse is said to regulate by running slow and the circadian rhythm to falter. It is the time, old timers insist, when the bad accidents happen. To work through dead man’s hour would be sorely to tempt fate. While we are meant to be rational humans there lurks in each of us a covert superstition which probably began when man worshipped rocks and trees and which we ignore at our own peril. For the grizzly man, better the hour saved by cutting fuses short than one used when death stalks the dark underground tunnels at the same time every night.

At four-fifteen I completed laying the mud pack over a routine charge, cutting the fuse short as usual. I had inserted it under the mud-covered gelignite and took the lighted cheesa stick from the number one boy, whom I called Elijah because he liked to light the cheesa stick himself, forfeiting his chance to retire to the safety of the escape shaft. He waited with me until the fuse began to splutter. With the cheesa stick Elijah handed me I touched the notched and splayed end I’d cut to reveal the granules of black gunpowder which ran through the body of the fuse. Nothing happened. No flare as the gunpowder caught, no familiar splutter as it tore down the centre of the fuse. Even before I could question the reason, the vision of the black mamba filled my mind’s eye, ‘Christ! It can’t be. It’s a running fuse!’ A running fuse is when a fuse burns inwards and appears from the outside to be inert while in fact it is moving just as quickly towards the charge of gelignite. It is extremely rare, most grizzly men have never seen one, or if they have, haven’t lived to tell the story.