Ivan Doig - Work Song

As hoped, Tolliver reflexively bolted off after the stone thrower, although he had no chance in the world of catching up with Russian Famine. Eel Eyes angrily stayed sentry, but his gaze kept dodging toward the darkness or in search of the jeering laughs from the rank of passing miners, while Griff and I, prim as monks, flashed our work tickets and slouched past him.

Jared caught up to us in the mine yard.

“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. Hearing Griff’s rushed words or perhaps my breathing, the other passengers glanced over their shoulders curiously at us.

“My partner here is a greenhorn, I’m breaking him in,” Griff confided to them. “He’s got a little case of heebie-jeebies.” That brought knowing laughs and a round of wisecracks about how lucky I’d be if I didn’t get anything worse than that from digging copper.

In a minute came another sickening jolt downward and one more shuddering wait. Then swish! The next thing I knew, the cage was dropping at top speed, so fast that I feared we had been cut loose and were free-falling to our doom. I shut my eyes, not wanting to see death coming. Then, though, I heard the steady whine of the cable, and I cautiously peeped past the darkened outline of Griff and the others. Down and down and down, the shaft walls flew past in a terrifying black blur. My ears popped. I was trying to work my jaw when everything stopped with a hard bounce. The cage yo-yoed for long seconds as the springiness of three thousand feet of cable settled down.

Someone outside flung open the cage gate and I was blinking into a harshly lighted concrete chamber. Hot air rushed into the elevator shaft as the other men clambered out ahead of Griff and myself. A staccato chorus, like invisible riveters, emanated from various tunnels where compressed-air drills were noisily cutting into walls of ore. “Here we are,” Griff announced as if it were a tourist destination, “as deep as it goes in the Muckaroo.”

As I gawked around, the next cage settled to a stop and Jared climbed out. Giving us a thumbs-up, he disappeared off into a timbered tunnel across the way. By now the underground traffic was thick, files of miners passing us by, their talk trailing away as they vanished into various tunnel portals. Griff had been orienting himself. “C’mon, we want to scoot off over here.”

He had picked out what looked to me like an abandoned tunnel, except that steel rails were aligned in the center of it. Our headlamps cast bobbing beams as we hiked deeper into the darkness. Every so often, the light caught a gleam where water dripped down a rock wall. The stammer of drilling followed us at first, gradually dropping to a distant murmur that was simply in the air, like the metallic smell that smarted in my nose. I kept waiting for where this burrow led to, some larger cavern, timbered and more secure, where actual mining was done. Then something occurred to me, from my session of studying the mine model in the library.

“Griff?” I sounded like I was in the bottom of a well. “I believe this is what is called a drift tunnel-”

“Righto. You know more about this than a person might think.”

“-and if I am not mistaken, the only purpose of a drift tunnel is the excavation of ore. It isn’t a passageway to any of the rest of the mine.”

“Right again. You are a whiz.”

“Then where’s the crew that’s supposed to be in here doing that digging? I don’t see or hear anyone.”

“That’s because we’re it.”

I stopped almost in mid-step.

Griff plowed along for a few more paces before noticing I was missing. Turning around, he examined me critically. “I don’t want to worry you, Morrie, but you look kind of milky.”