Origin of the Brunists (15 page)

But, pleased as he was, he had little chance to enjoy it. His Monday edition lay blank before him, plugged only in part by the two full-page ads of condolence from businessmen, professionals, and organizations, and the uphill ritual of his newsday now had to be compressed into half the time. Yesterday's special had devoured all his standing copy on the mine, leaving him at best some eighty or ninety column inches of unused miscellany lying idle. Yesterday's photos were not printed, but there were a few old ones he could use a second time. Hastily, he plotted a six-page layout and sent back a pageful of wirecopy. He asked Willie Hall, seated stoically deadpan in the vortex of a pandemonium he didn't understand, to give him five minutes more and raced over to Mickey DeMar's Bar and Grill to deposit copies of the UP story with the morning klatchers. Found Jones in there with Ted Cavanaugh, dimestore owner Burt Robbins, and the Chamber of Commerce secretary, Jim Elliott, town's tireless prince of gossips. Miller had a rushed coffee, while Mick and the others enjoyed the tale. It was a great entertainment, and others who arrived joined the laughter. Robbins, dependably acidic, tagged Jones with “Father” and the rest delightedly picked it up, all but Cavanaugh, who almost always excepted himself in the banter and who in any case had been cool toward Jones since the typo that had humiliated his wife. To escape the worsening consequences, Jones agreed to return to the stable, and that eased some the day's increasing stress.

While Jones issued wearily forth like a jaded elephant to collect the routine tidings, Miller hurried back to the waiting Willie Hall, and Hall had no sooner left than in came mine supervisor Barney Davis, and he was followed by Vince Bonali, one of the facebosses on at Number Nine Thursday night near the blast in the southeast section. It was after noon before he got his breath and ate the doughnut Annie had bought for him.

From Hall, he picked up a small feature on the events that kept him home from the mine Thursday night and away from death. Spare stunted man in his early fifties, married but childless, with a long record of absenteeism in the mine, Hall explained that he had “had a hunch” about that night: it was on the eighth of the month, and one of his cousins had been hurt by a fall on the eighth of July some years back, and his bird dog had died the eighth of last December, just a month ago.

“Now, I ain't superstitious, Mr. Miller, I don't hold no truck with black cats and suchlike, I ain't no old woman. But, see, them mines they is always dangerous in the winter, now I'm fatalistic about it, I figger when the Good Lord He says my day is up, well, it's up, but then in the summer they's always these here falls. The roofs, why, they jis fall in. You kin usually hear them, they's a kinder stretchin' sound, a kinder crackle, oh, it ain't near so bad in the winter. I don't mind workin' in the—but, see, in the winter then, everthing it gits all dried out and they's a powerful lot of dust, and, you know, that dadblamed mine, they don't lay enough rock dust, Mr. Miller, I'm tellin' you the Lord's own truth, they don't give a care about us miners, they don't give a care about nothin' except makin' money. Why, the coal dust gits so bad you cain't even see them machines, them big machines, you jis trip right over them, your lights right on them and all. And that's how it is that it's winter when all these here explosions takes place. I don't mind it in the summer so terrible much. But, you know, I don't think I'm gonna work no more down in the mines. No, sir, I don't think so.”

Hall squirmed buglike in his chair, twisted his visored cap in his slender hands, pale mapped with blue veins. He refused the cigarette Miller offered him. “No, thanks, Mr. Miller. It's right kind, but I don't smoke none. No, listen, I got all this here coal dust down in my lungs, see, cause once you breathe it in, why, it don't never come out again, and I'm afeered that smokin' might touch off a kinder explosion right there in my lungs and, you know, smokin' causes TB and this here dust it sticks to the wet part of the lungs, now a doctor told me this, Mr. Miller, it's the Lord's truth, and the lung it gits as tough as the backside of an old mule, and you start coughin' and ifn you smoke, you git TB. Oxford, he smoked all the dadblamed time, and I always says to him, I says, Oxford, dadblame it—Oxford, he's my buddy, he
was
my buddy, he got killt down there, Oxford Clemens, they all called him Ferd, but I called him Oxford, oh, he weren't worth a hill a beans, he come from pretty poor stock, and that man he cussed and smoked all the time, but I ain't one to use nicknames, see, I think it's downright unfriendly, and, why, nobody called Jesus by no nickname, did they? But Oxford, he didn't pay me no mind, he went right on smokin'. He had a cough, too, I weren't surprised none. He even smoked down there in the mine, oh, it was agin the rules and all, but he never gave no care about no rules, when he wanted him a dadblamed smoke, he was gonna have it. Shoot, everbody else done the same, it weren't jis Oxford. But our faceboss, that's Angelo Moroni, Mr. Miller, he got killt, too, well, he didn't like the idea none, and he always said, don't lemme catch none a you guys smokin' down here or I'll have you outa here on your tail fast as scat, that's more or less how he put it, but he never took the cigarettes away, so what happened is all these guys'd duck off in some room where they'd stopped working and sneak them a smoke now and agin, and, well, Mr. Miller, ifn they'da smoked out in the haulageways in the open, it wouldn'ta been dangerous at all, but these here abandoned rooms, they's plumb fulla gas, and everbody told Angelo that, but he jis said, dadblame it! I don't want none a you guys to smoke at all and that's period! That's pretty much how he put it.”

“How many years have you been a miner, Mr. Hall?”

“Thirty-six years, Mr. Miller, thirty-six years, off and on.” The man had small eyes circled with worry lines, an overbite, very little chin. A light gray grizzle furred his cheeks.

“Do you know Bruno well?”

“No, I seen a lot of him, he was on my shift and all, but, no, I cain't say as how I really know him. Always I felt sorry on account of the others they all picked on him a lot down there, but you couldn't never git friendly with him, he was a kinder
inter
-verted type, ifn you know what I mean. Like you'd say it was a nice day, and he'd jis stare back at you. He was a funny bird.” Hall tilted his head to one side a moment as though listening, himself resembling for that instant a “funny bird,” and then he continued: “Knowed his buddy well. Wasn't it a pity, Mr. Miller, how Ely Collins had to suffer? Don't seem right somehow, man like that, he was our preacher, you know, how his leg got chopped off and how …” Hall's voice trailed away as, gazing off, he suffered Collins' mutilations. “He took a lotta trouble with Bruno, he was always tryin' to save him, build him up.”

“You mean he was trying to convert him from Catholicism?”

“Not exactly, on account of he weren't no Catholic, or leastways none a them other Roman fellers cared to claim him. They said he'd split off or somethin' and I guess he's sort of nothin' at all.”

“Did Collins talk to you about leaving the mine?”

“No.”

“Or seeing white birds in the workings?”

“Seein' birds? No, not Ely, musta been somebody else.”

“And now you're thinking of retiring, Mr. Hall?”

“Well, now, I won't exactly say that, Mr. Miller, but I'm gonna be lookin' around. I ain't too old to learn a new trade. My wife Mabel she thinks I oughter start over in somethin' where I kin work out in the open. I ain't afeerd none a the mines, a miner he ain't skeered about goin' down, else he'd never go, you git fatalistic, but it's jis they's so dadblamed unhealthy. Besides, that there bed is playin' out, and now they's this mess down there to clean up—you know, they don't give no care at all about the poor miner what gits throwed outa his job, they jis only reckon up what it's gonna cost them to fix up all the damage, and they reckon up how much they kin make off the coal that's left, and they add and subtract, and it all depends on the number they end up with, see, no, it's the Lord's own truth, Mr. Miller. It don't come to their minds none about us poor miners, outa work and too dadblamed old to start over again. Why, I don't know
what
I'd do now, see, I'm over fifty, and you cain't learn an old dog, as the feller says, why, they're jis leavin' us to rot!”

“That pansy!” Davis grinned later, when Miller described the interview. “Why sometimes right in the middle of a shift, he'd start bellyaching about the smoke and cry around there was going to be an accident and he'd refuse to work. He hasn't got the nerve for the job.”

“Maybe,” said Miller, “but, still, there he was, right afterwards, volunteering for rescue crews and taking twice the risk of usual work.”

“Feeling guilty probably,” said Davis.

“Here, Barney, before I forget. I saved you a couple extra copies of the special. Your ugly mug made it again.”

“What the hell! Two nights running! I'm getting famous!” Davis opened the paper, searched out his photograph, studied it a moment, then tossed it down on the desk with an effort at indifference, handsome square jaw set in disdain. “Think you'll win some more prizes with it?”

“Maybe. If your picture doesn't stop them.” Barney laughed and Miller asked, “What caused it, Barney? Have you figured it out?”

“Smoking, Tiger. I'd bet my last buck on it. We located two or three possible areas where it might have been touched off. Trouble is, the first blast set off secondary ones, so you can't always be sure which is the first one. But we're pretty convinced one of those guys or more was smoking.”

“Who's ‘we,' Barney? You mean the operators?”

“Well,” said Davis with a loose laugh, touching the bridge of his rimless glasses, “you don't figure the union's gonna volunteer that, do you? Anyhow, we already found some cigarettes.”

“Whose were they?”

“I don't want you to print any of this now, Miller, it would only prejudice the inspections, but we found them next to a new kid, his first night down there, kid named Tony Rosselli, by him and a timberman, Oxford Clemens.” Clemens was out of Miller's own generation, and his violent death, like a breath of his own approaching doom, had preyed on Miller more than any of the other ninety-six. Ox had been his adolescent effort at rehabilitation of the downtrodden, and though Clemens as hero had disconcerted him, the emotions and indistinct yearnings of that sophomoric time had their claws in him yet. “We didn't find any matches, but they may have got blown up or maybe one of the rescuers snuck them out.”

“Why was there so much fire, Barney?”

“You're getting at we didn't have enough rock dust down,” Davis said defensively, adjusting again the glasses on his small sharp nose. “I know, that's what the union propaganda's trying to establish. Sure, it could have been better, it always could have been better, it's one of those things you can never do enough. But we passed all the inspections, Miller, and we'd just ordered some more, figured to lay it down in February, but, well, it just didn't work out the best possible way—we didn't want those guys to die, Miller.”

“No, I know, Barney, but—”

“I wish to hell we
had
had more rock dust down, I can tell you that, I'm goddamn sorry how it has turned out. But that's a small thing, you don't need any rock dust at all if you don't have fire in the first place. Why, we hold safety meetings every month, and do you think it does one goddamn bit of good? Those bastards go right on smoking—what can you do?—and not taking care of their machinery, just asking for trouble. Sometimes, it's just like they're daring the goddamn mines to fall on their heads and half hoping it will, like that's gonna prove something or something.”

Miller asked the question he supposed he'd be asking for weeks to come: “What about it, Barney: think you'll reopen?”

“Can't say yet, Miller. I hope so. It's my job, too, after all. After the official inspections, we'll survey the mine, consider its potential, and if there's any goddamn chance at all it can be profitably reopened, why, we'll do it. There's too many people around here depend on that mine, Miller, and we don't want to let them down. We're not a charity, but we're not pigs either. If you're gonna print anything, I'd suggest you say that at this time the company has no intention of closing the mine. I think you can say that.” Davis got up to go. “And, say, I just want to mention, we didn't think too much of that story by Chigi. He was just one guy of hundreds out there working their asses off and it seemed like his story made it out he went down there single-handed and carried Bruno out on his goddamn back.”

“Really? I thought it was pretty fair, Barney—”

“Well, I'm exaggerating. But I just wanted you to know—and it didn't exactly paint the mine as the prettiest place in the country to work, either, if you know what I mean.”

“Well,” Miller laughed, “it isn't.”

They stood, and while they were shaking hands, Vince Bonali walked in. Greetings were exchanged. Bonali wallowed a cheap fat cigar around in his mouth. “You got a real parade today, Miller,” Davis said.

“Hell, you can't hog it all,” Bonali said.

Davis laughed unconvincingly and, with good-byes, left.

Miller took down Bonali's account of the night of the disaster. Bonali was faceboss over eighteen men in twelfth west off old Main South, not too distant from where Bruno and the other six had entombed themselves up in fourteenth east; he had been in the zone of impact and only yards out of the sections where the fire had reached. With the habit of all facebosses Miller had ever known, he provided an extensive preamble on his own merits as a miner, punctuating with stabs of his mutilated cigar. As he talked he grew excited, nearly shouting. No longer looking at Miller, he seemed to be concentrating on some point about five or six feet out in front of him. Big barrel-chested guy with a voice that filled the office. Impressive man. Probably a good faceboss, all right. “So I run back and already the shit's so thick you can't see. I find out there's four guys have bugged out. Two of them, Lucci and Brevnik, they got out okay, though I gave them a royal chewing afterwards for jumping the goddamn gun. The other two who left was Cravens and Minicucci. They must have gone the wrong way.” He paused to consider them, then went on to describe enthusiastically exactly how they had used the ninth east air course, crossed over on the overcast to the New Main South air course, running into Abner Baxter's section, and exited the mine about two and a half hours after the explosion.