The Power of One (75 page)

Rasputin would carefully pack away the record player, dust the records and slip them into their jackets and lay them on top of a towel in an old suitcase. Then he would take the wooden ball and add it to a pile on the floor inside his hut. There must have been six or seven hundred or even more of these, all about the size of a bowling ball, stacked in separate heaps of about one hundred each, one ball added each day. Some of the older ones had turned a lovely silver-gray color and others bore beautiful markings from the native timber he used. Each ball was identically sized and beautifully made; you could pick up two carved months apart and their perfect roundness and size were so close the eye couldn't pick out the difference, each ball a testimony to his enormous skill and strength. His hut smelled of the sap of young timber, not unlike the smell of a forest. Rasputin would step into his hut after returning from his shift and take a deep breath, inhaling the sappy odor of the uncured native timber.

“Smell like Roosha, Peekay.” I often wondered if in his native Russia he had once lived among the birch forests of the taiga, but I could think of no way of asking him.

I became fascinated by the beautifully carved balls and found that I could hold the ax in position to work a piece of wood for no more than three minutes before the hand holding the wood would no longer function and the pain in my right wrist from

holding the ax became unbearable. I realized that the exercise involved would strengthen my arms, wrists, and even hands for boxing, so I purchased a smaller and lighter ax and Rasputin sharpened it for me until it was like a razor. The idea that I wished to emulate him gave the huge bear of a man great pleasure. We'd sit on his verandah whittling away and listening to Mr. Tchaikovsky, Rasputin drinking brandy and shedding tears that fell like drops of liquid silver down his cheeks to disappear into his huge black beard.

Eventually I worked out that the wooden balls were Rasputin's calendar, one ball for each day he had spent in the mines. By my reckoning he had been there about three years.

We would meet after our shift came up at seven
a.m
. and cycle back to the mess for breakfast. Rasputin would always be showered and waiting for me as my cage came up from underground. Somehow he managed to finish his shift early and get up to the surface before the grizzly men.

“Much muck move, Peekay. You good boy,” he would say without fail as I stepped out of the cage. Then he would take my miner's lamp from me and put it on charge in the battery room so that I could go straight to the shaft office, check my ore tally, sign off, and quickly get to the showers. When I emerged from the change rooms twenty minutes later, he would be standing outside in the morning sunlight with my bicycle, ready for a quick getaway.

I'd been off grizzlies for only a week after having done my three months when the mine captain called me into his office and asked me to volunteer to go back on. I was supposed to be rested with a main haulage job such as bossing a gang of lashers, but three grizzly men had been badly injured and the mine had no replacements coming out of the school of mines. The incentive was to double my copper bonus for the period I was back on grizzlies. It seems Botha the diamond driller had been screaming about the new grizzly man on his stope and wanted me back. The money and the compliment were too much for me. Youth has a strong sense of its own immortality, and I was no different from most. I found myself back at my grizzly platform for another three months. At the end of the month two cases of brandy arrived from Botha, which made Rasputin completely independent of the Crud Bar. He was so proud of me he started to cry.

Lashing a case of brandy to the carrier on each of our bikes, we pushed them the three miles to town, the twenty-four bottles

in each case clinking merrily as we steered the bikes over the corrugated dirt road. When we arrived at the crud compound he put the cases in his hut and emerged moments later carrying an ancient twelve-bore shotgun.

“Tonight Rooshan stew!” he announced. Rasputin's rabbit stew was his highest compliment, and I must say it really was delicious, a thick broth flavored with strange herbs he gathered in the wild and delicious chunks of pink rabbit meat served with tiny whole onions and potatoes. I watched as he headed for the bush, not even waiting to have his breakfast at the mess.

I rose at four in the afternoon as usual. From Rasputin's hut came the delicious smell of the rabbit stew. I knew he would call me in about five-thirty to eat, and so I headed off to the shower block to do my ablutions. We would eat and then attend a movie at the club. It was Wednesday night, and Wednesday was always a western. Rasputin loved westerns with a passion. We would arrive early and sit in the front row, Rasputin with a bottle of brandy and his mug, ready to shout and scream and wave his fists at the baddies on the screen. He would weep when the hero was in a tight spot about to be burned by Indian braves or tortured by malicious outlaws. Finally, when the film reached its climax and the hero emerged unscathed and triumphant with the girl, he would stand up and bang his mug against the empty brandy bottle and shout his approbation in Russian. Nobody seemed to mind. Rasputin was a part of the Wednesday western, and he'd always buy sweets and ice cream at the interval for all the kids. It became a tradition to yell and scream and pretend to cry at all the places Rasputin did, and a grand time was had by all.

At five-thirty I heard his bellow: “Peekay, you come!”

Rasputin had placed two bowls on the table, and beside them were two large spoons. Arranged in a jam tin in the center of the table were wildflowers he had gathered when he was out rabbit hunting, and beside the flowers rested a round loaf of fresh bread. The flowers were a nice homely touch, and the stew in a large pot on his single electric burner smelled wonderful. Rasputin poured it straight from the pot into the bowls, and the delicious broth came steaming up at me. He dipped into the pot with a fork, stabbing chunks of pink rabbit meat and placing them in my bowl. Finally he produced a bottle of lemonade for me and filled his tin mug with brandy. We tucked in, tearing huge hunks of bread from the loaf and slurping hungrily at the delicious stew. Neither of us said a word until it was all eaten and we'd had a second helping.

“Russian stew very delicious, Rasputin,” I said finally, rubbing my tummy to emphasize my satisfaction.

Rasputin looked pleased, even a little embarrassed, at the compliment. He rose from the table, and, walking over to the wardrobe, withdrew from it the ancient twelve-bore shotgun. Pretending to aim at an imaginary rabbit in the distance he squinted down the barrel. “Ho, ho, Peekay, rabbit meow meow, me boom boom, rabbit kaput!” He laughed uproariously and put the shotgun back into his cupboard.

I had never eaten a cat before, but I knew there was no way I would be able to refuse Rasputin next time he paid me his supreme compliment and went rabbit hunting again. I quietly prayed that I wouldn't do anything in the future that would please him too much. I wondered silently which of the town families was wondering what had happened to the cat.

IT
is the human experience, particularly true of the young, that all routine, no matter how bizarre, soon becomes normal procedure. Just as the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps talk of the routines imposed and followed which measured the days of horror until they seemed the normal passages of life, working a grizzly became a job as unexceptional as any other. Boldness, at first a stranger to be treated with caution, soon becomes a friend, then a partner, and finally taken for granted, as is the daily relationship between two married people.

There comes a stage when the nervous system adjusts to accommodate the new environment, in which a former state of anxiety becomes one of calm and situations that formerly brought a rush of adrenaline through the blood leave it calmly going about the business of supplying the heart.

A good grizzly man attracts a good black gang. Africans straight from the bush instinctively understand the security a confident leader brings. As the months went by and my grizzly remained accident free and I unscathed, those blacks who worked regularly with me would seldom stay away sick, preferring to shiver through a bout of malaria rather than to take a chance of losing their place to another black anxious to work in a
juju,
or mystically protected gang.

When a grizzly man blew himself up, it was not unusual for him to take his number one boy with him. The number one is the most experienced mine boy in the gang, usually a secondtimer. Better paid than the rest of the crew, he acts as black leader as well as right-hand man to the grizzly man. It is he who handles the charges and prepares the mud packs to bed down the explosives. When an accident occurs, he is generally working close to his grizzly man. Knowing this, a good grizzly man will generally dismiss his number one to the safety shaft to man the blast warning siren before he lights the fuse, and a good number one will repay his grizzly man by building the mystique of the grizzly man in the eyes of the bush Africans who make up the rest of the gang.

Once a gang has been associated with an accident on the grizzly level, they become bad
juju
in their own eyes and in the eyes of those of the other black miners. It is inconceivable to these primitive bush Africans that a superior white man should die and that a thoroughly expendable black one should live. The gods had, quite obviously, made a mistake. The “stick lightning” had been meant for them, and the mark of death was upon them if they remained in the mines.

Black miners did not understand or believe in the concept of increasing odds and would have been quite unable to grasp the simple logic that dictated that the longer I remained working grizzlies the more likely I was to come unstuck. The superstition that 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, even 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. Even 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 where Fats Greer, who drove the number seven shaft hoist and who also acted as the mine's parttime 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 the 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 narrow individual escape the explanation is often made to include a premonition of the disaster. Whereas, in truth, most accidents strike like lightning from a clear blue sky. It is as though human beings like to pump up the importance of a near accident 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 in 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 in 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. Mesmerized, I was unable to move until I realized it was too late. I jabbed the burning cheesa stick at the head of the snake as it struck. The lighted stick of sulfur 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 sonofabitch, 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 timeworn behavior 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 laughed, conscious that now that I had made the decision to quit a weight had lifted from my mind.

The shift boss laughed. “Again, I'm glad I'm not the one to tell him.” Rasputin was the best timber man in the mine but the scourge of shift bosses, whom he wouldn't allow near him when he was building a bulkend or timbering a new haulage. Nevertheless, they had all come to accept and respect him. 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 run slowly 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 that probably began when man worshiped rocks and trees and that 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 Fd cut to reveal the granules of black gunpowder that ran through the body of the fuse. Nothing happened. No flare as the gunpowder caught, no familiar splutter as it tore down the center 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 inward and appears from the outside to be inert, while in fact it is moving just as quickly toward the charge of gelignite. It is extremely rare, and most grizzly men have never seen one or, if they have, haven't lived to tell the story.

I grabbed Elijah by his shirt collar and propelled him toward the safety shaft, tackling him the last few feet into the shaft as I dived for safety a split second before the charge went off. The explosion roared fifteen feet from where we lay. Had the snake not returned to me in my dream, I might have persisted with the shortened fuse. Three seconds longer, and Elijah of the burning bush and I would have been history.

Rising to his knees and dusting his hands on the seat of his trousers, Elijah started to babble with excitement as the rest of the gang came running toward us. He told them how a devil fuse that did not light had set off the charge, but how I had known of its magic and thwarted its evil intention by pulling him to safety. The gang listened with open-mouthed astonishment. Then each in turn came over to me and touched my arm, dropping their eyes as they did so. Once again I had confirmed my magical status. Was this not yet more proof that their collective safety was assured? The Tadpole Angel was back at work again.

I am forced to admit that I too felt hugely elated by the experience, enchanted with the meaning of the dream. I kept asking myself whether I would otherwise have recognized a running fuse. It was a mining occurrence so rare Thomas hadn't even mentioned its possibility in the school of mines. I had seen it noted briefly before being dismissed as extremely unusual in one of the numerous textbooks we'd been issued, a textbook possibly only I, among the class, would have taken the trouble to read.

Instead of seeing the near disaster as a real-life warning, I became so elated I decided to withdraw my notice to quit grizzlies. I felt a tremendous sense of my own destiny, of the rightness of the path I had chosen. I had gambled and won, my slate was wiped clean, the accident designed to happen had been thwarted, the original odds were once again restored. I would see this old bitch grizzly through until the fifteenth of February, one week over eleven months, to the day. Screw Fats Greer, I'd make it a new record.

I admit to the unsoundness of my reasoning, but it wasn't all stupidity. The pay for a soft-option job on a main haulage was less than half the amount I was receiving each month working a grizzly. With my double copper bonus as well as my tally bonus, I could add another forty percent to this as well. Giving all this up would mean staying on at the mines another three months and by doing so missing the commencement term at Oxford.

Feeling good all over, I walked up to the grizzly and, standing on the bars, shone my lamp up at the hang-up that had developed at the mouth of the stope. It looked unsafe, a bunch of grapes where the loosening of one small rock might bring the lot down. Fifty tons of rock could be held suspended above my head by a mere pebble. The old bitch was playing with me, teasing me. My ears strained to hear her talk—a creak, a moan, the echoed clatter of a single pebble to let me read the constraint of the rock avalanche poised above my head.

It came at last, the sudden sharp, erratic clatter of a single rock as it broke free from the hang-up to ricochet against the steeply funneled rock sides leading from the stope. One, two, it would take three bounces before landing on the grizzly bar farthest from where I stood. My intimate, almost instinctive, knowledge brought about by working more than two thousand hours on this one grizzly told me the rock was about the size of a large grapefruit and that it almost certainly preceded the collapse of the hang-up.

I moved fast, leaping instinctively across the bars toward the protection of the safety shaft. Above me the hang-up groaned momentarily, a second or two's warning before the roaring avalanche followed. My feet had already left the bars in the final leap to safety when the single rock hit the grizzly and, bouncing erratically off the tungsten steel bar, flew through the air to hit me in the stomach.