Page 38 - WTP VOl. XII #1

The Longest Day of the Year at the Nellie Greene Mine
The exit to the mine yawns open before her, a gaping maw of blinding sunlight, brilliant green leaves and white-barked aspens. The early morning sun penetrates the darkness with a blunt wedge of yellow light that illuminates the hard-packed, boot- imprinted dirt. She stands motionless at the edge of the light. Across the trail, the ground drops away into the creek that tumbles and rushes through the cleft between the two mountains. The roar of the water, violent from gravity and snowmelt, rises up between the walls of rock, dissipates slowly in the warming June air. Mountain chickadees dive and wheel and hop about on the trail looking for any scraps the men might have left when they trudged out of the dark- ness the night before. She tries to listen through the murmur of the water and the twittering of birds, as if her ear were a funnel into which only one sound can enter...his footsteps. They send tremors through the earth that soak up through her legs. Sometimes she can feel his approach before she hears him.
Her mine. It is her mine, being named after her when her father found the gold those five years ago. A lucky strike, although he always told it as a scientific endeavor consisting of his astute reading of the rocks. Nellie my girl, he’d said when, standing in front of the entrance, narrower in its youth, he showed her the paperwork with The Nellie Greene Mine in bold type, if only your ma was here. She’s heard more than a
few of the men, after crossing themselves, muttering a prayer and stepping into the entrance tunnel, say that the name should be changed, that it was worse luck even to have a mine named after a dead girl than it was to have a live girl inside one. On occasion they even spouted suggestions, Big Drop Mine for the drop down to the creek that one sleepy miner had fallen into, Mountain Princess Mine after some damsel one of the younger men had read about in a dime novel.
All talk stopped though when her pa entered, stooped and shuffling and relegated to toiling in the mine he’d discovered by the rich dandy who’d bought him out and who, unbeknownst to her pa, had stolen more from him than just the mine.
The namesake of the Nellie Greene stretches out a hand and dips her fingers into the shaft of light, watching as they fade until they have no more shape than fog rising from a lake, and thinks to herself how much worse luck they would think it to have a dead girl in the mine. She draws her hand back and is still relieved to see her fingers coalesce again in the dark- ness. It has taken her how many years to get used to the backwardness of her life...her death, to be more accurate. She can only see herself in the dark. If she looks at the light for too long, everything goes too bright to see, making her feel thin and wispy, like an ancient, frail lace curtain left hanging in a bedroom window long after the room’s occupant has died
and been buried. She stares out at the rock face and listens through the rumble of the creek for his foot- steps and remembers how she cried her own creek in the beginning, after it had happened, her tears a torrent down her smooth cheeks, scared because the sun scared her, frightened that she was no longer frightened by the darkness. On the shortest day of the year, she is certain that she only dreamed that she loved the smell of the sun on her hair or held a columbine to her lips to feel the satiny smoothness of its sun-warmed petals. Certain that it is the dark- ness that has always been her friend and the sun is something shiny but distant and aloof. On that day, she wanders through the mine tunnels singing to the walls, caressing them with her hands. Most other days, she doesn’t even think about it. The darkness is the darkness and the light the light. There’s no loss or sadness associated with the light, nor any particu- lar comfort in the dark. But she has come to dread the longest day of the year. The light blazes through the curved arch of the mine and lights a fire in her memory and she can feel the flower petals and smell the sun, and she begins to burn and scorch like she is the sun. It’s a blast of heat from a furnace that whips around her like a dust devil she saw once spinning tall and skinny and wild on the plains, tearing up grass and small animals, leaving desolation and torn earth in its wake. The light of that day leaves her pillaged of any remnants of peace or happiness or comfort, taking from her even that vague blankness that inhabits her mind most days.
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