Page 39 - WTP VOl. XII #1

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Four years, she thinks, watching the block of sun intensify. Judging from the look of the men who came in and out every day, it has been at least four. Michael McCullough was her measuring stick. He’d started
at the mine the year he’d turned thirteen and she’d turned twelve. He’d been skinnier than a flagpole then. The extra foot he’d grown and the added inches across his now broad and muscled shoulders had her guessing he was seventeen at least. She waits every day, standing as close to the shaft opening as she
can stand, listening for him with her ears, feeling for him with her whole body. She wants to spend every second she can with him. She follows him deep into the shafts where the only light is from his lantern. That light doesn’t bother her at all. She moves rocks out of his path, has relit his hand-me-down lantern on the several occasions that it has gone out leaving him in the pitch dark that made his heart pound hard enough that she could feel it vibrate through the rocky ground and up into her own chest. She knocks on the walls to force him to turn back from spots where the invisible gas curls its tendrils around her calves and arms, just waiting for someone to inhale it deeply into his lungs.
While he eats, she sits with him, not so close that it gives him the shivers, but close enough so she can breathe in the smell of him. Sweat and rock dust and something undefinable that belongs to him and no one else. Except her, she thinks. While he eats, she tells him all about herself. Not that there is much to tell. She’d only been thirteen when it had happened, and there hadn’t been much that had happened to her during those years. They’d been normal for a girl in a mountain mining town, outside of her pa discov- ering gold and naming a mine after her, but that was so close to it that it almost didn’t count. School for a while till Mum died, then housework and caring for Pa and her brothers. Days bookended by watching her pa leave before it was light and come home just as the dark was creeping into the sky.
When she’d found she was repeating herself, she told him all about her family. Pa and Mum. How proud Pa’d been to name the mine after her, her being the first baby born in Clark County made it seem all the more fitting. Her brothers, Peter (the only one older than she), Malcolm, Roger and William. And baby Clementine, so tiny and pink, who was surely not either of those things anymore and who she was very sorry she had shaken that day when she couldn’t stand the baby’s squalling any longer. She told him how she missed them so much that, especially on
the longest day of the year, it felt like she was being torn apart inside by badger claws. The only time she leaves him during the day is to find her pa and Peter and Malcolm, to breathe them in and listen to their talk, learning that Clementine stays with the Widow Lucas down the way and Roger and William are in school but are pressing Pa to let them come into the mine. They never say her name.
Early in May, she knew it was May by the little purple and white flowers that spread their faces along the path where the snow had receded, she’d told him she loved him. She feels it now, the same jittery, jiggly sensation that had crept into her tummy then, even though she knew he wouldn’t be able to hear her. A humming had spread through her and she’d shaken so hard when she said the words, that dust had sifted down from the rocks above them and he’d stopped chewing to glance nervously about in the dark and listen for the crack of splitting rock. A few deep breaths had calmed her and soothed the mine, and she’d sat in silence as he finished his apple and knew that if she were still alive, he would’ve taken her in his arms and told her that he loved her too.
Standing near the block of light, she feels the loneli- ness hang heavy in her, mixing with the itch and twist of the longest day, in a melancholy simmer. Sundays are always lonely, even when the day is short. The men, she knows, would have tried to sleep in but failed, their bodies timed to wake in the dark. Pa would be sitting on the porch and other men would saunter over, plant themselves in the other chair or on the steps, and there they would sit, smoking and staring at the mountain and talking over the happen- ings of the week. Peter would sit out there with him, old enough now. She looks down at her feet and slides one booted toe into the block of yellow sun, watches it fade until she can’t even make out the outline, then pulls it back. The quiet is thick behind her in the absence of the hammering and dynamite that break
it into pieces. There is only the shifting and settling
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