Voices rose up, growing louder, competing to be heard.
Stetler held up two shadowgees and hollered for silence, but no one listened in the swarm of shouting men.
“We’re all gonna peg out now.”
“Better save the lump oil.”
“Keep chargin the door.”
“Used to could go that way, but the shoot’s caved in.”
“No food, no water.”
“Preacher left us in the soup!”
“Gonna run out a light!”
“Hobble your lips!”
“Don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.”
“Shut the f**k up!”
Meanwhile, Bessie McCabe stood in the center of the chamber, screaming for Harriet again, screaming until she couldn’t breathe, until she felt like she was suffocating on choke damp, the chaos only stoking the hysteria in her head.
She overloaded, spotted the small boulder, fell to her knees, and crawled toward it.
She heard the miners shooting again, babies screaming, someone praying nearby.
Bessie got up on her knees, found two handholds in the rock, and, with every ounce of strength and zero hesitation, slammed her head down into the boulder. She heard the crack before she felt it, and blood ran between her eyes. When she came to, the cavern was inverted and spinning. She struggled back onto her knees, located the handholds, and managed two more blows before losing consciousness again. The next time she came around, she knew she’d done the job. A crowd of revolving, blurry faces surrounded her, and their voices and the gunshots and weeping and shouting all blended into a steady rush like the noise of a waterfall.
Her head lay in a warm, expanding pool, and she knew it was her blood and hoped it meant the end, thinking only of her daughter now, praying the injuns hadn’t gotten her, and that wherever she awoke, Harriet would be there, too.
As her brain seized, she went back almost ten months, to a February morning on the plains of west Kansas, she and Harriet aboard a Union Pacific train chugging to Denver.
Staring off in the distance, she’d seen them lifting out of the horizon like a bank of clouds, thought they were coming into weather until she overheard another passenger say to his companion, “Have a look at the Snowy Range.”
And as she died on the floor of that mine on Christmas night, she relived with a sort of bewildered nostalgia all the excitement she’d felt, watching the Front Range rise and rise as the train steamed west, a dream and a dare at once.
She’d pulled Harriet into her lap and pointed out the window. “That’s where Daddy is and where we’re goin. That’s our future, sweet pea.”
And she’d believed it, too.
With all her heart.
2009
SIXTY-TWO
Starting out proved simple enough. They took the only passage that branched off from the chamber, Lawrence leading with the headlamp, followed by Abigail and June.
They hadn’t walked thirty feet before Lawrence stopped, said, “Well, guys, here we are. First choice of many.” The main tunnel continued on, at least as far as his headlamp shone, but there was also an opening in the rock nearby. Lawrence knelt down, looked through the hole. “A snug fit, but it definitely goes somewhere.”
“Don’t you think we should stick with the larger passageways?” Abigail asked.
“I honestly don’t—” He gasped. “There’s a skeleton in here and a pair of wrist irons. This might have been a prisoner. Yeah, let’s stick with the main passage for now.”
So they continued on, soon leaving all signs of mining activity—holes drilled in the rock for dy***ite, rusted cans of black blasting powder, empty carbide kegs, strips of railroad track, drill steels, support timbers—and emerged into a natural cave, ceasing to follow the path of any particular tunnel, moving instead from room to room, some smaller than a closet, others larger than that first cavern, and the rock formations becoming more alien the deeper they ventured. Stalactites hung down from the roof, spilling their corrosive solutions into drip holes on the floor. Abigail ran her hands over walls of breccia—fragments of rock, fossils of bone and prehistoric crustaceans cemented together in sandstone.
An hour in, they came upon a richly decorated grotto. Lawrence’s head-lamp shone up at the ceiling, where stalactites bunched together, row upon row, like sharks’ teeth. In the center, they’d melded into a strange conglomerate that reminded Abigail of a chandelier. Against the nearest wall, they resembled a pipe organ. In a far corner, the long tentacles of jellyfish.
They wandered into a smooth-walled tube, the ceiling just a foot above Lawrence’s head. As they progressed through the elliptical passage, the walls grew farther apart and the ceiling lowered. Soon they had to walk hunched over, then squatting, then crawling on their knees, and finally their bellies, dragging themselves through the flattener on their forearms, just sixteen inches between the ceiling and the floor.
They’d been moving along this way for five minutes when Abigail yelled, “I’m getting claustrophobic!” She couldn’t see Lawrence’s light, felt trapped in total darkness, the warmth of her own breath blowing back into her face when she exhaled against the rock.
Something grabbed her ankle, but there wasn’t enough space to turn her head.
June whispered, “They’re all around us, Abigail. They won’t stop talking to me.”
Lawrence yelled back, “I hear something up ahead!”
They pushed on, the ceiling scraping the top of Abigail’s head, her left leg beginning to bleed again, the crawling murder on her tailbone. I can’t breathe, she thought. Then, Yes, you can. It’s just in your mind. She had to tilt her head to the side and flatten her shoulders in order to writhe her way through. What if we get stuck? I can’t even move my limbs enough to turn myself around. This would be a horrible way to die.
June cried, whispering in the darkness behind her, and Abigail had started to tell Lawrence to just turn the f**k around when she heard it, too—white noise.
The bulb of his headlamp swung toward her. “You’re almost there,” he said. Where the tube ended, less than a foot of space remained between the floor and the ceiling. Abigail squeezed her way through, and Lawrence grabbed her by the arms, helped her find her footing.
“Where is this?” she asked. Lawrence turned and let his light run up the sixty-foot walls of an immense hall. “Oh my God.” They stood at the edge of a subterranean lake, fifty feet across, two feet deep. On the other side, a four-foot waterfall plunged into a pool out of a fissure in the rock. The pool over-flowed, fed the lake, the lake flooding into a hole that chuted the mineral water into the depths of the mountain. The hall resonated with the crush of the waterfall, and the sound made Abigail think of her favorite spot in Central Park—the fountain at Cherry Hill. If you sat close, it was loud enough to drown out the city noise.