7
Until the lightness passes off, she sits on the edge of the bed, as though at a beginning place. Then she slides to the marble floor and pads in bare feet into her brother’s room. Withdrawn he lies, absorbed into the bed, one with it, dark etching on the immaculate sheets. “Giovanni!” she whispers. No sign is given her but the determined pulsing of a vein in his neck. His skin has shrunk taut over his high skull, exaggerating the recession of his hairline. His black hair is long on the neck, feathers dark and wild on the pillow. He is … somehow … changed: yes, a new brother must come of it. She fears for him. So white! The dried blood she’d seen on his face seems to have sunk beneath the surface, now mottles with rose the flesh’s pallor. For the first time since the night of the disaster, black doubts peck at her.
Miller was met on Monday midmorning arrival by an officeful of comedy and the miner Willie Hall, who’d been waiting there since eight, Lou Jones having left for “Mick’s Dispensary,” leaving the message that the doctors advised complete rest and not to expect him for a week or two. His prank had been a complete success, and the wirecopy which he retrieved from the wastecan testified to UP’s subsequent panic. Someone had run over to the bus station to buy up the early morning editions from the city, and all but one carried it, one of them happily subheading the prayerbook episode. Miller equipped his ad force with copies to entertain the businessmen they called on that morning, and wrote up a boldface box for that night’s front page on “this strange and inexplicable lapse in East Condon journalism.” He wondered if the UP rep was still in town — man! the dumb bastard had even embellished his cribbed account with praise of Jones’“long and worthy experience” in the mines and his “model Christian fatherhood”! Such are history’s documents! He laughed. Miller had been seeking this vendetta ever since Jones had jockeyed through his latest typo a couple months ago on “the new Chronicle subscription rates, announced this week by publisher and editor Justin Milker,” which eventually made The New Yorker. He’d been burned more than once by Jones’ propensity for the rigged typo, his worst being when Mrs. Ted Cavanaugh, wife of the banker, was named “Lay of the Year at the Presbyterian Church”—Only by the grace of Ted’s fear of court publicity had they escaped being sued. Now he had squared it and had twitted the sloppy East Condoners as well.
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.”