A fine snow, more like frost, flecked the land overnight, and Monday dawned bright and cold. Eleanor dressed in warm wool and, after poached egg on toast, slipped on her winter coat and galoshes, fur cap, gloves and scarf and walked out to the mine, she had decided upon it last night, walked out, as it were, to the point of origin.
The town, as she passed through it, or at least this northwest segment of it, seemed strangely unaffected by the disaster that had rocked its very underpinnings and widowed so many of its houses. If anything, there was a fresh renewal, a mocking sense of gladness, brick and painted homes adazzle under the harsh blue sky, toys and bikes in a gay scatter, naked elms casting long graceful shadows on the gilt pavement.
But what was an exhilarating crispness in town became a bitter cold at its edge. Wind smarted her eyes, tears converting the blue radiance into a blurred and angry glare. She pinched the scarf up tight against her throat, but the cold blew through it. The mine road was rutted and her booted feet made poor progress on it. After about ten minutes, she stopped, looked back at the town behind her. She had barely begun. It would take her at least an hour, She faltered. What was the point of it, anyway? But something vital in her, something more than mere will, some deep-celled quality forged in some other life’s trial, pivoted her once more and thrust her forward down the old road to Deepwater No. 9.
The road, like the barren yellow-stalked fields, was of a brownish clay the color of bruised fruit. Short bushes grew wildly along the ditches to either side of her, and occasional tree sprouts stuck up like stripped switches, but desolation and death was mostly what she saw through her tears. Much of the time, she walked with eyes closed, her face a numb mask, the air gathering in icy pockets within her lungs. Her legs grew very weary, then indifferent, then seemed even to strengthen, discovering a needled warmth in motion. She walked head down, staring at her feet, counting the steps. She began to see the burdened feet of humanity, treading through their endless centuries of despair. Each gray-booted foot appeared before her like a birth, and died just as quickly as the other materialized to replace it, a ceaseless recurrence, and yet each step was different, unique, fell on different soil, angled away from hazards, delayed a moment longer or perished in a quickened stumble, and always, cushioned by soft earth or tormented by frozen corrugations, there was pain and, in spite of the progress … a loss. The voice beside her took her wholly by surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What did you say?”
“Can we give you a lift? It’s a cold morning.” Inside the old car there were two men, both in miners’ clothes. They looked to be Italians, the driver a large dark man, bold-jawed and perhaps intemperate, the other slender with a generous hooked nose and crinkly smile.
“No, no, thank you,” she stammered. “I … I’m just out for the walk.” How foolish that sounded! Timidly, she smiled.
“Are you sure?” asked the driver. He had a large voice, resonant and willful, but friendly. “It’s a pretty rough hike.”
“How much farther is it?”
“About ten, fifteen minutes more. You can see the small rise up there ahead, that hill. The offices and portal are just to the left.”
She could see nothing, but she nodded. “I’ll walk,” she said. “But thank you very much.”
They shrugged and left her. She watched the car lurch and rattle away from her, then turned her eyes once more to her feet. She had been close to something and had lost it, but still she could hold before her that which she had had and investigate it with her mind. The unthought thought that the men in the car had blocked was this: Though each step, each appearance and disappearance, was singularly unique, the spirit lodged in them was of an unalterable whole, inseparable from past steps, a part of future ones — it was not the mere passage of finite existences themselves with which one had to reckon, but with passage itself; motion, not the moving thing. And though opposites her feet — this, too, had been at the edge of her broken thoughts — though apparently isolate and contrary, at their source they were a single essence, there their duality disappeared. A triangle occurred to her, but something suddenly unpleasant about it repulsed her. She looked up, wearied of her feet, and discovered the mine buildings just ahead of her, crouched in a sparse grove of barren trees. To her right, distantly, a small rise, itself almost treeless. Above, a potbellied watertank that overlorded the squat buildings; beneath it, cars sat in a gravel lot, including that which had passed her. She was glad she had walked the whole distance, yet an edge of disappointment frustrated complete satisfaction: her meditations had not equaled the promise of the previous direct experience.
An odor of sulfur here, soot in the air, and near the buildings the sky seemed to yellow. Slate like black jasper crunched underfoot. Behind the watertower reared an insectlike structure, housed in at the top, about four stories high. She guessed it was where the coal was processed — was it sorted or cleaned or something? — for a chute yawned from it over railroad tracks. She stared at the building, letting its eccentric shape sear into her underconsciousness — there was nothing like it in her memory — while her thoughts sputtered and bubbled away. A line came to her suddenly from somewhere, she fumbled in her coat pocket, found paper and penciclass="underline"
Out of fog: new signals; in clarity: the gathering of … fog.
She seemed to wake, discovered for the first time there were people about her, mostly miners, motion was minimal, there seemed to be nothing happening, some glanced at her, but none paid attention. She sighed, secretly relieved, for the sense of awakening in public had startled her. She read the message. It did not seem to be from Domiron. Some lesser aspect probably. Of these, she trusted few, and doubted now. On the contrary, she reasoned, fog is a false emptying that adds interest to the mystified forms, while clarity, simplifying perception, liberated the mind from counteractive effort. Nevertheless, she pocketed the note … it was foolish to be too hasty.
Over one grimy brick office building, a wind sock jabbed rigidly. A northwest wind, and it pierced her thoroughly. The sock poked its signal at the nearby rise, which lifted its nubbed crest just over the fretwork of denuded trees to the east of the buildings. Too squat for a hill really: a hummock, a soft knoll. On a concrete wall, next to a steel door, she found a sign that read: CAUTION! NO SCUFFLING OR PLAYING! NO SMOKING! This is a Closed Light Mine — Smoking in or Carrying Smoking Materials into This Mine is a VIOLATION OF THE LAW! Scratched on the wall with coal was: Look! This Means You! with an arrow aimed at the word “Scuffling.” A few adolescent obscenities, cartooned nude women, male genitals, no clues. In red: JE$U$ $AVE$! Why don’t you? 1st Nat’l Bank. She counted the words on the printed sign: twenty-eight — it meant nothing to her. Four sevens. Well, so what? The first five words, true, contained a certain meaning applicable to her: to be careful not to become childish about this crisis, nor to seek unnecessary trouble; but, given the rest of it, it was probably merest accident. What was a “closed light mine”? She didn’t know. Were the lights enclosed, or was the mine defined somehow as “light”? Perhaps there was, in a sense, light trapped in the mine that needed now to be released. But all these directions seemed futile. And then, suddenly, beside the steel door, as though it were materializing, appearing there now for the first time, she saw a telephone! So certain was she that she had marched this bitter way to receive a message, that she impulsively lifted the phone off the hook and put it to her ear.