When they crossed the footbridge over the creek, Charles said, “Why’d you do that, boy? I told you to stay out.”
The boy held onto the mule’s bridle, his head not even coming up to the mule’s chin. “They’ll burn, Papa.”
Charles nearly stumbled, then glanced at the boy. He wore an old, flannel shirt too big for him with the sleeves rolled up. Pale, skinny arms. Dark hair cut above his eyebrows. Dark eyes. He was given to long, unblinking looks. A serious mouth, like his mother who died bringing him into the world eight years before.
“I’m glad he’s out of me,” she’d said in the moment before she died screaming.
“What do you mean, boy?”
“I put the death in them.” He held up his finger that had touched the girl as if in proof. “Just like the other lambs.”
“Don’t talk like that.” Charles pulled the bridle from the boy’s hand, his own hand shaking. “You go on home, and I don’t want to see a mess in the cabin when I get back. Sweep the floor.”
“I can smell the fire,” the boy said before turning toward their cabin.
Charles thought about his son all day, deep in the mine, as he worked the single jack, bent low in the tunnel only three quarters of his height, placing the steel bit against the stone, pounding it a bit deeper with each blow, rotating it each time to clear the bit. Pausing just before he drove the hammer home. The angle had to be perfect. The placement, perfect. He had to judge before he struck. Striking without looking could shatter the drill. There was always the pause before the hammer came down to be sure he was doing the right thing. So there could be no mistake. It was a feeling of good or bad in the way the drill stood. Charles considered his judgement with the hammer to be his only genius. He never struck wrongly. Clang! The hammer would fall against the rod. Rock dust crumbled from the hole. Clang! He’d hit it again, his strong right arm driving the blow home. Numbing work to create a hole for the charge. He could raise the hammer all day with that arm; the work had made it larger than the other one, a giant’s arm, but he couldn’t shape the boy with it. He couldn’t even hold him.
The boy had been bad from the beginning. His wet nurse took sick and died. After that, no one would help Charles, so he fed the child himself with goat’s milk, certain that the first winter would kill him, having no mother to care for him, but as winter filled the mountains with snow and cutting wind, even as influenza swept through the camp taking many babies, the boy thrived. He was walking by the next summer, and Charles would leave him locked in the cabin when he worked his shift, half expecting to find the toddler dead on his return. But every day the boy met him, a little taller, a little stronger, and never smiling.
Setting the powder took a half hour. Each hole had to be filled with the proper amount. Then the fuse cord had to be measured. Charles worked methodically. This deep in the mine, the stale air hurt his lungs and gritty rock coated his eyes and tongue. He checked the candle burning brightly in its shadowgee stuck in the wall. When he set the last charge, he retreated to the bucket lift, covering his nose and mouth with a soaked bandana to protect against the dust. After the blast, he stood with head bowed, breathing through the wet cloth.
Charles wanted to love him. He tried. The weather in the boy’s heart was cold, though, and hugs meant nothing to him. He never played. He never cried. And always, around him, children died. Diphtheria. The grippe. Typhoid. The croup. Pneumonia. Whooping cough. Small pox. Lingering diseases. Wasting illnesses. The cemetery filled with tiny corpses.
The ore cart rattled on the rails as Charles pushed it toward the broken ore. For the rest of his shift he’d fill the cart, take it back to the lift, empty it and return for another load. No candles lit the path, but that didn’t matter. Charles didn’t mind the dark most days, but today he couldn’t stop thinking about the boy. What does the boy do while I’m at work? What does he daydream about? Charles imagined him wandering through the camp, looking for children.
In the spring he’d taken the boy to a funeral. Seamus McGarity had lost both his boys and his wife to dysentery three days apart. McGarity, his kin and friends circled the coffins, two tiny wood boxes and a long one. During the prayer, Charles looked down at his boy dressed in mourning black. The corners of the boy’s mouth turned up and his eyes were shining. At the ceremony’s end, the boy dropped dirt in each grave. Surreptitiously, he also put a handful of grave soil in his pocket.
“Lucky your kid’s doing good,” McGarity said to him the next day as they waited for the bucket to take them down the shaft. His lunch pail dangled from his hand, and the miner looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept for a month. “He came by a week ago. Found him sitting by the door.”
“What did he want?” Charles wished he could pat McGarity on the shoulder. How would it be to lose your whole family? There’d been other men whose children died who drank themselves to death. The other miners stood away from them. People died in the camps all the time, but it wasn’t easy to be next to the bereft, not at first.
McGarity didn’t answer for a while. He stared out over the valley, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything. Finally he said, “Caleb used to sing his little brother to sleep. I don’t think he knew I was listening. ‘Amazing Grace’ it was. Learned it from his mom. He had a nice voice for a ten-year-old.”
They found McGarity at the bottom of a shaft a week later. Was he drunk and fell in, or did he jump?
At the blasting site the dust still hung in the air, surrounding the candle in a pale globe. Charles hefted ore into the cart. My boy’s not human, he thought as each rock crashed against the metal. Methodically he bent and lifted, bent and lifted. Not human. Not human. Charles pictured the boy with his finger in his mouth, salty-bitter from the Laughlin girl’s scarlet fever sweat.
After a while Charles stopped loading. His hands stung. He stepped next to the candle’s feeble light and held them up. Blood ran down his wrists from his ragged fingertips. Dully he realized he’d not worn his gloves. And a certainty came to him, a gravestone solid conviction: my boy’s a monster!
Charles lay in his bed, motionless. The boy breathed evenly on the floor below him. Only the sliver-moon lit window floated in the dark. Charles kept his eyes wide open. If he shut them, even for a second, the boy might stand. He might lean his unsmiling face close. The boy might run his finger across Charles’ forehead.
“I see you burning, Papa,” the boy would say. He always called him Papa, like it was a curse.
And dawn was hours away.
Ron sat in his van on the abandoned mining road near the boulders the park service had used to block the path, his map spread out on the seat beside him marked with X’s for mining claims. From Central City there were so many. The historical marker at the town limits proclaimed THE RICHEST SQUARE MILE ON EARTH. He shook his head. If only it were that small.
Starting at Black Hawk at one end of the valley to the other end of Central City was a couple of miles. Mine tailings spotted the slopes on both sides. Then there were the gulches: Chase, Eureka, Russell, Lake, Pecks, Fourmile and others the map didn’t name with mines of their own, and the road went on to the ghost towns of Yankee Hill, Ninety Four, Alice and Kingston. Nevadaville was only a stone’s throw to the west. He could almost see the honeycomb of tunnels.
Ron smoothed the map, but his attention shifted. On the floor, barely visible in the blue dusk of sunset, a red plastic building brick lay canted on its side. He stretched around the steering wheel, crinkling the map with his elbow, and picked it up. The brick had almost no weight sitting on his palm. He straightened, put the brick on the dashboard.