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
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.