A Place Called Freedom (1995) Page 7

  The first rooms they passed were empty, presumably worked out, but after a while Jay stopped beside a room where a man was digging. To Lizzie’s surprise the miner was not standing up: he lay on his side, attacking the coal face at floor level. A candle in a wooden holder near his head threw its inconstant light on his work. Despite his awkward position he swung his pick powerfully. With each swing he dug the point into the coal and prized out lumps. He was making an indentation two or three feet deep across the width of his room. Lizzie was shocked to realize that he was lying in running water, which seeped out of the coal face, flowed across the floor of his room, and drained into the ditch that ran along the tunnel. Lizzie dipped her fingers into the ditch. The water was freezing cold. She shivered. Yet the miner had taken off his coat and shirt and was working in his breeches and bare feet; and she could see the gleam of perspiration on his blackened shoulders.

  The tunnel was not level, but rose and fell—with the seam of coal, Lizzie presumed. Now it began to go up more steeply. Jay stopped and pointed ahead to where a miner was doing something with a candle. “He’s testing for firedamp,” Jay said.

  Lizzie let go of his hand and sat on a rock, to relieve her back from stooping.

  “Are you all right?” Jay said.

  “Fine. What’s firedamp?”

  “An inflammable gas.”

  “Inflammable?”

  “Yes—it’s what causes most explosions in coal mines.”

  This sounded mad. “If it’s explosive, why is he using that candle?”

  “It’s the only way to detect the gas—you can’t see it or smell it.”

  The miner was raising the candle slowly toward the roof, and seemed to be staring hard at the flame.

  “The gas is lighter than air, so it concentrates at roof level,” Jay went on. “A small amount will give a blue tinge to the candle flame.”

  “And what will a large amount do?”

  “Blow us all to kingdom come.”

  Lizzie felt this was the last straw. She was filthy and exhausted and her mouth was full of coal dust, and now she was in danger of being blown up. She told herself to keep very calm. She had known, before she came here, that coal mining was a dangerous business, and she must just steel her nerve. Miners went underground every night: surely she had the courage to come here one time?

  It would, however, be the last time: of that she had no doubt at all.

  They watched the man for a few moments. He moved up the tunnel a few paces at a time, repeating his test. Lizzie was determined not to show her fear. Making her voice sound normal, she said: “And if he finds firedamp—what then? How do you get rid of it?”

  “Set fire to it.”

  Lizzie swallowed. This was getting worse.

  “One of the miners is designated fireman,” Jay went on. “In this pit I believe it’s McAsh, the young troublemaker. The job is generally handed down from father to son. The fireman is the pit’s expert on gas. He knows what to do.”

  Lizzie wanted to run back down the tunnel to the shaft and all the way up the ladder to the outside world. She would have done so but for the humiliation of having Jay see her panic. In order to get away from this insanely dangerous test, she pointed to a side tunnel and said: “What’s down there?”

  Jay took her hand again. “Let’s go and see.”

  There was a strange hush throughout the mine, Lizzie thought as they walked along. Nobody spoke much: a few of the men had boys helping them but most worked alone, and the bearers had not yet arrived. The clang of picks hitting the face and the rumble as the coal broke up were muffled by the walls and the thick dust underfoot. Every so often they passed through a door that was closed behind them by a small boy: the doors controlled the circulation of air in the tunnels, Jay explained.

  They found themselves in a deserted section. Jay stopped. “This part seems to be worked out,” he said, swinging his lantern in an arc. The feeble light was reflected in the tiny eyes of rats at the limit of the circle. No doubt they lived on leavings from the miners’ dinner pails.

  Lizzie noticed that Jay’s face was smeared black, like the miners’: the coal dust got everywhere. He looked funny, and she smiled.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “Your face is black!”

  He grinned and touched her cheek with a fingertip. “And what do you think yours is like?”

  She realized that she must look exactly the same. “Oh, no!” she said with a laugh.

  “You’re still beautiful, though,” he said, and he kissed her.

  She was surprised, but she did not flinch: she liked it. His lips were firm and dry, and she felt the slight roughness over his upper lip where he shaved. When he drew back she said the first thing that came into her head: “is that what you brought me down here for?”

  “Are you offended?”

  It was certainly against the rules of polite society for a young gentleman to kiss a lady not his fiancée. She ought to be offended, she knew; but she had enjoyed it. She began to feel embarrassed. “Perhaps we should retrace our steps.”

  “May I keep holding your hand?”

  “Yes.”

  He seemed satisfied with that, and he led her back. After a while she saw the rock she had sat on earlier. They stopped to watch a miner work. Lizzie thought about the kiss and felt a little shiver of excitement in her loins.

  The miner had undercut the coal across the width of the room and was hammering wedges into the face higher up. Like most of them he was half naked, and the massive muscles of his back bunched and rolled as he swung his hammer. The coal, having nothing below to support it, eventually crumbled under its own weight and crashed to the floor in lumps. The miner stepped back quickly as the freshly exposed coal face creaked and shifted, spitting tiny fragments as it adjusted to the altered stresses.

  At this point the bearers began to arrive, carrying their candles and wooden shovels, and Lizzie suffered her most horrifying shock yet.

  They were nearly all women and girls.

  She had never asked what miners ‘ wives and daughters did with their time. It had not occurred to her that they spent their days, and half their nights, working underground.

  The tunnels became noisy with their clatter, and the air rapidly warmed up, causing Lizzie to unfasten her coat. Because of the dark, most of the women did not notice the visitors, and their talk was uninhibited. Right in front of them an older man bumped into a woman who looked pregnant. “Out of the damn way, Sal,” he said roughly.

  “Out of the damn way yourself, you blind pizzle,” she retorted.

  Another woman said: “A pizzle’s not blind, it’s got one eye!” They all laughed coarsely.

  Lizzie was startled. In her world women never said “damn,” and as for “pizzle,” she could only guess what it meant. She was also astonished that the women could laugh at anything at all, having got out of bed at two o’clock in the morning to work for fifteen hours underground.

  She felt strange. Everything here was physical and sensory: the darkness, holding Jay’s hand, the half-naked miners hewing coal, Jay’s kiss, and the vulgar hilarity of the women—it was unnerving but at the same time stimulating. Her pulse beat faster, her skin was flushed and her heart was racing.

  The chatter died down as the bearers got to work shoveling the coal into big baskets. “Why do women do this?” Lizzie asked Jay incredulously.

  “A miner is paid by the weight of coal he delivers to the pithead,” he replied. “If he has to pay a bearer, the money goes out of the family. So he gets his wife and children to do it, and that way they keep it all.”

  The big baskets were quickly filled. Lizzie watched as two women picked one up between them and heaved it onto the bent back of a third. She grunted as she took the weight. The basket was secured by a strap around her forehead, then she headed slowly down the tunnel, bent double. Lizzie wondered how she could possibly carry it up two hundred feet of steps. “Is the basket as heavy as it looks?” she sai
d.

  One of the miners overheard her. “We call it a corf,” he said to her. “It holds a hundred and fifty pounds of coal. Would you like to feel the weight, young sir?”

  Jay answered before Lizzie could speak. “Certainly not,” he said protectively.

  The man persisted. “Or perhaps a half-corf, such as this wee one is carrying.”

  Approaching them was a girl of ten or eleven, wearing a shapeless wool dress and a head scarf. She was barefoot and carried on her back a corf half full of coal.

  Lizzie saw Jay open his mouth to refuse, but she forestalled him. “Yes,” she said. “Let me feel the weight.”

  The miner stopped the girl and one of his women lifted the corf. The child said nothing but seemed content to rest, breathing hard.

  “Bend your back, master,” the miner said. Lizzie obeyed. The woman swung the corf onto Lizzie’s back.

  Although she was braced for it, the weight was much more than she had anticipated, and she could not support it even for a second. Her legs buckled under her and she collapsed. The miner, seemingly expecting this, caught her, and she felt the weight lifted from her back as the woman removed the corf. They had known what would happen, Lizzie realized as she collapsed into the miner’s arms.

  The watching women all shrieked with laughter at the discomfiture of what they thought was a young gentleman. The miner caught Lizzie falling forward and easily supported her on his strong forearm. A callused hand as hard as a horse’s hoof squashed her breast through the linen shirt. She heard the man grunt with surprise. The hand squeezed, as if double-checking; but her breasts were large—embarrassingly large, she often felt—and an instant later the hand slid away. The man lifted her upright. He held her by her shoulders, and astonished eyes stared at her out of his coal-blackened face.

  “Miss Hallim!” he whispered.

  She realized the miner was Malachi McAsh.

  They looked at one another for a spellbound moment, while the women’s laughter filled their ears. Lizzie found the sudden intimacy deeply arousing, after all that had gone before, and she could tell he felt it too. For a second she was closer to him than to Jay, even though Jay had kissed her and held her hand. Then another voice pierced the noise, and a woman said: “Mack—look at this!”

  A black-faced woman was holding a candle up to the roof. McAsh looked at her, looked back at Lizzie, and then, seeming to resent leaving something unfinished, he released his hold on Lizzie and went over to the other woman.

  He looked at the candle flame and said: “You’re right, Esther.” He turned back and addressed the others, ignoring Lizzie and Jay. “There’s a little firedamp.” Lizzie wanted to turn and run, but McAsh seemed calm. “It’s not enough to sound the alarm—not yet, anyway. We’ll check in different places and see how far it extends.”

  Lizzie found his equanimity incredible. What kind of people were these miners? Though their lives were brutally hard their spirits seemed unquenchable. By comparison her own life seemed pampered and purposeless.

  Jay took Lizzie’s arm. “I think we’ve seen enough, don’t you?” he murmured.

  Lizzie did not argue. Her curiosity had been satisfied long ago. Her back ached from bending constantly. She was tired and dirty and scared and she wanted to get out on the surface and feel the wind on her face.

  They hurried along the tunnel toward the shaft. The mine was busy now and there were bearers in front of them and behind. The women hitched their skirts above their knees, for freedom of movement, and carried their candles in their teeth. They moved slowly under their enormous burdens. Lizzie saw a man relieving himself into the drainage ditch in full view of the women and girls. Can’t he find somewhere private to do that? she thought, then she realized that down here there was nowhere private.

  They reached the shaft and started up the stairs. The bearers went up on all fours, like small children: it suited their bent posture. They climbed at a steady pace. There was no chattering and joking now: the women and girls panted and groaned beneath the tremendous weights they were carrying. After a while Lizzie had to rest, but the bearers never stopped, and she felt humiliated and sick with guilt as she watched little girls pass her with their loads, some of them crying from pain and exhaustion. Now and again a child would slow down or stop for a moment, only to be hurried along by a curse or a brutal blow from its mother. Lizzie wanted to comfort them. All the emotions of the night came together and turned into anger. “I swear,” she said vehemently, “I’ll never allow coal to be mined on my land, as long as I live.”

  Before Jay could make any reply, a bell began to ring.

  “The alarm,” Jay said. “They must have found more firedamp.”

  Lizzie groaned and got to her feet. Her calves felt as if someone had stuck knives in them. Never again, she thought.

  “I’ll carry you,” Jay said, and without more ado he slung her over his shoulder and began to climb the stairs.

  8

  THE FIREDAMP SPREAD WITH TERRIFYING SPEED.

  At first the blue tinge had been visible only when the candle was at roof level, but a few minutes later it appeared a foot below the roof, and Mack had to stop testing for fear of setting fire to it before the pit was evacuated.

  He was breathing in short, panicky gasps. He tried to be calm and think clearly.

  Normally the gas seeped out gradually, but this was different. Something unusual must have happened. Most likely, firedamp had accumulated in a sealed-off area of exhausted workings, then an old wall had cracked and was rapidly leaking the dreaded gas into the occupied tunnels.

  And every man, woman and child here carried a lighted candle.

  A small trace would burn safely; a moderate amount would flash, scorching anyone in the vicinity; and a large quantity would explode, killing everyone and destroying the tunnels.

  He took a deep breath. His first priority was to get everyone out of the pit as fast as possible. He rang the handbell vigorously while he counted to twelve. By the time he stopped, miners and bearers were hurrying along the tunnel toward the shaft, mothers urging their children to go faster.

  While everyone else fled the pit, his two bearers stayed—his sister, Esther, calm and efficient, and his cousin Annie, who was strong and quick but also impulsive and clumsy. Using their coal shovels the two women began frantically to dig a shallow trench, the length and breadth of Mack, in the floor of the tunnel. Meanwhile Mack snatched an oilcloth bundle hanging from the roof of his room and ran for the mouth of the tunnel.

  After his parents died there had been some muttering, among the men, about whether Mack was old enough to take over his father’s role of fireman. Apart from the responsibility of the job, the fireman was regarded as a leader in the community. In truth Mack himself had shared their doubts. But no one else wanted the job—it was unpaid and dangerous. And when he dealt efficiently with the first crisis the muttering stopped. Now he was proud that older men trusted him, but his pride also forced him to appear calm and confident even when he was afraid.

  He reached the mouth of the tunnel. The last stragglers were heading up the stairs. Now Mack had to get rid of the gas. Burning was the only way to do this. He had to set fire to it.

  It was evilly bad luck that this should happen today. It was his birthday: he was leaving. Now he wished he had thrown caution to the winds and left the glen on Sunday night. He had told himself that a wait of a day or two alight make the Jamissons think he was going to stay, and lull them into a false sense of security. He felt sick at heart that in his final hours as a coal miner he had to risk his life to save the pit he was about to quit forever.

  If the firedamp were not burned off, the pit would close. And a pit closure in a mining village was like a failed harvest in a farming community: people starved. Mack would never forget the last time the pit closed, four winters ago. During the harrowing weeks that followed, the youngest and oldest villagers had died—including both his parents. The day after his mother died, Mack had dug up a nest
of hibernating rabbits, and had broken their necks while they were still groggy; and the meat had saved him and Esther.

  He stepped out onto the deck and tore the waterproof wrappings off his bundle. Inside was a big torch made of dry sticks and rags, a ball of string, and a large version of the hemispheric candle-holder the miners used, fixed to a flat wooden base so that it could not fall over. Mack stuck the torch firmly in the holder, tied the string to the base, and lit the torch with his candle. It blazed up immediately. Here it would burn safely, for the lighter-than-air gas could not gather at the bottom of the shaft. But his next task was to get the burning torch into the tunnel.

  He took another moment to lower himself into the drainage pool at the bottom of the shaft, soaking his clothes and hair in the icy water to give him a little extra protection from burns. Then he hurried back along the tunnel unwinding the ball of string, at the same time scrutinizing the floor, removing large stones and other objects that might obstruct the movement of the blazing torch as it was drawn into the tunnel.

  When he reached Esther and Annie, he saw by the light of the one candle on the floor that all was ready. The trench was dug. Esther was dipping a blanket into the drainage ditch, and now she quickly wrapped it around Mack. Shivering, he lay down in the trench, still holding the end of the string. Annie knelt beside him and, somewhat to his surprise, kissed him full on the lips. Then she covered the trench with a heavy board, closing him in.

  There was a sloshing sound as they poured more water on the board, in a further attempt to protect him from the flames he was about to ignite. Then one of them tapped three times, the sign that they were leaving.

  He counted to one hundred, to give them time to get out of the tunnel.

  Then, with his heart full of dread, he started to pull on the string, drawing the blazing torch into the mine, toward where he lay, in a tunnel half full of explosive gas.

  Jay carried Lizzie to the top of the stairs and set her down on the icy mud at the pithead.