“Let me down!” she cried. “Let me down!” But he held her, panting, sobbing, and rushed again at the muddy slope; he had almost reached the flat crest with his now violently unmanageable burden when a stick under his foot gathered itself with thick convulsive speed. It was a snake he thought as his feet fled beneath him and with the indubitable last of his strength he half pushed and half flung the woman up the bank as he shot feet first and face down back into that medium upon which he had lived for more days and nights than he could remember and from which he himself had never completely emerged, as if his own failed and spent flesh were attempting to carry out his furious unflagging will for severance at any price, even that of drowning, from the burden with which, unwitting and without choice, he had been doomed. Later it seemed to him that he had carried back beneath the surface with him the sound of the infant’s first mewling cry.
The Wild Palms
Neither the manager of the mine nor his wife met them—a couple even less old though considerably harder, in the face at least, than Charlotte and Wilbourne. Their name was Buckner, they called each other Buck and Bill. “Only the name is Billie, i,e,” Mrs Buckner said in a harsh Western voice. “I’m from Colorado” (she pronounced the a like in radish). “Buck’s from Wyoming.”
“It’s a perfect whore’s name, isn’t it?” Charlotte said pleasantly.
“Just what do you mean by that?”
“That’s all. I didn’t mean to offend. It would be a good whore. That’s what I would try to be.”
Mrs Buckner looked at her. (This was while Buckner and Wilbourne were up at the commissary, getting the blankets and the sheep coats and woollen underwear and socks.) “You and him aint married, are you?”
“What made you think that?”
“I dont know. You can just tell somehow.”
“No we’re not. I hope you dont mind, since we’re going to live in the same house together.”
“Why should I? Me and Buck wasn’t married for a while either. But we are now all right.” Her voice was not triumphant, it was smug. “And I’ve got it put away good too. Even Buck dont know where. Not that that would make any difference. Buck’s all right. But it dont do a girl any harm to be safe.”
“What put away?”
“The paper. The license.” Later (she was cooking the evening meal now and Wilbourne and Buckner were still across the canyon at the mine) she said, “Make him marry you.”
“Maybe I will,” Charlotte said.
“You make him. It’s better that way. Especially when you get jammed.”
“Are you jammed?”
“Yes. About a month.”
In fact, when the ore train—a dummy engine with neither head nor rear and three cars and a cubicle of caboose containing mostly stove—reached the snow-choked railhead there was no one in sight at all save a grimed giant upon whom they had apparently come by complete surprise, in a grimed sheep-lined coat, with pale eyes which looked as if he had not slept much lately in a grimed face which obviously had not been shaved and doubtless not been washed in some time—a Pole, with an air fierce proud and wild and a little hysterical, who spoke no English, jabbering, gesturing violently toward the opposite wall of the canyon where a half dozen houses made mostly of sheet iron and window-deep in drifts, clung. The canyon was not wide, it was a ditch, a gutter, it soared, swooping, the pristine snow scarred and blemished by and dwarfing the shaft entrance, the refuse dump, the few buildings; beyond the canyon rims the actual unassailable peaks rose, cloud-ravelled in some incredible wind, on the dirty sky.
“It will be beautiful in the spring,” Charlotte said.
“It had better be,” Wilbourne said.
“It will be. It is now. But let’s go somewhere. I’m going to freeze in a minute.”
Again Wilbourne tried the Pole. “Manager,” he said. “Which house?”
“Yah; boss,” the Pole said. He flung his hand again toward the opposite canyon wall, he moved with incredible speed for all his size and, Charlotte starting momentarily back before she caught herself, he pointed at her thin slippers in the trodden ankle-deep snow then took both lapels of her coat in his grimed hands and drew them about her throat and face with almost a woman’s gentleness, the pale eyes stooping at her with an expression at once fierce wild and tender; he shoved her forward, patting her back, he actually gave her a definite hard slap on the bottom. “Ron,” he said. “Ron.”
Then they saw and entered the path crossing the narrow valley. That is, it was not exactly a path free of snow or snow-packed by feet, it was merely that here the snow level was lower, the width of a single man between the two snow banks and so protected somewhat from the wind. “Maybe he lives in the mine and only comes home over the week-end,” Charlotte said.
“But he’s got a wife, they told me. What would she do?”
“Maybe the ore train just comes once a week too.”
“You must not have seen the engineer.”
“We haven’t seen his wife, either,” she said. She made a sound of disgust. “That wasn’t even funny. Excuse me, Wilbourne.”
“I do.”
“Excuse me, mountains. Excuse me, snow. I think I’m going to freeze.”
“She wasn’t there this morning, anyway,” Wilbourne said. Nor was the manager at the mine. They chose a house, not at random and not because it was the largest, which it was not, and not even because there was a thermometer (it registered fourteen degrees above zero) beside the door, but simply because it was the first house they came to and now they had both become profoundly and ineradicably intimate with cold for the first time in their lives, a cold which left an ineffaceable and unforgettable mark somewhere on the spirit and memory like first sex experience or the experience of taking human life. Wilbourne knocked once at this door with a hand which could not even feel the wood and did not wait for an answer, opening it and thrusting Charlotte ahead of him into a single room where a man and a woman, sitting identical in woollen shirts and jeans pants and shoeless woollen socks on either side of a dog-eared pack of cards laid out for a game of some sort on a plank across a nail keg, looked up at them in amazement.
“You mean he sent you out here? Callaghan himself?” Buckner said.
“Yes,” Wilbourne said. He could hear Charlotte and Mrs Buckner where Charlotte stood over the heater about ten feet away (it burned gasoline; when a match was struck to it, which happened only when they had to turn it off to refill the tank, since it burned otherwise all the time, night and day, it took fire with a bang and glare which after a while even Wilbourne got used to and no longer clapped his mouth shut just before his heart jumped out) talking: “Is them all the clothes you brought out here? You’ll freeze. Buck’ll have to go to the commissary.”—“Yes,” Wilbourne said. “Why? Who else would send me?”
“You—ah—you didn’t bring anything? Letter or nothing?”
“No. He said I wouldn’t—”
“Oh, I see. You paid your own way. Railroad fare.”
“No. He paid it.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Buckner said. He turned his head toward his wife. “You hear that, Bill?”
“What?” Wilbourne said. “What’s wrong?”
“Never mind now,” Buckner said. “We’ll go up to the commissary and get you fixed up for sleeping, and some warmer clothes than them you’ve got. He didn’t even tell you to buy yourself a couple of Roebuck sheep coats, did he?”
“No,” Wilbourne said. “But let me get warm first.”
“You wont never get warm out here,” Buckner said. “If you sit over a stove trying to, waiting to, you wont ever move. You’ll starve, you wont even get up to fill the stove tank when it burns out. The thing is, to make up your mind you will always be a little cold even in bed and just go on about your business and after a while you will get used to it and forget it and then you wont even notice you are cold because you will have forgotten what being warm was ever like. So come on now. You can take my coat.”
“What will you do?”
“It aint far. I have a sweater. Carrying the stuff will warm us up some.”
The commissary was another iron single room filled with the iron cold and lighted by the hushed iron glare of the snow beyond a single window. The cold in it was a dead cold. It was like aspic, almost solid to move through, the body reluctant as though, and with justice, more than to breathe, live, was too much to ask of it. On either side rose wooden shelves, gloomy and barren save for the lower ones, as if this room too were a thermometer not to measure cold but moribundity, an incontrovertible centigrade (We should have brought the Bad Smell Wilbourne was already thinking), a contracting mercury of sham which was not even grandiose. They hauled down the blankets, the sheep coats and woollens and galoshes; they felt like ice, like iron, stiff; carrying them back to the cabin Wilbourne’s lungs (he had forgot the altitude) labored at the rigid air which felt like fire in them.
“So you’re a doctor,” Buckner said.
“I’m the doctor,” Wilbourne said. They were outside now. Buckner locked the door again. Wilbourne looked out across the canyon, toward the opposite wall with its tiny lifeless scar of mine entrance and refuse dump. “Just what’s wrong here?”
“I’ll show you after a while. Are you a doctor?”
Now Wilbourne looked at him. “I just told you I was. What do you mean?”
“Then I guess you’ve got something to show it. Degree: what do they call them?”
Wilbourne looked at him. “Just what are you getting at? Am I to be responsible to you for my capabilities, or to the man who is paying my salary?”
“Salary?” Buckner laughed harshly. Then he stopped. “I guess I am going about this wrong. I never aimed to rub your fur crossways. When a man comes into my country and you offer him a job and he claims he can ride, we want proof that he can and he wouldn’t get mad when we asked him for it. We would even furnish him a horse to prove it on only it wouldn’t be the best horse we had and if we never had but one horse and it would be a good horse, it wouldn’t be that one. So we wouldn’t have a horse for him to prove it on and we would have to ask him. That’s what I’m doing now.” He looked at Wilbourne, sober and intent, out of hazel eyes in a gaunt face like raw beef muscle.
“Oh,” Wilbourne said. “I see. I have a degree from a pretty fair medical school. I had almost finished my course in a well-known hospital. Then I would have been—known, anyway; that is, they would have admitted publicly that I knew—about what any doctor knows, and more than some probably. Or at least I hope so. Does that satisfy you?”
“Yes,” Buckner said. “That’s all right.” He turned and went on. “You wanted to know what’s wrong here. We’ll leave these things at the cabin and go over to the shaft and I’ll show you.” They left the blankets and woollens at the cabin and crossed the canyon, the path which was no path just as the commissary had not been a commissary but a sort of inscrutable signpost like a code word set beside a road.
“That ore train we came up on,” Wilbourne said. “What was in it when it went down to the valley?”
“Oh, it was loaded,” Buckner said. “It has to get there loaded. Leave here loaded, anyway. I see to that. I dont want my throat cut until I know it.”
“Loaded with what?”
“Ah,” Buckner said. The mine was not a shaft, it was a gallery pitching at once straight back into the bowels of the rock—a round tube like the muzzle of a howitzer, shored with timbers and filled with the dying snow-glare as they advanced, and the same dead aspic-like cold that was in the commissary and lined by two light gauge rails along which as they entered (they stepped quickly aside for it or they would have been run down) came a filled ore tram pushed by a running man whom Wilbourne recognised also to be a Pole though shorter, thicker, squatter (he was to realise later that none of them were the giants they seemed, that the illusion of size was an aura, an emanation of that wild childlike innocence and credulity which they possessed in common)—the same pale eyes, the same grimed unshaven face above the same filthy sheep-lined coat.
“I thought—” Wilbourne began. But he did not say it. They went on; the last glare of the snow faded and now they entered a scene like something out of an Eisenstein Dante. The gallery became a small amphitheatre, branching off in smaller galleries like the spread fingers from a palm, lighted by an incredible extravagance of electricity as though for a festival—an extravagance of dirty bulbs which had, though in inverse ratio, that same air of sham and moribundity which the big, almost barren building labeled Commissary in tremendous new letters had—in the light from which still more of the grimed, giant-seeming men in sheep coats and with eyes which had not slept much lately worked with picks and shovels with that same frenzy of the man running behind the loaded tram, with shouts and ejaculations in that tongue which Wilbourne could not understand almost exactly like a college baseball team cheering one another on, while from the smaller galleries which they had not penetrated yet and where still more electric bulbs glared in the dust-laden and icy air came either echoes or the cries of still other men, meaningless and weird, filling the heavy air like blind erratic birds. “He told me you had Chinese and Italians too,” Wilbourne said.
“Yah,” Buckner said. “They left. The chinks left in October. I waked up one morning and they were gone. All of them. They walked down, I guess. With their shirt tails hanging out and in them straw slippers. But then there wasn’t much snow in October. Not all the way down, anyhow. They smelled it. The wops—”
“Smelled it?”
“There hasn’t been a payroll in here since September.”
“Oh,” Wilbourne said. “I see now. Yes. So they smelled it. Like niggers do.”
“I dont know. I never had any smokes here. The wops made a little more noise. They struck, all proper. Threw down their picks and shovels and walked out. There was a—what do you call it? deputation?—waited on me. Considerable talk, all pretty loud, and a lot of hands, the women standing outside in the snow, holding up the babies for me to look at. So I opened the commissary and gave them all a woollen shirt apiece, men women and children (you should have seen them, the kids in a man’s shirt, the ones that were just big enough to walk I mean. They wore them outside, like overcoats.) and a can of beans apiece and sent them out on the ore train. There was still a considerable hands, fists now, and I could hear them for a good while after the train was out of sight. Going down Hogben (he runs the ore train; the railroad pays him) just uses the engine to brake with, so it dont make much fuss. Not as much as they did, anyway. But the hunkies stayed.”
“Why? Didn’t they—”
“Find out that everything had blew? They dont understand good. Oh, they could hear all right; the wops could talk to them: one of the wops was the interpreter for them. But they are queer people; they dont understand dishonesty. I guess when the wops tried to tell them, it just didn’t make sense, that a man could let folks keep on working without intending to pay them. So now they think they are making overtime. Doing all the work. They are not trammers or miners either, they are blasters. There’s something about a hunky that likes dynamite. Maybe it’s the noise. But now they are doing it all. They wanted to put their women in here too. I understood that after a while and stopped it. That’s why they dont sleep much. They think that when the money comes tomorrow, they’ll get all of it. They probably think now you brought it and that Saturday night they’ll all get thousands of dollars apiece. They’re like kids. They will believe anything. That’s why when they find out you have kidded them, they kill you. Oh, not with a knife in the back and not even with a knife, they walk right up to you and stick the stick of dynamite into your pocket and hold you with one hand while they strike the match to the fuse with the other.”