The Giver of Stars(28)
‘What?’ said Alice.
‘Where are you going?’ said Beth.
‘Hoffman. Beth, can you pick up some of my rounds? I’ll see y’all later.’
You could hear the ominous sounds of the Hoffman Mining Company a good couple of miles before you saw it: the rumble of the coal trucks, the distant whumpf of the explosions that vibrated through your feet, the clang of the mine bell. For Margery, Hoffman was a vision of Hell, its pits eating into the scarred and hollowed-out hillsides around Baileyville, like giant welts, its men, their eyes glowing white out of blackened faces, emerging from its bowels, and the low industrial hum of nature being stripped and ravaged. Around the settlement the taste of coal dust hung in the air, with an ever-present sense of foreboding, explosions covering the valley with a grey filter. Even Charley balked at it. A certain kind of man looked at God’s own land, she thought, as she drew closer, and instead of beauty and wonder, all he saw was dollar signs.
Hoffman was a town with its own rules. The price of a wage and a roof over your head was a creeping debt to the company store, and the never-ending fear of a misjudged measurement of dynamite, a lost limb from a runaway trolley, or worse: the end of it all, several hundred feet below, with little chance for your loved ones to recover a body to grieve over.
And, since a year back, all of this had become suffused in an air of mistrust as the union-busters arrived to beat back those who had the temerity to campaign for better conditions. The mine bosses didn’t like change, and they had shown it not in argument and raised fists but with mobs, guns and, now, families in mourning.
‘That you, Margery O’Hare?’ The guard took two steps towards her as she rode up, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun.
‘Sure is, Bob.’
‘You know Gustavsson’s here?’
‘Everything all right?’ She felt the familiar metallic taste in her mouth whenever she heard Sven’s name.
‘Everyone accounted for. Think they’re just having a bite to eat before they head off. Last saw them over by B Block.’
She dismounted and tied up the mule, then walked through the gates, ignoring the glances from miners clocking off. She walked briskly past the commissary, its windows advertising various on-sale bargains that everyone knew to be no bargain at all. It stood on the hillside at the same level as the huge tipple. Above it were the generous, well-maintained houses of the mine bosses and their foremen, most with neat backyards. This was where Van Cleve would have lived, had Dolores not refused to leave her family home back in Baileyville. It was not one of the larger coal camps, like Lynch, where some ten thousand homes scattered the hillsides. Here a couple of hundred miners’ shacks stretched along the tracks, their roofs covered with tar-paper, barely updated in the forty-odd years of their existence. A few children, mostly shoeless, played in the dirt beside a rootling pig. Car parts and washing pails were strewn outside front doors, and stray dogs trotted haphazard paths between them. Margery turned right, away from the residential roads, and walked briskly over the small bridge that led to the mines.
She spied his back first. He was sitting on an upturned crate, his helmet cradled between his feet as he ate a hunk of bread. She’d know him anywhere, she thought. The way his neck met his shoulders and his head tilted a little to the left when he spoke. His shirt was covered with smuts and the tabard that read ‘FIRE’ on his back was slightly askew.
‘Hey.’
He turned at the sound of her voice, stood and lifted his hands as his workmates began a series of low whistles, as if he were trying to tamp down a fire. ‘Marge! What are you doing here?’ He took her arm, steering her away from the catcalls as they walked around the corner.
She looked at Sven’s blackened palms. ‘Everyone okay?’
His eyebrows lifted. ‘This time.’ He shot a look at the administrative offices that told her everything she needed to know.
She reached up and wiped a smudge from his face with her thumb. He stopped her and pressed her hand to his lips. It always made something flip inside her, even if she didn’t let it show on her face.
‘You missed me, then?’
‘No.’
‘Liar.’
They grinned at each other.
‘I came to find William Kenworth. I need to speak to his sister.’
‘Coloured William? He isn’t here no more, Marge. He got injured out, oh, six, nine months back.’
She looked startled.
‘I thought I told you. Some powder monkey messed up his wires and he was in the way when they blasted that tunnel through Feller’s Top. Boulder took his leg clean off.’
‘So where is he now?’
‘No idea. I can find out, though.’
She waited outside the administrative offices while Sven went in and sweet-talked Mrs Pfeiffer, whose favourite word was ‘no’ but she rarely used it on Sven. Everyone across the five coal patches of Lee County loved Sven. He had, along with solid shoulders and fists the size of hams, an air of quiet authority, a twinkle in his eye, which told men he was one of them, and women he liked them, not just in that way. He was good at his job, kind when he felt he needed to be, and he spoke to everyone with the same uncommon civility, whether it was a ragged-trousered kid from the next holler, or the big bosses at the mine. Most days she could reel off a whole list of the things she liked about Sven Gustavsson. Not that she’d tell him.