And the Hills Opened Up (6 page)

9

The stagecoach guards all smelled like beer and whiskey and they stumbled clumsily into the street, unsure of where to take their dead friend.  Father Lynch followed the group at a distance, his thin lips pursed in distaste, and said a silent prayer that the men would not drop the coffin between them, the impact of which would surely split the cheap pine contraption Leg Jameson had the nerve to call a coffin.  The killer had already been led away to the general store, where he’d be kept until the next morning.  Soon enough, Johnny Miller would be rolling back through the hills toward a noose of his own and it would all mean nothing, absolutely nothing, and the Devil would be laughing mightily at the never ending stupidity of man. 

“We should ask Hollis where to keep him.”

“We should just load him back into the wagon.  Ain’t no money box inside it anymore.”

“May draw flies, though.”

“Chester always was a ripe one.”

The men laughed and Father Lynch winced—what sort of name was Chester, anyhow?  That sounded like the type of name that laid out of the path to damnation for a child before it could take its first step.  Chester.  The name of a born sinner.

“All right,” one of the guards said.  “Let’s go ask.”

The four men staggered toward the Cooke House with their shared load.  Father Lynch sighed and rubbed his temple—if there was a more unpleasant man in the world than Revis Cooke, who harbored the duel sins of greed and arrogance in staggering abundance, Father Lynch did not want to meet him.  Mr. Cooke was enough unpleasantness for anyone to encounter in the skin of one man.

The stagecoach guards dropped the coffin and conferred with each other in the way of nervous, half-intoxicated men.  Finally, after some heated debate, one of their number was made to go up to the house and knock on the front door.  The metal door was so stout the man’s fist barely made a noise against it, only a soft
thud-thud-thud
Father Lynch had to tilt his head to hear.  Nothing happened for a moment, but as the man made to knock again the door’s peek-a-boo slot was thrown back and a pair of oil-black eyes appeared.   

“Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you, sir, but is Hollis Wells in there with you?”

The black eyes narrowed. 

“Yes, he is.  We are tallying accounts.  What do you want?”

The guard, now much closer to sober, took off his hat and wrung it in his hands.

“Well, sir, there’s been a difficulty.  We were at the saloon across the road there and one of our men was shot and killed.”

“I see.  We wondered at the gunfire.”

The guard nodded.

“The killer was unprovoked and we’re going to take him to Rawlins in the morning for trial.”

“That sounds in order.  What do you need Mr. Wells for, at this very minute?”

“Well, sir, we was wondering what to do with the body.  With Chester’s body.”

Cooke blinked again from behind his metal door.  Father Lynch wondered what could make a man so given toward the indoors, so fearful of God’s bright firmament.  Was it a love for money alone that could wreak such havoc upon a man?  Or was there a greater twisting inside Cooke which required four walls to keep it at bay?

“Go ahead and stow the remains in the wagon,” Cooke said.  “I suppose he’ll keep well enough on wheels.”   “No,” Father Lynch called out, stepping toward the house.  “Bring the coffin to the church.  Chester’s first night departed should be spent in the house of God.  I’ll watch over the body.”

The stagecoach guards startled at the priest’s voice, having forgotten his presence.  Cooke snorted through the door.

“That’s fine with me, Father.  Now leave us alone.”

The peek-a-boo bar slammed home.  The guards looked in directionless befuddlement at the priest, a look he’d grown to know all too well.  He raised his hand and lo, they followed.

Father Lynch had them set the coffin down at the rear of the church, in the standing room behind the pews.  The men stepped back from the coffin, hats in hand, and stared balefully at the floor.  The spirits on their breath had turned hot and sour and their clothes still smelled of the road, like horses and juniper and sweat.  Inside the church, they did not seem like good or bad men.  Just four mortal souls, making their path through the world as best they could.

“Thank you, gentleman.  You can go back to the saloon.  Your friend should be fine here for the night.”

The dejected guards mumbled their thanks and went out the door.  Father Lynch made a sign of the cross over the coffin and said the Lord’s Prayer, as much to comfort himself as the dead man.  He’d presided over hundreds of funerals during his career and spent countless nights sitting up with the dead, both with family members and alone.  Many folks were made uneasy by the dead, frightened by the mirror held up to their own eventual future, but Lynch was not.  He’d watched a great many men, women, and children die over the past forty years.  He’d seen the light fade from their eyes and how their chests rose slowly, fell slowly, then ceased to move altogether.  He’d bathed the dead and dressed them in their Sunday finest.  Combed their hair.  Rolled their eyes shut.  He’d felt them stiffen beneath his touch, their bodies seized by the clenched fist of rigor mortis.  And, as they were lowered into their final resting place, Lynch had done his best to speak a few words of comfort above their mortal bodies as their souls traveled toward the Lord, who alone could sit in judgment upon them.

Truly, Father Lynch didn’t mind the company of the dead in his little church, which was always so empty during the long nights.  He retrieved the bottle of gin from the back room, took a pull, and brought a chair back out with him to the sanctuary, where he sat with the coffin before him.

Outside, the descending sun broke through the clouds and brightened the room.  Father Lynch imagined he was sitting among the clouds, bathed in the sun’s white light as he drifted above the world.  How beautiful it would be to look down upon creation from such a height.  The death of this one man would seem even less than it did now, nearly insignificant in comparison to the world’s mountains, lakes, deserts, forests, and frothing oceans. 

And the wind blowing across it all, like God’s very breath.

At six o’clock Father Lynch finished his drink, put on his hat, and headed out the door.  Lynch didn’t feel like cooking and
Chester didn’t seem to mind if he stepped out.

Across the way, the girls had come back outside the Runoff Saloon, waiting for the Saturday night rush.  Tonight the miners would drink and carouse and lay with whores.  Tomorrow, twenty or so would filter into his church, bleary-eyed and penitent, fully expecting the approaching week to be exactly the same as the previous.  The pattern of a mining camp was simple enough, based as it was on a great amount of work followed by a brief, stormy period of revelry, the entire town exhaling with the beginning of each shift and inhaling once again as the miners returned, eager to spend their salaries and hold women so much softer than the rock they spent their days hacking loose. 

Father Lynch squinted as he walked slowly down the street, hoping to find Ingrid Blomvik among the girls placed along the Runoff Saloon’s front porch.  She’d seemed so sad at her confession earlier that afternoon, so full of mourning for her dead husband.  He’d wanted to console and bed her at the same time, to combine his heat with her own and pray for God’s forgiveness after.  But the sad girl from Minnesota was not out among the other doves, which did seem to coo to each other as they fiddled with their elaborate garments. 

The priest stopped in front of the Copper Hotel, went up the porch steps, and stepped inside.  He found it cooler here than in the church, with the comforting murmur of men speaking to each other in a variety of tongues.  The hotel’s dining room, which also served as its lobby, was large enough to accommodate forty souls, with a rectangular second floor balcony rising above it from which the tenants could watch the action below.  Father Lynch bought a plate and sat down at a small table in a corner of the room, content to let the numerous conversations wash over him as he prayed and began to eat. 

He was well into his overcooked steak when a young man
with green eyes and a shock of red hair ran into the hotel, breathing hard and waving his arms.  “Three men,” the boy shouted, looking wildly about the room with an oddly triumphant shine to his eyes.  “Three men dead at the Dennison Mine!”

Chairs scraped on the wood floor as the diners got to their feet and began shouting questions.  The boy smiled at the attention and began babbling away about three miners with their throats ripped out and blood everywhere.  Pushing his unfinished steak away, Father Lynch felt a coldness settle upon his shoulders and perch there like a pink-eyed vulture, flapping its broad wings as it prepared to fly.

10

The top level of the mine was empty, the miners having abandoned their stations to run off and seek a sight of greater interest.  The foreman could easily picture how the news of three men killed would have spread swiftly throughout the mine, drawing the men like ants to honey and suspending operations in every dark corner of the hillside.  The sort of delay Hank Chambers would not have allowed had he been on hand and not lying abed with fever like a wilting pansy.       

But done was done and they had a new situation on their hands.  Chambers hooked the strap of his rifle across his shoulder and started climbing down a vertical access shaft, one hand free to grasp the metal ladder sunk into the rock wall and the other minding the oil wick lamp.  At the second level, he stepped off the ladder and looked around, calling out to anyone within shouting distance.  No sound of metal ringing against rock, or the grind of ore carts rolling along the tunnels.  Levels Two and Three each had adits cut into the south side of the mountain, with their own set of haul wagons waiting outside to remove the ore.  The tunnels to each of these exits ran a quarter of a mile long and kept the mules busy rolling out full carts and returning them empty.

Chambers returned to the vertical shaft and paused, listening to the feathery rustle of bats overhead.  A wall of loose rock, blasted small enough it could be removed by hand, lay at a slant against the room’s far wall.  Chambers studied the stope and wondered if there was something he was missing here.  A miner who knew what he was doing could walk up that angled pile of rock easily enough and pick through the rubble for a piece that suited him—but if you made a wrong step and shifted the pile too much, the whole mess could break loose and roll out under you, burying you quick and deep.

“Stop thinking, Hank,” the foreman said aloud.  “You’re letting the fever spook you.”  The soles of Chambers’ boots, wet from groundwater, slipped against the ladder’s rungs as he climbed downward, sending the oil sloshing inside his lantern and placing an even greater strain on his clinging right arm.  None of this was a new sensation—he’d been climbing up and down slick ladders half his life—but the fever had weakened Chambers considerably, dampening his palms and dripping sweat into his eyes. 

The ground came up sooner than he’d expected.  Chambers leaned his weight back, ignoring the rubbery nature of his arm, and lowered the lantern to get a better look at what he’d touched foot upon.

Four men looked back at him.  All claw fingered, all staring upward with glassy eyes.  Packed together like fish in a barrel and dead as it got.

Chambers swore beneath his breath, his voice strange to his own ears.  He hooked the lantern to a rung above his head and gripped the ladder with both hands, wanting to fall less than ever.  He recognized all four miners, though not by name.  They’d all come recent to Red Earth, arriving after the spring thaw and looking for work. 

And they’d died trying to escape it, so panicked they made migrating lemmings seem downright rational. 

“Hey there,” Chambers shouted in the direction of the dead men, hoping his voice would carry through into the third level.  “Anybody hear me?”

The dead men gaped back at him, silent.  Chambers looked closer, searching for the mark of a bullet or a knife.  He wondered if they’d suffocated somehow, but the air smelled clean enough to him. 

“Sorry, fellas, but I need to get through.”

The foreman brought his boot down on the chest of the nearest miner, pushing on him with nearly all his weight.  A rib snapped but the body hardly budged. 

“Goddamn.  Y’all got wedged in there.”

Chambers recalculated his aim and brought his boot down on the forehead of the man farthest back.  This time, something gave way and the body slid backward.  He kicked the miner again and kept his full weight on the body until it fell away.  The other bodies held their spots in the shaft for a moment, waiting for gravity to catch up, then they dropped as well, landing with a thud not six feet down. 

Chambers unhooked the lamp and continued downward, the rifle banging uncomfortably against his shoulder.  He felt a powerful urge to change direction—to climb right the hell back up to the surface, have Bonnie pack her things, and head straight to Rawlins, where they could catch any train heading east or west.  He owed the Dennison Mining Company his living, not his death. 

He resisted the urge and dropped to the ground.  The four men he’d kicked loose had landed facedown, exposing their backs to the yellow light of his lantern.  One had a nasty wound beneath his shoulder blades, as if he’d been punctured by something sharp as he climbed.  The others had no such wound, yet their necks were broken.  Either the short fall down the shaft ladder had done that or something with an awfully strong grip.  Chambers peered up the exit shaft once again, considering the ladder rungs.  He heard his wife in his mind, telling him to git.  But he also heard his father’s tobacco coarsened voice, telling him it’d be a worse hell yet if he didn’t see to the fate of his men, whatever that may be.

The old man won out one more time.  Chambers turned right and started down the tunnel, heading toward the new room where Bear Tollackson would have been working with his crew.  He saw a candle burning in the distance, still far off, and it distracted him from the next body till he nearly tripped over it, chasing the breath from his lungs and placing another curse upon his tongue.

In 1863, Hank Chambers’ father, Robert Chambers, returned home from the War Between the States with one less arm, wild eyes, and a love of gruesome tales.  In the evenings he’d drink rotgut whiskey as he sat before the fire, waiting for Mother to go to bed, and when she did he’d call Hank over and start talking, speaking more freely than he ever had before the war, and out would pour story after story of severed limbs, festering wounds, and men cut down by cannon fire.  So many men killed they heaped upon each other in great waves, a sea of dead covering entire fields and littering the earth like grains of sand upon a beach.  Men screaming for their wives, mothers, cornfield loves.  Men laughing crazily as surgeons removed their limbs right before their eyes.  Men crawling over each other, begging to die in the mud while frightened horses ran in every direction, trampling the fallen beneath their panicked hooves.  Men dying in a deep silence worse than any scream.

What the foreman encountered on the lowest level of the Dennison Mine resembled his father’s war stories, only compacted and pressed into one long tunnel with a few open rooms along the way.  Dead men strewn about like forgotten toys: their eyes wide with horror, their blood pooling on the ground, and the chilled air reeking of a slaughter house’s coppery tang.  Some had tried to run, some had tried to fight.  Many had their throats torn, as if they’d been gotten at by a bear or a wolf.  Their eyes bulged, frog-like, and he could not help but wonder what ugly thing they’d seen in their final earthly moments.

Chambers tied his handkerchief over his mouth and picked his way through the crowded tunnel.  He entered the first open room and found more of the same—several men had climbed the stope here, risking burial by rock in their terror.  The foreman ticked off names as he identified the fallen, counting the dead into the high thirties before losing heart and giving up the reckoning.  The oil lamp burned richly in his hand, hissing softly, and he wondered briefly if all this was another dream, a terrible, lucid fever dream, but the sweat dripping down his brow said otherwise, how it stung his eyes and caused him to squint as if he were looking into the sun. 

The next tunnel was the worst yet, as if the tunnel had caved in except the rubble was the bodies of dead men, not rock.  There were so many bodies their collective bulk would have stuffed the tunnel shut except something powerfully strong had torn through them, boring through their mass like a drill bit cutting through limestone.  The resulting mess caused Chambers to pull up outside the tunnel and turn his head away—he would have retched had he’d eaten anything in the last two days.

“Jesus,” he whispered, a shudder sweeping through him.  “Jesus Almighty.”

He could hear the tunnel’s ceiling drip. 

Drip, drip, drip.

The opened gore, falling from up to down.  The split intestines and ruptured veins.  The human body spilling forth with all its stored wonders.

Chambers set his lantern at his feet and adjusted his rifle by its strap.  His shoulder, unused to the strain, ached from wearing the gun.  He focused on the minor pain, closing his eyes and hissing through his teeth.  He would not be going through that tunnel.  That was too much to ask any man.  This would be as far he got—let the sheriff come down here and finish the investigation.  Let him sort—

A scream pierced the silence, as sudden and electrifying as a bolt of lightning landing at his feet.  A man’s scream.

A living man.

Chambers’ chin dropped against his chest.  He’d heard a scream like that only once before, when a coal tunnel had partially collapsed and buried a man up to his waist in several tons of rock, pulverizing everything below his belt. 

The screamer repeated himself and Chambers turned back to the dripping tunnel.  He picked his lamp off the floor and climbed inside, setting his knees on a man’s shoulders and scrambling forward.  He’d gotten about three yards into the tunnel when he felt the wetness dripping onto his back and the bodies shifting beneath him.  He tried not to imagine what fragile strings held the dead above him in place, what it would feel like if they came loose and buried him among them.