Red Sky in Morning (16 page)

A
NOTHER WEEK OF WORK
relentless and the earth bared its teeth as if it was angered at the intrusion. The rock was sheared away in spalls of stone that split the air with no concern for a man’s face sending dust that silted their reddened eyes and none of the cutting deep enough despite the calls of Duffy to drive harder. His cigars burned to the butt as he paced in frustration and he cursed the goddamned cut and the useless cunts of Ulstermen and he said they were losing not just days now but weeks.

He disappeared the next morning leaving his deputy in charge, an Irishman called Doyle who carried a heavy foot and kept his face unwashed, the whites of his eyes pure and luminous despite the dust that darkened his face. He ordered the men quietly until a day later Duffy reappeared with men driving horses carting dozens of barrels of black blasting powder while sitting on the back with swinging legs were four face-painted whores.

The men whooped at the sight and that evening they formed brazen queues. Not enough women to go around and only half the men seemed interested anyway, and Coyle watched from the firepit some of the men standing in the queue holding dramatically on to their balls while The Cutter was seen going into the tent twice, and began to queue for a third time until the others protested and a fight ensued.

The next day the women were gone. Near midday the men put down their tools and they left the rock to go below where they watched a group of men begin drilling. They stood atop the rock with hand-held hammers and they beat the bits of the drills into the rock and it dulled their tools and the blacksmith set up station nearby, a man with sorrowful steel eyes and a sad horseshoe moustache, forging and heat-treating and resharpening. Eight blast holes were dug and the dusted rock was spooned out and from down below the workers watched the barrels being brought up, the powder poured in and then a group of men set to tamping. A young man called Stamp stood on the ledge with an iron bar in his hand and a pipe in his mouth and he worked the tamping bar downwards. The sun above a burning coin and the men below stood at the water station drinking. Coyle sluiced the brown water over his head and he wiped his eyes and water dribbled off his dusty beard. The Cutter sat down with his head between his legs. He looked up and took his sleeve and wiped snot from his nose and pointed. There’s a farm over there on the other side of the valley, he said. Coyle turned his head and wiped water out of his eyes.

Chickens?

Worth a looksee.

The next moment there came an explosion and their hands went to their ears and their bodies cringed instinctively as the sound clattered off the valley. They looked up to see but couldn’t see much and they listened incredulous to the rain of rubbled rock. Up on the ridge where Stamp had been standing was now a gout of dark smoke and all about they heard men shrieking. The tampers near him were blown off their feet and they picked themselves up dumbfounded, their hands to their ears as rock hailed all round them. Men below began to rush towards the site and they found Stamp supine, the iron bar three feet long he had been holding blasted clean through the lower flesh of his jaw, up and out through the front of his head, and the bar fell beside a man who stood bleeding, and he picked it up and held it, the item viscid with brain matter, and he looked at the injured man incredulous whose eyes were wide open and his mouth gasping.

There’s Duffy, a man said, and they turned to watch the contractor climbing up to the ledge with Doyle dragging behind. He walked towards the men with heated eyes and he stood over Stamp with his hands on his hips and looked down at him and sucked hard on his cigar. The injured man staring blankly at the sky clouding with cigar smoke, his face rock-dusted and unblinking. Another man was bent behind him examining with his hands the hole in the head and Duffy stuck his toe into the man and pointed down into the valley. Take him down to the tent. Jesus. Did I not tell yez no smoking.

When the smoke and dust had cleared a man began to shout and then they found another, a man called Ruddy pinned dead under a rock. He had been blown thirty feet to the other side of the ridge, his legs flattened and a boulder crushing his chest and an eye hanging loose outside his head. The men winced when they saw him and another got sick and two more got iron bars and tried to prise the rock and when that failed they got jacks and worked the boulder free.

In the camp Stamp was alive but by evening he was dead and they made a wooden box for each of the men. They dug a hole in the ground and Duffy looked at it and told them to widen it just in case and they put the coffins in, their feet pointed east and their heads pointing west, and they filled the earth leaving some room beside them. The men asked permission to mourn the dead men and Duffy sucked on his cigar and said you can do whatever you like after dark but it’s back to business tomorrow and they went to the shanty and they drank till they slept and in the morning they resumed work, the earth above the dead men unrested.

E
ACH DAY THE SUN
a fury that worked the valley into a dim heat. The cut deepened and in the air the dust hung permanent and one by one the men began to weaken until shadows of men they became. Some of them took injury from falling rocks loosed above them but it was the tiredness that took its toll. He watched a man called Henry drop down beside him, his lips blue and his eyelids brown, and he put a hand over his mouth to see if he was still breathing. He yanked the man up as others gathered round and then Duffy was standing over him.

Coyle motioned towards Duffy. This fella here’s sick so he is, he said.

Get you back to work, said Duffy.

This fella needs water.

I won’t tell you again.

The Cutter came forward and they dragged the man away to take water and Duffy just stared and then he walked away. The man picked himself up like some elderly convalescent and he took a drink of water in a shaking hand and then he went back to work.

N
O WORK ON A SUNDAY
and the men lay about the shanty like bovines insensitive, heavy-footed and their eyes dark and their hats hung low. Those that bothered to get up from their beds had cups full of whiskey and they gambled and groused at one another while a man strangled a fiddle till he was told to shut up. A narrow stream ran through the valley and some of them washed their clothes standing naked by the side of it plashing water on their tired bodies.

Coyle gambled with the men and when he lost four dollars he put down his cards and got up. Boys I’m off for a walk. The lingering of a dream in his head and he nosed into the trees, their trunks skinny and snaking skywards and everywhere was green. A dark-eyed junco squatted on a branch near him and he stood and looked at it, never saw a bird like it, and the leaves all around dappled and dazzling in sunlight and he walked up the hill till the sky widened and he saw in the valley below the white spread of a farm. In the lap of a nearby field he could make out two duck-egg-c
olored
carts and he sat and watched the sky broad and blue and he turned and walked back the way he came, inhaling the scent of the forest all the while before he got to the shanty.

He found The Cutter and sat down on a log beside him and took some whiskey in his cup and drank it.

Goddamn rat kept running over me while I was asleep last night, he said.

Some of the men nodded. Aye, said Chalky. Been noticing an increase in them hoors.

When I was a wean, The Cutter said, we used to smoke em out. We’d plug up all the holes but for one and then we’d light a wee fire and the rats would all come running out, hundreds of them, and we’d have the dogs there waiting. The dogs went wild so they did.

Some of the men laughed. A man staggered over from a circle of gamblers and he took out his cock and began to piss in front of them. The Cutter looked up. Are ye making me a proposition?

The man’s eyes slanted. What?

Would you ever fuck off with that skinny thing and go an piss someplace else.

I’m pissin here so I am.

Coyle stood up and went to the man and pushed him hard with the flat of his hand in the face. The man staggered till he fell over on his back and a dark stain began to spread on his leg and some of the men laughed and others let out a cheer. Coyle sat back down on the log and the man picked himself up and he stared at Coyle before stumbling away.

That’ll learn ye, The Cutter said.

Coyle took a stick and began to scratch with it odd shapes in the ground like he was trying to divine the runes of some obscure language housed within him.

T
WO DAYS LATER CAME
first rain. He watched the sky swell and roll darkly over the valleys and he whispered to himself, make it come. Cloud shadow darkened the swirling dust and the sky thundered above them. Then it came, rain thick and pounding, spilled as if burst from a belly, and the men stopped their work. Some of them took off their hats and arced their faces and opened their mouths and some of them smiled and light returned to their eyes, narrow smiles of happiness but inside them a turmoil of sadness that bestowed on them again their humanity. Two young men began to wrestle with each other, a hand on each other’s collar and they went down to the ground laughing. Duffy watched the men from above on his horse and he looked up at the sky and he turned and rode away to the trees. The Cutter put down his pick and began to take off his clothes. He appointed his mouth like a stoup to receive the rain and he peeled his tattered garments, rumbles of laughter from his dirty black chest and naked in the puddling dust he lay. Coyle smiled and sat on a rock and he looked at an embankment of cloud. It reached down to meet the hills and he saw the ground beneath his boots soften, watched it receive the rain until it began to wear, drop by drop, and the ground was no longer what it was and began to wash away and he had the thought that all of life in the end was like this.

The Cutter stood up and his body began to shake and Coyle saw he was starting to dance, his knees furling and his elbows taking wing till he was caught up in the fury of some demented jig, the melody and cadence of which were known only to his inner self, and he was howling and the others began to watch and struck by it too they began to strip, peeling their clothes until they were revealed in their nakedness, soiled and sodden and they linked their arms and they kicked their feet into the air and they danced and they danced and they danced.

T
HAT DAY OF RAIN
was singular and the days warmed again. The land returned to dust and in the valley below the fill became a minor hill, rising imperceptibly at first over the stone culvert, then reaching slowly towards the leafy shoulders of the valley. Heat from the sky and heat from the earth and one by one on the valley floor the horses and mules began to fall. They would sink to their knees and lie down still, eyes glossed and distant. The men would holler and boot them in the ribs but the animals looked back with eyes that spoke a singular language understood by the men. Each animal was shot and its corpse dragged away and its meat when it could be eaten was butchered and cut to shreds and jerked.

He bent to the ground and broke it with his pick and he came back up and saw his father backbent and brushing smooth the sable flank of a horse. Here gimme that. The man pointing to the dandy brush.

Again, loping up the road, the dog circling and nosing his heels. Long legs and the sky low as if it were coming down to meet him and his father not bothered by the rain. Never was. You’re as soon as wet as you’re dry again and you’re as soon as dry as wet again. No point fighting it.

After the rain the world glossed new and the air smelling damply.

T
HEY SAW IN THE NEAR
dark the stranger had more teeth missing than remaining and he eyed up the men with the giddy look of a hemmed-in hound let loose. When he spoke they figured him for a fool, his voice taking flight with rampant enthusiasm though he was an Irishman like all of them and so they took to him and they asked him what part he was from. He told them he was from Kerry and he had come from the canal digs, walked some forty miles finding food just the twice and he had to steal it once from a dog and the dog wasn’t too happy about it and another time he had to go into a house but fuck them. There were terrible things he had to get away from but the weather was nice and sure it wasn’t too bad sleeping outdoors though it was a bit cold aye at night and that’s all there was to it. Here I am, Maurice is the name, two shites and a shovel. When he spoke he looked about the ground as if he were looking for something he dropped and when he finished they saw he was eyeing up the stew in the firepit.

What kind a things are you talking about? said Chalky.

Sickness, Maurice said. They got it bad. But I ain’t hanging about to get it for no man so I’m not. I’ve been walking for three days. Wild arse burn on me so I have now gimme a hanch of that supper. He produced a tin plate from the backseat of his pants and pitched it forward in front of him. Two shites and a shovel, he said.

P
INK LIPS LAUGHING
on the black faces of the men when they saw the fella slink off to the woods ass-clutching. A bony kid called Glacken and he stayed there for hours and they became grim-faced when he returned and went to the ground and did not get up. Two of the men carried him to the shanty. He groaned throughout the night and in the morning his face was puckered and his eyes were sunken glass and he gasped for water and the men gave it to him but the kid found no relief. Duffy came to look and he told the men to clear a tent for the kid and they put him in there shivering and stomach-clutching, for what Duffy feared most he had seen evident in the symptoms of the man. The workers asked if he would spare one of them to stay, for the kid needed nursing, but Duffy said he would not and it would do neither him nor them any good at all and they left Glacken in the morning to his moaning.