This Is How I'd Love You (18 page)

She wipes his forehead with a cool cloth and tells him, “
Ça va,
Monsieur Reid. You returned to us. This is all that matters.” He recognizes her kindness but knows how easy it is to lie to an injured man. He feigns sleep and soon it is real.

When he wakes, Rogerson sits beside him.

“They got you on some nice morphine, Reid. Can you tell? We’re all a bit envious of that.”

Charles closes his eyes. His body is heavy, as though he’s turned to lead. He cannot move his head or lift his arms. He smells the sourness that he knows means infection and he hardly has the energy to hope it’s not from his own wound. Foulsom has pulled off the bandages and is checking the drain that he knows must be buried somewhere in what’s left of his leg.

He both does and does not want to see what is left.

Foulsom lays a hand on the bedsheet covering Reid’s good leg. As he walks away, he says to Rogerson, “Still dodgy.”

Rogerson leans close to Charles. “He’s a prick. But he saved you, so I can’t hate him anymore.”

Charles tries to smile. If only to assuage Rogerson’s worry, which is palpable.

S
acha knows the mine has given up fifteen million since 1915. His wife’s cousin, Thomas Wright, rode into this valley as an act of youthful rebellion almost ten years ago. He’d left his family’s home in California, intent on proving that his mother was wrong about his poor manners and sullen expression. His father had deserted them five years earlier, and though he swore he’d never forgive him, Thomas thought he understood. Rumor has it, Thomas visited the red-light district in Kingston, spent three nights and all his money on a girl with a glass eye. He thought she might have loved him, but when his money was gone, she danced with one fellow and let another follow her up the stairs with his hands on her waist.

Thomas stole a bottle of gin from the bar and rode his horse into the star-studded desert, intent on dying, his gun pressed against his hip like an eager lover. He drank until morning, reviewing and extending the list of grievances he’d endured in his twenty-two years. Then, as the sun came up, he discovered that he’d fallen asleep with his face in the dirt and his horse unhitched. He stood, kicked the empty bottle, and reached for his pistol. Instead of shooting himself, now he was intent on killing the ungrateful horse. With his head pounding, Thomas began tracking the beast. It was a miserable morning, with slow-moving flies lingering on his face, the sky nearly white with the summer heat, and no breeze at all. He threw rocks at birds and ached for any small spot of shade. There was no sign of the horse.

Finally, weeping for his own stupidity, yearning for the comforts of home, wondering how he ever thought life could get better, he shot his gun at the side of a rocky cliff. The noise cracked the day open, filling the quiet just after it with fear. Even Thomas was afraid of what might happen next.

But here’s what did: his horse whinnied and ran right out of a deep gash in the cliff, and a heavy piece of rock fell away, throwing a dust cloud into the heat. Where the bullet hit the rock, it revealed a milky white quartz bleeding all through the side of it. Having grown up in California, with rumors of gold fortunes swirling around his cradle, Thomas’s fingers and toes vibrated with the possibility of that ore. He walked slowly toward the horse, lifted its reins from the dirt, and leaned against it, basking in the reassurance of the animal’s deep, steady breath.

Believing the quartz must have been a hallucination, Thomas stood there for a long time, pleading with each and every force he could imagine. The tears he’d already cried stung his cheeks and reminded him of his cowardice. Eventually, though, he gathered his courage and faced the rock again. To his surprise, the quartz was, in fact, there. Startlingly pale against the expanse of brown. Like a shock of lightning trapped in a dark sky. With the horse’s breath still hot and reassuring on his neck, Thomas approached the rock. He laid his hands on the cool face of the ore. From this moment forward, he would be a very rich man and his tears, when they were cried, would never sting his cheeks again but would be caught by a fine linen kerchief, monogrammed with silk thread.

Thomas Wright married Ramona, the girl with the glass eye, and built a large house in Kingston, hoping to fill it with their offspring. When this didn’t happen, he took her to doctors all over the world to find out why. It was during one of these trips that she disappeared—crawled out a bathroom window in Baltimore and hasn’t been seen since.

Thomas swore he would not return to Kingston without her, so he spent his money following the trail of his fugitive wife, the same pistol that he’d shot that desperate morning ten years ago strapped to his hip. The mine in southern New Mexico that continued to fund his quest required a new superintendent at the very same moment Sacha Dench resigned his position at the
Times
. Through family connections, each man learned of the other’s needs.

The miners know of this family connection and have distrusted the newspaperman from New York from the moment he arrived. The first thing they did was begin cuffing their pants again, a practice that every previous superintendent had outlawed. But Sacha didn’t suspect that small nuggets of gold could be smuggled out of the mine, hidden in these cuffs, when the men ascended the shaft, their faces blank and tired.

Despite this new perk, the other consequence of Sacha’s inexperience was a swift decline in morale. Working in the mine, spending twelve hours thousands of feet below ground, requires that each man trust his coworkers. With a naïve superintendent, the men suspect that not only are the others all cuffing a few nuggets for themselves, but that there are other weak spots. Is the hoist man sleeping on the job? Can they be assured that their shift will be returned to the surface on time? Will there be food in the cook tent when they return? Are the tram lines being maintained? Is the spark man stingy with his fuses?

Though Sacha Dench is not a miner, he does know something about human nature. The suspicion and mistrust at the mine are palpable. It reminds him of recent months in the newsroom at the
Times
.

When he arrives just before dusk in dungarees, tall boots, and his own carbide strapped to his head, the miners snicker and tease. This does not bother him. The foreman, Henry, greets him with a handshake and directs him to the crew cart they will ride into the mine. Sacha folds his legs into one of the carts and sits beside Henry. The night shift piles in behind them, and he can smell that few of them have bothered to bathe. Their picks and hammers rattle against the side of the cart as they begin their journey into the tiny black tunnel, carved into the side of the mountain. The air is cool and thin in the tunnel and as they descend an invisible track the miners whistle high-pitched good-byes to the daylight. Sacha closes his eyes, thinking he will adjust to the darkness, but there remains no difference in what he can see whether they are open or shut. The darkness is so complete it’s as though he himself has disappeared. Momentarily, he feels weightless and empty. He clasps his hands in his lap to reassure himself of his own existence.

Hensley’s words still nag at the edges of his thoughts. Has he become a hypocrite? The truth is, he doesn’t want to urge her into a marriage of necessity. Whatever rare happiness she might claim on her own terms might be better than marrying the very louse who assaulted her. But, fearing his own sentimentality, he wrote to Harold so that someone else—someone more practical than he—could help shoulder the burden of persuading her to make a wise decision. Her situation reflects, to some degree, his own failings as a father, his own inability to recognize the perils of ordinary life. For a young girl to grow up without a motherly influence is unfortunate, but surely he could have done more to protect her. Perhaps his own preoccupation with his work has had more dire consequences than ending up here, in this desolate place.

Regardless of the cause, he now doubts his own objectivity. He fears his own cowardice. Despite the shame of Hensley’s situation, he loves her more each day. She is a lively, fearless girl. Her spirit is so much like her mother’s it both soothes and pains him. Olivia’s death often seems so long ago, the phenomenon of being loved receded so quickly, overpowered by the terrible loneliness left in its wake. He often coaxes himself to remember her ways, her mischievous sense of humor, her easy affection, her contagious smile. Though painful, he knows that there are lessons she can still teach him. How to be attentive to the children, how to laugh more easily and often, how to forgive himself when he does not. Somehow, Hensley has emerged every bit as sweet and smart and loving as Olivia. If she were to go now, if he were to watch her train pull out of the station in El Paso on her way to marry the man who defiled her, the drive back to this arid place would be an extraordinary hardship. And every day thereafter.

But this is nonsense. It is utterly irresponsible. He is her father. However he has failed, he knows his duty now must be to see her begin a life of her own. To become settled in a marriage. And how much easier that would be if her mother were alive. She could tell Hensley, with some authority, that real love is not the stuff of cheap novels but, rather, a force to be cultivated and cajoled, separate and apart from desire. Is this what Olivia would say? In the darkness of the tunnel, he wipes at his eyes. A new grief swells as he must acknowledge that he would like to share this burden. Regardless of the pain it might cause her, he wants Olivia to be here now more than ever. To look into his eyes and love him again. Together, they could long to undo what cannot be undone. Together. What a lovely word, he thinks.

Their own courtship had been chaste. He hadn’t even touched her lips with his own until the night of their marriage. But he’d memorized the curve of her lashes, the length of each finger, every freckle on her face, the scent of her breath after tea, the way her nostrils flared when she stifled a giggle, the beads of perspiration that flanked her temples when the sun was hot, the fierce look in her eyes when she disagreed with him. These details accompanied him through the long months of their betrothal.

It’s true that he often infuriated his wife. She always wished he were more diplomatic, less ideological, lighter-hearted. But there was never any doubt of his love for her. He cherished her. He cannot endure the thought that his daughter would be any less treasured by her husband. But he also cannot conjure an honest man who would treasure the mother of a bastard child. The world is not a very imaginative place.

Henry leans close to Sacha and says, only, “Sunrise.” Their cart mates turn on their headlamps and he follows their lead. Now he can see that the walls of the shaft are supported by thick wooden beams overhead. Soon the passage widens and they enter a huge cavern. A half dozen men disembark from the cart and Henry directs them to take their places with their hammers and picks to chip away at the quartz. Henry is a tall man with a thick black beard that covers most of his face. Only his eyes, a startling green, prevent him from being a creature drawn completely from black and white. He watches the miners studiously, directing their steel chisels in his soft voice, then returns to his place beside Sacha.

On the wall hangs a wooden block with a series of black bells that are connected to the hoist man who sits in the small office adjacent to the mine’s entrance. This is the way all messages are delivered between this blackened universe and the lighted world.

The cart keeps moving and the black ahead of them gives way to their headlamps. Sacha’s ears plug with the change in altitude. Their beams throw shadows against the rock. That this whole world exists below the ground they walk on seems as improbable to him as the circus that drove into town.

In the next shaft, the muckers jump out and move toward the shovels that line the wall like single girls at a dance. They confront the piles of loose rock that are waiting to be loaded into the ore carts parked on the adjoining track. In places, the ceiling is so low they have to shovel while nearly doubled over. The noise of the metal shovels scraping against rock echoes into the dark tunnel ahead of and behind them. And as the rock tumbles into the ore cart, there is no room for thought. Sacha wonders that they are not all deaf from the noise. But Henry seems to be speaking to some of the men, gesturing to the carts and then to his watch.

The cart descends farther now, the din swallowed by the steep shaft behind them. Sacha pictures the map of this underground world that hangs on the wall of his office. It is a series of lines, both vertical and horizontal, with shaded sections of ore overlaying the shafts. It could very easily be a map of the subway tunnels in New York. But this is not New York and there is no stop at Times Square.

Finally, the cart yields in an opening no bigger than a child’s fort. This is where the most recent ore has been found. There are only three of them left in the crew cart. Henry turns to face Sacha.

“Mr. Dench, you know our powder man, Amador.”