Abandon

SIXTY-ONE

I

t took eight miners to hoist the boulder—seven hundred pounds of solid granite that ignited back cracking and groans. They started in the chamber, fifteen yards back, freighting it slowly over the rock, carefully accelerating to jog as they neared the iron door.

The collision was tremendous. The front third of the boulder shivered off and broke the feet of three men.

The surface of the door had barely caved.

The Godsend’s cager grabbed a hammer shotgun leaning against the wall, sited up the door, fired a shell of buckshot.

As the metal sparked, other men drew their revolvers and rifles, hammers squeezing back, levers cocking, the mine exploding in a cacophony of gun-fire and filling with an acrid haze.

When the shooting stopped, the door stood defiant, the metal covered in silver chinks but no real damage done, except for the young man who lay quivering on the floor, a hole through his cheek, blood frothing out of his mouth onto the rock in a pink geyser.

Voices rose up, growing louder, competing to be heard.

Stetler held up two shadowgees and hollered for silence, but no one listened in the swarm of shouting men.

“We’re all gonna peg out now.”

“Better save the lump oil.”

“Keep chargin the door.”

“Used to could go that way, but the shoot’s caved in.”

“No food, no water.”

“Preacher left us in the soup!”

“Gonna run out a light!”

“Hobble your lips!”

“Don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Meanwhile, Bessie McCabe stood in the center of the chamber, screaming for Harriet again, screaming until she couldn’t breathe, until she felt like she was suffocating on choke damp, the chaos only stoking the hysteria in her head.

She overloaded, spotted the small boulder, fell to her knees, and crawled toward it.

She heard the miners shooting again, babies screaming, someone praying nearby.

Bessie got up on her knees, found two handholds in the rock, and, with every ounce of strength and zero hesitation, slammed her head down into the boulder. She heard the crack before she felt it, and blood ran between her eyes. When she came to, the cavern was inverted and spinning. She struggled back onto her knees, located the handholds, and managed two more blows before losing consciousness again. The next time she came around, she knew she’d done the job. A crowd of revolving, blurry faces surrounded her, and their voices and the gunshots and weeping and shouting all blended into a steady rush like the noise of a waterfall.

Her head lay in a warm, expanding pool, and she knew it was her blood and hoped it meant the end, thinking only of her daughter now, praying the injuns hadn’t gotten her, and that wherever she awoke, Harriet would be there, too.

As her brain seized, she went back almost ten months, to a February morning on the plains of west Kansas, she and Harriet aboard a Union Pacific train chugging to Denver.

Staring off in the distance, she’d seen them lifting out of the horizon like a bank of clouds, thought they were coming into weather until she overheard another passenger say to his companion, “Have a look at the Snowy Range.”

And as she died on the floor of that mine on Christmas night, she relived with a sort of bewildered nostalgia all the excitement she’d felt, watching the Front Range rise and rise as the train steamed west, a dream and a dare at once.

She’d pulled Harriet into her lap and pointed out the window. “That’s where Daddy is and where we’re goin. That’s our future, sweet pea.”

And she’d believed it, too.

With all her heart.