The Rock Here Is Solid

Short Story

It’s no fresh revelation that the sparkle of a rock can ruin a man’s life more than it might ever enrich it. There’s also truth in that a man must ruin the rock in turn, and I can verify they are far from indifferent in this exchange, knowing that bits of itself are within us, too, our blood and bones. Drill and blast and it sees light for the first time since God stuck it there, a flash like a burst sun and then dull torchlight until we’ve gone back out. The rock prefers it that way, without our light. But as far as man is concerned—and I’m not talking the toil that breaks his back, but it’s a different thing, going underground, it takes a special sort—be it gold or silver it is a preference of ours to have it illuminated, in some fashion. Our blood and bones.

The rock here is solid, the thickness makes a challenge. The Shield, and it supports the heartiest of trees, a blind-dark carpet of balsam and spruce. Not so dark as the mines, though, I promise you. And it is ancient.

You working men don’t dig for the benefit of yourselves directly. We have a romantic notion of the ones before us who were fool enough to try it on their own, those unkempt bastards squatting with pans at rivers’ edges or staking the virgin earth hoping to hell they found the right spot. You, the majority of the diggers and blasters, with your stulls and chutes, powder kegs and ore carts—the smarter sort, work for a company, they already found the spot and that’s what they have over you and although you know it you earn your wage, ‘cause there’s no guarantee of anything else. It might cross your mind to stick a bit of prize rock in your pocket they deem their property that you did rightly dig, but that’s your ass.

I don’t pan, nor blast. Once you’ve carved the hole, dug what you’re paid to dig, I go in after. I enjoy the solitude of the dark dust, and the prizes vary. Not all of it comes out with me.

Just past the rear of my property there hides a long abandoned adit, made during the silver rush, 1870s or thereabouts. The only evidence it’s there at all is the burned out cabin you may have taken lunch in, and a jut of stone, behind which someone pushed a boulder to close up the entrance. Of the cabin, the remaining timber is all rotted and covered in moss and lichen, the caved-in roof surely hides some personal effects but those are left alone. I know this place is a grave.

The Shield hides many secrets. To discover one I carried my pickaxe through the crack in the cliff wall, my oilcloth bag and a lamp. It’s a tight squeeze, and the rifle slung across my back got caught on a limb of jackpine that grew beside the mouth. I tugged it free and no harm had come to it.

A mine is the darkest place on earth that the living can witness, except maybe the bottom of the ocean but as I haven’t seen it I can’t verify. Only the rolling surface, only twice. This is a dark the earth provides. I could feel it on me as if the shield produced it like sweat. My lamp, the burning kerosene, lifts the weight enough I could move my legs. Perhaps I longed for the choke.

Puddles of rusted water along the abandoned track. The rail itself was torn up but the ties have been left behind for me to walk along. In spots the punked wood broke and squished. Eventually I came to a hill of rubble. Stuff dumped of no perceived value, no lead or silver, or not enough worth hauling out. This adit had no false floor, that was clear, and my steps became more confident. Before venturing in, I had inquired into the history of it but could find no maps or notes on the books, which is not uncommon a thing. I often wonder if this particular hole had been found just a mile south, on my property—it was my grandfather’s at the time—how different my life would’ve gone, but that’s luck.

Along the wall a strewn crate of dynamite still bore the label fresh as if newly painted. The darkness preserved it. Deeper inside there lay an abandoned pair of denim pants I nod to. Both a waymarker and a reminder. My light is the only light that bit of cotton has seen since you closed up the mouth of the place, and the blue is only faded from the abuse it was woven for. A yellowish tint to the fade. The pair I wore that day might’ve been identical, decades apart.

I don’t know how long I walked before coming to a collapse. There was space enough to climb over but I decided to stay and go through the rubble. A breeze hit me as I picked choice stones. It was refreshing on my skin but had a sulphuric tone, a rotten breath.

“Oldest rocks in the world,” I said to nothing. Didn’t know if I was wrong or right but they felt ancient in my hand.

The breeze drew me. Like getting pulled by a lead that attached to my spine. A great mouth huffed rancid breath. My eyes watered. Somehow I knew if I had a canary I’d be rushing to flee, but the opposite urge had me dropping the stones, climbing the mess and walking deeper.

A few yards. The end of the adit. It was marred by pickaxe and blast marks, but it seemed a solid wall. Above me there was nothing, no ventilation, only rock and wood. Where the breeze of stink had come from was a mystery that ran sweat down my neck.

The light I held cast shadows over the granite, exposing more jagged marks as I lifted my arm and approached. I followed a crack with my fingertips and found a split in the rock hardly fat enough for a man’s hand. And it was cold. It gasped as I knelt to it, that stench in my face, but I couldn’t move. It had spoke to me. Strange fluid began to seep, oily and thick. Not water at all, not grease from a pipe, I couldn’t name the stuff but it coated the fingers I held to the crack.

And my hand was swallowed.

Did the rock ever know precisely what I was doing or where I came from, and would it have cared at all? It was cold under the rubble, yet insulated from the world. A timelessness. But I doubted if I was dead, for all the piercing cold on my limbs and immovable fingers, and through the thing that had been me there was a bubbling concourse, though I could not say for sure if it was a finger or a stomach or my own jaw that felt the breath of the earth that boiled me cold.

A man sat across the drift, the rocks no longer weighed me but I was as still as they would make me. His helmet covered his face. His calves were wrapped in cloth and boots thick with mud. It was a soldier’s helmet. Lamplight gone yet I saw him dimly as if he sat at a distance from a fire.

     VD check.

     But I’m a married man.

     Married men get the clap just the same.

A rail track beneath my feet—not my own. Younger and sturdier bones walked along it, next a lumber cart, horse-pulled along the track. He had a missing finger. He walked past the lean-to, sloshing through rain and another man sat sheltered, sharpening the teeth of a saw and he’d use it later to sever the finger in an argument about a card game. The trees they felled were turned to timbers and they hauled them from the mill to the horse cart and I was walking again. Beneath my feet the ties turned to

     a trench bottom and I couldn’t hear my boots for the wraps at my ears, but I felt a number of irregular vibrations with every step like a hundred feet walked with me and the ground shook from somewhere else, so strong they might be felt all the way home

     on a train and watched Superior pass by broad as the ocean.

     Your hands shake so bad you can’t pack a pipe.

     Nose gets so full of shit.

     Can you swing a pick?

     Shovel that muck boys.

Muck follows me everywhere.

Maybe that’s what’s bubbling me now. The man in the helmet still crouches against blast-scarred rock and he tells me you gotta worry about the gas

     there’s a crack in the face and a terrible black mud seeps out from it but it has no shine. It’s where the dark comes from, he tells me. I know it’s what boils me but there’s no movement I can make to stop it.

Are you a miner? I ask. I don’t know how.

     Nothing left to mine.

     Surely they know somewhere worth blasting.

     Nothing. You’ve forgotten me?

     I could never forget you.

     You’ve always been drawn to the dark. Burying yourself over there, burying yourself here. Does your hand still shake?

Everything is too thick to shake.

There’s no fortune to be made, and the earth is indifferent to my plight but not to itself. It wants to never be torn into again. This was not the darkest place on earth, and I knew it and I had denied it. It knows it enough to brag. My brothers and I learned it when they dropped their tools to go and blast different earth. I boil in it, that failed adventure. The stone seeps and I remember as I choke. All of us swallowed up.

     You brought the rifle home.

Not much else to bring but thoughts. I can’t admit it with words but he knows. The romantic notions all gone and rotten. Treasures to be dug up

     gold or silver it is a preference of ours to have it illuminated, in some fashion. Our blood and bones.