Читать книгу The Green Age of Asher Witherow - M Allen Cunningham - Страница 8

IT IS A TUESDAY IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1950 AS I WRITE THIS. I AM no longer young, to say the least, and these recollections have come whistling through my ancient brain like wind-wraiths. Even these early years, though I thought I’d get them down without much trouble, perturb me in some faint manner. Might it be that even back then we should have caught the malignant whiff in that valley air? But if so, how? Ah, I mustn’t get started on that—that’s idle thinking. There’s no rearranging things now. Though the slightest recollection stirs up a terrific haunting, I know one can’t expect much of memory, whose utility is limited. In my old hands I turn the pages of a book where a Greek poet writes that every day on this earth begins and ends in the mind, the dawn occurring on one side of your head, dusk on the other. And I think it must be a good thing that I’ve read this only toward the end of my life, for how lost it might have made me in my years of learning.

My earliest Nortonville memory is father’s smell as he entered the house at night, an odor like wet burlap and dead animal. I remember the grind of his washing barrel as it scudded across our floor: wood against wood; his naked perch on the barrel’s rim, black above his neckline, white beneath, scooping water from between his knees; the plashing as mother washed his back.

I remember the growl of the breaker. I woke each morning to its wheel-and-shaft clamor, like a terrible grinding of teeth. I remember the gray smell as mother shoveled the coal in our stove. And I remember the culm banks, steaming in the June sun, slothing from here to there. They rose on the edge of town like charred monuments: black lopsided pyramids. Mother loved the shimmer-sound those banks made when they moved. She said it reminded her of the beaches in Wales, the seawater ebbing back from the rocky shore. She closed her eyes sometimes and listened to it, muted as it was beyond the squawk of chickens.

Early one April morning, 1863, father had awakened to find mother standing at the window in her peach chemise, shuddering with a horror she couldn’t name. He coaxed her back to bed and bore her convulsions the whole night through. The next evening when he returned from the works he found her seated on the stoop. She was pawing her belly and weeping tearlessly but with abandon. Believing it to be a spiritual ailment, he read to her from the letters of the Apostle: “But though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day,” and she strained to find comfort in the old cadences. But her melancholy was incurable and the paranoiac fits bulged in time with her growing belly. She had believed herself fruitless. The new roundness of her stomach could barely convince her that this haunting, as she called it, was maternal and not demonic. For the next seven months mother quavered, soothed only by readings from the New Testament. Her torment would not fully subside till I was delivered from her womb.

Under the shadow of Mount Diablo, with a terrible warble which filled the little company house, Abicca Witherow squeezed me into the world. The labor began one indigo morning when she spasmed awake in tears. Then she struggled an entire day and night, clear to the following afternoon. The midwife, Sarah Norton, darkened my parents’ door as a bulk of shadow. She had the stout hands and mannish arms of one who pried at wombs for hours on end, and wore a string slung crosswise on her breast, dangling with pouches of fresh and dried herbs. Tisanes, roborants, analeptics, caustics, tonics, and salves—all of old-world or Indian concoction. She put her mouth to mother’s twitching ear.

“First thing is to calm those nerves, dearie.” She gave four pouches to father. “Each in a separate pot. Boiled.” And as he dashed out, she stood smiling down upon her tremulous patient. “We’re bursting, aren’t we, dearie? The little thing’s eager for air. Here’s a comfort for you.”

Her black hair stranded downward as she bent and slipped hooks from eyes, spread open the belly of her own blouse, bunched the undershirt clear. She moved into the light and showed mother the long blue scar running from her navel to the dark pubic swatch.

“And still the child was lost,” she said. “But yours won’t be anything as bad as that. Yours wants to come, so don’t shudder, sweet.”

Mother’s head thrashed on the damp pillow. Years later she told me: “I just had to give myself up to her, shadowy though she was. And she delivered me well, but I was happy to have her gone.”

Finally at dusk I was born. Father—who knelt by the bed with his left hand cracking in mother’s grasp till the knuckles nearly broke, and with his right hand wiping her nose, which bled as eagerly as her womb—he said the room seemed to tremble at my coming. But both my parents assured me that once I kicked free of the belly I glowed with a healthy infant-light which healed the nine-month malaise.

They named me Asher. I never learned why, but now I think it a good name for someone born in the night amid culm banks and black-water drainage bogs.

It means much that Sarah Norton delivered me. With her callused pagan hands, she gripped my knuckly arms, yanked me from blue amniotic to gray November night, lifted me wailing, slashed my cord, swaddled me, and imparted to me something unreckonable. I still do not understand it fully, but I’ve always listened to its reverberations. They say the woman delivered six hundred infants in her lifetime, and in a quiet ritual of hers she planted a cottonwood tree for every one of those babies. Dreaded apothecary of secret medicine, maven of birthing and its converse—even now I often have visions of her: hunched in hillside greenery, breaking up the moist earth to set my own cottonwood seeds in place, then patting the soil firm with extra care.

AS SOON AS I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO WALK AND TALK, MOTHER SENT ME out by morning to climb the banks and pick the shards of coal from the slate and shale. I would sometimes get up with father and go with him and the men just as far as the banks, then watch them shamble on toward the works, dark shapes before the dawn. The squeak and thud of boots, the rattle of lamps, the glassy shake of the mule riggings, voices murmuring in Welsh. The men spoke of adits and pillars and collars and goaf, talked of the fire-boss, who seemed to me a kind of magician. Boys not much older than I tromped along the road with them, their mouths thick with tobacco. One day I would walk to the pits myself. Patience was hard. I could barely muster disinterest in the face of marvelous words like fire-boss.

The culm banks were known to shift without warning. A child picking coal always hazarded stumbling into some disguised cavity, unsettling the whole mound, and ending up entombed under the chunks of slag, all air squeezed off overhead. The company had issued plenty of warnings to this effect—tales of boys gobbled up in the dumps for their thievery, as if by the unforgiving mouth of justice. But always leery of the company’s tight-fistedness, mother saw straight through the moralistic pretext of such warnings and relished the subversion of sending me out with an empty pail.

So I scurried up the jagged banks and combed the lumped tops for the chunks with the dull sheen. Those were the coal. The slag gave rise to a blackish dust that caked my shins and fogged my mouth. Shadowy taste. From atop the banks I could see over most of the buildings along Main Street, gossamered with dark smoke. And almost parallel to Main Street: the railroad, car after car jittering up and down its incline.

Now and then I ducked over the backside as a brakeman rode by, or I lay flat on the rubble when a watchman patrolled below. Spread there with my chin chafing on slate, I watched the sun splinter atop the hills and pour its first light into our valley.

Father, for the trouble these culm pickings posed him should the bosses learn of them, opposed them with a stance of high ethics. But mother knew her husband feared the company, and worse—was willing to bow to its stinginess. She sent me out despite him. Like Elidyr of the Welsh legend, who stole the gold from the Little Folk, I only sought to do my mother’s bidding.

In all my mornings at the dark banks I was collared only half a dozen times, but always by the same captor: an irascible watchman named Boggs. The mottled Irishman was arrogantly alert at his post. I believe it delighted him in some sadistic way to ensnare me and other coal pickers—and he had a brutal grip. “Witherow!” he would bellow. And if he had not yet locked my eyes, I would try to creep down the back of the bank and come running out the side opposite him. But flight was futile, for not long after I’d reached home and ditched what little coal I’d found, Boggs would come swaggering up to our stoop. Finding mother at work in the yard, he would proclaim in his curious official manner: “Abicca Witherow, your young Asher has pilfered sellable goods from the Black Diamond Company, the return of which I herewith demand.”

Then the charade would begin, variations on a scene familiar enough to seem scripted.

“Mr. Boggs,” mother might say, smoothing out her apron or pressing a forearm to her brow—tired gestures intended to show that the watchman was interrupting something important, “my husband, as you well know, is a miner in one of your shafts. He tells me the Black Diamond Coal Company conducts its business with the utmost care. He’s right in this, isn’t he? And he tells me that when the cars are lifted from the shaft their coal is sifted and sorted to determine waste as waste and goods as goods. That’s what that god-awful breaker house is for, isn’t it? Now, as long as the company knows waste for waste well enough to litter our town with big black dumps of it, then we folks who have to live next to the ugliness should be entitled to use what the company cannot.”

“But Mrs. Witherow, your son has trespassed—”

“And as far as I can tell, Mr. Boggs, you’re trespassing now: coming uninvited onto my property to point your finger at my son.”

However many times Boggs came up against it, mother’s iron will never failed to stun him. And though in all legality our house and the land it stood on was the company’s property, not ours, invariably he’d be too rattled to recall this fact, let alone address it.

“Now if you’ll let pass Asher’s infraction,” mother would say, “I’ll let pass yours, so long as you make haste at once.”

And away along the railroad Boggs would go, as soon as he’d made an awkward bow.

After such a scene, word of mother’s brusqueness would travel all along the circuit of company employees. From the mouth of Boggs it would pass down to the floor of the shaft within the afternoon, finally reaching father’s ears in mutated form. The events having swollen to the level of hyperbole, he would come home at night ready to admonish her.

The other workmen chided father for his wife’s distemper. He confessed his predicament to mother, begged her to allay her eccentricity a little. To this she always listened quietly, her jaw locked, and father never knew whether she meant to take his dilemma to heart.

David Witherow was a young man when he came to Nortonville. Narrow-chested and wiry, he worked with a gritted nerve at the longest and deepest of rooms in the vein. He wore a mustache and long beard and spoke in a hushed, bearded voice, peering through eyes the jade hue of polished quartz. His hands were wide and tough as paws, the skin flecked black on the fingers and wrists, tiny flakes of coal spotting the knuckles. Coal followed the sweat furrows in his brow too, streaking beneath the skin in faint lines like letter paper. Beside mother he cut the figure of an unlikely mate. She was a thin woman, but big-boned and hardy. She wore by habit a vague scowl which spread clear in the most luminous smile when he spoke kindly to her.

My parents had come from Monmouthshire, Wales, to the Diablo hills with all the high ideals of people in exodus. Jolting in the westbound stage from Stockton, they watched the mountain swell upon the horizon—the sun cresting the peaks like a burning bush. In the Carbondale valley they found a ragtag township. A new railroad snaked through high grasses, the tracks trestling up to a humpbacked bunker house. A few wood-and-nail structures leaned along the main street amongst a few fine brick ones. Noah Norton’s house towered on a hillside beyond the smokestack, and a number of miners’ cottages dotted the edges of the valley.

Mr. Norton himself secured my parents a room in George Scammon’s lodging house, and the next morning father went to work as a haulier on the Mount Hope Slope. Within the year, as the mines proved stalwart and Nortonville’s population flourished, hammers set to ringing on the skeleton of the new Exchange Hotel. Father moved to the Black Diamond shaft to work laborer on the Clark Vein. Six months later he made miner there. This was his job when I was born. By that time he and mother had befriended a number of other Welsh. They attended weekly Bible readings in a neighbor’s house and father frequented the small saloon, to the protests of his wife.

They secured a wooden company house, a sturdy place with a broad front stoop and six narrow windows. It stood at the northern end of the valley, at the head of Main Street and below School House Hill. Fifty feet east of the front door, the Black Diamond Railroad ran north through the cleavage of two camelback hills to slither six miles down to New York Slough. Otherwise, the house was surrounded by a clutch of company homes, which all stood mutely amid lisping grasses. A wide fur of chaparral spread up the hills on the west, and down among the shops and meeting houses stood a few eucalyptus trees.

MEMORY IS A NIGHT LANDSCAPE. SHADOWS OF HILLS AGAINST SHAdow of sky. I walk into myself when I travel back through my memory, and I find a dark world, streaked with intermittent lamplight. Yet some deep place within me, some smooth-worn reservoir, contains all the unbroken images of my past—people and moments long gone. Somewhere in the body we carry even the humblest moment we’ve lived. So maybe I can behold the intuitions that were already flitting through that valley eighty years ago, but I can’t blame any of us for failing to notice them. I was a little boy, not the wizened and brittle-boned thing I am now, sitting here enjoying the privilege of remembrance and poised to damn myself for all I couldn’t have known. The price of memory is a certain profound impotence. One can do nothing but observe, collect, revise this impression and then that one, and enjoy the pure futility of illumination.

Slinking into focus now is the Diablo of my youth. You could see it from the ridge just above Nortonville. As a boy I went up there to find a great canyon gashed between the peaks, as though some blast had cored the mountain. The twin summits gazed across the hollowness at each other, awaiting a massive earth-lunge that might one day unite them again.

In those days I was a mess of legend, and that Diablo was like my Sinai. I dreamt of William Israel, gangly farmer who hunched at a wound of earth on a day in ’59, a stained hat pushed back on his head, his fingers poking at the black ground. Israel’s pastures six miles south, where coal first showed itself, seemed to me as distant and wondrous as the Egyptian desert. I thought Mr. Israel the heroic figure from the Book of Exodus which mother read to me: “And there Israel camped before the mount.” I dreamt of Francis Somers and Cruikshank unearthing the great Black Diamond Vein. I saw the black deposit worked with sack and shovel, the paltry yield packed out load by load on the backs of mules. These early men labored away at something momentous, like the minions who hauled those great stones to the pyramids. And Noah Norton was the new pharaoh in these daydreams of mine. Not long after his arrival he had linked the meager operation to shareholders in Martinez fifteen miles west. In ’61 he raised his hands and decreed that railroad tracks be laid to the docks on the slough, a move that roused the works to a monumental standing, so that by the time I was born our company steamers had sewn the waters countless times to Stockton, San Francisco, and Sacramento.

In my boyhood the Welsh folk were entranced by all sorts of quasi-historic and fairy tale beliefs. And so in addition to Bible stories and the ancient yarns of the old country, mother and father taught me all about the Welsh Prince Madoc and his heroic escapades. Most impressive was his discovery of America in the twelfth century. I learned of our fierce brethren, the Welsh-speaking Padouca Indians, natives of our region whom we’d surely encounter one day. I learned of the adventurer John Evans, the Welsh Methodist minister who prefigured Lewis and Clark in his exploration of the northern Missouri while searching for the ancestors of Madoc.

Though fictitious, all these legends were harmless—especially harmless when compared with that larger fiction by which I was nursed for my first twenty years: that our town was an empire in its own and would thrive till time ran off its spool.