Chapter 25
Tern stood beside the three men he’d chosen to help in the search for Elbows: Turnip Tippen, because he’d survived more cave-ins than a cat had lives; Bob Hall, because he knew the course of Number 4 like the back of his hand; and young Billy, because he was slight of frame. The boy had no shoulders to speak of. He’d be more valuable than gold if they needed someone to squeeze through tight spaces. Stanley James had approved the crew. Tern knew Stanley was champing at the bit to come along, but he had to supervise the whole affair, not just the inside job.
Billy carried the replacement bird in one hand and a coal-oil lantern in the other. “What should I do with this other’n?” he asked, his voice cracking midsentence. He opened the tiny door of the hanging cage and the dusty canary hopped onto his finger.
“Fling it off,” Turnip said. “It won’t live long with all this dust in its throat.”
“What do you want to do?” Tern asked. It wouldn’t hurt to indulge the boy, considering what he might face when they found the missing miner.
“It ain’t but a short ways back. Cain’t I put it outside?”
“Make short work of it,” Tern said.
“We shouldn’t tarry over a dumb bird,” Turnip said and spat on the floor.
“We won’t,” Tern said. “Billy can catch up.” The light from the young man’s lantern was already fading.
The men rolled a rock that must have weighed a hundred pounds out of the path.
“We need to give Billy Boy a nickname. I think I’ll call him Fleet,” Turnip said, huffing for breath.
Tern cast lumps of coal and rock to the side. “Fleet?”
“Yeah, Fleet, like fleet of foot. A moniker makes you feel like you belong—like you’ve been initiated into the club. The boys have been tossing around a name for you, Joe.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“Drifter.”
“Why Drifter?”
“You don’t seem to light anywheres for long, I guess is the reason.”
“Fair enough,” Tern said, hefting a rough-hewn truss and laying it aside. He was rewarded with a splinter big as a matchstick in the meat of his hand.
They reached a fork in the tunnel. The lamps attached to their caps barely penetrated the darkness. They also carried lanterns. Billy caught up to them, holding his high.
“Which way, Bob?” Tern asked, sucking on his palm.
“Hold up a sec.” Bob made a megaphone of his hands. “Elbows!” he shouted. “Elbows!”
Tern strained to hear a reply. Silence amplified the utter darkness of the mine. If you stayed still long enough, you’d find that even silence had a sound. Tern always thought it sounded like hopelessness felt—like a rushing sadness filling one’s soul. He guessed that must be what hell was like.
Bob pulled at his chin, thinking. The men’s faces were black with coal dust. All Tern could see was their eyes. They looked like strange, disembodied creatures. Tern knew he looked the same. He wished Bob would hurry. Elbows, if he was even in here, could be bleeding out or drawing his last breath while Bob dithered time away.
“He would have gone this way.” Bob pointed to the right. “This’n to the left was blocked before the fall.”
All right,
Tern thought,
a plan.
Every few feet there was another pile of debris to move. And every few feet one or another would call out, “Elbows! Elbows!” Like an aggravated mother calling her recalcitrant child to supper.
“Listen,” Bob said after a dozen rounds of calls. “I hear something.”
Sure enough, a strange mewing sound could be heard far off in the distance. But where did it come from? The tunnel forked again, but Bob said they were both true avenues. Elbows could have taken either one.
“Which one would have filled a gunny sack fastest?” Turnip said.
“You don’t know he was stealing,” Tern said.
“He wasn’t in here on no picnic. ’Sides, maybe he thought he was owed something more than the miserly wage the company doles out for sixteen tons a day.”
“He’ll get fired on the spot if that’s the case,” Bob said.
Turnip spat again. “And what if’n he’s splattered like a june bug on a window glass back in there? Is the company gonna feed him if he’s so busted up he cain’t work no more?”
“Shut up and listen,” Tern said. “We need to find him before we judge him.”
The men leaned first one way and then the other, cupping their hands behind their ears. The pitiful, bleating sound seemed to come from all directions, like an echo when you shouted down a well.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Tern said. “Bob, you and Turnip take the right. I’ll take the left. Holler out if you find him. Billy, you stay here with the lamp. That’ll help us find our way back.”
After a short but tedious hike over ankle-twisting rubble and chunks of breakdown big as ice chests, Tern came upon a space in which he could stand upright. What a relief. The cave was black as pitch. Holding a lantern high, he examined the area for the threat of shifting rock. There was no shoring timber in the chamber nor any broken castoff tools, no rusty bean cans with jagged lids or empty amber-colored whiskey bottles littering the floor, no sign this place had ever entertained men before.
Water trickled through fissures in the rock face like dozens of tiny waterfalls. A sightless salamander clung with suctioned feet to the limestone. Tern poked the soft, moist skin on the creature’s back, and it dropped soundlessly to the floor. Cave crickets bounded about in the searing light of the lantern like grasshoppers before a threshing machine.
Tern could have stood there all day taking in the ancient splendor of the place. He wasn’t a man who often talked to God, but if it hadn’t been for the fact that he could hear Elbows calling, this experience would have moved him to do so. “Later,” he said, feeling foolish—as if God was waiting to hear from him, Tern Still.
He could clearly hear a voice somewhere off to the right and about five feet off the cave floor. Finally, by crawling about the perimeter of the cavern, Tern found Elbows in a crawlway so narrow he had to slide inside with both arms overhead, like a swimmer poised for a dive. He was stretched out flat, his feet just barely inside the duct-like corridor, when the tip of his index finger touched the tip of Elbows’s own. The trapped man’s digit jerked like he’d touched a live wire.
“Elbows, it’s Joe Repp. Can you speak?”
“Cain’t I always?” Elbows said around a rusty little laugh.
“What happened?”
“Was you a curious boy, Joe?”
“I guess, a little.”
“I was always exploring—caves, sinkholes, lairs—didn’t matter what. It started with one time my brother dared me to go in a fox’s den. I was ten or so. I went in there and wound up here. Ain’t life grand?”
“Listen, I’ve got to holler for the others. You hold on. We’ll get you out of here.”
Tern backed out one clammy inch at time. It felt wonderful to be free. “He’s found!” he shouted toward the glowing light of Billy’s lantern. “He’s found.”
Soon the other men were gathered round, except for Billy, who stayed where Tern left him. Tern bet the boy hadn’t moved an inch. He bet he’d stay there until Beelzebub’s nose dripped icicles or until Tern granted permission for him to leave.
After assessing the height and width of the opening to Elbows’s prison, Bob scratched his bald pate through the soft cloth of his cap. “You say his head’s facing us? That means he was coming this way when he got trapped. I’ve got a feeling this passage goes through to where me and Turnip were at. It’s more than likely wider and easier to access on the other side. Let’s go have a look-see, Turnip.”
Once the other men had left, Tern felt compelled to shimmy back to Elbows. “Bob Hall’s looking things over. We’ll get you out straight away.”
“I wonder, could you spare a sip of water?”
Tern slithered out, slid back in with his canteen, and tucked the strap under the fingers of Elbows’s outstretched hand. The man’s nails scrabbled against the rock floor like a dog on an ice-covered pond, but he couldn’t seem to grasp the woven belt. The effort set off a paroxysm of coughing followed by wheezing rales. Tern caught himself holding his breath, the sound was so painful to hear.
“Ah, me,” Elbows said, “it’s like I ain’t had a drink all day.”
Tern cupped his hand and poured a drab of water into it. Try as he might, he couldn’t get the water to Elbows without spilling it. And he couldn’t give him water straight from the canteen because it was too big to pass between the stone that formed the ceiling and the man’s head.
“Try filling the lid and passing it in,” Elbows said. “If I can work this one hand free, I can manage a drink.”
That worked well enough, but it took a lot of lids and a lot of effort before Elbows’s thirst was quenched. Most of the water dribbled down his chin. This was the most pitiful thing Tern had ever seen.
Tern’s leg knotted with a fierce charley horse. He scooted out of the tunnel, walking straight-legged until the cramp wore off. If a few minutes in the hole did this to him, what must Elbows be suffering?
He crouched by the opening. He should keep the injured man talking. “Can you tell me what’s got you trapped?”
“I reckon the rock fall shifted something down on me.”
“Are you flat on your back then?”
“No, I’m sort of twisted in my middle part. My feet are turned kindly sideways. My tailbone’s caught on something, but I cain’t tell what.”
“Are you hurting?”
“Some. Mostly I’m thirsty, and I need to stretch my legs.”
Time dragged by. What were Bob and Turnip up to on the other side?
“Listen, Elbows, I’m going to send Billy back to keep you company for a while. I won’t be long.”
“Could you do me a favor before you leave off out of here?”
“Sure thing,” Tern said.
“Would ye scratch my back?”
“That’s not funny, Elbows,” he said, but he was more than glad to hear Elbows’s mirthful cackle. He was quite sure he would not be able to crack a joke if he were in such dire straits.
“There is one little thing you could do for me. It ain’t a joke, though.”
“Spit it out. I’ll do anything I can.”
“Is there anyone out there but you, Joe?”
“Just me.”
“Would you mind to say, ‘Leroy, your mommy loves you’?”
“Huh?”
“My mother would always say, ‘Leroy, your mommy loves you.’ She said that ever time I left the house, from the time I was just a tad.”
Tern dashed a bit of moisture from his cheek. “That was nice.”
“So would you say that to me? Say, ‘Leroy—’”
“Leroy, your mommy loves you,” Tern said, hearing nothing but a sniffle in reply. He was desperate to get away for a moment. “Now listen, you hang on. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
After warning Billy not to go in the aperture with Elbows, Tern sent the boy back to keep company. He went to the fork that bore to the right and walked down to where he figured he’d find Bob and Turnip. The men had hauled a pile of debris from the opening of a lateral shaft so wide Tern could walk in.
“I believe you’re right, Bob,” he said when he reached them, “but we need more men, especially the shoring crew, and we need tools. You’ll never dig him out this way.”
“Did you figure what’s got him stuck? Do you know what position he’s in?” Bob asked.
“Face up. He’s twisted at the waist, the knees, and the feet. Something’s pressing on his backbone. He can’t seem to move himself below the waist.”
“Poor soul,” Turnip said.
“Maybe we could rig a harness and pull him out. He ain’t that far in,” Bob said.
“I don’t know about that,” Turnip said. “Remember what happened to Pike Chapman when he got trapped down Mammoth Cave way? They about pulled him apart with a rappelling rope. He didn’t live but two hours after he was freed. His internals were all a mess.”
“This ain’t that bad, Turnip,” Bob said.
“I hope not, but this setup puts me in mind of that time in ’97—was you here then, Bob?”
“Nah, I was over to Benham in ’97.”
“Well, in ’97 we had a situation much like this one, except there was three men died in a tunnel squeeze then. It was a rainy season that year too, much like this one has been, and then to make matters worse, we’d been blasting at the site. Unluckily, these three were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the ceiling collapsed and trapped them in a stricture much like what’s got Elbows in a tether. After days of shoring roofs and hauling rock to get to them, the mine walls weakened and hydraulic pressure forced the floor up toward the ceiling. It worked just like a vise. There weren’t a thing we could do but save ourselves. I can hear them screaming yet.”
“It don’t set well to listen to all that right now, Turnip. It’s like you’re only thinking of the worst.”
“Forewarned is forearmed is all I’m saying.”
Bob rubbed his chin. “Ayuh, there’s truth to that.”
“Well, here’s a truth for sure,” Tern said. “We’re not helping the situation by standing around here jawing.”
Bob and Turnip hustled to the mine entrance to update Mr. James. He’d decide what the next step was. Tern returned to Elbows’s hidey-hole and sent Billy back to the Y.
“You still in there, Elbows?” he said.
“How many days have passed?”
“Days?” Tern shook his head. “It’s only been a few hours.”
“Ah, me, it feels like days.”
“I’m coming in,” Tern said. “We can talk better that way.”
Tern settled in as best he could, stretched flat on his belly, head to head with Elbows. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get out of here?”
“I always wanted to get me a job with the railroad. My daddy used to be a tie hacker with the L&N. He’d bring home a passel of juggles nearly every day.”
“Juggles?”
“You know, big splinters from the railroad ties. Daddy could hew twenty-five ties a day with his broadax. The juggles was just leavings, but they made the best kindling. What we didn’t need, I’d take up and down the pike to the widow women.”
Tern’s hand ached. He knew all about splinters.
Elbows coughed, and Tern gave him more water.
“You don’t have to talk anymore if it’s too much effort.”