Woodcutter's Revival, page 5
Recomposing himself, Raymond said, “Daryl, there is something I want you to consider. How would you like to share a room at the inn? It would be nicer than the boarding house, but cheaper than rooming alone. ”
“Sure! But I thought you weren’t going to stay.”
“Well, since I am not sure, the inn might be the best temporary solution.”
“Temporary, as in you leaving or maybe trying to share a place with someone else in the future?” Daryl grinned as he glanced over to the alcove.
Raymond could not believe Daryl had broached the subject or had been able to detect his secret desires – so secret that he had not even admitted them to himself. But now he was happy the subject had been broached. He could not deny how he really felt.
Supper finally arrived, so he diverted their attention, at least outwardly, to the food. As Mr. Thomas passed his table to exit the dining room, Victoria smiled a pleasant smile in his direction. He felt uneasy as the brief moment their eyes met, seemed like an eternity. As uneasy as he felt, he could not look away. After she had passed, he sat awkwardly, with a silly grin on his face, staring at the door, forgetting about his hunger or his food.
Finally, the trance broke and he began eating. He felt embarrassed as he looked around the dining room. The other patrons attempted not to appear to notice, and be observed watching him in amusement and amazement. Raymond finished his supper, thanked the waitress and bid good evening to all. There was no use in attempting to downplay the entire scenario. He knew any effort to minimize the situation would only amplify the obvious to the observers.
As he returned to his room he felt the solitude and the emptiness the sparse setting seemed to reveal to his soul. He had felt homesickness, but this was the first time he realized what it was to feel loneliness. He reclined on his bed for a while, thinking and finally drifting to sleep. Thoughts of Victoria were filling his every waking and sleeping moment. Seeing her had not brought any relief, only intensification of the condition.
As he began to dream, he saw her walking toward him in a white gown, carrying a bouquet and wearing a veil. He awoke in a cold sweat. The excitement of such unexpected happiness quickly turned into despair as he realized the cold, dark emptiness of the room. Although fatigued, now he could not go back to sleep. He tossed and turned. The harder he tried to sleep, the wider awake he became. “How could she ever be attracted to me?” he thought. “Her dad owns this town. I am a stranger here. She knows nothing about me except that I needed a job when I went to work in her dad’s mine.”
Once he finally drifted off to sleep again, morning came quickly. As Raymond arose, he felt as though he had not slept at all. Raymond lit the lamp by his bed. As he regained his conscious thoughts, he said to himself, “It’s only Thursday. The week is only half over.”
He also reasoned, “If I am going to leave after a month, like I planned, that would be a week from tomorrow. Oh well, I am more than half way through.”
Raymond had been in the shaft for about two hours when he heard the alarm. All he knew about the alarm was it meant there had been trouble in one of the tunnels and get out as quickly as possible. The community was situated in such a way that everybody could hear the whistle – similar to a locomotive whistle with a longer blast and shriller.
The whistle was mounted on the steam engine which drove the conveyor system. The ominous sound shocked Raymond as he had never heard it before. Once he realized, by the duration of the blast, that is was the warning, the sound became extremely annoying.
As he found his way out of tunnel number two, he could see dust still settling around the entrance of tunnel number four, the most recent shaft to be dug. There was a crowd of miners gathering around the semi-sealed opening. Some of them, like him, were from the crew of tunnel two. Most of them came from the other shafts or the smelter. There seemed to be some commotion and disbelief as people began to define the situation and determine a course of action. Raymond stopped beside one of the onlookers, “What happened?”
“The shaft collapsed. There are still two in there.”
Then the foreman, Mr. Peters began organizing the onlookers. He told them to form two lines. The people nearest the opening began to hand rocks and debris to the person next to them and so on, down the line. This method seemed to be the best method to clear the debris in the fastest manner possible. Raymond, noticing that a great amount of the debris consisted of small rubble, began looking for a shovel and a wheel barrow. He also enlisted the efforts of Daryl, next to him, to grab the second shovel.
As he dug and removed the small debris, he could see a pick and bigger tools were needed. He enlisted another participant from the debris brigade to dig, while he looked for some bigger tools. Everybody else seemed to know what to do and worked quickly and without speaking. There was no time to wonder if their efforts would be futile. Most offered silent prayer while they worked.
They had to hope the two miners were alive, had enough air and had been in a secure place when the slide occurred. They worked for at least an hour, which seemed like an eternity. The slide did not appear to extend inside as it appeared from outside. As they inched their way into the dust and rock-filled shaft, there was some room near the top of the shaft where debris had not lodged into the top shelf. The small space extended several feet of the length of the shaft and all the way across.
Finally, about fifteen feet into the shaft, they reached a space where the slide began to diminish. It seemed they had dug through the greatest concentration of the debris and were now beginning to dig away from the center of the collapse. One of the rescuers shined a light through a small opening at the top of the slide. He could barely see two faces covered with dust. The only way he could perceive the faces was the whites of the eyes and teeth reflected in the light. “Are you alright?”
“Yes. We were in deeper, but the slide blocked us off here. We felt our way back to the back of the pile.”
“Thank God!” Raymond exclaimed.
Soon, the debris was cleared enough for the two miners to squeeze their way out. They were hugged by their fellow miners in great celebration. As the rescue party moved out of the tunnel mouth and into the clean air, most of the town’s people, who had assembled outside the shaft, let out a collective shout of joy and relief.
Mr. Peters noticed Mr. Thomas standing at the back of the crowd watching the situation. When the celebrating was finished, Mr. Peters announced, “It’s closed for the day. Go home and get some rest.”
As the rest of the people slowly found their way down the side of the embankment and into town, Mr. Peters increased the speed of his stride in proportion to the increase in his indignation. His anger came near to a boiling point as he stormed into the mine office. The clerk behind the desk could only look with amazement as he detected the rage Mr. Peters was exhibiting. He did not even bother to ask Mr. Peters if he could help. He knew Mr. Peters would find his own way into Mr. Thomas’s office as he had in the past.
Mr. Thomas was talking to the Reverend Pharris. They both looked slightly shocked at the expression on Mr. Peter’s face. “I told you this would happen. The time and money we saved by shoring at ten feet rather than six is going to get somebody killed.”
In the past, he had attempted to appeal to Mr. Thomas’s logic, by saying the gains made in less shoring would cost in down time and injury. Today, with the near loss of two lives, he was beyond logic and sugar-coating the truth. Mr. Thomas, attempting to diffuse the situation and appear to remain in control, in the presence of Reverend Pharris, replied, ‘We can discuss this later.”
“Unless you get those problems corrected and these tunnels safe, there will be no next time for me.”
Now, Mr. Thomas, no longer able to posture composure, exploded, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”
Mr. Peters shouted back, as he stormed out of the office, “Fine, I will be out by the weekend.”
Mr. Thomas turned red with rage. He was not used to having anybody tell him the way things would be. He did not like it! Reverend Pharris did not know what to do to break the tension. He finally said, “Edward, have you done all you could to ensure the safety of the miners?”
“Listen, Preacher, this is my town. The only thing I don’t own is the church, but we both know who supports it. You take care of their social needs and I will take care of the rest.”
“I understand. I know you contribute more than the rest combined. I will be on my way now. Oh yes, may um…, may God bless you.”
The next morning Edward and Victoria were in the office very early. “Father, how could you let Mr. Peters walk out? He was a very valuable employee and a leader”
“Nobody is irreplaceable.”
“No, but they all respected him.”
“They respect me!”
“Father, they fear you. How far would they follow you because of fear? They would have followed him to their death. It is not respect when people do what you say because you have power over them.”
Mr. Thomas growled under his breath in exasperation, “Ugh, do you ever remind me of your mother! Nobody crosses me and stays here. It is my way or the railway. Young lady, I would not let you stand there and talk to me this way if you weren’t my daughter.”
Victoria knew she was the only person who could reason with him. She also knew she was reaching the limit of where she could press the issue. Simply because she was able to express her view did not mean her words would be heeded or even considered. She was beginning to question that if he was so strong, why was he so afraid of allowing anybody to break through his veneer. She was also beginning to understand that actions postured as self-respect were actually attempts to gain or convince himself of respect by dominating others.
Victoria began to reintroduce reality into the situation, “Enough of worrying about what happened. We need to consider what we are going to do. Since people respected Mr. Peters, we will have to be careful what we say and what steps we take to replace him.”
Mr. Thomas interjected, “If we try to use one of his friends, they will undoubtedly know the alleged problems he has discussed with them. We need to bring someone in who is intelligent but unaware of the way things operate, naive.”
“You mean someone you can control?”
“I was thinking more in the lines of someone we could train into our way of thinking and mold him into a leader.”
Victoria had never seen Edward perplexed like he was today. She had a sudden realization of fear that the man she most admired in her life might have strongly different ways of thinking about how people ought to be treated than she had. “But, who could we find, Father?”
They both thought of the same person, but were reluctant to offer their thoughts for fear of what the other might say. Their motives varied, also. Mr. Thomas thought a young, well-read man, with work experience, in what might be considered a family business, might be easier to control and shape into his own image than one of the local people.
He had not spent any extra money educating these people for more than just the expense. Oh, he provided a school, but that was more to indoctrinate than to educate. He feared that the more people were educated the less they tended to be controllable. He had justified this belief by referencing that Fredrick Douglass, a slave who broke the law by educating himself and becoming a writer and orator was able to get the anti-slavery message out.
Victoria’s choice reflected the belief that the young man might have some potential – maybe personally and professionally. She justified her position by stating, “Did you notice how that, I think his name was Raymond, took charge and kept a cool head in the emergency?”
Edward said, “There is one other problem we have to discuss.”
“What is that?”
“Apparently, and coincidentally, our school teacher, Kimberly Knox has given notice. I never would have guessed she would leave when Mr. Peters left,” Edward said as he gave Victoria an overly dramatic wink of the eye.
“Well, she was only renewed with reservations last year. We were going to have to dismiss her this year anyway. She signed on last August, but did not report to work until two weeks before Thanksgiving. She was warned several times about being considered the town gossip by sharing confidential information about students and their families. She was like Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens’s novel, Hard Times. She thought she could reduce education to a mathematical equation. She thought she could convey all facts without appealing the emotion of the learner. What was her reason?”
Mr. Thomas replied, “She says she is going to take an administrative position down at South West School of Education. She will be leading a faculty of seventeen teachers and professors. How would you like to work for her?”
“Not if she leads the way she taught. Besides, I think we are talking more about controlling and managing the faculty, not leading them. You have to know something about education and learning to lead other teachers,” Victoria said.
At breakfast, Daryl came down in his traveling clothes. Raymond asked, “Are you going to work in those today?”
“No, I am on the ten fifty-five out of here. I cannot go back into that grave with only one open end.”
“I wish I could convince you to stay.”
“No, I have been thinking about this since we got here. I have to go. I wish you and…the others all the best.”
Raymond finished breakfast quietly and shook Daryl’s hand as he left for work. He said, “Thanks for going through the mountains with me. I will see you when I get to Wellspring.”
Daryl offered a doubtful grin and said, “Good bye.”
The miners finished the week on a status-quo basis. There were several rumors about what happened to Mr. Peters, but no official word. People who knew what happened were not talking, at least not publicly.
On Monday, as Raymond reported to work, there was a note that directed him to go to the office to talk to Mr. Thomas. He recognized the writing on the note and beamed. As he headed toward the office, his joy turned into apprehension. They had probably decided they did not need his services any more. That would be fine. This was the week in which he planned to leave any way. He had not saved enough for train fare. How much would they pay him for the time he has already worked? Would he have to walk to Wellspring? If he had to walk down, did he have enough to buy supplies? “I wish we were paid in real money or actual value in silver rather than these stupid tokens. With this much time passing and the walk down, how would I find Stewart?”
Upon entering the office, the clerk told him Mr. Thomas would be right with him. The door to Mr. Thomas’s office was standing open and as soon as he saw Raymond, he said, “Come on in.”
Victoria was in the office and Mr. Thomas closed the door. ‘Raymond, we have been noticing your performance.”
“I can explain. It was an emergency. I acted out of instinct. I can learn more.”
As he defended himself, Raymond began to realize that he really wanted to continue working in the mines. At least, if he was leaving, he wanted it to be his choice, not somebody else’s.
“Oh, you misunderstood,” laughed Mr. Thomas. “Mr. Peters is no longer with the company. We thought we might train you to work in the position of foreman.”
“Thank you for the compliment, but I am not really qualified.”
“Oh, don’t be modest. You have worked all your life in a family operation. That is what we want you to do for us. Help us run our family mines. Like I said, we will give you all the training and support you need.”
“But, there is so much to learn. I don’t know if they will accept me.”
Victoria responded, with almost mechanical repetition of a phrase she had heard her father repeat, “With no risk, there is no courage. Without adversity there are no heroes.”
Then she brightened, almost as if she had a sudden revelation, “Besides, I hear you acted heroically, during the aftermath of the cave-in.”
These words from anybody else would have seemed cliché. Raymond knew he had only acted logically and found something that would speed the rescue. From Victoria the words shot straight into Raymond’s heart, overriding any logic or defense he had considered. The words acted as a magic elixir, bolstering any real courage he lacked.
Victoria, below the conscious level, in the deepest recesses of her mind, might have been subconsciously seeking a new hero.
Chapter Six
THE ESSENCE
Michael appeared to be enjoying his time of recovery. Stewart’s cooking was improving and he was able to keep ahead of the food supply and the daily tasks necessary for survival. There was collecting water from the stream, splitting and stacking wood, tending the fire, cooking and cleaning. Michael was beginning to get rested so he was awake more hours a day than Stewart. The time they both cherished most was when all the activities were completed and they had some occasion to talk. Michael never wasted time on small talk. Stewart almost felt as if Michael already knew everything about him without having to reveal many facts.
Michael seemed to have boiled down the elements of life to the essence. He had so much time to think, read, and pray without a lot of distractions. He had even tried his hand at writing. He was a patient man and had mellowed with age. As he grew older, he also came to the realization that time grew shorter each day and there was no retrieving any lost hours, days or years.
He was not afraid to cut to the quick in conversation. If a statement was made without much prior thought or one that might have required a further exploration of facts, he would ask direct questions. Stewart wondered if it would be this way back down in the flat lands or if he and Michael found themselves in “normal” circumstances.
