greene
Did seare away: and with the leaves, the trees were burned cleene. The parched corne did yeelde wherewith to worke his owne decaie. Tushe, these are trifles. Mightie townes did perish that same daie. Whose countries with their folke were burnt: and forests ful of wood Were turnde to ashes with the rocks and mountains where they stood.
Father crossed the lobby sometimes and sat with his chums on the settle nearby. Joel Aitken was a haulier in the Mount Hope Slope. He looked too huge a man to work in a mine—he had arms like oak branches. He flung his massive legs onto a table and spat frequently into a spittoon on the floor. He uttered few substantive words while the men rumbled at one another, but often his guttural earthquake of a laugh would tremor through the ranks and he would throw a ton of palm against a nearby back and affably wag his head. He leaned over to me once and fixed me with bloodshot eyes. His love for father made me peculiarly precious to him I think. The two men had worked on a team together in the early days of the town.
“What do you study, boy?”
“Ovid, sir.”
“Ovid,” he said. The name rolled untamed over his tongue. “Ovid . . . Ovid, by Jove!” He grinned with yellow mouth and winked, one sackcloth eyelid falling heavily. “Learning your Latin tales are you? That’s well!”
His attention trailed back to the uproar of the men and he sat upright in their midst again, guffawing at something and slapping the tabletop hard.
I returned to my book. In a moment Joel’s voice was near me again and I raised my head to find him leaning once more.
“Have you met with Daphne yet?”
“Daphne and Apollo, yes!”
“No—Daphne,” he said, “hard-won woman I mean. Have you? No? Well, you shall, boy! You shall! More than one woman has turned to a tree at my chase! You shall!”
He clenched my shoulder mercilessly, then turned to spit.
One night before the blue of my knuckles had faded, I was with father at the Exchange Hotel when Boggs and Buxton swaggered in.
Buxton was a watchman. He had a jouncing, bowlegged walk, as though his feet burned him when they bore his weight. He talked in Welsh but was proudly of Irish birth, and he took to Boggs in a way that seemed insidious. Really, his mixed culture served him even less than an undiluted Irish bearing would have done, and he and Boggs were equally despised. For Boggs’s part, it needed a queer temerity for an Irishman to stand as a boss in a mainly Welsh town, let alone think to frequent the workingmen’s leisure places.
I watched the two men enter and walk to the bar. Father set down his tumbler and grew quiet amidst his noisy fellows. The tendons in his neck flexed stiff. He turned to me and studied me in silence a while, then slid toward me.
“Not a word now, Ash. Come.”
I rose and followed him across the wide wooden floor, then stood off a few feet as he shouldered up against the bar. He leaned close to the two Irishmen, talking and nudging Boggs with a wide-braced elbow. Some of his words drifted my way: “You’ll not bruise the boy again.”
Boggs glanced back at me. He shook his head and drank from his tumbler, father’s mouth moving in his ear.
More murmurs and the subdued gestures of shoulders and heads. Father said something to Mr. Gwynn, the hotel owner and bartender, and Mr. Gwynn looked dismayed, stooping to bring out his ledger book from beneath the bar. He glanced askance from father to Boggs to Buxton as he leafed through the pages. Then he entered something down in pencil. Father turned and I stepped out with him into the frosted night.
We crossed the tracks toward our house in silence. A white fog lurked in the hollow around us.
“It’s best to buy a man’s drink in a grievance, Ash,” said father at last. “Then if it comes to fists you know it’s needful.”
And as we came up to our house, he laid a hand on my back and turned to me. “Your mother would say different than what I’ve told you. That’s well enough. You’ll decide your own way. But you mustn’t tell her what I’ve done. She’ll not bear it well.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” He grinned. “You’re growing up.”
{5}
THE LONG DAYS IN THE BREAKER WORE ON. I DEVELOPED A wordless language with Thomas Motion as our lessons evolved. Everything could be made for discourse, everything a code. The fixing of a stare on a joint in the chutes. The altering rhythm of hand and slate. Left hand to ear: a warning. Thumb to knee: a signal for readiness. A tug at your cap: a request for more tobacco.
Our lessons were like this: As Boggs passed on Thomas’s side, I leaned and spat a thick splodge of brown at the boss’s back. He whirled round and yanked Thomas down off the slat and flailed his quirt across the boy’s chest.
“Dirty little puke! I’ll not take it, boy!”
I hunkered at my work while Thomas sprawled in the chute and grunted under the sharp whacks—one two three four five six—and then he would not bear more. At the seventh, he shot out his hand and snatched the quirt from Boggs, jabbed it hard into the boss’s gut, then scrambled up and turned it fast on me.
“You stupid fucking Irish!” he screamed as the quirt ripped over my neck. “It was Witherow!”
With two great mitts at Motion’s jacket, Boggs tore him clean out of the chute and jostled him to the wall. There Thomas took a number of hard blows across the ass, sobbing and holding his tongue with all his strength. Finally Boggs spun him around and prodded him back to his place beside me.
“I’ll be damned if this will continue, boys!” barked the foreman, to be heard by all above the clamor. He stood near us for a time, angrily straightening his coat as we bent to our work. At last he took up his supervisory pacing again.
Thomas looked long at me, red-faced and grim. He snorted through wet nostrils and returned to his work without a word.
I allowed a few days to pass. Then I lit a fire again.
I gave Thomas the signal that all was clear, so he sat back from the chute and stretched out his stiff spine and neck.
“Boss!” I shouted, and Boggs turned to find him so.
The boss pounded off two blows of the rod and Thomas bit his tongue till it bled. He showed me that night at school.
“You see!” he said. Neat tooth marks ran like hyphens across the bluish tongue. “I did this but I didn’t make a squeak. I’m doing good, huh? Not a squeak!”
“Better, Thomas, yes.”
“Better, for damn sure, than beating you with the boss’s quirt!” He heeled back and socked me so hard at the shoulder that I stumbled away from him.
“Yes, Thomas. Better.”
As for me and my lessons—I was getting nowhere. I stood in the tall grass of our hills like a castaway, distracted by the dark rustlings about me.
I
