IN THE WATER WORKS (BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA 1888)
Red Mountain, weathered tip end of Appalachia’s long and scabby spine, this last ambitious foothill before the land slumps finally down to black-belt prairies so flat they’ve never imagined even these humble altitudes. And as if Nature hasn’t done her best already, as if wind and rain and frost haven’t whittled aeons away to expose the limestone and iron-ore bones, Modern Industry has joined in the effort, scraping away the stingy soil and so whenever it rains, the falling sky turns the ground to sea slime again, primordial mire the color of a butchery to give this place its name, rustdark mud that sticks stubborn to Henry Matthews’ hobnailed boots as he wanders over and between the spoil piles heaped outside the opening to the Water Works tunnel.
Scarecrow tall and thin, young Mr. Henry S. Matthews, lately of some place far enough north to do nothing to better the reputation of a man who is neither married nor church-going, who teaches geography and math at the new Powell School on Sixth Avenue North and spends the remainder of his time with an assortment of books and rocks and pickled bugs. The sudden rumble of thunder somewhere down in the valley, then, and he moves too fast, careless as he turns to see, almost losing his footing as the wet stones slip and tilt beneath his feet.
“You best watch yourself up there, Professor,” one of the workmen shouts, and there’s laughter from the black hole in the mountain’s side. Henry offers a perfunctory nod in the general direction of the tunnel, squints through the haze of light October rain and dust and coal smoke at the rough grid of the little city laid out north of the mountain; barely seventeen years since John Morris and the Elyton Land Company put pen to ink, ink to paper, and incorporated Birmingham, drawing a city from a hasty scatter of ironworks and mining camps. Seventeen years, and he wonders for a moment what this place was like before white men and their machines, before axes and the dividing paths of railroad tracks.
The thunder rolls and echoes no answer he can understand, and Henry looks back to the jumbled ground, the split and broken slabs of shale at his feet. The rain has washed away the thick dust of the excavations, making it easier for him to spot the shells and tracks of sea creatures preserved in the stone. Only a few weeks since he sent a large crate of fossils south to the State Geological Survey in Tuscaloosa, and already a small museum’s worth of new specimens line the walls of his cramped room, sit beneath his bed and compete with his clothing for closet space, with his books for the shelves. An antediluvian seashore in hardened bits and pieces, and just last week he found the perfectly preserved carapace of a trilobite almost the length of his hand.
A whistle blows, shrill steam blat, and a few more men file out of the tunnel to eat their lunches in the listless rain. Henry reaches into a pocket of his waistcoat for the silver watch his mother gave him the year he left for college, wondering how a Saturday morning could slip by so fast; the clockblack hands at one and twelve, and he’s suddenly aware of the tugging weight of his knapsack, the emptiness in his belly, hours now since breakfast but there’s a boiled egg wrapped in waxed paper and a tin of sardines in his overcoat. The autumn sky growls again, and he snaps his watch closed and begins to pick his way cautiously down the spoil towards the other men.
Henry Matthews taps the brown shell of his hard-boiled egg against a piece of limestone, crack, crack, crack, soft white insides exposed, and he glances up at the steelgray sky overhead; the rain has stopped, stopped again, stopped for now, and crystalwet drops cling to the browngoldred leaves of the few hickory and hackberry trees still standing near the entrance of the tunnel. He sits with the miners, the foreman, the hard men who spend dawn to dusk in the shaft, shadowy days breaking stone and hauling it back into the sunlight. Henry suspects that the men tolerate his presence as a sort of diversion, a curiosity to interrupt the monotony of their days. This thin Yankee dude, this odd bird who picks about the spoil like there might be gold or silver when everyone knows there isn’t anything worth beans going to come out of the mountain except the purplered ore, and that’s more like something you have to be careful not to trip over than try to find.
Sometimes they joke, and sometimes they ask questions, their interest or suspicion piqued by his diligence, perhaps. “What you lookin’ for anyways, Mister?” and he’ll open his knapsack and show them a particularly clear imprint of a snail’s whorled shell or the mineralized honeycomb of a coral head. Raised eyebrows and heads nodding, and maybe then someone will ask, “So, them’s things what got buried in Noah’s flood?” and Henry doubts any of these men have even heard of Lyell or Darwin or Cuvier, have any grasp of the marvelous advancement that science has made the last hundred years concerning the meaning of fossils and the progression of geological epochs. So he’s always politic, aware that the wrong answer might get him exiled from the diggings. And, genuinely wishing that he had time to explain the wonders of his artefacts to these men, Henry only shrugs and smiles for them. “Well, actually, some of them are even a bit older than that,” or a simple and noncommittal “Mmmmm,” and usually that’s enough to satisfy.
But today is different and the men are quiet, each one eating his cold potatoes or dried meat, staring silent at muddy boots and lunch pails, the mining-car track leading back inside the tunnel, and no one asks him anything. Henry looks up once from his sardines and catches one of the men watching him. He smiles, and the man frowns and looks quickly away. When the whistle blows again, the men rise slowly, moving with a reluctance that’s plain enough to see, back towards the waiting tunnel. Henry wipes his fingers on his handkerchief, fish oil stains on white linen, is shouldering his knapsack, retrieving his geologist’s hammer, when someone says his name, “Mr. Matthews?” voice low, almost whispered, and he looks up into the foreman’s hazelbrown eyes.
“Yes, Mr. Wallace? Is there something I can do for you today?” and Warren Wallace looks away, nervous glance to his men for a moment that seems a lot longer to Henry who’s anxious to get back to his collecting.
“You know all this geology business pretty good, don’t you, Mr. Matthews? All about these rocks and such?” and Henry shrugs, nods his head, “Yes sir, I suppose that I do. I had a course or two—”
“Then maybe you could take a look at somethin’ for me sometime,” the foreman says, interrupting, looking back at Henry, and there are deep lines around his eyes, worry or lack of sleep, both maybe. The foreman spits a shitbrown streak of tobacco at the ground and shakes his head. “It probably ain’t nothing, but I might want you to take a look at it sometime.”
“Yes. Certainly,” Henry says, “Anytime you’d like,” but Warren Wallace is already walking away from him, following his men towards the entrance of the tunnel, shouting orders, and “Be careful up there, Mr. Matthews,” he says, spoken without turning around, and Henry replies that he always is, but thanks for the concern anyway, and he goes back to the spoil piles.
Fifteen minutes later it’s raining again, harder now, a cold and stinging rain from the north and wind that gusts and swirls dead leaves like drifting ash.
May 1887 when the Birmingham Water Works Company entered into a contract with Judge A. O. Lane, Mayor and Alderman, and plans were drawn to bring water from the distant Cahaba River north across Shades Valley to the thirsty citizens of the city. But Red Mountain standing there in the way, standing guard or simply unable to move, and its slopes too steep for gravity to carry the water over the top, so the long tunnel dreamed up by engineers, the particular brainchild of one Mr. W. A. Merkel, first chief engineer of the Cahaba Station. A two thousand, two hundred foot bore straight through the sedimentary heart of the obstacle, tons of stone blasted free with gelignite and nitro, pickaxes and sledge hammers and the sweat of men and mules. The promise of not less than five million gallons of fresh water a day, and in this bright age of invention and innovation it’s a small job for determined men, moving mountains, coring them like ripe and crimson apples.
A week later, and Henry Matthews is again picking over the spoil heaps, a cool and sunny October day crisp as cider, an autumnsoft breeze that smells of dry and burning leaves, and his spirits are high, three or four exceptional trilobites from the hard limestone already and a single, disc-shaped test of some specie of echinodermia he’s never encountered before, almost as big as a silver dollar. He stoops to get a better look at a promising slab when someone calls his name, and he looks up, mildly annoyed at the intrusion. Foreman Wallace is standing nearby, scratching at his thick black beard, and he points at Henry with one finger.
“How’s the fishin’, Professor?” he asks, and it takes Henry a moment to get the joke; he doesn’t laugh, but a belated smile, finally, and then the foreman is crossing the uneven stones towards him.
“No complaints,” Henry says and produces the largest of the trilobites for the foreman’s inspection. Warren Wallace holds the oystergray chunk of limestone close and squints at the small dark Cryptolithus outstretched on the rock.
“Well,” the foreman says and rubs at his beard again, wrinkles his thick eyebrows and stares back at Henry Matthews. “Ain’t that some pumpkins. And this little bug used to be alive? Crawlin’ around in the ocean?”
“Yes,” Henry replies, and he points to the trilobite’s bulbous glabellum and the pair of large compound eyes to either side. “This end was its head,” he says. “And this was the tail,” as his fingertip moves to the fan-shaped lobe at the other end of the creature. Warren Wallace glances back at the fossil once more before he returns it to Henry.
“Now, Professor, you tell me if you ever seen anything like this here,” and the foreman produces a small bottle from his shirt pocket, apothecary bottle Henry thinks at first, and then no, not medicine, nitroglycerine. Warren Wallace passes the stoppered bottle to the schoolteacher, and, for a moment, Henry Matthews stares silently at the black thing trapped inside.
“Where did this come from?” he asks, trying not to show his surprise but wide eyes still on the bottle, unable to look away from the thing coiling and uncoiling in its eight-ounce glass prison.
“From the tunnel,” the foreman replies, spits tobacco juice and glances over his shoulder at the gaping hole in the mountain. “About five hundred feet in, just a little ways past where the limerock goes to sandstone. That’s where we hit the fissure.”
Henry Matthews turns the bottle in his hand, and the thing inside uncoils, stretches chitinous segments, an inch, two inches, almost three, before it snaps back into a legless ball that glimmers iridescent in the afternoon sun.
“Ugly little bastard, ain’t it?” the foreman says and spits again. “But you ain’t never seen nothin’ like it before, have you?” And Henry shakes his head, no, never, and now he wants to look away, doesn’t like the way the thing in the bottle is making him feel. But it’s stretched itself out again, and he can see tiny fibers like hairs or minute spines protruding between the segments.
“Can you show me?” he asks, realizes that he’s almost whispering now, library or classroom whisper like maybe he’s afraid someone will overhear, like this should be secret.
“Where it came from, will you take me there?”
“Yeah. I was hopin’ you’d ask,” the foreman says and rubs his beard. “But let me tell you, Professor, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” And after Warren Wallace has taken the bottle back, returned it to his shirt pocket so that Henry doesn’t have to look at the black thing anymore, the two men begin the climb down the spoil piles to the entrance of the tunnel.
A few feet past the entrance, fifteen, twenty, and the foreman stops, stands talking to a fat man with a pry bar while Henry looks back at the bright day framed in raw limestone and bracing timbers, blinking as his eyes slowly adjust to the gloom. “Yeah,” the fat man says, “Yeah,” and Warren Wallace asks him another question. It’s cooler in the tunnel, in the dark, and the air smells like rock dust and burning carbide and another smell tucked somewhere underneath, unhealthy smell like a wet cellar or rotting vegetables that makes Henry wrinkle his nose. “Yeah, I seen him before,” the fat man with the pry bar says, wary reply to the foreman’s question and a distrustful glance towards Henry Matthews.
“I want him to have a look at your arm, Jake, that’s all,” and Henry turns his back on the light, turns to face the foreman and the fat man. “He ain’t no doctor,” the fat man says. “And I already seen Doc Joe, anyways.”
“He’s right,” Henry says, confused now, no idea what this man’s arm and the thing in the jar might have to do with one another, blinking at Wallace through the dancing whiteyellow afterimages of the sunlight outside. “I haven’t had any medical training to speak of, certainly nothing formal.”
“Yeah?” the foreman says, and he sighs loudly, exasperation or disappointment, spits on the tunnel floor, tobacco juice on rusted steel rails. “C’mon then, Professor,” and he hands a miner’s helmet to Henry, lifts a lantern off an iron hook set into the rock wall. “Follow me, and don’t touch anything. Some of these beams ain’t as sturdy as they look.”
The fat man watches them, massages his left forearm protectively when the schoolteacher steps past him, and now Henry can hear the sounds of digging somewhere in the darkness far ahead of them. Relentless clank and clatter of steel against stone, and the lantern throws long shadows across the rough limestone walls; fresh wound, these walls, this abscess hollowed into the world’s thin skin. And such morbid thoughts as alien to Henry Matthews as the perpetual night of this place, and so he tells himself it’s just the sight of the odd and squirming thing in the bottle, that and the natural uneasiness of someone who’s never been underground before.
“You’re wonderin’ what Jake Isabell’s arm has to do with that damned worm, ain’t you?” the foreman asks, his voice too loud in the narrow tunnel even though he’s almost whispering. And “Yes,” Henry replies, “Yes, I was, as a matter of fact.”
“It bit him a couple of days ago. Jesus, make him sick as a dyin’ dog, too. But that’s all. It bit him.”
And “Oh,” Henry says, unsure what else he should say and beginning to wish he was back out in the sun looking for his trilobites and mollusks with the high Octoberblue sky hung far, far overhead. “How deep are we now?” he asks, and the foreman stops and looks up at the low ceiling of the tunnel, rubs his beard. “Not very, not yet . . . hundred and twenty, maybe hundred and thirty feet.” And then he reaches up and touches the ceiling a couple of inches above his head.
“You know how old these rocks are, Professor?” and Henry nods, tries too hard to sound calm when he answers the foreman.
“These layers of limestone here . . . well, they’re probably part of the Lower Silurian system, some of the oldest with traces of living creatures found in them,” and he pauses, realizes that he’s sweating despite the cool and damp of the tunnel, wishes again he’d declined the foreman’s invitation into the mountain. “But surely hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years old,” he says.
“Damn,” the foreman says and spits again. “Now that’s somethin’ to think about, ain’t it, Professor? I mean, these rocks sittin’ here all that time, not seein’ the light of day all that time, and then we come along with our picks and dynamite—”
“Yes sir,” Henry Matthews says and wipes the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. “It is, indeed,” but Warren Wallace is moving again, dragging the little pool of lantern light along with him, and Henry has to hurry to catch up, almost smacks his forehead on the low, uneven ceiling. Another three hundred feet or so and they’ve reached the point where the gray limestone is overlain by beds of punky reddish sandstone, the bottom of the Red Mountain formation; lifeblood of the city locked away in these strata, clotthick veins of hematite for the coke ovens and blast furnaces dotting the valley below. “Not much farther,” the foreman says. “We’re almost there.”
The wet, rotten smell stronger now, and glistening rivulets meander down the walls, runoff seeping down through the rocks above them, rain filtered through dead leaves and soil, through a hundred or a thousand cracks in the stone. Henry imagines patches of pale and rubbery mushrooms, perhaps more exotic fungi, growing in the dark. He wipes his face again and this time keeps the handkerchief to his nose, but the thick and rotten smell seeps up his nostrils, anyway. If an odor alone could drown a man, he thinks, is about to say something about the stench to Warren Wallace when the foreman stops, holds his lantern close to the wall, and Henry can see the big sheets of corrugated tin propped against the west side of the tunnel.
“At first I thought we’d hit an old mine shaft,” he says, motions towards the tin with the lantern, causing their shadows to sway and contort along the damp tunnel. “Folks been diggin’ holes in this mountain since the forties to get at the ore. So that’s what I thought, at first.”
“But you’ve changed your mind?” Henry asks, words muffled by the useless handkerchief pressed to his face.
“Right now, Professor, I’m a whole lot more interested in what you think,” and then Wallace pulls back a big section of the tin, lets it fall loud to the floor, tin clamor against the steel rails at his feet. Henry gags, bilehot rush from his gut and the distant taste of breakfast in the back of his mouth. “Jesus,” he hisses, not wanting to be sick in front of the foreman, and the schoolteacher leans against the tunnel wall for support, presses his left palm against moss-slick stone, stone gone soft as the damprough hide of some vast amphibian.
“Sorry. Guess I should’a warned you about the stink,” and Warren Wallace frowns, grim face like Greek tragedy, and takes a step back from the hole in the wall of the tunnel, hole within a hole, and now Henry’s eyes are watering so badly he can hardly see. “Merkel had us plowin’ through here full chisel until we hit that thing. Now it’s all I can do to keep my men workin’.”
“Can’t exactly blame them,” Henry wheezes and gags again, spits at the tunnel floor, but the taste of the smell clings to his tongue, coats it like a mouthful of cold bacon grease. The foreman gestures for him to come closer, close enough he can peer down into the gap in the rock and Henry knows that’s the last thing he wants to do. But he loathes that irrational fear, fear of the unknown that keeps men ignorant, keeps men down, and all his life gone to the purging of that instinctual dread, first from himself and then his students. And so Henry Matthews holds his breath against the stench and steps over the mining car tracks, glances once at Warren Wallace, and to see a strong man so afraid and hardly any effort into hiding it is enough to get him to the crumbling edge of the hole.
And that’s the best word, hole, a wide crevice in the wall of the tunnel maybe four feet across and dropping suddenly away into darkness past the reach of the lantern, running west into more blackness but pinching closed near the tunnel’s ceiling. A natural fault, he thinks at first, evidence of the great and ancient forces that must have raised these mountains up, and the smell could be almost anything. Perhaps this shaft opens somewhere on the surface, a treacherous, unnoticed pit in the woods overhead, and from time to time an unfortunate animal might fall, might lie broken and rotting in the murk below, food for devouring mold and insects. And the thing in the jar is probably nothing more or less than the larvae of some large beetle new to entomology or perhaps only the hitherto unknown pupa of a familiar specie.
“Take the lantern,” Warren Wallace says, then, handing the kerosene lamp to the schoolteacher. “Hold it right inside there, but don’t lean too far in, mind you,” and Henry feels the foreman’s hand on his shoulder, weight and strength meant to be reassuring.
“Hold it out over the hole,” he says, “and look down.”
Henry Matthews does as he’s told, already half-convinced of his clever induction and preparing himself for the unpleasant (but perfectly ordinary) sight of a badly decomposed raccoon or opossum, maybe even a deer carcass at the bottom and the maggots, maybe more of the big black things that supposedly bit Mr. Isabell’s arm. He exhales, a little dizzy from holding his breath, then gasps in another lung full of the rancid air rising up from the pit. One hand braced against the tunnel wall, and leans as far out as he dares, a foot, maybe two, the flickering yellow light washing down and down, and he almost cries out at the unexpected sight of his own reflection staring back up at him from the surface of a narrow subterranean pool.
“It’s flooded,” he says, half to himself, half to the foreman, and Warren Wallace murmurs a reply, yeah, it’s flooded, and something else that Henry doesn’t quite catch. He’s watching the water, ten feet down to the surface at the most, water as smooth and black as polished obsidian.
“Now look at the walls, Professor, where they meet the water,” and he does, positions the lantern for a better view, and maybe just a little braver now, a little more curious, so he’s leaning farther out, the foreman’s hand still holding him back.
At first he doesn’t see anything, angle a little less than ninety degrees where black rock meets blacker water, and then he does see something and thinks it must be the roots of some plant growing in the pool, or, more likely, running down from the forest above to find this hidden moisture. Gnarled roots as big around as his arm, twisted wood knotted back upon itself.
But one of them moves, then, abrupt twitch as it rolls away from the others, and Henry Matthews realizes that they’re all moving now, each tendril creeping slow across the slick face of the crevice like blind and roaming fingers, searching. “My God,” he whispers. “My God in Heaven,” starts to pull away from the hole, but the foreman’s hand holds him fast. “No. Not yet,” Warren Wallace says calmly, and “Watch them for just another second, Professor.”
And one of the tendrils has pulled free of the rest, rises silently from the water like a charmed cobra. Henry can see that it’s turning towards him, already six or seven feet of it suspended above the dark water, but it’s still coming. The water dripping off it very, very loud, impossible drip, drip, drip like a drumbeat in his ears, like his own racing heart, and then he notices the constant movement on the underside of the thing and knows at once what he’s seeing. The worm thing in Wallace’s bottle, coiling and uncoiling, and here are a thousand of them, restless polyps sprouting from this greater appendage, row upon writhing row, and now it’s risen high enough that the thing is right in front of him, shimmering in the lantern light, a living question mark scant feet from Henry Matthew’s face.
And later, lying awake in his room or walking at night along Twentieth Street, or broad daylight and staring up towards the mountain from the windows of his classroom, this is the part that he’ll struggle to recall: Warren Wallace pulling him suddenly backwards, away from the hole as tendril struck, the lantern falling from his hand, tumbling into the hole, and maybe he heard it hit the water, heard it splash at the same moment he tumbled backwards into the dark, tripped on the rails and landed hard. And the foreman cursing, the sounds of him hastily working to cover the hole in the tunnel wall again, and lastly, the dullwet thunk, meatmallet thud again and again from the other side of the tin barrier.
Minutes later that seem like days, and the schoolteacher and the foreman sit alone together in the small and crooked shed near the tunnel, sloppy excuse for an office, a table and two stools, blueprints and a rusty stovepipe winding up towards the ceiling. Coal soot and the sicklysweet smell of Wallace’s chewing tobacco. Henry Matthews sits on one of the stools, a hot cup of coffee in his hand, black coffee with a dash of whiskey from a bottle the foreman keeps in a box of tools under the table. And Warren Wallace sits across from him, staring down at his own cup, watching the steam rising from the coffee.
“I won’t even try,” Henry starts, stops, stares at the dirt floor and then begins again. “I can’t tell you what that was, what it is. I don’t think anyone could, Mr. Wallace.”
“Yeah,” the foreman says, shakes his head slow and sips at his coffee. Then, “I just wanted you to see it, Professor, before we bring in a fellow to brick up that hole next week. I wanted someone with some education to see it, so someone besides me and my men would know what was down there.”
And for a while neither of them says anything else, and there’s only the rattle and clatter of a locomotive passing by a little farther up the mountain, hauling its load of ore along the loop of the L. & N. Mineral Railroad. In the quiet left when the train has gone, the foreman clears his throat and, “You know what ‘hematite’ means?”
“From the Latin,” Henry answers. “It means ‘blood stone,’” and he takes a bitter, bourbon-tainted sip of his own coffee.
“Yeah,” the foreman says. “I looked that up in a dictionary. Blood stone.”
“What are you getting at?” Henry asks, watching the foreman, and Wallace looks a lot older than he ever realized before, deep lines and wrinkles, patches of gray in his dark beard. The foreman reaches beneath the table, lifts something wrapped in burlap and sets it in front of Henry Matthews.
“Just that maybe we ain’t the only thing in the world that’s got a use for that iron ore,” he says and pulls the burlap back, revealing a large chunk of hematite. Granular rock the exact color of dried blood, and the foreman doesn’t have to point out the deep pockmarks in the surface of the rock, row after row, each no bigger around than a man’s finger, no bigger around than the writhing black thing in Warren Wallace’s nitroglycerine bottle.
The chill and tinderdry end of November: Mr. W. A. Merkel’s tunnel finished on schedule, and the Water Works began laying the two big pipes, forty-two and thirty inches round, that would eventually bring clean drinking water all the way from the new Cahaba Pumping Station. Henry Matthews never went back to the spoil heaps outside the tunnel, never saw Warren Wallace again; the last crate of his Silurian specimens shipped away to Tuscaloosa, and his attentions, his curiosity, shifted instead to the great Warrior coal field north of Birmingham, the smokegray shales and cinnamon sandstones laid down in steamy Carboniferous swamps uncounted ages after the silt and mud, the ancient reefs and tropical lagoons that finally became the strata of Red Mountain, were buried deep and pressed into stone.
But the foreman’s pitted chunk of hematite kept in a locked strongbox in one undusted corner of Henry’s room, and wrapped in cheesecloth and excelsior, nestled next to the stone and floating in cloudy preserving alcohol, the thing in the bottle. Kept like an unlucky souvenir or memento of a nightmare, and late nights when he awoke coldsweating and mouth too dry to speak, these were things to take out, to hold, something undeniable to look at by candle or kerosene light. A proof against madness, or a distraction from other memories, blurred, uncertain recollection of what he saw in that last moment before he fell, as the lantern tumbled towards the oilblack water and the darker shape moving just beneath its mirrored surface.
All would be well.
All would be heavenly—
If the damned would only stay damned.
—Charles Fort (1919)