The Quality of Mercy

6



Bordon woke shortly before daybreak, as always; it was a habit that came from the long years of rising for work, an awareness of the changes of light that came to him in sleep and roused him. He was fully awake when the calls came from the alley outside, sad-sounding, more like a lament for the night gone than a welcome to the new day. It was the turn of Hardwick and his sons to shout the hour; they had no clock but they never failed, not like some who had one. Peter Hardwick claimed that he could tell when day was coming by a change in the cries of the owls that haunted the Dene, but this was not believed by everyone.

Nan rose at the call, put on a coat and went to see to the men’s bait, tie the lids across the cans to stop the food from spilling while they walked over the fields to the pit. There was a bag for each of the three, with a leather strap to go over the shoulder; they knew which bag was theirs, but what was inside the cans they only knew when they opened them. The contents varied from day to day: bread, pasties, hard-boiled eggs, bacon, cold potatoes—she saw to it herself and used what she had in the house and what she could find amid the sparse stock of the store. With three of them working there was money enough—they were not in debt for groceries, as many were.

Bordon rose and went to the door of the other bedroom, where his sons slept. The cottage was identical to all the others in the village, just as the yards behind were identical: three rooms, not counting the square-built chimney corner, all on one floor. He knocked and shouted, waited for an answering call and retired to the bedside to put on his pit clothes.

Percy woke at the knock, heard David muttering beside him; these two shared a bed, while Michael, as the eldest, had one of his own, a narrow pallet set against the wall. Percy tried to sleep again, turning away from the plaints of his brother, who was always slow to wake. He would stay in bed for another hour at least, not rising till it was full day, a privilege he tried to make the most of, knowing it would not last much longer now. Soon he would be going down with the others, a thing desired and dreaded in equal measure.

This morning sleep did not return to him, something increasingly frequent of late. He was afraid of the mine because he knew it was a testing ground; you had to go down before you could become a man. The sound of clanking and hissing came over the fields to him, as if issuing from some monster under the ground clamoring for victims. The fear was not lessened by the return home each day of his father and brothers, because they were bigger and stronger and had stood the test, but perhaps not everybody did. He had a very close friend called Billy Scotland, who was the same age as himself, and he had often wondered if Billy too was troubled by these doubts. But he could not ask because he knew that Billy would deny it, and by asking he would have revealed himself as fainthearted. Recently it had occurred to him that Billy might be keeping quiet for the same reason.

While he lay there, prey to these thoughts, some seventy men and boys set off in the half-dark, walking in loose groups across the pasture fields that led to the eye of the pit. Michael watched for the light, as he did always; it was the only natural light that he would see that day. The sea still slept in the distance, shrouded in darkness. But there was light enough now for him to make out the tufts of sheep’s wool caught in the fences, a soft clogging of the wire, no definite shape to it, only a sort of softness. There were catkins on the hazel trees; he could not distinguish the color, but he could see how the foliage was thickened by them. Colors came out now, as the light slowly strengthened, tints of dawn that would be lost in the full light of day; he made out the reddish gleam on the trunks of the birch trees higher up, at the edges of the fields, a color that had seemed menacing to him as a small child, making him always feel relieved when he had got past.

Deeply familiar things, but they had never grown stale for him. From the age of seven he had walked through these fields in all seasons and weathers, walking behind his father, as he did now, as his father had done at that age, and all the fathers before him that Michael could imagine. From open-cut to shaft, they had been hacking out the coal here for a longer time than anyone could reckon. There was nothing but the mining, no other work for the men. The village of Thorpe was there because of the coal, and for no other reason in the world.

He could distinguish his father’s back now, among the others, in the forward group of twenty or so. He found himself wondering if his father took notice of these changes in the light, these small signs of the changing season. Such things were too intimate to talk about. He sensed the wound of loss in his father, the rage in him, knew of the long-held desire to possess the plot of land by the streamside in the Dene. This had never been openly confessed, but his father had talked of the acreage, the sheltered position, the ease of irrigation. Practical things—it was the nearest he could come to unburdening himself. It was no more than a dream, in any case. He could never hope to buy the land, it would never be offered for sale, he would never have the money. But a dream nursed so stubbornly, over so long, becomes something more.

There was no real hope of saving. There were the three of them, soon to be joined by Percy, who would bring in an extra sixpence a day for the first five years, more after that, maybe double, when he rose to be putter’s lad, as David was now. In four or five years David could hope to be promoted to headsman, taking two-thirds of the earnings of the sledge loads. He himself was twenty-one now; he looked forward to becoming a full pitman, a hewer like his father, with fifteen shillings a week. But the family would lose his wages when he married. There was a girl he liked, Elsie Foster, who lived six doors away from them, though he hadn’t yet taken the decisive step of asking her to walk out with him. He was hoping to see her now, though it would be only briefly, before he went down; she started work at the same time he did, sorting out the waste from the coal at the head of the shaft.

There was enough money, they could hold their heads up, they need be beholden to no one. There was even enough for him, with his father’s permission, to take three hours a week in addition to Sunday, to practice at handball. He was recognized as having a talent for the game, and would be the Thorpe champion in the annual match with the nearby colliery village of Northfield, due to take place fairly soon now.

One of the men in the group ahead of him was Daniel Walker, who he intended to have a word with as soon as he saw a chance of getting him alone. He thought again of his brother’s hangdog look the previous evening when his bruises were revealed. He had been ashamed … David was walking beside him now, silent, still not fully awake. He might have hastened his steps so as to come up with Walker, and perhaps find an occasion as they walked side by side. But he did not want to be among the first to go down; in the few minutes of waiting for the rope he could look at Elsie; he looked for her every morning and she looked for him.

He could hear the sounds of the workings as they drew near the pithead, the grinding of the cogs on the drum, the jingling of the horses’ harness as they plodded round, the creaking of the stern pole fixed to the axle of the drum. The first men were going down already. There was a fire burning in the iron basket suspended over the shaft, and by its light he saw Elsie with the other women, crouching over the heaped coal. As he waited, with seven or eight others, for his turn to be lowered down the shaft, she looked up and saw him watching and smiled. The banksman shouted up from below that the shaft was clear, and the men prepared to descend.

There was no platform, only the winding rope that dangled before them. They bound themselves into the rope, each man making a loop and thrusting one leg into it, each using one hand to grip the rope above him, each keeping the other free to guard himself against being dashed against the sides of the shaft in the descent—collisions that had sometimes maimed men in the past. The younger boys sat astride the knees of the men; the older ones clung with their hands to the rope and twined their legs about it. Clustered thus, colliers and boys riding down on a single rope, it was as if they had been spliced together and hung on a string by some giant hand.

The fire bucket was kept burning above them, suspended over the mouth of the shaft, placed there to move currents of air through the mine workings and disperse accumulations of marsh gas. By its light, as they descended, they could see for a while the vitreous glints in the walls of the shaft. These were lost as they went deeper, and for a while they were in a darkness almost total, with only the candlelight far below them on the shaft floor and no sound but that of the rope uncoiling on the drum.

Michael found the occasion he was looking for soon after touching down at the shaft bottom. David had stopped at the entrance to the main gallery, to load empty corves onto a sledge. At a point where the gallery divided into two narrower ways toward the coal face, he came up with Walker and spoke a greeting to him. Walker turned quickly, as if startled. The light of the candle he was holding lit up the lower part of his face, glinted on the fair stubble around the heavy jaw. “What does tha want?” he said.

Neither of them could stand upright here, the ceiling was too low. Crouching forward, with heads lowered, they faced each other. There had never been much love lost between the two families; small disagreements had been magnified over time, as happens in close-knit communities.

“Tha’s been bearin’ too heavy on our David,” Michael said. “Tha’s been too free with yor fists.” He saw Walker’s mouth loosen with a sneer. “A’m tellin’ you to lay off it,” he said. “The lad’s only twelve.”

“He’s been blabbin’ then, blabbin’ to big brother,” Walker said. “Blabbin’ and blubberin’.”

Michael had resolved at the outset to keep calm, but the unfairness of this brought the beginning of anger to him. “He dinna blab,” he said.

“He’s nay bleddy use,” Walker said. “He dinna put his back into it. He’s losin’ me a shillin’ a day.”

“He does his best,” Michael said. “A know him better than tha does.”

“Is tha callin’ me a liar?”

“Keep yor hands off him,” Michael said. The anger rose in him, impeding his breathing in that constricted space. “Tha thinks tha owns him. He is smaller than you, he pushes the baskets at yor biddin’, so tha thinks he’s yor property, to kick an’ punch as tha choose. A’ll teach you different.”

“Teachin’, is it?” Walker said. “Sunday mornin’, ten o’clock, at the big field.”

“A’ll be there,” Michael said, and on this they parted.