Chapter 4

The Cable Breaks

Whenever my grandmother made tea, she did it the same way. First she would get a tea bag out of a metal tin and put it in her cup. Then she would put in a spoonful of peanut butter. Then she would pour in a little bit of brandy, just enough to fill up the bottom of the cup and slosh around the lump of peanut butter. Then she would fill up the cup with apple juice, and put it in the microwave for one minute. Her tea had a very strong smell that filled up the whole house. Even if I was on the fourth floor in my bedroom, I could smell if she had made tea. I liked how it smelled. Sometimes she let me try a sip, but I didn’t like the taste. It was too strong for me.

This time, after she had made her special tea she seemed calmer, and she smiled as she sat on her usual end of the living room couch and pulled her hand-knitted blanket around her. I sat at the other end of the couch, facing her and hugging one of the couch pillows. I didn’t feel cold, but I was finding out about so many strange new things that I wanted to hold onto something familiar and soft.

“I told her,” my grandmother said, continuing her story, “that it was dangerous down there. I told her over and over. She never listened to me. She was very intense about her work. She’d go down the shaft and start to work on a fossil, and forget about everything else in the world. Time didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to the rest of us. Hours would go by, and somebody would have to shout down the hole to remind her to come up for dinner. Once she stayed down all night without even noticing. She thought it was only a few minutes. Five years ago (you were only a year old) she went down to work on T29’s skull. A wooly mammoth skull is very big, and very heavy, especially if it’s filled up with solid rock instead of brains. She went down on the end of that cable with her pick tied to her wrist. Her team stayed at the top of the hole. I bet she was so focused on one little piece of bone under her pick that she wasn’t paying attention to the rest of the skull, to the balance of the whole thing. After about three hours, her team up top heard a sudden terrible crashing sound, and the floor shook under their feet. Something yanked sharply on the cable. And when they pulled it up, she wasn’t attached to it anymore. It was broken off. The end was crushed and frayed, and it was covered with . . . with blood.”

I stared at my grandmother in horror, and neither of us said anything for a moment.

“Did anyone go down to try and find her, Grandma?” I said, finally, in a small voice.

“Too dangerous,” she said. I could see that her hand was shaking as she lifted her tea mug to her lips. “It was too dangerous, because the whole thing might collapse. They called down for her, and shined their flashlights, and never heard any sound at all. She was gone.”

“But Grandma, somebody must have gone down to look.”

“Why do you think that?” my grandmother said, looking at me sharply. “Why would anyone risk getting crushed?”

“I would have gone down!” I said indignantly. “I would have wanted to see if she was okay. Maybe all she needed was the wooly mammoth skull lifted up a little bit. Maybe she was just knocked out and she could have been pulled out and saved.”

“You’re a wonderful boy, Love. You are right. That was the right thing to do. That’s what I thought her husband would do. But he was too scared. He thought she was dead, and in a panic he ran out of the house and never came back again.”

“He didn’t!”

“I tell you, I never saw him again. I heard he went to work in a circus in Alabama. He had developed such a terrible fear of depths, that he got a job as an acrobat on a high wire.”

“That’s not true, Grandma! He wouldn’t do that!”

“Well, okay, I made up the part about the circus. I don’t know where he went, and I don’t care.”

“Then nobody went down to try and rescue my mother?”

“Somebody did, yes.”

“It was you, Grandma, wasn’t it?”

“The rest of the staff didn’t want me to. They were afraid I would get killed. But I strapped on that belt, hooked the cable to it, and insisted that they lower me down. It wasn’t my first time down. I had gone down once or twice before, just for fun. But this time it was no fun at all. I thought I would get crushed to death any second by a falling stone. The whole tunnel was full of a choking dust. After about three hundred feet I reached a blocked part of the shaft. A solid mass of rubble. It couldn’t be moved. I shouted and stamped, but there was no answer. Just a little bit of blood on the rocky wall of the tunnel. There was nothing anybody could do, so I had them pull me back up again.

“Her helpers eventually left, of course. We lived here by ourselves after that. Just you and me. Sometimes I’d go down into the basement and look into that hole.”

We were both quiet while my grandmother sipped her tea. I thought the story was over. It had been a horrible story, but in a strange way I was happy because I had found out about my parents. Now I knew why I lived alone with my grandmother.

But then my grandmother fixed me with a piercing look and continued. “After about two years, I started to hear sounds from down the hole.”

I stared at her. “What kind of sounds?” I asked. “Not . . . not like a ghost?”