IT HAD BEEN a dream full of noise, a voiceless, howling wind. But now all was quiet. The widow opened her eyes and after a moment sat up. There was a tree directly in front of her. Seams of fine moss ran along the bark’s nap. She leaned over and saw another tree, several more, and then nothing but night. Protruding from her forearm was a cedar twig, complete with needle tufts. None of this interested her, so she lay her head back down on the ground, hearing a faraway hiss and rattle coming through the dense earth, a sound like pebbles shaken in a metal pan. Her brain was ringing.
A little later, perhaps a long time later, the widow found herself in the process of standing up. With great difficulty, she staggered into an upright position. At her feet were smashed branches and twigs. She looked up at the tree that stood in her way. In the weak morning light she saw the broken top of it leaning into a grey sky. She understood somehow the immense height from which she had fallen. She could see where she had hit the tree, and where her body had barrel-rolled downward. The twig in her arm ached, and so she pulled at it, extracting an inch of swollen wood from the hole, while her fingers cramped and danced, and then went limp. She looked vacantly at the thing for a moment, the fibres of wood waterlogged with blood, then she dropped it and staggered forward on bare feet, heading for home, though she didn’t know where she was or which direction she was going.
At first it appeared as if someone had rolled white rocks here and there to mark something out. Small boulders lay among the trees like dead comets at the end of their trajectories, each one with a tail of destruction behind it, all of them aligned in the same direction. These the widow stepped around, limping.
It was unearthly still. No wind. No sounds of animals. She could hear her own breathing, dull and hollow. On the air, a faint taste of dust. She passed a boulder the size of an out-house, trees strewn under it like a straw bed, and she went on without amazement. It was simply in her way.
Something funny about the air — she stopped and listened; the trees above moved soundlessly. She shuffled her bare feet, to no effect. So, she thought, I’m deaf again, though she could not remember when she had lost her hearing before. At her feet, an old, scorched pot, lying upturned. No lid. She poked it with her naked toe and it rolled over. Ancient volcanic residue all around its sides, as individual as a face — it was her own pot or, rather, the Reverend’s. She leaned down to touch it, and everything went black.
She woke again walking, looking for him. She tried calling his name but the effort made her sob, and so she went on in silence.
The smell of smoke. Here was a little lean-to, crouched against a shallow rock drop. A half-tent, with some ash-grey timber set vertically as a wall, and at its mouth a bent old coot in long johns and a hat, tending his fire. His cheek was pale as new porcelain, the grey-blue undercoat of shock.
“Queer, isn’t it?” he said, but she could barely hear him. His voice was muffled, as if she were eavesdropping through a thick door.
“What?” she said, swallowing.
“You mean you ain’t seen it?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“All of that. Out there.” His gesture was meant to take in much of the world.
Then the man shifted on his little stool and looked at her, the fire crackling merrily before him. He saw her bare feet, the blood running down her arm and thickening into viscid strings at her fingertips. He looked at the shreds of dark cloth, exposing her legs and much of her right hip, the half-buttoned bodice.
“D’ye think ye could sit down?”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t seem to have heard. Her eyes were strangely unfocused. So he looked away in a sudden spasm of embarrassment, shamed by the intimacy of injury.
“I was here,” he said quietly, apologetically. “Just sleeping. All I was doing was sleeping.” When he looked up again, she was gone.
THE WIDOW MOVED amid the trimmings of a nightmare forest. Blown debris was piled up everywhere. Branches and stones. Trees leaned drunkenly, many broken halfway up their tall shafts, heavy heads tilted crazily. On everything was a pale dust, giving the dark green vegetation a leprous air. Small, colourful bodies were strewn on the ground like Easter eggs, bright fallen birds, killed by the first blast of hot wind. Finches, chickadees, grey jays with their velvet breasts exposed. Farther on, a young lynx lay bloodied on its side, eyes still moist, open mouth still moist, and on its motionless fur a growing dusting of chalk. She weaved away from it. Now there were bits of cloth and torn chunks of mattress and a kettle and crushed chairs. A door stood bizarrely upright, having spun through the darkness like a playing card to land there. A hat was dangling from a high branch. Through the curtain of bent trees she could see that she was approaching something wide and pale.
When she reached the verge of the trees and stepped out onto the moonscape itself, the widow finally stopped to gape. She sought a landmark, something to tell her where she was. Nothing was familiar, even the mountain was a different shape — an ashen, treeless concavity, strewn with rubble, some of it still moving, everything shrouded in strange clouds. The widow registered this the way one would in a dream. It was information, nothing more. She simply struggled on across the rock in bare feet, driven by her one thought: to go home.
A bloated red sun crept the far ranges. Even two hours after the avalanche, rocks still bounded downhill, beaming red as they went, deflecting, colliding with larger boulders and coming to an abrupt halt in a spray of shards.
The widow picked her way over the sharp ground. A boulder leaped ahead of her, another fell behind her, but she tottered on, charmed. Distantly, she could hear a sound, a human voice, shrill and insistent, coming closer. And then McEchern was seizing her round the wrist, his childlike shouting horrible to her ears.
“What in shit’s name are you doing?”
Because she wasn’t moving fast enough, he dashed behind her and pushed her rump, impelled her into a trot, hurrying her along, her bare feet leaving bloody smears on the rocks as she went. Finally he stopped pushing. All of a sudden it was cool and quiet. Together they stood in the shadow of a massive boulder, several storeys high. He seized her tattered, open collar and dragged her down to face him.
“You stay here,” he said fiercely, his pudgy finger nearly on her nose. “Stay put, d’you hear?” She nodded meekly. Then he was gone, running away over the stones as nimble as a goat, one hand raised to keep the bowler on his head.
The widow sat down heavily and began to inspect her bloodied feet.
“I’m damned sure not dead,” said a voice beside her.
She looked, and there sat a dirty boy she had never seen before. He was blond, his features rabbity, a wild and crooked grin on his face. His mouth hung open in near glee as he gazed about him at the desolation. The boy’s right arm was laid across a flat rock beside him. The hand was thickened and blue and there was a dark line across the forearm where he had broken both bones. When he moved, the hand and wrist dragged a little. His lips were blue.
“You’re not either,” he exhorted her. “Are ya?”
She watched his mouth move and did not understand him.
“I’ll tell ya a secret.” He leaned toward her, teeth chattering, the hinge in his wrist ghastly. “Walter is sure as shit dead. I know that much.”
“Who?”
“Walter. He’s dead.”
“I don’t know you,” she said.
“Holee, ” he cackled, “they dug me out from under I don’t know how much. I was half out of the tent, and all tangled up in it, with this tree trunk laid acrost me. I was calling for fuckin’ ages. And when they started pulling me out I felt something soft under me. I said, ‘Hey, fellas, I think there’s someone else down there.’” The boy started hooting. “It was Walter!” He laughed so hard his nose began to run. But when he looked down at his swollen and flaccid fingers, the laughing subsided.
A spray of small stones exploded in a fan off the thing they sheltered behind. After an interval they both winced and ducked away, comically slow, two injured people in slow motion.
They sat listening to the crack and hiss of falling rock. And then the boy lost consciousness. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then his head lolled and he slumped back against the rock. The widow rose and stood over him, looking. The damaged arm with its extra joint lay dangling, the flesh bent like a sausage. This curiosity held her for a moment. And then she headed downhill again, still searching. Intent as she was, she didn’t notice the broken birds rising from the ground at her feet, popping like fleas over the shattered rocks.
What used to be a river was now a shallow lake, swelling upward along the fissures and runnels that wandered up the mountainside. Water spread wide and flat and muddy along the valley bottom. Dust suffused the atmosphere, erasing the far side of the valley, the flooded river endless now, a sea extending into cloud. Dust rained on the congested cedars, drifted over the empty railway tracks, and swirled about with the antic movements of several figures down by the water. A maddened horse dashed insanely up and down the new shoreline while bloodied, injured men tried in vain to catch it. The men had kerchiefs to their faces against the dust and the animal bellowed and coughed.
One of them, a big Swede, had a rope and was in the process of fashioning a lasso when the widow emerged over a hump of rubble. He strode out toward the lapping waterline to face down the galloping black yearling, palming the rope low, the slack gathered into loops in his other hand. He had tied the far end to a tree.
“No, no!” another man hurried toward him. “You’ll break the bastard’s neck!”
The yearling charged, then balked and dashed around them, its tail wild and high, darting into the water in a rooster tail of spray. It ran and bucked wildly, frightened into madness, then slipped and sank hindwise into the river, the unstable scree beneath its hooves giving way. A few more futile lurches and the horse slid in up to its neck. It began paddling away from the shoreline, confused, circling back, and then suddenly, without warning, disappeared altogether, as if yanked downward. The men ran forward to stand at the edge of the opaque river, its water the colour of milky tea.
“Shit!” said the Swede. There was silence after the suck of its going, then, horribly, a quiet churning from somewhere below. Bubbles rose in a curved line.
Then the animal rocketed upward, gasping and coughing, now turning instinctively to shore, eyes huge and rolling. It saw the men there, lasso dangling from the Swede’s hand. Hooves pounded the surface in twin explosions, as if the yearling was galloping, and it pawed at the sludgy shoreline, long black legs finding purchase only to lose it, the body surging upward with great deep groans only to drop away again.
“Shit,” said the Swede again, “he will drown,” and indeed it did seem inevitable. Too late, the men backed away from the shoreline, but the animal swam in ever-weakening circles, afraid now of the shore, of the invisible and slithering thing beneath. Soon only the head swam along, and the huge round nostrils blew a beige mist along the surface. In the wan morning light, the surface of the water was glassy, motionless but for the turbulence of this foolish young horse. Finally, the animal found a more manageable slope. Streaming and glossy as a newborn, it humped and dragged its sorry way back onto dry land, then circled dully to face its pursuers, coughing like a bellows, its legs buckling. It fixed the two men with a look of sullen defeat.
“I go get him now,” said the Swede, but it was a question.
“Fuck it,” said a scrawny man. “Leave him be.” They stood side by side, the lasso forgotten.
The widow sat and attended to her shredded feet, which didn’t hurt too badly and had for the most part stopped bleeding. She turned her head uphill and saw curtains of dust hanging motionless over the landslide. Slowly, a veiled anxiety had begun to grow in her. Familiar. Like hunger. The emergency had begun to dawn on her, and the Reverend was at its heart. She stood up and turned back uphill.
MCECHERN’S STORE HAD collapsed. The tent’s centre pole had snapped halfway up and the jagged stump jutted sword-like through the heavy white canvas, beneath which the outlines of piles of goods could be discerned. The topography of the establishment was now implied in humps and sags, like sleepers under a blanket. The widow arrived to find the place crowded with miners — in this town filled with men, she had never seen so many at one time. Some had been bandaged with torn shirts and handkerchiefs, and they sat quietly on the store’s raised platform. A few were moaning and writhing. All along one side, a number of bodies had been laid out in a row along the planks, each pair of boots in a slack V. The widow approached and leaned half-swooning against a tree, the thrum of birdwings above her, her eyes in unwilling study on these many boots. Toes risen up, a palisade against life, and beyond them, the faces of the dead. Among them was a pair of bare feet, the hooked toes intimately white and still. Farther away, dragged under the canopy of a spreading cedar so that he was almost invisible, lay another man, or what was left of him. One foot and calf was missing entirely, his crushed upper body merely reminiscent of a human shape, the knot of exploded viscera bluish and soupy. A wide smear ran along the planks where he had been dragged, and this alone announced the man’s hiding place. The widow gaped, the sight so unreal that her mind could give it no meaning. After a moment, she simply turned and wandered away.
The dwarf was standing with another man, the two of them worrying over a third who seemed desperate to lie down and sleep. Several onlookers stood about, offering suggestions: Stand him up. Lie him down. Give him whisky. Give him salt. The man in question was the Norseman, now entirely red. His face was slashed in a dozen places, his neck and chest were streaming blood, his shirt was torn and deeply punctured, and blood had soaked the waistband of his pants. McEchern and the other man’s hands and shirts were scarlet from handling him. Together they sat him upright and shook him to force his attention, and McEchern was plying him with water, which the drooping miner treated like poison. His trembling hand, sticky with blood, kept coming up to push the metal cup away. But when they managed to get the cup to his lips, he drank.
The environs of the store had become an impromptu hospital. Men rushed by with steaming buckets of hot water, with shovels and rope. They moved the injured along on stretchers made of blankets, fallen branches strapped together with rope, blasted sections of walls from fallen houses. Debris lay everywhere and they scavenged through it for what they needed. A crushed pair of boots had laces that could be used as a tourniquet. Wind-blown clothes could keep the injured warm. Among this industry there were dazed men, some of whom wandered anxiously and aimlessly while others simply waited, talking under their breath, or not talking, rolling cigarettes with cold and palsied fingers.
“Where is he?” she said to herself, fretful as a child, scouting among these strangers. At the sound of her voice, McEchern looked up, and his face wowed.
“C’mere, honey,” he called as sweetly as if she were a tame bird. His fingers beckoned. “Come on now. I told you not to wander.”
The widow remained where she was, her eyes on the fainting red man. Suddenly she was streaming with tears.
“You!” The dwarf thwacked his companion on the shoulder and pointed. “Go get her.”
The big man settled the widow on an upturned tin bathtub to inspect her wounds, and there she sat, unable to stop sobbing, the tears running down her face and neck and into the shredded collar of her widow’s costume.
“Look at this knot,” he said with some admiration. He shuffled from side to side, probing with his thumbs at a massive swelling behind her ear. At some point, blood had flowed lavishly, hidden by her hair, but now it had stanched and coagulated, and where his finger pressed it was sticky and hot and almost numb. The widow suffered these ministrations the way a child suffers a washing. She could see the Norseman had finally been left alone to sleep, lying on the wooden planks with his legs dangling. She saw the swell of his chest, the torn knees of his pants, his legs hanging down in their loose boots, one leg bouncing very slightly with the pulse of his heart, slowly, like a contented man, keeping time with the music in his head.
Vaguely, the widow became aware of a grinding next to her skull. The big man was working something out of the wound. She reached up to touch it and her hand was slapped away. Then a sharp pain, and the man said, “Hello.”
His grimy face appeared before her, exultant, holding between thumb and forefinger a small thing the size and shape of a tooth. A shard of granite perhaps. He flicked it away, patted her cheek and said, “You got your bell rung all right.” She scowled at him, and probed the wound with her fingers, proprietorially. She felt the renewed warm tickle of blood crawling down her shoulder blade and into the small of her back.
McEchern’s condensed shape could been seen searching around under the tent’s heavy canvas, roaming from lump to lump, keeping up a consternated and muffled discourse with himself. She listened intently, following his voice as it floated among the other men’s voices and shouts and moans, tracking him the way one tracks movement in the underbrush or a chirruping among blowing trees and high wind. There was something in McEchern’s voice that calmed her, and she, too, stepped into the vestibule, where suddenly everything seemed very quiet and there was only movement. She was at the verge of consciousness, waiting.
The big man was gone and she was alone. She looked about her for a familiar face, but the men were all camouflaged with dust, with blood, and something else, a distortion common to those in a disaster, a huge-eyed infantility brought on by surprise. On a few of the faces was something approaching exhilaration, gratitude, pride. How glad we are not to be dead. How clever to avoid it.
The poor red Norseman lay like a reveller in one of McEchern’s drunken soirees. He was unearthly still. His foot had ceased bobbing. Beneath him, urine dripped between the planks into the shadows under the store.
She remembered it now. The noise so percussive and sharp she had felt it in her chest, like the nearby discharge of a cannon. An impact that came from no particular place, but out of the very air. Still silly from sleep, she had leaped from the bed and was dressing in the dark. Moonlight came through the window and she could see everything with perfect clarity. An unearthly rumbling everywhere, and the floor on which she hopped and struggled into her clothes was shimmying madly. She saw the Reverend groggy on his pallet, propped up on one elbow, his hair in a scruff on his head. His face silvery in the darkness, the glint of his eye. The look on his face was fear — he knew what was happening. He was speaking, but she couldn’t hear the words. Something huge and white flashed by on a thunderous trajectory, puncturing the air and blowing her hair about her face, sucking the breath momentarily out of her lungs. The boulder blew past almost unseen, a curious flare amid the roaring dark.
She would never know why she’d run after it, stumbling on the leaping floorboards, the sound of other smaller impacts against the walls of the house behind her, like uneven gunfire, but she’d followed like a dog to the jagged, stove-sized hole near the eaves where the thing had escaped. Here she stood, the Reverend somewhere behind her in the dark, when a shadow cut across the moon and the screaming wall of rock hit the side of the house. The building flattened like a bellows, and blew her out into the night. She remembered the wind and the cold, her body tumbling through space, a body among many, all travelling together.
She was drinking now from a whisky bottle — mid-sip. She held the bottle at eye level, uncertain where it had come from, then lowered it to her knee.
“Have another.” McEchern stood before her, his solemn face a foot from her own.
“He’s dead,” she said, unbelieving.
“I know.”
“He didn’t move. He didn’t get up out of bed.”
“No one had time to do anything. It happened too fast. Take a drink.”
“But,” she sobbed, “look at me!”
The dwarf ’s eyes left her face and skated aimlessly; indeed, how was it that she was there, alive and intact? He retrieved the bottle and took a swig, held it in his hand and pressed his wrist to his mouth. His face was dusty and washed out, the exhausted eyes small and dull and redrimmed. Behind him, the hubbub of the makeshift infirmary, men shouting. He gazed at his collapsed establishment, burst like a balloon, the wormed sign pitched up at a woozy angle, the lettering shaded by drifts of dust, now saying only erns. Strange that in its collapse the little man’s store had never been so popular. Given a moment to think, every man who was still able to walk had come here.
“That pole broke,” he said, “and came down one foot from my head. Then the tent came down after it, sort of floating. I know an avalanche when I hear it. I just waited for the rest of it to hit. It never did. See over there, and over there? It came down both sides. Missed the store completely.” He shook his head. “You and me got an extra dose of luck.”
“How do we know he’s dead, Mac?” she said, her voice weak and empty.
“Drop it, Mary,” he said.
“But how do we know? Maybe . . . maybe he’s all right.” She had been plucked from the path of the disaster — why not him? McEchern was silent for a long time, and she waited, unblinking, as a wife awaits explanation from a wayward husband.
“That whole side of the mountain is gone,” he said finally. His eyes grew moist and two livid streaks appeared high on his cheeks. “The Rev’s gone, too. Under a hundred feet of rock.”
He stayed with her a while longer, the two of them sunk into silence, seated side by side on the tin bathtub, the widow in her tatters and bare feet, the dwarf ’s beard caked with dust and his bowler dirty and flattened on one side. They remained like that until McEchern roused himself to shout at an old fellow working his way under the folds of the tent into the store.
“Get out of there!” he piped, leaping from his seat. “You heard me, get out of there!” The miner only mumbled something and turned back to his struggles. As the dwarf walked forward he extracted from the waistband of his trousers the old Colt revolver and fired it once into the air. A unified jolt of surprise ran through the assembly of men. A few of the injured actually sat up to see what new calamity was coming.
“That’s right,” McEchern said as the jabbering man backed away from the collapsed door flaps. “No one goes in there but me. You hear that?” His voice was shredding with emotion. “I catch any of you fuckers helping yourselves, I’ll make you sorry.”
DARKNESS FELL EARLY that night, the sun setting cold and shrunken in the dusty air. The widow moved slowly in the fading light, wandering the face of the slide. Her hands were grimed with blood from nursing the injured and dressing the dead. A cavalcade of horrors paraded before her eyes still. She now knew intimately the colour of exposed bone, the silver sheaths on muscle, the whiff of intestine.
All that day, she had gone barefoot among the barnyard racket of moans and coughs and begging, helping where she could, and there was dried blood on her from a dozen different sources. Those in terror would hold her hand and bless her for her kindness; some of them called her by names that weren’t her own.
But before long, one man had sat up and pointed at the widow, shouting, “It’s her. She done it!” until someone told him to shut up. And eventually he did shut up, but there was strained silence afterwards, and there followed behind the widow something like a bitter wind, some men actually pondering the issue, the possibility that this bedraggled creature in her torn clothes had somehow brought destruction upon them. Men brought up on God and superstition in equal measure, labouring in dark mines, where no woman had ever stepped, its darkness full of ghosts. And now here she went among them, the living and the dead, in her witch’s garb and bare feet, scuffing up pale dust as if it were an infernal smoke billowing from her skirts.
She had ministered to a young man with most of his hair singed off and cuts to his face, washing carefully the jagged wound along his jawline, within which an intact artery throbbed visibly.
“I don’t blame you,” he had said. “You can’t blame something like this on a lady, no matter what she did.” The wet rag had trembled in her hand.
She took up a needle and thread and willed her fingers still to sew the boy’s wound closed, while he winced and whined like a dog, the skin rolling grossly away from the dull needle, like a worm from a hook, until punctured with an audible pop. This, she thought, is what the embroidery lessons were for.
“The place was unstable,” another angry, quivering voice was saying. “What’d ya think all that rockfall was about? Fun and games?”
“I’m not saying it’s her fault, just her doing.” And all around the widow, in sotto voce, there sprang up impromptu debates on issues occult, with the widow as the question to be answered. Where does misfortune come from? What hand brings it? Are the wicked among us? Does disaster find them in the end? Jonah fled from the Lord and hid among sailors, but He found him and brought to them all a terrible storm. McEchern stood by Mary’s side, his expression sour, and his eyes watchful of the men and full of warning. Pistol at his waist.
Now, walking up the slope of the landslide at dusk, the widow paused. She pressed these images away with the heels of her hands and went on, stumbling uphill. Incredible that mere men, tiny as burrowing ants, could cause such geological transformation. All the miners buried deep in the mine, their graves already dug. The men sleeping in tents, rolled under tons of rock and spread thinly about, no more sacred than a tree or a clump of grass or an entire meadow. And the pointless industry of the living — pulling dead men from the mess, sometimes just to recognize them, only to bury them again under the selfsame rock. There was no sound, not even the tinkle of falling rock any more, no animal sound, no wind. The world was hollow and dead, as closed and ghostly as the mine below. No moon. She simply clambered upward as the light failed, holding a buffalo hide about her shoulders, her breath chuffing, drifting behind her in the damp air. In her mind, she was heading for her buried home.
On her feet she wore a pair of McEchern’s boots, another borrowing. At first, he had tried to find boots among the upturned feet of the dead, pulling off first one then another boot to test it against her foot, but they were all too big. Finally, he tried a pair of his own boots. When she had slipped the first one on her foot, she grinned. It fit perfectly. This seemed to her a terrible joke.
“What?” he’d said, but his face said he knew what. The dwarf and the woman, lucky miscreants, outlanders, errors that should not exist but lived on anyway.
She went on following a path more imagination than memory. Though she could not know it, she had been moving laterally across the slope, toward the mine, away from her buried home. Tumbled rock lay in her way alongside shattered trees, their branches torn loose or tufted into bouquets. The silhouettes of old root systems reared up before her like warnings, something brainlike in their clogged, venous gnarls, and dangling there amid the damp earth like Christmas ornaments were pebbles and shards. Soon, all was black, and she stood in weighty silence, uncertain how to go on. So she huddled with her back against some large upright thing, waiting, although she knew not for what.
She remembered the Reverend’s face in the moonlight. His mouth had been moving, so she knew he was speaking, but his words had been drowned out by the roar of the approaching avalanche. What had he been saying? She tried to remember the shape of the words. But it was impossible. The floorboards had been bucking under her feet. She remembered the tuft of hair on his head, the way it had looked every morning, and a wave of tenderness pierced her heart. Not her fault, but her doing. If not her, then who? The widow put her face in her hands and wept herself into an exhausted sleep, wrapped in the rough winter hide, her cheek on the cold rock. Tired, tired, always tired. Even in sleep, she listened for him somewhere down in the earth.
She dreamed and did not dream. The sound was like a little tin spoon clacking against a table. She felt it in her teeth. The rhythmic tapping was telling her something important, and in her half-sleep, she attended the lesson patiently. A clicking. Then a scrape. The sound of several voices, indistinct but very close. The widow sat bolt upright, letting the buffalo blanket fall, suddenly fearful in the pitch-black.
At first, there was a dim glow somewhere to her left. Like a match had been dropped between the fissures of rock and was guttering there. She heard a few more clicks, and then a small stone rolled away downhill, pushed by a human hand. The hand felt about, clawlike, and dragged a few rocks into the glowing breach. The widow screamed once and then clapped her hand to her mouth. In response came muffled shouts from below. There was a barrage of hammering, and eventually a hole the size of a pie pan opened in the ground, eroding and ever widening as the widow watched in disbelief. The light of several lamps could be seen, now flickering with the unseen struggle below. Then a lone miner emerged onto the surface of the slide, shoulders first and then sitting, like a man hoisting himself through an attic trapdoor, bringing with him a whiff of stale and gassy air. He did not see the widow there, for she sat sprawled in the darkness not moving, so he crawled like a newborn devil a few feet from his infernal fissure and stood upright on unsteady legs. He removed his helmet and put his face upward and took a deep, swooning breath of fresh air. And then he bent at the waist and bellowed, “Fuck me! ” collapsing again to his hands and knees. Behind him, coming from the bright hole, could be heard hoots and whistling, the voices of men, raw and weak and full of joy.