Vermilion Drift by William Kent Krueger Page B

Cork had stopped at his house and picked up a sweater to wear in the mine, a cardigan his kids had given him for Christmas six or seven years earlier. It was red, with a white reindeer embroidered on the left side. He put it on in the cage as they descended. When Haddad saw it, he laughed and said, “Ho, ho, ho.” He wore a fleece-lined windbreaker. They both wore hard hats, each with a light mounted in front. For backup, Cork had brought the Maglite he kept in his Land Rover. Plott, the security guard on duty in the Rescue Room next to the framehead, had given Haddad a Coleman electric lantern.
    It took no time at all to reach Level One. They stepped into the cage station area, which was only dimly lit. Haddad indicated the dark tunnel directly ahead. “The Vermilion Drift,” he said.
    Bright sun, blue sky, green trees, sweet air, abundant life—all this was only a hundred feet above his head—but the solidness of the chill rock around him made Cork feel completely cut off from the world he knew. As he stood facing the dark throat of the Vermilion Drift,everything human in him cried out to back away, to return to the light, and for a moment he couldn’t make himself go forward.
    “Claustrophobic?” Haddad asked with real concern.
    “No,” Cork said. “It’s not that.”
    “Alien, isn’t it?”
    “Like I’m on another planet.”
    “Imagine spending your whole life in a place like this, Cork. A lot of men did, my old man among them.”
    In that moment, Cork felt a greater respect for Lou’s father and the men like him than he ever had before.
    “You okay going on?” Haddad asked.
    “Yeah. I’m right behind you.”
    They walked slowly into a dark that, if their lights failed, would swallow them completely. The floor was flat, the tunnel itself a ten-by-ten-foot bore whose walls showed every scar of its creation. Cork had expected the rock to be red here, but it was dull gray-green.
    “Ely greenstone,” Haddad explained. “Waste rock. They had to get through this to reach the ore. That’s what this drift is for. And see that?” Haddad pointed toward a short tunnel that cut off to their right. “A crosscut. The ore deposits didn’t flow in neat fingers. Sometimes there were offshoots, and crosscuts were used to get to them. Here, let me show you something.”
    Haddad turned off the Vermilion Drift into the crosscut tunnel. Near the end of the crosscut, which was only a dozen yards long, he stopped and shined a light toward the ceiling, illuminating a wide hole there.
    “This is a raise,” he told Cork. “In the mining here, they used a technique called undercutting. They tunneled beneath the deposits and blasted raises, these short upward accesses into the ore itself. They’d mine the ore, creating rooms called stopes, and send the ore down the raises into cars waiting on the rails below here in the drift. The cars would take the ore back to the main shaft, where it was lifted up to the framehead and dumped for crushing.”
    Cork looked down at the bare rock under his feet. “What happened to the rails?”
    “Recycled,” Haddad said. “Whenever they finished mining a drift,they pulled up the rails and used them somewhere else.” He stared upward into the raise above his head, and, when he spoke, his voice was full of admiration. “The men in charge of a crew, they were called captains. These were guys who’d spent their lives in mines in Wales and Slovakia and Germany. They were tough cusses, proud men. They knew rock and how to mine it.”
    “What did your father do?”
    “He started out as a mucker, worked his way up until he had his own crew. Damn near broke his heart when they closed the mine.”
    Cork knew that afterward Haddad’s father had gone to work in the family grocery store, but his heart was never in it.
    “I don’t know,” Lou said. “Maybe it was a good thing, having to leave the mine. A lot of miners at the end were suffering. Arthritis, lung problems. Hell, in the