The Seventh Knock
Eddie counted the men again.
Keene sat beneath the awning with a blanket around his shoulders. Bell was beside him, staring into a cup. Dacey lay near the engine-house wall while two men argued quietly over how best to secure his leg.
Varela had not let go of Harker’s hand.
Peter Shaw slept with his mouth open.
Six.
The sound came once more.
Three blows, measured and faint.
Eddie turned the brass check over in his palm.
Mary Jane stood close enough that her sleeve touched his.
“What do you hear?”
He looked toward the shaft.
She followed his gaze, then looked back at the rescued men.
“No.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’ve got the same look.”
Across the yard, somebody called for another blanket. A bucket overturned, spilling water into the dust.
Mary Jane took Eddie’s wrist.
“Come away from it.”
The pressure beneath his breastbone tightened as she led him toward the shade. He expected the sound to grow fainter.
It did not.
***
They put Harker in the assay shed.
A man named Collins had sent a rider for a doctor and another for a peace officer. Until either arrived, he had taken charge by the simple method of continuing to give useful instructions.
He was the man who had stood in Rusk’s way.
Eddie learned his name when Collins knelt beside him and held out a pair of dry socks.
“Can’t find boots your size.”
“These are fine.”
“You’ll want them off first.”
Eddie looked down.
His boots were still full of mine water.
He bent to unfasten them. His fingers slipped against the wet leather.
Collins waited, then helped without remark.
When the first boot came free, water poured into the dust.
“Hell of a place to go swimming,” he said.
Eddie almost smiled.
Collins examined the boot’s torn heel, set it beside the other, and rose.
“Bone?”
Eddie looked up.
The man’s expression had changed.
“Those fellows owe you.”
“They owe her too.”
He nodded toward Mary Jane, who was helping carry Harker through the shed door.
“Already told her.”
Collins paused.
Then he offered his hand.
Eddie took it.
For a moment, the sound beneath the yard disappeared.
***
Calder found him putting on the dry socks.
The farmer lowered himself onto a crate with both hands braced against his knees. Dust had dried along one side of his face. There was a tear in his shirt beneath the arm.
Eddie looked at it.
“Did that happen below?”
“Probably.”
“I’ll mend it.”
“Ruth might prefer you didn’t.”
They sat without speaking.
Beyond the awning, Mary Jane crossed the yard carrying an empty basin. A dark wet mark spread down the front of her work shirt. She had not changed.
Calder watched her go.
“Collins sent men after Rusk.”
Eddie lifted his head.
“Which way?”
“North, they think. Took two horses from the stable.”
“Mercer with him?”
“Yes.”
Eddie reached for his boots.
Calder put one hand on them.
“No.”
“He’ll get away.”
“He already has.”
“We can still—”
“You can barely dress yourself.”
Eddie stopped.
The farmer’s hand remained on the wet leather.
For a moment, anger rose so quickly that Eddie could feel it in his teeth.
Then he saw Calder’s torn sleeve again.
The dirt on his face.
The tremor he was trying to hide by keeping his palm flat against the boot.
Eddie sat back.
“I know.”
Calder withdrew his hand.
“I’d like you to keep knowing it for the next hour.”
***
They searched the office after Collins found a key in the engine-house cupboard.
The door had been left open, but a heavy drawer beneath the desk was locked. Collins tried the key, turned it, and stepped aside.
Eddie remained at the threshold.
He had thought daylight would make the room different.
It did not.
There was the desk.
The window above it.
A narrow shelf holding lamp chimneys and two unopened tins of tobacco.
He knew the distance between the chair and the wall without looking.
His knee began to ache.
“Eddie?”
Calder stood beside him.
“I’m here.”
The farmer waited.
Eddie stepped inside.
The air smelled of paper, cold smoke, and the faint sweetness of spilled spirits. A rug had been pulled crookedly across the floor.
He looked at its edge.
Beneath it, the boards had been scrubbed.
One narrow seam remained dark.
Mary Jane saw where he was looking.
She shut the door behind them, leaving Collins outside.
Eddie appreciated that more than he could say.
Calder opened the drawer.
Empty spaces marked the dust where papers had lain.
“Ledger’s gone.”
Mary Jane crossed to the shelf.
“So are the pay envelopes.”
Eddie kept his eyes on the desk.
There was a fresh gouge near its corner.
He touched it.
A sound returned.
Not the gun.
Before it.
His own breath, forced through his teeth while Mercer twisted his arm.
Rusk reaching for the paper.
Eddie’s free hand sliding along the desk.
He had found something.
A steel marking point.
He could feel the narrow shaft in his fingers.
Then Mercer’s shout.
The memory ended with the foreman stepping back, his expression suddenly settled.
The decision had taken no time at all.
Eddie pulled his hand away.
Mary Jane stood very still.
“Do you need to go out?”
“No.”
He moved around the desk.
The chair was ordinary wood.
The kind a man could sit in for years without remembering a single day.
Eddie looked at it and wondered how many times Rusk had returned to work after doing something he could not take back.
***
They found invoices beneath a stack of blank forms.
Mary Jane recognized the supplier’s stamp.
She carried the pages to the window, where Calder joined her.
Eddie heard parts of their conversation.
Dates.
Amounts.
A pump assembly delivered to a freight depot.
A signature beside a claim for collection.
“Is that Rusk’s?” Calder asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you swear to it?”
“I watched him write it enough.”
They laid the papers flat and weighted them with an ink bottle.
Eddie looked at the name.
Gideon Rusk.
It was written neatly.
He had expected something in the hand itself to reveal the man.
There was nothing.
Mary Jane turned another page.
“This says the replacement reached the district three weeks ago.”
“Where is it?” Calder asked.
She shook her head.
They kept searching.
In a small drawer near the wall, beneath twine and sealing wax, Eddie found an envelope with his surname written across the front.
He stood holding it.
The paper had softened along one edge from handling.
Mary Jane looked over.
“What?”
He showed her.
Her face changed.
“That came last week.”
“Mine?”
“I put it by your place on the bench.”
He opened it carefully.
Inside lay a folded letter.
The writing was unfamiliar until it was not.
A slanted line.
A long stroke beneath a word.
His eyes moved to the bottom of the page.
*Mara.*
The room seemed to recede.
***
He did not read the letter.
Not there.
He folded it along the existing creases and put it inside the borrowed coat.
Calder pretended to examine an invoice.
Mary Jane looked back into the drawer.
Eddie knew what they were giving him.
He could not use it yet.
The knocking returned.
This time, it sounded beneath the desk.
He looked down so abruptly that Calder turned.
“What?”
Eddie listened.
Three blows.
The floor remained still.
The ink bottle did not tremble.
Outside, a hammer rang against metal as someone repaired the plank used to carry Dacey.
That sound was sharp, close, ordinary.
The other passed through it without belonging to the same air.
Mary Jane saw his face.
She crossed to the desk.
“Tell him.”
Eddie looked at her.
“Tell Calder.”
The farmer waited.
Eddie took his hand from the letter.
“There’s still knocking.”
Calder glanced toward the window.
“From the mine?”
“I thought so.”
“And now?”
Eddie looked at the boards beneath his feet.
“I don’t know.”
***
They took him outside.
He objected once, then let them.
The sun had begun to move away from the yard. Long strips of shade lay between the buildings. Someone had tethered Jack near the well, and the horse lifted his head when Eddie appeared.
Eddie crossed to him.
He put one hand beneath the mane.
Warm skin.
A steady living smell.
The pressure in his chest eased.
Calder and Mary Jane stayed a few paces away.
“Did you hear it before you came here?” the farmer asked.
Eddie nodded.
“At the house?”
“The night I remembered Rusk.”
Calder looked toward Mary Jane.
She said nothing.
“At first I thought it was machinery,” Eddie continued. “Then it was the checks. Then the shaft.”
“And you heard those men.”
“Yes.”
Calder rubbed the back of his neck.
“So did we, in the end.”
Eddie leaned his forehead against Jack’s neck.
He could still hear Mary Jane’s answer beside the cage.
*No.*
He had not been breathing.
He had not needed to.
“I saw somewhere,” he said.
Neither interrupted.
“Under the water. A light.”
His hand tightened in the mane. Jack shifted but did not move away.
“I’d seen it before.”
“In the mine?” Mary Jane asked.
Eddie shook his head.
“Before I woke up on the road.”
A little wind moved through the yard.
From the shed came Harker’s cough.
Calder took a slow breath.
“What was there?”
“I couldn’t see.”
“Did it speak?”
“No.”
“Then we don’t give it words yet.”
Eddie turned toward him.
The farmer looked frightened.
It was the first time he had allowed it to show so plainly.
“We know what happened to you,” Calder said. “Some of it, anyway. We don’t know what follows from that.”
Mary Jane folded her arms tightly.
“The men need rest. So do you.”
Eddie glanced toward the shaft.
She stepped into his line of sight.
“All six.”
He nodded.
But the sound had not stopped.
***
The doctor arrived near evening in a narrow buggy behind a lathered mare.
He was a small man with a gray beard and a coat buttoned wrong at the bottom. He climbed down carrying a leather bag and began asking questions before Collins could introduce himself.
The injured men took him from them.
Calder helped carry hot water.
Mary Jane found clean cloth.
Eddie stood beside the well until the doctor noticed his wet trousers and bandaged hands.
“You one of them?”
“Went down after.”
“Sit somewhere I can find you.”
Then Harker cried out inside the shed, and the doctor forgot him.
Eddie was grateful.
He took the letter to the back of the stable.
There was a low box beside the wall and enough evening light left to read.
He sat.
For several moments, he held the folded page without opening it.
Then he smoothed it across his knee.
*Edward,*
He stopped there.
A woman stood in the doorway of a house he could almost remember.
Dark red hair drawn back from her face.
One hand on the doorframe.
Waiting while he pretended he had not heard her call.
He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth.
The image faded.
He read on.
*Your brother says you will write when you have something worth telling. I told him that being alive and in possession of a pencil ought to be sufficient.*
Eddie bent over the page.
The next breath hurt.
Not beneath the scar.
Higher.
*There is no need to send money this month. Your father and I have managed what needed managing. Keep enough to feed yourself properly, and stop calling coffee a meal.*
A little farther down, the ink had thickened where the pen paused.
*You said in your last letter that something at the mine was wrong. If it is dangerous, leave. A wage is no use to us if it costs us you.*
He read that line until the words lost their shape.
Then he put the letter against his chest and sat very still.
***
Mary Jane found him after the light had nearly gone.
She carried his coat.
The old one.
Clean water had darkened it in patches, and the hem remained torn where Ruth had opened the lining.
“They brought it up with the rope.”
Eddie took it.
“Thank you.”
She saw the letter in his other hand.
“Bad news?”
He shook his head.
That answer did not hold.
“I don’t know.”
Mary Jane sat on the far end of the box.
For a while, they watched dust move through the last light beyond the stable.
“My mother,” he said.
“She writes often?”
“I think so.”
Mary Jane looked down at her hands.
“You used to take the letters out behind the engine house.”
He turned.
“You remember?”
“Yes.”
“What did I do?”
“Read them.”
He waited.
“Sometimes twice. Then you’d put them away and spend the rest of the day pretending you hadn’t been pleased.”
Something like a laugh caught in his throat.
It hurt less than he expected.
Mary Jane leaned back against the boards.
“You weren’t always frightened.”
Eddie looked at her.
The statement was so simple that he had no defense against it.
He tried to picture himself before the ditch.
Before the office.
A man who worked, wrote letters, complained about food, and knew what his own hands would do.
“What was I like?”
She took time before answering.
“Useful.”
He looked down.
“You mean quiet.”
“Sometimes. Not when someone had repaired something badly.”
That brought the faintest smile.
“You’d stand there looking at it until they wished you’d just start shouting.”
He could almost feel that irritation.
A wrongly seated bearing.
A bolt forced into a thread that did not fit.
Mary Jane watched his expression.
“And you laughed,” she said. “Quite a bit, when you forgot to mind yourself.”
The smile left him slowly.
He folded the letter.
“I’d like to remember that.”
***
Calder came around the stable carrying two tin cups.
He handed one to Eddie.
“Doctor wants you.”
Eddie looked into the water.
“What for?”
“The same reason doctors usually want people.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No.”
Calder sat on an upturned bucket.
“I told him you’d been in the water.”
Mary Jane stood.
“I’ll ask after Harker.”
She left them together.
The yard had quieted. Men spoke in low voices near the shed. Somewhere behind the engine house, someone was feeding a stove.
Calder noticed the letter.
“Family?”
“My mother.”
“She know where you are?”
“She did.”
The farmer nodded.
Eddie ran a thumb along the fold.
“I should write.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“You needn’t put everything in the first sentence.”
Eddie looked at him.
Calder lifted his cup.
“Tell her you’ve found someone willing to make you eat breakfast. That ought to satisfy one concern.”
For the first time since the road, Eddie laughed.
It was brief.
It surprised them both.
Calder smiled into his cup and let it pass without remark.
Then, from inside the stable, came three soft knocks.
Eddie went still.
Calder lowered his cup.
“What?”
Eddie looked toward the open door.
The stable was empty except for harness, feed sacks, and the dim outlines of stalls.
“Stay here.”
The farmer set his cup down.
“Eddie.”
He rose.
The sound came again.
Closer.
Wood against wood.
Three measured blows.
***
Inside, the air smelled of hay and warm leather.
A lantern hung from a hook near the far stall. Its flame barely moved.
Eddie stood in the doorway until his eyes adjusted.
Nothing.
No one.
Behind him, Calder’s boots stopped on the threshold.
“Where?”
Eddie raised a hand.
The knocking came from the last stall.
He walked toward it.
Each step tightened the pressure beneath his scar.
A horse blanket hung over the partition.
A bucket rested upside down beneath it.
Beside the wall stood a narrow plank, loose at one end.
Eddie crouched.
He touched the wood.
The pressure vanished.
So did every sound from the yard.
For one terrible second, he was not in the stable.
He knelt on dark ground beneath a lightless sky.
Ahead stood the distant lamp.
Closer now.
Near enough to reveal a little of what waited beside it.
A hand rested against a door.
The fingers were gray with earth.
Eddie tried to move.
The hand lifted.
Three blows fell against the wood.
He stumbled backward.
Sound returned all at once.
Calder caught him beneath the arms before his head struck the stall.
“Eddie.”
He could not answer.
The farmer lowered him onto the dirt.
“Look at me.”
Eddie stared past him.
The plank stood motionless against the wall.
A little dust drifted from its upper edge.
Calder took his face between both hands.
“Here,” he said. “You’re here.”
Eddie found the farmer’s eyes.
Held them.
The stable slowly became a stable again.
***
Mary Jane arrived with the doctor.
Eddie heard them enter but could not stop looking at the plank.
The doctor knelt and opened his bag.
“What happened?”
Calder answered.
“A turn.”
“What sort of turn?”
“That’s what we hoped you’d tell us.”
The doctor took Eddie’s wrist.
His expression changed.
He shifted his fingers.
Waited.
Eddie watched him.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Then the doctor looked up.
“Bring that lantern.”
Mary Jane lifted it from the hook.
Light moved over the doctor’s hands.
He tried Eddie’s other wrist.
Eddie could feel the fingers pressing.
Could feel the callus near the man’s thumb.
Could feel everything except the beat they were both waiting for.
At last it came.
Slow.
Heavy.
The doctor’s eyes met his.
From somewhere beyond the stable wall, three knocks sounded again.
Eddie flinched.
The doctor did not.
Neither did Mary Jane.
Neither did Calder.
Eddie looked from one face to the next.
Then he understood.
Whatever was knocking had never been inside the mine.