DALE BAILEY GIANTS IN THE EARTH Burns didn't imagine he could ever bring himself to really like Moore, but as he watched the man work the auger in the flickering shaft of his cap light, he had to admit a kind of grudging admiration for the fellow's grace. Down here in the mines, you noticed such things, for a clumsy man could kill you. It was just Moore's piety that bothered Bums; he had a way of preaching at a man. Now, Moore swung back from the wall, nodding, a thin gaunt-featured man with lips pinched for want of living. The breast auger extended from his chest like a spear; it gleamed dully beyond a glittery haze of coal dust. Bums stepped forward, tamped a charge into the hole, plugged it with a dummy, and turned around to look for Moore, but the other man had already retreated through the blackness into the heading shaft. An empty cart stood on fresh-laid track, waiting to be filled, but otherwise the room was empty. Somewhere a miner hollered musically, and the sound chased itself through the darkness. There was a stink of metal and sweat, and the rattle of dust in his lungs. He could feel that old dread tighten through his chest. Damn Blankenship for not wetting down the walls, he thought. Tight-fisted sonofabitch. And then, with a gutteral sigh for the way life had of creeping up on a man -- first a wife, and then a baby, and then you were trapped, there was nothing to do but work the coal -- Bums turned back to the wall. He struck a match and touched it to the fuse. The fuse sputtered uncertainly, and for a moment Bums thought it might be bad, and then it caught with a hiss that seemed thunderous. It flared a self-devouring cherry, and Bums spun away, squeezing the match between his fingers as he stumbled from the room and flattened himself against the wall in the main shaft. The charge went up with a muffled thud, and he braced himself for a second, more-powerful explosion that did not come. The dust had not ignited. He heard the wall crumble, tumbling Blankenship's coal out of the seam, and a thick cloud mushroomed into the main shaft. Bums glanced over at Moore. In the glare of the cap light, the other man's face looked pale and washed out, his eyes like glinting sapphire chips set far back in bony hollows. Moore smiled thinly and lifted the auger Over his head. "The Lord's with us." "Lucky, I reckon," Burns said. He hunkered down, dug through the tool poke, and hefted his shovel and axe. "Reckon we ought to get to it," he said. Burns stood and ducked back into the room without waiting for Moore to follow. Coughing thick dust, he picked his way through the rabble to the chest-high hole the charge had gouged in the wall. He dropped the shovel and went to his knees to prop the axe against the sloping roof of the undercut and that was when he saw it. Or, rather, didn't see what he expected to see -- what he had seen maybe a thousand times or more in the year since he and Rona had married, the baby had been born, and he had taken to working as a loader in Blankenship Coal's number six hole. What he didn't see was the splash of his cap light against the wall, pitted by the charge he had rigged to loosen the seam. Instead, the beam probed out in a widening cone that dissipated into dust and swirling emptiness. A black current of stale air swept out at him, and Burns quickly crab-walked backwards. He jarred the prop loose, and the heavy tongue of rock above him groaned deep within itself. Pebbles sifted down, rattling against his hardhat, and then the mountain lapsed into silence. When the callused hands closed about his upper arms, Burns nearly screamed. "Goddammit," he snapped, "what the hell do you think you're doing?" He spun around to face Moore, and the other man backed away, flattened palms extended before him. Moore looked like a vaudeville comic in blackface. Coal dust streaked his gaunt features, was tattooed into the very fabric of his flesh, and it would never wash away, not even with years of scrubbing. You could tell the old-timers by the dusky tone of their complexions. Burns knew that if Moore would strip away his shirt, the exposed flesh of his face and hands would meet the pale skin beyond in hard geometric planes. He knew, too, that someday he also would look as if he wore perpetually a dusky mask and gloves, and he hated it. But there was Rona and the baby. Swirling in the veil of dust that hung between the two men, Burns could almost see them, their features etched with a beauty too real and fragile for life in these mountains. A year ago, he had not known that a man could feel this way, and sometimes still it crept up on him unawares, this love that had led him to this deep place far beneath the earth. He glanced away before Moore saw his eyes throw back the dazzle of the cap light. "Get that light out of my eyes, you've about half-blinded me," he said, and he turned away to collect himself. The massive tongue of rock that projected over the hole seemed almost to mock him. So close, Burns thought, and then where would Rona and the baby have been? "You okay?" Moore asked. Burns looked up. "Hell," he said. "Sorry. I thought the rock was coming down on me." Moore gave him a curt nod, bent to re-set the fallen prop, and then wedged his own axe into the gap. "That ought to hold it," he said, extending a hand to Burns. Burns took the hand, and lifted himself to his feet. He dusted off his clothes out of habit, not because it would do any good. "There's something else," he said. "What's that?" "Something ain't right. That hole don't stop. It just keeps on going." Moore lifted an eyebrow and studied the undercut for a moment. "Well, let's have a look," he said. "I don't reckon there's anything to be afraid of." He hunkered down, slid into the gap, and vanished. Examining these last words for some taint of suggested cowardice, Burns followed. The roof slanted down a bit and then disappeared entirely as he emerged into a larger darkness. Though he could not immediately see the space, some quality -- the acoustics of a far-away water drip or perhaps the flat, dank taste of the air -- told him that it was at least as large as the room he and Moore had been working, that it had been sealed beneath the mountain for long years. Burns stood. His light stabbed into the dark. "Moore?" Abruptly, he became aware of a sound like muffled sobs. "Moore? What happened to your light?" "I turned it off." Burns turned to face the voice. Moore sat just beyond the darker mouth of the opening into the other room, his arms draped over drawn-up knees, his head slumped. When he looked up at Burns, the sapphire chips of his eyes were shiny with a kind of madness. Tears glittered like tiny diamonds on his dusky face, and Burns could see the clean tracks they had carved across his cheeks. The room seemed to wheel about him for a moment, the gloom to press closer. Uneasiness knotted his guts. "Why'd you turn off your light?" "Giants in the earth," Moore whispered. "There were giants in the earth in those days." "What are you talking about? Why did you turn off your light?" Moore gestured with one hand toward the darkness farther into the room, and Burns felt ice creep out of his belly and begin the paralyzing ascent into his throat. Almost a year ago, just a month or so after Bums had started to work, a spark from somebody's axe had ignited the dust in the number three hole. The men who survived the explosion came out of the mine with faces smoothed over by experience; the unique lines time and character had carved into their features had all at once been erased. They had no more individuality than babies, fresh from an earthen womb, and it occurred to Bums that Moore looked just that way now. Burns did not want to look into the darkness at the center of the room. He liked his face. He did not want it to change. And yet he knew that if he did not move or speak, did not take action, the ice that was creeping slowly into his throat would fill up his mouth and paralyze him. He would be forever unable to move beyond this time and place, this moment. He looked into the room. In the flickering shaft of his cap light there lay a creature of such simple and inevitable beauty that Bums knew that for him the significance of that concept had been forever altered; it could never again be applied to mere human loveliness. Burns felt as if he had been swept up in a current of swift-running water, and in the grip of that current, he took a step forward, stunned by the apprehension of such beauty, unadulterated by any trace of pettiness, or ugliness, or mere humanity. He thought his heart might burst free of his chest. He had not known such creatures existed in the world. And then, through that veil of terrible beauty, there penetrated to him the particular details of what he had seen; he came abruptly to a stop as that paralyzing ice of awe and fear at last rose into his mouth. This is what he saw: A being, like a man, but different, ten feet long, or twelve feet, curled naked in the heart of the mountain. Wings, white rapturous wings, that swept up and around it like a cloak of molten feathers. And in its breast, the rhythmic pulse of life. Giants in the earth, he thought, and then -- because he knew that if he did not look away, the lines of his face would be erased and he would lose forever some essential part of himself -- Burns turned to look at Moore, who still sat against the wall. His gaunt face hung slack; tears glistened on his cheeks. "I couldn't bear it," he said. "We have to tell someone," Burns said. "But who?" "Someone who can do something." "Who?" Burns thought furiously. For a moment he thought he heard the rustle of feathers in the darkness behind him, and half-fearful, he turned to face the creature, but it had not moved. They could not be responsible for this, Burns thought -- and the word responsible was like a gift, for suddenly he knew. He crossed the room, crouched by Moore, and peered into his face. The slap sounded like a pistol shot in the enclosed chamber. Burns drew back his stinging palm for another blow, but he saw it wasn't necessary, for the madness in Moore's eyes had retreated a little. "Get the cashier," he said. "Get Holland." He reached out and snapped Moore's cap alight, saw the man's gaunt features tighten with wonder. "Go on, now," he said. "Not a word to anyone but Holland, hear?" Moore stood without speaking and ducked through the undercut. Burns was alone. Once again, he remembered the miners, their faces smoothed by experience, as they emerged from the explosion-shattered heading of the number three hole. And as he turned away from the undercut to look yet again at the awful beauty that lay slumberous in the center of the room, a terrible vision fractured his thought: his own face, smooth and featureless as a peeled egg. In the wavering beam from his cap, Burns caught a single glimpse of the creature -- -- the giant, the angel -- -- and then he reached up with trembling fingers and shut off the light. In the succeeding blackness, sounds were magnified. The far-away drip of water became an intermittent clash of cymbals punctuated by measureless silences in which the creature's labored respiration sounded clamorous as a great bellows stoking the furnaces of the earth. Finally, not because he dared to smoke, but because he had to do something with his hands or go mad, Burns fumbled for tobacco and rolling papers and began to make a cigarette. Even in the darkness, his fingers fell without hesitation into the familiar rhythm of the process, and the prosaic nature of the task -- here in the midst of wonders --enabled him to envision Moore as he made the long trek through the heading shaft to the surface. He imagined the annoyed glance Jeremiah Holland would direct at Moore when he stepped into the cashier's shack, could almost see the thoughtful look that would replace it when he heard what Moore had to say. Holland, Burns knew, was a thoughtful man, the kind of man who considered the angles of a thing, and could work them to his own advantage. Burns licked the paper, twisted the cigarette into a cylinder, and slipped it into his mouth. The tobacco tasted sweet against his lips. Holland would be a good friend to have, he thought. Holland could help a man. And yet . . . He felt a flicker of doubt. Such beauty . . . The sound of men crawling through the undercut came to him. A wavering light illuminated the chamber, and Burns's heart broke loose within him as he caught a glimpse of the creature, curled fetal on the stone floor. The light bobbed into the air, and he saw that it was Moore. A second ghostly shaft penetrated the darkness, and Burns heard a metallic rattle of tools. He stood, his fingers fumbling at his cap as he stepped forward to meet Holland. The cashier emerged from the undercut and pushed himself erect, a thin, wiry man with a battered toolbox clutched in one hand. His lean face looked hollow, even skeletal, in the intersecting beams of the cap lights, and his dark eyes returned Burns's gaze from deeply recessed sockets. "I hope you're not planning to light that thing," he said. Burns plucked the cigarette from his mouth with shaking fingers. "I just had to do something with my hands. That thing--" Licking a moist fragment of tobacco from his lips, he slipped the cigarette into his shirt pocket. Holland lowered the toolbox to the floor with a clatter. "Yes, that thing. Your friend wasn't very articulate about that . . . thing." He glanced ruefully at his clothing, store-bought linen several grades more expensive than the cheap flannel the miners wore, and Burns saw that the cloth was soiled with dark streaks of coal dust. "Where is it?" Burns glanced at Moore, but the other man had retreated deep into himself. "It's over there," Burns said. Almost unwillingly, he turned his head and impaled the creature on the flickering shaft of his cap light. Its breast kindled with life; wings stirred in the passing wind of a dream. Burns blinked back tears. It seemed as if each particle of the air had suddenly flared with radiance, and though in fact it did not diminish at all, Burns imagined that the darkness retreated a little. Jeremiah Holland drew in his breath with a sharp hiss. "I thought you ought to see it," Burns said. "I wanted to do the right thing. I got a wife and baby and I was hoping --" He stopped abruptly when he realized that Holland wasn't listening. The cashier's face had gone very white, and as Burns looked on, the tip of his tongue crept out and eased over his lips. He turned to look at Burns through widened eyes. "Have either of you touched it ?" Burns shook his head. The cashier crouched by the toolbox, threw back the latches with trembling fingers, and withdrew a tamping bar. He stood, clutching the bar in one white-knuckled hand, and looked from Burns to Moore, who stood a few feet away, his face looking new-minted. "Let's see if you can wake it up," he told Burns. Burns hesitated, and Holland lifted the tamping bar a little. "Go on now." His heart hammering, Burns began to creep across the room. That paralyzing ice once again edged into his throat. Blood pounded at his temples. He felt as if he had been wrapped in a thick suffocating layer of wool. And then he was there, standing over the -- -- giant, the angel. The creature, he told himself. "Careful," Holland whispered, and glancing over his shoulder, Burns saw the flesh beneath the cashier's right eye twitch. "Do you realize --" he said, "-- have you any idea what we could do with this thing?" He laughed, a quick harsh detonation, abrasive as shattering glass, and brandished the tamping bar. "Go on now." Burns felt breath catch in his throat. He tried to speak, to protest, but that paralyzing ice had frozen away his voice. Swallowing, he prodded the creature with his boot. Flesh gave, the thing shifted in its age-long sleep: a hush and sigh of wings in the enveloping dark, the rusty flex of ancient muscles, and all at once the creature lay prone, face turned away, arms outstretched, great wings flared across the dusty floor. Conflicting impressions of promethean strength and gentleness swept through Burns, and -- like nothing he had felt before--a swift and terrible hunger for such beauty, ethereal and mysterious. Not until it passed did Burns realize he had been holding his breath. He released it and drew in a great draught of stale air. The ice had retreated a bit. Strangling a gout of hysterical laughter, he turned away. "Maybe it's hibernating," he said, abruptly reminded of something he had heard at Rona's church -- a story of an epoch impossibly distant, when graves would vomit forth the dead. Would angels ascend from the womb of the shattered planet? Holland had returned to the toolbox. "We can't let it get away." "Get away?" Holland stood, his angular features ashen, and extended in his left hand the shining length of a hacksaw. The serrated blade threw off radiant sparks in the shifting luminescence of the cap lights. A sickening abyss opened inside of Burns. "I don't think that's a good idea," Burns started to say, but he let the last word trail away, for he saw that a kind of lethargic energy had animated Moore's features. With the languor of drifting continents, half-formed expressions passed across the experience-scrubbed surface of his face. "No," Moore whispered. "Please . . . please don't." Holland spared him a single dismissive glance, and then he looked back to Burns and shook the hacksaw. The blade rattled against its casing. Simultaneously, Moore also turned to face him. The twin glare of their cap lights nearly blinded him. He raised a hand to shield his eyes as the chasm that had opened within him yawned wider still. For a single uncertain moment, he felt as if he might plunge into the chaos that churned there. As though from a great distance, he heard Moore's voice degenerate into sobs of desperation, saw Holland turn and strike him a single blow with the tamping bar. The glare diminished as Moore stumbled away. Holland stepped up to meet him, the tamping bar upraised, the hacksaw dangling in his left hand; there was no mistaking the threat implicit in his posture. "Do it," he hissed. Burns moved closer to the wiry cashier, suddenly aware that he could wrest the tamping bar from the smaller man in less than an instant; in a moment of sudden clarity, he saw that Holland knew this, too. Beyond the mask of his bravado there lay a core of desperate fear. Burns saw that Holland had not perceived the creature's beauty. He could not, for fear drove him; perhaps it always had. Turning away, he began to move toward Moore, slumped by the dark mouth of the undercut. He hadn't gone more than two steps before Holland spoke. "Did you say you had a wife and child?" Burns hunkered down by Moore, rested a calloused hand against his shoulder. "That's what I said." "Sauls Run," Holland said. "Not much work here, unless you're a miner." "Please," Moore whispered. "Do you know what this means? It's true, all true . . ." A fleeting image of that church story -- the Rapture, Burns suddenly recalled -- passed through his mind: angels, erupting by the thousand from beneath the mountains of the dying planet. True? The Lord's with us, Moore had said, and he had replied, Lucky, I reckon. The hacksaw clattered to the floor behind him. "Winter's coming," Holland said. "Hard season for a man without a job. Hard season for his family." Burns emitted a strangled laugh, lifted his hand, and touched his fingers to Moore's stubbled face. Moore's lips trembled, and tears slid down his cheeks. Burns could smell the sour taint of his breath. "An angel," Moore whispered, and cursing, Burns stood and turned away. That image -- angels erupting from the subterranean dark -- returned to haunt him as he stooped to pick up the hacksaw; he dismissed it with an almost physical effort. Not an angel, insisted some fragment of his mind. Some pagan god or demon; a monstrous creature out of myth; an evolutionary freak, caught in the midst of the transformation from beast to man -- but not an angel. A creature, nothing more. He crossed the room without a word and knelt beside -- the giant, the angel -- -- the creature. At the base of the thick-rooted wings, its flesh curled horny and tough, almost pebbled. Its back heaved with the regular cadence of its respiration. He could not bring himself to look it in the face. Burns closed his eyes and drew in a long breath. He could hear the whispered litany of Moore's prayers, the faraway cymbal clash of the water drip. He thought of the coming winter, harsh in these mountains, and once again, that great love surprised him. For a moment, limned against the dark screens of his eyelids, he could almost see them, Rona and the baby, shining with an all too human beauty. Fragile and ephemeral, that beauty was, but a man could get his mind about it. A man could hold it. He exhaled and opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. Winged giants slept in the earth, but nothing had changed. The world was as it had been always. "Do it, you son of a bitch," Holland said, and despite the fact that less than an hour ago Burns had not known that such creatures existed in the world, despite the fact that even now every molecule of air seemed to flare with a beauty so radiant that it was painful even to behold --despite all this, Burns began the terrible task. The creature stirred when the hacksaw bit into the root of the near wing; its fingers drew into talons, its breath shuddered into a quicker rhythm, but it did not wake. Burns's muscles tightened into the work; sweat broke out along his hairline. The hide was tough as old hickory, but at last, with a noise like wind through dry leaves, the wing fell away. Burns kicked it aside. In the pale luminescence of his cap light, the wing stump glistened like a bloody mouth. Sighing, he stepped over the creature to start at the second wing. Once again, he leaned into the saw, once again dragged it back through the thick flesh, but this rime -- for no reason he would ever be able to discern -- he looked up, looked directly into the creature's face. And saw that it was awake. The sounds of Moore's prayers and Holland's panicked respiration receded as Burns gazed into the creature's eye, so blue it might have been a scrap of April sky. He felt as if he was falling, down and down into that endless blue, but he felt no fear. A wave of gratitude that he could not contain flooded through him -- to have seen such beauty, to have touched it. Once again, the entire room seemed to flare with light, and for the space of a single instant, he perceived, beyond the shabby guise of reality, an inner radiance that permeated all things. Then, as suddenly as if he had shut off his cap light, the radiance was gone, overwhelmed by a tide of wretched exhilaration. No other man had ever mastered such a creature. Burns flung away the hacksaw in disgust. The creature's eye had closed. He could not tell that it had ever awakened. A suffocating knot formed in his throat, and for the first time in the long year he had worked the mines, claustrophobia overcame him. The walls pressed inward. The entire weight of the mountain loomed over him. Holland stepped up, his face blanched, his eyes reduced to glints far back in shadowy hollows. "Finish it," he said. Burns wrested the tamping bar away from him and let it clatter to the floor. "Finish it yourself." With a last glance at Moore, he pushed the cashier aside, ducked through the undercut and the empty room beyond, and emerged into the heading. From far down in the shaft, there echoed the din of a sledgehammer as a work crew snaked new track deeper into the planet. He wondered what beauty they might eventually lay bare; he wondered what they would do with it. Turning away, Burns began to walk slowly along the tracks that led to the surface. Men moved by him, nodding as they passed, and sometimes a loaded car muscled through the shaft; in the rooms that opened to either side, he heard the casy talk that came at shift's end. He had no part in that now. Deliberately, he turned his mind to other things, to the surface, where the sky would be fading toward night. He imagined the stench of burning slag riding the high currents; imagined the tin roofs of Sauls Run, faraway in the steep-walled valley, throwing off the last gleam of evening sun. Presently, he emerged from the earth. He paused by the cashier's shack and fished the cigarette out of his breast pocket. His coal-smeared hands shook a little as he struck the match, and then harsh sweet smoke filled his lungs. He exhaled a gray plume and surveyed the valley below. Everything--the sky, the smell, the flash of sunlight against the tin roofs of town -- was just as he had imagined it. Nothing, nothing had changed. Drawing in another lungful of smoke, Burns started down the mountain to Sauls Run, to Rona and the baby. High above the painted ridges, the day began to blue into darkness, and a breath of autumn wind touched him, chill with the foreboding of winter.