Chapter 25

25

IT WAS PAYDAY IN THE CUT.

Tucked inside the waistband of his trousers was a small pouch Omar used to hold his coins once he got them. The men were paid every two weeks, and so far with the money he had earned, Omar had purchased new boots to replace the first pair after the soles split apart, but the rest of it he simply stashed in a small box at home, saving it for something, he supposed, though he did not yet know what.

The pouch rubbed his hip, and Omar stopped to adjust it. The heat in the Cut that day was punishing, over one hundred degrees without benefit of the breeze, and between the heat and the drizzling rain, the whole gorge steamed. Omar wiped a sleeve across his forehead and took a deep breath, inhaling smoke and the heavy, hot air. All around, drenched men shoveled while chains of dump cars clattered on the tracks. There was always more dirt before them, more of the earth to be pried open and moved.

Omar swung his pick. He felt fully recovered from the malaria now, malaria that his father still did not even know about. That, Omar thought, was another mountain before him. There was always more silence, it went on and on, and he could not understand when or how it would come to an end.

“Big day,” Berisford said, breaking Omar out of his thoughts.

“What?” Omar said.

“Payday today.” Berisford grinned. “Soon I have enough money go back home, buy a house, marry my gal.”

Clement said, “You mean the gal in your head?”

Berisford just ignored Clement and sang, “Big day coming! Big day here!”

***

MILLER PACED THROUGH the rain, smoking his second cigar of the morning. They were Havana cigars, which cost 7￠ each, though that seemed a small price to pay for the pleasure they gave him. The cigars were the only thing that got him through the days here sometimes.

It was mid-October, and the men were still working to dig out from the ruinous slide that had bedeviled them recently. There was so little, Miller observed, that was within his control, and the slides, it seemed, were just one more thing. Not even the engineers were able to predict when they would come or why. Something about an “angle of repose” that had yet to be reached, from what he had heard.

Miller removed his cigar and paced as he yelled. “This is the day of reckoning, boys! You’ll work straight through lunch if you have to, but you will get it done! And”—Miller stopped and looked out—“if you’re still standing by the end of it, we have a treat for you.”

“Ice cream?” Berisford said to Omar, and grinned.

Miller, thinking he had heard something, glanced over and frowned, but he wanted to finish what he had been saying. “It’s payday, boys!”

A cheer rose up like Miller knew it would. Money was the great motivator. That was true every place in the world.

He saw that the man with the red handkerchief was the one who had interrupted him. Miller threw down the stub of his cigar before grinding it out. Then, through the rain, Miller walked over to him. “You say something just now?”

“No, sir,” Berisford said.

Miller sighed loudly through his nose. He was tired of it, the same round and round. Was he a circus ringleader or a man? He raised his arm high in the air like a ringleader might and pictured a pride of lions gathering in a formation of some sort—a pyramid maybe or ten high on a ball. Miller had never been to a circus, but one had come through South Carolina when he was a boy, and talk of it had captured his imagination. He sighed again, a sort of grumbling snort. He was supposed to have been something by now. The world, it seemed, had promised him that. But the world, changing quicker than he could keep up, had reduced him to this.

Then Miller had an idea. From his pocket he pulled out the man’s chit, a slip of paper that Miller was responsible for giving each of the men if they were to be paid. The men were supposed to present the chit to the pay clerk in order to collect their wages.

“I’ll make you a bet,” Miller said, holding the chit in the air, not caring if it got wet. “You—on your own—dig four cars of spoil today, then I’ll give you this. You dig anything less, I’ll burn it instead.”

He wished his cigar was still lit so he could demonstrate, but he had tossed it out and his third cigar—he allotted himself three a day—was in his other pocket, where he was saving it for an afternoon pick-me-up.

“That my chit, sir?” the man asked.

Miller looked at it. “If you’re 360412, then it is.”

“Sir, I earn my money these weeks.”

“Not yet you didn’t. You dig four full cars of spoil today, and then you earn it. You don’t...” Miller wiggled his fingers to represent flames.

“Sir, I work hard all these weeks.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Please, sir.”

“We have a saying down South. You know what it is?”

“No, sir.”

“The saying is, Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Well, you best not count your chickens because I got the eggs.” Miller closed his fist around the wet chit and grinned.

“Four cars, sir?”

“No less.”

“I alone?”

“You’re the only one whose chit I got in my hand.” It was an inspired idea, Miller thought. A wonder he had not come up with it sooner. “Go on. Time’s a-wasting,” he said, and he watched until the man started to swing.

***

“BACKRA RIFFRAFF,” BERISFORD grumbled after Miller walked off. “Why he picking on me all the time?”

“You can do it,” Omar said.

“But what reason I got to do it? These weeks I work the same as everyone, no?”

Clement looked Berisford in the eye. “Because Miller have your chit, that’s why.”

Berisford slumped his shoulders and cast his gaze down the line in the rain. “Four cars make a long day for me.”

“Always long days for us,” Prince said. “Long days, short life.”

“I will help you,” Omar offered.

But Berisford’s cheerfulness from earlier had disappeared. Sulking, he said, “I do four cars, seem I should get more than a paycheck. Four cars, I should get a prize, too.”

“No prize but the glory,” Joseph said.

Clement shook his head. “Not even that. We do the work, but the glory for them.”

***

BERISFORD PLANTED HIMSELF in the mud and churned his arms through the air. He swung and he swung, and the pile of spoil grew behind him, and every so often the neck of the steam shovel bent down to the ground and scooped some of it up and dropped the heavy clay and the mud on the bed of the dump car directly in line with where Berisford stood. Omar, working beside him, occasionally tossed the clumps that he picked over to Berisford’s pile instead, to help his friend meet his goal. If Berisford noticed the gesture, he did not say. He was focused on the task at hand. He just grunted and heaved.

Miller sauntered by every now and again with one hand tucked under the bib of his overalls. Omar saw him look down at Berisford and nod and walk on.

Near eleven o’clock, the hour when on any other day the men should have stopped for lunch, Miller walked up to Berisford and said, “So what do we have?”

Omar watched. He saw Clement and Prince and Joseph all glance up, but Berisford did not. His wet shirt was pasted to his back as he hunched, his trousers matted with mud. He kept swinging his arms.

Standing in front of Berisford, Miller said, “Looks to me like you’re coming close to finishing your first car.”

Without breaking pace, Berisford said, “This my second, sir.”

“Is that right?”

“I fill another one before this and it already go on away.”

“Well, how am I to know about that?”

“I telling you, sir.”

“This is the first one I see.”

“Ask Mac up there.” Berisford jerked his head in the direction of the steam shovel operator, who was sitting in his cab nearby.

Miller glanced up. How would this pick-and-shovel man know the operator’s name while Miller did not? That did not seem right. If anyone should be friendly with a steam shovel man, it should be him.

“You don’t know any Mac,” Miller said.

“He been there the whole time. He can tell you, sir, if you ask.”

Miller crossed his arms. “I don’t need to know whatever anyone has to tell me when I can see it with my very own eyes.”

Berisford, still swinging his pick, still rotating his arm back-down-and-up, said, “It my second car, sir.”

Miller was tired. The days down here lately filled him with displeasure. He wanted to go back to the United States, back to the South, where things still made a certain amount of sense. He was tired of wandering. All of a sudden, he just wanted to rest. Put his feet up. Drink a sweet pink lemonade somewhere in a reasonable sun. Get away from this heat and this mud and this goddamn rain. See his mother again, see how she was getting on.

Miller looked at the man. “I say this is your first.”

Omar opened his mouth to say something, to stand up for his friend, but that small movement somehow caught Miller’s eye, and Miller glared at Omar and said, “You have a problem now, too?”

His face burning, Omar closed his mouth and swallowed his words. Embarrassed, he struck his pick at the ground.

Next to him, Berisford was still swinging, too.

“That’s the way!” Miller said.

Berisford yanked the pick back again and again. Up and back, down and pull. His arm like the turn of a railcar wheel. Up and back, down and pull.

For nearly a full half hour, well after the lunch whistle blew, Miller stood with his legs spread wide, watching Berisford work. And for that full half hour, Berisford swung without pause. He shifted his feet every so often and grunted louder as the work went on, but unbelievably, there was not a single break in his rhythm. Furiously, over and over he heaved his pick at the ground.

Omar worked a little faster, too—all of them did, since Miller was standing right there—but however fast Omar worked, he could not match Berisford’s speed. It did not matter anyway. Miller was not looking at him anymore or at anyone else. He had eyes only for Berisford now. Miller stood and he watched. He barked out an order or two. And when Miller finally got bored, when he sighed and straightened the soaking wet hat on his head and mounted the berm and strolled off, Berisford brought his pick down once more and then left the thing there, the tip of it wedged in the mud. He was breathing hard, snorting air and blowing it out again through his lips. Berisford bent over with his hands on his knees. He panted for a minute, then threw up.

“Berisford,” Omar said.

As Berisford wiped his mouth with his red handkerchief, a look passed between Clement and Omar.

“Ease up,” Clement said. He had been in Panama for two years, doing various jobs, and he had seen more than one man keel over from pure exhaustion before.

Berisford panted. He was spattered with mud, glistening with rainwater.

“Berisford,” Omar said again.

But Berisford was not in a listening mood. He wiped his mouth again, this time with his wet shirtsleeve, and stood up straight. Vomit sat in a puddle at his feet. He grabbed his pick still wedged in the mud and pulled it free. He set the handle back over his shoulder and, without a word, he swung again.

***

THE RAIN KEPT falling and falling, and in his mind Berisford was playing a game with it, seeing who could hold steady for longer—the rain or him. “Keep falling,” he said, and as he was in a kind of delirium, he did not know whether he said it in his mind or out loud into the air. So long as the rain did not stop, he told himself, neither would he. He thought of Naomy and how proud she would be of the way he was keeping up. Of course, knowing Naomy, there was a chance, too, that she would say he was a fool for thinking he could outwit the rain. That was probably what she would say, but that was not what he wanted to hear, so he chose to believe that Naomy would be proud. He chose to believe that if she saw him at this moment, she would smile to see him working harder than God. He wanted that pay chit. He needed the money that he would get once he turned the chit in. Twenty dollars in Panamanian silver would be one more brick in the life he was trying to build—for himself, for Naomy, for the babies that one day they would have if they were so blessed. All of it started here. Dig the land in Panama, buy some land back home. If he could earn enough money, it would set them up right. He was not after a fortune like some men seemed to be. He just wanted enough to set them up right. They could have a wedding at last, and what a happy day that would be. In his mind, he saw Naomy in a long white gown and even a veil, and he would peel that veil back at some point during the ceremony the same way she peeled skin off of gooseberries, slow, taking her time, and her face underneath would be far, far sweeter than any berry in all of creation. Everything that he wanted was just on the other side of some digging and some rain. But the rain did not stop, and after a time—he had no idea how long—Berisford, as he kept digging, shouted up at the sky, “You not playing fair!” It would not relent. He had put himself up against a formidable foe. Still, he would beat it, he thought, for all that he wanted was on the other side.

Hour by hour he swung his arm. Up and back, up and back. And hour by hour, the sky kept sending the rain. It just would not quit. Berisford glanced up again at the sky and saw the underside of all those millions of drops falling down, no end in sight, and he had a new thought: Just a short break. That’s what he needed. So short that no one would notice, not even the rain, and then he would be right back to it, ready to take down the foe, ready to win, ready to get over to all that awaited him on the other side. Berisford stumbled and suctioned his feet through the mud. He was so worn out that it was difficult to move. The rain’s fault, he thought, meaning both his exhaustion and the endless plains of mud. He was angry at the rain now, and he wanted to get out of it, just to take a short break. He kept lurching from side to side, trying to move, but the mud kept holding him back. He fell to his knees. He folded forward and put his hands in the mud and felt himself sink. Maybe I can crawl to the other side , he thought.

***

TO THE MEN who saw it, Berisford crumpled like a stalk of wheat under the thrashing of rain. Out of the corner of their eyes as they swung their own picks, Clement had watched, and Prince had watched, and Omar had watched, too, as Berisford swung and swung and swung again. He had shouted out once, something about not playing fair, a comment that Omar had assumed was directed at Miller even though Miller was not near enough to hear it. Miller had walked up the rise, and every other pick-and-shovel man had walked off for lunch. It was just their gang toiling down in the Cut. Berisford most of all. He had swung until at some point Omar saw him let go of his pick and stagger toward the railroad tracks behind them like he was struggling to walk. “Are you okay?” Omar had called. But Berisford either had not heard him or did not have the energy to respond. He had sunk to his knees, then collapsed.

“Berisford!” Omar cried. Holding his pick, he ran over and rolled Berisford onto his back. Berisford’s eyes were closed and his body was slack. The rain fell upon him. “Berisford!” Omar screamed again.

Clement rushed over, too.

Omar said, “He fainted, I think.”

“He breathing?”

“I do not know.”

Clement held his hand under Berisford’s nose. He put an ear to Berisford’s chest. Then he frowned and lifted Berisford’s wrist. He lowered it, slowly, and looked Omar in the eye.

“We can take him to the field hospital,” Omar said.

Clement shook his head.

“We can. It is not far.”

“Too late now.”

“Too late?” Omar sputtered.

Clement merely looked at him like there was nothing more to say.

“But—”

“Best thing we can do is start digging before Miller come back.”

Omar stared at Clement with incomprehension.

“We have to dig a grave,” Clement said.

“Here?”

“Better here than who know where else they put him.”

Omar was too stunned to move. He looked at Berisford lying still on the ground. It did not seem possible. He had just been digging. He had just been working with them. Hesitantly, Omar put his hand on Berisford’s chest, waiting to feel a heartbeat, but there was not one.

Clement grabbed Omar’s arm and pulled him up. “We got to hurry. Come on.”

Clement motioned Prince and Joseph over, and together, without any discussion, the four of them dug. Omar blinked back tears. As fast as they could, they sank their picks and shovels into the ground, and when the hole was deep enough, they carried Berisford over and laid him down. They gave him back to the earth so that he could rest.

***

WORDLESSLY, THE MEN trudged back to the line, but Omar, with a queasiness in his gut, could not bring himself to move. He just stood next to the freshly turned earth with his pick in his hand. The mountains towered around him. The rain fell lightly and prickled the ground. In the distance Omar saw Miller hike up higher onto a plateau. He was gazing out northward as though enjoying the view. At some point, he stopped and struck a match to light his cigar. Omar squinted, watching Miller cup his hand over the flame. Such painstaking care to keep that one flicker alive.

All at once, Omar dropped his pick. His boots squelched in the mud as he charged past the men. He did not stop until he had climbed all the way up to where Miller was standing, looking off to one side, smoking his loathsome cigar.

Miller turned, startled. He pulled the cigar from his mouth. “What are you doing up here?”

Omar was trembling as he said, “Someone died.”

“Well, people die every day.”

“Because of you.”

Miller experienced a wriggle of worry he had not felt for some years. “Me? I sure as hell didn’t kill anyone.”

Omar was shaking, but his voice did not waver. “You did.”

“That so? When?”

“Just now.”

Miller scoffed. “I don’t know how that can be when I’ve been standing up here.”

“You did,” Omar said again.

Miller took another puff of his cigar. There wasn’t time for these antics. There was work to be done. He ashed his cigar and looked the boy in the eye. He was the lone Panamanian in the whole division, never trouble till now.

“No,” Miller said slowly. “But since you seem confused about what I did and did not do, let me explain it to you. I came to this country and helped you make something of it, see? No one in their right mind wanted to set foot here before, and if they did it was only to make their way through. But now everyone wants to be here. And why do you think that is? Because of something you did? No. You people had this place to yourselves for hundreds of years and you managed to make it a swamp. But we got rid of yellow fever and built bridges and towns. We paved your streets and gave you water that runs through pipes underground. That’s civilization, see? We brought Panama out of the jungle and into the God-fearing light. That’s what we did. We gave you a gift.” Miller leaned forward. “You’re supposed to say thank you when somebody gives you a gift.”

Omar tightened his lips. His chin quivered in rage.

“Say thank you now.”

“No.”

Miller took a step closer. “What’s that?”

“No.”

There was only a fleeting second of satisfaction before Omar felt the blow—Miller’s fist to the hinge of his jaw. Omar stumbled back.

Miller said, “It will behoove you in this life to be grateful. Now try it again. Say thank you.”

Omar tasted blood in his mouth.

“Say it.”

But Omar refused. He turned around, his jaw throbbing.

“There you go,” Miller said. “Back to work now.”

With tears again in his eyes, Omar walked toward the terrace of stairs that led up the mountainside. Miller yelled after him, but Omar did not look back. One step at a time, he climbed out of the Cut.