The Miner

Charlie had the north walk half graded when the wagons started coming up the hill.

He worked it with a shovel and a steel rake, filling and leveling the last stretch of path that ran down from the new stone building toward the little lake, and he had been at it since first light because the crew boss wanted the grounds clean before the crowd came. The building above him was the biggest thing on the hill, brick and pale stone, put up for the mining school by architects who had come out from New York and gone home again. In front of it, wrapped in canvas and cord, stood the thing everyone had come to see. Charlie had helped set the footing for it the week before. He had mixed the mortar and carried the cut stone up the slope and had never once seen what the canvas hid.

He was thirty-five. His mother, Tona, had been born in this valley when it was a valley and not a town, and when he was small she had walked him along the river and shown him where her people wintered before the railroad came and gave the place the name of a soldier none of them had ever met. The low meadow where they had set their houses of bark and tule was under Virginia Street now, under the brick and the awnings. The hill he was grading had been open ground where the women dug roots in the spring. He did not say any of that to the crew boss. He filled the soft place in the path and raked it flat and moved his tools three feet down the line.

By nine the road up from town was full. Buggies and a few automobiles and people on foot, the men in dark coats though the June morning was already warm, the women holding their hats against the wind that always came down off the mountains by midmorning. It was commencement day at the university, and the whole town seemed to have climbed the hill for it, more people than Charlie had ever seen in one place, more than came for the fair. He heard someone say ten thousand. He did not think there were ten thousand people in the whole of Reno, but he did not count.

They set chairs on the grass he had cut. They built a platform of raw lumber near the covered statue, and men in good suits climbed onto it, and one of them spoke a long time in the flat voice men used for speaking to crowds. Charlie caught pieces of it from where he worked at the edge, the words school and mines and future, and the name Mackay, over and over, Mackay. He knew the name. Everyone knew the name. Mackay had gone down into the Comstock a poor Irishman and come up one of the richest men in the country, and he had died back East years ago, and now his son had paid for a building and a bronze man to stand in front of it. The governor was up on the platform too. The old governor, Sparks, had died that spring, and the town over the tracks that carried his name was still hung with black, and the new man said his piece and sat down.

Then two workmen Charlie knew pulled the cords, and the canvas came down off the statue, and the crowd made a sound like wind in a stand of pine.

It was a miner. Charlie set his rake against his hip and looked at it with the rest of them. Bronze, dark and already going a little green at the seams, life-sized, a man in a rough coat and heavy boots with a pick held loose in one hand and a chunk of ore cupped in the other, the way a man holds a thing he means to show you. The sculptor had made him plain, not grand, a working man caught between one swing and the next. His bronze face was turned up and to the east, toward the pass and the mountains, toward Virginia City and the silver that had paid for all of it, the building and the crowd and the town below.

Charlie stood on the ground his grandmother’s people had held and looked at the bronze man looking away from him, out at the hills, and thought that the mountains the miner watched so hard had been watched a great deal longer than the miner knew. His mother’s mother had gathered in those hills. His mother had. He himself had cut wood up there for wages the winter before last, for a rancher who ran cattle where the pine nuts used to be. There was no place in this whole country set aside for his people, not one acre with their name on the paper, though the paper said everything now. He had heard men in town talk about it, that maybe the government would buy them a little ground someday, a few acres at the edge of the towns where they already worked. It had not happened. He did not hold his breath for it. He was Washoe in the Washoe valley and he owned nothing in it but his tools and the coat on his back.

He did not feel it as anger, standing there. It had gone past anger a long time ago into something quieter and harder to name, the way the river had gone quiet after they put the ditch across it and sent the water south. He looked at the miner a while longer. It was well made. He could say that much. The man who made it had known how a working man stood, how the weight went into the hips, how the hands were never quite at rest.

The speeches started again. People shifted in their chairs. A brass band he had not seen began to play somewhere near the platform, and the notes came apart in the wind before they reached him. Charlie picked his rake back up.

There was still the south stretch of walk to bring level, and the beds along the building to edge, and the boss would want the wheelbarrows and the extra lumber hauled off before dark so the grounds looked as though no one had ever worked them, as though the lawn had always been there and the paths had laid themselves. That was the trick of it, to make the labor disappear. He wheeled a load of gravel down to the low place where the water would stand if he left it, and he tipped it out, and he began to spread it thin and even under the sound of the band and the speaking and the ten thousand strangers on his grandmother’s ground, and he did not look up at the bronze man again, because the bronze man was not looking at him.

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