STONEPASTURES.
STONEPASTURES.
“To know a man well you must learn his city.”
Thereare three districts in Soot City: By the Bridge, By the Tracks, and the Stonepastures.
Simeon Quarry—who lived with the Buttes By the Tracks, and who knew more of this story than I do—always began the tale of his town with this phrase, “As way back as ‘30”; for that was the year when the big birds sitting on the big boulders first watched the strangerswith the strings and water levels, and heard the strangers’ words.
There abode in the wilderness of those days—for everything was Stonepastures then—a Methodist preacher with a taste for the scripturally obscure. His circuit included the site of Soot City, to which place he gave the name of Padan-Aram, which endures as the county name until to-day.
Among the strange words the birds heard were “ile,” “iron,” and “smelt-oven.” These sounds were each an “open sesame” to hordes of foreign workers, with a proportion of native Americans generalled by Jo Bentley—grandfather of the Bentley whose plant is still the first in Soot City.
In a single lustre there sprang from the arid strip of country confined with treeless hills—“Baldhead Rangers” and “Cleanshorns”—rows on rows of mean houses, containing men and women every year lessening their acquaintance with the world without. Soot City was their cradle, the arena of their endeavour, their deathbed, and their sepulchre.
By the Bridge dwelt foreman, bookkeepers, furnace masters, together with the Bentleys’ outdoor servants—for they had a great place now. The son had rowed in the Cambridge boat, the daughters had become Episcopalians and gave great house parties, and the people By the Bridge who knew them best were the lawyer, the doctor, thebaker, and the undertaker, who conspired against the rest of humanity as occasion permitted.
Soot City has no street. Instead, it has narrow-gauge tracks, along which the workmen go forth to and return from labour in the empty ore cars. The houses By the Tracks are ranged on either side of them, and are inhabited by mechanics, iron workers, truckmen, freight handlers, and preachers of minor denominations.
Beyond the bridge are the Stonepastures, and beyond these the ore bed, the smelting place, and the nutt and bolt factory. The bridge straddles the tracks so that the highroad may traverse the town, and the narrow gauge runs fromthe gate of Bentley’s Place to the ore bed under the bridge and over the Stonepastures. The tracks are only four miles long, joining the main line at the furnaces.
No townsman ever looked at the sunset, because it went down on the Stonepastures. Every one’s sunset was “over there”; and in the mean hovels that stood out sharply to the town gaze in an evening’s afterglow dwelt men who had the white-lead poison in their hands, or who had been scorched in a blast, or who, trying to preserve themselves in alcohol, had failed.
The men were hungry and chafed, wrenching themselves from sleep of a morning to a dull day, three parts thirst to one of hunger.The children went to school and learned to know their parents’ mistakes, bringing home bitterness instead of bread. The mothers washed rags in rusty water, prayed and played with the children, or picked up scrap-iron for the men to sell.
Accident and sudden death were about as frequent as night and day. A squeeze between two ore cars, or a tendency to slumber on the tracks after a “cosey of arrack” at Grigg’s drinkshop, meant black on some one’s door-handle. But the “blast” was the horror that made the women kiss their men with the fervour of the last parting when they went off to work at the ore bed. The blastwas not famous for respect of persons. It rarely killed, but its victims were rarely cured. There was a rocky stretch by the ore bed which young Bentley was having blown out for the town reservoir, and the new iron vein backed against it. Scarcely a blast had been managed without some one being thrown to the earth, mangled with jagged stones—“the throw” the men called them. It might be that some one would fall with the shock and find himself thereafter deaf to everything but the “dumb roaring,” and such a one would die of what the unlettered Methodist preacher said was “eternal injuries.” The very children feared the blast.
There were, however, three thingsthat Soot City loved: Pay-day, Jarlsen, and the cinder flare. At night they would pause in their homeward way from drinkshop or chapel or Jarlsen’s neat sitting room, and look toward the smelting furnace. And as the blaze jumped into the yawning sky they would bless its fierceness, and look at the houses and tracks standing out clearly, saying along with their good-nights and good-byes, “God’s lookin’ at cher, Bill!”
For they named the light from the dumped cinder “The eye of God.”