THE GREEN AGE of ASHER WITHEROW
THE GREEN AGE of ASHER WITHEROW
M. Allen Cunningham
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Excerpt from the Contra Costa Gazette of 1880, courtesy of Contra Costa Central Library, Pleasant Hill, CA.
The Principal Upanisads. Copyright © 1994 by S. Radhakrishnan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright in the customized version vests in Unbridled Books.
Passage on p. 242 quoted from The Saviors of God; Spiritual Exercises by Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar. Copyright © 1960 by Simon & Schuster.
UNBRIDLED BOOKS,
Denver, Colorado
Copyright 2004 M. Allen Cunningham
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Originally published as an Unbridled Books hardcover.
First paperback edition, 2005
Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Cunningham, M. Allen.
The green age of Asher Witherow / M. Allen Cunningham.
p. cm.
Hardcover edition ISBN 1-932961-00-3
Paperback edition ISBN 1-932961-13-5
1. Coal mines and mining—Fiction. 2. California—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3603.U667G74 2004
813'.6—DC22 2004013507
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Book Design by SH · CV
For Katie, every day a miracle
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
—DYLAN THOMAS
The supply seems to be inexhaustible. From the figures in my possession I have reasons to believe that over 2,250,000 tons of coal have been shipped to the market from the Diablo mines; and considerably more than half of that immense amount was shipped from the Black Diamond mines at Nortonville. Where is the mine in the State that can show a better record in regard to the past, or as bright a prospect for the future?
—LETTER FROM NORTONVILLE,
CONTRA COSTA GAZETTE, JUNE 28, 1880
On a boggy day in 1806 a detachment of Spanish soldiers apprehended a band of Bay Miwok Indians in a marsh at the foot of a solitary California mountain. Commanded to redeliver the natives to the stern grace of the mission they’d fled, the Spaniards detained them in a nearby thicket as night fell. A dun darkness came on, browning out the stars. The night grew quiet but for the din of crickets. Then at some deep and slippery hour the Miwoks vanished, turned to vapor and floated away in the mist, dematerialized as demons were known to do. The next morning the soldiers woke in a dawn steam thick enough to blank the big mountain from sight. They found themselves bereft of their errant mission-folk and turned round on their heels till their heads swam. Bedeviled as they were, they forswore the place Monte del Diablo, Thicket of the Devil, and for years the name lingered like a fog over that marsh. When at length the English-speaking settlers arrived, the Spanish Monte was taken for Mountain and was believed to refer to the twin-shouldered mass looming nearby. So the mountain became Mount Diablo, made to bear an unholy namesake.
IT IS A TUESDAY IN THE EARLY SPRING OF 1950 AS I WRITE THIS. I AM no longer young, to say the least, and these recollections have come whistling through my ancient brain like wind-wraiths. Even these early years, though I thought I’d get them down without much trouble, perturb me in some faint manner. Might it be that even back then we should have caught the malignant whiff in that valley air? But if so, how? Ah, I mustn’t get started on that—that’s idle thinking. There’s no rearranging things now. Though the slightest recollection stirs up a terrific haunting, I know one can’t expect much of memory, whose utility is limited. In my old hands I turn the pages of a book where a Greek poet writes that every day on this earth begins and ends in the mind, the dawn occurring on one side of your head, dusk on the other. And I think it must be a good thing that I’ve read this only toward the end of my life, for how lost it might have made me in my years of learning.
My earliest Nortonville memory is father’s smell as he entered the house at night, an odor like wet burlap and dead animal. I remember the grind of his washing barrel as it scudded across our floor: wood against wood; his naked perch on the barrel’s rim, black above his neckline, white beneath, scooping water from between his knees; the plashing as mother washed his back.
I remember the growl of the breaker. I woke each morning to its wheel-and-shaft clamor, like a terrible grinding of teeth. I remember the gray smell as mother shoveled the coal in our stove. And I remember the culm banks, steaming in the June sun, slothing from here to there. They rose on the edge of town like charred monuments: black lopsided pyramids. Mother loved the shimmer-sound those banks made when they moved. She said it reminded her of the beaches in Wales, the seawater ebbing back from the rocky shore. She closed her eyes sometimes and listened to it, muted as it was beyond the squawk of chickens.
Early one April morning, 1863, father had awakened to find mother standing at the window in her peach chemise, shuddering with a horror she couldn’t name. He coaxed her back to bed and bore her convulsions the whole night through. The next evening when he returned from the works he found her seated on the stoop. She was pawing her belly and weeping tearlessly but with abandon. Believing it to be a spiritual ailment, he read to her from the letters of the Apostle: “But though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day,” and she strained to find comfort in the old cadences. But her melancholy was incurable and the paranoiac fits bulged in time with her growing belly. She had believed herself fruitless. The new roundness of her stomach could barely convince her that this haunting, as she called it, was maternal and not demonic. For the next seven months mother quavered, soothed only by readings from the New Testament. Her torment would not fully subside till I was delivered from her womb.
Under the shadow of Mount Diablo, with a terrible warble which filled the little company house, Abicca Witherow squeezed me into the world. The labor began one indigo morning when she spasmed awake in tears. Then she struggled an entire day and night, clear to the following afternoon. The midwife, Sarah Norton, darkened my parents’ door as a bulk of shadow. She had the stout hands and mannish arms of one who pried at wombs for hours on end, and wore a string slung crosswise on her breast, dangling with pouches of fresh and dried herbs. Tisanes, roborants, analeptics, caustics, tonics, and salves—all of old-world or Indian concoction. She put her mouth to mother’s twitching ear.
“First thing is to calm those nerves, dearie.” She gave four pouches to father. “Each in a separate pot. Boiled.” And as he dashed out, she stood smiling down upon her tremulous patient. “We’re bursting, aren’t we, dearie? The little thing’s eager for air. Here’s a comfort for you.”
Her black hair stranded downward as she bent and slipped hooks from eyes, spread open the belly of