“To know a man well you must learn his city.”
THERE are 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 strangers with 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, the baker, 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 from the 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 blast was 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 things that 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.”