He explained to his sons how millions of years ago pockets of liquid had turned solid inside rocks, trapping free-flowing grains and nuggets of gold, and how these gold-bearing quartz veins had waited ever since for the Hook boys to find them and dig them out and make their fortune. ‘It’s like big ol’ bank vaults that are locked up down there,’ Arthur Hook said, and he raised his pickaxe, ‘and we got the key to the lock.’
And Arthur Hook swung his axe at that underground rock face as if it were the face of Tom Berry himself. He hacked at it, slashed it and smashed it. And for three straight weeks he and his sons worked on that face, Aubrey and Horace lugging buckets of mined ore up the ladder and over to a nearby creek, where they sorted through rocks and panned the most promising dirt, letting lighter materials wash away down the creek and waiting, hoping, for the heavy gold to sparkle at the dirty bottoms of their pans. But the gold never showed itself and a rage grew inside Arthur Hook. ‘Where are you?’ he screamed. ‘Where are you?’ And his axe swung and the muscles in his wire skeleton and no-meat body tore and he coughed and spluttered on all the rock dust he was sucking into his lungs.
It was Aubrey who told his father he was working too hard on the rock face, too fast, who told him he wasn’t respecting the mountain as he should. That he was too reckless. Too hungry. Too vengeful. That they were moving too fast through the tunnel and they were not propping up the roof of their dig hole with sufficient wooden frames. But his father did not listen, could not listen, because his father was someone else. He was now a man with a yellow light in his eyes, a fire in his eyes, gold in his eyes. He was overcome by the lust for gold. The hatred for gold. The absolutes of it all.
And it was Aubrey who was at the rock face with the ore bucket, standing six safe feet behind his father’s flailing rock hammer, when twenty feet of unsupported rock ceiling caved in on father and son. Aubrey saw the tunnel ceiling fall in on his father first and had time enough to turn and kneel down on the ground with his head towards his crotch and his arms over his skull, and brace for the cave-in. Two large boulders wedged a pocket of air around his face, which was pushed hard against the ground, and grey rock dust and debris pressed on his back and for three full minutes he breathed the shortest of breaths while waiting for the oxygen in that small pocket of air to be used up, and in his final moments beneath that terrifying rubble blanket he discovered the only thing in life he cared about.
It was a girl. The image of her entered his mind. She was spinning in a white dress at the school dance that past summer. Violet Berry, the teenaged daughter of Tom and Bonnie Berry. Violet Berry, with the curly brown hair and blue eyes and deep red lipstick. Violet Berry, who he was not supposed to talk to under any circumstances, and that had suited him fine because he always knew she would blind him, make him deaf and dumb, were he to stand too close to those eyes. An angel too precious to say hello to, much less ask to square dance. But now he was so close to death that he had the courage to make a pact with himself. If I survive this cave-in, he thought, I will ask Violet Berry to go riding one Sunday afternoon.
And then he felt a shovel scraping at the rubble mound above him. He felt a boulder give way and the weight of the cave-in release its suffocating pressure on his chest. Then another boulder was removed, and a shovel was frantically digging into the mound, scraping, hauling, shifting the pressure away from Aubrey’s body. Soon the dirt around him was loose enough that he could push his right-hand fingers up through it and those fingers found other fingers. His brother’s hand. And Horace pulled with all his strength, pulled so hard on his older brother’s right arm that Aubrey thought it might come clean away from his shoulder.
Horace pulled and pulled and soon he could see his brother’s hair buried in the dirt, coloured grey by the rock dust. Then he saw his face, so grey that it looked like Aubrey had turned to stone beneath that rubble. Finally his brother emerged with the air-sucking gasp of a vampire that had been trapped in a coffin for five hundred years. And Horace fell on his backside beside his coughing and spluttering older brother and the two boys looked at the impenetrable rubble wall before them knowing they both now had to dig for their father, who was lying somewhere beyond it.
But something mysterious kept them from reaching for their shovels and pickaxes. It was a strange and powerful force running through them both, something they knew never to underestimate. It was hate.
*
On the army transport, flat on his back between the human rubble of bloodied bodies,
