The River, The Mine, and All of Us

CW: pandemic

The water there was red. Little particles of clay were constantly swept away by the raging river, and the iron deposits made it look as though the water itself had rusted. The river itself was positively serpent-like, winding its way across the Earth in a hissing rush, as though maddened by something. The process by which that water was filtered was long. If there was a slight delay at the plant, we may have a few hours with no running water in our homes. If you were washing the dishes and suddenly your pipes ran dry, you didn’t have to wonder about the reason.

I’m telling you all of this because it was the most interesting detail about the town I’m from. There were two hundred and twenty-seven people living there. The ground leading down to the river was uneven and damp. There wasn’t a single house that didn’t have to stand on support beams to make sure the floors were level. The weather was seldom bad, but it was seldom good. Pale gray skies and chilly air were the norm, with the occasional gust of strong wind appearing from nowhere, and disappearing into the same. If it weren’t for the poorly-managed mineshaft still active in the hills, no one would have lived there at all.

 Everyone knew each other, or at least knew of each other. The same twenty or so families had lived there for generations, so we all had a long, well-known, utterly boring ancestral history. We bypassed each other in the street like little proteins floating by, encased by the membrane of the river. There were no events held there. No fairs, festivals, or town get-togethers. Just quite communications on the curbside. Nothing happened there. Nothing at all.

If you asked me what my favorite New Year’s Eve celebration was, I would have an immediate answer for you. That’s because there is only one I can remember any details of. My family did the exact same things in the exact same order that we had every previous year. My mom cooked some sort of pasta casserole. My Dad poured the champagne and gave me a glass, too, even though I was only sixteen. He told my mom it was sparkling apple juice. We clinked our glasses together at the stroke of midnight and declared our resolutions. Mine was to make more friends at school, even though there were only twenty-two people in my class and they were all as boring as the town itself. My mom’s was to learn to cook a more diverse array of cuisines, even though the grocery shop only carried the ingredients for ten dishes. My Dad’s was to find a better job and get out of the mineshaft once and for all, even though he’d been saying that for the past five years and by the end of the third month he’d come up with some reason why it was fiscally irresponsible. Still, the flow of red blood in my veins managed to dredge up some hope, just like the river and the red clay.

We did have a very slow internet connection in that town, but seeing as most of the outside news was irrelevant to us, and very few had enough money to afford it, news reached our town slowly. Therefore the surrounding country was already in a lockdown by the time we heard. It was the most interesting thing we’d had to talk about in years, so the speed with which the word leapt from ear to ear was like the virus itself. The muted curbside conversations became almost animated as people recounted the horror stories they’d heard, probably twisted after thirty news outlets beamed their static whispers across the river. Still, no one really worried. Those gray skies and red shores had quarantined us for so long.

Then the owner of the mines came for his annual inspection. I say annual, because that is what it’s supposed to be, but he always showed up three years late. Our mine was the eyesore on an otherwise stellar entrepreneurial resumé. If I had to guess, I’d say the owner was perturbed every time he crunched the numbers and found that the mine was just profitable enough to keep running, and to keep paying those gray workers with their gray eyes covered in gray dust their gray coins.

He came that year looking pale and weary, and a tiny sheen of sweat was evident on his wrinkled brow. Or perhaps it was just moisture from the river carried on the wind. He walked the poorly ventilated corridors of the Earth, inspecting the mines as he liked to do, even though his experience would never allow him to pinpoint a code violation. He coughed as the dusty air filled his lungs. He shook the dry, cracked hands of all those who worked there. He blew his nose into a tissue, then handed it to the nearest miner to be disposed of. He left without good-byes, slipping into the back of his chauffeured ride as he’d done countless times before, never leaving a trace. Except this time. The two hundred and twenty-eighth person had brought the devil to our red banks.

When the first few miners got sick, nobody thought much about it. It was flu season after all, and in the tight quarters of the mine shafts a single case would work its way through the entire task force in a matter of days. Even when the first person died, no one was scared. It was just the old man who lived at the top of the ridge and slowly descended the slopes once per month to buy canned soups. He wasn’t the most pleasant of characters. Eventually people learned what day he would appear in the grocery store, and do their shopping early. We mourned him half-heartedly only because he was the oldest resident of the town, and I suppose that constituted a loss of sorts.

Then a woman who lived close to my family caught it. I had always liked her. Her house was the only one on the block with an asphalt driveway, and she bought colorful chalk just for me and my brother to draw with when we were young. Her house always smelled like it was Christmas: pine needles, cinnamon, baked apples and gingerbread. A week after the old man died those welcome scents disappeared. I sat beside my open bedroom window at night, facing her open kitchen window, nose pressed close to the screen in hopes of catching a whiff of the cinnamon muffins she baked. Nothing. I went to visit her against my better judgement, promising my father that I would step inside the entryway and venture no further, that I would place the meal my mother had cooked for her on the floor, then turn and leave. I did just that, but my throat was too clogged with the smells of sweat and vomit to choke out a “feel better soon”. She died forty-eight hours later in her bed. I hoped she’d been asleep.

Half the town had it within the month. It passed by mysterious means, no matter how much we tried to enclose ourselves within the four walls of our homes, it found us. The young couple two miles down the road both caught it. They were sick for three weeks, the husband more than the wife, but they both lived. The four-year-old girl who rode her tricycle every single day caught it. Those wheels didn’t always turn like they should but she fought her way up and down the slopes of our roads without fail because she had strong little lungs. Four days later they clogged and died.

Five biblical months later my father sat on our balcony, cigarette desperately clamped between his teeth, staring out over the hills in the direction of the mines, out of commission this whole time. His back was hunched, and I wish it could say it was an after-effect from years of work, but I’d seen it worsen recently. I approached the railing slowly, as if the air I moved were enough to compress him into the diamond he’d always hoped to find.

“Dad; I heard there’s work at the gas station. My classmate used the work the night shifts. You know, the one who died.”

“I don’t want you working around all those cigarettes,” my father wheezed, taking a long drag and letting the smoke leak from his lungs.

“It wouldn’t be much money, but it would help pay the gas bill.”

“I’m still getting unemployment pay from the government.”

I dug my nails into the damp, rotting wood of the railing. Just that morning I’d looked through his checkbook, seen the financial hemorrhage that wasn’t going to clot. I’d seen the standard amount of money being allotted each month, and I’d seen how much electricity, gas and water we used, how much food we ate, how little of my brother’s asthma medication cost our insurance covered. My father’s eyes met mine only briefly, opened wide and red. I don’t think he even blinked anymore.

Somewhere in the house, my brother coughed, and we knew.

My mother spent our last three dollars on Vicks VapoRub, applying it to his chest and upper lip twice every hour, frantically running her fingers underneath the rim of the jar when it ran out. I opened his bedroom door with a bowl of hot soup and found her leaning over him, fingers coated in toothpaste from our bathroom. She was smiling and looked relieved.

“The mint will help,” she whispered. “Be quiet; he’s sleeping.”

I dropped the bowl. It shattered to pieces and sent splashes of soup on the floor and baseboards. I ran from my own house that day, from my own mother, but I’m willing to bet if you had seen someone smiling ear to ear and rubbing toothpaste on a cold, ashen corpse’s chest, you would have run, too.

Then came the news. The mines were closing for good. The owner who had spread his nasty, nasty breath through those dirt hallways had succumb to the illness he’d cursed us with, and the heir to his millions wanted nothing to do with this dingey little corner of land. Suddenly, the drudgery which had lured us to remain here was gone. Men looked at their ramshackle lives and became elated, then terrified, then elated again, thinking perhaps they could finally run. The fear that had us all shivering was swept away by nervous excitement that set our hearts ablaze.

The news seemed to reach every house and every ear within at the same exact time. Clothes flew crumpled into suitcases, main breakers were shut off in fuse boxes, precious family heirlooms were forgotten. The energy about us was so chaotic, rapid heartbeats generating so much friction the river nearly dried up in the heat. The murky membrane burst as we, the council of purgatory, tore across those murky waters, into the unknown outside.

That all happened decades ago, before the vaccine was shipped across the oceans and jabbed into every arm in every corner of the world. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, now that my children are grown and my mortgage is paid in full. My wife and I made an agreement that we would travel everywhere we could think of in our retirement, see the eight world wonders and discover the ninth, get our feet cut on the coral reef and get bitten by mosquitoes in Yellowstone National Park. She wanted to see it all, but as we booked our first plane tickets, all I could think about was driving back to the infected town we’d broken. I yearned for the amber waves of the river and gentle silver skies, the whimsically rolling slopes and cold breezes on our balconies. But I didn’t dare.

I believe, now that the trauma had been absorbed, therapized and tamed, that the town itself had never been a terrible place. Rather, we had been the problem without knowing it, like weed killer on a weed that grew flowers prettier than the grass someone was trying to maintain. Like it or not, we were all poison. So, I have chosen to leave that place alone, and be thankful that the memory of my life there wasn’t enough to make me hate the red water that it washed away in. Still, to this day, every time I wash my hands in the sink, drink from a plastic bottle pulled from the fridge at a gas station, wash my car on the curb and watch the soap-laden water wash away down the storm drain, I can’t help but wonder if one ghostly drop, never to touch me again, was from our river.