Lost Child

by CLARA LAIDLAW

1

SOMETIMES it’s a half-heard sound that makes me think of Annunziata. Then I remember Iron Harbor, too, and the snow, and that sound that might have been the heart’s pounding, but was not.

I don’t know how it is today, but when I went there to teach, Iron Harbor was beautiful and yet somehow sinister, with its bright, skyey distances, its rocky hillsides thick with mingled blue-black pines and spruce, silver birches, and red maples, but near-by, always the mines, ugly on the hillsides, dirty, ominous with portent of violence.

John Steele, the principal, talked with me just after the first, teachers’ meeting about the work of the coming year. We sat in his bare little office at the top of the two flights of stairs in the old James building, where we could look out of the window, away over the rusty hills gashed with the red of the ore piles to the little clusters of houses around the Beacon mine — Beacon “location, they called it.

“They’re good kids,” he said earnestly, the list of my prospective homeroom students in his hand. “First-generation Finns and Italians mostly. They’re clean, and they want to learn, which is half the battle in this job of ours.” Then he added, glancing at the list and smiling a little ruefully, “Of course we have our problems— I see you’re to have the Zerullio girl. Bright little thing, but she’s taken to skipping school off and on lately. Maybe you can remedy that.”

“What made her skip?” I asked, smiling, for it sounded such a trivial thing. “Was it spring-fever skipping or I-don’t-like-school skipping? Or some special iron-country variety ?”

John Steele laughed. “Come to think of it,” he said, “ I don’t believe I know. She skipped — that’s all.” Then he grew serious. “ I see what you mean, though,” he nodded, “but I don’t believe anyone has tried to trace the business back to its source. Poor little thing — no mother, and then lost her father summer before this. Fives with a brother and his wife. The child seemed right enough until last March, when she began this running away from school, the first time in the middle of a blizzard!”

“Not exactly spring-fever weather,” I said. “It may help to know that.”

“Well,” he said, rising, “you’ll manage with her, I’ve no doubt.”

Despite his confidence, the thought of the girl he had mentioned troubled me as I walked home from the school to my room at Mrs. Pagety’s, across the fields, along the bank of the unnamed river that ran like blood through the meadow, its red waters swift but unbroken by ripple or wave. Almost home, I began to be conscious of something through a sense halfway between hearing and feeling. It was a sound, yet not a sound. A faint pulsation.

Mrs. Pagety looked at me sharply when I asked her about it upon my return. “Some say ‘tisn’t good to ‘ear the mines,” she said, folding her agepuckered lips together forebodingly. “Some ‘ears ‘em an’ some don’t. But that’s what you ’eard, seemingly, the pounding in the mines.”

The next morning in school I called the roll from the typewritten sheet Mr. Steele had given me. My homeroom students looked up at me expectantly, the big boys waiting to guffaw when the new teacher mispronounced a name.

“Annunziata Zerullio,” I read. It was the last name on the list. I looked up as the girls in the class began to giggle. Tn the front seat a big boy with blue-black curls, warm olive skin, and large melting Italian eyes flushed darkly and turned to frown back at the girls.

“She ain’t here,” he said. “I’m Telio Gasparini, ‘Nunziata’s cousin, and I live next door to ZeruIIio’s down at the location. ‘Nunziata, she couldn’t come to school this morning.”

Derisive coughs came from the back of the room, and Telio’s ears grew very red.

“I seen ‘er ‘eadin’ for Camplin Pit just as I was startin’ for school,” volunteered skinny little Davy Ives, grinning maliciously.

Telio broke in excitedly, “I told her to keep away from there. That’s sinking ground. That’s where—” He stopped in the middle of a word.

“Sinking ground?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Condemned,” explained Davy importantly. “Been mined under. Might cave in most any time. Part’s gone down a’ready — that’s the pit. But it’s still sinkin’ round the edges.”

“Why can’t she stay away from that pit?” Telio said unhappily. “She’ll get hurt maybe.”

The bell rang then, and after a while I was left alone. I had first hour free. I was still looking down at the list of names with Annunziata ZeruIIio’s at the bottom when Mr. Steele opened the classroom door and looked in.

Behind him stood a tall miner, his sharp, dark face smudged with the red dust from the ore, though it was obvious he had tried to wash the grime away. He wore cheap, clean work-clothes. Apparently he was fresh from the “dry,” where the miners scrubbed and changed clothes before they returned home from the mine.

“This is Guido Zerullio, Miss Conway,” Mr. Steele said, “Annunziata’s brother. And this is Annunziata.”

From behind the tall young Italian a thin, heartshaped little face appeared. The eyes looked into mine with a queer, unwilling defiance, and I stared at the child, frankly startled. She was very young, surely not fifteen, though the thin body had almost lost its childish awkwardness. I looked at the face, so sullen and so lovely: sharp, clear lines where the incredibly translucent flesh followed the bone; eyes of black flame, darting anger — or something more than anger. The eyebrows above the piercing eyes were dramatically black, their slender, tapering curves sweeping upward toward her temples like delicate strokes of a brush. Her mouth was soft and vulnerable, though the tension of her set chin and clenched jaws made my own jaws tighten.

I don’t know what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. With something like relief, I thought, “Why, this is no problem case. This is only a little girl, lonely, lost somehow in the not-so-long-ago transition from babyhood.”

Without thinking, I held out my hand to her. “Come in,” I said. “I think this is where you belong, Annunziata.”

I smiled into her strange eyes, and in the silence the lovely syllables of her name seemed to linger like the echo of a song.

The young miner spoke then, roughly, yet with an honest sincerity that made me pause.

“Don’t you be coddling her up,” he said sternly. “She won’t thank you for it. You just see that she stays in school. I’ll see she gets here. You keep her here. There ain’t to be no more skipping.”

The girl did not come toward me, but the sullenness on her white face had given way to a queer expression I could not define. I let my outstretched hand drop to my side and waited for her to come in.

2

AFTER the brother and Mr. Steele had gone, I made out Annunziata’s schedule. She spoke reluctantly, staring at me distrustfully all the while. No, she didn’t care what she took. Yes, she liked music all right. Yes, she knew where to go for all her classes.

I handed her the completed schedule, and she took it in silence. I watched her thin little figure in the faded blue dress as she turned toward the door. She carried herself with a proud, unconscious grace that was like music to watch, the little, halfdeveloped figure apparent under the sleazy, toosmall dress.

At the door she hesitated, her back still toward me. Curiously I watched her. With a quick movement she turned.

“ Thank you,” she said shortly and disappeared into the corridor.

The days passed, and Annunziata continued to attend school with some regularity. But with regularity, too, came disturbing reports of her conduct in her classes. “She left, in the middle of class without my permission,” wrote Miss Nichols, who taught English. “Annunziata is extremely insolent,” said the math teacher, Miss Tully, a fiery little pouter-pigeon of a woman. “She will not answer even when I call on her repeatedly. She just sits and stares out the window.” The art teacher wrote me a concerned little note: “Annunziata has real talent, but she will work at nothing but dark abstractionist blobs.”

I talked to Annunziata, of course, about attentiveness and courtesy, and she listened with stiff, nervous reserve. The reports grew fewer after that, except that Miss Tully was still unsatisfied. “She doesn’t look out the window any more,” she complained. “She looks straight at me as if I were the window and she could see right through me. She makes me wonder if my slip is showing!”

“Shall I tell her to go back to looking out the window?” I suggested, though I didn’t really feel like laughing.

To me it seemed that the child was struggling, in an actually physical way, to control whatever there was within her that made her different. What concerned me was not her occasional failure but why the adjustment was so difficult for her to make.

In spite of everything, I came to believe that she was growing more happy in school, until early one rainy afternoon she left against Mr. Steele’s request, walked out while he spoke her name telling her to return. She ran off into the downpour, disappearing behind some sprawling red buildings beside the road.

The next morning Annunziata and I were both asked to come to the office. Mr. Steele was standing at the window, his head bent, his hands clasped behind him. It was still raining. Without turning, he asked us to sit down.

“I’m not going to ask you why you disobeyed me, Annunziata,” he said, his usually easy voice stern, “because I know you wouldn’t tell me.”

Annunziata moved uneasily in her chair.

“I’ve had faith in you,” he went on. “I think you know that. I was always on your side — Miss Conway and I, both — even though you hadn’t confided in us.”

There was no sound from Annunziata, but her face was white.

“Well,” he said, “that faith is gone, Annunziata. You can’t go on believing in people when they show you openly that you’re wrong.”

“Mr. Steele,” I protested, “perhaps she can—”

“Explain?” he said, turning. “Can you, Annunziata?” In spite of his stern tone, his eyes were kind.

The knuckles of her hands shone bone-white, so close was her grip on the chair-arms.

“Not so you’d believe me,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Would you believe me that I didn’t hear you?”

He looked at her, frowning sharply. “Not when I spoke to you in the hall, asking you to see me after school?”

“No.”

“And when I called your name twice as you were opening the door?”

“I didn’t hear you.”

Ho turned abruptly. “You are right,” he said, moving the papers on his desk. “I cannot believe that. But that isn’t the point. Will you tell me why you went?”

She looked at him a moment with smoldering eyes, her white lips tight. “No, I won’t tell you,” she said.

3

WHEN the child was gone, he sat down heavily at his desk, rubbing his hand across his eyas with a tired gesture.

“Was I too harsh?” he said. Without waiting for my answer, he went on, “Too bad the father died. She was straight before. This sort of thing started half a year later. No control. Her brother and his wife are young— and indulgent.”

He brought his fist down several times on the desk as if he would pound understanding out of it.

“Well,” he said. “Well, there’s not much from now on but to be firm with her, firm and watchful.”

“Couldn’t it be,” I asked hesitantly, “that she really didn’t hear?”

“No,” he said, rising. “No. We’ll have to admit it. She heard, and still she went. Well, watch her all you can. No more escapades, or — Well, you’ll know what to tell her.”

On my way back to the classroom I met Telio. I saw him hesitate as I nodded in passing, and on an impulse I turned.

“Telio,” I said, and he paused and faced me, leaning one elbow awkwardly against the shadowed wall, “Telio, she won’t speak for herself. Do you know why Annunziata runs away? She must have some reason. Could you tell me?”

He stared down at his hands, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t know,” he said reluctantly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought we might do something to help, if only we knew.”

I moved to go on, but he spoke quickly. “I don’t know why she skips, but I’ve followed her sometimes and seen what she does. Miss Conway, she don’t do anything! I mean she — just goes.”He swallowed and looked up from his clasped hand, meeting my eyes. “She just walks, to the woods, or up Mary’s Hill, or back of the Beacon. She walks fast as if she was going someplace, and then she’ll stop, and just stand. Then after a while she’ll turn and come back. If it was anybody but ‘Nunziata, I’d say she was nuts. For gosh sakes, skipping in a rainstorm— like yesterday!”

“That’s just it,” I said quickly. “She doesn’t seem to skip for the fun of a day in the open, or for any of the usual reasons. And if she were ill, all she’d need to do would be to tell me, and I’d excuse her. It can’t be that, either. Why do you suppose she does it, Telio?”

“Darned if I know,” Telio said helplessly. Then he added, “But I bet she’s got a reason. Otherwise she wouldn’t get you mad at her. She likes you, Miss Conway.”

“I’m not ‘mad at her,’ Telio,” I said, turning. “Just worried — worried.”

There was an added tenseness in Annunziata’s manner after that, but she seemed pathetically trying to be good, to restore lost faith. Her face, lifted to mine in the homeroom, stood out from the others with sharp clarity. The rosy Cornish faces and the pale, bluish Finnish ones seemed quenched, as if under water, and the clear, ivory oval of Annunziata’s face appeared to gather rays of light and to glow.

She seemed unconscious of her loveliness, of the turning eyes and flushing faces of the adolescent boys. They could not look away from her, especially Bruno Riskunen. One day, as he passed her in the aisle, he touched her hair in an awkward caress. Like a flash she had thrust out her foot, and the big lumbering Finnish boy toppled to his knees while his classmates hooted with joyous laughter.

That night after school Annunziata stopped to talk with me, her arms full of books. She stood before my desk a moment, silent.

At last she said accusingly, “Why didn’t you bawl me out for tripping Bruno?”

“Do you think I should have?” I asked.

“Why—why, sure.” She looked at me uncertainly.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why, teachers always do.” She seemed bewildered.

“What would you have me say that you haven’t told yourself already?”

She hesitated a moment, and then all at once her face lighted in a smile. “You’re a funny teacher, Miss Conway,” she said. The eyes that seemed always to be looking into something far-distant grew warm and near, and fun sparkled in them for a moment.

After she had gone, I sat for a long time in thought, trying to see a way to reach her, to help her. Behind her apparently meaningless behavior I felt there was something else. She was, in a way I could not explain, too close within herself, too rapt. It went beyond willfulness, this force that seemed to drive her. Almost, it seemed to me, it was not willfulness at all, but a queer abnegation of will. I could not put into words the sense I had of her over-aloofness, of her seeming engrossment with sights beyond vision. As I had thought when I first had seen her, so now I thought again, that she was lost — lost and afraid. More than that. I could not see.

Between sixth and seventh hours the next day Annunziata disappeared again. Mr. Gresham sent me a cryptic note: “Off again, gone again, Zeruilio again!”

“Seventh hours seem always hard on Annunziata’s staying powers,” he said later, cocking one eyebrow whimsically when I questioned him outside his classroom. “She started last spring. Used to sit there in her scat with her head on one side, her eyes big as saucers, looking as if she were listening to something — ‘horns of fair Elfland’ sort of thing. Then, let me turn my head just once — no Annunziata!”

She came back the next morning looking white and ashamed, frightened and yet defiant. She brought no excuse from home.

“Does your brother know you left without permission, Annunziata?” I asked, looking up reproachfully at her as she stood in front of my desk, her small pointed chin set stubbornly, her eyes dark with feeling.

“Yes,” she said proudly. “I told him. He whipped me.” Then she added sharply, “He didn’t hurt me, though. Does — does Mr. Steele know?”

I shook my head. “But why did you go?” I asked. “Tell me truly.”

Her breathing grew quick and shallow. She looked over my shoulder into nothing, and her eyes shone wildly.

“The bells,” she said breathlessly, “like at church, ringing —” She stopped suddenly as if for the first time she realized she had spoken aloud to me.

“I just had to go,” she said shortly, retreating into stubborn silence.

I rose and went to her, clasping her arms at the shoulder, holding her slight body at arm’s length. She turned her head sharply to one side so that she need not face me, and stood stiff and unresponsive.

“Look at me, Annunziata,” I said.

She shook her head in a violent negative and kept her face averted.

“There were no bells, Annunziata,” I said. “Can’t you tell me what it really was?”

Slowly, unwillingly, her head turned, and she lifted her wild, bright eyes to mine. Without warning she choked queerly, and I found myself holding her shaking little body in my arms while she sobbed out a wordless grief against my shoulder. For a moment her arms clutched at me, holding me in a convulsive grip, and then, as suddenly as she had come to me she wrenched herself away. Her face was tear-marred and pale.

“You have no right to ask,” she cried accusingly. “Oh, can’t you leave me alone? There’s nothing to tell. Nothing I can tell. Don’t you think I’d say if I could — if I knew? Oh, I wish I was dead!”

The stormy tears flooded her eyes, and she ran sobbing from the room.

I did not call to her or go after her.

What if she really did not know the force that drove her, I wondered, any more than the child in the night who sobs, “The dark! The dark!

I tried to put her out of my mind then, but thought of her was never far from me.

4

LATE one night that November, while I was on my way home from a meeting, my car broke down about two miles from town. I was alone. Since it was the nearest way to get help, I cut across the fields and took the path up the hill past the Beacon mine.

It was moonlight, still and cold, though there was as yet no snow on the ground. My feet made little sound on the red dust path, and as I walked, I listened in the night quiet to the sound I had heard before, the tiny silver sound of elfin hammers beating underground. It made me remember that this solid earth I walked upon under the stars was really honeycombed with shafts, level after level extending down where men worked day and night to break loose the ore that was piled on the rusty hillsides. Deep under the earth were men, sweating, bending under the low ceilings. I pictured them, down, down, tiny as the far-off, muted sounds of their blows.

I shivered a little. Over there to the north was Camplin Pit. That happened, too. Sometimes the levels were cut away too much, and the ground sank down on the empty corridors, down on the dark rails and on the timbers that had not been strong enough to hold up the tremendous earth.

I was passing the mine buildings now, painted red all of them, the color of the ore and of the dusty, unpaved roads of the iron country. To my right was the hoist. Ahead was the “dry,” and next to it the offices. In the pale moonlight I caught sight of something moving near the rough walls.

Annunziata! I could not mistake that face, clear in the moonlight.

I called to her and saw her hesitate for a moment as if she had been turned to stone. Then she ran away. I could see her flimsy dress flaring in the wind beneath her short coat.

She was in school the next day, pale and quiet, but she would not look at me, nor would she answer me when I told her I wanted to talk with her after school, though I called her name twice. Perhaps she will not stay, I thought, but she did.

She stood before me, meeting my eyes at last, guardedly, as if she dreaded my asking.

“Why?” I said. “Can’t you tell me why, Annunziata?”

“No,” she said coldly, turning her face away. That was all.

“I should like to go home with you tonight, Annunziata,” I said, “to talk with your brother and his wafe.”

“If you want to,” she said with chill passivity.

It was cold as we started out. Underfoot the ground was frozen, and the lumps of half-crushed ore hurt my feet. There were no sidewalks - only the narrow red path separated from the frozen ruts of the highway by a strip of dead grass, stained a dull red too, from the dust of the road.

In spring there would be a short time when the bright green of the grass, glowing beside the highway, contrasting with its redness, would be lovely beyond telling, but soon the oro dust would be over all. Even the trees were never green for long, but stood tarnished and pale along the roadsides through the brief summer.

Now it was time for the snow that would come down white and clean. For an hour it would lie over the ore piles and the torn hillsides, making us remember how once the world had been young and untouched. Then from somewhere over the hills the wind would blow, and the ore dust would settle down on the whiteness, and the drifts would lie there looking like soiled bandages from which the blood had been partly washed away.

Annunziata walked beside me silently, and the crunch of our footsteps on the frozen rocky path and the whirling sigh of the rising winter wind were the only sounds to break the stillness.

The path from the school to the Beacon location skirted the woven barbed-wire fence which surrounded the sinking ground around the Camplin Pit. We were passing it now. For some reason we both paused.

“The waters are frozen in the pit,” I said, glancing to the left. “Could that be why they’re so much lower than usual?”

The ugly sides of the sunken area rose jagged and ominous above the dirty ice.

The girl did not speak, but from the corner of my eye I was startled to see that, for no apparent reason, she was making the sign of the cross. In the windy stillness I heard again the far-off, faery sound of hammers underground.

Annunziata heard it, too, and I was conscious of her heightened nervous breathing.

“They’re gathered under the sinking ground,” she said in a strangled voice. “Hear them! They’re working down there!” She crossed herself again.

“It must be safe,” I said practically. “The safety inspectors would not permit —”

She began to run in a frightened way, and I followed as quickly as I could. Once past the pit, she stopped and waited, paths of tears glistening on her cheeks, though she had wiped her eyes dry.

We came to the row of gray painted company houses — the Beacon location. All the houses were identical, and all were ugly now. In summer climbing roses on the gray walls or clumps of bright red and yellow nasturtiums or blue cornflowers in round, stone-bordered beds by the steps would make them less alike, but now everything was dead.

5

BFORE the fourth house in the row, Annunziata paused and we turned in and climbed the plain board steps to the little unrailed porch. Annunziata threw open the door and motioned for me to go in.

“Guido,” she called. “Guido!”

The small front room was very clean and very bare. In the center of the floor was a round table covered by a brightly embroidered doily on which was set a vase of paper roses. Four plain straight chairs stood against the four walls. To the right of the door on a low wooden table a white wax candle burned beneath a gaudy lithograph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

As Annunziata was calling her brother, a door opened and a young woman came in. She was beautiful in a healthily flamboyant way, full lips crimson with rouge, eyes black and lash-fringed.

“This is Maria,” Annunziata said tonelcssly, “my brother’s wife. — Miss Conway has to see Guido.”

Her brother came in then, too, and shook hands, his face very serious. Annunziata stood, framed in the low doorway, still dressed in her coat and scarf, and the look on her white face made me start and almost wish I had not come. She moved as if to flit soundlessly away, but Guido turned.

“Annunziata! You stay,” he said with stem affection. Then, turning to me, he asked, “What’s she done? Must be plenty bad — you got to come see me, Miss Conway.” He laughed nervously, a little defensively.

I began to tell them what I had seen the night before and of how Annunziata had run away from school, disobeying the principal. Even as I began, I felt the man brace himself stubbornly against the criticism he thought was coming. The woman, too, without moving from where she sat, seemed to be between the girl and any judgment against her, protective, jealous.

“These things are true,” I said at last, looking from the man to his wife. In her chair Annunziata sat, still and listening, her eyes looking deep into the candle’s flame where it flickered upon the gilt picture frame. Little wavering lights burned in her eyes.

“These things are true,” I repeated, “but I know surely, and you even more surely, that while they are true they also lie.”

All but Annunziata looked at me, startled. She was leaning toward the candle’s wavering yellow tongue, her lower lip drawn buck from her teeth, the muscles of her pointed chin and her throat knotted and tense. No one spoke for a moment, but the flame of the candle bowed, and the gilt frame enclosing the sacred picture swayed a little on the wall. In the stillness the distant, frightening sound of underground rumbling reached our ears.

“They lie,” I went on, “because they do not mean what they seem to mean. What is true, I don’t know. I think perhaps you can help me to find out.”

No one answered, but the tension of their antagonism seemed to break. I waited expectantly for one of them to speak, to throw some light on my uncertainty. When Guido spoke, however, I knew that his bewilderment was deeper than my own.

“By the Beacon ain’t a good place to be, ‘Nunziata,” he said, turning to her slowly and speaking with blundering candor. “Why do you go there?”

“It is not good to be there,” he repeated patiently when she did not answer. “Hear me, ‘Nunziata. If you care for me or for our papa who is in Paradise, you will go to school daytimes and stay safe and good with Maria nights when I am in the mine.”

The girl’s breathing grew more rapid, but still she did not answer or give any other sign that she heard.

He stood up, unnaturally tall in the candlelight. “Listen!” he said. “Listen! What is it you do? What is it you see when you go off alone? Tell me now. Tell me!”

Something in his urgency touched Annunziata, rousing her from the icy paralysis of her silence. She jumped up, trembling, and her words, when they came, were choked and incoherent.

“I can’t tell. There’s nothing. That’s it — there’s nothing! And I have to go. Oh, can’t you stop asking and asking me? Just let me go!”

He reached out his arm to stop her as she ran for the outer door, but she eluded him. Stopping, poised, the table between them, she said, her voice hardly recognizable in its impotent, angry grief, “And our papa isn’t in Paradise! Don’t tell lies! He’s out there under the rock and water in the pit. And he’s dead. He’s dead!”

With a shock I remembered how she had made the sign of the cross when we had paused at that place. I had not known her father had died that way.

Her voice rose into a shrill wail, coming back to us through the open door as she fled down the bare board steps, out into the falling night.

Guido started after her, but Maria caught his arm.

“Let her go,” she said dully. “In the dark you could not find her. I know. I have tried.”

Guido stood looking out the open door into the windy dark. For a long moment he stood there with Maria’s hand upon his sleeve and his own hand on the white china knob, before he closed the door and turned to us again. The bewildered agony in his eyes when they met mine made me look away quickly.

He walked to a chair like a man asleep and sat down, resting his forehead in his hands.

“ Isn’t there something — anything — you can tell me that may help?” I said at last desperately, breaking the silence.

He shrugged without speaking and brushed one thin wrist across his eyes.

“She ain’t a bad girl,” he said at last, with dogged stubbornness.

It was the one thing of which he was sure, and he repeated it helplessly now, since he had nothing else he could say.

Maria said, “I’ve seen her out sometimes, not doing a thing. Just walking, or stopping— like to listen.” She looked at me hopefully as if she expected me to find in her words a meaning deeper than she herself could find.

“Telio told me so, too,” I said. “But — listening? For what does she listen?”

They shook their heads helplessly.

“Once she said something about — bells,” I suggested, watching their faces. “Bells — like the bells at Mass—”

I sighed to see the deepening bewilderment in their faces.

“Our father died in the mine,” he said hesitantly. “But it wasn’t only that - with Annunziata. It hit us all pretty hard, him getting killed like that. ‘Nunziata she cried till she was sick. Well, after a while Sister Vincent came over, and then ‘Nunziata seemed to — to not take it so hard. Sister Vincent got her started to going to church more and helping at the hospital.”

“So this— this strangeness in her did not follow your father’s death?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “She seemed to get over that some. This other come a long time after — her acting bad, I mean. Why, from the time Sister Vincent came, ‘Nunziata seemed to — to get almost holy.”

Maria nodded quickly. “For hours she’d pray in the church,” she said, “until her forehead was marked from resting against the pew ahead.”

“I used to call her my nun, my Sister,” Guido said with a sad pride. “All the time she was with the Sisters, helping at the hospital — with Sister Vincent most of all. I even thought maybe — But she’s stopped all that now.”

6

THE little sitting room reserved for the Sisters in Saint Luke’s seemed dingy and unlovely the next day. Through the small window I could see the dark and sprawling ore piles beside the Beacon. Only the sky above their jagged tops was clear and lovely, and when I drew my gaze back from out-ofdoors and looked again at the cracked ceiling with its bluish calcimine, the bare table, the wooden rockers lusterless and old, the memory of the sky’s illimitable blue made the little room look even darker and more cheerless.

I roused from my idle contemplation as Sister Vincent entered, her white habit rustling in the corridor outside before she herself appeared. She extended her hand, finely formed but reddened by the work she did.

“I am Sister Vincent de Paul,” she said, smiling with gentle warmth. “You wished to speak with me?”

Without quite knowing that I had begun, I found myself telling her my problem, of my nameless fears for the child she knew, Annunziata.

“I blame myself,” she said contritely when I had told her of Annunziata’s erratic behavior. “She helped here in the hospital when she could, the little Zerullio, and I am at fault that one so young has seen what she has seen.”

“Her brother was pleased that you took an interest in her,” I said. “He even seemed to think she might —”

The nun sighed. “It is a good life, ours,” she said simply. “Hard — but what life is not hard? And we have compensations.”

Involuntarily I looked up at the unrelieved ugliness of the dim room. Sister Vincent saw my glance and smiled.

“She was so vulnerable,” she said with deep pity, her sweet voice weighing the words earnestly, “so easily touched — the sight of the high altar, the sound of the little bell that rings when the Host is lifted up, a poem by Thompson or Hopkins — they all reached her heart. It is not good to be so quickly moved.”

For a moment the nun seemed lost in thought, her head bent so that the stiff headdress shadowed her face.

“Before she came to help us, she had lost her father,” she said, looking at me keenly. “You knew ? ”

I nodded.

“She missed him, and yet his dying — the agony of such a death — was not real to her. Then one night they brought in an injured man from the Paiatka. He had been crushed in the mine. Not a cave-in, A timber or section of roof had fallen — I do not remember. The child was just, going home. She stood in the hall as they carried him past, and he was dying. He kept screaming through the blood from his lips, saying, ‘Mama, mama, mama, help me. Don’t let them hurt me, mama,’ though he was old, old as her father. She just stood quite still against the wall, looking with those amazing eyes of hers. And then he died, and lay there on the stretcher like some crushed insect, foul and awful.”

The nun stopped, her shadowed eyes seeming to see the whole dark scene.

“I had hurried to the child,” she said. “She shrank back from me a little when I approached her, and I could see that she was greatly shocked. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth, like a dog that is in terror, and her throat was tight as if she were screaming silently inside herself. ‘I heard it, but I didn’t know that was it,’ she was saying, but not to me. Do you know what she meant ?”

“Death, perhaps?” I said, but I was troubled by a shadowy certainty that there was more than I had yet perceived. No one, I thought, has ever heard death.

On the road home I met Guido Zerullio upon the hill above the hospital. He saw me and stopped.

“I go on early shift tomorrow,” he said, shaking my hand. “Nights now I can watch over my sister.”

“That is good,” I said, and we each went our way.

7

IT WAS just two days later that the men of the early shift were trapped in the mine, trapped and drowned when the roof of the sixth level crumbled, and suddenly the water that had been seeping out of Camplin Pit poured into the near-by Beacon. Only one man, who escaped the falling ore, lived to tell about it.

Annunziata went quietly to her seat in the homeroom the morning of that day. She looked at me and nodded without smiling but with that flamelike illumination of her face that was so lovely.

During the quiet of the afternoon study period, I happened to glance down the rows to where she sat. She was looking up unseeingly, white and tense, and her whole body was trembling. She was listening to something. The “horns of fair Elfland,” Mr. Gresham had said.

Then I, too, became conscious of an all but inaudible beating, a far-away rhythmic throbbing underground.

Watching Annunziata, I remembered Mrs. Pagety’s words, “Some say ‘tisn’t good to ‘ear the mines.”

With Annunziata it was not good. For her, I thought, there seems never to have been the easy peace of the accepted, the customary, that shield against the sharpness of experience. Others might forget the dark world underground, but not Annunziata. Never Annunziata.

She “hears the mines,” I thought, like signals from another world, like bells ringing to danger.

Something brought me back from whatever far place my mind had traveled to, and I saw that Annunziata was listening still, her eyes gleaming fearfully. Then, all at once I was aware that the pounding had ceased, and the silence that followed seemed to come like the rushing of a deep and ominous wind to our straining ears. I had an eerie feeling that we were listening, not to silence, but to the ghost of some mighty sound.

The fear in the girl’s eyes grew into panic. The sight of her knotted throat muscles made me think that she might scream, but instead she rose unsteadily. Coming down the aisle to me she said, an almost unbearable tension making her voice rasping and harsh, “I’m going. I have to go.”

She started to turn away, and then she did a strange and moving thing. She turned back to me, and slowly she stretched out her hand.

Her fearful, haunted eyes held mine for a moment before she turned away. It was as if she had asked a thing of me and been denied.

“Wait,” I said sharply. “Wait. I’ll go with you, Annunziata.”

I had no right to go, to leave my classes and all my work unfinished, but I went nevertheless.

By the dreary Camplin Pit she stopped her headlong flight to listen. I stopped, too. There was no sound of elfin hammers now — only the swish of the cold wind in the dead leaves that blew about the sinking ground.

“They aren’t working down there any more,” she said, and the smile she turned to me was dreadful to see.

“Annunziata!” I cried. “What do you mean?”

“They try to get out,” she said wildly, “the dead men — my father and the others. You can hear them underground, pounding, pounding.”

She started to walk then, her thin little body shivering inside the worn coat.

“What you can hear is the sound of the crews working in the Beacon,” I said reasonably, keeping pace with her half-running steps. “The sound seems to come from the pit. It doesn’t really, of course.”

“They’re trying to get to where Guido and the rest are,” she said breathlessly, going on as if my words had been no more than the wind in the leaves. “They don’t know they’re dead. They keep working to get out. I hear them. Oh, Guido! Guido!”

When the drowned bodies were recovered from the Beacon, a mass funeral was held in the little cemetery, snow-covered now, for the winter storms had begun at last, and clean white drifts covered all the ground.

Queerly enough, these mining folk buried their dead in the very center of the town, a quiet acre of polished gray stones with the houses of the living close on every side. It was as if they felt that, living, their men had been buried far below the earth, so that, dead, they would want to be brought home within reach of chimney smoke and lighted windows by night, and blue sky and sweet winds by day.

Now at the funeral, all eyes followed the movements of the one survivor, a wizened little Cornishman named Johnny Trevarthan. More even than the widowed women and their children he wept and would not be consoled.

“The roof it came atween us,” he kept telling whoever would listen, “an’ then was a rushing as o’ many waters on t’other side. An’, oh, but I wisht I ‘adn’t ‘a lived to coom back.”

I had called at the Zerullios’ before the funeral, of course. Father Muratti had been there, and I had seen that Annunziata was telling her beads, kneeling, her pale forehead bowed against the worn red-velvet cloth that hung from the edge of the coffin. She looked up then, her face alight with an inner illumination and a strange, precarious peace.

When a week had gone by after the funeral, I went once more to the bare company house to urge Annunziata to return to school. It would be easier for her there, I knew, than to stay in the house where each creak of the floor would remind her of the living presence of her brother.

The house was empty. No curtains covered the windows and no smoke came from the cold chimney. Strangely chilled, I turned away.

“Telio,” I asked the next morning, “where are they?”

He looked unhappy and shook his downcast curly head. “They’ve gone away,” he said. “Just gone away. That’s all we know. Maria said she couldn’t stand to hear the hammering underground, now that Guido was dead, and the next morning they’d both gone.”

That’s all, except that the next winter a letter came for me, postmarked from a little town in Kansas. There was no salutation and no signature, but in Annunziata’s round, little-girl hand a verse was written.

I read it over twice, with the memory of Guido’s voice in my ears. As if he sat before me, I saw his ore-stained hands and heard the sad pride in his voice as he spoke of his sister.

For the poem Annunziata had sent me was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s song of the little nun about to take the veil. The whiteness of the robe Sister Vincent had worn seemed to shine before my eyes, but under the stiff white coif it was a child’s face I saw, pale, heart-shaped, empty of all fear.

I walked to the window. Outside, the snow was falling heavily again, clean and white and chill, covering the ore piles and the raw cuts on the hills, erasing the powdered red dust of the roads and the dark ice on Camplin Pit — falling alike on Saint Luke’s and the graves of the dead.

Silently the snow was blotting out unsightly things, making it believable, if only for an hour, that there might really be created another, cleaner earth, innocent and calm and safe.