Chapter Six
Lead, Kindly Light

Jacques is thinking of his mother as he crouches down into the 
roadside ditch and removes his shoe. His memory goes back to a 
little Frenchtown cottage on Rex Street. His mother was keeping 
him from fidgeting as she adjusted his denim overalls and hard 
hat, and pointed his carbide lantern straight.

*"Now son, don't go out just yet. Eez very important."*

Sitting in the ditch, Jacques pulls his sock and bandages off, 
remembering how impatient he felt with his mother's instructions. 
His friends would be driving down the street to pick him up soon. 
His brother's spare overalls felt itchy. He couldn't wear the 
others because his brother's blood hadn't been completely washed 
out.

*"When ze car pulls up, you no come out."*

Jacques remembers nodding, and he pulls a rock off the ground. He 
strikes it against another rock; it crumbles in his hand.

*"When zey honk once, you no come out."*

He picks up another rock.

*"Zey honk twice, you no come out."*

Jacques smashes the new rock, it breaks in two with a clean, sharp 
edge.

*"Zey honk three times, zen you go out, because I want everyone in 
Frenchtown to know my soon eez working this week."*

Jacques takes his belt off and sinks his teeth into the leather.

*"Lord watch over mon enfant petit today..."*

Jacques bites down hard on the belt as he cuts the stone's edge 
into a blister on his foot. The memories of the house on Rex 
Street shatter into hot streaks of light. 

Some men boat about golf games or hunting elk; coal miners boast 
about how many days they got to work in a week. Nothing made a 
mother happier than her son working more than any other miner in 
the neighborhood. That's why Jacques' mother had wanted the 
friends to honk up a storm.

His mother hadn't said much since he told her about the strike. 
Dinners were quiet on Rex Street now, except for when his mother 
might say how Frank would eat here, or used to mine there. She 
talked about his brother a lot these days. He last saw her just 
yesterday, after the church service.

After thirty-two miles of walking since they were marooned on the 
plains, Jacques' feet are swollen with blisters. Every few miles, 
he stops to drain a new one. He tears another strip off his Sunday 
dress shirt, and wraps it around his foot. The other strips turned 
solid red long before the sun had set.

Jacques looks up, wiping the water from his eyes. He is the first 
to see the lights coming towards them. He yells out, and the 
others turn toward the oncoming car. Bell, Eastenes, Ortega, and 
Jacques are waving, leaping, hollering in their native tongues, if 
they walk one more mile they are sure to go mad, they need this, 
just this one kindness, a good Samaritan, oh God, please stop--

The car drives past. Eastenes and the others shield their eyes 
from the radiant headlights and clouds of dust. They tumble back 
into the ditch along the road, coughing and groaning. 

Jacques gets back on his feet, and opens his eyes. 

The night is bathed in starlight.

Over a hundred miles from the nearest city, stars burn in the 
night sky with a dazzling brilliance, bright enough for them to 
see the highway.

They keep walking. 

They have been walking since yesterday afternoon, when they 
watched the Sheriff's van drive away, shrinking to a black speck 
on the horizon. They kept walking as their freshly-shined dress 
shoes stretched and pulled into scraps of leather. Their pressed 
and starched shirts turn grey with sweat.

Dying of exposure in the mid-November air was nothing compared to 
what their wives were going to do to them, once they saw their 
husband's best clothes ruined. Mary Ortega had spent five weeks 
washing clothes to pay for Johnny's suit, and Jacques' friends 
sold wine under the table for a month to a friend-of-a-friend at 
the Acme Mine. Now she probably thought he'd abandoned his job, 
the job his mother had made him wait inside for, until his friend 
honked the horn three times. Some son he was.

Eastenes had other matters to consider. Perhaps he could find a 
tailor in Lafayette who would buy whatever tatters were left of 
his clothes. That would help put him closer to buying the dress 
for Dorothy. Or maybe the butcher shop on Simpson could let him 
put the money down for a Thanksgiving ham. He'd joined this stupid 
strike because of that stupid song, the song that made him fear 
he'd forget his children's faces. How could he face them now, 
anyway? Throwing away his job in the name of some ideal; that's 
some father.

"What song is that, East?"

Eastenes looks over at Bell. "What song?"

It was Eastenes' bad habit to hum while working, his off-key 
burblings echoing through the shafts and tunnels without end. 
Complaints spread from the miners to their wives, until Bertha 
dragged her husband to church choir for lessons on Sunday 
afternoons. He was still no real singer, but now he could at least 
carry a tune, and his coworkers could keep their sanity. 

Eastenes tries to remember what, in fact, he had been humming. 
"It's just something I learned from an old English miner. He told 
me this story about a mine explosion in England. One hundred and 
fifty were killed, instantly.

"A few survivors were trapped in an air pocket. They had no 
lanterns, no light. God, it's so dark in the mines when the 
lanterns fail. It's like a blackness that's looking into your 
soul.

"Well, one of the miners started singing this song. Another one 
joined in, and another. They didn't stop. Singing this song kept 
those miners alive in the darkness, until they got rescued. I've 
been trying to teach it to my little Dorothy. I thought she could 
sing it at Christmas mass, or something."

"Teach us," says Ortega.

Eastenes looks over at Ortega, and sees the boxer is serious.

"Nah," says Eastenes, "I'm not like Dorothy; she can sing like her 
mother."

Bell wipes off his glasses with a strip of his shirt. "It's a long 
way back to the Columbine Mine, East. If we want a chance of 
making it, I think we're going to need something to sing."

Eastenes looks around. His fellow travelers aren't taking another 
step without a song on their lips. He sighs, and lets the words 
come back to him, filling the melody:

  *"Lead, kindly light, amidst the encircling gloom,*
  *The night is dark, I'm far from home,*
  *Keep thou my feet, I do not ask to see*
  *The distant scene, one step enough for me."*

As far as music goes in the coal fields, nothing compares to the 
Welsh voice choirs. Their sonorous harmonies turned train depots 
into cathedrals, and the dingy, rat-infested coal tunnels into 
reverberant concert halls. The miners from Wales had worked from 
childhood in mines that extended far beneath the North Sea, and 
brought everyone who heard their choirs a little closer to the 
divine. 

Whatever you would call this quartet of marooned picketers, a 
Latino, a bohunk, a Frenchman, and a soapbox socialist forever 
without a home, a Welsh choir they are not. They are fortunate 
that no-one is around to listen. Still, the words of the old 
English Hymn bring them all nourishment on this lonely highway. 
Four men, of different lands and languages. Four men who can 
hardly agree on why they had gone on strike at all, are bound up 
in this hymn. The hymn unites them all in the singular task they 
now face: the long road back home.

Bell says they still have another hundred and fifty miles ahead of 
them. 

*Is that all,* thinks Eastenes. *We'll make it.*