The Bricklayer's Son Owns The Desert

CHAPTER TWO: THE FOREMAN

Rosa served supper on the good plates, the ones with the blue rim that used to come out only at Christmas. It was bread and soup, and the soup was mostly water with a few slices of carrot drifting in it. Ivan ate left-handed, his splinted arm resting on the table like something that belonged to someone else. Nobody mentioned the men in the yard. Nobody mentioned the six years either, and the silence sat between the three of them like a fourth guest.

Zane kept looking past his mother's shoulder at the gate.

Six years ago, he had been the youngest site engineer Hatherley Developments had ever hired, twenty-four and proud of the hard hat with his name stencilled on it. Larch Tower was the family's first glass tower, the building meant to make the Hatherley name. When the scaffold steel arrived, Zane tested it and found it cheap, thin-walled and badly welded. He refused to approve it. He said so in writing, and he said so to the Hatherleys' faces.

Three days later the scaffold came down. It folded off the ninth floor in the middle of a Wednesday morning and took three men with it.

When the inspectors opened the file, the approval was there. It carried Zane's name and Zane's signature, on a form he had never seen. Detective Mortlake, who was a superintendent now, read it aloud in an interview room that smelled of burnt coffee and charged him with manslaughter. Zane told him about the steel. Mortlake wrote nothing down.

The night before the hearing, Rowland Hatherley came to the gate. He brought two men and a red can of petrol, and he didn't bother to lower his voice.

"Disappear," he said, "or your parents' house burns with them inside it."

Zane had looked past him at the lit kitchen window, where his mother was washing up and humming. Then he had looked at the can. By morning he was gone.

A cargo ship carried him to Kessara, hidden in the hold among crates of engine parts. He worked the diamond pits there for a dollar a day, hauling gravel in the heat until his hands split and healed and split again. In his second year, a shaft collapsed with forty men inside. The overseers wanted to wait for machines that were days away. Zane read the rock instead, the way he had once read steel, and found a route through the old workings to reach them. He brought them out in twos and threes, and when only one man was left, he went down for him himself. The ceiling shifted while he was dragging the man free, and it took the tip of his left little finger and kept it.

The miners called him the Foreman after that. A year later, following a band of gravel nobody else thought worth the trouble, he found the Sundrift seam, the richest vein of diamonds anyone had ever opened. Sundrift Mining was his now, all of it, and the trade still called him the Foreman. Very few people in it knew his real name.

He had never written home. A letter with a Kessari stamp would have told the Hatherleys he hadn't truly vanished, and that would have brought them back to his parents' gate with their petrol can. So every month, without fail, his right hand, Kwame Asante, wired money to the one relative who had sworn to pass it on quietly. Uncle Vince had cried on the phone the first time Kwame called him. He had promised, on his own mother's grave, that Ivan and Rosa would want for nothing.

Zane looked down at the soup.

"Dad," he said. "How have you been managing?"

Ivan set down his spoon. He was a proud man, and Zane watched him decide whether to lie. Then he glanced at his wife, and something in him gave way.

"We haven't, son," he said. "Not really. Six years, and not a word from you. Not a postcard, not a cent. Some years we didn't know if you were alive."

"Ivan," Rosa said softly.

"He asked." Ivan turned back to Zane. "Your mother takes in sewing. Hems, alterations, anything they bring her, and she works at night now because the lamp is kinder to her eyes. I go round the building sites with a barrow and collect scrap metal for the yard on Cooper Street. They give me a few coins a kilo. Some months it's that girl's envelope that keeps the lights on." He shrugged with his good shoulder. "We managed. I'm not ashamed of it."

Zane's hands were flat on the table. He had watched men die in the pits and kept his voice steady, and he kept it steady now.

"I'm sorry I didn't write," he said, and that was all.

He could have told them then. He could have said that money had crossed the sea for them every single month, but he didn't yet know where it had gone, and he would not hand his parents a wound without knowing who had made it. So he finished his soup, every drop, and he told his mother it was good. She smiled for the first time all evening.

They went to bed early. Zane sat alone at the kitchen table, under the lamp his mother sewed by, until his phone buzzed. It was Kwame.

The message was short, the way Kwame's messages always were. Attached were the bank records, seventy-two transfers over six years, every one of them collected in cash at the counter, in person. The signature on every receipt was the same.

Vince Whelan.

Zane read it twice. Then he set the phone face down beside the sewing machine and sat very still, while the wedding dress on its pins watched him from across the room.

Down the hill, on the good side of the river road, his uncle stood in a floodlit driveway with a fresh set of keys in his hand. He had just bought his second car, and he was admiring how the two of them looked side by side.