The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

Four Days on Clay’s Cut

That night at the kitchen table I told Eli what I meant to do.

I laid it out the way I would lay out a season, on a yellow legal pad, with the numbers down the side.

Four days of running. Fuel, about six thousand dollars, which would take most of what was left in the account.

Then a cleanup, and we would carry the pan to Duncan and ask him to put it beside the lot Rand sold him.

“And if the cut’s no good?” Eli asked. “If Dad already took the best of it?”

“Then we’ll have spent six thousand dollars to find out,” I said. “But your dad opened that cut because the test holes were good. He knew this ground better than anybody alive.”

Eli looked at the pad a long time. Then he took the pencil out of my hand and wrote at the bottom, in his careful square printing, Loader: me.

“I’ll run it,” he said. “You run the plant. Like always.”

We started at seven the next morning. It was the twenty-sixth of September.

There was frost on the gravel and a skim of ice along the edge of the settling pond, and our breath steamed in the cold while we walked down to the equipment.

Clay’s excavator had not moved since August. Hap came up the road at seven thirty without being asked and climbed into the cab, because Eli was not yet a hand on the big machine and I had never run it.

“Clay ran it for me the summer I broke my wrist,” Hap said, settling in. “About time I paid that back.” He did not say anything else about it, then or ever.

So Hap dug and Eli fed the plant with the loader, and I stood at the wash plant with the water roaring and watched the spray bar wash the gravel over the grizzly and the fines go down the long metal sluice.

It was the work I had done for nineteen years. My hands knew it without me.

Every so often I would look up and see the yellow excavator swinging on the cut with somebody else in the seat, and it would catch in my chest like a fishhook.

Then I would look back down at the sluice and keep going.

The weather held. That is the thing I remember most about those four days.

It should have been raining, the way it usually does at the end of September, but every morning came up clear and cold and every afternoon the sun lay down warm on the tailings piles.

The birches on the hillsides across the creek were all gold that week. Against the dark spruce they looked lit from inside.

Eli said once, at lunch, that his dad always said the hills put on their best for cleanup, and then he did not say anything else for a while.

On the second day, a little before noon, Eli shut the loader down and walked over to the plant.

I thought something had broken. Instead he stood beside me with his hands in his jacket pockets and watched the water for a minute.

“Mom,” he said. “Did Dad ever want to quit? Out here, I mean. Like when it was bad.”

“Every single fall,” I said. “Every fall he’d say this was the last one. And every spring he’d be down here in April chipping ice off the sluice before the snow was even gone.”

Eli smiled at that, the first real smile I had seen on him since August. Then he went back to the loader.

We ran four days. Hap would not take a dime for his time.

On the fourth evening he shut the excavator down, climbed out, and patted the side of the cab twice, the way you would pat a horse. Then he went home to his supper.