The Pit-Heads: Short Story by David Nickle Page A

throat — memories of the miner Tevalier’s age-yellowed flesh, his cruel and hungry grip, renewed in my blood.
    Trembling alone in my bed, I vowed to myself that I would not call Paul Peletier, and I would not go to Cobalt again.
    Paul was the first one of our little group to visit Cobalt, and when he reported back on it, he didn’t tell us the whole of the story. Not by far.
    It was 1974, just a year after Paul’s divorce, and he was making ends meet teaching landscape painting classes to art clubs in and around North Bay. In April, he drove up to Cobalt at the invitation of the Women’s Art League of Hailiebury, and spent a weekend critiquing the septuagenarian League ladies’ blurry watercolours out at the Royal Mine #3. He told us about it in July, when the four regulars in our own little Art League — me, Paul, Jim Osborne and Harry Fairbank — were camped on the south arm of Opeongo Lake, on what would turn out to be our last annual midsummer painting trip together.
    “I wasn’t up there to work, which is why it was such a damned shame. It was all I could do to keep my paints in their tubes,” he said, leaning against the hull of his canoe as he spoke.
    Jim took a swill from his thermos and grinned. Jim worked as a lawyer back in the city, and at the end of the year I figured he bought almost as many paintings as he produced. Privately, Paul told me that he thought Jim Osborne painted pictures the way that other men went fishing: he didn’t want to catch anything, just get out of the rat race for a few days every summer and escape to the bush.
    “
Keep your paints in the tubes
.” Jim rolled the words thoughtfully. “Or did you mean keep your tube in your pants? Those art club biddies can be pretty spry, I hear.”
    Paul laughed, but it was a distracted sound, barely an acknowledgement. He was never easy with vulgarity.
    Paul continued: “The geography around this town is spectacular. It’s all rock and scrub, a few stands of poplar and cedar here and there, and it’s had the life mined out of it. But I don’t think it’s possible to make a bad painting there.”
    Jim was about to say something, but I shushed him. “High recommendation,” I said.
    Paul grinned. “The pit-heads outside Cobalt are a Mecca for those ladies — they swear by them, and I can’t argue based on the results.”
    “Practice makes perfect,” deadpanned Jim.
    Paul gave Jim a look, but I cut in before he could comment. “Just what kind of pit-heads are these?” I asked. I was only twenty-five then, and almost all of the out-of-town painting trips I’d been on had been with Paul and the rest — which pretty much limited me to Algonquin Park and one quick trip up to Lake Superior.
    Paul pulled out his sketch pad and began roughing out an illustration: “Here’s what they look like.”
    Harry put down the paint-smeared panel he’d been swearing over all afternoon and studied Paul’s drawing in the failing light.
    “Do you want to do a trip there?” Harry finally asked.
    Paul swatted at a black fly on his neck, and examined the little bloody speck on his hand. “It’ll be one hell of a drive — about eight hours from your place in good weather, and I want to go up in November when the snow will have started. It’s a long way to go for a painting.”
    Harry took another look at the sketch, then at his own failed oil painting. “This — ” he threw his arms up to include the entire Group-of-Seven, Tom-Thomson splendour of Algonquin Park on a clear summer evening “ — is already a long way to come for a painting. And by the looks of things tonight, I don’t even have a decent one to show for it. Give me a call when you’ve set a schedule; I’m in.”
    Paul smiled and set down the sketch on the flat of a rock for all of us to see. It was crude, but I think it may have been the most accomplished work we’d ever seen from Paul to that date. His carpenter pencil had roughed out the thick spruce beams that