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Work of |
Polishing Diamonds
The summer that I was nine, Northern Utah was rocked by a major earthquake. It is an area of frequent tremors; there are visible faults scattered throughout the mountains; in many places you can actually see where the rock has slipped. Small earthquakes are fairly common and we were used to looking up and saying to each other, quite calmly, "are we having an earthquake?" You could usually tell the difference between an earthquake and a passing truck because an earthquake would make the chandeliers swing. Even the slightest earth tremble set the chandeliers rhythmically ticking from side to side like pendulums. The earthquake in the summer of 1963 did more than make the chandeliers sway. I woke to see the air full of dolls, sailing in mid-flight over my sister's bed. Still half in dreamland, I sat up wondering just what kind of fun they were up to and so I was almost completely awake when the second, big shock hit; knocking everything off of the walls and making the beds bounce and slide against the floor. A moment later, with the world still rocking, my mother appeared at the bedroom door with my little brother on her hip, his long pajama sheathed legs hanging down. "Downstairs, quickly," she said, calm and collected as always in a crisis. We followed her down the long set of angled stairs which seemed to be shifting in a fascinating M.C. Escherish sort of way, to the bizarre, scarcely believable sight of my father carrying my grandmother out the front door. Things were still quaking and crashing when we reached the front lawn. When the damage had been assessed it was fairly heavy. Besides knocking everything off walls and shelves all over town, the quake damaged many buildings, including four schools. The roof of the church caved in, but the worst damage was to the Junior High building which was just a block away from our house. It was a very old building and a new Junior High was under construction and almost finished at the time. The earth quake sheared the old building, breaking it in two, like a double popsicle. It also buckled and twisted many of the walls and broke most of the glass in the building. Since it was so close to our home, we were told, emphatically, not to even set foot on the grounds as the building was unstable and very dangerous. A few days later, I was playing quietly with a neighbor when my sister arrived in a whirl and flurry and pulled me aside. Her eyes were bright and she had that animated, 'lit from the inside' look she sometimes got when she was in the process of creating something particularly spectacular. She had, she informed me with suitable restrained drama, discovered a Diamond Mine. Now, this was Interesting. Were there diamond mines in the middle of small college towns in Northern Utah in the summer of 1963? There were if my sister said there were. Could I tell Miriam? No. This was too great of a discovery, it was the Highest of Secrets and she wasn't telling anyone but me. Wow. There were others in the neighborhood, Miriam herself for example, who were braver than I was and were sometimes selected as co-conspirators, leaving me behind. A really first-class find usually had to be shared, sooner or later, with everyone in the neighborhood. Not this time, she told me. "The Highest of Secrets" she repeated, quite solemnly; this was to be only the two of us. I got rid of Miriam in a record hurry, but then, in the way of childhood summers, things began getting in the way. It was time for lunch and after lunch we found ourselves 'stuck' with our younger brother. Why couldn't we just take Eddie to the Diamond Mines? No way. Diamond mines are waaaaaay too dangerous for little kids. The long afternoon stretched out in perpetuity and I commented that I couldn't really see why she should just up and decide that her diamond mine was too dangerous to drag a little brother to. Her lips thinned and one eyebrow raised significantly. By this point in my life I was fairly adept at tiptoeing through landmines and I knew when to shut up. We waited. It was late in the afternoon when we started out, without Eddie, and wearing shoes which we didn't usually do in the summer. Each carrying a dishtowel, which she had mysteriously provided at the last second, we headed west, down the hill and around the corner. As we neared the Old Junior High building, I stopped dead still and looked up at her with eyes narrowed by both the setting sun and suspicion. "We aren't going IN there are we?" My answer was silence and a satisfied smile. I stood on one foot, contemplating the old building which the strong final beams of sunlight were turning into a puddle of blazing gold. I was trying to decide how scared I was, really, of walls falling on my head. I considered the honor of being the only one chosen and the total disgust I would encounter if after having waited all day I 'chickened out' now. The words Highest of Secrets and Only You echoed in my mind, ricocheting between fear and yearning. Finally I shrugged and sighed, "Ok, but I'm not crawling through any little places." She smiled again and gave me her usual reply: "you are such a baby." The police had strung that colorful yellow caution tape haphazardly around the perimeter of the building. Not very useful, really, you can duck under it in about half a second. Up against the building, the glass which had fallen from the windows, was piled in glittering, dangerous drifts. "Well," she said, surveying the site with her fists on her hips, "Here are The Ruins. Tonight we will polish here and tomorrow we will go into The Mines." So we spent the last amber light, before the sun slipped over the mountain, polishing sharp shards of broken glass with the terrycloth towels we had brought. She explained that we had to be very, very careful because you can damage a diamond if you don't polish it correctly. Also, if you cut yourself, someone would be sure to find out about The Ruins and The Mines and this would be a disaster, because they belonged to the two of us alone and no one else must ever know. I polished very, very carefully. For the next two weeks we climbed through broken windows and wandered around inside the sheared and buckled building collecting broken glass and piling it into huge mounds of diamonds which we then sat and polished. There was always a thick dust in the sunbeams that came through the broken windows and in some places through cracks in the ceiling. Occasionally we would come in the morning and find that something else had collapsed during the night. The walls spoke inside the mines, a soft soughing; a whispered moaning; the building was still settling, or perhaps it was the ghost of generations of adolescents lamenting the shattered end of somewhere they had never wanted to be in the first place. Being inside an abandoned school was strange and not at all like being inside an abandoned house. We had plenty of experience with abandoned houses. Our neighborhood was in the process of changing from big, vintage homes to retail areas and offices. Crawling into old, abandoned houses and into half built new office buildings was a regular pass time. Most of these old houses had stood deserted and derelict for many years. Dankly dreaming of the past, they were entrenched in their slow, damp, deterioration and decay. The wall paper pealed down, the walls blistered, everything smelled moist and musty. The school was completely different; here was destruction rather than decomposition, wreckage rather than rot. Instead of the slow slide of years of neglect, this ruin was the work of a few violent seconds. There was still writing on the blackboards, things in the desk drawers, oddments scattered all over the floors where they had fallen and were now covered with glass, rubble and dust. The smell here was sharp like sulphur; a smell of grinding bricks and that fine, chalky dust that was everywhere. It was this dust that we had to polish off of the diamonds, making shining piles that glistered in the debris peppered slants of late summer sun. It was oddly hypnotizing to sit in the midst of ruin, picking up broken glass and polishing it with your tea towel. It was almost September when The Mines in The Ruins were discovered. This was to be the last enterprise of summer and, really, the last adventure of our shared childhood. At the end of the summer, the city finally razed the unstable buildings and my sister went to the new Junior High. Soon she didn't really 'play' anymore and I, with mixed emotions, retreated into my own world which was softer and slower than the vivid world of her bright invention. Gone were gangsters in hideouts, murderers lurking behind doors, robbers scheming, supercops sleuthing, rafting the Mississippi canal, caravan journeys into unknown territory, gangs broiling, spies colluding, drama, danger, intrigue, fascination, glamour and huge sharp piles of scintillating diamonds, glistening in perilously balanced Ruins. I was left with my own pacific, pastel day dreams; yielding cloud shapes composing in the sky and words spinning stardust through my mind. She told me not to tell and I never did. This doesn't count, this is merely a shadow and semblance; an echo of fact. Reality exists in that place in time where two little girls sit deep in The Ruins of an ancient mine, polishing diamonds with tea towels. One is thin and deeply sunbrowned; her long brown hair escaping the twin braids over her shoulders. She is animated, quick; her eyes, as always, are brimming with thought. The other is smaller, rounder and paler with a short halo of gold hair, gone white with the powdery dust. The elder is expounding on the nature of diamonds; how hard they are, their chemical makeup, where we will sell them, how we will export them, who might try to steal them and what we will buy with the booty. The younger is silent, her eyes are big and slightly unfocused. Diamonds. The word floats inside her mind like the dust motes in the bars of honeyed light. "Di - a -monds. Bright . . . brilliant . . . luminous . . . lustrous . . . glinting . . . glistening . . . glitter . . . gleam . . . they will gleam in the stream, these diamonds of dream . . . twinkle, twinkle, sparkle, shine . . . all these diamonds are yours and mine . . ." She blinks and brings her eyes quickly back to reality, back to her sister's face. She has been chosen as a partner in these Mines of Wonder; entrusted with The Highest of Secrets. The tangibility of this last alliance must last forever. She will polish so very carefully. And she will never, never tell. Edwina Peterson Cross September 2002
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