Return to The Quarry

Chapter Eleven

1925

No better than 1924. A perfect disaster of a year.

Septimus Hackett certainly seemed to think so as he made his way through the now quiet quarry in the fading light of early evening. All the workers, or rather, the few workers who remained in his employment, had gone home to hungry children and wives furious with them that they had worked another week with no paycheck to show for it. Not for having squandered the earnings, mind you. It was because no earnings were paid.

Septimus had heard it all. Cheat. Skin-flint. Failure. Granted, he had overestimated the need for cut stone once the Great War had ended, and in hindsight, it was foolish for him to put all of his profits into buying additional equipment. He had hoped the destruction over in France and Belgium would have been greater, leading to foreign contracts for stone to help rebuild cities. They never panned out, and here he sat with steam shovels and conveyors, some of which had never been started up - and no one to operate them.

So many of the workers had given notice without warning. Some even were talking to lawyers for advice on what to do if he did not make good with the back wages he owed them. The Hackett name was on the brink of disaster. During the previous year, he realized that he had to do something. And he had to do it fast.

As he walked, the slate shingle roof of the Big House appeared over the tops of the trees. It wasn't actually a big house, rather, it was a crude but substantial log cabin that served as his office, the head of operations for the quarry. Built by some great grandfather of his, it sat atop a slight rise and was elevated on posts banked deep into the earth. Inside he had his desk and his chair, the curtains that his Moira had sewn for the windows, the silly woman. What the hell did a man need with curtains when the desk was piled high with bills, past-due notices, and threatening letters from lawyers - and the paid spindle beside them sat empty? Oh, what he wouldn't give to take the whole stack of them, just gather them up in his arms and walk across the room to the giant fireplace and chuck the whole lot in and watch them burn.

Septimus climbed the steps to the Big House and let himself in. Slamming the door behind him, the bleakness of the outbuilding closed in around him. The smell of ancient creosote and the sourness of the unchanged ashtray on his desk blocking out the petrichor as the first drops of rain began to fall on the bare rock all around. The smell of problems, he thought bitterly. He went over to that huge fireplace, the one he devised and masoned for himself out of cast off stones he carried up from the river. He had pushed the square boulder on which the whole thing sat up the hill himself, or pulled it rather on a skid he threw together out of scrap wood. So far, it seemed that that fireplace was the only thing he contributed to the centuries of Hackett profits.  

Anger rose in him. He struggled to build this fireplace like he tried to contribute to this damn business. A fireplace meant he could continue working further into the colder months. Septimus inherited the family enterprise when it was just sort of bobbing along in the current with big plans to thrust it into the 20th century. Now with two kids and a wife, and a string of failures like a noose around his neck, everything was about to grind to a halt.

Unless he took some calculated risks.

Not all of the equipment he bought was for cutting stone. Some of it took the form of copper stills with great spiraling parts that looked more like something out of a science periodical. With the nation plunged into prohibition and he was left with a network of tunnels on the property that were now unused, the only natural course of action was to turn both problems into a profit. The booze selling racket did pay some, although business of this kind was slow. Painfully slow. He kept telling himself that if the fellas that acted as his go-betweens could come by one big contract, just one, perhaps that would put him over the top. Maybe there would be enough extra that he could get some of the old workers to reconsider their jobs. Things would turn around then.