Stanley Mills
Kissing the Shuttle
E S ThomsonWhen I was six years old my father showed me the tunnel cut through the rock. ‘Your great grandfather built this,’ he said. ‘He spoke only the language of the islands, but he knew what was being asked of him when they put a shovel in his hand and sent him down into the earth.’ I watched the water racing out of the dark hole. It was black – not clear, like water should be – black and cold as the ground it had surged through. ‘Black with the souls of the men who died digging it’, my father used to say, ‘and as cold as Mackenzie’s heart. There’s never been a foreman at Stanley as cold and hard as John Mackenzie.’ By the time I was seventeen my father’s hatred had solidified into something as unyielding as the stones on the hillside, and as capric
