Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  He was happy to know me just because we shared Jolene.

  She comes out of the house. She stops in the middle of the sidewalk to check her purse for something.

  “Did you get boxes?” she shouts at me.

  “They’re in the back of the truck.”

  “Okay, boys,” she calls as she walks to her car. “Get back inside with your brother. Harrison, you’ve got homework. And Ebbie, you are not going to the auction with Hannah and her mom wearing a pirate costume. Go change.”

  “You’re going to the auction?” I ask him.

  “Yeah,” he says, his small, bright face turning thoughtful. “I like to attend events.”

  From outside the truck window, Harrison snorts a laugh and shakes his head.

  “I’ll be home later tonight,” I assure Eb. “And I’ll whup your butt at whatever game you choose.”

  He gives me a lopsided prizefighter’s smile with one of his top front teeth missing, and a bottom one, too. He holds up his eye patch so I can see both eyes.

  “You wish,” he says.

  He gets out of the truck and starts to race away, then stops suddenly and comes racing back. He reaches inside his plastic hook and takes out a small white envelope covered in stickers. “Uncle Ivan” is written on the outside in red marker.

  He hands it to me through the window.

  “This is for you,” he says, as he slips his fist back into the hook. “You can read it later.”

  Zo’s house is square, made of old, powdery, dark-red bricks, trimmed in white, full of windows, with a wide front porch supported by four white pillars.

  It’s in pretty good shape for a hundred-year-old house. Some of the floorboards on the porch are starting to rot. The downstairs window trim could use a fresh coat of paint. The hedges need to be cut back. The roof leaks in one of the upstairs bedrooms. One of the hinges on the outside cellar doors has rusted through. The showerhead in the bathroom needs replacing. These were all jobs I was hoping to get to before she died.

  Between Safe Haven and her other charitable pursuits, I know Zo just about depleted her inheritance before she passed away. Randy and Marcy are about to hear the news formally, sitting in a lawyer’s office: All that’s left is the house.

  I’m assuming Randy will sell it and the two hundred acres of untouched wooded hills. He has no interest in moving back here, plus he won’t be able to pass up the money. J&P has been after his family to sell for three generations. It’s prime land for strip mining.

  I walk through her back door and drop a load of empty boxes I picked up at Bi-Lo. There’s a small room before the kitchen where she kept an extra freezer, her washer and dryer, her husband’s gun rack empty now except for one rifle she used to shoot raccoons that got in her garbage cans, and an old gray filing cabinet containing what she ominously referred to as “her papers.”

  Jolene’s standing in the middle of the kitchen with her hands on her hips doing a silent inventory. Her hair is pulled to the top of her head in a gilt ponytail.

  “This is insane, Jolene,” I call out. “There’s no way we can pack up this whole house by ourselves.”

  “You’re right,” she says. “Let’s quit already.”

  I pull out one of the drawers in the filing cabinet and quickly close it again. I don’t even want to think about going through that mess. Me and my stupid promises.

  On the wall next to the cabinet is a wooden plaque with GREETINGS FROM MIAMI spelled across it in tiny silver seashells. I take it down and turn it over. On the back is a piece of masking tape with her mailman’s name written on it.

  After her latest heart attack, Zo had become obsessed with preparing for her inevitable demise. She knew she had a son and a daughter-in-law who had no interest in any of her personal possessions and wouldn’t think twice about getting rid of any of them. Fueled by nightmares of her mother’s hope chest being auctioned off to a stranger or her favorite gravy boat being sold at the Goodwill store for a quarter, she labeled every object in her house with a piece of masking tape and a name.

  I reach for one of the three J&P ball caps hanging on a set of hooks near the back door.

  “Christ,” I say.

  “What?” Jolene calls out.

  “She’s even labeled the hats.”

  She joins me. I hand the plaque to her. She turns it over, looks at the name, and sighs.

  “I’m only going through the personal stuff,” she tells me. “Her dishes and pots and pans are going to the church. Her clothes are going to Goodwill. Randy’s hired someone to take care of the furniture. I think he’s going to have an auction. Is it wrong for me to take the canned goods?”

  I walk into the kitchen and take a beer out of the refrigerator. Zo always kept a few around for visitors.

  “So this is what it all comes down to,” I observe between gulps of beer. “You accumulate stuff your whole life. You die. And it all gets thrown away.”

  “It’s not getting thrown away. It’s being given to other people.”

  “For them to throw away.”

  “Don’t say that. People will treasure this stuff. It’s being recycled.”

  She gives my face a frank stare.

  “You just can’t relate to any of this because you don’t keep anything,” she says. “You’re a grown man with only one box.”

  I follow her into the kitchen. The box she refers to is sitting in a closet in her house behind a kaleidoscopic curtain of all the evening gowns she ever wore in a pageant, beginning with the emerald green taffeta that won her Laurel County Fair’s Pine Princess and ending with the slinky gunmetal blue sequined number she was wearing when she was temporarily crowned Miss Pennsylvania.

  I donated most of my football memorabilia to the high school, but I kept a few things, not for myself but with the sole intention of giving them to my son someday: a Penn State jersey signed by my teammates the year we won the national title, one of the game balls from our Sugar Bowl win, a signed framed photo of Bob Hope shaking my hand, and the letter Mike Ditka wrote me after I broke my leg.

  It was a nice gesture from a man I had met only twice and who didn’t owe me squat. It was brief and not what I would’ve expected. He didn’t say anything about my leg. He didn’t make any references to our similar blue-collar Pennsylvania backgrounds or our blue-collar Ukrainian fathers. He didn’t even mention football. He wrote about heart and how people who have it will succeed at whatever they commit to, and how people without it can still succeed but will never be invited to his house for dinner.

  Jolene starts picking up things off Zo’s kitchen counter and flashing pieces of tape at me before packing them into an empty box: a ceramic spoon rest shaped like a rooster for the pastor’s wife, a Steeler cookie jar for a family down the road with three little boys, a marble rolling pin for a girl at her church who just got married, an electric can opener for her cardiologist.

  “I wonder what Zo left for me?” she asks herself loudly.

  Fortunately Jolene recognizes all the names. Zo knew she would, and this is probably why she asked her to deliver the things. She made me promise I’d help her, but the process is still going to take months. She should just put an ad in the newspaper and one on Zo’s church bulletin board alerting everybody that ever knew her in any capacity to stop by her house and pick up their reward.

  I walk over to one of Zo’s china cabinets filled with everything but china. She has even more knickknacks than my mom does. They’re all gifts from people who knew her through Safe Haven, or miners’ wives, or the generations of kids she’s taught in Sunday school.

  The kids got into the habit of buying or making her angels for Christmas every year, and she must have hundreds of them, representing every craft material known to man: ceramics, wood, plastic, Play-Doh, gold plate, resin, marble, papier-mâché, wax, Styrofoam, pewter, elbow macaroni. Some are too big to fit in the cabinet. Others are as small as Hershey Kisses. Some are actually made from Hershey Kisses. Some are obviously expensive. Oth
ers were made with fifty cents’ worth of pipe cleaners and glitter. They fly and kneel and twirl on top of music boxes. They hold harps and gifts and hymnals and candles.

  I open the door and pick up an angel with a swirling red gown and enormous wings, blowing on a trumpet.

  I don’t even bother turning her over to see if there’s a piece of tape. Dispensing the angels alone is going to take Jolene months.

  I put the angel back and reach for another one. She’s porcelain with a perfect painted face and soft brown curls. She’s dressed in layers of stiff golden fabric and holds a baby fawn.

  I do turn her over, and I’m so excited by what I see I look toward heaven and mouth a silent thank-you to Zo.

  I set the angel aside where Jolene won’t notice her.

  On a different shelf is Zo’s framed photograph of a small crowd of miners sitting and standing on the front steps of the old J&P company store circa 1915. If I had to pick her most prized possession, it would be this photo.

  The men are filthy, on their way to the bathhouse after a shift, dressed in work clothes, wearing their hard hats with lamps attached to the front. Some are carrying metal dinner buckets. One has a Napa lamp hanging from his belt, a new innovation at the time for testing the air for methane, much to the relief of canaries everywhere.

  The miners called the company stores “pluck me” stores because their prices were about 25 percent higher than stores’ in surrounding towns, but if a miner bought his supplies somewhere else, he was fired and blacklisted. His pay was a pittance to begin with, and, along with feeding and clothing his family, he also had to buy his own tools, dynamite, and carbide. The pluck-me stores gave credit, and miners ended up so far in debt to the company they could never leave the coalfields. The debts didn’t die with them either. They were passed on to their sons and to their sons’ sons.

  The store in Zo’s photo is a nondescript box without any signs. During the era it was built, most miners couldn’t read. The companies didn’t provide schools, but they were quick to provide jobs for the children sorting coal or digging it in the deep shafts where the tunnels were so narrow only a child’s small body could fit inside them.

  A little boy, no more than ten years old, sits at the feet of the men, as filthy as they are, wearing a familiar grin. It’s Eb’s grin. The boy is his great-grandfather, Zo’s dad.

  He was a breaker boy for five years before he went into the tunnels. His job was to sort and clean the coal. He would sit against a wooden chute, where raw coal streamed past in a black river, and pick from dawn to twilight, removing debris and breaking large chunks of coal into smaller ones. In the picture his hands look like the claws of a crow.

  It was dangerous work. Hands were mangled, legs crushed. There were stories of very young children at other mines who had been sitting astride the chutes and fell in and were smothered by the coal.

  Zo’s dad never lost a finger. This was a great source of pride for him, Zo always said. That and the fact that he never sold his two hundred acres to J&P.

  I pick up the photo. I don’t need to check. Zo’s most treasured family heirloom will go to her only son, but as I take it down from the shelf, I glimpse a piece of masking tape on the back. I turn it over and read the name: Val Claypool.

  9

  MARCELLA’S HAS BEEN AROUND FOR ABOUT A YEAR, AND, LIKE the few other upscale restaurants in the area, it serves Italian food and steaks. The tablecloths are made of cloth. The lighting is dim. The menus are bound with gold tassels. The bartender knows how to make a manhattan. Most of the wait staff can pronounce “gnocchi.”

  I look in the direction of the cigar and gift shop adjoining the lobby of the restaurant. From this table I can see a corner of the shelves where figurines and music boxes are displayed. The blown-glass rooster sits near the window. He’s a fiery glint of color.

  Chastity takes the angel and holds it up to the candlelight like a jeweler examining a gem.

  She checks out the small snip of masking tape I left underneath her skirt with the name Chastity Morrison written on it in Zo’s frail script.

  “She’s beautiful,” she says, and sets her down next to her veal marsala. “It was nice of Zo to think of me.”

  She picks up her wine and takes a long, slow sip. I watch her lips grip the rim of the glass. She’s wearing her hair up. The style shows off her long, slim neck and the shape of her shoulders beneath her cream-colored sweater.

  I ache for her. I don’t mind. It helps take my mind off my knee and my eye. I try to compose one of my pain harmonies. Knee-eye-eye. Knee-balls-knee. La-di-da. Do-re-mi. Balls-balls-knee.

  “And very nice of you to take time out from your evening to deliver it to me,” she says, smiling knowingly at me.

  She’s seen right through me. I tracked her down through the hospital. She was on call tonight and ended up missing most of the auction because she had to perform an emergency appendectomy. She’s having a late dinner now.

  Once I found out where she was, I was so caught up in the fact that I had a legitimate excuse to see her again that I didn’t stop to think that delivering a remembrance from a dead old lady might not be considered an urgent enough reason to show up at a restaurant.

  “Do you want to join me? I was supposed to meet someone, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to make it,” she says.

  What could possibly be more important than sitting across a table from this woman and watching her put things in her mouth? I wonder as I take a seat.

  “So what happened to your face?” she asks me.

  “It happened in the line of duty.”

  The words are out before I can stop them.

  She’s kind enough not to make a smart-ass comment. She lives in this town. She knows what kinds of duties I perform.

  “It was a picnic-table-related incident,” I add.

  She smiles and nods.

  “I’ve heard those can turn really ugly.”

  She’s not wearing a ring, and her boyfriend is standing her up. There’s no way she’s engaged.

  “It turns out we have a lot of mutual acquaintances,” she comments. “It’s strange we haven’t met before now.”

  “Yes,” is the only response I can come up with.

  “There was Zo. There’s Dr. Ed. Your mother and your sister.”

  “You know Jolene?”

  “Only casually. I met her and her sons a couple years ago when Josh was in that fender bender and was brought to the ER. I was on call. All three of her sons look very different from one another.”

  “They have different dads.”

  “Really? I thought Randy Craig was their father. I thought they were all Zo’s grandchildren.”

  “No, just Eb. Josh never knew his dad.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Is he dead?”

  “No, a marine.”

  The waitress shows up, and I order a Jack Daniel’s.

  Chastity takes a bite of her veal, then puts her fork down.

  “Actually we have met before.”

  Her fingers reach for the strand of gold around her neck. She plays with it, then smoothes it against the soft fabric of her sweater.

  Knee-balls-balls. Balls-eye-balls. Balls-balls-balls.

  “We have?”

  She nods slowly.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  The word “Clearfield” flashes through my brain. I start to panic. Clearfield. We played Clearfield every year. I did some partying in Clearfield. Clearfield girls did some partying down here. Did I make out with her? Did I have sex with her? Did I promise her I’d take her out sometime and then blow her off?

  She picks up her wineglass again and leans back in her chair, watching and waiting.

  “I have a bad memory,” I try to excuse myself.

  “I’ll help you out,” she offers. “September 1980. Clearfield High School.”

  Shit, I say to myself. Is it possible I made out with her? Is it possible I had sex with her, and I don’t remember her?


  I clear my throat. It’s possible.

  “Last game of the season,” she goes on. “You guys killed Clearfield, forty-five to six. You scored three touchdowns.”

  “Right,” I say. “And after the game . . .” I leave the words hanging, waiting for her to finish the sentence for me.

  She’s not going to help me out at all. She cocks her head to one side and smiles sweetly at me.

  “Yes?” she says. “After the game . . . ?”

  I remember the game. I was on fire. No one could touch me. We were district champs that year. We had a huge blowout of a party that night, but it was back in Centresburg.

  “After the game”—she grins at me—“when your team bus pulled in to the McDonald’s, a bunch of cars and pickups pulled in behind you, and when you got out of the bus, a bunch of kids egged you.”

  “That’s right,” I tell her. “I remember it now. Someone got me in the side of the head.”

  “Yes,” she says excitedly. “That was me.”

  I find myself grinning back at her.

  “Really? You had great aim.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “When I was a kid, I used to crawl out my brother’s bedroom window onto the roof and spend hours throwing rocks at my neighbor’s lawn jockey, trying to smash the lantern he was holding.”

  “Well, it paid off,” I congratulate her.

  “Thanks,” she says again.

  “So why did you pretend not to know me or anything about football when we met?”

  “I was just having fun.”

  “At my expense. Again.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there anything else you like to do for fun besides abuse me?”

  “I like to embroider. Cross-stitch, mostly.”

  “Rock throwing and embroidery,” I ponder.

  “And I’m a surgeon,” she adds. “What do they all have in common?”

  “You need good aim.”

  She gives me a gorgeous smile, full of all the delight of a little girl getting what she wants for Christmas and all the sudden sensuous attention of an intelligent grown woman encountering a man who says something she finds smart and funny.