by Ninie Hammon
Ruby lost everything she owned but the clothes on her back that day—not that she’d had a whole lot more than that to begin with. But she didn’t mourn none of it except her pictures and their tags, Bow’s and Ricky Dan’s. When a miner checked in for his shift, he took a tag that had his name and Social Security number on it from the “out” side of a Peg-Board and put it on the “in” side. The Wilson Cooper Mining Company gave her and the other families the tags their men had put up on the Peg-Board the day Harlan #7 exploded. The tags was what they got instead of bodies to bury. The company never did find none of them miners, just sealed up the mine and shut it down. Said there wasn’t no bodies to recover, fire that hot, burning in the coal at the face. Said there couldn’t possibly be nothing left. Ruby couldn’t deal with the thought of nothing. When she looked at Black Mountain, she seen it as a headstone over a grave that held her husband and son, and her brother and son-in-law.
After the house fire, her daughters Stella, Ruth Ann and Charity pitched up and got her and the little ones the trailer. If she’d known that’s what they were planning, she’d have stopped them. Didn’t none of the three of them have money for a thing like that, trying to keep food on their own tables like they was. Well, Ruth Ann had a little more than her sisters. After Jody died in #7, she’d married the man who run the Walmart in Somerset and he got all the trailer’s appliances for next to nothing, scratched ones from the warehouse. Even got a clothes dryer so Ruby didn’t have to hang out the laundry no more.
That was good; the clothesline was out past the circle.
She turned to put the hammer back in the catchall drawer, between the Duct Tape and the Bondo Lloyd used to patch the aluminum skirting around the bottom of the trailer. Her elbow caught the mail JoJo’d brought in and put on the counter and the pile dumped onto the floor. She didn’t even have to bend over to see the story on the front page of the Harlan County Daily Enterprise.
Memorial Service Planned Friday on Twentieth Anniversary of Harlan #7 Explosion.
Today was Monday. The anniversary of the worst day in her life was 4 days away. She didn’t need no memorial service to remember that.
“Why cain’t they leave it be?” she asked Crawdad quietly. “Just leave it be.”
WILL HEFTED THE strap of the gym bag over his shoulder and looked down the dirt road in a silence so profound the air was burdened by the weight of it.
He had always been struck by the contrast of the quiet of the mountains above ground with the cacophony at the face of hundreds of coal mine shafts down in their roots. The ear-numbing, vibrating, rumbling roar of the continuous miner as it chewed into the coal seam with slashing tungsten-carbide bits as sharp as a giant shark’s teeth. The thump and rattle of hunks of coal dumped behind it. The clattering of the shuttle cars and the squall of the conveyor that carried the coal away. All the sounds bounced off rock walls, fractured and multiplied in a space only 20 feet wide by 4 feet tall.
Will stood by the roadside and listened, imagining he could hear an echo of the rumble under the mountains. But there was a silence here more than the mere absence of sound. It had substance of its own, a life-form warming itself before the sun disappeared behind the ridge and afternoon shadows stretched out fingers of darkness across the valley. Then he heard the murmured music of the woods, the arthritic creak of ash, hickory, sugar maple, white, and red oak trees in the breeze—a faint screech like treading on stairs in an old house or opening a gate on rusty hinges.
A mine was never completely silent either, even when all the machinery was turned off and the vibrations calmed. There was the constant drip, drip, drip of water. And when you ripped out miles of coal beneath a mountain, millions of tons of rock, soil, and water above the missing coal shifted. Rocks cracked and fractured, layers split, the immense pressure threatened to rip open the roofs of mine shafts or rupture the sides. Then the mountain had a voice. Its groans, squeaks, pops, and rumbles spoke to the old-timers as clearly as all the fancy monitoring devices; it whispered warnings to those with ears to hear, told them to run for their lives back out into the light while there was still time.
Will put his hand up to his forehead to shade his eyes—habit—there was no glare. He figured it’d be a hike from here to Aintree—the name of both the “holler” and the little town at its base. All the way around the side of the mountain, then down into the steep valley on the other side.
He took a deep breath and set out walking, kicked up puffs of fine dust in the road with every step. Didn’t rush, though. Will Gribbins was in no hurry to make his way to Aintree Hollow. No hurry whatsoever.
CHAPTER 4
As JoJo COMPOSED a mental list of everybody she could think of who owned a handgun, the old fellow who lived up Goat Rope Ridge came through the door and flashed her a toothless smile. He was wearing a wife-beater T-shirt, blue jeans cut off at the knees, high white socks and muddy work boots with the laces untied. She didn’t know the old man’s real name. He’d been called Tugboat ever since his crew at the Hard Rock Mine near Hazard had cut into old works—the Boogie Man of coal mining.
There’d been somebody or another digging coal in Kentucky since 1820, so all the mountains were riddled with abandoned mine shafts—some of them mapped, most of them not. Over the years, those empty shafts, called old works, had filled up with all kinds of stuff and none of it was good. Explosive levels of methane gas. Deadly carbon monoxide. Carbon dioxide called Black Damp that left no oxygen in the air. A crew that accidentally cut into one of those old shafts usually paid for the mistake with their lives. Tugboat was the only one of his crew who made it out when they hit old works full of water. The rest of them drowned, but Tugboat somehow managed to float out of the mine hanging onto a wooden roof beam.
The old man picked up an RC Cola, two Slim Jims, a Moon Pie and a packet of Red Man Chewing Tobacco and handed them to JoJo to check out.
“Some’m wrong, Missy?” he asked as she put the items into a sack. “You got the sorrowfulest look on yore face.”
His kindness left JoJo momentarily speechless.
“Looks like you could use a hug,” Tugboat said, his watery blue eyes fixed on hers. “I ain’t choicey no more. I don’t git a hug more’n onct in a blue moon, so I take ’em where I can git ’em and I hand ’em out the same way.” He hobbled around the end of the counter, wrapped the surprised girl in his arms and squeezed. Then he gave her a fatherly pat on the shoulder, picked up his sack and limped out the door.
After Tugboat left, three strangers came in to pay for gasoline. Deer hunters. One of them, a fat man whose beer belly stretched out his camo T-shirt, flirted with JoJo, but she knew how to handle herself. She just did what Granny told her to do when she was a little girl if she ever come on a rattlesnake in the woods—stand real still and don’t say nothing and eventually it’ll lose interest and leave.
Then two coal truck drivers stopped in to buy scratch-off lottery tickets and made little piles of rubber crumbs on the counter as they rubbed down to the numbers with their blackened thumbnails. By the time she’d waited on them all, dusted off the countertop and the store was empty again, JoJo had decided it’d be too much trouble to find a gun. Besides, guns were scary.
You’re afraid you might get hurt by the gun you’re going to use to blow your brains out?
There was probably humor in that somewhere, but right now JoJo couldn’t see it.
She’d thought of an easier way, neater and cleaner, too. If anybody in Harlan County could lay hands on enough Oxycontin to drop a moose it was JoJo Sparrow. Not all the dealers had gotten busted in the sting that shanghaied Avery 8 days before their wedding and sent him on a 15-year, all-expenses-paid vacation in the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville.
She shivered. Sometimes the reality of what her life had become since then slammed into her like a wrecking ball—19 years old; she’d just turned nineteen! But whenever she instinctively backed up from what she had to do, the way you yank your hand away from a hot st
ove, she thought about the skinnys, witch people who clawed at the air and drooled, their eyes wild.
Yes siree, there was plenty of worse ways to die than in a coal mine. And plenty of Oxy out there to make it all go away.
AS SOON AS Will stepped out of the woods into the meadow at the top of Aintree Hollow, he finally got the emotional wallop he’d braced himself for. When he was at sea, there’d been days his soul sang such a song of longing for this place he imagined he could reach out his hand and the melody would wind around his fingers like a pet snake. Seeing it real now, not a vision, took his breath away.
The little town spread out below him had once been home to upwards of five hundred people, but that was before Harlan #7 massacred two dozen of the hollow’s own in one screaming moment of agony. Or sucked the life out of them—one strangled gasp at a time. All of the 29 miners who were digging coal together when #7 blew were still buried under Black Mountain—except Will Gribbins and Lloyd Jacobs. They got out alive.
Will’s eyes followed the line of the blacktop road that wound down the valley. A handful of streets—all of them paved now!—branched out from it like tendrils of asphalt morning glory weaving up the mountainsides. He could see the elementary school about half way down, grades one through six. Harlan County School District bus #32 carried students the 45-mile round trip into Harlan for junior and senior high. He could also see three churches, a filing station, houses he recognized and some he didn’t and the flag out front of the post office, which shared a building with a grocery store—at least it used to.
And down at the bottom, at the base of the hollow, sat the mine, about a hundred yards from where the road connected to the highway across a one-lane bridge over Turkey Neck Creek. From where he stood, it was an insignificant hole in the side of the highest crest in Kentucky, 4,135-foot Black Mountain, which towered more than 2,500 feet above the valley floor.
In the beginning, when he first left the mountains and realized the rest of the world got their understanding of coal mining from the movies, he’d tried to set the record straight. Tried to help the people he met understand what it really was like.
You don’t sling a pick over your shoulder and ride an elevator down into a long, dark tunnel deep underground. In Eastern Kentucky, most of the coal mines aren’t under the ground beneath your feet; they’re under the mountain you’re standing beside, so you ride straight in seated on a train called a mantrip. Get comfortable; it could be a long ride. The coal you’re about to dig is at the far end of a maze of shafts that could stretch 10 miles into the mountain. And forget about standing up and stretching when you get there. Forget about standing up at all! You work your whole shift bent over, squatting or on your hands and knees. The shaft roof is only about 4 feet off the floor—because that’s how thick the coal seam is—and not a coal company on the planet would dig out the rock above the seam just to make the shaft comfortable for the miners. Moving rock costs money; miners with bad backs can be replaced.
But the long-dark-tunnel part—you got that right! Only there’s not just one of them. Imagine that a two-hundred-fifty-floor building (one that’s 30 miles long and 15 miles wide) had a base of solid gold 4 feet thick. You, of course, want the gold. How would you get it out? If you just dug into it and started hauling it away, pretty soon the building would collapse on top of you. But what if you left big hunks of the gold base behind, 50-by-50-foot squares of gold every 18 feet to hold up the building while you removed all the gold around them, with shafts going long-ways and connecting tunnels called breaks going crossways. When you were finished, you’d leave a grid under the building, like a map of a city with main arteries and cross streets, a honeycomb of empty shafts and square support pillars. That’s what the inside of a Kentucky coal mine looks like.
By the way, the coal companies don’t leave those 50-by-50-foot coal pillars behind forever. Eventually, they send miners back in to harvest them in a process called “robbing the coal.” The miners start at the face of the mine at the far end of the shafts, dig out the pillars one by one and replace them with 12-inch-thick wooden beams to hold up the roof—until the pressure snaps the beams like toothpicks and the roof collapses. Robbing the coal is the most dangerous operation in mining.
But after a while, Will stopped trying to explain. It was too complicated. And merely understanding the process didn’t tell you anything that really mattered about coal mining. Nothing short of doing the job could teach you that.
He could see a flurry of activity at the entrance of Harlan #7, where a colony of miniature people scurried around, operating correspondingly small pieces of machinery.
He’d clocked a drunk Marine in Norfolk once for saying something like that. The Marine had started it, made fun of Will’s accent—early on, before Will got rid of it. Called him a hillbilly. Hillbilly is a name mountain people call themselves and each other. It’s not an insult when they use it; it is an insult when anybody else does. Then the jarhead had said coal miners were nothing but little boys playing with toy trucks, digging holes in the dirt.
That’s when Will decked him, but his memory of the event ended abruptly a few seconds later when one of the Marine’s buddies broke a beer bottle over his head.
He reached up and felt around but couldn’t find the scar anymore. It had faded—unlike Will’s emotional response to the view of the hollow below him. Far from fading, it had swelled unexpectedly huge in his chest.
But his reaction wasn’t primarily to the sight of “where he was from,” a far more important location than he ever would have dreamed when he left it. His hole-in-the-belly feeling was more specific. It focused on the meadow below him and the oak tree that stood at the edge of the woods above it. The day after Will turned 12, he and Lloyd had carefully arranged five empty Budweiser cans on the ground in front of that tree, a row of three on the bottom with the remaining two balanced on top of them.
“Like this?” he’d hollered at the figure who stood in the middle of the meadow holding Will’s birthday .22 rifle in one hand and a beer in the other.
“Yeah,” Ricky Dan had called back, “but hold your horses.” The tall, broad-shouldered man with hair the color of corn silk and a shiny gold tooth that sparkled in his dimpled grin, tilted his head back and chugged the rest of a beer in one long gulp. “Now, you can have this ’un to set on top of them others.”
Ricky Dan drank too much. Well, Ma Sparrow said he did, but in her view even one beer was too much. He cursed too—never in front of a woman, though. And the thing was, his weren’t the ordinary swear words all the men used. His were…flamboyant and outlandish. Will had studied Ricky Dan’s creative use of profanity for hours when the two of them were out sangin’ in the woods. Then Will would go home, close the bathroom door, stand in front of the mirror and practice, sliding the words in between the syllables of normal words the way Ricky Dan did.
Everything about Ricky Dan was out there on the edge. At lease, it seemed that way to Will. He drove too fast, had too many girlfriends and laughed too loud, made a sound like a mama goose protecting her chicks. He ate his meals like he was sitting on a red ant bed, wolfed his supper down so quick Ma Sparrow warned he’d get piles from not chewing his food. Often, the meat on the table was venison; Ricky Dan dropped a buck the first day of deer season every year. The evening after the target practice with Will’s .22, Ricky Dan had demonstrated for Will and Lloyd one of the rapidly disappearing Appalachian folk arts, handed down from generation to generation; he’d taught them how to light a fart without catching their underwear on fire.
Ricky Dan Sparrow was everything Will Gribbins aspired to be. Though Ricky Dan was only 7 years Will’s senior, he seemed much older. That was because he’d quit school and gone to work in Harlan #7 when he was 16—2 years younger than the legal age for miners.
And if you were a miner—under age or not—you weren’t a boy anymore; you were a man.
A noisy stampede of brittle leaves rattled along the autumn breeze down the road
and Will stood transfixed, the image of Ricky Dan so real he was reluctant to breathe for fear movement would shatter it and send the jagged shards of it tinkling into the dirt. At the same time, he wanted nothing in life more than to escape the image, to turn and hightail it back over the mountain the way he’d come.
Mostly, he wanted a drink. No, needed a drink. Desire hadn’t been part of the equation since…it didn’t matter anymore when booze had finally bested him in the shell game. He understood now, though, knew that its seductive oblivion only magnified the squinty-eyed harshness of the reality that followed. He knew the merry-go-round of blackout-real-life-blackout was no kiddy ride, that booze held a cocked shotgun to his temple.
Only one tiny flickering light shown in the darkness in his soul that was deeper than the bowels of Harlan #7.
He shivered as much from the enormity of what he’d come here to do as from the chill fingers of the wind that tickled his neck under his collar. Then he walked resolutely down the road into the hollow, into his past and his future.
CHAPTER 5
JAMEY FIXED HIS mind on the lump of coal…wondering. He never knew what was hidden in a piece of coal, waiting to be set free. When he was only a boy and had just took up carving, he’d try to make the coal be something. An ashtray for Mr. Jewett, who smoked like a chimney even though Ray-Ray said his daddy coughed up blood. A squirrel, a duck, even a church house. But the coal didn’t like being forced to be something it wasn’t. Usually it’d break, crumble in his hands, like if it couldn’t be what it wanted to be, what the good Lord had put it on this earth to be, it wouldn’t be nothing at all. It took Jamey a long time to figure that out, but soon’s he did, he didn’t have no trouble with the coal at all.
