by Ninie Hammon
“They all think their sh…” He’d caught himself just in time. “…crap don’t stink, Ma!”
Ricky Dan hadn’t adjusted well to Harlan County High School, wasn’t suited for academics, and couldn’t seem to catch the rhythm of other teenagers’ lives. But this time, their school argument had taken a different turn.
“You ain’t quittin’!” Ma said. She didn’t raise her voice enough that anybody would have called it a shout, but she was louder than Will had ever heard her. “You’re stayin’ in school and you’re gonna graduate, and that there’s the end of it!”
Ricky Dan had almost knocked Will off the porch when he marched out in a rage. Will followed him over to the stump where Ricky Dan liked to sit, but didn’t say anything, just stood beside him.
Eventually, Ricky Dan looked over at him and said with a wry smile, “Welcome to adventures in missin’ the point.”
Will didn’t know what that meant so he kept silent.
“Ma don’t get it,” Ricky Dan said, picked up a stick and began to peel the bark off it. “It ain’t just we need the money and I hate school. It’s that…” His voice trailed off. Then he started again, “When I’m workin’ on weekends, and I come up after my shift, dirty and wore out, my snot black and grit in my teeth—that ain’t bad. It’s feeling…alive.”
And Ricky Dan’d had this look on his face, this animated, vibrant look Will would never forget. It was years before Will was old enough to interpret it. Ricky Dan’s was a look of purpose, the look of a man who knew who he was and what he was made for.
Ricky Dan had that same look on his face now as he stood in the doorway of Granny’s kitchen—but only for a moment, then it morphed into a kind of childlike confusion and he turned his head and looked off to the side.
This was wrong, all wrong. How could Ricky Dan be standing here a young man like he’d been when Will was a little boy?
Was this…a ghost, one of Granny’s haints?
Then Will noticed for the first time that there was a yellow bird on Ricky Dan’s shoulder—a canary.
Granny stood up and began to speak, but it took Will a couple of seconds to hear her through the roar in his ears.
“…should have warned you. I forget sometimes how much he looks like his daddy.”
His daddy?
Granny turned to the young man in the doorway. “Jamey, you don’t know this fella, but he—”
“Oh yes, ma’am, I surely do know him!” the young man said and extended his hand toward Will, straight and stiff like he was drawing a sword. “I’m James Bowman Sparrow, sir, named after my granddaddy, but ever-body calls me Jamey. Well, most ever-body. ’Cept JoJo and sometimes she calls me mow-ron, but she don’t mean nothin’ by it. And sometimes Granny calls me Jamey Boy.” He paused to get a breath. “But you can call me Jamey. The end.”
The whole monologue had been proclaimed in a cheery voice, but the young man never looked at Will, kept his head down, and his gaze roamed the room like a searchlight on a guard tower, up and down the baseboards of every wall.
Will found he actually could get up, on trembling legs, cross the room to where Jamey stood and take his outstretched hand. The young man clasped Will’s hand and pumped vigorously up and down like he was inflating a bicycle tire.
“My name’s—”
“Oh, I know who you are,” the young man said, excitement in his voice, still pumping Will’s hand without looking at him. He turned to Granny, looked at her briefly before he dropped his gaze. “You said I didn’t know who he was but I do, too, know this fella—well not his name.” He turned back toward Will. “What’s your name, mister?”
“Will Gribbins.”
“Proud to make your acquaintance, Mr. Gribbins!” The young man peeked up at Will, then dropped his gaze. He seemed to realize he could stop shaking now and he released Will’s hand. “Only we ain’t strangers, me and you. I know you think we are, but we ain’t. I don’t know yore name and the like, but we done already met. We met this mornin’. I’ll show ya. The end.”
After he put the verbal period on his spiel, the young man turned and bolted out of the room, the bird on his shoulder clinging tenaciously to his shirt. Will heard the back door open and bang shut again.
Granny spoke one word into the stunned silence.
“Sit.”
Will sat.
Her voice was flat; she seemed to have aged a decade.
“I didn’t find out until after Ricky Dan got killed that Joanna was pregnant,” she said.
Will should have guessed it. That was why Ricky Dan got engaged so quick and then wanted a Thanksgiving wedding. Twenty years ago, unwed mothers were almost unheard of in the mountains. But short engagements and “premature” babies that weighed 8 pounds were as common as layoffs and disability checks.
“And Joanna…she took it hard. Her only brother had hisself a heart attack and died right after, and they was real close. So she…” Granny’s voice trailed off. Then she took a deep breath and continued. “She tried for a good long while, but you could see all that hurt in her was still raw as the day we lost ’em. Then there was a car wreck. Some said it wasn’t no accident. You might ’member, her mama went all crazy like, hollerin’ and carryin’ on, and they had to put her away. Well, her granny done the same thing, so some folks got to sayin’ Joanna wasn’t draggin’ a full string of fish, neither. I cain’t speak to the why of it; only her and the good Lord knows that. All I know is she wrapped her car ’round a tree when she was 8 months along. They took her in one of them helicopters to Lexington and we all went runnin’ up there. She was a-layin’ in that bed with tubes comin’ outta’ her ever-where and machines wheezin’ and beepin’...”
Will reached over and took Granny’s hand.
“The doctors said her body was still alive but her brain…onliest thing keeping her breathin’ was them machines.” Granny sighed. “She stayed like that for a right smart while, but then they couldn’t wait no longer and they cut her open.”
Another pause, her voice grew quieter. She gestured with her head toward the door where Jamey had left. “Named him after Bowman…” Her voice was thick. Then she gathered herself and continued. “Jamey didn’t breathe soon’s he come out, had stuff in his lungs. One of them nurses told me he was blue as a ink stain on a shirt pocket. Even when he commenced to cryin’ he liked to never pinked up. And while he wasn’t breathin,’ his brain wasn’t gettin’ no oxygen so…”
The back door opened and slammed shut again and Jamey raced into the living room. He had something round and black in his hand. He ducked his head to the side as he held it out to Will.
“Here ’tis, mister,” he said, panting like he’d been running. “See! I told you we done already met!”
The object was a lump of coal carved into a bust.
It took Will a beat to process it all. The sculptor who’d created all the incredible art in this room was a mentally handicapped boy?
Will reached out for the dark rock, took it in his hand to examine it. The room went instantly airless. Granny made a squeaking sound and covered her mouth with both hands.
The face on the bust had been captured in the coal in painstaking detail; its identity was unmistakable. It was Will.
He looked from the bust to Granny and back to the exact reproduction of his own face on a lump of coal he held in his hand. But he couldn’t speak.
She could.
“Jamey Boy’s done opened up a whole new can of worms here ’fore I was all the way done with the last one. Here’s the whole of it, Will. Like I said, them doctors liked to never got Jamey to breathe…but the second baby come out a-squalling. Funny how he talks all the time now and she’s the quiet one. Her name’s Joanna, after her mama. But when Jamey was little, he couldn’t say Joanna, so—”
“I called her JoJo,” Jamey interrupted, beaming. “Ain’t JoJo a fine name! Jamey and JoJo—we’s twins.”
CHAPTER 7
LLOYD JACOBS HAD spent his whole life w
ith a sour look on his face, even when he was a baby. His mouth turned naturally downward at the corners; that’s just the way it was built. And perhaps the person he became evolved to match his looks. Or could have been the other way around. Hard to tell. It was obvious, though, as time went by, that Lloyd’s insides more closely resembled his outsides every day. His face was square, his forehead high beneath an unruly mop of black hair. A bushy unibrow rested over eyes a dark chocolate shade of brown. But his eyes weren’t quite big enough, like he’d somehow been issued a size too small for his face.
Will used to call him “Pea Eye”—thought it was funny. Lloyd never thought it was funny.
For some reason, when he came out of the mine at the end of his shift, Lloyd was thinking about that—how Will’d called him Squinty and Mole Man, too. But the cool wind blew the thoughts out of his mind and replaced them with two familiar itches he ached to scratch. First, he needed a smoke! And second…oh, how he longed for a shower—scalding hot water making soapy rivers of liquid coal dust that streamed off his body into the shower drain. The raccoon mask fading away; his hands clean…no, not clean. Once you got coal dust under your fingernails, got it imbedded in your skin, it had to wear off. Took a long time. Look at a man’s fingers and you could tell whether he was a working miner or one who’d been laid off.
Lloyd was a working miner. For now. But he certainly wouldn’t be a month from now, or 6 months—however long it took them to dig out all the roof falls in Harlan #7.
He remembered distinctly the day he’d learned they were going to reopen the mine like you remember exactly where you was when you heard Kennedy’d got shot. He’d been in church. They’d had a fine service, lots of singing, lots of testifying, good, solid hell-fire preaching. He felt especially good. It was before Norma Jean left him, before Jesse got himself all messed up in drugs, before Amy got pregnant. The whole family stood together on the church steps. It was a spring day and the mountains rose up all around, no leaves yet, but with tiny bits of color on every tree that made it look like the mountains was broke out in a green rash. He remembered thinking that this was how it should be, the way life was supposed to be. He wanted to capture the moment and put it in one of them glass balls you could shake and snow’d fall all over everything.
Then Virgil Higgins—folks called him Tie Rod—stepped up and asked Lloyd if he had a light. Of course, he had a light. He smoked two packs a day. Everybody knew it. But he didn’t smoke at church. Tie Rod knew the First Pentecostal Church of Aintree Hollow didn’t hold with smoking. What’d Tie Rod put him in a spot like that for?
Lloyd reached into his pocket, pulled out a lighter and handed it to him, then turned to walk away.
“Whatcha’ think ’bout #7?” Tie Rod asked. And a little tickle in Lloyd’s stomach stopped him. He turned back around.
“What about #7?”
“About them reopening it. Where you been, Lloyd? It was in the Enterprise on Friday that a company called Black Gold Mining bought it from Wilson Cooper.” Lloyd had taken the day off Friday to go hunting. He was one of the best shots in the hollow. He’d stayed gone until late Saturday evening, didn’t even go to the mailbox.
Tie Rod spit in the dirt. “Whadda ya bet it’s the same bunch, just changed the name ’cause they never paid none of them fines.”
The federal MSHA, Mine Safety and Health Administration, had yanked all Wilson Cooper’s operating permits and shut the mine down after the explosion in 1980, slapped big fines on the company for a whole herd of safety violations. The company had responded by going belly-up and never paid anything. In the past two decades, no other mining operation had been interested in reopening a mine that had high methane levels and roof falls all over—including half the belt line and the whole face—a mine where 27 miners had been killed. But with the price of coal higher now than it had been in years…
“Said they’s gonna start workin’ by the end of the year, but you know how that is. They don’t never start diggin’ when they say they’re gonna.”
It had been an amazing phenomenon, the only time anything even remotely supernatural had ever happened to Lloyd except when he was caught up in the spirit in church and spoke in tongues. He looked at his family all dressed up together in the spring sunshine on the porch of the church and the image started to run. Like it was a painting and somebody had splashed water on it. As he watched, all the color washed out of his family, the church, the mountains and the sky, dripped down into a murky puddle on the ground until the whole world was a black-and-white photograph.
And that had been just about what happened. His family did “run.” Norma Jean ran off, filed for divorce the day after Thanksgiving. And even before she’d hauled off all the dishes and silverware, Jesse got busted for drugs. Amy moved in with her boyfriend. Everybody knew she was pregnant, but when she didn’t start showing he knew she’d had an abortion. His whole world fell apart.
It had all started the day he learned they was going to reopen Harlan #7. But Tie Rod had been wrong. They did start digging by the end of the year. Black Gold got all their ducks in a row right before Christmas and they’d made pretty good time after that, dug a mile and a half into the side of Black Mountain. They’d bought the mineral rights to an area south of #7 and were digging out a new section at right angles to the shafts damaged by the 1980 explosion. It was a shoestring operation, though, just like Wilson Cooper’d been. They’d have to make some money before they could expand, dig out the roof falls, and open up the rest of the mine.
They’d hired a crew of about 30 men and Lloyd had quit his job at Bear Creek Mine to hire on as a boss. Took a pay cut, but he had to be there, had to stay close. Maybe if he was there when…well, maybe he could do something when they started digging out the old mine. Because the day they dug out the belt line shaft, Lloyd’s life would be over. Worse than any roof fall in the mine, his world would crash down around him and crush him to death under the weight of it.
Some days he told himself it wouldn’t happen. That it was like everybody thought—there was nothing left to find. Other days he knew better.
There was days on end he didn’t sleep at all. He didn’t think you could go without sleep that long, but whenever he’d lie down and close his eyes, he’d see the walking dead coming for him.
He knew it was dangerous to go into the mine in the state he was in. You had to be sharp—on your toes. Accidents happened when you wasn’t careful. But he didn’t have no choice. His belly had been tied in knots for so long now he couldn’t remember anymore what it felt like not to be scared. Call it what it was. Lloyd Jacobs was scared.
A Scripture popped into his head, as passages from the Bible often did.
“Do not be anxious about anything…just present your requests to God and the peace of God will guard your heart.” Something like that.
Peace? Lloyd didn’t know what peace was. Hadn’t since they dragged him out of Harlan #7. And he’d presented his requests to God again and again. Nothing. He probably ought to accept that was the way of it, tell the church he didn’t believe it no more and resign. Well, he still believed some of it. The part about Hell waiting for sinners, he believed that part! And rewards to them that done right, he believed that part, too. Outside punishing and rewarding, though, he’d figured out God didn’t want to have nothing to do with Lloyd Jacobs.
But no matter what he did or didn’t believe, he couldn’t walk out on the church. Life had whittled his world down, cut into his soul with sharp, savage strokes—took everything. The church was all he had left. He was an elder. Folks looked up to him, respected him. He was somebody.
Lloyd had told himself not to panic a thousand times. He still had one hope. He had a way out—Will Gribbins. Will Gribbins dead. He was, he had to be. Nobody’d heard so much as a peep—not a call, a letter, a postcard—in two decades. Not even when his daddy’d passed. Worse come to worse, Lloyd’d lay it all onto Will. Lloyd’s word against a dead man’s—who was they gonna believe?
“You seen him yet?” he asked Lloyd.
“Seen who?”
“You don’t know?”
“If I knew, chances are I wouldn’t be askin’,” Lloyd snarled.
“You don’t hafta bite my head off,” the little man said. “I was in the Jiffy when Granny Sparrow called JoJo to tell her to bring home some crackers so’s she could fix him up his favorite supper—salmon patties and French fries.”
There was a sudden, huge ringing in Lloyd’s ears that seemed to fill his whole head with sound. He couldn’t talk. He couldn’t breathe. When he didn’t respond in any way, Li’l Bit shrugged. “I figured somebody told you Will Gribbins come home, figured you’d be the first person they called.”
A young miner had come up behind the mechanic. “That Gribbins guy, he the one that got out with Lloyd?”
“Yeah. Them two, they’s the only ones made it.”
CHAPTER 8
WILL SAT IN the ejection-seat recliner and watched Granny and JoJo fix supper. After Jamey set the table, he plopped down in front of the television and vanished into a game of Mario Super Smash Brothers on his Nintendo 64. Will had offered to help in the kitchen—peel potatoes or something—but Granny’d told him to put his feet up and relax.
There was a time Granny would have been indignant at his offer to help. When Will was growing up, men didn’t do “women’s work.” Even when the miners were out on strike, men did their jobs and women did theirs. For all that strict division of labor, families were as close-knit as steel wool. You looked after your people and they looked after you.
