by Ninie Hammon
Tonight didn’t neither one of them do much good, though, because what his hands was making was scary. There was sad, hurtful images in that rock and the longer he worked on it the more he wondered if a rock could be bad. People could be bad. He hadn’t never knowed nobody who was bad, but Granny’d talked about bad people and the Bible had stories about bad people so there must be some somewhere. They must be the folks who lived out on the flat because wasn’t no bad hillbillies.
But if people could be bad, then maybe things could, too, and if things could be bad, maybe this piece of jet was one of them bad things.
“How would you know that a person was bad?” he asked ValVleen. The bird studied him as if she was considering the question and trying to come up with an answer. But Jamey figured out the answer first. “It’d be ’cause they looked bad, right, or acted bad? That’s how you’d know!”
So if looking bad meant a person was bad, then that must be the way you could tell that a thing was bad, too. And this piece of jet looked bad, least what he’d seen of what was hidden down inside it did.
Jamey stopped carving and sat stock-still. You don’t suppose he was committing a sin to turn the bad things in this rock loose. He wasn’t exactly sure what a sin was, but he did know he didn’t never want to do one. A sin was bad. If this rock was bad, maybe the rock was a sin.
He put down the chisel in his hand and fat tears leaked out of his green eyes.
“ValVleen, I think I’ve made a sin arts. But I didn’t really make nothing. I let’ out what was in there, so I guess I let a sin out of this bad rock.”
He scooted his stool back and looked at the shiny piece of jet. It glistened in a thousand points of light from the flickering flames of the lanterns.
Had to be a sin, because didn’t feel right, none of it did. Nothing about setting the images free in this rock had felt like it was supposed to. When Jamey come back from that place he went when he worked on his arts, the big miner in the front was all done, everything just right. But there was all those other miners outlined in the background to pull up out of the rock. And he couldn’t manage to get back to his place to do it. It felt a little like when he first started to carve and he tried to force the coal to be what he wanted it to be. Only, he hadn’t tried to force this piece of jet to be nothing. So why wouldn’t the images come on out of there like they was supposed to? Was it his job to drag them out?
He sighed. He didn’t have no choice; it was his job to finish it. Jamey wiped his tears and his nose on the sleeve of his shirt, picked up the chisel, and went back to work.
The moon was a white bone in the black sky before he put his mallet and chisel down on the workbench for the last time. He was done. He shouldn’t have been. Should have taken him a whole lot longer to finish it, seeing as how there was all them miners to set free. But the arts didn’t turn out like he figured it would.
He sat back and looked at the images in the shiny black rock and began to wonder if it was a sin after all, because now that it was finished, it sure was pretty. Scary and sad and ugly and pretty all at the same time in a tangled up way Jamey didn’t have enough words in his bucket to describe.
There was so much detail in the explosion frozen there in the piece of jet it was like Jamey was there and could see it. Rocks flew, helmets was knocked off, roof bolts and lunch pails in the air. You could make out the pockets on the miners’ shirts, the holes in their pants, the laces on their work boots. The big miner in front had lost his helmet; his hair went ever which way. The right sleeve of his shirt was torn beneath the string thing tied on his arm and all the buttons was missing so it flapped open. Two other men was tangled together and one didn’t have no shirt on at all and Jamey stared at it, wondered where it went. Could a explosion blow your clothes off?
The longer Jamey looked at the carving, the more grateful he was that there wasn’t no faces on none of them people.
He’d told Granny he didn’t think there was any faces in the rock but he’d been wrong. There was probably faces all over it. You just couldn’t see them. All them miners had they heads turned away, or there was somebody’s arm or leg blocking their face, or a helmet or piece of rock.
As he stared at the carving, he felt himself drawn into it, like it was a pool of shiny black water instead of shiny black rock. Then he seen what was in there, deep down in the bottom of it. And soon as he did, he laughed right out loud.
“Look at that, ValVleen.” He pointed into the depths of the rock and laughed again. “Ain’t never seen nothin’ like that ’fore in a rock.”
The bird didn’t chirp, didn’t make a sound. Jamey didn’t think nothing of it at the time, how she acted. But later he understood.
ValVleen had looked into that rock and seen what was coming.
CHAPTER 27
WILL WOKE UP early Friday morning, probably just as the sun cleared the horizon. But he didn’t get up right away. For a long time, he lay in bed and listened to the birds perched on the old clothesline pole outside his window. His mind was calm, the way he’d seen palm trees on a beach grow still and expectant as the boiling black clouds of a hurricane hurled at them across the sea. As if in response to his thought, thunder rumbled in the distance.
When he heard JoJo’s muffler-free car roar louder than the thunder as she left for work, he got out of bed and dressed. After he startled Granny with a quick peck on the cheek, he headed to town. Her voice called after him from the porch that he ought to get a coat, a storm was on the way. A few fat raindrops fell from high in the steadily blackening sky and landed with a splat on the ground as he crossed the yard to the road, painting a camouflage pattern in the dust.
There used to be a barber shop located in the converted living room of a house next door to Pete’s Place. Will was outside when it opened at nine o’clock. He really did need a haircut, but it still felt like getting all cleaned up for his own funeral. Today, he would do what he’d come all this way to do.
As the barber snipped at his hair, he tried to keep his mind firmly in the present. If he inched out there into the future, he wanted a drink so bad he feared he might grab a bottle of aftershave and chug it down in one, long gulp.
“I reckon you’ll be going to the ceremony at lunchtime,” the barber said. “I’s telling Maude this mornin’ that it’d sure be a good time to break in and steal whatever it is you been covetin’. Ain’t gonna be nobody left at home in the whole town—everybody’s going.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Will said. That was a lie, of course. Will couldn’t have been dragged to that ceremony by a team of Clydesdales and the Budweiser beer wagon. But if he’d admitted that, he’d have had to explain why not.
Another customer came in as the barber dusted talcum powder on Will’s neck. The man had a black armband tied around his upper arm with the number 27 printed on it in silver.
“Where’d ya get that?” the barber asked, indicating the armband.
“Handin’ ’em out down at the Jiffy and the filling station, and there’ll be more at the ceremony.”
“I wanna get me one. My sister’s first husband was killed in #7.”
The approaching storm edged into the hollow as Will sat in the barber chair. In a brief, hard downpour, raindrops scampered across the windowpane with the sound of running feet. The rain had let up by the time Will left, spit a few drops now and then that shattered the mirror puddles on the blacktop.
Will’s windbreaker was “water-resistant,” rather than “waterproof.” In a serious storm, that distinction would matter, so he needed to get back inside quick. He jogged the final quarter mile to Granny’s trailer and could hear the rain crank up behind him. As he reached for the doorknob, his teeth began to chatter, but that wasn’t from the chill in the air. It was from the chill in his heart.
His teeth had chattered in #7 the day she blew. Fifty-eight degrees in the mine; that was cold. But his teeth weren’t chattering from the chill in the air that day either.
When Lloyd suggests th
ere might be some way out of the sentence of death by suffocation, Will begins to tremble. Even before Lloyd says a word, Will is shaking all over.
“What do you mean there’s one thing we could do?” Ricky Dan says. “Like what?”
“Maybe the explosion didn’t blow out all the seals.”
“Every break we passed, the seal was blown—except this one. What’s your point? Even if some of the seals didn’t blow, it will still take the rescue team—”
“That’s not what I’m talkin’ about,” Lloyd coughs and loses his breath. Will and Ricky Dan say nothing, just wait for him to continue. “You know they had me greasin’ the belt line last week. I got way up past this here break.”
The rail line is located in the shaft in front of their enclosure and the belt line is located in the shaft behind it.
“So?”
“So when we worked up here in September, we parked the scoop on the other side of the belt line, in the next break up from this ’un. You ’member—Hob had a pile of cinder block stacked in there and he parked the scoop in front of it so wouldn’t no inspector see he wasn’t usin’ concrete block. And just for good measure, he put up a curtain to hide it all. You ’member?”
Ricky Dan nodded, but Will couldn’t tell if that meant he remembered or just that Lloyd should continue.
“Well, last week when I was greasin’, I noticed Hob moved the cinder block but never took that curtain down. I come this close to yankin’ it down my own self, but I forgot about it.”
Will feels his heart begin to labor in his chest. He thinks he understands what Lloyd is driving at.
“You’re sayin’ that—?” Will begins.
“I’m saying that on the other side of the conveyor out there,” Lloyd points toward the curtain on the back of the enclosure, “and 50 feet up is another space just like this ’un, only it’s got a wall on the back side ’stead of a curtain.” He pauses for effect, but he doesn’t need to. “And it’s empty—’cept maybe a couple of broke cinder blocks Hob never used. Ain’t got no rock pile nor nothin’ like that in it.”
Empty of rocks means it is full of air. Air that’s been sealed off from the deadly smoke and poison gas that now fill the whole mine—4 feet by 18 feet by 25 feet of good, breathable air!
“The air’s there if the curtain on the front didn’t blow,” Ricky Dan says. “And if the block seal on the back didn’t blow. And if nobody else come along and yanked that curtain down since you seen it last week. That’s a lot of ifs.”
“There’d be more’n 20 hours of air for all three of us,” Lloyd blows by Ricky Dan’s caution; his voice louder, more strident. “Com’on! 85-90 feet away is…”
“Not ‘is’ Lloyd. ‘Might be!’ There might be another sealed-up break over there. You ask me, I bet ever seal in this whole mine blew.”
“This ’un didn’t!”
“This ’un was full of rocks! That’s what kept it from blowin’ and you know it.”
“I don’t know no such thing. Maybe this ’un didn’t blow ’cause it was far ’nough away from the ’xplosion that the blast didn’t get it. Maybe ever seal from here to the mouth’s still there.”
“Maybe. You wanna bet all our lives on maybe? ’Cause that’s what we’ll be doing if we try to get from here to that next break.” Ricky Dan shakes his head as he warms to the argument. “Think ’bout what you’re suggestin’, Lloyd. There ain’t no way on earth we could do that, even if it was a lead pipe cinch there was good air over there.”
Ricky Dan leans back and ticks off the reasons on his fingers.
“We’d have to hold our breath the whole way.” One finger.
“We’d have to climb over the conveyor—just by feelin’ of it. So much smoke out there even with a headlamp you couldn’t see a thing.” Two fingers.
“And then we’d have to feel along 50 feet of coal pillar ’til we come to the curtain. An’ all the time holdin’ our breath, remember, ’cause if we breathed just once, we’d start coughin’ and it’d be all over.” Three fingers.
“You could swim underwater that far if you had to, holdin’ your breath the whole way,” Lloyd fires back. “What’s the difference?”
Ricky Dan pauses. That’s a good point. Then he gestures toward the swollen, distorted lump that sticks out of Lloyd’s pants leg. “Could you swim with a broken ankle? Me ’n Will dragged you here or you’d still be in that shaft snuggled up to a piece of bent rail. How you figure to climb over the conveyor with a broke ankle?”
“I figure if I don’t, I’m a dead man—that’s how!” Lloyd shouts. He stops, collects his temper. “Don’t you think we’d oughta at least try?” He is pleading, now—because it is a foregone conclusion that whatever decision is made, it will be Ricky Dan who makes it.
“Tryin’ means dyin’ if you ain’t right, son.” In that moment, Ricky Dan sounds so much like Bowman it’s creepy. “’Cause even if we could get there—and I don’t b’lieve we could—but sayin’ we did, once we was there and didn’t find no curtain, ain’t no way in the world we’d make it back here alive. We go and it’s a one-way ticket.”
“What if only one of us went?” Will says. The words fall directly out of his brain and through his mouth with no conscious thought. He is actually surprised to hear his own voice. “What if one of us went to see if the seal and the curtain are still there? If they are, he could stay there long enough to catch his breath, then come back and get the other two. And if the seals are blown…well, don’t all of us get killed, only one.”
“And the other two’d have a better chance to make it with only two men breathin’ the air in here ’stead of three.” Lloyd leaps with both feet onto Will’s bandwagon. “Fact is, if the two of you was to leave me here by myself, I’d have plenty of air.” He stops for a beat. “That’s the way it’d have to be if you find more air—leave me here alone and you two go. We all know ain’t no way I’d ever make it over that belt line.”
Ricky Dan looks from Lloyd to Will and then speaks to Will.
“So you’re thinking one of us, either you or me, oughta go out in that smoke and gas and try to make it to the next break?”
Ricky Dan’s words punch Will in the belly. He had just blurted out the idea, hadn’t thought it through. If he had, he’d have factored in a game-changing consideration: no power on earth could force him back out into that poison air to die, to gasp and choke and flop around like that fish on the creek bank! He didn’t want to die, but if that’s what he had to do, he’d die here. Folks said suffocation was like fallin’ asleep. The lack of oxygen eventually made you pass out and you never woke up.
“I don’t know what I was thinkin’,” Will says despondently. He leans back and stares up at the pattern of fossil ferns on the roof. “We can’t—”
“’Cause just one of us goin’ makes sense to me,” Ricky Dan says. “Either way, live or die, the man who leaves is helpin’ the other two.” He pauses, then continues fiercely, “He ain’t leavin’ ’em behind.”
Miners live by a code. They stick together. One miner would never abandon his friends to save himself, and Ricky Dan is a miner to the core.
Will, on the other hand, has not a speck of miner’s instinct. He hates everything about digging coal. The terror of it is more ferocious than any emotion he has ever known. He’s just been unwilling to admit it, to himself or to anybody else, because of some stupid, little-kid need to be just like Ricky Dan. He’d thought that if he could gut it out for a while, his fear would lessen. The opposite has happened; every day, it is exponentially harder than the day before to get on that mantrip and ride into the dark depths.
Ever since Ricky Dan extinguished his hope of rescue, Will has been struggling to figure out how to die like a man. In the process, he has made a solemn vow. If by some miracle of God he gets out of here alive, he will never set foot inside another coal mine again as long as he lives.
“So which one of us is it gonna be?” Ricky Dan says, then begins to cough again. He has
hacked and wheezed since the moment he fell into the break of “clean air”—which is only clean by comparison to the poison soup outside. They brought smoke in with them; the enclosure smells like a charcoal grill ready for steaks.
Ricky Dan continues to cough; his watering eyes spew tears down his face.
“You can’t go, Ricky Dan,” Lloyd says. “Yore lungs is all tore up. You couldn’t suck in enough air to last you, wouldn’t make it 6 feet ’fore you started to cough.”
The terror that drills into Will is more powerful than the 300-volt electric shock that temporarily blinded him once when he touched a frayed cable.
He can’t. He won’t! Put a gun to his head and he’d still refuse to crawl through that hallway in hell clasped in the savage embrace of instant death. No!
“We ain’t gonna just decide it’s Will and that’s it.” Ricky Dan clears his throat, then manages a limp grin. “We’ll decide it the same way we decided who had to crawl under the porch and get that dead cat out. Rocks in the hat.”
For as long as Will can remember, disputes have been settled and decisions made by randomly drawing rocks out of a hat. Two black rocks, one white. The one who draws the white rock loses.
He’d drawn the white rock on the dead-cat carcass. It reeked so bad under that porch, he’d puked down there and made it worse. Granny liked to never got the dead-animal and vomit smell out of his clothes.
Of course, in this case there will be only one white rock and one black rock. Not one chance in three. One in two. Fifty-fifty. Will doesn’t like those odds. Doesn’t like them one bit!
CHAPTER 28
LLOYD SQUINTED. EVERYTHING seemed too bright. He cut off the light over the sink in the kitchen because it hurt his eyes. All the lights had shiny circles around them like headlights seen through a car windshield in the rain.
