by Ninie Hammon
“Not a clue. I’m still in shock at what we’ve already seen in it. I’m stunned that Jamey can…” Will had no words to describe how Jamey could carve the past, the present—and the future. “…do whatever it is he does.”
“It is pretty special, ain’t it. When I’s a little girl, I used to be jealous he could carve, mad that I couldn’t. I tried. I’d take a hammer and chisel to a piece of coal, and ’course it’d shatter.” She paused. “And the rest of it, the part that’s more than just carving—I done seen it so often it don’t shock me no more. But I guess it should. It’s magic, ain’t it?”
“I wouldn’t call it magic—that’s dark and Jamey is all light. But it is unmistakably supernatural. And I’ve never believed in that. Always thought there was a rational explanation for everything. Jamey and his…gift fly in the face of everything I know or understand. I don’t know how to respond.”
“You don’t got to respond to everything in life, do you? There’s some things that just…are. And you ain’t no part of it.”
They’d reached the shed. When he’d retrieved the carving from behind the potato box, Will hadn’t reattached the padlock. He reached out, turned the knob and shoved the door open for JoJo. She stepped past him into the building, then turned to face him.
“There’s one thing about Jamey’s carvings I have figured out over the years, though. Whatever message they got, you need to listen to it. ’Cause somebody went to a whole lot of trouble to deliver it.”
The shed was dark. Dull shafts of gray sunlight filtered through the wall cracks and stuck like pale arrows in the floor. Their faint glow barely lit the dust motes in the air.
With their eyes unaccustomed to the darkness, they had to leave the shed door open while they located the box of kitchen matches to light the first lantern.
Then they did as Granny had directed.
One after another, they lit all the lanterns. Then they closed the door and plunged the small room into a darkness relieved by flickering, golden light. Will put the piece of jet down on Jamey’s worktable, where a large lantern provided the best illumination. Then the two of them stared at the shiny surface that sparkled in the dancing light.
Will had no idea how long they stood there. The storm finally struck, mounted a ferocious assault on the hollow. Thunder cracked and boomed, wind slammed into the side of the shed and rain battered the roof. The combined cacophony was so loud it would have drowned out normal conversation.
But it didn’t drown out JoJo’s scream. Her shrieking wail pierced the semi-darkness in the shed and drove an ice pick of agony into Will’s left ear.
CHAPTER 32
LLOYD SQUATTED BRIEFLY so he could focus the light of his headlamp out in front of him. The rumble of the continuous miner filled all the cavity around him. He breathed the roar into his body with every breath, could feel the vibration in his teeth. The machine operated at the end of what was essentially a really long extension cord. Lloyd picked up the heavy power cable and moved it out of the way so the miner man wouldn’t run over it when he backed up.
Looked like the miner’d already got the cord once. Its plastic insulation had been scuffed so deep one spot was just shy of bare wires. Probably the result of constant dragging across the mine floor. It needed to be fixed, though, could give somebody a nasty shock if they touched it wrong. Inspector seen that, he’d write them up sure.
But after today, wasn’t no inspector going to care about a worn cord; there’d probably never be another inspection in Harlan #7. With the storm outside, the explosion might bring the whole mine down. Lloyd knew once why that was, but he’d forgotten the specifics. Something about how the low barometric pressure of a storm allowed more methane out of the coal and the moist air the fan sucked into the mine weakened the roof.
“Need to get some tape and fix that.”
Lloyd didn’t know the miner’s assistant was behind him until the man shouted in his ear.
“Yeah, I’m on it,” Lloyd said and pretended to look concerned. Like he’d pretended to look concerned as he watched the back curtain for Ricky Dan’s return.
Lloyd stares at the piece of yellow plastic, tries to muster the same look of yearning he sees on Will’s face. Time passes and the look on Will’s face doesn’t change, but the feeling behind it does. It’s like those cicadas that shed their skins, leaving them stuck to the bark of trees every summer. Will has left his face behind, frozen in a look of anxious anticipation. But the person who is Will Gribbins has given up all hope, is utterly despairing. And devastated.
Finally, Lloyd reaches up and turns off the headlamp so he doesn’t have to look at Will’s face anymore. In the utter darkness that envelopes him, he struggles not to get disoriented, unable to think clearly. He needs to do the math again. He tries and fails. The problem has become too complex for him to get his mind around. How much of the six hundred and forty cubic yards of air did the three of them use breathing it for…what, 3, maybe 4 hours? How much was left for him and Will? Would it be enough?
The longer he frets over the numbers, the more anxious he becomes. Suppose the three of them had used up so much there wasn’t enough left to sustain him and Will until rescue came? Ricky Dan spent almost the whole time coughing his head off. Did that use up more oxygen? Or less because he couldn’t breathe deep? Almost the whole time they’ve been imprisoned in the break, Will has been panting in terror. That certainly used up more air.
It’s the dark that makes figuring so difficult, that sends racing, panicked thoughts through his brain. The dark and the silence. Will hasn’t spoken a word. The moment Ricky Dan plunged out into the poisoned shaft, Will fell silent, like he’d been struck dumb.
Lloyd can’t stand the dark any longer. He reaches up to turn his headlamp back on when the second explosion goes off. His ears pop as a sudden thunder rumbles all around him, roars louder than the coal train pulsing above his body years ago. The ground shakes, the curtains flap. He smells dust, hears the clatter of rocks nearby, and puts his hands over his head in a ridiculous effort to protect himself as the mountain falls down on top of him.
This is it! All his scheming has been for nothing. Terror seizes his guts harder than when he heard the first explosion. He didn’t have time to process it then, didn’t understand what was happening, what it meant. But he does now. He’s going to die here in the dark!
Then the rumble subsides. He begins to cough; dust chokes him. He fumbles for the switch and turns on his headlamp. There has been a roof fall inside the break. Will is stretched out on the floor under a fresh pile of rocks with a widening pool of blood spreading out from his head. For a moment, Lloyd is too surprised to react. He starts to crawl to Will, but the instant agony in his broken ankle shoots up into his belly and makes him nauseous.
He settles back, panting, tries not to cough in the dusty air. He shines his headlamp the best he can on what he can see of Will. There is no movement. Without a helmet to protect him, Will’s head has been cracked open by the hunks of slate. He is dead.
Lloyd’s initial rush of sorrow is quickly short-circuited by relief. Then joy. Will is dead! And that’s a shame, it really is. He liked Will a lot; he was like a brother. But so was Ricky Dan. And with both of them gone, all the air that’s left in here, dusty as it is, belongs to Lloyd. Just one man breathing. He can last for hours, longer than it will take a rescue team to reach him. He’s going to make it after all. He’s going to live!
His giddiness quickly passes. The roof fall sent some rock down on his side of the enclosure as well. Dust and gravel slid off the back of his helmet into his shirt and down his back. Now it has mingled with his sweat to form an itchy goo. He leans forward carefully, unbuttons his shirt and eases it off. And his magician’s rope plops out into his lap. He’d forgotten that he stuffed it down the front of his shirt at lunch—which seemed a hundred years ago. The short ones he stuffed up his sleeve are gone.
He picks up the rope and looks at it, still tied in a hangman’s noose
, and wonders if the disaster would cancel the Halloween carnival. Duh. Of course it would! And he hated that. He’d worked so hard to…
There’s a noise outside the curtain next to him. Lloyd freezes. Why would the rescue team come down the belt line shaft?
The rocks that hold the curtain to the floor suddenly roll away as it is pulled up from the bottom. And Ricky Dan Sparrow falls through the opening right into Lloyd’s lap.
Gasping, choking, his helmet gone, he tries to speak.
“…’xplosion knocked…curtain down…” he gasps.
He’d found it; he’d actually made it to the other pocket of air!
“…couldn’t fix…” Then he begins to cough—hacking and gagging. He’s half in, half out of the enclosure. The curtain’s not completely sealed and smoke pours in around him.
“Ricky Dan, you gotta—”
He keeps coughing, won’t move, probably can’t move. The air inside the break begins to fill with smoke!
Lloyd has no memory of thinking before he acts. His movement is simple reflex, pure self-preservation. In one quick motion, he slips the hangman’s noose around Ricky Dan’s neck and pulls it tight.
Ricky Dan reaches up and claws at the rope. His eyes wild, he struggles frantically to get his fingers around it to pull it away. Then he jerks upward and Lloyd realizes he has woefully misjudged Ricky Dan’s remaining strength. In panic, in deadly fear, Ricky Dan raises up onto his hands and knees and yanks backward, and he and Lloyd tumble out of the break into the poison air in the shaft. Lloyd squeezes his squinty eyes shut against the burning smoke and stops breathing. He holds tight to the rope. The big muscles in his arms bulge as he pulls with all his strength. Ricky Dan jerks and flops. And then is still. Lloyd holds on for a moment longer then knows he has seconds to get back into the enclosure before reflexive coughing will kill him.
He lets go of the rope and plunges back under the curtain, the agony of his ankle a remote pain, like the throb from a pulled tooth as the novocaine wears off. Everything feels distant, disconnected. In a dazed, spinning dream he forces himself to belly crawl the rest of the way in so the curtain drops back onto the floor behind him. He drags himself a foot or two farther, then he begins to cough. There’s so much smoke and dust. He coughs and coughs and…
When he opens his eyes, there is no bad air. There is a mask over his face that delivers blessed, cleansing, clean oxygen. He closes his eyes again and drifts away.
Lloyd moved the cord again to give the miner man slack to dig deeper. Already 20 feet into the cut, he just kept going. Wasn’t supposed to dig more than 20 feet without letting the roof bolter insert screws to hold the rock layers together. But that slowed down production and production trumped safety concerns every time. Company didn’t care that the miner man and his helper was working at the end of a 30-foot tunnel of unsupported roof. Long’s that black sunshine stacked up on the belt line, nothing else mattered.
The air here was already bad; ventilation was lousy for the same reasons now it’d been bad in 1980. New owners didn’t do nothing but put lipstick on a pig; Harlan #7 was still a dog hole mine.
Lloyd coughed. It was a shame he had to suck in coal dust with his last breaths on earth. It had felt so good to breathe the oxygen in that mask. He’d spent the first half hour of consciousness with his eyes closed, savoring the pure joy of good air.
Then he’d heard voices, men, not nurses, and he knew he had to return to the world. Inside two minutes, he realized that the time he’d spent innocently enjoying fresh air would be the last moments of innocent enjoyment he would ever know.
“He’s awake,” somebody says. Lloyd squints and the face comes into focus. It’s Beau Grissom, the head of Big Sandy Mine’s rescue team. He’s all cleaned up, nice shirt. Lloyd is confused, not completely certain where he is or how he got here.
“What…happened?” he croaks, and the effort to speak sends shards of glass through his raw throat.
“I know it hurts to talk,” Beau says. “You just listen.”
Then Beau describes the rescue effort and in a sudden rush powerful as a rain-swollen creek, it all comes back to Lloyd.
The explosion.
The break full of rocks.
Will.
The hat.
Ricky Dan!
Lloyd’s afraid he’s about to be sick. Surely, he dreamed it. He didn’t really…but he knows it’s no dream. And when a full understanding hits him, it feels like he’s been gut shot.
He had killed Ricky Dan Sparrow! Strangled him with his magician’s rope.
But even more important—he had left the rope around Ricky Dan’s neck!
Lloyd hasn’t heard a word Beau has said. Even in this fresh air, he can’t catch his breath. There’s an iron clamp around his chest squeezing tighter and—
“…got a pretty bad concussion, I ain’t gonna lie to you. And he ain’t woke up yet. But Will’s a fighter. My money says he’ll come out of this fine.”
“Will is…?” Lloyd tries, but the words won’t form.
“Alive? Yeah, he is.” Beau thinks Lloyd can’t talk because of the pain in his throat. “We need to let you get some rest.” He nods to another rescue squad member, a man Lloyd can’t place, standing on the other side of the bed. “You need to know the good Lord was watchin’ over you ’n Will. We almost didn’t see that smeared chalk on the curtain, and wasn’t long ’fore it all went.”
“All…?”
“Yeah, it blew big, bigger’n the first two times. While we was gettin’ you boys out, the team from Hard Scrabble got close as they could to the face and seen… After that, wasn’t no reason to send in more men. Glad we didn’t, ’cause a couple hours after the big blow, the roof let go in your section. Collapsed. Good news is looks like the blocked shaft put out the fire in the coal.”
“Ricky Dan…?”
Beau and the other man exchange a look. Then Beau reaches out, touches Lloyd’s arm and speaks softly.
“Lloyd…there’s just you ’n Will. You’re the only two got out. All the rest...I’m sorry to have to say it, Lloyd, but they’s all gone. Twenty-seven men lost and we didn’t recover a single body. That coal fire at the face, it was burning hotter’n… there couldn’t a-been nothing left of none of ’em. There ain’t no open shafts on that side of the mine no more, neither. Roof falls everywhere.”
And for the next 20 years, the first thought in Lloyd’s mind every morning is the same: Someday somebody’s gonna dig out the belt line shaft in Harlan #7. When they do, they’ll find Ricky Dan Sparrow’s body. With Lloyd’s magician’s rope—a hangman’s noose around his neck.
CHAPTER 33
GRANNY STOOD at the back door as Will and JoJo went down the porch steps. She smiled at the memory of the look on Will’s face when she told him. Shock. Disbelief. Wonder. And in the end, she’d seen the beginning of… joy. Or hoped she had. Will probably wouldn’t even recognize the feeling; it’d been that long since he’d had anything to be joyful about.
She watched the two of them until they were out of sight in the trees beyond the garden, and she wondered what they would see when the lantern light flickered on the piece of jet they carried with them. She also wondered if Will had got anywhere with JoJo. That child was wrapped up tighter than an ear of corn in the husk.
Granny sighed, turned, and almost tripped over Crawdad.
“You hadn’t oughta sneak up on me, you fat thing.” She reached down and picked the cat up in her arms. “Good way to get a paw mashed.” She petted him gently and his motor instantly turned on. His purr sounded like the hum of that old freezer they used to have before it broke. “Yore feeling lonesome ’cause Will’s here and ain’t nobody payin’ no attention to you, ain’t you, boy?” She scratched the big cat behind his left ear. “Well, Granny still loves ya, even if you are worthless as wings on a goat.”
She carried the cat to the kitchen table, sat down, and put the cat on the floor at her feet. He rubbed back and forth against her leg. But wh
en she wouldn’t pick him back up, he strolled over to his favorite spot in front of the double patio doors, circled three times and then curled up on the patch of worn brown carpet that would have been warmed by sunshine if there’d been any.
Granny looked at the chair where Will had sat as he took his heart right out of his chest and handed it over to her. Bleeding, but still beating. It was a brave thing he done. Brave to come back here and face her. She was proud of him.
Now Lloyd? She sighed again. He’d been harder. Way harder. But God had give her the strength to forgive Lloyd too. It had taken a long, long time. Years and years of getting up ever morning and forgiving him all over again. Lloyd had been right here in the hollow. He could have come to her anytime, told her the truth. But he hadn’t let life humble him, like it done Will. Hard times had just made Lloyd bitter. When they was youngsters, she used to look up from planting or weeding the garden and watch all three boys tumble around in the backyard like bear cubs. Even then, Lloyd didn’t seem to know his own self what he aimed to do one second to the next. But he’d already got too close to the fire and she couldn’t pull him back.
Bucket gave a disinterested, half-hearted bark at something, probably that badger lived in a hole across the road. If Bucket hadn’t been so old, he’d a-got that badger a long time ago. But it had started to rain and wouldn’t nothing get that dog off the porch in the rain; he hated to get wet. Granny hoped Will and JoJo’d made it to the shed before the rain hit. She looked in that direction as if she could see through the walls. And she wondered again what the two of them would see in Jamey Boy’s arts.
Speaking of Jamey Boy’s arts…
His latest one lay on the table in front of her, wrapped in a pillowcase with pale blue stripes the same color as the ragged blue hoodie that hung on a hook beside the front door. The hoodie Jamey Boy should have worn to work. Fifty-eight degrees is a mite nippy if you ain’t dressed for it. But he was a man full growed, she reminded herself, even if he’d always be a little boy. Had to let him do for himself.
