Sister Mine

by Tawni O'Dell

  A quick search of the house turns up nothing interesting. Shannon’s room looks exactly the same as it did last time I checked it. Her bed is unmade. Her suitcase is open and sitting on the floor. There’s a hairbrush, a People magazine, a crumpled-up candy bar wrapper, an empty Mountain Dew can, and a tube of moisturizer that promises to help reduce the unsightly appearance of stretch marks sitting on the bedside table.

  The present to Junior is still sitting on the kitchen table where I originally left it.

  Vlad cleaned up meticulously before he left, washing and drying and putting away the cups, rinsing out the coffee pot, disposing of the beer bottle full of his cigarette ashes, and taking his newspaper with him. I could almost convince myself that he was never here and I imagined our whole encounter, except for the knot behind my ear and my throbbing headache.

  I look through my cupboards and refrigerator and remind myself again that I have to go grocery shopping, a task I hate. The only people who come close to annoying me as much as left-laners are cart-hogs, shoppers who leave their carts in the middle of the aisle and wander a few feet away, where they stand with their mouths open staring stupefied at the shelves as if they’ve never seen food before.

  I make a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of tea and retire to my couch along with my old Walkman from my college days and the National Geographic volume on Ireland.

  I pop the tape in the player, put on my headphones, and start leafing through the familiar pages of the book, past photos of streets lined with brightly painted storefronts like a crayon box, weathered faces of white-haired old men in plaid caps, their trousers tucked into the tops of their wellies, sheep in long creamy coats grazing on green minty hillsides, lonely thatched white cottages, a fantastic splash of bloodred window shutters against gray stone walls where girls in dull school uniforms loiter before first bell, spectacular views of sheer carved coastline and a raging iron-colored surf.

  I stop at a picture of a tiny whitewashed house with a slate roof and a red door. It’s surrounded by a heathland of broom bushes, fists of yellow gorse, wild rhododendron, and a carpet of small, long-stemmed orange flowers shaped like kisses, but it’s a mere dot in the rest of the bleak, broken landscape. Ragged, treeless mountains rise behind it and a foaming sea lies in front of it. There are no other signs of human life anywhere, not even a road.

  I’ve always imagined it must be one of the most isolated houses in the world. I find it beautiful and terrifying. This is where my safe place is, I used to think. If I could look inside its dark forsaken windows I would see the furnished place inside my soul.

  The interview begins. It starts off very official sounding and I think back to the days of stiff, awkward testimony the five of them were forced to give at the initial investigation. I attended every day and watched with morbid fascination as E.J. and the others were paraded back and forth to the microphone in their ill-fitting suits and shiny dress shoes bought just for the occasion, nervous and fidgeting, stripped of the protective camouflage of their ball caps and flannel shirts.

  These were some of the toughest, most self-possessed men on the planet. They could handle any physical discomfort and endure any abuse. They weren’t afraid of anything except losing their jobs. And here they were, wiping their sweaty palms on their suit pants and mumbling apologetically to men they had never met before and had certainly never wronged.

  The five of them testified about smelling the burning rubber. Lib testified about seeing the wisp of smoke, but admitted after lengthy questioning that he couldn’t be absolutely sure he saw it in the poorly lit conditions of a mine. They explained why the cable had been taped with duct tape instead of being properly repaired, and as expected this became the fault of the miners, not the company.

  Other J&P miners testified that sometimes they jury-rigged equipment, too. No, they responded to Cam Jack’s lawyers, they had never been officially authorized by the mine operator to do it, but they knew they were supposed to. How did they know? Could they read minds? No, they admitted that they couldn’t. Except for Humpy Dunmire who had been able to predict that his wife was going to leave him after her sister paid for her liposuction. She ran off with a computer programmer a month later. No one else had seen that one coming.

  For the most part the miners did an admirable job of not incriminating themselves and not making the company look bad either, which isn’t always easy but is something they’ve been trained to do for generations.

  Cam Jack’s history of ignoring safety violations came up, too, but the inspectors took most of the heat for his failure to comply.

  What good was a rule if no one enforced it? his lawyers argued. Historically speaking, the mine owner has always been put in a difficult position when it comes to miner safety, they went on. Yes, there needed to be safety standards, but with or without them, it was a deadly job. How was Cam Jack supposed to react to the inspection process when one side of society’s collective face told him to clean up his act while the other side admitted it was impossible to do so?

  No one ever got to put the question directly to Cam Jack, since he never put in an appearance during the entire investigation.

  From where I sat, it wouldn’t have mattered. He would have put the blame on someone else the same way everyone else did.

  It was the inspectors’ fault for not enforcing the safety violations. It was the miners’ fault for not pushing harder to have the equipment repaired. It was the miners’ fault for trying to patch cables with duct tape. It was Lib’s fault as crew boss for letting his men work around substandard equipment. It was the fault of the manufacturer for making the equipment in the first place.

  They were a roomful of men pointing fingers at each other, but there were only so many men and so many fingers, and inevitably each one of them ended up being pointed at as well as doing the pointing.

  When it was over, the Jolly Mount Five hung their suits in the backs of their closets to wait for a funeral or a wedding and felt nothing but relief even though—to those who kept track of such things—they had technically lost. But those same people never lived through what they had lived through and didn’t understand the time line of emotions that accompanied cheating death. The bitterness and the need to blame would set in much later. For the time being, they were high from the simple fact of their survival. They felt so lucky to be alive and free, it was hard to feel hostility toward anyone or anything even if they knew deep in their hearts it would eventually be necessary.

  INTERVIEWER: I want to thank all of you for agreeing to talk to me so soon after the rescue. Before we begin, can you each state your full name, your age, and how many years you’ve worked for J&P Coal?

  LIB: Liborio Joseph Bertolli, fifty-six. I’ve worked for J&P thirty-four years.

  JIMMY: James Francis Phyrst. I’m fifty-eight years old, and I’ve worked for J&P for thirty years.

  RAY: Raymond Scott Wylie. Thirty-eight. Fifteen years.

  DUSTY: Dustin Ross Spangler. Twenty-three. Two years.

  (joking comments from the other men about his youth and inexperience)

  E.J.: Thirty-eight. Twenty years.

  INTERVIEWER: And your full name?

  (snickering)

  E.J.: Eamon James Phyrst.

  (loud laughter)

  E.J.: Fuck off.

  (more laughter; laughter subsides)

  INTERVIEWER: Let’s start with that morning when you arrived at the mine to begin your shift. This is J&P Mine Number Twelve, also known as Josephine.

  RAY: Jojo.

  INTERVIEWER: Right. Jojo. Is there anything in particular that sticks out about that morning? Anything you remember?

  E.J.: Lib needed the bonus money.

  (roaring laughter)

  INTERVIEWER: The bonus money?

  DUSTY: Top loading crew gets a bonus every month.

  JIMMY: Lib was taking his lovely wife, Teresa, to the Poconos for their wedding anniversary and needed a little extra money.

  DUSTY: Yeah,
she wanted one of those honeymoon suites with a heart-shaped bed.

  RAY: And a hot tub.

  E.J.: Lib’d been busting our asses the whole week.

  LIB: I should’ve been busting your heads.

  DUSTY: We were going to get it no problem but that morning Wayne’s wife called in sick for him so we were going to be one man short. Usually we were an eight-man crew. The five of us, Wayne, Sam, and Andy.

  INTERVIEWER: You mean one of your crew actually called in sick that day?

  RAY: He was really sick, too. He wasn’t faking. He would’ve never had the balls to play hooky on Lib when we were so close to being top loading crew.

  INTERVIEWER: After the explosion happened, he must have felt like the luckiest man alive.

  LIB: He felt guilty.

  (silence)

  INTERVIEWER: So this is what you were talking about before you went inside the mine?

  LIB: The departing shift came out, and we talked about conditions, machinery, the usual stuff. One of the shuttle cars had stopped working, and the other crew boss told me where they’d left it.

  JIMMY: We got into the mantrip—

  INTERVIEWER: Mantrip?

  JIMMY: It’s the cart that takes us to the face where we’re cutting. It’s battery-powered and rides on rails like a train.

  INTERVIEWER: Describe the trip.

  LIB: There’s not much to describe.

  E.J.: It’s dark.

  (laughter)

  LIB: You enter the tunnel and head into the mains. You pass through them for a little over a mile before you get near Right Four. It’s a mile-long corridor leading off the mains with eight entries of its own and dozens of crosscuts between them. We were working pretty deep in Right Four.

  INTERVIEWER: How deep is pretty deep?

  LIB: About seven hundred feet below ground. About two miles from the portal.

  INTERVIEWER: Can you describe the mine?

  LIB: Describe the mine?

  JIMMY: Jojo is a room-and-pillar mine. That means the coal is dug from her one section at a time with blocks left behind to keep the roof from collapsing. She’s not a web of long dark tunnels. She’s more like a black maze and she’s larger than the entire town of Jolly Mount but with a height that never reaches more than five feet.

  LIB: She’s low seam but high yield.

  INTERVIEWER: So you never get to stand at your full height the entire time you’re working?

  LIB: No.

  INTERVIEWER: That’s incredible. What does that do to you physically?

  LIB: It’s hard on the body. There’s no denying it. A lot of miners get arthritis. E.J.’s shoulder had been bothering him. You got a shot of cortisone the day before, didn’t you? But it wasn’t helping much. That’s why I ran the miner for the first part of the shift.

  INTERVIEWER: So you take the mantrip to Right Four. How long does that take?

  LIB: About forty minutes.

  INTERVIEWER: So you get to the face. What happens next?

  RAY: Lib made some adjustments to our work assignments since Wayne didn’t show up and we were one truck short.

  E.J.: And my arm was fucked up. Excuse me. My arm was messed up.

  LIB: Dusty and Jimmy were bolting. Sam and Andy were driving shuttle cars. And Ray was on the scoop.

  INTERVIEWER: Can you explain some terms for me? What is bolting? And what exactly is a shuttle car and a scoop?

  LIB: Bolting is securing the ceiling. You drill holes in the roof and throw four-foot-long bolts up into them and tighten them. Shuttles are the electric dump trucks that take the cut coal to the beltway. The scoop is sort of like a low tractor with a bucket in front. You use it to clean up loose coal and debris.

  I was working the miner since E.J.’s arm was bothering him. He was assisting.

  INTERVIEWER: What is the miner?

  LIB: Continuous miner. It does the cutting. It has a steel cutter head. Carbide teeth.

  INTERVIEWER: Is this something you drive or carry?

  (laughter)

  LIB: This is a sixty-ton machine. You operate it with a remote control box you hang around your neck. You stand about twenty feet back for your own safety. Even experienced operators can accidentally tear into an old well or a pocket of firedamp, or hit a seam of rock, or cause a roof to collapse.

  INTERVIEWER: Are you thinking about the danger?

  LIB: You know there’s danger in this job. You’re conscious of it but you don’t think about it. If you think about it, you can’t do your job.

  DUSTY: There’s danger everywhere. You can get killed in your bathtub. You can have a totally safe job and end up dead. You can be a secretary for an insurance company and a terrorist can fly an airplane into your building and you’re dead. It’s fate. It’s your personal fate. You can’t pick your job that way.

  RAY: You know what they say, eagles may soar but groundhogs don’t get sucked into jet engines.

  (laughter)

  INTERVIEWER: What do you wear for protection? What kind of gear?

  LIB: Wear? Well, some guys wear coveralls. Others wear jeans and flannel shirts. Whatever you’re comfortable in but you gotta wear long johns cause you’re gonna be cold.

  E.J.: Knee pads, rain gear, rubber boots—steel-toed. Ear protection. Our helmets.

  JIMMY: Our tool belts.

  DUSTY: They have our ID tags on them.

  INTERVIEWER: Let me ask this. Can each of you try and remember one thing you were thinking before you went off to your individual jobs?

  DUSTY: I remember looking over at Jimmy, who’d already set off toward the bolters, and I saw his shadow against the wall, all stooped over the way we all walk and he was using his hammer as a walking stick and I thought he looked sort of like a gorilla using a little cane.

  (loud laughter)

  JIMMY: Such deep thoughts from one so young.

  RAY: To tell the truth, I was thinking about the bonus money, too. My oldest daughter, Autumn, was having her birthday in a couple days and my wife, Vonda, was throwing this big party for her and I was worried about what she was spending.

  INTERVIEWER: Lib, what were you thinking about?

  LIB: I was thinking about the broken shuttle car. I decided I’d send Sam and Andy to take a look at it during our lunch break. Andy has a knack for electronics and jury-rigging that comes in real handy in a J&P mine, since Cam Jack never pays to have anything properly repaired or replaced.

  (silence)

  LIB: Allegedly.

  INTERVIEWER: What do you mean?

  LIB: We’re not supposed to talk about what we think caused the explosion.

  INTERVIEWER: Who told you that?

  E.J.: Some lawyer.

  LIB: Ray’s wife, Vonda, had a lawyer waiting for us when they brought us out.

  RAY: She had potato salad waiting for us, too.

  INTERVIEWER: What about you, Jimmy?

  JIMMY: Nothing sticks out in my mind about that particular morning. I was probably thinking what I usually think. There’s a certain state of mind we all have to reach in order to do this job. Not necessarily because we’re afraid but because it’s a different world than what we live in. We might not even be conscious that we’re doing it. I do it by thinking of Jojo as a lady, someone who will give us what we want if we treat her well.

  (laughter)

  DUSTY: I like to think we’re like astronauts.

  LIB: Astronauts?

  DUSTY: We’re going where no men have gone before us, just like them. We’re space explorers, only we’re exploring an inside confined space instead of an outside endless space.

  JIMMY: Now that is deep, Dusty. I like that.

  INTERVIEWER: That’s very interesting. What were you thinking about, E.J.?

  E.J.: Lunch.

  (laughter)

  INTERVIEWER: So everyone has gone off to do their jobs.

  LIB: We were about to break for lunch. I handed the controls of the miner over to E.J. and told him to finish one last cut. I wanted one more c
ar full before moving onto the new room. Ray was still on the scoop. Jimmy and Dusty were settling down to eat. I was gonna drive the last load to the belt.

  E.J.: All of a sudden, the miner shut down.

  LIB: We went and took a look at the methane monitor in back.

  E.J.: I’ll never forget that. I’d never seen such a high reading. That was a helluva lot of damp.

  INTERVIEWER: You mentioned firedamp before. Now damp. What are you referring to?

  LIB: Damp’s a term for any gasses found in the mines. There’s black-damp, that’s carbon dioxide mostly, nitrogen mixed with it sometimes. It also means any time when there’s not enough oxygen to breathe. Afterdamp’s what you call all the gasses mixed together after an explosion. The air’s highly poisonous then because of the amount of carbon monoxide. That’s what our self-rescuers are for. They provide protection from the carbon monoxide.

  JIMMY: Firedamp is methane mixed with air. It’s highly explosive.

  INTERVIEWER: Where does the methane come from?

  JIMMY: Everywhere. Methane comes from the decomposition of coal.

  INTERVIEWER: Is that what caused this explosion?

  RAY: Probably.

  INTERVIEWER: So there’s no way to eliminate this problem?

  LIB: If you’re going to put men in a coal mine, you’re going to have firedamp.

  INTERVIEWER: What were you thinking when you saw the reading?

  E.J.: I’m thinking about what would happen if the tiniest spark got ignited. Even a spark from two particles of coal dust colliding. We’d all be dead.

  LIB: I’m thinking we’re going to have to shut down this room, maybe the whole crosscut. I was seriously pissed.

  I called Ray and Jimmy and Dusty over. We checked out the area with our personal monitors. The gas was everywhere. Then I smelled it.

  INTERVIEWER: Smelled what? The gas?