by Chris Cander
“Walter? Walter, you’re gonna be okay, hear?” John moved to pat him on the shoulder, in an expression of comfort or solidarity, but then he froze. Lord knew he had no such right to touch him. Instead he scooted over a foot or so toward one end of their space and began pulling at a hunk of coal that stuck out far enough to grab it. Then he yanked it free and fell backward from the sudden give. But rather than revealing a hole, a hope, the empty spot filled again with fallen clots that had been lying above the one he removed. Walter moaned again.
John had never been trapped inside a collapsed mine before. There’d been some small cave-ins in his experience, worked-out sections fallen in after the last pillars supporting the roof were mined. But there’d never been an explosion he knew of personally, never any lives lost. It happened all the time, of course — that was the risk of going underground. Though it hadn’t happened in Verra, he’d heard that any explosion or cave-in would be felt aboveground. That the entrances would work like chimneys and dump smoke into the sky. That people on the surface would see the smoke that signaled disaster, feel the mountain moving. Help would soon come running.
John heard Walter try to speak and shined the lamp on his face. Walter squeezed his eyes against the brightness and licked coal dust off his lips.
“Abel?” he said.
“Don’t know. Can’t hear anything. You okay, Walter? Are you feeling anything?” John didn’t want to draw attention to his left hand, gone under a crush of slab.
“Head hurts.”
John nodded, shining the light around again, sweeping the space for Walter’s dinner bucket. No small miracle that it was trapped with them. John lifted the lid and pulled out biscuits wrapped in a cloth napkin, two lengths of kielbasa, a pear, and a pat of garlic cream cheese. He felt an oddly timed sting at that, this small act of treason, this particular food preparation, customized for Walter’s tastes. If she’d ever had the chance, Alta would never have put that particular combination into a bucket for him. Here was a symbol of the life she lived when he wasn’t making love to her in their cabin in the woods. This man he lay trapped with had no idea the luck he had, the loyal bit of love Alta saved for him. John may have had her heart, her body, but Walter had this: their history, their son, this thoughtful dinner bucket filled with Polish food and a folded napkin. Lifting the tin that held it all, John placed it on the ground. They might, if they lasted, get hungry for it.
Meantime, he leaned forward and scooped Walter’s head into his hand and lifted it up. Then he held the bucket to Walter’s lips and let the water fill his mouth, careful not to pour too quickly. Still, Walter coughed and winced, then tried to lift his head forward, wanting a little bit more. Frowning at the flow, John lifted his head up again. He was thirsty, too, he realized. But then, John didn’t have a hand cut off at the wrist. He’d save all the dinner bucket water for Walter.
“Wha happen.”
“Something. An explosion. I’m not sure how, but I think it was planned. Where are the other guys?”
Walter opened then closed his eyes. “Abel.”
“I know. I know he’s here.”
Walter let his head fall back and his eyes close.
“Walter, Abel got out,” John said. “I was calling and he heard me. He made it out. I passed him on my way in.” John’s voice grew louder, confident. “He wanted to come back in for you, but I told him no. Said I’d come in. He wanted to come for you, he did. He’s all right. He’s safe.”
Walter pressed his eyes closed and nodded. “Thank …” He nodded, very slightly, again.
“He’s all right,” John said, and nodded, too.
“Why’re you down here? Ain’t you … sick?” Walter asked in a strained voice. Then he raised his head and pressed against the floor with his good hand. “Need to sit up.”
John glanced again at Walter’s wrist. “Best you stay where you are,” he said. “Space’s tight. Not much room for sitting up.” He scrunched himself down lower as he spoke, took a breath that came up short. What time was it? Theirs were the only voices he’d heard.
“Gotta get them,” Walter said. “They’re up … at the face.” He took a breath and waited. “Laying track. Must be ’bout lunchtime.”
John’s head started to thump in the center of his forehead. “Long about,” he said. “Don’t worry. They’ll take a break when they need one.”
Walter rolled his head slowly toward John and fixed his stare. “I know,” he said.
John nodded. “They’ll be getting along … fine.”
“Not that,” he said. “I know … about you … and Alta.”
Were his head not pounding, John might have had a different reaction. But feeling the cool, tight air turning into poison, making it harder and harder to breathe, knowing the lack of human sound around them meant their time was counted, he just said, simply, “I’m sorry.”
Walter shook his head. “No.” He paused. “She was only happy ’cause of you.” He took a labored breath. “I couldn’t ever make her happy … as she deserved to be … you did, though.” He breathed. “An’ I’m grateful for it … believe it or not.”
John dropped his head into his hand, then turned the light away from the both of them.
“Air’s thick.”
John nodded.
“Something’s wrong with my arm.”
“I think there might be.”
“You get outta here, you give her a message for me, will you?”
“Truth said I think my fuse is … pretty short, too,” John said. “I’m not sure I’m getting out if … you don’t.”
“Then … let me … I want to leave her a letter, tell her something,” Walter said, quiet. “Abel, too.”
With this, John could see their end. Rivals crumpled up together inside the mountain, voices and wants and futures muted. Their mutual love for Alta, revealed at this last moment, seemed almost conspiratorial. John had a violent urge to confess everything to Walter. But he restrained himself and instead patted down his own pockets in search of a pencil and paper.
“Notepad … in … my pocket,” Walter said.
John leaned slowly in, as though he were swimming upstream in New Creek, and dug into Walter’s front pocket, never minding the oddness of the act. He pulled out a short ballpoint pen and small leather-bound pad of paper. Peeling back the cover and the first dozen or so pages of notes — when they’d tested for methane gas and where, how many buggies had gone out on the production shifts — he found a blank. He handed it to Walter.
“Can’t. Something’s wrong … with my arm. Can’t … feel it … at all.” He stopped and took a labored breath. “You gotta write it for me. I’ll tell you … what to say.”
So John took a dictation, sloppily spoken and sloppily translated, from the dying husband of the only woman he’d ever loved. It was longer than he’d thought, and harder to write, but he owed it to him, considering. When he was finished, John tore out the pages and folded them in half.
“Put ’em … in my bucket,” Walter said. “Bottom half. Least she might … get that … if we burn up down here.”
John hadn’t thought of the possibility of a fire. But of course, it was there. They were surrounded by methane gas and coal dust, ready for ignition.
He was about to say something to Walter, he didn’t know what — his thinking was starting to become a little unhinged — but when he looked down, he saw that Walter’s eyes were closed again, but in a different way. Less determined, somehow. And his mouth had gone slack.
He’d have reached out to shake him, but he was afraid there wouldn’t be any response. So instead he peeled back the pages of the pad again and began to write a note of his own. He started to think about Liam, why he’d planned this, if he should give him up, but it was too confusing. He didn’t have enough energy to sort it through. Instead he thought of Alta, the source of his greatest comfort. He could barely think of what it would feel like for her, finding those two notes stashed together in the emptied-out bot
tom of her husband’s dinner bucket, any more than he could imagine himself and Walter dying together, alone, three miles underground. Nonetheless, he felt the walls folding in, the air seeping out, and time squandering itself into unclaimable scraps.
John finished his own note to Alta, folding it up unnecessarily small. He poured out the rest of the water and put his note on top of Walter’s at the bottom of the bucket. Then he emptied the top portion of its thoughtful, wasted meal, and set it down inside. Walter remained still. Wax-like. Then John set the lid and pressed it down with all his remaining might and leaned back against the filthy coffin wall.
The last thought he had, before his entire, unfinished life passed before his eyes, was of Alta. She was lying on the white sheets of their bed in the woods, looking at him. She was smiling.
October 13, 1950
Nearly a week had passed with the entire town slogging through the days. Those who’d lost only their sense of security brought food to those who’d lost their husbands, fathers, sons. People greeted one another with nods and grim hellos, but they took extra care to help one another carry bags and cross streets, aware of the precariousness of daily life. The Number Seventeen was shut down, under investigation; the Blackstone Coal officials, panicked; thirteen miners, gone.
“Behold, I tell you a mystery,” Father Timothy read to the congregants gathered that Friday night at St. Michael’s. The pews were full of mourners, lapsed and faithful both, there to honor the passing of the six dead Catholics. The Methodist and Presbyterian churches were likewise full, remembering their own. “We shall all indeed rise again: but we shall not all be changed.”
The caskets were open. Six of them lined up, each with candles at both ends. At Abel’s head, his baptismal candle; only he was young enough for his mother to still have his to use. They were all laid out, hands crossed, in their Sunday clothes. Except for Walter, whose left hand couldn’t be put back together respectfully enough. Instead, his right hand rested across his still heart.
Myrthen sat at the organ, upright and chaste, watching the mourners. She wouldn’t look at the gray, blank faces lying in their coffins; they threatened to remind her of all the things she wanted to bury. When she saw Alta lean so far down into the last coffin, her hand resting on her son’s, Myrthen turned her back to them. She had suffered her own litany of inconceivable losses, she reasoned; it was God’s way of keeping things in balance.
“Let us pray,” said Father Timothy, vested in his alb and stole, once the bereaved had all passed their loved ones. “Be mindful of our brothers who have fallen asleep in the peace of Christ. Lead them to the fullness of the resurrection and gladden them with the light of your face. Amen.”
After a moment, they all looked up at Father Timothy and he nodded at Myrthen. She hadn’t yet paid her respects as the others had, because, as the parish’s honorary music minister, it was her role to console and uplift the mourners. She was to create, through the music of the organ, a spirit of hope in Christ’s victory over death. It was a role she usually relished, but tonight she stared at her own fingers as she played dirge after dirge, slow and somber.
After so long, she was finally free. But even as she breathed the deeply fusty, divine love she’d so long held, she couldn’t breathe easily.
Myrthen lifted her hands from the organ keys in a floating movement, then let them drift back down to her lap and interlace themselves into their familiar clasp. She remained seated at her bench as one after another stood and shuffled to the lectern to share their memories of their dead. Stinky, whose given name was Elmer, was eulogized by his twin brother, Homer, who scrubbed at his tears with his fist and wished to God he’d taken on that fated dead shift in his brother’s place. Bones’s son, Jacob, stood next, in from Philadelphia, where he was going to dental school. He told a story about how his daddy had taken him down the mine when he was seven years old and made him lie flat on his face and hold his breath until he was gasping. That was what it was like working underground, his daddy had said. Bones saved every bit of scrip he could and forced Jacob to do extra homework, even on the weekends, so he could earn a different kind of living. Cross’s wife, Betty, went up, carrying their four-month-old son, their sixth child, and meant to say something poignant and meaningful her five elder children could remember, but all she could do was cry. Father Timothy took her arm and walked her back down to the pew.
Nobody moved to eulogize the other three men. John’s parents were both gone by then, as was his brother, lost to war. Myrthen made no move to speak, and nobody encouraged her to do so. Walter and Abel loomed too large for the congregation, a respected foreman and his quiet son, and when Alta remained blanched and silent, nobody dared take her place. Not even her brothers, who’d returned to Verra from their scattered homes to be with her.
When the prayers had been said and the candles had dripped down to their holders, it was time for them to go. People flowed out through the aisles and peacefully into the night, Myrthen accompanying them on her organ with a dirge entitled “Though the Mountains May Fall.” Father Timothy shook the mourners’ hands as they left the narthex, giving details about the Requiem Mass and burials scheduled for the following day. After a quarter hour or so, everyone was gone, the church empty but for its low light and ancient incense smell, and the laments bursting gravely from the organ.
Only one person stopped to offer condolences to Myrthen.
“I’m sorry …,” Alta said from behind her.
Myrthen went rigid, her back, her fingers. She took a deep breath in and held it. Alta.
“For your loss — ”
Myrthen flung up her right hand, quickly, to stop her. She didn’t want anyone, especially Alta, to intrude on her narrowed thinking. She had prayed very hard, bruised her knees and squeezed her eyes so intently until she no longer saw or even thought of the periphery of her actions. If there were credit or blame to be assigned, it all would go to God.
“I’m sorry for your loss, too,” she said without emotion. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
Alta turned as if to go, but then stopped. “They say it was your cousin who was responsible,” she said, her voice trembling.
Myrthen paused. It wasn’t the first time in the past week she’d been asked. “So they say.”
“Do you believe it?”
“It’s possible,” she said to the organ keys.
“But why? Why would he do such a thing?”
“It’s not our place to understand God’s will.”
“God’s will?” Alta cried. “God’s will? You think God wanted my child to die? Our husbands? You think God wanted Liam to take everything away from us?” Alta stamped her foot and Myrthen jumped at her stool. “Turn around, for chrissakes! Look me in the eye and tell me that God wants me to be a childless mother!” Alta cried out. “You sit there like a statue. Like we haven’t lost anything.” Her voice shook. “You have no idea — no idea — what I’ve lost.”
Myrthen turned slowly around and pressed her shoulders back against the guilt and fear until they were nearly smothered. “We have all suffered, and none so greatly as the Lord Himself. He lost His one and only son — ”
“I lost my one and only son!” Alta screamed at her. “Do you hear me? My one and only son!” With each word, she banged her heart with her fist. “You can have your God,” she said. “I want no part of it.”
Myrthen looked around, hoping Father Timothy would come in to hush Alta, to take her away. The rawness of her was beginning to take effect.
“You can only know God’s grace if you have faith in Him,” Myrthen whispered, looking down at the worn planks of the church floor.
She forced herself to forget her part in it, to believe her own words. Then she turned back to the organ and began, again, to play.
November 9, 1950
Alta sat at her kitchen table, her long hands cupping a mug of hot coffee. Next to her sat a soggy, three-day-old Charleston Sentinel. Her bowl and spoon had been washed and set t
o dry on a linen towel spread by the sink. The counters cleaned. The stove quiet. The only sound was the clock in the living room, ticking away the minutes.
She looked beyond the steam rising from her cup and out the window. It had just started to rain again, fat drops, slow and even. She’d been staring through that window daily since the day they came to tell her that everyone she loved had died.
She’d only just seared the pork tenderloin for that night’s dinner when Sonny Schumann knocked on her screen door. He still had on his turtleback hat. When she opened the door and stood before him, he took it off and held it at his waist.
“Mrs. Pulaski?”
“Morning, Sonny. What brings you by so early?” She hadn’t heard the thunder and lightning coming up from underground. Other townsfolk had. They’d come trotting up to the mine entrance, gathered around, watched the black smoke billowing out, growing tense, waiting.
“It’s the mine,” he said. “Mr. Pulaski — your husband — was working Number Seventeen this morning, wasn’t he?”
“He was working, yes.”
“There was … an accident.”
“No,” she said. She took a step backward.
Sonny paused, then wiped his brow and said at last, “Your husband and your son were underground.” He waited a moment for her to absorb his words, seeking her eyes for the moment of recognition.
“There was an explosion.”
“No.”
He looked down at his hat, the expression on her face too much to bear. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“An explosion?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Pulaski. It was an explosion. They got rescue teams going down. But your husband … your son … they both been found. I’m sorry.”
Alta swallowed hard. Abel’s and Walter’s dishes were drying beneath a shaft of sunlight on the kitchen counter. The ironing board wore one of Walter’s shirts, the empty sleeve dangling loose in the open air.
“Found?”
“The mine collapsed around ’em, Mrs. Pulaski. I was sent to tell you. Walter — Mr. Pulaski — was found in the power station with Mr. Esposito, don’t know if you know him, and your son — Abel — was with the other men closer up the face. The investigators are coming in, but it appears to be caused by methane. Weren’t nobody found alive.”
