When Butterflies Cry: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  They hadn’t got far enough! The water from both lakes in one huge wave would slam down on them any second! Piper screamed. Grayson knocked her to the ground and threw himself on top of her. They smelled the nameless evil stink of coal vomit. Piper’s screams and Grayson’s, too, were gobbled up by the wall of sound streaking toward them. The ground shook, and the malevolent rumble grew until it drowned out all thought and reason and intent. Water hit them with the force of a fire hose, soaking them as they cringed in the dirt of the road. The beast, the behemoth of black death, shrieked a cry wild and Jurassic…as it passed them by.

  Grayson raised up on an elbow and looked through the splashing water, watching the hideous black freight train race past—the farthest edge not twenty feet away. Then it disappeared into the mist.

  Piper rolled over, and the two of them sat up and watched as an ever-diminishing rush of water rumbled by them and then was gone.

  It was over in—how long? Two minutes? Five? Thirty seconds? Grayson marveled that it took no longer than that for millions of gallons of black water to race past them down the hillside. But the grade was steep. The big dam was at least five hundred feet higher than where they lay in the mud. And the top of Chicken Gizzard Mountain was two thousand feet above Sadlerton, seven miles away.

  Where the ugly black smile had been, a small waterfall of stagnant water flowed down to the creek bed below. Grayson and Piper stared in shock at what lay below the waterfall. The tidal wave of coal waste and water had stripped down to bare rock everything it touched.

  Like the only two survivors of a nuclear attack, Grayson and Piper rose slowly to their feet in wonder, staring at the fog that was rapidly clearing with the warmth of the sun. They could see now as far as the house. But, of course, the house wasn’t. The butterfly meadow was gone, too. Where it should have been was a slimy smear of black mud.

  Without speaking, they lifted their eyes in unison and stared at the mist still swaddling Sadler Hollow. When it lifted, what would be left of the little town of Sadlerton?

  Chapter 35

  After the black monster crashed through the dam at the top of Sadler Hollow and leaped down into the creek bed and forest below, it gathered steam as it surged downward through the mist, picking up trees and rocks to use as battering rams on its first victim.

  Though delirious with pain and dizzy from shock, Riley Campbell heard it coming. The grinding, roaring sound instantly roused him, and he stared wide-eyed and afraid into the fog as the sound grew louder and louder, wondering what could possibly make such a noise. He saw it, got a good look at the oily, black serpent taller than the trees, but his voice was gone so his shriek of terror made no sound.

  The monster chewed up Riley in seconds, then surged toward its next victim, the metal bridge on Northfield Road. The carcass of the bridge was later found eleven miles downstream, a mangled mass of tangled blue beams that looked like a clump of dead blue spiders.

  The black flood that in some places spread out three hundred feet wide swept up the railroad track, tangling the rails and crossties with telephone poles and wires as it plowed through the first of the homes, businesses and other structures it would destroy along an eighteen-mile swath of devastation through Sadlerton and the coal-camp towns downstream: Akin, Bent Twig, Alice Springs, Barberville, Copperhead and into the county seat in Chandler. In all, sixteen coal-mining hamlets were visited by death that day.

  But Sadlerton took the brunt of the monster’s fury and served up most of its victims.

  The Granger family lived at the intersection of Strawman Road and Northfield Road. Tom’s father had stuck the scarecrow in his cornfield that had given the road its name. They were all asleep in their beds and never knew what hit them. Tom and his wife, Sonia, and three little girls died instantly when their house just past the bridge collapsed on top of them. They had never heard the fire alarm Sheriff Cliff called in. The fire station was at the other end of town.

  Oh, the oldest girl, Becca, heard the whoop of a siren in the distance and somebody yelling through a loudspeaker. She covered her head up with her pillow and went back to sleep.

  Five trailer houses sat beside Strawman Road, up from the Grangers. In all, a dozen adults and seventeen children lived in the mobile homes. Four trailer houses were swept away; the ten adults and fourteen children in them were killed. The fifth trailer house was slightly higher on the ridge than the other four. The monster carried away the chicken house, the clapboard garage and the pickup truck next to the trailer house, but only shoved the trailer sideways on its foundation and left it be.

  Bennett’s Five and Dime on the west side of the road vanished at the same time the post office on the east side was enveloped in the grinding black tidal wave.

  Five more houses, five more families. No one survived.

  *

  Carter found Tommy on the other side of the road, running toward his house, crying, “Buttons! Come here, boy! Buttons!”

  He caught up with the boy, maybe eight or nine years old, reached out a long arm and grabbed his shirt collar, effectively yanking him off his feet.

  “Hey, mister. I gotta git my dog!” the boy sputtered.

  Carter grabbed the boy by the upper arm, jerked him upright and turned to drag him back across the road toward where his mother and siblings had disappeared into the mist.

  He heard it when he turned. Two steps later and he knew what the roar was, growing louder and louder. Another three steps and he understood that they weren’t going to make it.

  Hey, maybe it was better to be out in the open like this, not crushed in a building or a house. Maybe the water would just wash you along, if you could manage not to drown until—

  Then Carter saw the black monster roaring toward them out of the mist to his left, a boiling, frothing, carnivorous beast forty feet tall. And he knew no living thing could survive contact with it. The rumbling, grinding roar drowned out every other sound; the sight drove out all thought, like looking into the gaping, black maw of hell itself.

  Tommy looked up the street toward it and screamed. Carter gathered the boy in his arms and hugged him to his chest, then turned his back toward the monster so the boy wouldn’t see.

  “Shhhh, don’t look,” he said into the boy’s hair, but the beast ate his words. He felt a spray of cold water, tensed and thought of Piper’s face the day they walked to the meadow and saw the butterflies. The way her eyes sparkled when she smi—

  Then it was on him, and Carter and the boy vanished into the bowels of the beast. The monster hammered them to the pavement and ground them up with trees and roofs and bricks and railroad ties and thick black water.

  Three more houses beyond the Carpenters’ house were destroyed. The families living in two of them had heard and heeded the sheriff’s cry of warning and had run for higher ground. The father in the third house wandered to the refrigerator in his underwear after the siren awakened him and was staring into its interior when the monster gobbled up his home and family.

  Other families on this end of town, closer to the fire siren that had already gotten their attention a few minutes before the sheriff’s run-for-your-lives warning, made it to safety. Everything they own vanished in an instant, leaving them shaking in disbelief on the hillside. But alive.

  Jesse McCullough’s family was not among the survivors. The fire siren awakened him, and he wondered idly what was burning before dozing off. When he heard the sheriff’s warning, he tried to get his family together to run, but it took too long. Survival rested on leaping out of bed and running for high ground. Jesse couldn’t get the kids to cooperate. Buster had gotten drunk as soon as he heard about Zeke Campbell and had stayed mostly drunk since. He grumbled that he wasn’t going anywhere no matter how loud Jesse yelled. Angie Faye was too fat to move fast. She made it out to the porch with their five-year-old before the black monster washed them all away.

  Sheriff Cliff had turned around at the edge of town and started back. He’d called dispatch in Chandler
with orders for deputies to warn the people living in the coal-camp towns downstream from Sadlerton but knew they wouldn’t be able to muster much of a response before the monster was on them. When he saw the black beast hurling at him, he whipped his cruiser back around and tried to outrun it. He very nearly made it. But not quite.

  It was all over before it was even time for kids to be in Sunday school. The eerie stillness that followed the monster’s rampage was testimony to the absolute devastation it had wreaked. One hundred and twenty-eight people died within fifteen minutes; one thousand, two hundred and thirty-two more were injured. Five hundred and seven houses, forty-four mobile homes and thirty-seven businesses were destroyed. Out of a population of five thousand people, four thousand were left homeless.

  Piper and Grayson Addington did not know that at the time, of course. But when the fog lifted, cleared completely by eleven o’clock, they saw that nothing remained in Sadler Hollow but a swath of smeared black mud that stretched as far as they could see.

  “Maggie knew,” Piper whispered, her voice hushed and awed.

  Grayson tried to speak, wanted to tell her that he had known, too, had seen a vision he hadn’t understood or believed. But his throat had closed up so tight he couldn’t make a sound. So he just nodded, tears in his eyes.

  “Where is she?” Piper asked. “Is she with—?”

  Grayson shook his head slowly from side to side, and Piper’s face went white. She couldn’t speak, just mouthed, “No!” her brown eyes wide and pleading. He reached out and pulled her into his arms and held her as she sobbed.

  Chapter 36

  If it hadn’t been for Sadie, they’d never have seen it. Grayson and Piper were buying groceries and other supplies in Charleston to take back to the shelter. They’d driven down through the riot of fall foliage, gold, russet and copper, and soaked up the color. Beauty was soothing to the soul, and there was nothing beautiful in Sadler Hollow anymore. Two months after the flood, it was still a wasteland of tangled debris, wrecked cars and black mud. Northfield Coal had, of course, refused responsibility for the disaster, claiming both dams had been sound. If a crazy man blew a hole in one of them, that certainly wasn’t the company’s fault, even if the crazy man happened to be the company president.

  The federal inspections, boards of inquiry and USBM investigations would drag on for years. Lawsuits would litter court dockets for decades.

  Meanwhile, the tattered, devastated remnant of the populations of the communities along the eighteen-mile route of devastation down Sadler Hollow struggled to put their lives back together.

  Piper and Grayson had decided to stay and help. When the press got hold of Gray’s story—combat veteran, chaplain of massacred unit comes home, and a week later his hometown is wiped out; his mother, brother and brother-in-law killed, along with nine cousins and assorted second and third-kin—the governor of West Virginia requested and got for Grayson a hardship discharge from the army.

  When his National Guard unit returned to Kentucky from Vietnam in September, Sergeant Hotchner led a group of volunteers who showed up in Sadler Hollow and spent a week renovating the old church building at the end of Turtle Road as a place for Grayson’s family to live. A little Baptist church on Bates Road had been a quarter mile above the tidal wave’s path, but the pastor and his family had not been so fortunate. Gray took over that church and worked with the Red Cross to set up a shelter and soup kitchen there for the Sadlerton victims of the disaster who’d made it out alive. And he conducted funeral services there for those who had not and buried them in the little cemetery out behind the church. Seventy-one new white crosses.

  Grayson bought stones, not crosses, to match the older stones already set in the Addington family cemetery next to the church at the end of Turtle Road. One of them read Marian Irene McCullough Addington, Born July 25, 1909, Died August 24, 1969. Hers rested on the right side of Grayson’s father, Everett. On the left side, next to the old stone where Becky’s name had started to fade, was a newer one: Everett Carter Addington Jr. Born June 1, 1940, Died August 24, 1969.

  And on the other side of Carter’s was a small new stone. It read simply, Maggie, Died August 24, 1969.

  That’s why it was so spine-tingling when Sadie cried, “Mabie! Look, Mommy, I see Mabie!”

  Piper knelt on one knee beside the child and looked into her eyes.

  “No, honey,” she said. “We’ve talked about this. Maggie’s gone. She’s in Heaven with Nana and Uncle Carter and Jesus. Remember?”

  “Mabie’s wight dere.” Sadie grabbed Piper’s hand and dragged her to the magazine rack beside a shelf of novels, cookbooks and calendars. “See!”

  On the rack at Sadie’s eye level was a copy of Time Magazine. Piper saw it and couldn’t seem to draw another breath.

  Grayson appeared with the basket, took one look at her face and asked. “What’s wrong?”

  She had no air to speak. All she could do was point to the magazine.

  As if in a dream, Grayson picked it up, and the two of them stared at it in shock.

  “Mabie,” Sadie cried, tugging on her father’s pants leg. “Wanna see Mabie, Daddy.”

  Grayson reached down and gathered Sadie into his arms without taking his eyes off the magazine, where Maggie’s face stared at them from the cover.

  “Where Is Andy Shelbourne?” shouted the headline above the picture.

  With numb fingers, Grayson flipped through the magazine to the story, which showed Maggie’s picture again alongside several pictures of the shattered elementary school in the Vale of Amberclewydd, Wales, that was destroyed by a coal slide down into a fog-filled valley on August 11, 1969.

  Grayson pointed to the date and whispered. “That was the day my platoon marched away from Yan Ling.” He’d told her the story of the little girl named Nguyen they’d left behind there. But not the whole story. He’d only told one person all of it. Carter. And that was enough.

  He’d also told her about seeing the black monster, falling to his knees, and crying out “Sadie!” and how he’d heard the echo of another voice united with his that day.

  August 11 was the day he’d uttered a prayer to a God he no longer believed in that was answered by the God who still believed in him—and by a little girl who had looked up out of the space beneath two boulders and said, “The dark’s all out of my head. It’s bright now, full of light.”

  Grayson’s eyes dragged from one word of the story to the next, reading it aloud quietly. It described the findings of the board of inquiry about the disaster, contained interviews with the parents of children who had died and with those who’d survived. No mention was made of the little red-haired girl on the cover until the final paragraph.

  “The lone mystery left to be solved about that awful day in August is the mystery of Margaret-Andryea (Andy) Shelbourne. Andy was milking the family cow on a hillside above the mist and saw the coal begin to plunge down into the valley—toward the school where her little sister was sitting in class. Andy raced to the school and made it into the building just as it collapsed.

  “The mystery is that Andy Shelbourne’s body was never found. The body of every other child was recovered and placed on the pews in the village church. But not Andy’s.

  “The girls’ only relative, their grandfather, committed suicide after the accident. Now, he lies buried in the church cemetery beside the grave of his younger granddaughter. Her grave is marked with a small stone that chronicles her short life in a single line. Born June 18, 1963, Died August 11, 1969, beneath her name: Sadie Shelbourne.

  Piper gasped, “Sadie!”

  “The grave next to it, marked Andy Shelbourne, lies empty.”

  Grayson raised his eyes and looked into Piper’s. Puddles of tears had formed there, and she blinked them into streams down her cheeks. He couldn’t seem to form the words to tell her that the first time he’d heard Maggie’s voice it had seemed familiar. He’d recognized it then, but couldn’t place it. Now he could. Before he met Maggie in
his mother’s parlor, he had heard her voice in his head.

  Outside a village in Vietnam, an army chaplain had cried out for his Sadie at the same time a little Welsh girl named Andy had cried out for hers. And somehow…

  Piper’s voice was ragged. “Who was she?”

  Of course, they both knew.

  Maybe Sadie did, too. In fact, maybe Sadie’d always known.

  The child reached out her chubby hand to the picture, stroked it tenderly with her little fingers.

  “Mabie,” she crooned wistfully. “Mabie loooves Sabie.”

  THE END

  *****

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  Author Ninie Hammon

  talks briefly about BLACK SUNSHINE

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  BLACK SUNSHINE

  After two decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to face his past.

  He and his best friend were the only two survivors of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 Eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 Coal Mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit little community of Aintree Hollow. But the two young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried the burden of a terrible secret about another tragedy that occurred in the mine after the explosion, a secret that destroys the next two decades of Will’s life.