Coal River

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  “No,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind.”

  “I could take good care of you, Emma. You know that, right?”

  She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Was he really that dim-witted? Or had he hit his head when he fell? She resisted the urge to tell him she’d rather die, or go to jail, than be with him. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay. This place holds too many bad memories.”

  He sighed again and, after a long pause, said, “Good luck, then. I mean that.”

  “Thank you.” She forced a smile.

  “If you change your mind,” he said, “you know where to find me.”

  “I do.”

  “I guess this is good-bye, then.

  “It is.”

  He nodded once, then turned toward his horse. She watched in silence, her chest and shoulders loosening in relief. Now, for the first time since coming down from the culm pile, she felt pain in her stomach, arms, and back. Sulfur burned the cut on her hand. Her entire body ached as if she’d been hit by a runaway wagon and trampled by a hundred hooves. Frank put his foot in the stirrup and glanced over at her one last time. Please, just go, she thought. Finally he climbed on, kicked the horse, and galloped away. If he told Mr. Flint, or anyone else, that she was up here this morning, who knew what would happen? Maybe Uncle Otis would come looking for her. Maybe he would drag her home and lock her in a closet, or have her taken away. Maybe Mr. Flint would send someone to arrest or shoot her. She took a deep, shaky breath and made her way toward the miners’ village, praying Frank would keep his word.

  CHAPTER 21

  At first, Clayton refused to let Emma move in, insisting she obey her uncle and take the next train out of Coal River. Things were getting too dangerous, and he didn’t need any more trouble. Besides, it wasn’t her fight. She had stood on his leaning porch in her filthy, soot-covered clothes, one hand covered in blood, and said she’d go to one of the widows’ houses and offer to help them with their passel of children instead. Either way, she wasn’t leaving. He stared at her then, thinking. Then she pulled the money out of her brassiere and, after a long moment, he let her in. They hid the money in a mason jar and sent the oldest girl, Edith, to buy cornmeal, a ham, potatoes, and five pounds of flour.

  Clayton gave Emma some clothes from the bottom drawer of his dresser—a faded housedress with low pockets, a blue Sunday dress with a white collar, two aprons, a cotton skirt, and a button-up blouse with a high neck. Using a needle and thread from a sewing basket she found in the storage room, Emma took in the bodices and shortened the hems to fit her petite frame, then did her best to ignore Clayton’s unsettled glances when she wore his late wife’s clothes.

  During the first week of her stay, Emma swept the walls and floors, wiped down the table and chairs, and washed the windows a hundred times. Despite her efforts, coal dust clung to every crack and crevice and surface, inside and outside the shanty, as if they were living inside a giant water globe filled with anthracite powder instead of snow. By the third week, her hair had grown oily and limp, and no matter how often she rinsed her arms, neck, and face, a fine, gritty dust coated her skin. Like the rest of the women and children, she only bathed on Saturday nights, saving water for the miners and breaker boys.

  To get water, she had to wait in line with the other women at a well pump near the end of the lane, then carry the heavy buckets home, her shoulders and hands aching. One well supplied water for twenty-five families, and when it went dry, they used buckets and tubs to scoop runoff from the brackish ponds near the culm banks.

  With the help of Clayton and Edith, Emma slipped into the rhythms of village life. Monday was washday, Tuesday, ironing, Wednesday, baking—if they had the ingredients—Saturday, Edith and Sadie did the shopping, and Sunday was supposed to be a day of rest. Clayton usually spent it drumming up interest for the union and making repairs around the house. Emma had little experience growing vegetables and tending animals, but did what she could to clear the garden of weeds, and learned how to take an egg from beneath Henny without getting pecked. She went into the woods with the girls to search for nuts and berries, learned how to make dandelion salad, exchanged goods with the other women, and stuffed the holes in the shanty with rags to keep out the vermin and flies. In the evenings, she met with some of the miners’ children in the living room to teach reading, writing, and basic math. She also held a weekend class for several of the immigrants’ sons and daughters to teach them English.

  While the women cleaned up after supper and tended to the children, a good number of the miners went down to the village tavern to bet on cockfights, play poker, and drink moonshine and beer. Clayton stayed home to wash dishes and work in the garden, picking cutworms off the struggling potato leaves and feeding them to Henny, or fixing the makeshift fence to keep out the neighbor’s goat.

  And while Emma was happy to have a purpose, she realized she was living like Clayton’s wife without the benefit of his affection. At night she slept in the storage room on a pile of old blankets, aching to go into his bedroom and crawl beneath the covers with him. Every day she had to remind herself that having a relationship with him wasn’t why she was there. She was there to help the miners’ children and the breaker boys. When two of the village women asked if she and Clayton were betrothed, she shook her head and dropped her eyes. Luckily, the women had too many troubles of their own to pry further. But the question had made her uneasy, and filled her with a strange, yet familiar, sense of loss.

  Because for some reason, despite the attention Clayton had paid her when they first met, he was all business now, skirting around her so they wouldn’t bump into each other in the small kitchen, sitting on a stool if she was on the davenport, refusing to let her wash his soot-covered back after work. He seemed grateful and happy to have her help with the children and the household duties, but she couldn’t figure out if he had lost interest in her, or if he was too preoccupied with organizing the strike and the next secret meeting to think about anything else. After sunset he was skittish, jumping up from his seat to look out the window if he heard the creak of an axle, or a barking dog.

  Or maybe he didn’t want to be unfaithful to his late wife.

  After all, Pearl had told Emma that Clayton and Jennie were best friends at ten, and had gotten married at sixteen.

  “When she died,” Pearl said, “you could see it in his face that he could barely stand to keep on living.”

  Whatever the reason for Clayton’s behavior, maybe it was for the best. They had more important things to worry about.

  Then, yesterday, when the colliery whistle blew before noon, Emma went into a panic, fighting the urge to run over to the mine to make sure Clayton and Sawyer were all right. But she couldn’t take the chance that Uncle Otis might see her, so she kept checking the main road for the Black Maria. When she saw it coming a few hours later, she stood trembling on the front porch, her heart pounding so hard, she thought it would burst. She gripped the railing to steady herself but had to sit on the stoop to wait and see where the hearse would stop. When it went by the last shanty at the end of the row and turned into the next lane, she hung her head, blinking back tears of relief.

  Within minutes, the tortured screams of a new widow filled the hollow.

  That night, Clayton told Emma that a vertical mine shaft had shifted and started to collapse. One miner was crushed while another fell four hundred feet to his death on the gangway below. Thinking about it afterward, Emma couldn’t imagine living with that fear every day, wondering if her husband and son would come home from work alive. Then realization hit her, and she had to sit down in the nearest chair.

  She was completely and hopelessly in love with a miner. And unless there was a change in the way the colliery was run, or a miraculous turnaround in their fortunes, Clayton would always be in danger. When she first moved in with him, she knew she had feelings for him. But after living here all these weeks, after working together to make a home for the orphans, after sharing meals and quiet
evenings on the porch, drinking sweet tea and watching sunsets, those feelings had turned into something more. Now she was certain. Clayton was the love of her life.

  What was she thinking? That she could convince him to leave Coal River? That a strike would change everything? That she would help the breaker boys, and life would be trouble free from that day on? Even if the strike gave the miners a fair wage, coal mining would always be dangerous work. And Clayton would never leave. Working in the mines was all he had ever known. Was she willing to live in constant fear to be with the man she loved? Or would she have to leave to stay sane? Overcome, she put a hand over her mouth and wept. She was so tired of feeling helpless and confused. What would she do if something happened to Clayton? And what if the townspeople were right, that she really was cursed? Maybe she would have to leave to protect him.

  She allowed herself to wallow for a few minutes, then wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. To her relief, the gnawing stress had eased. She tried to be rational. Clayton wasn’t interested in having a relationship with her. And no matter how badly she wanted him to return her feelings, perhaps he never would. Maybe the interest he had shown her earlier was his way of trying to heal after the loss of his wife. Maybe he thought the distraction of someone new would ease the horrible, wretched pain in his heart. But now that Emma was there, living under his roof, maybe he realized pursuing her had been a mistake. He would never love anyone as much as he loved Jennie, and he would never be unfaithful to her memory. Little did he know he didn’t need to worry, because Emma was only staying until she could figure out how to help the breaker boys. That was it. After that she was leaving. Until then, she would get through every day as best she could. She had lost loved ones before. She would survive losing Clayton. And leaving him behind would be easier than seeing him killed in the mines.

  Now, Emma stood in front of the hot coal stove in Clayton’s kitchen, stirring water, lard, and flour in a cast-iron skillet with a battered wooden spoon—her first attempt at making bulldog gravy. It wasn’t like any gravy she’d ever had, but Clayton said he’d made it a hundred times. It was one of his mother’s old recipes. Besides, it was the closest thing to gravy they could afford. She wiped her brow with the back of one hand, and stirred fast to get rid of the lumps. In another skillet, she pushed thin slices of old cornbread and squaw biscuits around, hoping the lard would soak in and soften the stale edges. Other than the occasional egg from Henny and the scraggly carrots from Clayton’s struggling garden, it seemed they’d been living on squaw biscuits and wild greens for weeks. She wondered what they’d eat come the cold weather in November, only a few weeks away. She couldn’t believe it’d only been a little over three months since her return to Coal River. It felt like three years.

  Now, it was nearing dinnertime, and Clayton and Sawyer would be coming home any minute, trudging in the back door, bone-tired and starving, their clothes heavy with mud and coal dust. Emma checked the kettles to see if the bath water was boiling, then went to the storage room to get the wooden tub. She dragged it into the kitchen and put it in its usual spot next to the coal stove, centered in the round sooty stain on the floorboards. The youngest girl, Violet, was napping, while Jack and the older girls, Sadie and Edith, played in the backyard.

  Emma gave the bulldog gravy a good stir, and heard footsteps on the porch steps. At first she thought it was Clayton and Sawyer, but she hadn’t yet heard the miners’ boots crunching up the slag road. Besides, they always came in the back door so they wouldn’t track dirt into the house. Then someone knocked. She went to the front window and peered around the curtain to see who was there. Two children waited on the porch. She opened the door to discover the neighbor boy, Jimmy Fitzpatrick, and his younger brother, Nelson.

  “You wash your hands yet?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy said.

  “Come get some supper then.”

  Jimmy was ten, the third boy in a family of six brothers and two sisters. He couldn’t work in the breaker because of deformed fingers, and his father was dead, killed in a cave-in last year. His mother took in boarders to bring in a small income.

  Jimmy came inside holding his younger brother by the hand. “I just brought Nelson,” he said. “I already ate dinner.”

  Four-year-old Nelson was barefoot, his face and shirt covered with dirt and day-old snot. But his hands and lower arms were clean, as clean as Jimmy could get them anyway. Emma divided a slice of cornbread between two bowls, scooped a spoonful of gravy from the skillet, poured it over them, and set the bowls on the table. Despite his claim about already having eaten, Jimmy eyed the food as hungrily as his brother.

  “You can share my portion,” Emma said. “I’m not very hungry tonight.”

  Jimmy and Nelson climbed onto the chairs and sat down, waiting patiently as she got silverware.

  “Go ahead and dig in,” she said. The boys did as they were told. Within seconds they were done, licking crumbs off their forks.

  “Does your momma have milk for the baby today?” she asked.

  Jimmy nodded. “One of the boarders brought her a jug yesterday.”

  “You let me know if she ever runs out,” she said. “And I’ll figure out a way to get her more.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jimmy said.

  Just then, the crunching of a hundred footsteps on slag drifted in from outside.

  “Best run along,” Emma said.

  The boys wiped their mouths, thanked her, and left. A few minutes later, Clayton and Sawyer came in through the back door after removing their jackets and boots outside. Their faces were black.

  “Is that bulldog gravy I smell?” Clayton said.

  “I hope so,” Emma said. She wrapped a dishcloth around the handle of a boiling kettle, hefted it up with both hands, and poured hot water into the tub. Curls of steam swirled into the air. Clayton and Sawyer put their dinner pails and canteens next to the sink and took off their shirts. Every night the routine was the same—first they would get cleaned up enough to eat; then, while everyone was outside or upstairs, they would finish bathing in private. Emma handed Sawyer a bar of lye soap and took the shirts out into the back room, where they would be scrubbed on a washboard and hung up to dry. When she came back into the kitchen, Sawyer was on his knees bending over the tub, scrubbing the coal dust from his hands and the back of his neck. Clayton was at the stove, tasting the gravy, the end of the wooden spoon in his mouth. When he saw her watching, he grinned, his eyes wide and white in his black face.

  “You caught me,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. “How did I do?”

  “It’s gravy all right.”

  She crossed her arms and smiled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s just like my mother used to make.” He took another taste, then put the spoon on the edge of the skillet, his face suddenly serious. “Sawyer, finish washing up and go outside with the others. I need to talk to Emma.” He went over to the sink and leaned his back against it, waiting.

  With a hard slab of fear forming in her gut, Emma sat down at the table. This was it. He was going to tell her she had to leave. There was nothing they could do to stop Mr. Flint, so she might as well be on her way. He was going to say he was grateful for her help with the children and the housework, but her uncle’s money was long gone, and he couldn’t afford to keep her there any longer. Time slowed to a crawl as Sawyer finished washing up and dried his hands and face on a towel. After what seemed like forever, he went outside.

  “What is it?” Emma asked Clayton. “Is something wrong?”

  “You said you wanted to help, so I need you to do me a favor.”

  She exhaled, relief washing over her. “Anything.”

  He picked up his dinner pail, set it on the table, took off the lid, and pulled out a newspaper. It was a copy of the Scranton Times.

  “I need you to write a letter,” he said. “To this man, Johnny Mitchell.” He pointed at a picture of a dark-haired man on the front page.
“The person who gave me this paper said Mr. Mitchell could help us. He’s the president of the United Mine Workers.”

  “I can do that,” she said. “Just tell me what to say.”

  “We need to join the union before we strike, and we need him to talk to the miners, to convince them it’s the right thing to do. Tell him what we’re up against, and ask him to come to Coal River.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  “I don’t know, but it can’t hurt to ask.”

  Together they looked at the picture of the man in a suit and tie, his hair slicked back from his clean-shaven face. Emma wondered if one man really had the power to bring about such change. If so, one woman surely had the power to help the breaker boys. A few paragraphs below Mr. Mitchell’s picture, a grainy, black and white photo showed a group of miners gathered at the mouth of a mine shaft, their faces grim. The caption said: “Three miners killed by coal company guards on a picket line in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania.” She could barely make out individual features, but the pain and hardship in their eyes was as plain as the coal dust caked on their skin.

  Then she noticed Clayton was only holding the paper, not really looking at it. His eyes were darting over the page, but he wasn’t reading the articles. She assumed he had asked her to write the letter for her penmanship, but now she wondered if he could read and write at all. Instead of asking, she reached for the newspaper.

  He gave it to her, and she began to read out loud the article featuring Mr. Mitchell’s picture. “Says here the soldiers of Company E of the Ninth Regiment stationed in Parson, Pennsylvania, lustfully cheered the name of ‘Johnny’ Mitchell as they marched by the headquarters of the United Mine Workers of America in Wilkes-Barre today. Most of the soldiers in the company are coal miners.”

  “See,” Clayton said. “That’s why we need him. We need the support of every worker, and we won’t get it until we have someone who can take charge, someone the miners will listen to.”