A MistY MourninG

by Rett MacPherson

  She’d stopped chewing and was staring at me.

  “What?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious.

  “You should see yourself when you talk about your family tree. You get this glazed look in your eye, like you’re visualizing the charts and stuff. You actually see your ancestors, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said and blushed. It was true.

  “Don’t deny yourself that. That is passion. That is what makes the world go around. Not love. Not money. Passion. It is passion that drives everything,” she said. “It proves you are one of the living.”

  “My point being,” I said, “that I suppose I carry some of that over into my real life. If I come up against a wall, I just back up and go at it from a different angle. Or I parachute down on it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Oh, completely,” she said.

  “What made you want to be a journalist?” I asked.

  “Same thing. Absolute burning desire to know everything. And if you tell me I can’t know it, it pisses me off so badly that if I have to steal to know what I’m not supposed to know, I will,” she said.

  “Wow,” I said, impressed with her confession. “So, then. You’ll understand when I ask again. Tell me what it was like to live in a coal town.”

  She smiled and prepared to tell me what I wanted to know.

  Twenty-eight

  Before the beautiful Sherise Tyler would tell me anything, she went and got herself another Rolling Rock and lit up a cigarette, apologizing again for smoking in my presence. I assured her that as long as she opened the window, I would breathe shallowly.

  “I always feel bad when I read those statistics. You know, the ones that say some ten thousand children are admitted to the hospital every year because of second-hand smoke,” she said. “I feel bad until it’s time to light up another cigarette, and then I feel bad for me. I’m terribly selfish.”

  “Maybe you just can’t commit to quitting,” I said.

  “And admit I’m weak? I’d much rather be selfish,” she said.

  “Okay, selfish it is,” I said. “Feel better?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  For some strange reason I knew that she was wanting me to agree with her on this. It was some sort of penance. She admitted her guilt. I agreed. And then she could move on.

  “Seriously, though. If it were bothering me too terribly much, I’d go get a gas mask or something,” I said, joking.

  She laughed finally, ready to move on to telling me all about life in the coal town of Panther Run. She tied her long silky hair in a knot, something I’ve only been able to do once in my life when I was very young and my hair was long and straight. She pulled her feet up under her and took a drink of her beer. I had a big sparkling glass of ice cubes and water.

  “Okay,” she said. “First of all, your life was the company’s. Throw out whatever patriotic notions you’ve got about freedom of speech and the freedom to go anywhere. Throw out the insane ideas that men are created equal, they get equal pay for an honest day’s work, they have the right to improve their position. It didn’t exist.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “First off, the miner was paid by the carload. Not by the hour or even by the day. Which meant that the operators had any number of ways to cheat the miner. Which is why so many of the miners began bringing their sons in to work alongside them. To try and produce more coal,” she explained. “Which enabled all the money to go into the one home.”

  “How did the operators cheat the miners?” I asked. I should have been taking notes, but I wasn’t about to run upstairs to get my notebook and pencil. I had a feeling she was only going to talk for so long and that was it. I didn’t want to give her time to think about it and change her mind while I was upstairs.

  “Well, one of the ways was that the company got all of the coal that was knocked off or fell off the cars. See, the miner would load a car and put his number on it, and then it would go and get weighed, and that was how he got paid. The company kept anything that fell or got knocked off. That was coal that no miner got paid for, the company got it free and clear. In some cases, the operator would change the shape of the car to hold more coal. So instead of the miner taking a day to fill it up, he might take a day and half or two days, but still get paid the same amount of money.”

  “Well, that’s crappy,” I said. “How fair is that?”

  “Fair? Throw it out. That word is not in the miner’s dictionary,” she said.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “Forget it. Second, the operators would enlarge the holes in the screens so that larger and larger pieces of coal would fall through, and these pieces were the company’s, free and clear. And the operators weren’t beyond rigging the scales,” she went on. “See, that’s why the owner/operators didn’t want a union. Because the union would threaten the operators’ ability to make a profit except through the efficient production of coal. But that’s neither here nor there at the moment.”

  “What else?” I asked and took a drink of water.

  “The biggest way the company really stuck it to the miner was by using what was called ‘scrip.’”

  “Scrip? What was that? Some kind of bad coal or something?”

  “No,” she said and put her cigarette out in the empty pizza box. Okay, that was gross. “Scrip was bogus money.”

  “Bogus money. Forgive me if I’m sounding really stupid. It is one-thirty in the morning,” I said. “What do you mean, bogus money?”

  “Miners were issued scrip instead of money. And scrip could only be used at the stores, doctors, barbers, and so on in town. And guess who owned the stores and barbershops and doctors?”

  “The company?”

  “Bingo. The company owned everything in the town. They owned the houses that the miners lived in, so who did they pay rent to? The company. In scrip. The company owned the doctor and his office. So who benefited from the miners’ use of those establishments? The company,” she said. “The store carried everything from fresh produce to furniture, all with excrutiatingly high price tags. The miner was forced to patronize the very places owned by the company because his scrip was no good outside of the coal town.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said and held my hand up. “Isn’t that a felony or something? Isn’t that against the law?”

  “Yes.” That was all she said. She did not elaborate.

  My head hurt thinking about the horrible cycle that those people had been in, the desperation they must have felt.

  “What’s more, the company made the miners sign contracts stating that they could be evicted after ten days’ notice. There are stories of how peddlers would come through the town selling produce or something, and the superintendent or his henchmen would throw their wares into the river. They didn’t want the mining families to patronize anything or anybody other than the company.”

  “How would they be able to anyway if they were paid only in scrip?” I asked.

  “Because sometimes their wives would make money from other things, like sewing or housecleaning in the next town. Or sometimes it was strictly a barter or trade. You know. I’ll give you this brandnew pair of socks if you give me a pound of tomatoes,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I understand.”

  “Do you?” she asked. “The superintendent was the one in charge of all of it. He decided who would be evicted or who wouldn’t. He decided everything. You know, it’s hard to get ahead when every dollar you earn is in turn given back to the very company you’re breaking your back for.”

  “How horrible,” I said. “How did they ever break the cycle?”

  “They either didn’t or the union came town by town, company by company. The union opposed forced buying in the company stores and cheating on weighing and that sort of thing. Plus, there were an awful lot of miners’ daughters who never married.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Meaning, they saw what their parents went through
. They lived in a coal town; who were they gonna marry? Coal miners. They saw with their own eyes what kind of life that was, and so they stayed unmarried or else in the middle of the night they’d just run off and never come back. Thus breaking the cycle.”

  I thought about Clarissa Hart taking off after the lynching of the company’s superintendent. “Where would they go?”

  “Most likely Charleston. Follow the river, and you end up in Charleston. From there you could catch a train or barge to anywhere. If you had the money. Some just walked until they dropped, and that’s where they stayed,” she said. “It’s quite suffocating to be the child trapped in your parents’ nightmare. Almost as suffocating as it was to be a miner.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I can’t thank you enough for all of this background. I had no idea.”

  “That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Things are a whole lot better for the miner today. But think about the living conditions back then,” she said. “The entire town was covered with a thin layer of coal dust. There were explosions and there was the risk of cave-ins. Most of the time mothers sent their boys, starting at eight years of age, off to that blackness known as the mine. They’d be carrying their lunch pails of food that the rats would most likely eat before they could get a chance to.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I think I’ve heard enough. I probably won’t sleep tonight, and it won’t be due to my back for once.”

  She smiled and downed half of her bottle of beer. “And then there were the deaths.”

  “D-deaths?”

  “Every family in a mining town could boast at least one son or husband who was dead or maimed. If your husband was a miner, you knew that when he went off to work, he might not come home.”

  “Sort of like a cop’s wife,” I said.

  “Very much,” she said. “Except it’s much more honorable to be killed in the line of duty while saving damsels from ne’er-do-wells than to be blown to bits in a coal mine. Or buried alive.”

  “I got the picture,” I said. Her energy was building with each sentence she spewed.

  “I’m just getting started. If you didn’t the in the mine, well, then you had to look forward to that pesky little thing known as black lung. Or pneumoconiosis. For a long time it didn’t have a name. The government didn’t want to acknowledge that there was such a thing.”

  “Reminicent of HIV. How many people had it infected or killed before they actually gave it a name?”

  “Exactly. The X-Files isn’t too far off when they quote ‘Deny everything.’”

  There was a sound outside and I jumped. It was the panther. She was back. I wondered if it was just one panther that I’d heard several times or if there were several. And why did I always refer to it as a she?

  “Panther,” she said.

  “Yes. Startled me,” I said. “Anyway, back to the black lung.”

  “Well, the miner in general was a completely deteriorated individual after forty or fifty years of mining. I mean, he would have had multiple fractures or broken bones in his lifetime. Often miners were stoop-shouldered or burned. Their blood was weak—”

  “Why?”

  “Because the air that they breathed in the mines was full of gases. As a result, they did not have oxygen-healthy blood,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling totally stupid.

  “And it was full of coal dust. Thus the black lung. The pores in their lungs would become clogged with it. They would cough and spit up black stuff,” she said.

  I think she was feeling her beer because every word she said now was overenunciated and filled with venom. Gee, I was really sorry that I had brought up some obvious sore spot. But I was very happy to have the information that she’d supplied.

  “Do you know how many little girls never even got to see their fathers?” she asked with a haunted look.

  It takes me a while, but eventually I catch on.

  I think I understood where her rather unexplained venom was coming from. She obviously had lost somebody in a cave-in or explosion or something. That last remark was just a tad peculiar.

  I cleared my throat, and she came out of her reverie, swiping at a lone tear as she arrived in the present. “Have you got a good picture of it now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you. You mentioned some of the girls just leaving. Heading to Charleston. What if they didn’t have the money for trainfare once they arrived? Was there a particular place they could go?”

  “Actually, there was. There was a women’s hospital there. Mostly for prostitutes or unwed mothers. Good deal of syphilis cases there, as well. I know, I’ve checked this out. Otherwise, there was a halfway house, where women could go and maybe get a job, or whatever. I mean, they didn’t have counseling like you have today.”

  “Really,” I said, thinking back to what Pastor Breedlove had told me earlier about Clarissa just taking off one day, only to return a year later.

  “But they did help people,” she said.

  “Would you happen to remember the name of this place?” I asked. I think if her judgment had not been impaired, she would not have answered this question. But because of the state she was in, all of her own doing, mind you, she was willing to talk. Did I feel guilty about this? Surprisingly, no.

  “VanBibber something or other.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “No, why?”

  “It’s just that. . . well, some of my ancestors were VanBibbers.”

  “Hmph,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Well, this particular branch of that family were Methodist and really into helping people.”

  “Wow,” I said. “How cool.”

  “I would have just left,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I had gotten out of this godforsaken hellhole, I wouldn’t have stopped in Charleston. No, siree. I would have kept going. Sometimes women had people waiting for them on the other side,” she said.

  “Other side of what?”

  “You know. . . just wherever. The other side. Meaning other than here. Like the Underground Railroad, only not as much cloak-and-dagger,” she said.

  Lord. The beer was really getting to her. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a fantasy of mine. I like to imagine some young girl leaving in the middle of the night, with nothing but the clothes on her back—”

  “Bridie did that Only she absconded. Got married to somebody the family didn’t exactly like. He was a divorced man,” I said in a whisper.

  “Anyway,” she said, irritated with my interruption. “I fantasize that this girl has an aunt or a cousin in a faraway state who helps her to freedom.”

  I know my expression was indescribable, because I, for one, wasn’t sure how to take her confession of such a romantic fantasy. I knew that the “slavery” known as coal mining was nowhere equal to that of actual slavery. Sherise, however, had gotten it into her head that it was a form of slavery, and there was no convincing her otherwise. I wondered if she was this melodramatic about everything in her life or just this particular subject.

  “Haven’t you ever read about the Underground Railroad? You know, how they used quilts to communicate. Like a map or something. Certain patterns meant certain things. Well, kinda like that. That’s my fantasy. She makes it to Charleston and in the train station is a big map printed on the station floor, only nobody sees it because of how big it is. You have to be up high. The girl eventually finds it and knows what train to take. And she lives happily ever after,” she said with a rather sad smile. “That’s what I like to imagine.”

  “A map,” I said. “Did you say a map?”

  Twenty-nine

  Norville Gross was killed by a panther.”

  The news sort of shocked me, really. I’d convinced myself that he had been murdered. I’m not sure which was worse, actually. Being attacked by a panther and afraid the whole time that you were going to die, or being attacked by a person and afraid the whole time that you were going to die.

&n
bsp; Sheriff Justice’s uniform was crisp and his hat kept the sunlight from his face. I stood out in the front yard, beneath the lynching tree, wondering why he was telling me this at all. It kind of looked bad for me, though. If Norville had been murdered, then the sheriff would have had to seriously consider somebody else for the murder of Clarissa Hart. My alibi, if Norville had been murdered, was my third-trimester stomach. Everybody and their uncle knew that I could not have committed a brutal crime like the attack on Norville Gross in my present state. His being killed by a panther sort of made Clarissa’s death look more like my fault.

  I didn’t do it. I swear. Where would I get penicillin, anyway?

  “Have you dusted for prints?” I asked.

  He smiled at me, although I could not read his eyes. “Why would I do that? Any and everybody has touched any and everything.”

  “I mean in the attic.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “The entrance to the attic is in Clarissa’s bedroom. Somebody could have snuck up there and out through the window while I was discovering the body,” I said. “If you dusted for prints around that window, you might be surprised to find that they’re not mine.”

  He was quiet a moment. I was happy. After I had gone to bed last night, I could not sleep. How could I with everything Sherise Tyler had just told me? After I’d finished mulling over all of her information I had begun to work on a way to prove I hadn’t killed Clarissa, rather than who had. I remembered Dexter telling me that he saw the window in the attic open. Around three in the morning, I thought of the fact that they’d probably left fingerprints. Now if I could just convince the sheriff.

  “Well?” I said. “Are you going to check?”