Hidden America

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  I heard that kind of story over and over again. Only a few of the coal miners I met didn’t own at least a hundred acres of Ohio farmland, chunks passed through the generations, added to, divided among brothers and sisters. Farming doesn’t pay the bills, so you go into the coal mines. The deep, rich, plentiful mines of the Appalachia region are what have helped keep so many family farms east of the Mississippi intact for over a century.

  If there was a threat to this natural order, it began over thirty years ago, when coal suffered its first serious reputation problem. The federal Clean Air Act of 1970 and its amendments in 1977 and 1990 placed stringent controls on the sulfur dioxide emissions from burned coal. Acid rain was the thing. Power plants were forced to turn to more expensive but cleaner-burning natural gas, while the industry flirted with nuclear technology.

  Coal? Suddenly, you could hardly give away the stuff they mined in the East, the medium-sulfur bituminous coal of the Pittsburgh Number 8 seam and the similar-grade stuff of the 6A seam, where I hung out with the E rotation guys in Cadiz. That coal burned dirty. Power companies turned to the far less efficient but cleaner coal out west, where very large-scale strip mines became coal’s new cash crop. Mines throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia closed as the industry in Appalachia went into a free fall.

  Cadiz felt the punch. It was 1980, and Cadiz, home to what was once the largest shovel in America—the Silver Spade, twelve stories high, capable of scooping 315,000 pounds of earth in a single bite—struggled with its very identity. Even the coal festival held every summer, the Coal Queen pageant, the coal-shoveling contest, the heavy-mining-equipment parade—even that became a sour joke. They stopped calling it the Coal Festival. They changed the name to Heritage Days.

  Guys scrambled for work, left town. Foot moved to Connecticut to manage two Wendy’s fast-food restaurants—him in one, his wife, Jackie, in the other. It was ridiculous. It was like putting a buffalo in some kind of hat boutique or something. The suburbs were nice but oppressive. “You go to work, come home, and what do you do?” he said to me. No square bales to haul, no manure spreader to repair, no wandering steer to chase home under the light of the moon. “How many movies can you go to?” He lasted a year. Him and Jackie came back from Connecticut with their tails between their legs, moved in with her mom, who, at that time, owned the farm. The farm. That was all that mattered.

  So when the eastern mines started reopening in the late 1990s, it seemed like God Himself was answering prayers. The mines reopened because the power plants had figured out how to burn that gloriously efficient dirty coal and wash the emissions, meeting EPA standards. They’re still reopening today, at a fierce rate, thanks to “clean-coal technology,” a controversial term if you talk to environmentalists who aren’t buying the sudden image change. Scientists are figuring out how to convert coal into liquid fuel to power cars and jets. The country is in a decidedly passionate mood to let go of its dependency on foreign oil. This is America, and this is our fossil fuel. Freedom fuel! Coal.

  —

  FOR SCOTTY, the mine was a way of funding his boxing career, such as it was. It wasn’t so much that Scott “the Rock” Tullius lost that fight to Todd Manning at Fight Night XV; it was that he was so widely expected to win, and not just in his own murderous heart, but even by the way the promoters were promoting it. On the radio. Talk shows. Scotty saying into the microphone, yeah, heck yeah, he was back, he took a year’s hiatus but he was back. He took the hiatus on account of his hand getting crushed in the mine, smashed on the bolter. But it healed up. And he got back into fighting shape, eating nothing but raw eggs and chicken and water for weeks, no pop, no iced tea, nothing—and there you are, working in a coal mine. Hardly ideal conditions for an athlete. But he was back, and he had always wanted to fight Manning, and he was seriously worried about killing the poor bastard.

  So it wasn’t just that he lost. Worst of all—way worse than his mouth guard getting knocked clear out of his mouth in the second round, worse even than his eardrum getting busted in the third—worst of all was that the ref called the fight in the fifth. Called it. Now, Scotty had fought over a hundred fights and never had a fight called. Scott the Rock had started competing at sixteen, had amassed a 92–17 record, and there he was, thirty-one years old, down on one knee in the fifth when the ref called it. The place went nuts. “He got back up!” “He wasn’t down!” He had fans in the audience throwing their T-shirts into the ring, everyone screaming, and then there was Scotty’s mother up there chewing out the ref for calling that fight he should not have called. “He got back up!” “He wasn’t down!” And then out comes the championship belt, that belt was worth over $600, that belt is what you fight all your life for, and there was Todd Manning wearing it. It was bad. It was so ugly. Just . . . ugly.

  The guys from the mine who were there saw Scotty getting whupped, and you can be sure he heard about it two days later when he showed up for work, all bruised and with a busted eardrum, and having to go back down five hundred feet under and run that buggy. The guys were, like, Oh, Scotty thought there were four guys punching him in that ring; oh, Scotty got his ass kicked. It was bad. It was ugly. It might have been the low point of his life, all around.

  He decided it was over. He was going to retire from the ring. Hang up his gloves.

  “Yeah, I’m done,” he told me. “I’m never gonna be a world champion. That’s what I always wanted to be, and I’m never gonna get there. I’m not. You know. I’m just . . . not.”

  He didn’t look sad. Or he was the happiest sad man I’d ever met. It’s possible that Scotty had lived a previous life as a golden retriever, a tail-wagging pal who keeps coming back around no matter how mean you are to him.

  “Boxing has given me a lot,” he said. We were at his house in a remote area of Wheeling, West Virginia, up a hill, where there’s nothing but woods out back, and so you can go on out and target-practice on pumpkins whenever you feel like it. His wife, Eddie, had a Playboy T-shirt stretched tight over her pregnant belly. She was about due. She was a boxer too. They had met at a fight.

  “Boxing gave me a family,” he said. “And I was close. Real close to going somewhere and getting the world title. But what are you gonna do? You’re not good enough to make a living at it, so you gotta work.”

  He smiled, laughed into the air. “Jeez!”

  He said anyway he was amassing a fortune. He laid out the numbers. The house needed work but was about paid off. Him and Eddie drove old cars. Between his job and hers at the plastics factory, they brought home $100,000 a year, most of which went straight to the bank. The plan was to work, save, and—as soon as they had enough cash on hand—quit. Retire. “We want to live our life. That’s what our plans are.”

  I asked him what his life would look like once he started living it. He couldn’t think of anything besides boxing, which was sort of where he had started out in the first place and what got him into this situation, so he didn’t know.

  The main thing was, he didn’t want to be sixty years old working in a coal mine. He didn’t want to be an old man like Pap, down there bolting every day. Nobody wanted to be Pap. Everyone spoke of Pap with respect, even kindness, but also with a certain amount of horror. The ghost of a future that was to be avoided.

  “One day I was boltin’, me and Pap, the roof was real bad,” he said. “And all of a sudden it started sprinkling all around us, and it just come in behind us. About buried us alive. We was goin’, ‘Ptuh, ptuh.’ We thought we was dead. I mean, we should have been dead. But we weren’t.”

  He laughed. “Ptuh, ptuh! Aw, that was bad!”

  I asked him if he thought that putting himself in such dangerous conditions upped the odds that he would die young—that he might, that is, never make it to retirement.

  “You can’t think like that,” he said. “It’s the chance you take. You don’t think like that. I mean, so
metimes you think about it, you know, you go, Man! Huh. Sometimes you do. But you get used to it. You get brave. You really do. I’m serious. You get brave.”

  He asked me if I wanted a drink of water or something like that. I said no, I was good. He asked me if I wanted to watch something on the big-screen TV, said maybe later we could watch tapes of some of his fights.

  “Now, a buddy of mine, Robby Dutton, he’s dead,” he said. “We were pretty good friends. And we was on the same crew. And the miner machine, there was something wrong with it, a hose was leaking, and they were turning it and a bit got caught and come down and mangled his leg. We had to drag him outta there on a stretcher, all bleedin’ bad. Aw, he was . . . we thought he was gonna die. Huh. But he didn’t die.”

  “I thought you said he’s dead,” I said.

  “Yeah. He come back like a year and a half later to the mine and he was having a hard time. Then, Memorial Day weekend. On his Harley. He was riding down the interstate and a woman was screamin’ at her kid and pulled out, started screamin’ at her kid, POW! Smothered him all over his Harley.

  “Huh. Pow! Can you believe that?”

  —

  WITH THE OBVIOUS EXCEPTION of combat soldiers, I’d never been around people who knew so many dead people.

  Pap’s son was dead. Got smashed by a coal truck in 1993. Pap told me this with no break in his voice or release of his gaze. “It was quick,” he said. “Oh, he never knew what hit him.”

  Death was a shame, a crying shame. Other than that, as a subject it wasn’t near as interesting as Smitty’s mail-order woman—who did not, by the way, arrive on schedule. There was a lot of chatter about this.

  “She didn’t show up?”

  “She was sick. She couldn’t board the plane.”

  “The way I heard it, there was a flu epidemic and they wouldn’t let any planes out.”

  “Out of Russia?”

  “That’s the way I heard it—or maybe just the town she was in.”

  “It’s her turn to come over, and everybody’s got the flu and they can’t come over? I think I would check into that. That would have been on the news somewhere.”

  “He said she was coming later.”

  “He already paid for her plane ticket?”

  “That’s the way I heard it.”

  “Aw, Smitty.”

  Pap was good friends with Smitty, thought of him as a kind soul. I rode with Pap in his pickup, through his hayfields. He was the only coal miner I met who had actual positive words to say about coal mining. Then again, Pap was a man of very, very many words, so this might have been a matter of odds. He was compact, rosy-cheeked, and his teeth were worn from left to right onward down a hill. “I come home from work,” he said. “And I don’t complain, ‘Oh, John made me mad,’ or ‘Bob made me mad.’ Like I tell my mom: ‘The gloopies were there.’ My mom, she knows. She always called them gloopies. Crazy coal miners. So I tell her, ‘The gloopies were there,’ and that’s it.”

  As we drove around, it wasn’t the gorgeous views he pointed out, the patchwork of hills rolling into the horizon, but instead various piles of rocks. Sometimes, he said, all you want to do is go out and pile up rocks. It’s relaxing. It makes you feel good to know the hayfields are clear, to know your baler won’t get banged up. He told me his wife used to help him on the farm, but ever since she got that job up at Sam’s Club, she’s too busy. Now that, he said, was a stupid job. “All them people do is eat,” he said, blaming retail sales for Nancy’s weight gain. Now, instead of just “the old bag I live with,” he had started calling her Moo.

  I asked him why he still worked in the mine, doing one of the hardest jobs.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. He talked about being “Little Frankie” in high school, only five feet tall, making the varsity football team. He said he was always very athletic. He was always a good worker. That started even earlier, in grade school, Father Coleman pulling him out, almost every day, just him and Dickie Angelo got pulled out every day after Mass to go on down and clean up the old cemetery. Tombstones were falling in, and it was all unlevel. So him and Dickie would wheelbarrow dirt in, smooth it out. Someone had to do it, and those boys were strong, good workers. Good workers. He worked instead of going to school, a choice decided for him by his church.

  “I’ve always been a good worker,” he said. “Me and Dickie were goats.”

  You work. If you’re healthy, you work. You don’t quit work until something bad happens, which is your sign to move on. Pap’s own belligerent father sanctioned this pattern. “He got covered up two days after I got hired,” he told me. “I took my physical on a Wednesday, I started on a Thursday, and Friday morning he got covered up. The boss working with him never made it. Crushed him. He was standing there, a guy knocked a post out, and the whole place tumbled. Killed the boss dead. Oh, they had to get jacks to get the stuff off my dad. Broke both his pelvises. He had pins in his pelvises, but it was the best thing that ever happened to my dad. He quit drinking after that, which was always his worst problem.”

  We drove past a doghouse that had Buttercup written on it. Buttercup, a yellow Lab, was a pup out of his son’s dog’s litter. “Ol’ Buttercup,” he said, tooting his horn.

  “You want to go on up and meet my mom now?” he asked. She was eighty-seven, hadn’t been sleeping well, but lately she had started eating a little bit. She lived in the original house, at the top of the hill, where Pap’s grandparents had lived and died. There was pride in this: dying on the farm.

  He rolled down his window, said it felt like spring was coming.

  When we got to his mom’s house, there were about twenty cats snaking on and around the porch. Inside was a small kitchen with a thin curtain leading to the living room where his mom was, in a hospital bed in front of a TV. She was tiny, swallowed up by that bed. On the opposite wall ticktocked a clock that had family members’ pictures instead of numbers. She lit up when she saw him enter. He called her Bubba and spoke to her in Polish. When they switched to English, they talked about cabbage. The whole backyard used to be cabbage, and that’s what the kids did: cut it, trampled it, put it in big barrels, and then it would foam up. They’d take the foam off every day, and when it quit foaming, you got your sauerkraut. “In the wintertime, that’s what we ate about seventy percent of the time,” he said. “Sauerkraut’s what we ate. Isn’t that right, Bubba?”

  She closed her eyes, fell sound asleep.

  “Okay, Bubba,” he said. “Okay.”

  She was dying in that room. Of course she was. And there was nothing shameful, or odd, or worrisome about it.

  I stood in the room with Pap and his mom, wondering what to say, where to look, and how it would be to live a life so coolly close to death.

  —

  ONE OF THE THINGS that happened was, way after I was finished researching coal mines, I kept going down into the coal mine. Explain that. I couldn’t seem to quit. A couple of more hours down, a couple more, a full ten-hour shift. Friends would leave me voice mail: “You’re not down in that coal mine again, are you?” My husband, despite being the recipient of many gifts, would call and say, “Okay, come on home now.” My children missed me, and my mother was sick of this particular prayer added to her daily prayer ritual.

  I had no explanation as to why I kept going back, other than that I was fooling myself into believing that I needed to go one more time. “It gets in your blood after a while, I think,” Scotty said to me once. “You know what I mean? After a while, it kinda sticks with you a little bit.”

  Foot said, “Isn’t it about time you got back to your life? I can’t take babysitting you anymore.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, pointing my light at his chin. I told him I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to leave. I started to go all Wizard of Oz on him. “I think I’m going to miss you most of all, Scare
crow,” I said.

  “Oh, Christ almighty.”

  I asked him if he wouldn’t feel just a little bit nostalgic for the Cadiz portal, which first opened in the 1970s and would be closing soon, nearly all of the coal gone. By summer the E rotation guys would all be over in the company’s other mine, in Hopedale. “You don’t think it’s kind of sad to say good-bye to this place?”

  “Uh,” he said. “No.”

  We were sitting at the power center, up on section, the place where they park all the generators and batteries running the equipment and the place where the microwave is and the couch. It was about 8:00 p.m., and some of the guys were taking dinner breaks, Rick with a Philly steak and cheese, cupcakes, Slim Jims. Chris had steak and a baked potato. Billy had homemade beef jerky. Foot was having chicken Alfredo, a Pepsi, and a Rice Krispies treat. The guys were, of course, covered in coal dust, their hands mostly black, but Billy said it wasn’t like eating in dirt dirt. “It’s clean dirt,” he said. “It’s just coal.”

  Hook, chewing Copenhagen, wanted to know if anyone thought Rod Stewart was gay.

  No one did.

  “Mick Jagger, he could go either way.”

  “He messed around with that what’s-her-face all his life. Aw, come on. Help me out here. What’s her name? That blonde? I’m narrowing it down here, ain’t I?”

  “Bianca!”

  “No, that might have been their kid.”

  “Bianco, isn’t that that black girl dancing around?”

  “No, that’s Beyoncé.”

  “We’re not really doing too good here, are we?”

  “Hey, I got the latest scoop on Smitty’s woman. He said she got to be asking too many questions, so he told her to go fuck herself.”

  “What about the flu epidemic?”

  “She wanted more money for a flu vaccine.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “He sent her $1,800 for the flight over. She does that to two or three guys a month, holy hell, she’s making a good living.”