Coal Run

by Tawni O'Dell

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Coal Run

  A Viking Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2004 by Tawni O’Dell

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1011-9055-5

  A VIKING BOOK®

  Viking Books first published by The Viking Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  VIKING and the “VIKING SHIP” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: July, 2004

  Version_2

  Contents

  J&P COAL COMPANY MINE NO. 9

  SUNDAY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  MONDAY

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  TUESDAY

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  WEDNESDAY

  18

  19

  20

  THURSDAY

  21

  22

  FRIDAY

  23

  24

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY TAWNI O’DELL

  Back Roads

  For my grandparents, Naomi Rebecca and the late H. E. Burkett, whose love for each other and their patch of Pennsylvania inspires and sustains me always

  J&P COAL COMPANY MINE NO. 9

  March 14, 1967

  A MEMORY

  THE DAY GERTIE BLEW, I WATCHED MY FATHER LEAVE FOR WORK like I did every morning. It was called morning by the men who worked that shift, but to me it was still night, black and cold and silent except for the far-off rumble of the coke ovens as their doors were thrown open and the infernos inside them roared. I could see them clearly from my bedroom window, strung across a distant hillside, the mouths glowing red, then going dark in a steady rhythm like the blinking of a hundred fiery eyes watching our valley.

  I didn’t know exactly what it was that woke me. Maybe the squeak of the mattress springs as he got out of bed in the room next door, or his muffled voice along with my mother’s as they said their good-byes, or the sound of his steel-toed safety shoes pacing the kitchen floor while he waited for the coffee to brew.

  Whatever it was, it had the power to pluck me from my bed and send me stumbling half asleep across the cold, bare floor in my bare feet where I waited at the window to watch him cross our front yard along with the dozens of other men crossing their front yards carrying silver lunch pails the size of toolboxes, their mouths already solemnly working the plugs of tobacco they chewed to lubricate their throats against the gritty coal dust.

  They didn’t converge in a sudden stream the way they used to when my mother was my age and watched her father and the other men leave the three-room, soot-coated houses in the discarded company town a few miles down the railroad line from here. These days they left one at a time, but still together, in a synchronized solitude.

  I always waved at him when he stopped at the car door and looked up at my window, and he always gave me a nod with a scolding half smile that said I should be in bed but what Mom didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. It was our secret, one we shared man to man.

  It wasn’t until the last taillight on the last car or pickup truck winked out of sight around the bend in the road that I went back to bed, but never back to sleep.

  I stopped by my bookshelf that my dad had built out of two-by-fours and proudly scanned my small but growing library of alphabet and number books, books about trucks and trains, Little Golden Books and Dr. Seuss books, and a book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes that had belonged to my mother.

  At the very end of the row was the copy of Wonders of Nature that Santa had left under the tree for me that past Christmas. I took it back to bed with me every morning, along with my flashlight, crawled under my covers, turned to the page about prairie dogs and the diagram of the elaborate underground maze where they lived, and let my mind journey to the place where my dad went every day to do his job.

  I didn’t know that much about it because my dad and the other miners never talked about their work; they only talked about their fear of losing it. What I did know, I had learned from my mother, who explained to me once that he worked underground in tunnels where he dug coal that was very important to everyone. It gave us energy. It made steel to build buildings. Without coal America would come to a screeching halt.

  The part about working underground in tunnels made the biggest impact on me, even bigger than the thought of a colossal shriek of brakes heard around the country and everyone and everything ceasing to move until my dad, and Grandpa, and Uncle Kenny, and Val next door, and my best buddy Steve’s dad, and my teacher Miss Finch’s boyfriend, and Jess Raynor’s dad—who everybody called “Chimp” because one of the other miners once said he’d rather shoot coal with a monkey than be partnered up with Clive Raynor—all went back in the mines and dug some more coal.

  The tunnels were what bothered me. I knew certain animals lived underground. Groundhogs and moles and snakes. But I couldn’t picture men down there.

  The first time I came across the picture of the prairie-dog town was the Christmas morning I got the book. I walked over to my dad, who was sitting in his favorite chair smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of coffee, and casting glances I didn’t understand at my mother, who was sitting on the couch with her bare legs curled up underneath her bathrobe and a short, shiny pink nightgown Santa had brought for her lying across her lap.

  He was wearing a bathrobe, too, a gray one over a pair of gray pajamas. The only time I ever saw him wear pajamas was Christmas morning and once when he had the flu and my mom made him miss a day of work. They didn’t suit him. He wore them uncomfortably, almost in an embarrassed way, as if he was trying to pull off a disguise.

  I stood in front of him holding my new book while he finished looking at Mom through a few wisps of smoke left hanging in the air after the last puff off his cigarette.

  I opened the book to the page with the prairie-dog town and asked him if that was what a mine looked like.

  He took the book from me and studied it in the serious way he approached all books and all questions, then looked at me with his hooded, brittle blue eyes that were two sparks of startling color in a man otherwise lacking all color.

  Sometimes when I watched him in the evening, washing up after work in my mother’s green-and-yellow kitchen, stripped to the waist, his arms in black sink water up to his elbows, I thought of him as a person who had been cut out of a black-and-white photo and unknowingly pasted into the real world, and, like the subjects in a black-and-white photo, he seemed to have more clarity to him than people with lots of color.

  He was pale skin, black hair, gray stubble, gray work pants, black coal dirt, gray cigarette smoke climbing from between his fingers or his lips, and a
blue-gray tattoo etched beneath the dark hair on his hard left forearm, of a glaring man with a bushy mustache nailed to a cross the way Jesus was in church. The man was ugly and frightening but eerily fascinating to me, especially when my dad took me on his lap and traced his outline in his skin and repeated the word “Stalin.”

  “It’s very much close to this,” he replied in his broken English. “Except this. See.”

  At the sound of his command, my sister, Jolene, got up from the play tea set she was arranging on the floor and toddled over to see the book, too, her dozens of new dress-up bracelets and necklaces made of plastic gold and silver beads clicking against each other as she walked.

  Dad pointed to the many escape routes the prairie dogs had made from their underground world to the world on top.

  “We don’t have this,” he told us. “We have one way in and one way out.”

  I had my Wonders of Nature book with me at the kitchen table when Gertie blew. I was leafing through its pages while I was eating a late breakfast and might have even been looking at the prairie dogs and thinking of my dad at the precise moment when he would have turned his head toward the roar of the fireball before he was incinerated. Or maybe he never saw it coming. Maybe he was buried instantly by tons of earth without warning. Maybe his bones were broken, his organs crushed, his senses obliterated, his existence erased before he had a chance to understand what was happening. But I doubt it.

  He had been a miner his entire adult life, and, like all miners, he understood the language of the coal face. Crackles, hisses, sighs, pops, squeaks, creaks, groans, gurgles—each noise meant something to them: a methane leak that could be ignited, an underground water source that could flood a shaft, a weak section of ceiling that was about to cave in. In response to the slightest tap of a shovel, the wall spoke back to them. I’m sure when it found itself about to be destroyed, it shuddered and screamed in a way they all recognized.

  I was in afternoon kindergarten, so I got to spend my mornings at home. I was concentrating on a bowl of Alpha-Bits cereal, trying to spell my name with the sugary letters, being frustrated by the lack of a V. Jolene was in her high chair drawing a picture with her big-girl spoon in the applesauce she had spread all over her tray. She had a cold, and Mom was sneaking up behind her with a bottle of red cough syrup and a teaspoon.

  The explosion came first, an enormous underground thunder that shook our house and shattered our windows in a spectacular musical instant with a sound like a million glass bells ringing all at once.

  Mom dropped her teaspoon, and it hit the table, where the vibrations bounced it across the Formica leaving a trail of bright red drops like a nosebleed. Her face went ashen as all around us cupboard doors sprang open and dishes fell out, pictures jumped off walls, canned goods tumbled off shelves and rolled across the floor.

  Then all movement and all sound ended as abruptly as it had begun. An absolute quiet filled the room that was every bit as loud as the explosion. It made my ears ring, and I clapped my hands over them protectively, somehow understanding that the silence was even worse.

  Jolene began to cry. Mom didn’t notice. She stared straight ahead at the wall where Dad’s most prized possession had hung for my entire life: a portrait of a glowering king with a mustache that drooped to his chin, wearing regal silks and a simple hammered metal crown that looked like a child might have fashioned it out of an old can and some cheap birthstones. It was the only object he had been able to salvage from the remains of his family’s farm in Ukraine after the war.

  SUPREME SOVEREIGN VOLODYMYR THE GREAT, the little gold plaque at the bottom of the frame read.

  “Supreme sovereign of what?” Val asked my mom once.

  “Our kitchen,” she told him.

  Now the portrait lay facedown in the midst of a scattering of glass shards.

  I waited to see what Mom’s reaction would be. Volodymyr was sacred to Dad, and so was the massive gold frame he had bought with his first paycheck working in the Illinois coalfields years before he came east to Pennsylvania. Her eyes didn’t leave the wall, and I realized she wasn’t looking at anything. She was paralyzed with fear, waiting for something else.

  None of us had ever heard the sound before, but when it finally came, we instinctively knew it meant death. It was a low, moaning wail that rose to a shriek, eerily human yet inhumanly immense, as if the earth itself were crying out in pain.

  Mom’s eyes filled with tears, and her mouth began to move. I couldn’t hear her voice over the scream of the siren, but I could read her lips. She didn’t say Dad’s name or the name of anyone else she knew working the morning shift. She simply said, “The men.”

  Before I knew what was happening, she reached out and grabbed me, knocking over my chair. She hoisted Jolene onto her hip and dragged me along behind her by my arm. We went running out the front door, stepping over toppled furniture and crunching through broken window glass spread all over the carpet.

  One by one the women of Coal Run joined us. Women I knew well. Women I hardly knew at all. Women my mom liked. Women she didn’t like. Old and young. Fat and thin. Pretty and plain. Some pregnant, some not. Some in housedresses, some wearing jeans and cotton blouses like my mom.

  They dashed out of their homes and stopped suddenly as if an invisible door had been slammed shut in front of them. They clutched the shoulders and arms of their children or breakfast dishes they had been washing or laundry they had been folding.

  They all stared in the same direction, at a spot two miles distant, impossible to see from our homes, but now it was marked by a thin cloud of black smoke seeping lazily across the blue sky. I searched the tilted faces, and for a moment, all their surface differences were stripped away and they were nothing but the daughters and sisters and wives and mothers of miners.

  One woman screamed like a girl in a scary movie. One woman groaned and collapsed to the ground. But these were the only signs of hysteria. The rest rushed with shell-shocked responsibility back inside their toppling homes and came out again with their car keys and purses.

  Our next-door neighbor Maxine went running for her car. Val was her son. He had dropped out of high school this past year to start working in Gertie. She shouted at my mom to come with her. Mom ignored her and started running.

  Down the side of the road we flew, her grip on my arm like a tourniquet. My legs couldn’t keep up with hers. I fell, and she yanked me up. I fell again, and she yanked harder and screamed at me to get up. Jolene sobbed from the pain of being jostled against Mom’s hip.

  I started crying, too. All around us the world was crumbling. Sections of the road sagged. Halves of houses sank into the ground. I watched a dog disappear with a solitary yelp, his paws scrabbling uselessly at the ground as the weight of the doghouse he was chained to pulled him down. I thought the world was coming to an end. I couldn’t know that acres of mine tunnels were collapsing beneath the town.

  Mom ignored everything and kept running. Soon I became aware of cars and trucks driving past us. Just a few at first. Then a steady stream. Like blood cells through an artery, they came rumbling up from side roads and back roads, bouncing across fields and crashing through woods. The pickup-truck beds were filled with kids and dogs and old people holding on to gun racks for balance.

  Some of the drivers slowed down and shouted at Mom to get in, but she didn’t seem to hear or care. We ran the whole way.

  By the time we neared Gertie, we were the only ones on the road anymore. Hundreds of people had passed by us in a matter of minutes, but now the roars of the engines and the shouting were gone. I could hear birds chirping and distant dogs barking to each other, along with the sound of Mom’s labored breathing and Jolene’s quiet, frightened sobs and the blood pounding in my own head. I was in a state of near delirium from exhaustion and the pain in my shoulder where Mom gripped me, and I no longer felt the ground beneath my feet. I seemed to be floating. The only thing real to me was the fierce little glitters of quartz in the road as Mom c
ontinued pulling me along.

  I fell a final time about a quarter mile from the complex. Gertie was at the top of a hill, like all the other deep shaft mines around here. It loomed at the end of a packed dirt and gravel road, looking like an enclosed village inhabited by a race of people who traveled by chutes and ladders and conveyor belts.

  Mom wrapped an arm around my chest and dragged me the rest of the way. My knees were scraped raw, and the skin where she had gripped my arm while we ran had turned purple. Her knuckles were white. Her ponytail had come loose, and her pale gold hair, now dark with sweat, was plastered to the sides of her face. Her bare feet were bloody. She hadn’t been wearing shoes when the siren sounded.

  She released me and put Jolene down, then bent over, coughing. The air was hard to breathe here. It had a charred stench to it, like a hundred moms had burned a hundred dinners and refused to open a window.

  Emergency vehicles from all over the county had arrived a while ago. Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, and the cars and trucks of regular people had all been hastily abandoned at strange angles with the doors left open.

  Some people stumbled blindly, calling out names. Others walked around with uncertain purpose, their eyes searching, lips mouthing names they couldn’t bring themselves to say out loud yet. The rest stood in stiff, silent, immovable rows, like an orchard in winter.

  My mom headed off determinedly, as if she knew of a destination that was worth arriving at, but the only destination I saw was the hillside, and despite having felt the explosion under my feet and hearing the shriek of the siren and seeing the commotion going on all around me, it was hard to believe anything bad had happened inside that hill. It didn’t look any different than any other hill.

  Where was proof of a catastrophe? I didn’t see anything that resembled the aftermath of explosions I’d seen on TV. No leaping flames. No organized heroics by men in uniforms and badges hauling people to safety. The miners on the outside, the police and firefighters, were gathered in big impenetrable knots of grave discussion.