by Ninie Hammon
Hob tapped the cigarette package against his finger and shook one free. He lit it, took a deep drag, and released the smoke slowly.
“I’s kid, I usta sit ’round the dinner table listenin’ to my daddy and mama, and minin’ was all they talked about. Daddy’d tell her ’bout what happened that day, what sections was bad, the ones nobody wanted to work, what machine broke down, who got hurt. I got so tired a-hearin’ ’bout it. But soon’s I went down, I understood. All that stuff—friends gettin’ injured, the near-misses, smashed fingers—it gets jammed up inside a man and he’s gotta talk to get it out.”
He flicked ash off the end of his cigarette into a metal ashtray on the table and spoke softly.
“But ’til #7 blew, I never realized what it done to the women. It’s the men work in the mines, but the women carry the mine around…” He tapped his chest. “…in here. Inside ’em.”
Hob reached out and patted Will’s arm.
“Ain’t a soul in Aintree wishes you had died in #7, Will; they just wish their men hadn’t.”
HOB PICKED UP his newspaper and pretended to read after Will left. But he didn’t see the words on the page; he saw the faces that came to visit him in his nightmares. Faces with red-rimmed eyes and skin so pale the smudged coal dust stood out like tar. Dead-men’s faces. Hob hadn’t told Will the whole of it. He’d said that, far as he knew, didn’t nobody in Aintree Hollow blame ole Hob for being home with a hangover the morning #7 blew.
That wasn’t true. There was one person who did blame him. Hob did.
He had not gone a day in the past 20 years without wondering if all them men would be alive if he’d gone to work. Hob was the ventilation man on the crew, the curtain hanger. Oh, he knew the foreman had hired some guy because he happened to show up that morning. But Lloyd said they’d put the new guy to work on the shuttle.
And if the new guy was driving the shuttle, who was hanging curtains?
Hob had always figured he’d come by being a ventilation man honest. When he was a little kid, he didn’t like nothing in the world more than playing in the creek. Only he didn’t merely splash around in the water—he rerouted it, changed its course, made it go where he wanted it to go. He’d use rocks to dam up the creek on one side, force the water to go down some channel he’d built out of rocks on the other side. The older he got, the fancier his dams became; time he was a teenager, beavers didn’t have nothing on Hobart Bascomb! Then he turned 16 and went to work in the mine and discovered that “rerouting” was the job description of a ventilation man. Only he didn’t change the flow of water from one place to another; he changed the flow of air.
Once you’d dug more than a couple hundred feet into the mountain, a coal mine’s chief issue became ventilation. The machinery that chewed into the coal seam at the far end of that hole created huge amounts of coal dust and released methane gas trapped in the ore. Methane was a bomb awaiting a spark; coal dust was the fuel. You had to get the dust and gas out of the mine before it reached explosive levels and you had to route good air into the mine for the miners to breathe. To do that you needed a fan, one big enough to move 3,000 cubic feet of air per minute across the face, the deepest part of the mine.
But the fan didn’t blow air. It sucked air. The fan didn’t push air into the mine, it sucked air through it.
Like most other mines, Harlan #7 was designed with three openings. The one in the middle was for the conveyor belt that carried coal from the face of the mine out to be loaded on trucks. The opening on the right was where good air was sucked into the mine down the supply rail line. The fan was located outside the opening on the left, sucking bad air out of the mine. It was a continuous loop—in the right side down the rail line, across the face and back out the left side.
A ventilation man’s job was to make sure the good air being sucked into the right-hand shaft flowed all the way to the face where the miners were working—which in the big mines could be up to 8 miles under the mountain. It was his job to route the good air across the face and then back out the left shaft through the fan, carrying coal dust and poison gases with it out of the mine.
And the ventilation man routed air the same way Hob had routed creek water when he was a kid—by building “dams.” Hob had to block off all the shafts running crossways in the grid of tunnels under the mountain to force the air to flow to the face long ways down the right-hand rail-shaft. The 50-foot, square coal pillars were set 18 feet apart, so the ventilation man had to build a “dam” over every one of those 18-foot gaps—called breaks—the whole route to the face and then back out the other side.
Of course, routing air was easier than routing water. You didn’t have to build a dam out of rocks; all you had to do was hang a curtain.
Harlan #7 was a little over a mile deep, so there were probably 90 breaks between the mouth of the mine and the working face at the far end. It was the ventilation man’s job to seal off all 90 breaks along the right-side shaft and an equal number of breaks on the left. Since he’d worked at #7 from the day it opened, Hob had personally hung most ever one of them curtains—some of them made out of untreated jute, heavy fabric like burlap, others out of thick yellow plastic. As the mine was sunk deeper and deeper into the mountain, it was also his job to go back up the line and make them curtain “dams” permanent by replacing the fabric or plastic with solid walls, seals built of concrete block and mortar.
Problem was, the company wasn’t paying Hobart Bascomb to do his job—they was paying him to keep his mouth shut.
Wilson Cooper run a dog-hole operation if ever there was one, about as dangerous a mine as Hob had ever seen. They got away with it by bribing the MSHA inspectors to look the other way. The ones they couldn’t bribe they tricked. Whenever there was a surprise inspection, the code words “we got a man on the property” spread through the mine. The underage miners, who got paid in cash so there was no paper trail, would quickly take cover at the far end of a remote break—with their headlamps turned off. The other miner’d fix or hide safety violations before the inspector got there. They’d all stop whatever they were doing and grab limestone dust and start dousing the walls—like they was supposed to do all along to make the coal dust inert—non-combustible. And they’d rush to put up curtains, clean rockfalls, and trash, tape frayed cords—stuff like that.
“You boys been drillin’ bore holes?” the inspector’d ask. They was supposed to drill holes into the face before the continuous miner ripped into it to make sure there wasn’t old works on the other side.
“Yes sir, boss,” the miners’d all say. “We shore have.”
Speak up about safety violations and the company’d get fined. With Wilson Cooper run on a shoestring like it was, a couple of big fines and they’d be out of business. They fold up and you don’t have no job, no money coming in to feed your family.
And every miner knew if he complained, the company’d fire him on the spot.
That’s why nobody said nothing when the company scrimped on everything—like permanent seals for the breaks—didn’t provide proper concrete blocks so the seals Hob built were nothing more than stacks of old cinder block with rock dust on them to look like mortar. Inspector ever leaned on one, it’d collapse. Lots of places up and down both shafts, Hob left the jute or plastic curtains because he never had time to build permanent seals.
But the worst safety violation was that the curtains that hung across the breaks close to the face were all the time getting yanked down to make it easier for the machinery to move around. Curtains slowed things down; time was money.
Removing a curtain had the same effect on the air flow in a mine as removing rocks from Hob’s dams in the creek. The air would flow through the un-curtained break like water through a hole in a dam and right back out of the mine without ever reaching the face. That left the miners breathing bad air and the threat of a methane/coal-dust explosion mounting by the second.
And as coal mines went, #7 was a gassy one, real gassy.
“Rec
kon that’s what happened?” Hob didn’t realize he’d spoken the words out loud until the waitress turned toward him.
“You say some’m?”
“Yeah, Sweetheart, how ’bout you warm up my coffee.”
It wasn’t the first time Hob had spoken the words aloud—not the first time he’d heard them in his head, neither. Did they move curtains out of the way that day, not put them back up until…?
He’d been over and over it. Truth was nobody’d ever know why #7 blew. Maybe the continuous miner dug into old works full of methane. Maybe the curtains was down and methane built up in the shafts. Maybe it was something else altogether.
But Hob always come back to the same place, the biggest maybe of all. If he hadn’t been too hung over to do his job that morning, maybe…
CHAPTER 14
AS LONG, SHADOW fingers reached out to grab hold of the hollow, Will walked up the hill to Granny’s house. He’d wandered all over town, but couldn’t seem to make the leap across the chasm of change—in the hollow or in himself—couldn’t seem to reconnect. It was almost worse than being a stranger.
A car pulled up beside him.
“Want a ride?”
He’d heard JoJo’s car coming up the hill. It was hard to miss the sound of the old Ford Escort, probably a 1990 model. Besides a serious knock in the engine, there was either a hole in the muffler or it had fallen off altogether.
Will nodded, walked around to the passenger side of the car and noticed a spiderweb of cracks spread out on the windshield from what looked like a bullet hole. More likely it was where a piece of coal falling off the back of a truck had nailed it. Coal trucks on the road kept windshield replacement operations in Eastern Kentucky in business. All that remained of the passenger side mirror was a rusty stump; whatever had amputated it was probably the same fence post or pole that had smashed in the side of the door.
Though seriously mangled, the door swung easily open and Will waited while JoJo moved a pile of assorted flotsam and jetsam off the passenger seat so he could get in. The interior smelled like pizza.
“You got to bang that door real hard or it won’t stay shut. Catch’s broke. I got a matched set. The door on this side won’t hardly open.”
“Your grandmother allow you to pick up strange men?”
“I know lots of men stranger’n you.” She looked sideways at him as she put the car in gear and continued up the road to the top of the hollow. “And I don’t think you’re all that strange. Just…” she paused. “I don’t know. There’s some’m ’bout your eyes is all.”
“It takes one to know one.”
Her smile faded. “What’s that s’posed to mean?”
“One alcoholic can spot another alcoholic on the other side of the room at a party, can feel the vibes. Or maybe it’s not vibes at all, merely the look of mouth-watering desperation on the guy’s face when the waiter goes by with a tray of martinis.”
“You’ve noticed that, have you?”
“No, I’m the guy looking desperate. I’m a drunk.
“Just like that? ‘Hi, my name’s Will and I’m an alcoholic.’ ”
Will nodded. “I’ll take What It Feels Like To Wake Up In Your Own Puke Under A Bridge for a thousand, Alex.”
He could tell he’d unsettled JoJo, surprised and perhaps intrigued her.
“So, what are you saying? That you think I’m an alcoholic?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what did you say?”
“I said it takes one to know one. But I wasn’t talking about alcoholism. That was an illustration.”
“Sorry, you’ve lost me.” She pulled off the road and parked in front of Granny’s trailer.
“I was talking about being hollowed-eyed and hopeless. I know the look, at least from the inside. And I figure what I feel like on the inside looks just like this…” He reached over and pulled down her visor with a mirror on the back. “…on the outside.”
JoJo glanced at the mirror, then turned to stare at him. All at once, the image of Ricky Dan bloomed in his head and he burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to regain his composure. “It’s just…if your daddy was here right now, you know how he’d describe the look on your face? He’d say, ‘That gal don’t know whether to scratch her butt or take third base.’ ”
That coaxed a tiny smile out of her.
She reached over and picked her purse up out of the floorboard on the passenger side and slammed her shoulder twice into her door before it opened. “Well, it was good talking to you,” she said. “I got to go help Granny with supper.”
“No, you don’t.” That stopped her. “We both know Granny could fix supper for all the blue-eyed men in the Norwegian army with one hand tied behind her back. Take a walk with me.”
“Take a…? I can’t, I…”
“Yes, you can. You’re just afraid to. You don’t want to be alone with me because you know you can’t con me, that I see through the everything’s-dandy-in-my-world act you’ve been performing ever since I met you.”
JoJo stared at him wide-eyed, too surprised to speak.
“I’ll bet I’m the only person in your life who knows you’re lying. And I’m certain I’m the only person who’ll tell you the truth still in the husk, all of it, no matter how ugly it is.”
It was clear nobody’d ever spoken to JoJo as he just had. Will watched warring emotions play across her face, then saw something like anger light her eyes. Good! He could work with anger.
“Fine.” She gestured toward the immediate world. “Where you wanna go?”
Will got out of the car, walked around to her open door and flashed a broad smile. “It’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey.”
As he turned and started up the road toward the shack that had once been his home, Will eased off the full frontal assault he’d mounted and dabbled in the gloriously mundane. Did she like her job? How did she get it? What happened to Will’s accent? Where and how did he lose it?
“I used to love that mulberry tree,” Will said of the dead carcass that had torn a hole in the house roof.
“I did, too,” she said quietly.
“Wind blow it over?”
“No. Ice storm got it.”
She walked to the tree and touched the dry, brittle bark on its trunk.
“When I’s a little girl, I used to come here a lot. There wasn’t no little kids my age around here; Jamey and me was the only ones.”
The explosion in #7 had slashed a swath of destruction through the male population of Aintree Hollow. There’d have been more children around if those miners had lived to have them.
“This tree was easy to climb because of that.” She stepped around and indicated a limb low on the trunk that on the fallen tree formed something like a bench. “Even when I was little, 5 or 6 maybe, I could get up on that one, and after that it was easy to climb the rest of the tree.”
“This was my favorite climbing tree, too, when I was a kid.”
“About 7 or 8 years ago—I wasn’t in high school, yet—we had an ice storm. Not a bad ice storm; there’s been lots of worse ice storms in this holler.”
“I remember one where the ice was half an inch thick on all the trees. Your daddy, Lloyd and I went up to the edge of the woods when it started to warm up and you could hear a sound like popcorn all around, a loud cracking and snapping. It was the ice breaking on the tree limbs.”
“This storm wasn’t like that.” She turned and leaned up against the base of the tree. “There was hardly any ice at all, a quarter of an inch, maybe. Didn’t even make the wires leadin’ to the house sag. And then I come out here and this tree was down.” She sounded sad and her eyes took on a far-away look. “A little bitty ice storm…killed it.”
Will said nothing. JoJo seemed to be moving to a place he didn’t imagine she took many people and he was afraid to inject his presence for fear she’d realize he was there
with her and throw him out.
“I think ’bout that tree a lot. Why’d that little storm kill it when it’d stood up under worse? But that’s the thing. You can’t tell from the outside. You can’t look at a big ole strong tree like that and know what’s going on…down inside it where you can’t see.”
She lowered her head and didn’t say anything else for so long Will thought she was finished. When she did speak, her voice was as soft and as intense as Granny’s.
“It don’t matter how much I loved that tree, I couldn’t have saved it. Even if I’d been standin’ right here when it started over, I couldn’t have held it up. Nobody’s strong ’nough to hold up a fallin’ tree.”
She lifted her head and looked him square in the eye.
“Ain’t nobody strong enough to hold up a fallin’ life, neither.”
She turned wordlessly and headed back down the road toward Granny’s. Will stood where he was and watched her until she had gone into the house and closed the door.
JoJo sat on her bed and listened to the sounds from the kitchen. Granny had made Jamey do the supper dishes tonight because he hadn’t done the breakfast dishes for JoJo like he’d said he would. She could hear the two of them talking with Will. Not the words, but the tone of their voices. It was relaxed and cheerful. Happy.
After Darrell was killed, JoJo was a ship cut adrift in a raging sea. The pain of loss was staggering, overwhelming—all slathered over with a layer of guilt. What Granny and the other women had gone through when #7 blew—not just losing husbands but fathers, brothers, and sons at the same time. Her own sorrow paled in comparison. She was almost ashamed to cry. What right did she have to mourn—they’d all seen worse. And once she’d experienced the agony of real heartbreak, she knew she couldn’t have stood up under what those women endured. There was a degree of courage and determination, strength, and stamina in all of them she flat out didn’t have.
In the chaos of grief, her shame was somehow transformed into anger. She lashed out at the nearest target—Granny. Crazy, irrational, she’d hollered at her grandmother that the only possible way she could have lived through that much loss was that she just didn’t care. Wasn’t no way she could possibly have loved her husband, her brother, and her son. If she had, she couldn’t have survived their deaths all at one time.