by Ninie Hammon
She reached over reluctantly, moved the dirty pillowcase she’d tossed on top of it, pulled the bundle toward her and braced herself for what she’d see. Jamey Boy’d said he didn’t think the miners in the rock had faces. But what if he was wrong? What if they did? What if she lifted the pillowcase off the rock and there was Bowman all tore up, his face a mask of pain? How could she stand to look at a thing like that?
When they first married, Bowman had come home one day with his hand all mashed. Got it caught between a roller and the belt on the belt line. It was the horriblest wound you ever seen, the skin on his fingers split open on both sides, mashed open the way an orange would split if you stepped on it. Soon as she seen it, she begged him to go to the doctor and get it seen to, though she knew they didn’t have no money for doctors. They was poor. But at least they didn’t live in a company town where one of them big coal companies owned your house and you got paid in company script, had to shop at the company store. And the company kept you always in debt so you couldn’t never leave. Her and Bowman, they was better off than that!
Only, truth was, they’s just as much prisoners as them company miners. They had nowhere to go, didn’t know any other way to live, and even as she begged Bowman not to go back down in the mine, she knew for total certain that’s what he’d do. She wondered he had any stomach for it, but what him or her wanted didn’t matter. Bowman’d go back same as every other miner got hurt at work did. He had to. They had three little girls to feed.
So she’d bandaged his hand up best as she could. She remembered the look of agony on Bow’s face as she seen to it, knew the pain was fierce. And ever after that, when her mind went to that bad place the minds of miners’ wives went if they wasn’t careful, she’d see his face with that look on it. The roof would be falling on him and he’d have that look. Or the miner would be backing over him and he’d have that look. Or…
She pulled the pillowcase away so the jet lay naked on the table, but at first she looked at it out of the corner of her eye—just enough to see if there was any faces you could recognize. But the arts didn’t look at all like she expected it would and she turned—surprised—and studied it.
When she’d seen it the first time, only the lone miner in front was pulled up out of the rock, “in relief” JoJo called it. All the other miners behind him was just outlined, like a sketch, still stuck down in the jet waiting for Jamey to set them free. Now, the arts was finished, but Jamey hadn’t pulled them miners in the back out of the rock. They was all just images scratched into the jet behind the one miner in front.
But even though Jamey Boy hadn’t carved them so’s they stuck out, he hadn’t left them sketches, neither. They was as detailed as photographs, though nary a face did she see on any of them! Somehow the tangled bodies flung backwards by the blast was situated so every face was covered up. All them miners, and not a one was anybody she could call by name.
She let out a breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding—felt almost giddy with relief. Oh, it was an awful sight, a terrible sight, but it was an anonymous sight. Them people could have been anybody, unless you could identify them by a helmet, or a shirt…
No!
Granny’s hands flew to her mouth. But she didn’t scream. She was too surprised, too horrified to make a sound. Her heart kicked into a dead run, threatened to tear a hole in her chest; her mouth went dry as the bottom of a flour sack. She sat frozen, her eyes fixed tight on the shirt of the big miner in front who’d been raised up out of the rock.
Wasn’t no mistake; wasn’t something she’d imagined. It was right there, plain’s day.
She leapt to her feet and almost tripped over Crawdad. The cat had left his nap spot in front of the door to rub up against her leg, but she hadn’t felt it. She couldn’t feel nothing at all below her waist; it was like she was numb.
Granny’d had that feeling before.
She lurched across the room to the couch, lifted the cushions and tossed them aside; she threw pieces of newspaper into the air. Then she turned to the coffee table. There it was. She picked it up with trembling fingers and staggered back to the kitchen table with it clutched tight in her hand.
It was the same. They were the same. Wrapped around the arm of the miner in the front of that mural was a band with the number 27 on it just like the one she held in her hand.
Granny wanted to scream, but she held the wail inside. Gritting her teeth, she balled her hands into fists and forced herself to stand absolutely still.
What did it mean?
She knew the answer to the question before her mind asked it, of course. Wasn’t no miner wearing an armband with a 27 on it when they went down into Harlan #7 that day in 1980!
Them armbands was just for the twentieth anniversary service. The only time a miner’d be wearing one was today.
The explosion Jamey Boy’d released from the rock wasn’t the one that happened 20 years ago; the explosion in the carving was today!
Her thoughts started to run crazy, jump ever which way. She’d only felt this scared one other time in her life and that time 27 men had died. She’d known then, too. A few seconds before the boom and roar, she’d known.
But maybe she had more than a few seconds now! Maybe there was still…
Time!
The big miner in front was wearing a watch. She squinted at it, could just make out the detail. It said 12:18, the exact time Harlan #7 had blown the first time.
She looked at the clock. Straight up eleven-thirty. Forty-eight minutes.
She could warn them!
How?
Wouldn’t no phone call work. What would she say? That she knew there was about to be an explosion because…because what? Wouldn’t nobody in they right mind believe a crazy old woman talking about carvings and armbands!
What could she…?
Will!
Will could…No, he couldn’t explain it, neither. Wasn’t time and nobody’d believe him any more than they’d believe her. Will’d have to go there. He’d have to go get them miners out his own self!
Then her racing thoughts screeched to a halt.
Go into the mine? Will? Wasn’t no way in the world Will’d go back into #7, askeered as he was of it!
She sucked in a breath that was a ragged sob.
Well, he’d have to, that’s all. Will had been askeered to tell her the truth, too, and he done it. It was either go into that mine or…
But Will and JoJo was up the hill in Jamey’s shed. They wasn’t in no hurry—no telling how long they’d be. She didn’t have time to wait for them to come back down to the house so she could send Will to the mine.
Granny’s heart stopped hammering. It beat slow, now. Everything around her slowed down, too, like the air was thick as pancake batter. It seemed to take a long time to think the thought; it also blew through her mind like a cannonball.
Granny would have to go up to the shed and get Will!
If she didn’t… if she couldn’t, Jamey Boy and all the other miners in #7 would die.
THE GOOD LADIES from the Coal Mining Museum in Benham had compounded Hob Bascomb’s misery by telling him he couldn’t smoke inside the tent they’d set up for the memorial ceremony. So on top of being nervous, he was about to have a nicotine fit. All he could do was fidget, stand on first one foot and then the other, jumpy as spit on a griddle.
Them ladies wasn’t standing around, though. They was hustlin’ to get everything finished up for the ceremony that was supposed to start right at noon.
Hob looked out over what the ladies had put together and he had to say they’d done a right nice job. The best thing they’d done, of course, was borrow the big tent from Wheeler’s Funeral Home in Pineville “just in case” it rained. It had sprinkled off and on since around three o’clock this morning. Hob knew because he’d been up at three. And now it was coming down like a big dog.
The ladies had set a flatbed tobacco trailer, like a raised-up stage at the far end of the tent they’d pit
ched in the parking lot in front of the mine entrance. They’d put some kinda material—looked like white bedsheets—all around the bottom of the trailer. To hide the wheels, he guessed. And then they’d got red-white-and-blue streamers and draped them around the trailer on top of the sheets like popcorn strings around a Christmas tree.
There was steps—one of them porch things that fit on a trailer house—leading up to the back of the stage. Up on top, all they had was a couple flower arrangements, a black music stand and a stand-up microphone. You got up on that stage all by yourself, folks wouldn’t have nothing to look at but you, like you’s an ant they was trying to set afire with a magnifying glass.
Hob’s stomach rolled. He’d already took enough Pepto-Bismol to turn his eyeballs pink; couldn’t take no more or it’d set up in his belly like Sackcrete and he’d never have another bowel movement as long as he lived.
Out front of the trailer-stage, the ladies had made displays on bulletin boards where they’d arranged pictures of the 27 miners, with their names underneath. Blurry snapshots or school pictures, a lot of them, but you could mostly tell who the men was. They even had some of the tags the miners’d put on the board that morning. The coal company had give those to the families, but some of them got lost. Or got burned up—like Bowman’s and Ricky Dan Sparrow’s tags.
The most impressive thing the ladies done had been installed on the concrete at the mine entrance a week ago, but nobody except the miners had seen it yet. It was a plaque—kind of like a tombstone only made out of metal—that said something like: “Twenty-seven miners lost their lives in Harlan #7 on October 16, 1980. May they rest in peace.”
A crowd had begun to gather in front of the tobacco-trailer stage—maybe 25 people. But it was early yet. The ladies had lined up preachers to open and close the doin’s in prayer, of course. Then they’d got the Harlan County Judge Executive, and the county’s state senator and representative to speak. You could pick them out; they was the only ones here had ties on. They’d also got the outside foreman who’d been on duty that day to talk and Beau Grissom, head of Big Sandy Mine’s rescue team who’d pulled Will and Lloyd out. Them ladies being from Brenham, they probably didn’t know Will was home or they’d have asked him to talk like they done Lloyd.
Yeah, Lloyd.
Hob couldn’t make no sense at all of his run-in with Lloyd that morning. Justine Hinkle told Hob more than a week ago that she’d asked Lloyd to talk at the memorial and he’d turned her down. But this morning, Lloyd’d told Hob he hadn’t brought his lunch to work because he was going to speak at the ceremony.
Soon as Hob seen Justine, he’d asked her about it again, didn’t let on Lloyd had said nothing.
“Lloyd said no,” she’d said. “’Bout bit my head off, too.”
And speaking of biting heads off, Lloyd near decapitated Jamey Sparrow soon as he seen him. Didn’t nobody yell at Jamey. He’d hollered at the boy that he shouldn’t be here, that he’d ought to go home.
What was that about?
More than anything else, though, was how Lloyd had looked. Hob couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly, but something was off, bad off. Lloyd’s little bitty eyes was…was the eyes of a crazy man! Hob didn’t know better, he’d swear Lloyd Jacobs’d done lost his mind.
Hob lifted the sleeve on his starched and pressed dress white shirt to reveal the face of his watch. Here it was less than half an hour before this shooting match was supposed to start and he still hadn’t come up with a speech. If something didn’t come to him when he got up there, what he had to say wouldn’t have to be shortened none to fit on his tombstone.
A squalling sound that set Hob’s teeth on edge blared out from the stage. The suit-and-tie judge executive stood like a rooster in front of the microphone and a too-loud voice boomed into the fresh autumn air.
“Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Is this thing on?”
Hob glanced toward the mine entrance. He’d read somewhere that soldiers felt like he sometimes did. Called it survivor’s guilt. Miners was like soldiers. They was tight because they risked their lives together every day—depended on each other. Hob had lived all these years with the memories of fellow soldiers he should have died with.
There was days he wished there was some way he could make up for that. This here was one of those days.
CHAPTER 34
GRANNY DIDN’T GIVE herself time to think about it. If she’d thought about it, she’d have froze up solid—wouldn’t have been able to move nary a finger.
She turned from the table and ran fast as she could to the back door and out to the porch. The rain was coming down hard now, so heavy she could barely see the back of the garden. Thunder cracked, then rumbled like somebody was rattling a piece of tin. Fat raindrops battered the roof of the trailer, the ground and the trees, making a noise like applause.
Soon as she stepped down off the porch to the top step, two things happened. The rain hit her, and she hit a wall, real as a brick fence. So real she liked to fell back from it and landed on her backside.
Her heart rattled in her chest, raced like a coal train heading down the valley. For the first time in her life it occurred to her she was an old woman and if ever there was a time to have a heart attack, now was it. She fixed her mind on taking just one step. She put her foot out and bit down so hard in concentration a tooth caught a bit of her lip and she tasted blood in her mouth.
She made it down off the first step to the second and was instantly soaked to the skin. The sudden chill of the cold rain raised goose bumps all over her body.
Why didn’t you get a raincoat, you mow-ron?
Water poured down off her head into her eyes so she could hardly see. Then she noticed a funny, mewing sound like the Jewett’s cat made that time it had kittens on Granny’s back porch. Where was that sound—?
Why, it was from her own throat, that’s where! She was making it, whimpering, about to cry. She had to grab hold of the railing alongside the steps to keep herself from jumping right back up on the porch.
She didn’t bother to try to convince herself this was all foolishness, that there was no real danger, nothing to be askeered of. She’d told herself a thousand times it was all in her head. Of course, it was all in her head—where else would it be? Everything was in your head; it was being in your head that made it real.
This was real.
She shook so hard she could barely hold onto the railing, but she put her foot out to take another step. Then pulled it back like she’d stuck it in hot oil.
Now, she was panting. Tears probably ran down her face, too; no way to tell with the rain coming down like somebody was pouring water on her out of a washtub.
She put her foot forward again. Made it down one more step and her heart pounded even faster. She was down far enough now that the wind hit her, blew the rain at her like bits of gravel and wrapped her soaked dress around her like a wet sheet.
This wasn’t getting easier; it was getting harder! The farther she ventured from the top of the porch, the farther out past the circle she stepped, the bigger the terror grew.
She started to cry, sob, but the roar of rain around her ate up the sound. Then she threw her head back so the raindrops smacked her in the face and hollered out in a tear-clotted voice. “Please, God. Help me!”
A heartbeat later, she felt a warm presence beside her. No, it wasn’t no angel, unless angels stunk like a wet dog. It was Bucket. He just stood next to her, right up against her leg. The dog that hated to get wet, used to hide under the bed he was so scared of storms...just stood there.
With a trembling hand, she reached down and took hold of the dog’s collar.
“Jamey Boy,” she gasped. “Bucket, go find Jamey.”
The dog started down the steps; Granny held on and was dragged down the steps along with him. He splashed into the puddle at the bottom and turned toward the trail around the garden. When Granny stepped into the puddle, water came up past her ankle and the mud sucked her sho
e off. But Bucket kept going and so did she.
The wind lashed her with raindrops like a cat-o’-nine-tails. It was so open, empty and vacant out past the circle. Like her heart and her life and her soul felt when she come back home alone for the first time after the explosion. She had wandered from room to room like an old dog looking for its master. Then it got real bright in the house, as if all the lightbulbs was car headlights. She went into the kitchen and she could smell fried chicken. And there was Bow! He sat at the table, his napkin tucked into his shirt at the neck, a fork in his fist the way he always held it, like he planned to attack anybody tried to get to the chicken breast before he did.
In the living room—a little bitty thing with a lumpy couch—Will and Ricky Dan had the pieces of Ricky Dan’s shotgun on the floor all around them. Ricky Dan was showing Will how to clean the gun. And they was laughing. Them boys was always laughing.
Why had she so dreaded coming home? Home was where she was belonged. Home was where Bowman and Ricky Dan and Will was at. And as she stood there in the middle of the living room, the pain in her heart faded and was gone. For five seconds, maybe ten, everything was right with the world. She let out a huge sigh of relief.
And then it vanished. Poof. With a little sparkle like a soap bubble, the fantasy was gone and she stood alone in the living room. It was dim and chilled and wasn’t no smell of nothing except wilted flowers. Her Bow wasn’t waiting in the kitchen. Ricky Dan wasn’t there on the living room floor. They never would be again. Not ever. They was dead. Gone. Vanished under Black Mountain.
She’d stood frozen as the realness sunk in; sickening pain punched her in the belly hard as it done when they said they wasn’t looking for survivors no more. They wasn’t even looking for bodies. They wasn’t looking at all. After the mine blew that last time, it was too dangerous, wasn’t right to risk a live man’s life to find a dead man’s body. And there wasn’t no bodies to find, anyway. The rescue team from Hard Scrabble seen that much before they run back out. The fire in the coal seam at the face of Harlan #7 was burning twice as hot as a crematorium.