by Ninie Hammon
Her face twisted in a monstrous cramp of grief and she cried out, “No!” She lifted her eyes toward heaven and begged, with a wail of such yearning it must surely have broke the heart of God to hear it. “Oh, please no. Not again!”
THE EXPLOSION ROARED out in every direction from the flame on Lloyd’s lighter with a force like dropping a lit firecracker into an empty Mason jar. Empty except for the miners running for their lives up the rail line shaft. Blowtorches of flame shot out, too, rode the coal dust in the air out hundreds of feet in every direction, flames hot enough to ignite solid coal in a couple of seconds and incinerate the pieces of equipment at the face. The miners, too, if they’d been there.
The force of the explosion chucked charred shuttle cars across the face and slammed them into the wall, crumpled them up like tin. It rolled the blackened continuous miner over onto its side and scooted it after them, and jammed them all together in an unrecognizable pile of scorched and twisted metal. The blast instantly melted the rubber on 75 yards of belt line and glued it to the rollers. It ripped the power station off the floor and smashed it against the coal pillar on the other side of the shaft, left the high line cable that brought in electricity from the outside a mass of exposed wires that sparked and snapped like a den of cobras.
A mighty fist of super-heated, expanding air sucker-punched the fleeing miners from behind. It hammered them to the floor, bounced them off the roof, slammed them against coal pillars and each other and fired pieces of coal, loose rocks, shattered cinder blocks and beams at them like missiles. It burst their eardrums, bloodied their noses and left them injured, dazed, and gasping. But alive. At least until the cloud of noxious fumes caught up with them, the poison gas and black smoke that trailed the explosion like a tail on a kite.
All around Jamey it was silent and dark. He lay on his side, jammed up against a coal pillar with something soft—somebody—shoved up against him. There were pale shafts of headlamp beams shining out in odd directions, from helmets knocked off their owners’ heads or from heads in strange positions. Jamey tried to move, grunted from the effort and could barely hear the sound he made through a roaring in his head. He reached up and felt blood coming out of his left ear.
He hadn’t lost his helmet, but lying on his side, his headlamp shone out across the floor and didn’t light up nothing. Jamey turned and seen that the man shoved up against him was the shuttle operator. He pushed and the shuttle man rolled away and began to move, feeling around with his hands, trying to get up.
“Who’s here?” Jamey heard a voice call out, but he couldn’t tell where it’d come from. “Call out! Who’s here?”
A little farther down from Jamey, a light moved up off the floor of the shaft, righted itself like a miner crouched down on his knees. Then other lights started moving slowly as their owners tried to get up, too, or figure out why they couldn’t.
“Com’on!” the voice called, and this time Jamey could tell it was the miner man yelling. He cursed—Jamey heard that!—and then yelled, “Holler out your names. Who’s still alive?”
Voices come from the dark or out from under headlamps that were now shining out at eye level all around. Jamey had trouble telling where the men were, his hearing messed up like it was. His own voice sounded funny when he yelled, “Jamey Sparrow.”
The miner man must have been keeping track because he said, “Everybody’s ’counted for ’cept Bradley. Anybody seen—?”
“I’m right here,” yelled a voice that come out of the dark farther down the shaft than the others. Headlamps turned and shone that direction and lit up shining eyes probably 30 feet away. “Lamp’s busted.”
Jamey started to cough. The smell of smoke was all around them.
“We got to run,” the miner man said, but he didn’t need to because everybody was already rising to their feet. “Anybody hurt? Check each other out.”
Headlamp beams washed over the miners, revealing bleeding ears and noses, and blood on clothes, too. The pinner man couldn’t hardly talk. He’d hit something smashed his mouth and broke out most all his front teeth. The blood had run down and turned his white beard red. The miner man’s helper had blood all over the bottom of his pants leg. The shuttle driver’s left arm was bent funny and he was holding it against his chest with his right.
“Can you walk, Jamey?” the scoop operator asked and Jamey looked at him like he was a fool. Of course, he could walk; he wasn’t no baby. Then he followed the light from the man’s headlamp and seen the splinter sticking out of his own leg halfway between his belt and his knee. It was a piece off a wooden beam, maybe 2 inches thick and stuck out of his leg 6 or 8 inches. He was surprised to death because he didn’t feel nothing. It didn’t hurt, but it was bleeding so’s his pants was getting soaked.
“I can walk.”
“Can you run?” the miner man asked. “If you can’t, we’ll carry you. We ain’t leavin’ nobody behind.”
The smoke was thick now; everybody had begun to cough.
“Can you make it?” the scoop operator asked.
“Sure I can!” Jamey said, but soon’s he moved, pain shot through his leg so fierce he was afraid he was gonna throw up. “You go on, I’ll be right behind you.”
Wouldn’t none of them leave, though, until Jamey got to his feet—foot—and started hobbling down the shaft. Soon as they seen Jamey could move, they all took off running.
Then Jamey remembered and stopped cold.
ValVleen. Where was ValVleen?
He’d had her in his hand, was cradling her little dead body as he run down the shaft and then the explosion hit and…he must have dropped her.
He turned and swept his headlamp over the floor. The smoke was getting thicker and it stunk! It didn’t smell like the bonfires he built to burn leaves. It made his eyes all watery so’s it was hard to see, too, hard to find ValVleen!
Jamey eased carefully down on his hands and knees and searched the floor, crawled back and forth, the pain in his leg an agony he could barely stand. Blood had soaked the whole bottom part of his pants and was dripping off, making a bloody snail trail as he crawled.
He called out to her—“ValVleen! ValVleen, where are you?”—in a strangled cry, though he knew she couldn’t hear him. “I ain’t leavin’ here ’thout, you, ValVleen. Where are you?”
Jamey looked and looked but he couldn’t find her anywhere.
CHAPTER 39
A SUDDEN DEAFENING ROAR reverberated in the shaft around Will and inside his head, too. A thunderous boom that sucked all the air out of his lungs was followed by an invisible force that knocked him backward against the pillar and banged his head painfully.
She’d blown! Just like Jamey’s art… Jamey!
The boy was gone. Will was too late. He’d tried to save Ricky Dan’s son, but the mine had gobbled the boy up just like it had his father.
Will sat stunned. He shook his head. Maybe he was crying; his face was wet. He caught a whiff of smoke that quickly grew into the stench of a coal fire. But he wouldn’t run from it this time. This time, he’s sit here and…
Voices!
He turned—his eyes searched frantically. Left, right, like the tap of a blind man’s cane. Then he saw something, or thought he did. Yes, pale light far in the distance down the shaft. Of course, they’d come out the rail shaft. The survivors would…survivors! Jamey!
Will got to his feet and stumbled off in the darkness toward the growing pinprick of light in the distance.
JAMEY’S HEADLAMP BLINKED out, then back on again. He was glad the other miners weren’t here to see that. They’d have teased him. They’d have said his girlfriend was cheating on him. That’s what miners always said: a flickering headlamp meant your girl was two-timing you. Jamey understood cheating. You said you didn’t have no queens in Go Fish when you really did. But he had no idea what two-timing meant.
The light flickered again. He must have messed something up on the lamp or the battery when he fell down. He turned his head careful, l
ike he was balancing a plate on top of it, and continued to sweep the floor of the shaft with the light, searching for the body of his friend.
He had begun to feel funny, though. Dizzy and weak. The splinter stuck in his leg had begun to throb along with his heartbeat. It still didn’t hurt bad, though, unless he touched it or moved. But when he looked down at it, a wave of nausea almost made him upchuck. He knew he’d ought to go, run toward the entrance the way the other’d done. But he had to find ValVleen!
And besides, he was tired. He’d have to rest up some before he could run off anywhere. By the time he was rested, he’d have to coon the rails to find his way in the smoke.
He began to cough violently, so hard he lost his breath for a minute. And it occurred to him that he might already have waited too late, that the smoke would take all his air away before he could make it to the entrance.
Well, if that was the way of it, wasn’t no use to pout about it. But if he was going to die here, he wanted to die with…
There! A speck of yellow showed out from under dirt and rocks. A piece of curtain or…
ValVleen!
He crawled to her quick as he could, dusted the rocks and dirt off her tiny body and lifted her tenderly. She wasn’t warm no more, warm and soft. Her body was cold and kind of stiff. She felt like a stuffed animal, the kind JoJo had piled on her bed.
His eyes watered and her image swam in the sudden tears. Well, she was still his ValVleen, cold or not.
“ValVleen, I been searchin’ ever where for you. Looks like me and you’s gonna stay here…” he coughed so violently the shaking sent a wave of pain from the splinter in his leg all the way to his knee. “I wish you’s here to sing to me while…”
“Jamey!”
His ears was so messed up he thought he heard somebody callin’…
“Jamey!” Again. Louder. He looked around, uncertain of the direction. Then seen a headlamp off in the smoky distance, dancing like somebody was running with it.
He tried to get from his knees to his feet, but his legs was all rubbery and didn’t want to hold him up. And the smallest movement stabbed a dagger of pain down his whole leg. So he sat down carefully in the dirt.
The light coming at him got bigger and brighter. It had this circle around it, like a halo, that Jamey thought sure was pretty. The voice under the light kept calling his name, and it sounded like…
Will?
It was Will. What was Will doing here? Jamey couldn’t puzzle that out in his head. In fact, his head swam so crazy-like he had trouble thinking at all—or even sitting up for that matter. And then he was on his back, his light shining on the roof. They was lots of leaves and flowers and such up there, the outlines of them anyway. They looked kind of like the wallpaper he’d seen in the lobby of the hospital he went to when he had the croup that time.
He wanted to reach up and touch the flowers but his arm was too heavy to lift.
WILL DROPPED TO his knees beside Jamey. The boy lay on his back between the rails and he wasn’t moving, didn’t even appear to be breathing.
“Jamey!” he cried.
The green eyes opened and Jamey smiled at Will.
“Whatchoo doin’ here? Yore askeered of coal mines. You said.”
“We gotta get you out of here, Jamey.” Will looked down at the wound on Jamey’s leg and his heart sank. The scoop operator who’d given Will his helmet and headlamp said the boy’d been right behind him, running even though he had a splinter in his leg. So Will didn’t think the wound would be this severe. Jamey’s pants leg was soaked and there was a puddle of blood settled into the dust around him. “Can you stand, Jamey? Can you run?”
Will’s words were punctuated by a fit of coughing. The smoke…They had to go now! Jamey’s eyes filled with tears and he held his hand up for Will to see. Lying in his open palm was his pet canary—dead.
“I killed her, Will. I killed ValVleen. But I hadta. I—”
“Later, Jamey. Get up, we got to get out of here.”
Jamey rolled to his side and tried to rise. He cried out in pain and slumped back down on the ground.
“I’m tired, Will. Let me rest a spell. You go on and I’ll be ’long directly.”
Will leapt to his feet and grabbed the back of the collar on Jamey’s work shirt.
“This is going to hurt, Jamey. I’m sorry.”
Then Will turned and took off toward the mine entrance dragging Jamey between the rails in the dirt behind him. Jamey cried out in pain but Will kept going. The power of déjà vu was so intense it was disorienting, almost overwhelming. Will tried to ignore it, just bent his head down and struggled forward as fast as he could go—which wasn’t very fast at all. The last time he’d dragged an injured miner down the shaft he’d had help. All by himself, it was slow going.
As he struggled for every step, the smoke in the tunnel got thicker and thicker.
JOJO GAPED AT the thick black smoke that boiled out the entrance of the mine. She could see the people who’d been in the white tent huddled together staring at it, too. A gray Kentucky State Police cruiser, lights flashing, siren screaming, had joined two brown Harlan County Sheriff’s Department cars, and the officers blocked off the entrance road to the mine and quickly began diverting traffic around it. But folks just abandoned their vehicles on the side of the road and ran the rest of the way to the mine on foot. None of the officers tried to stop them. Most of Aintree Hollow was already there, anyway.
She couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like the explosion doors on the fan had blown—and that was good. The doors were at the end of the metal enclosure that housed the ventilation fan, in a straight line from the bad-air shaft. The force of any blast coming from the shaft would blow the doors away and release the pressure, rather than destroying the fan, which was attached to the enclosure at right angles to the doors. From what JoJo could see, the doors were gone but the fan unit was still there. That mattered. With a fan to suck the bad air out of the mine, the rescue teams…
The teams weren’t even here yet.
She swallowed hard not to be sick and turned toward Granny. The poor old woman looked like a groundhog JoJo’d seen once swimming across a rain-swollen creek. Her hair had come undone and hung down to the middle of her back, a tangle of long, muddy curls and pieces of sticks and twigs.
Granny stood tall and straight, though. She stared unblinking down at the mine. But her lip trembled. JoJo couldn’t begin to imagine what she must be thinking, what nightmare horrors she remembered, what agony ripped open her heart now with Jamey—Jamey!
He couldn’t be…not gone. No! The thought took her breath away with a different kind of pain than she’d felt when they’d come to tell her about Darrell. Jamey was…it was like losing a child.
Just like Granny’d done.
How had she stood it? How had any of them? There’d been a time when JoJo was barely old enough to understand the tragedy that had befallen Aintree Hollow, that she couldn’t make sense out of the people who’d survived. They’d just…gone on. She hadn’t seen the beginning, the first few years, of course, but all those people were still around when she was growing up. They taught school, delivered mail, and raised kids. The men still went down in the mines. And the women still waited every day for them to come back out.
At the time, she’d thought it was cold and unfeeling to behave like nothing at all had happened. Now, she saw it as a kind of courage she could barely get her arms around.
A sudden, shattering roar shook the roots of the mountain, bigger and louder than the first one. The trailer wobbled like it was a toy sitting on the top of a washer on spin cycle. As JoJo watched in horror, the ventilation fan exploded off the side of the metal enclosure. The huge blade whirred up into the sky like some kid’s Frisbee, sailed over the treetops, and disappeared into the woods.
Granny grabbed the porch railing, no color at all in her face. She swayed and JoJo reached back and dragged the rocking chair over behind her.
“Sit d
own, Granny, ’fore you fall down.”
But Granny stood where she was, watched the crowd scatter, backing up and to the sides to get out of the black cloud that boiled out the entrance like smoke out a chimney.
Tears streamed down Granny’s cheeks. She mouthed words she didn’t give voice to, but JoJo could read her lips. She was silently repeating: Will. Jamey Boy.
CHAPTER 40
WILL’S BREATH SEARED his throat. His legs screamed in agony. He ran blind down the never-ending shaft, dragging Jamey behind him. The boy was no longer moving, hung there, limp.
Oh, please not dead!
Will didn’t stop to examine him. Just kept going.
Without the rails to guide him, Will would have gotten hopelessly lost. The smoke was so thick the headlamp on his borrowed helmet cast only a pallid glow, illuminating nothing but his own feet. Now and then he spotted the bright yellow of curtains across the breaks he passed. A few seals had held; most hadn’t. But he wasn’t looking for double curtains, a place to hold up and wait it out. Not this time. They’d make it or they wouldn’t out here in the shaft. Jamey would bleed to death if they stopped.
Several times, he coughed so hard and long he could only stagger forward. He went down to his knees once—coughed until he heaved. But lower down, beneath the ever thickening blackness, the air was a little better and he grabbed a breath, lurched to his feet, and struggled forward.
On and on in the endless, airless dark. Down through the deepest, black ditch of his worst nightmares. Through the smoke-filled antechamber of hell.
Time had no meaning here. Will imagined that the hands of his watch spun wildly round and round in opposite directions. Or dangled broken in a permanent six-thirty. At some point, he realized he had stopped moving forward. His head spun; his ears buzzed. The mine floor swayed and lurched like the deck of a ship in a storm.