by Ninie Hammon
Stop fighting it.
No!
He shook his head frantically to clear it and the movement pitched him forward face-first into the dirt.
Don’t get up. Rest.
No.
He rose to his elbows, his lungs on fire, lifted his head. The beam of his headlamp stabbed sightlessly into the swirling murk that filled the shaft.
And there, ahead—light!
Not his headlamp. Not shining out—shining in. A beam of light in the distance, a small, round beacon.
The trite phrase bloomed bright and beautiful in his mind. Light at the end of the tunnel. The mouth was there! He could see it. He began to stagger to his feet. Surely, he could make it that—
His ears popped.
A thunderous roar ate up all thought. Will felt himself flung through the smoke into a darkness where there was no light in front of him anymore. No light anywhere at all.
“GRANNY, LOOK!” JoJo cried, though she didn’t need to. Granny was looking the same place she was, saw what she saw. Miners had appeared in the smoke, coming out the mouth of the mine! Stumbling out. Folks was running toward them, rescue squad people and EMTs, hurrying them off to the side quick as they could out of the stream of smoke that poured from the entrance. But the miners was walking! Some of them was limping, but they was moving under their own steam. That meant at least some of the miners had been far enough away from the blast to survive it, and they’d got out quick enough not to suffocate in the smoke.
Granny grabbed JoJo’s arm, her grip so tight her fingernails bit into JoJo’s flesh. “I ain’t got eyes to look that far. I can’t…can you see Jamey Boy? Or Will?”
It was an absurd question, of course. From here, the people were smaller than baby mice. JoJo couldn’t see anybody’s face, and even if she could have, the emergency personnel had swarmed all over them so quick she couldn’t have identified anybody.
“No, Granny. I can’t tell.”
“You go find out, child!”
“But how—?”
“Walk…run. You take that little phone of yourn and you go down there and find out. And you call me. No matter what you find out, you call me. Now git!”
JoJo turned, took the porch steps two at a time and raced down the road.
HOB BASCOMB HAD been standing so close to the mine entrance he seen the first of the miners, seen their headlamps bob in the darkness. Ran in there with some other fellows and helped pull them out. Now, he went from one to the other, searching.
Jamey Sparrow wasn’t there. Neither was Will Gribbins.
Hob knelt down beside the miner man, who was leaned up against the wall of the lamp house with an EMT holding an oxygen mask over his face.
“Where’s Jamey? He make it out with you guys? Did you see Will?”
The miner man shoved the oxygen mask aside and rasped in a hoarse voice. “Will went lookin’ for Jamey. Ask…” He burst into a fit of coughing then and the EMT shoved the mask back over his face. So he finished the sentence by pointing at the scoop operator, laid out on a stretcher. EMTs on both sides were about to lift him up into an ambulance but Hob got there before they could get him inside.
“Will and Jamey! Where—?”
The scoop operator pulled the oxygen mask off his face.
“I told ’em.” He pointed to the outside foreman who was huddled with the rescue team that had just arrived from Big Sandy. “They was both alive last time I seen ’em,” he started coughing but waved the EMT away when he tried to replace the mask on his face. “Jamey’s leg had this big ole splinter in it. I thought he was right behind me, but you couldn’t seen nothin’ in that smoke…” Then he shook his head. “And that second blast coulda got ’em.”
The EMT pushed the mask onto the scoop operator’s face and shoved the stretcher up into the ambulance.
Hob marched over to the foremen and the rescue team, butted right into their conversation.
“Will went in after Jamey and—”
“We know that,” the foreman barked, “The team’s going in to start hanging curtains soon’s—”
“They won’t last in that smoke ’til you hang curtains!” Hob literally spit the words out. With no teeth, when he got excited he sometimes sprayed his listeners. “They ain’t far in. I know it.”
He looked at the crew from Big Sandy, then turned and picked up a self-rescuer. The team had just unloaded a box of them and set it beside the office door.
“I’m goin’ in after ’em,” Hob said.
“Oh, no you ain’t!” the foreman bellowed. “You ain’t certified in rescue. You can’t go…”
Hob realized the other rescue team members—five of them—had grabbed self-rescuers and put on nose clamps, too. Without another word, the six men plunged into the black smoke that billowed out of Harlan #7.
A HISSING SOUND.
A beep.
Another hissing sound.
There was a rhythm.
Will seemed to recall that rhythm, but he couldn’t remember where. Didn’t matter.
Then the sounds and the world faded away.
He was a bubble dislodged from under a rock in a creek, floating up and up and up toward sparkling bright light, diamonds of illumination refracted into sequins of brilliance by the water. He broke the surface into the light and there was air and noise.
He opened his eyes, saw blurry images, closed them again.
“I think he’s awake.” JoJo’s voice.
“Leave him be, child.” Granny’s voice. “Let him sleep.”
“I’m not asleep.” His own voice—only hoarse, damaged and painful.
“How long you been playin’ possum, laying there listenin’ to us talk about you?” Granny again.
He opened his eyes and left them open, the blurry images resolved into the faces that matched the voices. Granny and JoJo. So where was…?
“Jamey!” He tried to sit up. “What happened to Jamey?” Speaking slashed his throat with razor blades.
Granny shoved him gently back down on the bed. “Jamey Boy’s just fine.” The look on her face said that might not be entirely true.
JoJo was more blunt. “It was a near thing, though. When I called Granny to tell her they’d got you both out, I wasn’t even sure he was—”
Granny shot her a glance, then said a little too cheerfully. “You shoulda seen the line of folks waitin’ to give him they blood. I never seen the like.”
Will looked at JoJo. “Where is he?”
“Up Lexington.”
“Then where…” He glanced around. “…am I?”
“Harlan. The Appalachian Regional Hos—”
Will suddenly turned back to Granny and sputtered, “Granny…you’re here!”
“Ever-body’s got to be somewhere.”
She couldn’t quite pull off the humor, though. Her soft voice had a tremor in it. Will saw then how tight her hands gripped the railing around his bed, watched her hummingbird heartbeat in the big vein in her neck.
“Oh, don’t make over it none. It’s easier when you’s indoors. ’Sides, I already been to Lexington.” A shadow passed over her face, like the memory took her breath away. “I only done it ’cause I had to. Ain’t gonna make no habit out of it.”
“The other miners?” The pain in Will’s throat kept his questions brief.
“They all made it…” Granny paused, and in the moment of silence, Will felt that sense of foreboding—of something hurling at him in the dark. “’Cept Lloyd.” She drew in a deep, shaky breath. “He’s gone.”
That was the first time it occurred to Will that Lloyd should have been in the mine with Jamey and the others. He’d said that first morning, when he and Will almost came to blows, that he was changing shift, going from nights to days.
“Don’t none of what happened make sense,” Granny said. “Miners said they seen curtains down on the rail line—pulled down. And nothin’ ’bout Lloyd makes sense, neither. He told the crew he was goin’ back out to speak at the cere
mony and nobody ever seen him again. But he wasn’t speakin’. He told us he’d turned ’em down when they asked him to speak, said you’d ought to do it, instead. Remember?”
Will noticed that JoJo had an odd, hard expression on her face. He looked a question at her.
“I got some’m here you need to see,” she said. “I been waitin’ to show it to you.” She turned to Granny. “Why don’t you go—”
“They got a sody-pop machine down the hall.” Granny let go of the bed railing. “Costs a whole dollar but I’m gonna get me one anyway.” She nodded toward JoJo. “Then me ’n you need to get on back to the holler.”
It was impossible to miss the yearning in her voice.
As soon as the door whispered closed behind Granny, JoJo pushed the button to lift the head of Will’s bed up to a sitting position. Then she picked up an object wrapped in newspapers off a chair beneath the ceiling-mounted television and placed it in Will’s lap. It was heavy. Cold.
Will’s heart began to pound.
JoJo went to the window and closed the blinds, then turned off the bright overhead light and crossed back through the darkened room to his bedside.
“What…?” Will began.
But he already knew—wasn’t really surprised when she pulled back the newspapers and took out the jet mural Jamey had carved of the three miners drawing rocks out of a helmet. Still, he couldn’t stifle a moan at the sight of it.
“I know this is hard, but you got to see.”
She drew a cigarette lighter out of her pocket, flipped the switch, and held the flickering light near the mural. She pointed at the area to the right of the relief sculpture of the kneeling miners, to the coal wall that formed the background of the scene. “There. Look right there.”
Will looked. He didn’t see anything. He moved his gaze slowly back and forth across the shiny surface. Nothing. He couldn’t make out any more than he saw the first time he…
His sudden gasp sucked air down his raw throat so abruptly he almost choked. It was like that one optical illusion picture where he’d actually seen the second image. Once he located the image, it leapt out at him, stood out in stark relief, was so obvious it seemed that it was the focus of the artwork and the rest was background.
An intricately elaborate scene had appeared in the finely etched lines in the black rock. The detail was stunning. You could see Lloyd’s face, a perfect likeness. You could see the UK painted on his helmet. You could also see the deranged, maniacal twisting of his features, the knotted muscles in his forearms and the texture of the rope he had wrapped in a hangman’s noose around Ricky Dan’s neck.
For a moment the room spun around Will in the familiar motion of the state of inebriation just past a pleasant buzz and not yet slobbering and staggering—the place where you could carry on a conversation if it wasn’t a complicated one, could flirt fairly effectively if the girl was as drunk as you were.
Ricky Dan’s features were distorted in an awful cramp of desperation. His eyes were bugged out, his face swollen in a frantic effort to suck in air as his fingers clawed at the rope that dug into his flesh.
Will couldn’t speak. Neither could he tear his eyes away from the stone. The image seared into his mind like a brand; he could almost feel the heat, smell the raw, burning stink. Every line, every detail of it would remain with him, in photographic clarity, for the rest of his life.
He looked up at JoJo, his eyes pleading, as if she could somehow make it not so.
“Granny knew,” she said in an awed whisper. “All these years. Lloyd come to the house for supper, fixed my car when it broke down, took Jamey sangin’…and all that time, she—”
The door opened, spilled bright light into the dim room, and the image vanished. Granny stood frozen for a moment, a Dr. Pepper can in her hand. Then she flicked the light switch and crossed to Will’s bed.
“I wanted her to wait, but she wouldn’t hear none of it,” she said softly.
Wordlessly, JoJo picked the stone up out of Will’s lap and began to wrap the newspapers back around it.
“Now, you listen here to me, Will Gribbins.” The old woman shook her finger at him as she spoke. “You need to put all this ’bout Lloyd in a sack by the door for the time being and concentrate on gettin’ well. It’ll be there a-waitin’ for you when you’re ready. You hear me?”
Will nodded dumbly, too shocked to speak.
“You know there was three explosions in #7 this time,” Granny said in an obvious effort to drag the conversation off in another direction. “Third time was the biggest. I heared they had roof falls all over the new section they just dug. It’s gonna be like it was before. They’ll yank Black Gold’s permits same as they done Wilson Cooper’s. I ’spect they won’t never reopen #7.” She paused, then drifted back in spite of herself. “And maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe the whole thing needs to stay buried under the mountain.”
JoJo picked up the conversational ball then and tried to run with it.
“It was Hob Bascomb pulled you and Jamey out. Him and the rescue team. You’s not but about two hundred yards in.”
“I ’spect Hob’d a-kept goin’ if you’d been a thousand,” Granny said.
“That was two days ago,” JoJo said. She must have seen Will’s eyes grow wide in surprise. “They kept you all doped up ’cause you’s on a respirator for a while. They took Jamey off yesterday. Aunt Ruth Ann and Aunt Charity’s with him now.” She paused. “He ain’t hardly stopped cryin’ about that bird since he come to.”
Will remembered then. “Jamey said he’d killed ValVleen.”
JoJo explained why.
“That took a lot of cour—” Will’s voice gave out.
“Courage,” JoJo finished for him. Her eyes shifted from Will to Granny and then back. “Yeah, there’s been a lot of that going ’round lately. Must be some’m in the water.”
The world began to grow fuzzy again. Will heard the sound of the bed cranking back down, but he never heard it hit bottom.
WILL STOOD ON the porch beside Granny as Jamey carried the last of JoJo’s clothes out to the car, folded up neatly in a black garbage bag. A harsh November wind had sent the temperature down close to freezing, and Will was shivering in his windbreaker. Granny wore only a light sweater, but she didn’t seem to notice the cold at all.
“She’ll be fine,” Will said, just to have something to say. They’d been over this half a dozen times.
“If this here’s some’m she needs to do, she best get it outta her system,” Granny said without looking at him.
JoJo had surprised Will about a week after he got out of the hospital, asked him if she could go with him when he left Aintree Hollow.
“You don’t even know where I’m going,” he’d blurted out to cover up the relief that threatened to bring tears to his eyes.
“Don’t matter. Long’s it’s away from here.”
She’d turned and looked out over the valley. “Granny told me once you could see the whole world in just this one little holler if you knew how to look.”
Will said nothing.
“Still, I guess I need to see me some of the wide world for my own self. Need to do some livin’…” her voice trailed off, but he heard the silent before…
They’d been sitting together on the low limb of the mulberry tree that had caved in the roof of his father’s house. Will had invited her to take a walk with him and they’d ended up there, but she’d cut him off at the pass before he could launch into the speech he had all prepared.
She turned to him then and said softly, “I’m scared.”
Will reached out and squeezed her hand.
“So am I.”
They sat quiet for a few minutes before JoJo spoke again. Will didn’t let go of her hand.
“Why’d Lloyd kill my daddy?”
“For the air. He thought I was already dead and he wanted it all.”
Once Will had recovered from the initial shock, he discovered he wasn’t really surprised by the
hidden scene in Jamey’s arts. Will had been so guilt-ridden he’d never let his mind go to those last hours, that time in the curtained break. When he did, he saw what the boy he’d been then didn’t see, what the man he was now could interpret and understand. Lloyd had orchestrated it all, manipulated both Will and Ricky Dan to ensure his own survival.
Will believed Lloyd had orchestrated the explosion in #7 that killed him, too, that he’d pulled down the curtains the miners said were missing. Maybe the MHSA investigators would figure that out, but Will doubted it. The crime scene was buried under a million tons of rock. There was no proof, just an image carved in a piece of jet.
Will, JoJo, and Granny had studied Jamey’s explosion mural for hours, trying to understand why the real event hadn’t happened the way he’d carved it. What they figured out was that it had. The arts had shown the future…and the past. The only miner in the mural wearing an armband was the one in front. Though his face wasn’t visible, there were scratches on his arms and neck that he’d gotten when he fell through a rosebush trellis. The miners in the background, just outlines still buried in the rock…when JoJo counted them, it all made sense. There were 27. Twenty-seven miners killed two decades ago.
Jamey had pointed out something else in the mural the others didn’t see.
“I’m down in there,” he’d said. And it was true. If you looked deep into the carving, you could see it—a mirror. “I seen me smilin’ in the arts the night I finished it, so I knowed I was down in the center of it and I wasn’t askeered of it no more. Not ValVleen, though. She was on my shoulder. I shoulda seen her in the reflection. But she wasn’t there. I didn’t pay it no mind then, but she did. That’s how she knowed what was comin’. The end.”
Will had come to one final conclusion about Lloyd. He had no more proof to back it up than he did that Lloyd had caused the explosion. But his gut told him that Lloyd had been the poacher in the woods. Lloyd had tried to kill him.
Why?
Because he was mad that Will had run away? Or mad that Will had come back? Or maybe he was afraid Will had seen what he did to Ricky Dan. No way to tell. No way to understand why he killed himself, either, or why he had tried to take another dozen men with him when he died. It was all wound up in the reopening of #7 and Will’s arrival in the hollow, but the only person who could unravel the mystery had finally joined the rest of his crew in the silent, forever night under Black Mountain.