“Well, Harvey, I’ve come to talk about your home and your safety,” Ted said.
“My home and my safety are just fine, Ted. No need to worry about us.”
“Where’s Lucy?” Ted asked.
“Oh she’s feeling a little sick today. She’s sleepin’ it off right now I reckon.”
There was a pause as Ted looked at Harvey and down the hallway toward where Lucy was sleeping.
“You know, Harvey, that Lilac Avenue is sitting directly over the area of the mine fire that appears to be hottest according to the tests that have been conducted.”
“Well, I heard such rumors but I don’t intend to do much ‘bout em.”
“Harvey, the houses on the end of Lilac are scheduled to be bought by the government and demolished. Now, I know . . .”
“What the hell do you know? The hell I’m selling my house!”
“Where is your wife, Harvey?” Ted responded quickly.
“It’s just the damn flu, Ted. Don’t you come into my house, tell me what’s wrong with my wife, and then tell me I have to move.”
“Your wife, like nearly everyone else on this street, is getting sick from the gases seeping into your house from the mine fire. It is carbon monoxide, Harvey. One of these days you could fall asleep and . . .”
“And what? Die? Well, at least I’d be in my own damn house. It’s November, Ted. Did you ever hear of flu season?”
“The governor and other state officials will be in town later this week to assess the situation.”
“Well, they can assess the situation right off my property.”
“Harvey, be reasonable. Will you at least let us put a gas reader in your home to check if you have a problem here?” Ted pleaded.
“I don’t give a damn what your little black boxes say. You’re all just trying to stir up trouble and we just want to be left alone to live our lives.”
“Harvey, the houses around here have gas readings at very dangerous levels. Mr. Bidding collapsed two nights ago and was rushed to the hospital because he was overcome with the fumes.”
“I reckon he collapsed from exposure. I see those damn idiots sleeping with the windows wide open when it’s cold outside. And because their windows are open, I have to listen to those damn alarms going off all the time.”
“They’re meant to protect you.”
“They’re meant to scare me off my property, Ted. Maybe if I leave, maybe you’ll be the one to buy it up.”
“We just don’t want to see something tragic happen.”
“Something tragic is going to happen in this house if you don’t get out of it right now,” Harvey said slowly while picking up his rifle from the corner of the room.
“Harvey, no,” Lucy said quietly, peering from the other room. She looked pale, groggy, and sickly. “Please go Mr. Oakley.”
The drive back home was blurred by a cold, pouring rain, and Denver knew that her father felt torn. He wanted to preserve his friendship with Harvey and Lucy, but their safety had to come first. If the frustration of this day would have occurred several years ago, Ted might have stopped at a bar on the way home and come home late at night leaving her mother to worry and wonder, but those days had long since been put away. Still, they had not been forgotten. Denver suspected that this was the real reason he invited her to go with him, so he wouldn’t be tempted to stop somewhere on the way home.
When they arrived home, Denver hopped from the truck and ran to the front door while her father removed the sign from the front yard and tossed it into a trash can. Her mother had been baking bread and the kitchen air was warm with a comforting aroma, the way a bakery might smell in the early morning before opening for business. She heard her mother upstairs practicing her violin while the bread baked in the oven. Savannah once played violin in school and at local Christmas concerts when she was a young girl, but she stopped once she had a daughter and home to take care of. It had only been in recent months that she began playing again and Denver wondered why.
The melody played in such perfect pitch surprised Denver for a moment, as if she was catching a glimpse of the mother she never knew, an image of her before she was born, a fleeting look at who her mother could have been, if things would have been different. Denver recognized the tune as “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. She glanced again at the photo of the sign hanging on the refrigerator next to the list of important phone numbers and decided to remove it. She took it upstairs to her room and placed it in a desk drawer. She felt her body nestle down into her bed while the music streamed into her room. Each note had a rich vibration. It was only mid-afternoon, but she fell asleep singing to herself . . . small and white, clean and bright . . .
What Denver didn’t know while she slept was that Josh was thinking about her. He thought about her most every day, but especially on Saturdays when his weekend afternoon ritual involved walking to the ice cream shop downtown and ordering a chocolate shake, which was Denver’s favorite flavor. He thought about her when he tasted the creamy cold chocolate and wondered what she was doing at that moment.
On his way back home, he walked past an old diner known for its fluffy pancakes and juicy burgers and past a hardware store and the post office. He crossed through a playground and beyond the monkey bars and sipped his milkshake as he approached a carousel. He eyed a trash can up ahead and aimed the almost empty drink container toward the can. As soon as he let go of the cup, the ground beneath his feet gave way and he was underground up to his knees, then his waist, then he was gone.
A father who had been playing with his young son on a swing set ran over to the hole and crawled down flat on the ground and peered into the gap. The air smelled of sulfur and mud as a bellowing cloud blocked the view of Josh down in the underworld below. Josh gasped for air and struggled to pull himself up using a thick rope-like root from the oak tree that was hanging down into the pit. He pulled himself up far enough so that the man was able to grab his blue jacket and pull him out of the smoking abyss. Josh rolled onto the ground in a confused state, choking violently. The father, with his son now beside him, kept talking to Josh and slapping his face to keep him from losing consciousness while the nearby hardware store owner called the ambulance. There was nothing anyone could do but wait.
When the ambulance arrived, Josh was rushed to Branton hospital and tested for burns and carbon monoxide poisoning. Ted Oakley, along with several other town council members, waited at the hospital while experts were called to examine the subsidence.
When Denver heard what happened, she rushed over to Helena’s house and they went to the hospital together. Denver felt sick to her stomach. She began to feel an overwhelming hate for the mine fire, the kind of hate that can turn every cell in your body to ice. She hated Adena too. She detested all the people who wailed that the fire was not a problem.
The hospital emergency room was crowded with people when they arrived. Denver and Helena overheard a group of people arguing about the mine fire as they made their way toward the information desk.
“Coal is what built this town and it will probably be what destroys it,” a woman in a police uniform said. “Below us right now, on this road, is a massive tunnel where the walls are burning. The temperature is about eight hundred degrees and there’s smoke everywhere and the pressure is building like a steam cooker. And what about Phelps cemetery,” she continued. “The bodies and coffins buried there are being burned in their graves. I imagine if those people wanted to be cremated, they would have asked for it.”
“What I don’t understand is why they can’t put the fire out,” Helena asked as they stepped into an elevator.
“I don’t know,” said Denver. “I know that the fire is far worse than the federal and state agencies will let on because no one wants to invest any more money into trying to put it out. Dad said that the fire started dur
ing the bonfire when people were burning trash in an illegal garbage dump, and so it is the town’s problem, but the subsidence is occurring because the coal pillars were mined when they were supposed to support what stands above ground. I don’t know though. Nobody really knows.”
Denver’s heart went back into her chest when she entered Josh’s room, and she saw that he was conscious. He was hooked up to an oxygen machine and he looked pale and shaken, but he was okay. The doctor said that another three minutes in the hole would likely have killed him.
She excused herself from the hospital room, went to the nearest restroom, and locked herself in one of the stalls. She leaned her head back against the stall door and took several deep breaths to keep herself from crying. She took the piece of bloodstone out of her pocket and held it in the palm of her hand. She closed her eyes and closed her fingers around the stone at the same time as if to make a wish upon the stone or call upon its power. She placed the stone back in her pocket and opened her wallet where she had a photo tucked into one of the compartments. It was a photo of herself, Helena, and Josh at the swimming hole at Penn’s Creek. They were all so young in the photo. Where had the time gone, she wondered. She returned to the hospital room to the sound of Helena and Josh laughing.
“Where did you go, Denver?” Josh asked.
“Just down the hall.”
“What’s wrong?” Helena asked. “You look a little spooked.”
“I don’t like hospitals.”
“Tell me about it. There’s too much gauze in this place,” said Helena. Josh and Denver laughed.
“Why don’t you file a complaint?” Josh added with a smile.
“I would, but I’m afraid they wouldn’t listen to me. I don’t carry much influence here.” Helena pretended to be serious.
“Well, you have influence with me and I say, let all of the gauze be gone!”
“Problem solved!”
“Speaking of influence, has your dad finally convinced the cold side of town that Adena is on fire?” Josh asked Denver.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“It looks like someone is going to have to die before they figure out what to do,” said Josh.
“No one is going to die,” Helena replied. “Maybe it will just burn itself out.”
“When pigs fly,” Josh said smiling.
“They will have to change,” said Denver. “The people in town will have to learn to work together.”
“People in this town would rather die than change,” Josh said without hesitation.
It rang true. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was afraid that Josh was right.
Denver and Helena stayed with Josh until later that night when he was released. They carried armfuls of flowers that had begun pouring in only a few hours after his admittance that afternoon. Some of the flowers were from members of the Adena Coalition, a grassroots organization that had formed with the purpose of creating awareness and promoting activism about the mine fire.
Denver went home feeling anxious. She knew this event would only further escalate the already explosive controversy burning in people’s homes concerning the fire. The Adena Coalition felt more justified than ever in their pursuits. The coalition, which was once working with her father and the town council, soon disintegrated the partnership claiming that the council simply wasn’t living up to its responsibility to eliminate the mine problem. Despite his efforts, Ted gathered disapproval from both sides in what had become the Adena civil war. The serpentine coal shaft below the earth was not the only thing that had begun to fall in on itself.
Chapter 5
Fever Pitch
In January, Denver decided to attend classes at a small university near her home and work part time in the Adena community library where sometimes it seemed like there were more people in the building than books. But her life had some direction, and being a college student seemed to suit her. She wrote the words “Psychology” and “Religion” in her notebook and circled them, but she couldn’t decide what she wanted to know more about, her mind or her soul. It had something to do with vision. She wanted to learn how to see through the fog in the darkness, to use her instincts. She was tired of feeling so lost and uncertain, tired of blundering through life looking for the switch that would turn the world on.
She spent more time than necessary at school to avoid talk of the mine at home and began taking classes in environmental science at college to seek her own answers. She realized how much she had taken for granted about her hometown, how the small details of a place can become so familiar that you don’t see the curiosity in them anymore, if you notice them at all.
Adena and its war continued like an ongoing bad dream from which she couldn’t wake up, or like a dark presence no one caught a glimpse of long enough to catch. The mine fire had not been stopped despite efforts to extinguish what was being called “the tunneling inferno.” The federal government and the Office of Surface Mining had made attempts to put the fire out by digging boreholes and dumping a noncombustible fly ash substance into the mine. According to Denver’s father, the amount of money spent to save Adena was being eaten up as fast as the earth underground, and now no one wanted to take responsibility for the town that was turning into a tragedy. On the outskirts of town a sign read: “PUBLIC ALERT: Area subject to mine subsidence and toxic gas emissions.” Millions of dollars were going into efforts to put the fire out, and still it raged on while distorted tales of its impact spread and penetrated people’s minds and homes to different degrees.
It had become widespread news that the fire was burning the coal pillars that were left standing to support the weight from aboveground, and mine subsidence was beginning to occur near the origins of the fire. The earth expanded and contracted under the intense pressure of heat until the earth cracked and fell in on itself. One story claimed that a long time ago, the mines were robbed of the coal columns left standing to support the world above ground, leaving large, unstable caves below. It was an ominous thought, that the ground beneath could fall in at any moment, that the foundation of Adena was slowly being cooked and consumed by an invisible, unmerciful monster. Denver shuddered when she heard that the gas stations near the east end of town closed because the gasoline had reached dangerously high temperatures.
Five more subsidence holes broke the surface, but no one directly suffered from them. The hole where Josh almost fell to his death was framed with a flimsy wood plank fence as were many of the vent pipes that spotted the south and east sides of town to relieve the pressure from the steaming hell beneath. As for Denver, she witnessed what seemed like a geological bloodletting, as if the earth had been struck by a vile, incurable fever that needed to be drained constantly of its fuming toxins. When there was no wind, and the smoke rose above the earth and tainted the atmosphere with its unholy breath like exhalations from dark shadows of an underworld, the night sky was starless.
There was a time when she used to walk after dark through Adena to wear down her hot emotions with every street she traveled, even during the frosted, clear nights of winter, but the days of feeling safe in her hometown had come to an end. Even if she explored the quiet avenues where no fire had been found, there were no guarantees she’d be safe from the eyes that would peer at her from their windows shooting looks with nails and daggers in them. Curtains would move in the windows as she walked by, and on occasion, a door would open and a man would stand behind a screen door and watch her every step until she was out of sight. That winter, even with all the talk of fire, Adena seemed to her to be the coldest place on Earth.
During her first week of classes, she returned home one cold but cloudless afternoon to find her father sitting at his desk gazing out a window into a deep yard that bordered a field. In the summer, the field grew tall, green stalks of corn with leaves that waved like a thousand arms in the wind. In the wint
er, the field was a quiet bed of soil that stretched into the hilly countryside.
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
Ted took a deep breath before he spoke. “Things don’t look good here, Denver. The state DEP had not expected the fire to burn so fast. The fire has access to a fair supply of oxygen, and if there are traces of oil underground, the fire will burn faster. Attempts to put it out involved locating the fire and digging deep holes on both sides that were filled with cement to prevent oxygen from getting to the fire, and to prevent it from spreading, but nothing has worked to stop it.”
“What is going to happen next?”
“I don’t know.”
That night, in a dream, a gray dog, maybe a wolf, chased Denver through tall, tangled, wet grass. He had snarling teeth, yellow and pointed, and hard eyes like black marbles. She opened her mouth, but the wolf took her voice, and she never got the chance to scream.
Chapter 6
Bootleggers
That winter, Denver, Josh, and Helena spent most of their evenings at a pool hall on the south side of Adena. The hall had ten pool tables and was connected to a small burger joint and a bowling alley so the sounds of balls rolling and pins cracking were always in the background. Nearby, the pool balls clicked every so often and the air was thick with cigarette smoke and country music.
Josh was the one who loved to play pool. Once when he was in an exceptionally good mood, he walked over to Denver and Helena and said, “Do you want to see me make some easy money? Watch this.” They watched as he went to the other side of the pool hall and initiated a quiet conversation with an older gentleman with slick, black hair and a cigarette just barely hanging from his lips. Josh and the other player casually approached an empty pool table. The older gentleman placed four quarters in the coin slot to release the balls. The gentleman was polite and asked Josh to take the first shot, which in retrospect must have seemed like an expensive mistake. Josh cleared the table in less than five minutes without missing a shot. The man reached for his wallet, pulled out a few bills, whispered into Josh’s ear, and then slid the bills into Josh’s hand. Josh responded with a small grin and returned to the table where Denver and Helena were drinking colas.
Deep River Burning Page 3