Whisper Hollow

by Chris Cander

  “No thanks, boys,” John said with a smile. “I got other plans.”

  “You and your other plans,” said a guy who’d been called Sugar so long that even his wife of two decades didn’t know his real name. “One of these days we’re gonna figure out who ‘Other Plans’ is.”

  The day crew collected around the mine office, their sooty faces tipped, grateful, toward the sun, lighting and dragging on cigarettes and talking before they went inside the small shower shack to clean up before heading home. At the same time, the miners going onto the second shift drifted in with dinner buckets swinging. In the changing room adjacent to the office, they each had a wire basket that hung from a cable, where they stored their clean clothes while they were underground and left their belts and hats when the shift was over. The two crews overlapped — those on the way out taking off their filthy overalls and steel-toed, mud-slung boots, and those going in putting theirs on. Eventually, all the wire baskets would be raised to the ceiling, where they’d remain untouched for at least the next eight hours.

  Most of the men ended up with nicknames while they were still rookies wearing red hard hats. Going underground with a crew of colorfully named brethren gave them a sense of camaraderie, belonging, a feeling of comfort in a dangerous place. But there was one miner whose nickname never stuck: Walter Pulaski, strong and serious, with a neck that seemed to push his lower jaw forward and turn his mouth into a muzzle. When he first went into the mines, some cheeky upstart gave him the name Tiny. Walter was genial enough about it, but whenever someone tried to use it, it slid off and landed in the dirt. Eventually, they simply called him Walter.

  He was among the men coming on for the second shift that day. Walter had been an electrician for the first half of his career, then promoted to foreman a decade ago. He’d demonstrated he was good at running things smoothly underground: initiating swift and decisive action, bearing pressure without complaint, influencing the men without persuasion.

  Abel, Walter’s eighteen-year-old son, was there, too. He was still a red hat, a bright young man and quiet like his father. Because Walter liked to keep watch over him, they always worked the same shifts. From the time Abel was a small child, Alta had spoken to him of what she knew of the world beyond Verra’s blue ridges. She told him stories of her aunt Maggie and uncle Punk, conjured their elegant life in New York City and their travels to exotic locations such as Paris and London, California and Texas. It all sounded vaguely frightening to him, especially when his mother’s expression grew tense and animated in the telling. Instead of inspiring Abel to consider his other options, his mother’s stories only served to tether him closer to the confines of home. He knew all along that he’d follow his father underground, and come home black-faced and tired — God willing — each evening to his own small family of three or maybe four. To her credit, his mother never voiced disappointment in his choice if she ever felt any.

  Stanley Kielar, a twenty-seven-year-old electrician, came into the changing room just as the rest of the second-shift crew were rolling their clothes and hoisting them into the wire baskets. His dinner bucket dangled at his side and his shoulders slumped forward. Ever since his son, Eagan, had fallen ill several months before, Stanley hadn’t been the same. His robust frame looked slighter, his hair thinned. The skin around his eyes bagged like an old man’s. It was obvious he was lacking in sleep, had been for months. But today, there was a different kind of restlessness in his demeanor. A weight-shifting sag to his gait. He pulled on the string to lower his basket of work clothes without so much as a hello.

  Walter walked over to him. “How’s your boy doing?” he asked.

  “They say he won’t get much better,” Stanley said, staring at the coal-dusted floor. “Thanks for asking.”

  Walter nodded and put one hand on his shoulder. There wasn’t much more he could say. “See you outside.”

  “Got some extra work needs doing this weekend, boys,” Walter said to the commingled crews. “Need to lay track, set up some more stoppings. Anybody wants overtime, shift foreman for tomorrow needs ten, eleven men.”

  Walter held a clipboard and the stub of a pencil, nodding in response to each of the men who raised their hands: Babe Scardava, Stinky Lipersick, Piggy Kochran, Duck Luleck, Bones Krempeley, Pie Eye Del Vecchio, Cross Newcomb, Prairie Slack, Trout Palumbo, Fossil Zulcowski, Pops Langloss, Gibby Governsky, and finally, without looking Walter in the eye, John Esposito.

  Standing just outside the loose knot of men was the electrician on Walter’s shift, a red-haired and nervous man named Liam Magee whom they called Sparky. When Liam saw John raise his hand for the next day’s dead work shift, he chuckled out a black lungful of smoke.

  Walter counted the names. “Thanks, boys. Be safe tomorrow.” He went inside the small office and laid the clipboard on the desk for the mine foreman. Then he picked up his carbide headlamp, his gas tester, and his dinner bucket. He tipped his head toward the mine and said to Abel and the others going in, “Let’s go.”

  Willit, Mooska, Gibby, Sugar, John, and the other day-shift crew nodded their goodbyes and set off down the mountain.

  Liam lagged behind the others as they headed underground. Stopping just outside the mine entrance, which was only eight feet tall and opened into the side of the mountain like the gaping maw of a sleeping giant, he finished his smoke. He watched the crew start to climb aboard the mantrip that would take them more than a mile into the mountain to the face where they’d be working. Above their heads hung a hand-painted message: A GOOD SAFETY RECORD MEANS HAPPINESS FOR ALL, SO KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK, MEN. BE CAREFUL.

  Liam squinted at the sign through a final hard draw on his cigarette. Then he chuckled to himself once more, flicking the butt, still smoldering, to the ground.

  Walter’s production crew in the Number Seventeen worked hard that night, trying to haul out as much coal as they could. That slick and filthy stuff upon which their lives depended — made from the dead flora of peat bogs buried under three hundred million years of pressure and decay — ran through the mountains of West Virginia like the veins inside the miners themselves. Some of those men were on fixed salaries of sixteen dollars for an eight-hour shift, but most were paid by the ton loaded. An extra ton of that clotted mountain blood could mean an extra pair of shoes for a growing child, an extra pound of meat for a crowded dinner table.

  Battler, who yelled because he was nearly deaf, worked up front. He was the miners’ favorite machine man because he was best at cutting the coal, making it easier and faster for the men shoveling it up. There was an art to running the machine that gnawed away at the bottom part of a seam of coal with its sharp-toothed cutting chain, and sheared away a space between the seeping wet floor and the rest of the face. Then workingmen like Suds and Dixie came in. They bored holes and tamped in the powder that would explode the overhanging coal into chunks like fist-sized diamonds, never letting themselves think too hard about the fact that the entire mountain was pressing down almost upon them. They’d shovel it up as fast as they could, loading it into a waiting coal car. When the car was full, one of them would drop in his check — a round piece of metal that identified the loader so he’d get credit for the work once it was weighed. Hawk, the brakeman, would couple up the cars into a small train, and Petey, the motorman, would drive it out fast as a river through the cool, dank shafts, past the power station that electrified the whole operation, all the way to the tipple, where it was weighed and washed and driven away by steam engine to power factories and plants and homes all over the Mountain State and beyond.

  Walter checked his watch. Tipping his turtle-shaped headlamp up — never higher than chin height, so as not to blind a man in the darkness with sudden light — he shouted out to the men. “Shift’s over. Let’s go.” Then he lifted his lamp toward the golden door.

  Cramped and bent from eight hours of stooping labor, they climbed into the mantrip that had whooshed them to the mine and now spilled them back out into the dark night.

/>   Liam said aloud, as he’d practiced, “Damn it all. Tomorrow’s dead work, ain’t it?” Dead shifts were for maintenance, not for mining.

  Walter turned. “Yeah. What’sa matter?”

  Liam made a show of sucking on his fresh-lit cigarette, then tossing it to the ground and stamping on it. “I forgot to put the batteries on. They’re gonna lay track, they’re gonna need ’em charged up in the morning.”

  Walter nodded. “You go on. I’ll do it.”

  Liam raised his small-fingered hand. “My mistake. I’ll take care of it. ’Sides, you got a wife waitin’ for you home in bed. My whiskey ain’t frisky, she can wait a while.” He chuckled low.

  Walter shrugged. “All right. Want me to drive you back in?”

  “Naw, you go on.” He turned and raised a hand without looking over his shoulder.

  Walter nodded. He was tired. All of them were. Seamlessly, they’d moved from the darkness of the pit into the dark of night. Cracking jokes and ass-slapping on the way to the changing room, they then drifted out and ambled down the hill toward their waiting wives and sleeping children, work clothes balled into rolls under their arms, swinging empty dinner buckets. Nothing visible but the fiery ends of their cigarettes burning like red stars in the night.

  Liam turned and re-entered the mine.

  October 7, 1950

  At 6:00 a.m. the phone sounded like a siren coming from the kitchen. Alta was already up but was in the bedroom changing from her nightclothes to her slacks and sweater, wrapping her short hair in a cloth, preparing for the work of morning. She ran downstairs to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  Static, for a second. Then silence. “Morning, baby.”

  She turned quickly toward the window, cupped her hand over her mouth, and hushed her voice to a whisper. “John. Why are you calling me here? What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I need to talk to Walter. Is he up?”

  “He’s moving around. What’s the matter? What are you going to say?”

  “Nothing, baby. Nothing. It’s work. Lemme talk to him. It’s work is all.”

  “You sure? You’re not going to say anything.” The weight of their argument from the previous night was still heavy on her mind.

  “No, no. Course not. Just work stuff.”

  “You promise.” She took a deep breath, straightened her already straight shoulders.

  “I promise.”

  She stood, tense as a sentry, wearing her worry on her forehead. “All right then. Hold the phone a minute. I’ll get him.”

  “Alta,” John said.

  “What.”

  “Alta, I’m sorry about last night. I’m sorry I said those things I did. I swore to myself after last time I’d never bring it up again, but …” His voice trailed off. She could hear the morning song of a bird through the phone line. “Alta — ”

  “Hold the line. I’ll get Walter for you.”

  She cradled the phone and called out, trembling, to her husband.

  A moment later, Walter picked up the phone. “Hello?” he said, wiping the cream off his shaven face.

  “Walter, it’s Johnny. Sorry to bother you this time of day, so late in the morning.”

  “It’s only six.”

  “I hate to ask a favor, but I gotta skip out of this morning’s shift. I know Soup’s scheduled for foreman, but I can’t raise him by phone so I called you. They’re gonna need an electrician. I can’t do it, I’m sick as a dog. All night.”

  Walter shifted his weight onto one leg, leaned against the counter. The smell of bacon grease and eggs filled the kitchen. Kinking the phone against one shoulder, he pulled up one strap of his overalls and hooked them to the breast. “I’m not on today, it’s Soup’s crew.”

  Alta’s hands shook slightly as she shoveled scrambled eggs onto his plate. Bacon. Biscuits she’d made earlier. She called aloud to Abel, low and loud as she could without disturbing Walter’s conversation. Adding more to Walter’s already-full plate, she topped off his short glass of orange juice. She didn’t roam more than three feet away from the telephone pressed against her husband’s ear.

  A beat of silence and static on the line. “I realize it. I’m calling because I was thinking you might be able to take my shift. They’re gonna need somebody but there’s no way I can make it down. I know you worked second shift yesterday and I hate to ask it but I just can’t do it. I’ve got to send somebody in my place.”

  Walter didn’t sigh. He didn’t complain. There was no sense of irony when he said to John, “I’ll go. I’ll get Abel to go on with me. We could use the extra pay.” Then he looked down at his heaping plate and added, “I’ll ask Alta to take you up some biscuits and such. Keep your strength.”

  “I thank you, Walter. And, uh, no need to trouble your wife with anything. I’ll be fine. Back down on Monday for certain,” he said, nerves riding to the end of his voice. “Sorry again to ask the favor.”

  “No trouble. You go on and get yourself feeling better, hear?”

  “Thank you, Walter. Safe down there today.”

  They hung up and Walter leaned against the counter. “Guess you heard, I’m taking John Esposito’s shift. I’d call up Liam Magee and see if he could take it, but knowing him, he’s likely facedown drunk somewhere,” he said. He clapped his hands once and rubbed them together, as though to mark his decision. Then he called up to Abel, “We’re going on dead work, son. Get dressed and eat up.”

  Her hands still shaking, Alta filled her son’s plate. “I’ll put the biscuits in your buckets,” she said, as she did every day. “Eat what you can now. I’ll pack extra.”

  Alta always packed their dinner buckets full to brimming. The bottom half was filled with water, and then on top was a drop section for dry food. Walter never ate a full meal, despite his bulk, and instead offered what she packed to the miners whose wives came up short. Times were lean — again, still — and some men lived on little more than pinto beans and corn bread and wild ramps fried in bacon grease. Every shift some hungry man shyly accepted what Walter claimed he couldn’t possibly finish.

  When they were dressed and fed and full, she leaned across the chasm between them to kiss her husband goodbye, her lips barely touching his cheek, and handed him his bucket. Then she took her son into a full embrace until he wriggled gently away. He kissed her, then, and took his lunch.

  Alta’s heart had just started to settle back to a normal pace when Walter turned at the door and said, “You might want to run some dinner up to John, if you’ve got some time. He’s been sick all night he says. He doesn’t have a woman at home anymore, so he probably could use a decent meal.”

  Alta clenched the embroidered towel Walter had used to wipe his face. Giving a slight nod in response, she lifted her hand slowly in a gesture of goodbye a moment too late — their backs were already turned. Then, with a bang, the screen door closed behind them and they were gone.

  It was a few minutes past seven o’clock when Walter and Abel arrived at the entrance of the mine. Everyone else was there, drinking coffee and smoking, grousing about the earliness of the Saturday, laughing occasionally, flicking cigarette butts, talking about their women and money or lack thereof. Bones snuck up on Pie Eye — who looked a little drunk, as usual, from the night before — and grabbed his pack of Lucky Strikes out of his back pocket.

  “Hey! Hand it over!” Pie Eye slurred. “You gonna owe me sixteen cents, you don’t give it.” He lunged toward Bones, who laughed and made a show of staggering out of the way.

  “All right, men,” Walter said with one hand aloft, as though raising the flag. Though Soup Piontkowski was technically supposed to be running the shift, he leaned against the wall of the mine office with a mild, sleepy smile, watching the guys cut up.

  The men let their laughter dissolve into chuckles, then huffs, then reverberating silence. They dragged on their cigarettes as if they were taking their final breaths, then stamped them into the soot. After they all asse
mbled together, Soup finally said, “Let’s load up. We’ll be adding track into Three West and setting up stoppings along Two East.” He pointed to a pile of concrete blocks and eight-foot cedar ties, steel spikes, and tools. “Pile in those blocks and timbers, then we’ll get going.”

  Grumbling again, they began hauling equipment into the empty coal cars all coupled up and hooked to the flat-headed electric engine that would pull them underground. It was only about waist-high, a miniature of the trains that leave the tipple full of processed coal, then thunder through and beyond the mountain to parts unknown. The mine itself, just over five feet at its highest point, forced most of the men to crouch. Piggy was the only one who could stand up to his full height for those eight long hours.

  When they’d loaded everything, the men slowly climbed in, too. They all took a last glance at the lightening sky, then Fossil turned on the motor and fed them all to the hungry, hallowed mountain.

  John said goodbye and hung up, glad to be free of Walter’s plainspoken kindness. Relieved, too, that he’d be taking his shift. The only sickness he’d felt since Alta stormed out of the cabin the night before was heartache. Watching her gather up her clothes and hold them to her chest as though suddenly embarrassed — for the first time in six years — to be naked in front of him.

  “You’ve got no right to keep demanding it of me, John. I’ve loved you since I first saw you sleeping in that damned rocker in the middle of the woods. Before that, even. And I knew I always would. But you’ve no right to keep asking me to walk away from my husband and my son. Not until I’m ready.”

  He leaned forward, the covers falling away. “Loving you gives me the right! How do you expect me to go on like this, never knowing if you’re going to leave him? How am I supposed to love you like I do and think there’s a chance you’ll end up spending your whole life under his roof, in his bed? How am I supposed to live every day with that, Alta?”