Canary in the Coal Mine

by Madelyn Rosenberg

  “Medal,” scoffed Uncle Aubrey. “What’d he save, one man?”

  “Yeah, but he was blind,” Bitty said, reading the next two paragraphs. “The man, not the dog.”

  “One man,” said Uncle Aubrey. “We save more than that every day. But do we get a medal? No, sir.”

  “Now, dear,” broke in Aunt Lou. “What would we even do with a medal?”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything about . . . about Boggs?” Alice asked. “Or Mr. Polly?”

  “That’d be old news by now,” Bitty said.

  “Where’s the flying forecast?” asked Chester, changing the subject.

  Bitty, a faster reader, found it first, partly obscured by the water dish. He and Chester always read the flying forecast, even though it was for planes and crop dusters, and even though they never actually flew anywhere.

  “Clear skies,” Bitty said. “Winds from the northeast diminishing at a thousand feet.”

  They were quiet, imagining what it would feel like to fly that high. They had never been one hundred feet in the air. Or even ten.

  In the next room, Jamie’s father asked for the beans. The canaries heard him clearly through the thin walls. “Pass the corn bread, too, while you’re at it.”

  “Beans again?” said Jamie. Bitty could picture them sitting in those straight-backed chairs around the small table he’d seen on his trips in and out of the house. The room also held the Crosley radio that had been a gift from Mrs. Campbell’s parents. It was cheap as far as radios went, boxy instead of cathedral style. Still, the Campbells had almost sold it three times.

  “You’ll eat those beans and smile,” Clayton Campbell said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, me,” continued Mr. Campbell, his voice suddenly lighter, “I like beans. That’s why I married you, Mary. The day I saw you I said, ‘Now, there’s a woman who knows how to dress up a bean.’ Pass the Tabasco.”

  “Look,” said Jamie. “This bean’s wearing a suit. Get it? He’s dressed up!”

  “Try using your fork along with your imagination,” his mother said. “There’s pickled corn, too, Jamie.”

  “You want time to use your imagination, you should come work with me,” Mr. Campbell said. “Plenty of time for thinking.”

  “But Pa—” Jamie didn’t have a chance to say anything else.

  “Other boys are leaving school,” Mr. Campbell said. “Trying to, anyway. Jason Carter’s a trapper and he’s just a little older than you are.”

  Mrs. Campbell’s voice frosted over. “You want him to end up without a right arm, like the Wasserman boy? You want him trapped down there, writing his last words with a nub of coal? ‘See you in heaven, Pa?’ He’s finishing school. Clay, we talked about this. I’ll eat beans forever if that’s what it takes.”

  “I go down there every day, Mary. I’ve still got both my arms.” Bitty imagined Mr. Campbell flapping them, like wings.

  “Tell me it’s safe, Clayton.”

  “It’s good work with good men,” Jamie’s father said, sounding like Uncle Aubrey. “It’s proud work. I like it better than any job I’ve ever had.”

  “Tell me it’s safe.”

  There was silence after that, interrupted by the clatter of silverware.

  “Well,” Mr. Campbell said finally. “It’s not like demand’s up. There’s thousands of miners wanting for jobs, and grown men at that.”

  They started talking again, but there was no more laughter. Bitty wished for a closed door and thicker walls. Jamie had pasted comics all over his room for both decoration and insulation, but they didn’t do a thing to block out the sound. At night, Mr. Campbell’s snoring filled every cranny of the three-room house.

  Bitty shook himself and got in line for the chipped china water bowl. When it was his turn, he leaned back his head and gargled, hoping for the sweet taste of a mountain spring. The only flavor he could identify was coal.

  “What a day,” Uncle Aubrey said from his perch.

  “Same as every other day,” Bitty mumbled.

  Chester shook his head. “Why don’t you just sleep when we’re down there? It makes the time go faster.”

  “Oh, gee, I don’t know. Because when you sleep, they think you’re dead?” Bitty said.

  “Oh, so that’s why they’re always poking me. Sleep with your eyes open.”

  “Sleep. Work,” Bitty said. “The Big House is the right name for this place. Just call me One Forty-Six from now on.”

  “What’s One Forty-Six?”

  “My prison number. In human prisons they call you by a number instead of a name. It was in the Gazette.”

  “Jamie doesn’t call you One Forty-Six, does he?” Chester said. “So it’s not a prison, is it?”

  Jamie had his own special name for Bitty: Big Yellow. The “big” part was a joke, of course. Bitty was shorter, by half an inch, than any other bird in the aviary, including Alice. It might as well have been a foot. But joke or not, it wasn’t a number.

  “See?” Chester said. “You know I’m right.”

  “Well, it feels like a prison,” Bitty said. He drew himself up to his full height. “I’m thinking about busting out.”

  Chapter 4

  “Sure you are,” Chester said.

  “Well, I am,” Bitty said.

  “You wouldn’t leave.”

  “I would.”

  “But don’t you remember . . .” Chester paused and looked around. Then he whispered another name they all knew: “Hubert?”

  Hubert was the only bird who had ever escaped the Big House. He’d done it the previous spring, by way of a loose screw on a door hinge. The rest of them had watched as he flew out Jamie’s window and into the warmth of a Sunday. There’d been one glorious moment when he’d looked back at them, his face alight with freedom and sunshine. The next moment a dark shadow had swooped over him. A Cooper’s hawk. There was a flash of color as the hawk grabbed Hubert in her talons and squeezed.

  They never saw Hubert again. They never saw the hawk again, either, but they knew she was out there. Cipher. That was the hawk’s name. Jamie had taken her in not long before Hubert’s demise. She slept in a cage near the canaries for a week while Jamie mended her fractured wing. She’d spoken only once during that time, to say her name. The rest of the time she’d been still, as if she’d been carved from granite.

  “You should really consider becoming a vegetarian,” Hubert had called to her one day.

  “This is grade-A canary you’re looking at, toots,” he called the next. He nodded at Bitty and Chester. “They’re grade B.”

  He’d called her names. Bird Breath and Talon Toes were his favorites, along with Predator, which he uttered like a curse.

  Jamie had walked into the room just as the hawk lunged, denting the bars of her cage.

  “Whoa, now, hang on.” Jamie turned to the canaries. “Sorry. It’s not fair to make you spend all day in the mines and all night next to her.” He turned to the hawk, who had gone back to her granite-like pose, though her red eyes missed nothing. “I thought you were going to be good.” The red eyes bored into the canaries. Even with the bars and Jamie between, it didn’t seem like enough.

  “I wish my ma would let you stay in the front room,” Jamie told the hawk. “I’ll have to take you outside.” And he’d carried her into the cold evening.

  The hawk was restless on the porch. Jamie had been forced to release her before she’d completely healed. Her wing tipped up at the end in a kind of wave, which was how the canaries recognized her the day Hubert—to quote Aunt Lou—“went to his reward.”

  Dinner was over.

  Jamie came in, flopped on his bed and stared at the ceiling. Then he rolled over and looked at his birds. Bitty pressed his beak against the bars, which had once been a brassy gold but were now tarnished and nearly brown.

  “I know just how you feel in there, Big Yellow,” Jamie said.

  Hardly, Bitty thought. Jamie was allowed to walk around in the world, was
n’t he? Jamie got to see sunlight. The boy reached out with his index finger and touched the canary’s head, just above the eyes.

  “Nah,” Chester whispered. “You’d never leave. Anyway, it’ll be spring soon. It’s nice here in the spring.”

  But that was where Chester was wrong.

  “It isn’t nice here in the spring,” Bitty said. “It isn’t anything here in the spring. Spring’s out there, where the world is.”

  Together they looked through the window at the strong, unmoving backside of the mountain. Two turkey buzzards sailed like paper airplanes along the darkened ridge.

  “Spring is where they are,” Bitty said.

  “Yeah, but look at them. They can take care of themselves. You’re little. Bite-size. You’d be hawk food in no time.”

  Bitty supposed he should be used to it. His mother had called him “a bitty thing” from the moment he hatched—the only egg to open out of a clutch of four.

  “He may be small, but he dreams big.” Alice joined in the whispered conversation. She looked like springtime herself, with feathers the color of mustard flowers.

  “Thanks,” Bitty said. “I think.”

  “But Ches has a point. Wouldn’t you be scared out there? Remember the hawk—”

  “I’m scared in here,” Bitty interrupted. “Especially after what happened to Boggs.” He wished Alice would come up with a nickname for him the way she had for Chester, though it was probably just as well that she didn’t call him Bit.

  “We don’t even know what happened to Boggs,” Alice said. “It could have been lots of things.”

  “Exactly,” Bitty said. It made him think of “Gone, Birdie, Gone,” a nursery rhyme they’d learned when they were younger:

  If the dust don’t get you

  If the beam don’t fall

  If the gas don’t take you

  ’Fore the whistle’s call

  If your breath don’t rattle

  If your bones don’t shake

  Then you’re gone, birdie, gone

  Never more to WAKE!

  The canaries always yelled out the “wake” part as loudly as they could. Then they fell to the ground, the way human children fell when they played Ring Around the Rosie, though they forgot (like the human children) that the falling down part actually meant death. Bitty couldn’t forget it now. He was haunted by the poem’s words, by the truth of them.

  “You know, it wouldn’t be so scary if we were all out there together,” he said. He tried to make it sound offhand, as if he hadn’t imagined the three of them soaring out the window in a tiny, perfect V. “You guys could come with me. We’d have an adventure. Bona fide.”

  If there was one thing the birds in the Big House knew about, it was adventure. In the stories Jamie read out loud to them, humans were always sneaking aboard pirate ships or fighting with magic swords.

  “What would we eat?” Alice asked, sweeping her wing through some round seeds that had dropped from the feeder. Charleston’s Finest, that was the brand.

  “Eat?”

  “Just say, for the sake of argument, that we did go with you. What would we eat?”

  “We’d eat corn—not that pickled stuff, we’d eat it fresh off the stalk. Or worms.” Alice made a face. “Okay, not worms, then,” Bitty said. “Wildflowers.” He tried on the French accent he’d overheard on one of Mrs. Campbell’s radio shows. “Would you care for a plate of violets, Mademoiselle?”

  “Merci.”

  “I’ll bet everything tastes better when you’re free,” Bitty said.

  “Where would we sleep?” asked Chester.

  “Trees,” Bitty said. “We’ll build nests. Really comfortable nests, with cotton and straw and leaves.”

  “Like you know all about it. What about work?” Chester had spent most of his life trying to get out of work; still, it was a valid question.

  “We’ll find new work,” Bitty said, scooting over so that his feet partially covered up the words unemployment soars in a Gazette headline. “Come on, Chester, haven’t you ever wanted to be something besides a miner?”

  “I wanted to be a singer,” Alice broke in. “You probably think that’s stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid.” Among the canaries who did bother to sing, it was the males who always did it best, but no matter. Bitty looked Alice in the eye to show her how not-stupid he thought she was. Now he understood why she always threw in a few trills with her fee-yos. “How about it, Chester? There’s got to be something else you want to do.”

  “I’d like to be a taste-tester for a birdseed company,” he said.

  They laughed, but they stopped when Jamie looked at them funny. The boy needed a haircut, and it wouldn’t be long before Mrs. Campbell put one of her mixing bowls on his head and cut around it.

  “You weren’t talking about me, were you?” Jamie asked, counting the birds again. Without Boggs, they were an unlucky thirteen, though Bitty knew Jamie had already talked to Doc Tatum about finding a replacement.

  The boy sprinkled some extra seed through the wire. Then he pulled out a book and began to read aloud. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Chapter eight.”

  “You wouldn’t leave,” Chester whispered, moving closer to Bitty. “Anyway, you should never bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “No,” Bitty repeated. “You should never . . .”

  But then he stopped. He had a plan.

  Chapter 5

  It was the wind that told Bitty when to go, but a newspaper article told him where.

  The article was in the Coalbank Chronicle, which was full of the most boring news possible: “Flora Hoffsetter Visits Niece” and “Kiwanis Club Meets Tuesday.” But when he saw “Little Sammy Visits Legislature,” he read beyond the headline.

  Little Sammy Sowers, age 4, visited the still-under-construction Capitol this week with his proud parents. The family also stopped at the Courthouse, where the legislature is meeting while workers put finishing touches on the Capitol complex, the original building having been destroyed by fire. Imagine their surprise when Del. Abbot Allman invited the rosy-cheeked tyke to the floor and asked him what he wanted the legislature to do for him this term.

  “I want chocolate,” Sammy said.

  Del. Allman made the boy an honorary page and gave him a chocolate bar before the family departed for the home of their cousins, the Willard F. Scruggs Family of McCormick Street.

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t a huge thing, a four-year-old kid asking the state government for a bar of chocolate. But he got it. If a four-year-old could go to Charleston, ask for something and get it, maybe Bitty could ask for something, too. He knew that legislators spoke their own language—“political jibber jabber” Mr. Campbell called it. And their Bird probably wasn’t any better than the Gap-Toothed Man’s. But there were other ways of communicating, like the way Mrs. Campbell’s eyes told Jamie he’d pushed things too far, or the way Mr. Campbell’s boots, when he took them off on the front porch, foretold anything from payday (a gentle thud, followed by a light step into the house) to an accident (heavy thud, slow-moving feet). If Bitty could just make it to Charleston, he could visit those legislators and find a way to get through to them. He could convince them to make things safer for the Coalbank Hollow canaries—and for the men in the No. 7. Well, maybe he could.

  “Who do you think you are? Mother Jones?” Chester asked. “Hey—I saw an advertisement for a long black dress, if you’re looking.”

  “I’m not looking,” Bitty said. The late Mrs. Jones had tried to help the Coalbank miners fight for better conditions and pay. She’d tried to do the same across the state, and Bitty’s father had even broken his no-singing policy to learn some of her union songs. But the company had threatened to fire anyone who joined up—and then had made good on the threat. After that, a war of words had turned into a real war between miners and coal operators, along with their hired guns from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. In the years since, the Coalbank miners had let the idea of a un
ion die, like the embers in Mrs. Campbell’s potbellied stove. Every few months, the idea would spark up again, then grow cold.

  Oh, come on. Who was he fooling? If Mother Jones couldn’t do it, how could he? She’d been a leader. Bitty couldn’t even lead his two best friends out of a cage.

  On the other hand, the mine wars were old news. The miners’ problems—and the canaries’ problems—were still current events. Bitty thought about the reports the Gap-Toothed Man had filed. Requests for support beams that were sent back with notes that said “Buy ’em yourself” (which he did). Notices about a broken booster fan that was never fixed. Coal dust that he watered like lettuce seed. Bitty thought about his parents. And Boggs. Maybe it was time for someone to try again.

  “That kid was only four years old and he got people to listen,” Bitty said.

  “That kid was human,” Chester said. “And Mother Jones didn’t exactly have feathers, either.”

  “Well I can try,” Bitty said. “That’s something.”

  “It ain’t much.”

  “Oh, quiet, Ches,” said Alice. “It’s a start, isn’t it? You should go, Bitty. You could change things.”

  “Sure,” Chester said. “Go. Write a bill. Protest. Like nobody’s tried that before.”

  “Well, why couldn’t he?” piped up Aunt Lou, who was within earshot. “Not that he’s going anywhere, mind, but if he did . . .”

  “He’s a miner.” Old Bird Crockett rarely spoke, and his voice came out in a wheeze. “Miners have as much pull with the government as an ant has with an anteater.”

  “I just want to get a message to Charleston,” Bitty said. “And let them know how bad it all is.”

  “Don’t you think they already know?” Crockett asked.

  “Then I’ll tell them again.”

  Waiting was the hard part.

  To put his plan into action, Bitty needed an open window, and that meant he needed to wait until Mrs. Campbell thought it was warm enough to raise the windows more than her usual half an inch “for health reasons.” Springtime came later to the mountains than it did to the rest of the country, but already, Bitty could see signs of it. The robins were back. The Campbells’ yard was full of green sprouts where Jamie’s mother had planted crocuses everywhere that wasn’t already being used to grow carrots, beets, peas or potatoes.