Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  —

  Tennessee law permits the family of a victim to hire a special prosecutor to assist the district attorney. The lawyer who acted for the Coopers in the civil case helped prosecute Charlie Stevens. Both he and the district attorney assured the jurors that the presence of a special prosecutor was not to be construed to mean that the Coopers were vindictive. Outside the courtroom, Leo Cooper said that the verdict was of no importance to him—that he felt sorry, in a way, for Charlie Stevens. But there were people in Knoxville who thought Cooper had a lot riding on the prosecution of Charlie Stevens. If Stevens was not guilty of FaNee Cooper’s death—found so by twelve of his peers—who was?

  At the trial, Cooper testified emotionally and remarkably graphically about pulling FaNee out from under the car and watching her die in his arms. Charlie Stevens had shaved his beard and cut his hair, but the effort did not transform him into an impressive witness. His lawyer—trying to argue that it would have been impossible for Stevens to concoct the story about FaNee’s having mentioned a gun, as the prosecution strongly implied—said, “His mind is such that if you ask him a question you can hear his mind go around, like an old mill creaking.” Stevens did not deny the recklessness of his driving or the sorry condition of his car. It happened to be the only car he had available to flee in, he said, and he had fled in fear for his life.

  The prosecution said that Stevens could have let FaNee out of the car when her father stopped them, or could have gone to the commercial strip on the Maynardville Highway for protection. The prosecution said that Leo Cooper had done what he might have been expected to do under the circumstances—alone, late at night, his daughter in danger. The defense said precisely the same about Stevens: he had done what he might have been expected to do when being pursued by a man he had reason to be afraid of. “I don’t fault Mr. Cooper for what he did, but I’m sorry he did it,” the defense attorney said. “I’m sorry the girl said what she said.” The jury deliberated for eighteen minutes. Charlie Stevens was found guilty. The jury recommended a sentence of from two to five years in the state penitentiary. At the announcement, Leo Cooper broke down and cried. JoAnn Cooper’s eyes filled with tears; she blinked them back and continued to stare straight ahead.

  —

  In a way, the Coopers might still strike a casual visitor as an ideal family—handsome parents, a bright and bubbly teenage daughter, a little boy learning the hook shot from his father, a warm house with some land around it. FaNee’s presence is there, of course. A picture of her, with a small bouquet of flowers over it, hangs in the living room. One of her poems is displayed in a frame on a table. Even if Leo Cooper continues to think about that night for the rest of his life, there are questions he can never answer. Was there a way that Leo and JoAnn Cooper could have prevented FaNee from choosing the path she chose? Would she still be alive if Leo Cooper had not jumped into his car and driven to the end of the driveway to investigate? Did she in fact tell Charlie Stevens that her father would hurt them—or even that her father had a gun? Did she want to get away from her family even at the risk of tearing around dark country roads in Charlie Stevens’s dismal Pinto? Or did she welcome the risk? The poem of FaNee’s that the Coopers have displayed is one she wrote a week before her death:

  I think I’m going to die

  And I really don’t know why.

  But look in my eye

  When I tell you good-bye.

  I think I’m going to die.

  Called at Rushton

  * * *

  Central Pennsylvania

  NOVEMBER 1979

  Marilyn McCusker, a woman who had sued to get her job in the Rushton coal mine, was killed one afternoon this fall at the end of the eight-to-four shift. She was working as a roof-bolter helper at the time—placing long bolts in holes that a miner operating a squat little forty-thousand-dollar machine drills straight up every four feet to tighten the roof. The roof had been rebolted in an intersection next to a mined-out area when Mrs. McCusker noticed some movement—what miners mean when they say “the roof’s working.” The roof-bolter made it out, but Mrs. McCusker was pinned under an eighteen-foot section of roof. She was not crushed. No bones were broken. The death certificate said that she died of shock and asphyxiation. Although the reports being prepared by various agencies on the accident have not been completed, it is believed that one of Mrs. McCusker’s knees was bent upward against her windpipe. She had been a miner for almost exactly two years. In 1975, she and three other women had sued the Rushton Mining Company, claiming that they had been denied employment on the basis of their sex. The suit was filed only a few months after Marilyn McCusker, then Marilyn Williams, moved to the central Pennsylvania mining country from Utica, New York. The possibility of applying for work at Rushton had been brought up by a friend named Mary Louise Carson, who was prompted to apply because her sister-in-law was already working as a coal miner in another mine and her husband was not working at all. “If you don’t have money, you die in this country,” Mary Louise Carson said later. “You can’t survive.”

  People who knew Marilyn Williams at the time say that she probably went with Mary Louise Carson to file a coal-miner application because she was game. “She was the sort of person who’d say, ‘Sure—OK’ if someone got the idea at the last minute to go to the movies,” one of them said recently. As it happens, the movie house in Coalport, where she lived, has been closed for years. Moving to Coalport could qualify as game in itself. It is a small, gray town in a part of central Pennsylvania where the towns tend to be small and gray and to have movie houses that have been closed for years. Just outside Coalport, the view of the surrounding mountains can be spectacular, unless it happens to include one whose top was lopped off by a strip miner who managed to go bankrupt before the time came to reclaim the mined-out land. From the main street of Coalport—a line of dark taverns and fitfully open stores—the mountain that dominates the view is a mountain of spoil left from an abandoned mine called the Sunshine. Apparently, Marilyn Williams moved to Coalport because it happened to be the hometown of a fellow worker at a Masonic nursing home in Utica, where both of them were employed as nurse’s aides, and she happened to be at a point in her life when she wanted to live anywhere but Utica, New York. She was thirty, divorced, rather high-strung. She spoke very quickly, and she was quick to smile. She looked, according to one friend, “like someone’s third-grade teacher.” She brought her son, Michael, then twelve, along with her. A visitor standing on the main street of town can easily assume that the story of postwar Coalport in-migration begins and ends with their arrival.

  Mary Louise Carson had heard, apparently incorrectly, that the federal government had told Rushton to begin hiring some women. To a lot of working people in towns like Coalport, male as well as female, it must sometimes seem as if something on the order of federal intervention is necessary to get a job in a deep mine. It is common for people to put in an application at several mines—mines that might be forty or fifty miles from where they live—and then wait to be “called.” A conversation in one of the dark taverns of Coalport or Osceola Mills or Houtzdale sometimes sounds like the conversation at a conference of Baptist preachers—the man at the end of the bar talking about the time he was called at Bethlehem, the bartender speaking of someone who was called at Barnes & Tucker. The deep mines in central Pennsylvania are unionized, and the union scale for a coal miner is about nine and a half dollars an hour. The only other hourly wages in the area that approach nine and a half dollars are paid in strip mines—where job security is limited not only by the lack of a union but by the tendency of strip-mine entrepreneurs to take leave of the business without much warning. For some years, the coal industry has not been thriving, a condition that just about everyone in central Pennsylvania—labor and management and chamber of commerce and bystander—tends to blame on outlandish restrictions by the Environmental Protection Agency. These days, it is not uncommon for someone to have had applications on file with four or five mi
nes for years. Alan McCusker, the young man Marilyn Williams married a year or so after she arrived in Coalport, says that he had an application in at Rushton himself at the time his future wife applied. Rushton is the deep mine most convenient to Coalport. It also has the stability that comes with being what is known as a captive mine—a mine whose entire production is used by its owner, in this case a utility in the northeastern part of the state called Pennsylvania Power & Light. Alan McCusker was never called at Rushton. The response to the application of Marilyn Williams and the women who went with her was more clear-cut: the superintendent of the Rushton mine, Blair Rickard, told them that there would be women miners in his mine over his dead body.

  Eventually, the mining company settled the suit out of court, agreeing to hire all four women and to award them back pay. While the case was in court, there were rumors that the plaintiffs had been recruited by a lawyer from some women’s liberation outfit, but the rumors were untrue. They had found their own lawyer, Mary Ellen Krober, a young woman from Carlisle who was recommended by a local legal-aid attorney. Their interests were not ideological but financial. Nearly all the women who started working at the Rushton mine in 1977 were the breadwinners of their families. Alan McCusker has worked at a number of jobs, but never at one for a number of years. Bernice Dombroski, who had applied at Rushton without knowing about the suit and was called before the litigants were, is married to a man who is partly disabled and who works only seasonally. “If we had to live on what he makes,” she said not long ago, “we’d starve to death.”

  Before the settlement, Marilyn McCusker worked for a while in a local nursing home. Mary Louise Carson worked in a clothing factory. Neither of them made more than the minimum wage. “A lot of people in the sewing factory said I was crazy to apply to the mine,” Mrs. Carson told a visitor recently. “But the sewing factory was a sweatshop. I heard of people there having nervous breakdowns. You don’t know what a woman has to do.” Spending all day at a sewing machine can make a coal miner’s job seem almost liberating—particularly when it pays nine and a half dollars an hour. “I like it down there,” Mrs. Carson, the only original litigant left among the three women who now work at Rushton, said recently. “It’s a different world.” It’s a dirty world, of course—so dirty that coal miners have to use Ivory dishwashing liquid rather than bath soap when they finish a shift. It is often uncomfortable. It is always dangerous. Within the first few months at Rushton, Marilyn McCusker’s nose was broken by a pipe and her arm was wrenched when her shovel got caught in the belt that carries the coal out of the mine. Alan McCusker says that his wife was going to quit coal mining as soon as he completed a house he was building for the family across the road from where they lived, but he also says that her proudest day was the day when, after a year at Rushton, she won her mining papers and was able to trade the yellow hat of a “greenie” for the black hat of a certified miner. “She loved it from the first day,” he said recently. “It’s dirty and dark and rats running around all over the place. All her life, though, basically she’d never had a good day’s pay. She was just doing menial work. When she came back the first day, she was smiling from ear to ear. She just loved it.”

  —

  Even when the suit was settled, Blair Rickard never pretended to welcome women in his coal mine. Although Rushton picked up a small reputation for innovation a couple of years ago by experimenting with an “autonomous mining” program that gave work crews some say in how the day’s work should be approached—the program was eventually voted out by the union—Blair Rickard is an old-fashioned mine superintendent. Except for one six-month period spent wiring buildings, he has been in coal mining since he got out of high school, in 1937. He has worked as a miner “at the face” with a pick and shovel. He has worked as a foreman. He has run his own small mine. He is known as a strong churchgoer who believes that women would have no place in a coal mine even if they could do a man’s work. “Honest to God, I love the woman,” he said recently. “I respect the woman as a lady. I kind of look up to ’em. I know they have to find their way in society, but there’s just oodles of jobs for women—like office jobs. I’m a hundred percent against ’em in a coal mine. They just can’t do the work. We’re paying them women to get them off our back is all we’re doing.”

  These days, coal is gouged out of the face of a mine with a ferocious device called a continuous-mining machine, rather than with a pick and shovel. The women who work underground claim that the physical labor is no more strenuous than moving aside a couch for a vacuum cleaner or lugging around a husky three-year-old. “It just ain’t hard work,” according to Mary Ann Baum, a woman who worked at Rushton until recently. Male miners, though, tend to believe that women cannot do the job—cannot handle the sections of tree trunk that are used as props for the roof of the mine, cannot run complicated equipment like the continuous miner, cannot carry their share of rail or heavy pipe. (Blair Rickard acknowledges that there are a few jobs that women could do as well as men if only they were willing to work—including bolter helper, the job Marilyn McCusker was doing when she was killed—but he believes them incapable of running machines, and he doesn’t think many of them really are willing to work.) A lot of people in central Pennsylvania, male and female, agree with Rickard that a coal mine is simply no place for a woman. “I wouldn’t let my wife down there,” a former miner who has sons in the mines said recently. “I’d break her leg first.” Some people believe that, apart from the matter of efficiency and propriety, having women in a coal mine is bad luck—or worse luck, really, since working eight hours a day in a place where people are regularly killed or crippled might be considered bad luck to begin with. Miners have generally accepted the fact that equal-employment laws mean the inevitability of women in the mines—many male miners, in fact, have been helpful to the women who do get hired—but nobody pretends that male miners are much more enthusiastic about the presence of women than Rickard is. “Some of the men are OK,” Mrs. Carson has said. “But some of ’em goes up your one side and down the other. They don’t want us in there.”

  “As far as Rushton’s concerned, the women’s always going to have problems,” Bernice Dombroski says. She blames the problems not on the men but on Blair Rickard. Women who work at Rushton claim that in matters like shift assignments or certification for mining papers, Rickard favors his friends and relatives over anyone else, and anyone else over a woman. They claim that the United Mine Workers of America local at Rushton is not very useful in protecting their rights—and is too cozy with management in general. (“Rushton’s more like a scab hole.”) However angry women like Bernice Dombroski and Mary Louise Carson may sound at times, though, they do not think of themselves as militants—and certainly not as feminists. “I believe if a woman does the work she ought to get the pay,” Mrs. Carson says. “But I don’t believe in women football players or homosexuals or abortion.” Although Bernice Dombroski has a sweatshirt that says WHEN GOD CREATED MAN, SHE WAS ONLY JOKING, the sweatshirt is itself meant as a joke. “I don’t go along with women’s lib or homosexuals or nothing like that,” she says. “They’re for a lot of things I’m against.”

  Although Rickard cannot find anything to compliment about Marilyn McCusker’s productivity as a coal miner beyond a pleasing personality and a good attendance record, he admits that Bernice Dombroski is one female miner who does her job as well as a man. “I can throw them props as good as any man down there,” she said recently. “One of the guys taught me how to sling them over your shoulder.” She is a blunt, rough-talking woman who grew up in Coalport, one of sixteen children of a miner at the old Sunshine mine. She is accustomed to taking care of herself. She was Marilyn McCusker’s best friend at the mine (“We had a lot in common; we both had hard lives”), and she urged upon her friend the Bernice Dombroski method for getting along with abusive fellow workers—“You give it back, they’ll leave you alone.” She gets along with her fellow workers pretty well herself—partly, she says, “because I
talk like them and I can cuss them out.” Her response to hearing that some miners’ wives are concerned about their husbands’ working in such close quarters with women is likely to be rude remarks about how few of the men she works with would provide significant temptation. Before Mrs. Dombroski started working at Rushton, Blair Rickard lectured his miners about the necessity of modifying their language a bit. “Wouldn’t you know it?” he said recently. “It wasn’t two weeks before I had her in this office telling her she was embarrassing my men the way she talked.” It may have been the first time in the history of the American coal industry that anyone was officially chastised for using strong language in a coal mine.

  —

  Alan McCusker stopped work on the new house for a time, but he has now started again. He and his late wife’s son, Michael Williams, still live in a small frame house across the road—a house built by McCusker’s grandfather, who worked at the Sunshine mine. A couple of weeks after the accident, the mining-company official in charge of workers’ compensation phoned to say that he wanted to drop by to explain some differences in the death-benefits claim that arose from McCusker’s being a widower rather than a widow. McCusker thought the official meant differences in wording—changing a “his” to a “her” now and then—but it turned out that the difference referred to was a section of the Pennsylvania workers’ compensation law that says a widower is entitled to full benefits only if he is incapable of supporting himself and was dependent upon the worker who was killed. McCusker, who is twenty-eight and able-bodied, responded by accusing the company of attempting to treat his wife unequally in death as well as in life. “Marilyn didn’t win everything she thought she did,” he said. “The legal battle may not be over.”