40 Patchtown

by Damian Dressick

  “Get outta here, kid,” they says to me. “Before we settle yer hash.”

  The damn monkey looks on their faces swells me full up with so much hate that I don’t even care no more what the plan was in the first place. I go running the rest of the way up the hill right for them, yelling and cursing like the devil.

  “C’mon, ya fuckers!” I says.

  I’m only maybe ten yards away and they’re still laughing. I can feel the rage coming full on outta my heart, driving me closer in towards them. When I realize I’m also crying, I let one of them bony chunks fly.

  It catches the nearer Pinkerton right in his fat face. Grunting, he raises up a hand and yanks it away covered with blood and I see the blood’s pouring down outta his nose too. And that’s that, them Cossacks is hot after me then.

  I keep my stride high over them repair yard tracks, jumping rails and leaping from tie to tie. My footing’s chancy in that shale, but I’m moving like the wind, gliding down over the hill outta the yard towards Paint Creek.

  I can hear them Pinkertons’ feet behind me crunching the cinders. They’re carrying on and cursing me, but it don’t mean nothing. I feel like I can outrun a buck deer this minute and I’m just counting steps till I’m knee deep into Paint Creek.

  I hear ’em splashing slow into the orange water behind me and I’m wondering how far they’re gonna go before they turn back, but I don’t care. Let ’em run till they drop.

  Once I get to the far bank, I turn around to get a peek at them winded guards before I head into the woods for the trail towards Windber. Water up to their ankles, both of them Cossacks is doubled over in the middle of Paint Creek with their hands on their knees. The one I clipped with that rock is smearing blood off of his face with the sleeve of his coat.

  Glancing up past them wheezing Pinkertons, I see Mr. Paul making for the fan house at a dead run. His arms are pumping and his knees damn near catching his chest as he sprints away from the Little Office.

  Putting my hand up like a salute to shield my face from the sun, I keep right on looking. I count, one, two, three and all of a sudden, there’s a low rumble and them Little Office bricks is moving through the air like birds.

  When they start to come down, I don’t know, cause I’m long into the pine forest. My feet pressing deep in the soft needles, I’m putting acres of the thick tangle of evergreens between me and all of 40 Patchtown.

  Twenty-Six

  My last wagon ride outta Windber feels awful funny, like it’s halfway between the beginning of something and the end. Lottie and the twins and Johnny are setting with my ma and our heaped-up stuff in the back of the horse wagon we borrowed from Angelo. Half dead after them Ashtola shiners cornered him in a cell in the Somerset jailhouse, he ain’t gonna be needing it.

  Mr. Paul and Pauline is huddled up on the plank bench next to me. I can feel the weight of Pauline’s body pushed up against my shoulder. Her touching me like that makes it feel like maybe I won something here, even if a lot of things been lost. Behind me, my ma’s fiddling with her hands in her lap, but she’s smiling like I ain’t seen her do since before the strike started up. Her face easy, like she finally got her way, Lottie’s watching me and Pauline set next to each other on the buckboard.

  We’re rolling up Ninth Street to the 160 T and from there it’s gonna be a long haul west. We’re headed out for the north Illinois fields where Mr. Paul says it’s going on two years that all the mines there are run full union.

  Listening to the wood wheels clatter on the reddog as we make the overlook bend, my mind’s full up with all that’s happened. No small thing to be getting my family safe outta these Patchtowns and to have cash money in my pocket. I’m flat tickled that Mr. Paul’s coming and even more that Pauline’s coming too. But it ain’t like coal and bony. No how I can separate any of this from us losing the strike or what we done to that dago behind McKluskeys or sure not what happened to Buzzy neither. I still got that creosote stinking splinter I yanked from the Polish Church sidewalk tucked away in the inside pocket of my pea coat.

  How come we stuck so long after so many other people picked up and went? It’s a fair question, no doubt. I could tell ya ’bout how 40 Patchtown was our home and we didn’t want to give it up. Or I could say how once we started up the strike, we put so much of ourselves into it that giving in was the last, hardest thing we was prepared to do. Them things would all be straight true. But there’s something else underneath all of that, or maybe shot all through it, like different colors of yarn in my ma’s afghan crochet. It’s just as much the truth as the other, but a damn sight harder to make clear for anybody else.

  All I can say is that the Berwinds had so much say over what we done, telling us where to live, what to buy and when to work and when to sit home and starve, it was tough to see that anything was up to us at all. It’s like the light from a carbide lamp in the middle of the day—ya can’t even see it.

  But I can see clear now. I’m looking down the hill to the lights of Windber and watching the smoke curl off the bony piles that jut into the sky between Dago Town and Eureka 32. I can see the whole way across the valley to the darkening fields on the other side. I’m leaving something here among these patchtowns, I know, but it seems to me I might be able to pick up something better if I lighten the load.

  I lace one hand into Pauline’s firm and I give the reins a little shake with the other. Listening to the horses clomp as we make the last turn onto the blacktop pavement of 160, I take a deep breath and smell that clear, cold air blowing in from the west.

  Acknowledgements

  If every individual who aided in bringing this book into the world were accorded proper credit, I’m afraid the acknowledgements would run longer than the text, but there are some folks whose contributions simply deserve recognition. At the very top of that list, alone, is my grandfather, Alex Valentine Dressick, whose kitchen table stories of men trying to bring the union into the coal fields in the 1920s are the reason this book exists. My grandmother, Margaret Swincinski, generously shared hours of conversation about farm life on the outskirts of the coal patch in the early part of the last century. I would also like to thank John Martino and Don Bertschman–not only for decades of friendship and encouragement, but also for reading and rereading this manuscript. Numerous folks also helped out with research and stories detailing coal town life, including Joseph and Joann Dressick, Walter and Julia Swincinski, and Tony Madoskey. Millie Beik’s book The Miners of Winder and Phil Zorich at the library at Indiana University of Pennsylvania also proved to be of invaluable assistance. I would like to thank Larry Smith and the team at Bottom Dog Press for taking on this novel and their hard work to bring it out into the world. I would also like to thank Ann, without whom getting this and everything else together would have been near impossible. Lastly, and most importantly, I would like to thank my mother and father, Margaret A. and John F. Dressick for their support, not just during the writing of this book, but all the books that (thankfully) never saw the light of day. You guys were the best!

  About the Author

  Born into a coal mining family in western Pennsylvania, Damian Dressick worked for many years as a marketing executive in New York, Los Angeles and Paris before packing up his kit to return to Somerset County to research and write the novel 40 Patchtown. The book is inspired by an incident during the 1922 coal strike which his grandfather described while sitting around the kitchen table decades later. After renting a four-room wood frame “company house” in the coal patch town of Mine 37, Dressick spent months researching the rhythms of coal town life in the early part of the twentieth century, interviewing retired miners, their wives, and widows, and immersing himself in the coal heritage materials housed at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

  Dressick drafted the novel in the duplex frame house, until an occupant on the other half set the house on fire in a failed attempt to murder his roommate. After being injured retrieving the manuscript from the house as it burned, the autho
r revised the novel while living in Windber in the house of his maternal grandmother.

  Dressick is the also the author of the story collection Fables of the Deconstruction. His fiction and essays have appeared in more than fifty literary journals and anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s New Micro, Post Road, failbetter.com, Cutbank, Hobart, New Orleans Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Hippocampus, and New World Writing. A Blue Mountain Residency Fellow, he holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Described by Frederick Barthelme as “an artist to be reckoned with,” he currently teaches at Clarion University.

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