Black Sunshine: A Novel, page 12
Harlan #7 was a little over a mile deep, so there were probably 90 breaks between the mouth of the mine and the working face at the far end. It was the ventilation man’s job to seal off all 90 breaks along the right-side shaft and an equal number of breaks on the left. Since he’d worked at #7 from the day it opened, Hob had personally hung most ever one of them curtains—some of them made out of untreated jute, heavy fabric like burlap, others out of thick yellow plastic. As the mine was sunk deeper and deeper into the mountain, it was also his job to go back up the line and make them curtain “dams” permanent by replacing the fabric or plastic with solid walls, seals built of concrete block and mortar.
Problem was, the company wasn’t paying Hobart Bascomb to do his job—they was paying him to keep his mouth shut.
Wilson Cooper run a dog-hole operation if ever there was one, about as dangerous a mine as Hob had ever seen. They got away with it by bribing the MSHA inspectors to look the other way. The ones they couldn’t bribe they tricked. Whenever there was a surprise inspection, the code words “we got a man on the property” spread through the mine. The underage miners, who got paid in cash so there was no paper trail, would quickly take cover at the far end of a remote break—with their headlamps turned off. The other miner’d fix or hide safety violations before the inspector got there. They’d all stop whatever they were doing and grab limestone dust and start dousing the walls—like they was supposed to do all along to make the coal dust inert—non-combustible. And they’d rush to put up curtains, clean rockfalls, and trash, tape frayed cords—stuff like that.
“You boys been drillin’ bore holes?” the inspector’d ask. They was supposed to drill holes into the face before the continuous miner ripped into it to make sure there wasn’t old works on the other side.
“Yes sir, boss,” the miners’d all say. “We shore have.”
Speak up about safety violations and the company’d get fined. With Wilson Cooper run on a shoestring like it was, a couple of big fines and they’d be out of business. They fold up and you don’t have no job, no money coming in to feed your family.
And every miner knew if he complained, the company’d fire him on the spot.
That’s why nobody said nothing when the company scrimped on everything—like permanent seals for the breaks—didn’t provide proper concrete blocks so the seals Hob built were nothing more than stacks of old cinder block with rock dust on them to look like mortar. Inspector ever leaned on one, it’d collapse. Lots of places up and down both shafts, Hob left the jute or plastic curtains because he never had time to build permanent seals.
But the worst safety violation was that the curtains that hung across the breaks close to the face were all the time getting yanked down to make it easier for the machinery to move around. Curtains slowed things down; time was money.
Removing a curtain had the same effect on the air flow in a mine as removing rocks from Hob’s dams in the creek. The air would flow through the un-curtained break like water through a hole in a dam and right back out of the mine without ever reaching the face. That left the miners breathing bad air and the threat of a methane/coal-dust explosion mounting by the second.
And as coal mines went, #7 was a gassy one, real gassy.
“Reckon that’s what happened?” Hob didn’t realize he’d spoken the words out loud until the waitress turned toward him.
“You say some’m?”
“Yeah, Sweetheart, how ’bout you warm up my coffee.”
It wasn’t the first time Hob had spoken the words aloud—not the first time he’d heard them in his head, neither. Did they move curtains out of the way that day, not put them back up until…?
He’d been over and over it. Truth was nobody’d ever know why #7 blew. Maybe the continuous miner dug into old works full of methane. Maybe the curtains was down and methane built up in the shafts. Maybe it was something else altogether.
But Hob always come back to the same place, the biggest maybe of all. If he hadn’t been too hung over to do his job that morning, maybe…
CHAPTER 14
AS LONG, SHADOW fingers reached out to grab hold of the hollow, Will walked up the hill to Granny’s house. He’d wandered all over town, but couldn’t seem to make the leap across the chasm of change—in the hollow or in himself—couldn’t seem to reconnect. It was almost worse than being a stranger.
A car pulled up beside him.
“Want a ride?”
He’d heard JoJo’s car coming up the hill. It was hard to miss the sound of the old Ford Escort, probably a 1990 model. Besides a serious knock in the engine, there was either a hole in the muffler or it had fallen off altogether.
Will nodded, walked around to the passenger side of the car and noticed a spiderweb of cracks spread out on the windshield from what looked like a bullet hole. More likely it was where a piece of coal falling off the back of a truck had nailed it. Coal trucks on the road kept windshield replacement operations in Eastern Kentucky in business. All that remained of the passenger side mirror was a rusty stump; whatever had amputated it was probably the same fence post or pole that had smashed in the side of the door.
Though seriously mangled, the door swung easily open and Will waited while JoJo moved a pile of assorted flotsam and jetsam off the passenger seat so he could get in. The interior smelled like pizza.
“You got to bang that door real hard or it won’t stay shut. Catch’s broke. I got a matched set. The door on this side won’t hardly open.”
“Your grandmother allow you to pick up strange men?”
“I know lots of men stranger’n you.” She looked sideways at him as she put the car in gear and continued up the road to the top of the hollow. “And I don’t think you’re all that strange. Just…” she paused. “I don’t know. There’s some’m ’bout your eyes is all.”
“It takes one to know one.”
Her smile faded. “What’s that s’posed to mean?”
“One alcoholic can spot another alcoholic on the other side of the room at a party, can feel the vibes. Or maybe it’s not vibes at all, merely the look of mouth-watering desperation on the guy’s face when the waiter goes by with a tray of martinis.”
“You’ve noticed that, have you?”
“No, I’m the guy looking desperate. I’m a drunk.
“Just like that? ‘Hi, my name’s Will and I’m an alcoholic.’ ”
Will nodded. “I’ll take What It Feels Like To Wake Up In Your Own Puke Under A Bridge for a thousand, Alex.”
He could tell he’d unsettled JoJo, surprised and perhaps intrigued her.
“So, what are you saying? That you think I’m an alcoholic?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then what did you say?”
“I said it takes one to know one. But I wasn’t talking about alcoholism. That was an illustration.”
“Sorry, you’ve lost me.” She pulled off the road and parked in front of Granny’s trailer.
“I was talking about being hollowed-eyed and hopeless. I know the look, at least from the inside. And I figure what I feel like on the inside looks just like this…” He reached over and pulled down her visor with a mirror on the back. “…on the outside.”
JoJo glanced at the mirror, then turned to stare at him. All at once, the image of Ricky Dan bloomed in his head and he burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to regain his composure. “It’s just…if your daddy was here right now, you know how he’d describe the look on your face? He’d say, ‘That gal don’t know whether to scratch her butt or take third base.’ ”
That coaxed a tiny smile out of her.
She reached over and picked her purse up out of the floorboard on the passenger side and slammed her shoulder twice into her door before it opened. “Well, it was good talking to you,” she said. “I got to go help Granny with supper.”
“No, you don’t.” That stopped her. “We both know Granny could fix supper for all the blue-eyed men in the Norwegian army with one hand tied behind her back. Take a walk with me.”
“Take a…? I can’t, I…”
“Yes, you can. You’re just afraid to. You don’t want to be alone with me because you know you can’t con me, that I see through the everything’s-dandy-in-my-world act you’ve been performing ever since I met you.”
JoJo stared at him wide-eyed, too surprised to speak.
“I’ll bet I’m the only person in your life who knows you’re lying. And I’m certain I’m the only person who’ll tell you the truth still in the husk, all of it, no matter how ugly it is.”
It was clear nobody’d ever spoken to JoJo as he just had. Will watched warring emotions play across her face, then saw something like anger light her eyes. Good! He could work with anger.
“Fine.” She gestured toward the immediate world. “Where you wanna go?”
Will got out of the car, walked around to her open door and flashed a broad smile. “It’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey.”
As he turned and started up the road toward the shack that had once been his home, Will eased off the full frontal assault he’d mounted and dabbled in the gloriously mundane. Did she like her job? How did she get it? What happened to Will’s accent? Where and how did he lose it?
“I used to love that mulberry tree,” Will said of the dead carcass that had torn a hole in the house roof.
“I did, too,” she said quietly.
“Wind blow it over?”
“No. Ice storm got it.”
She walked to the tree and touched the dry, brittle bark on its trunk.
“When I’s a little girl, I used to come here a lot. There wasn’t no little kids my age around here; Jamey and me was the only ones.”
The explosion in #7 had slashed a swath of destruction through the male population of Aintree Hollow. There’d have been more children around if those miners had lived to have them.
“This tree was easy to climb because of that.” She stepped around and indicated a limb low on the trunk that on the fallen tree formed something like a bench. “Even when I was little, 5 or 6 maybe, I could get up on that one, and after that it was easy to climb the rest of the tree.”
“This was my favorite climbing tree, too, when I was a kid.”
“About 7 or 8 years ago—I wasn’t in high school, yet—we had an ice storm. Not a bad ice storm; there’s been lots of worse ice storms in this holler.”
“I remember one where the ice was half an inch thick on all the trees. Your daddy, Lloyd and I went up to the edge of the woods when it started to warm up and you could hear a sound like popcorn all around, a loud cracking and snapping. It was the ice breaking on the tree limbs.”
“This storm wasn’t like that.” She turned and leaned up against the base of the tree. “There was hardly any ice at all, a quarter of an inch, maybe. Didn’t even make the wires leadin’ to the house sag. And then I come out here and this tree was down.” She sounded sad and her eyes took on a far-away look. “A little bitty ice storm…killed it.”
Will said nothing. JoJo seemed to be moving to a place he didn’t imagine she took many people and he was afraid to inject his presence for fear she’d realize he was there with her and throw him out.
“I think ’bout that tree a lot. Why’d that little storm kill it when it’d stood up under worse? But that’s the thing. You can’t tell from the outside. You can’t look at a big ole strong tree like that and know what’s going on…down inside it where you can’t see.”
She lowered her head and didn’t say anything else for so long Will thought she was finished. When she did speak, her voice was as soft and as intense as Granny’s.
“It don’t matter how much I loved that tree, I couldn’t have saved it. Even if I’d been standin’ right here when it started over, I couldn’t have held it up. Nobody’s strong ’nough to hold up a fallin’ tree.”
She lifted her head and looked him square in the eye.
“Ain’t nobody strong enough to hold up a fallin’ life, neither.”
She turned wordlessly and headed back down the road toward Granny’s. Will stood where he was and watched her until she had gone into the house and closed the door.
JoJo sat on her bed and listened to the sounds from the kitchen. Granny had made Jamey do the supper dishes tonight because he hadn’t done the breakfast dishes for JoJo like he’d said he would. She could hear the two of them talking with Will. Not the words, but the tone of their voices. It was relaxed and cheerful. Happy.
After Darrell was killed, JoJo was a ship cut adrift in a raging sea. The pain of loss was staggering, overwhelming—all slathered over with a layer of guilt. What Granny and the other women had gone through when #7 blew—not just losing husbands but fathers, brothers, and sons at the same time. Her own sorrow paled in comparison. She was almost ashamed to cry. What right did she have to mourn—they’d all seen worse. And once she’d experienced the agony of real heartbreak, she knew she couldn’t have stood up under what those women endured. There was a degree of courage and determination, strength, and stamina in all of them she flat out didn’t have.
In the chaos of grief, her shame was somehow transformed into anger. She lashed out at the nearest target—Granny. Crazy, irrational, she’d hollered at her grandmother that the only possible way she could have lived through that much loss was that she just didn’t care. Wasn’t no way she could possibly have loved her husband, her brother, and her son. If she had, she couldn’t have survived their deaths all at one time.
Granny’s eyes had flashed, and for one flickering moment, JoJo had thought Granny might actually slap her. She didn’t. The flame went out in her eyes.
“If I’s to tell you some’m all corny like, it wouldn’t do you no good.” She’d reached out her big, gnarled hand and stroked JoJo’s hair. “But what I know that you don’t, child, is that you ain’t gonna hurt like this forever. You think you will, but you won’t. One of these days, you’ll be able to think ’bout Darrell and it won’t be painful.”
Granny had stopped then and looked deep into JoJo’s eyes.
“I can promise you ain’t always gonna be sad. But whether or not you can ever be happy again—that I cain’t say. That part’s up to you.”
Granny had been right, of course. Wasn’t a whole lot that woman was wrong about. There come a day when JoJo thought about Darrell and smiled. She had even come to a place where she believed there might be a good life out there somewhere, waiting for her. That she could love and be loved again. That she could be happy.
All that ended—she looked at the calendar on the wall—7 weeks ago. Saturday, August 26, 2000, to be exact. That’s the date they ought to put on her death certificate. It didn’t matter when her heart actually stopped and the blood no longer flowed through her veins. Shortly after noon on August 26, Joanna Darlene Sparrow died.
She got up off the bed and walked to her dresser, pulled the top drawer open, and got out the envelope she’d stuffed in there when she got home after her walk with Will.
She didn’t know what to think about Will, this man who’d barged into her life like Sherman marching into Atlanta.
She plopped back down on the bed with the envelope in her hand. She…liked Will. Yeah, she did. But she didn’t like the feeling she had that he could look right through her, that he knew what she was thinking, might even know what she was planning.
Then for one fleeting moment, she wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a father like Will, a man who didn’t pull punches, called them like he seen them. But the moment was over almost before it started. Didn’t matter what kind of father she had, what kind of man she married, what she did or said or thought or wanted—or pleaded with God for. Wasn’t nothing could give her a future she was willing to live in.
Will was well-intentioned. He had a good heart. He just didn’t understand that the kindest thing anybody could do for her right now was stay out of her way while she done what she had to do so’s she could step into eternity on her own terms. That was all she had left.
She opened the envelope and looked at the small white pills inside. When Dough Boy’d handed it to her, he’d told her to count them before she paid him. She’d give him the money and walked away. But she counted them now, held each one carefully, almost tenderly.
…22, 23, 24.
There was enough Oxycontin here to fell an elephant.
CHAPTER 15
WILL DIDN’T SO much sleep at Granny’s as pass out. Perhaps it was that feather mattress Granny was so proud of. More likely it was residual exhaustion. No matter where he had traveled in the past 20 years, he felt off balance, a little uncomfortable. Nothing and nowhere seemed to fit. It was like he always had sand in his shoe. But cradled tenderly in the protective arms of the mountains granted a security that eased tension out of him as gently as the sigh of a sleeping baby.
Which explained why he’d slept so late. By the time he woke up, the sun shone in his window—after ten o’clock! He lay still and looked up at the ceiling. As soon as his mind oriented to being awake and began to fasten onto reality, it slipped back out of his grasp. No matter how he wallowed it around in his head, he couldn’t come to grips with the…otherworldliness of Ricky Dan’s son and the incredible…gift?…the boy had. Will could wrap his arms around Jamey’s talent. Surely, there were other documented cases of artistic gifts in unlikely people. And if he had to, he was certain he could go…well, somewhere and look it up and find them. But he was equally certain there were no documented cases of artists who could carve exact replicas of people they’d never met. Or…
He had to drag his mind kicking and screaming to the place where it was willing to countenance the rest of Jamey’s gift. He’d examined the carving of Granny’s wedding; she’d pointed out to him details that weren’t in the original wedding picture burned in the fire, details nobody except the people who had been there could possibly have known. So how did Jamey? Will had examined the basketball carving, stared at it until he could see it with his eyes closed, like it was tattooed on the insides of his eyelids. A carving that was completed three days before either team suited up.
