Black Sunshine: A Novel, page 25
The longer he frets over the numbers, the more anxious he becomes. Suppose the three of them had used up so much there wasn’t enough left to sustain him and Will until rescue came? Ricky Dan spent almost the whole time coughing his head off. Did that use up more oxygen? Or less because he couldn’t breathe deep? Almost the whole time they’ve been imprisoned in the break, Will has been panting in terror. That certainly used up more air.
It’s the dark that makes figuring so difficult, that sends racing, panicked thoughts through his brain. The dark and the silence. Will hasn’t spoken a word. The moment Ricky Dan plunged out into the poisoned shaft, Will fell silent, like he’d been struck dumb.
Lloyd can’t stand the dark any longer. He reaches up to turn his headlamp back on when the second explosion goes off. His ears pop as a sudden thunder rumbles all around him, roars louder than the coal train pulsing above his body years ago. The ground shakes, the curtains flap. He smells dust, hears the clatter of rocks nearby, and puts his hands over his head in a ridiculous effort to protect himself as the mountain falls down on top of him.
This is it! All his scheming has been for nothing. Terror seizes his guts harder than when he heard the first explosion. He didn’t have time to process it then, didn’t understand what was happening, what it meant. But he does now. He’s going to die here in the dark!
Then the rumble subsides. He begins to cough; dust chokes him. He fumbles for the switch and turns on his headlamp. There has been a roof fall inside the break. Will is stretched out on the floor under a fresh pile of rocks with a widening pool of blood spreading out from his head. For a moment, Lloyd is too surprised to react. He starts to crawl to Will, but the instant agony in his broken ankle shoots up into his belly and makes him nauseous.
He settles back, panting, tries not to cough in the dusty air. He shines his headlamp the best he can on what he can see of Will. There is no movement. Without a helmet to protect him, Will’s head has been cracked open by the hunks of slate. He is dead.
Lloyd’s initial rush of sorrow is quickly short-circuited by relief. Then joy. Will is dead! And that’s a shame, it really is. He liked Will a lot; he was like a brother. But so was Ricky Dan. And with both of them gone, all the air that’s left in here, dusty as it is, belongs to Lloyd. Just one man breathing. He can last for hours, longer than it will take a rescue team to reach him. He’s going to make it after all. He’s going to live!
His giddiness quickly passes. The roof fall sent some rock down on his side of the enclosure as well. Dust and gravel slid off the back of his helmet into his shirt and down his back. Now it has mingled with his sweat to form an itchy goo. He leans forward carefully, unbuttons his shirt and eases it off. And his magician’s rope plops out into his lap. He’d forgotten that he stuffed it down the front of his shirt at lunch—which seemed a hundred years ago. The short ones he stuffed up his sleeve are gone.
He picks up the rope and looks at it, still tied in a hangman’s noose, and wonders if the disaster would cancel the Halloween carnival. Duh. Of course it would! And he hated that. He’d worked so hard to…
There’s a noise outside the curtain next to him. Lloyd freezes. Why would the rescue team come down the belt line shaft?
The rocks that hold the curtain to the floor suddenly roll away as it is pulled up from the bottom. And Ricky Dan Sparrow falls through the opening right into Lloyd’s lap.
Gasping, choking, his helmet gone, he tries to speak.
“…’xplosion knocked…curtain down…” he gasps.
He’d found it; he’d actually made it to the other pocket of air!
“…couldn’t fix…” Then he begins to cough—hacking and gagging. He’s half in, half out of the enclosure. The curtain’s not completely sealed and smoke pours in around him.
“Ricky Dan, you gotta—”
He keeps coughing, won’t move, probably can’t move. The air inside the break begins to fill with smoke!
Lloyd has no memory of thinking before he acts. His movement is simple reflex, pure self-preservation. In one quick motion, he slips the hangman’s noose around Ricky Dan’s neck and pulls it tight.
Ricky Dan reaches up and claws at the rope. His eyes wild, he struggles frantically to get his fingers around it to pull it away. Then he jerks upward and Lloyd realizes he has woefully misjudged Ricky Dan’s remaining strength. In panic, in deadly fear, Ricky Dan raises up onto his hands and knees and yanks backward, and he and Lloyd tumble out of the break into the poison air in the shaft. Lloyd squeezes his squinty eyes shut against the burning smoke and stops breathing. He holds tight to the rope. The big muscles in his arms bulge as he pulls with all his strength. Ricky Dan jerks and flops. And then is still. Lloyd holds on for a moment longer then knows he has seconds to get back into the enclosure before reflexive coughing will kill him.
He lets go of the rope and plunges back under the curtain, the agony of his ankle a remote pain, like the throb from a pulled tooth as the novocaine wears off. Everything feels distant, disconnected. In a dazed, spinning dream he forces himself to belly crawl the rest of the way in so the curtain drops back onto the floor behind him. He drags himself a foot or two farther, then he begins to cough. There’s so much smoke and dust. He coughs and coughs and…
When he opens his eyes, there is no bad air. There is a mask over his face that delivers blessed, cleansing, clean oxygen. He closes his eyes again and drifts away.
Lloyd moved the cord again to give the miner man slack to dig deeper. Already 20 feet into the cut, he just kept going. Wasn’t supposed to dig more than 20 feet without letting the roof bolter insert screws to hold the rock layers together. But that slowed down production and production trumped safety concerns every time. Company didn’t care that the miner man and his helper was working at the end of a 30-foot tunnel of unsupported roof. Long’s that black sunshine stacked up on the belt line, nothing else mattered.
The air here was already bad; ventilation was lousy for the same reasons now it’d been bad in 1980. New owners didn’t do nothing but put lipstick on a pig; Harlan #7 was still a dog hole mine.
Lloyd coughed. It was a shame he had to suck in coal dust with his last breaths on earth. It had felt so good to breathe the oxygen in that mask. He’d spent the first half hour of consciousness with his eyes closed, savoring the pure joy of good air.
Then he’d heard voices, men, not nurses, and he knew he had to return to the world. Inside two minutes, he realized that the time he’d spent innocently enjoying fresh air would be the last moments of innocent enjoyment he would ever know.
“He’s awake,” somebody says. Lloyd squints and the face comes into focus. It’s Beau Grissom, the head of Big Sandy Mine’s rescue team. He’s all cleaned up, nice shirt. Lloyd is confused, not completely certain where he is or how he got here.
“What…happened?” he croaks, and the effort to speak sends shards of glass through his raw throat.
“I know it hurts to talk,” Beau says. “You just listen.”
Then Beau describes the rescue effort and in a sudden rush powerful as a rain-swollen creek, it all comes back to Lloyd.
The explosion.
The break full of rocks.
Will.
The hat.
Ricky Dan!
Lloyd’s afraid he’s about to be sick. Surely, he dreamed it. He didn’t really…but he knows it’s no dream. And when a full understanding hits him, it feels like he’s been gut shot.
He had killed Ricky Dan Sparrow! Strangled him with his magician’s rope.
But even more important—he had left the rope around Ricky Dan’s neck!
Lloyd hasn’t heard a word Beau has said. Even in this fresh air, he can’t catch his breath. There’s an iron clamp around his chest squeezing tighter and—
“…got a pretty bad concussion, I ain’t gonna lie to you. And he ain’t woke up yet. But Will’s a fighter. My money says he’ll come out of this fine.”
“Will is…?” Lloyd tries, but the words won’t form.
“Alive? Yeah, he is.” Beau thinks Lloyd can’t talk because of the pain in his throat. “We need to let you get some rest.” He nods to another rescue squad member, a man Lloyd can’t place, standing on the other side of the bed. “You need to know the good Lord was watchin’ over you ’n Will. We almost didn’t see that smeared chalk on the curtain, and wasn’t long ’fore it all went.”
“All…?”
“Yeah, it blew big, bigger’n the first two times. While we was gettin’ you boys out, the team from Hard Scrabble got close as they could to the face and seen… After that, wasn’t no reason to send in more men. Glad we didn’t, ’cause a couple hours after the big blow, the roof let go in your section. Collapsed. Good news is looks like the blocked shaft put out the fire in the coal.”
“Ricky Dan…?”
Beau and the other man exchange a look. Then Beau reaches out, touches Lloyd’s arm and speaks softly.
“Lloyd…there’s just you ’n Will. You’re the only two got out. All the rest...I’m sorry to have to say it, Lloyd, but they’s all gone. Twenty-seven men lost and we didn’t recover a single body. That coal fire at the face, it was burning hotter’n… there couldn’t a-been nothing left of none of ’em. There ain’t no open shafts on that side of the mine no more, neither. Roof falls everywhere.”
And for the next 20 years, the first thought in Lloyd’s mind every morning is the same: Someday somebody’s gonna dig out the belt line shaft in Harlan #7. When they do, they’ll find Ricky Dan Sparrow’s body. With Lloyd’s magician’s rope—a hangman’s noose around his neck.
CHAPTER 33
GRANNY STOOD at the back door as Will and JoJo went down the porch steps. She smiled at the memory of the look on Will’s face when she told him. Shock. Disbelief. Wonder. And in the end, she’d seen the beginning of… joy. Or hoped she had. Will probably wouldn’t even recognize the feeling; it’d been that long since he’d had anything to be joyful about.
She watched the two of them until they were out of sight in the trees beyond the garden, and she wondered what they would see when the lantern light flickered on the piece of jet they carried with them. She also wondered if Will had got anywhere with JoJo. That child was wrapped up tighter than an ear of corn in the husk.
Granny sighed, turned, and almost tripped over Crawdad.
“You hadn’t oughta sneak up on me, you fat thing.” She reached down and picked the cat up in her arms. “Good way to get a paw mashed.” She petted him gently and his motor instantly turned on. His purr sounded like the hum of that old freezer they used to have before it broke. “Yore feeling lonesome ’cause Will’s here and ain’t nobody payin’ no attention to you, ain’t you, boy?” She scratched the big cat behind his left ear. “Well, Granny still loves ya, even if you are worthless as wings on a goat.”
She carried the cat to the kitchen table, sat down, and put the cat on the floor at her feet. He rubbed back and forth against her leg. But when she wouldn’t pick him back up, he strolled over to his favorite spot in front of the double patio doors, circled three times and then curled up on the patch of worn brown carpet that would have been warmed by sunshine if there’d been any.
Granny looked at the chair where Will had sat as he took his heart right out of his chest and handed it over to her. Bleeding, but still beating. It was a brave thing he done. Brave to come back here and face her. She was proud of him.
Now Lloyd? She sighed again. He’d been harder. Way harder. But God had give her the strength to forgive Lloyd too. It had taken a long, long time. Years and years of getting up ever morning and forgiving him all over again. Lloyd had been right here in the hollow. He could have come to her anytime, told her the truth. But he hadn’t let life humble him, like it done Will. Hard times had just made Lloyd bitter. When they was youngsters, she used to look up from planting or weeding the garden and watch all three boys tumble around in the backyard like bear cubs. Even then, Lloyd didn’t seem to know his own self what he aimed to do one second to the next. But he’d already got too close to the fire and she couldn’t pull him back.
Bucket gave a disinterested, half-hearted bark at something, probably that badger lived in a hole across the road. If Bucket hadn’t been so old, he’d a-got that badger a long time ago. But it had started to rain and wouldn’t nothing get that dog off the porch in the rain; he hated to get wet. Granny hoped Will and JoJo’d made it to the shed before the rain hit. She looked in that direction as if she could see through the walls. And she wondered again what the two of them would see in Jamey Boy’s arts.
Speaking of Jamey Boy’s arts…
His latest one lay on the table in front of her, wrapped in a pillowcase with pale blue stripes the same color as the ragged blue hoodie that hung on a hook beside the front door. The hoodie Jamey Boy should have worn to work. Fifty-eight degrees is a mite nippy if you ain’t dressed for it. But he was a man full growed, she reminded herself, even if he’d always be a little boy. Had to let him do for himself.
She reached over reluctantly, moved the dirty pillowcase she’d tossed on top of it, pulled the bundle toward her and braced herself for what she’d see. Jamey Boy’d said he didn’t think the miners in the rock had faces. But what if he was wrong? What if they did? What if she lifted the pillowcase off the rock and there was Bowman all tore up, his face a mask of pain? How could she stand to look at a thing like that?
When they first married, Bowman had come home one day with his hand all mashed. Got it caught between a roller and the belt on the belt line. It was the horriblest wound you ever seen, the skin on his fingers split open on both sides, mashed open the way an orange would split if you stepped on it. Soon as she seen it, she begged him to go to the doctor and get it seen to, though she knew they didn’t have no money for doctors. They was poor. But at least they didn’t live in a company town where one of them big coal companies owned your house and you got paid in company script, had to shop at the company store. And the company kept you always in debt so you couldn’t never leave. Her and Bowman, they was better off than that!
Only, truth was, they’s just as much prisoners as them company miners. They had nowhere to go, didn’t know any other way to live, and even as she begged Bowman not to go back down in the mine, she knew for total certain that’s what he’d do. She wondered he had any stomach for it, but what him or her wanted didn’t matter. Bowman’d go back same as every other miner got hurt at work did. He had to. They had three little girls to feed.
So she’d bandaged his hand up best as she could. She remembered the look of agony on Bow’s face as she seen to it, knew the pain was fierce. And ever after that, when her mind went to that bad place the minds of miners’ wives went if they wasn’t careful, she’d see his face with that look on it. The roof would be falling on him and he’d have that look. Or the miner would be backing over him and he’d have that look. Or…
She pulled the pillowcase away so the jet lay naked on the table, but at first she looked at it out of the corner of her eye—just enough to see if there was any faces you could recognize. But the arts didn’t look at all like she expected it would and she turned—surprised—and studied it.
When she’d seen it the first time, only the lone miner in front was pulled up out of the rock, “in relief” JoJo called it. All the other miners behind him was just outlined, like a sketch, still stuck down in the jet waiting for Jamey to set them free. Now, the arts was finished, but Jamey hadn’t pulled them miners in the back out of the rock. They was all just images scratched into the jet behind the one miner in front.
But even though Jamey Boy hadn’t carved them so’s they stuck out, he hadn’t left them sketches, neither. They was as detailed as photographs, though nary a face did she see on any of them! Somehow the tangled bodies flung backwards by the blast was situated so every face was covered up. All them miners, and not a one was anybody she could call by name.
She let out a breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding—felt almost giddy with relief. Oh, it was an awful sight, a terrible sight, but it was an anonymous sight. Them people could have been anybody, unless you could identify them by a helmet, or a shirt…
No!
Granny’s hands flew to her mouth. But she didn’t scream. She was too surprised, too horrified to make a sound. Her heart kicked into a dead run, threatened to tear a hole in her chest; her mouth went dry as the bottom of a flour sack. She sat frozen, her eyes fixed tight on the shirt of the big miner in front who’d been raised up out of the rock.
Wasn’t no mistake; wasn’t something she’d imagined. It was right there, plain’s day.
She leapt to her feet and almost tripped over Crawdad. The cat had left his nap spot in front of the door to rub up against her leg, but she hadn’t felt it. She couldn’t feel nothing at all below her waist; it was like she was numb.
Granny’d had that feeling before.
She lurched across the room to the couch, lifted the cushions and tossed them aside; she threw pieces of newspaper into the air. Then she turned to the coffee table. There it was. She picked it up with trembling fingers and staggered back to the kitchen table with it clutched tight in her hand.
It was the same. They were the same. Wrapped around the arm of the miner in the front of that mural was a band with the number 27 on it just like the one she held in her hand.
Granny wanted to scream, but she held the wail inside. Gritting her teeth, she balled her hands into fists and forced herself to stand absolutely still.
