Black Sunshine: A Novel, page 26
What did it mean?
She knew the answer to the question before her mind asked it, of course. Wasn’t no miner wearing an armband with a 27 on it when they went down into Harlan #7 that day in 1980!
Them armbands was just for the twentieth anniversary service. The only time a miner’d be wearing one was today.
The explosion Jamey Boy’d released from the rock wasn’t the one that happened 20 years ago; the explosion in the carving was today!
Her thoughts started to run crazy, jump ever which way. She’d only felt this scared one other time in her life and that time 27 men had died. She’d known then, too. A few seconds before the boom and roar, she’d known.
But maybe she had more than a few seconds now! Maybe there was still…
Time!
The big miner in front was wearing a watch. She squinted at it, could just make out the detail. It said 12:18, the exact time Harlan #7 had blown the first time.
She looked at the clock. Straight up eleven-thirty. Forty-eight minutes.
She could warn them!
How?
Wouldn’t no phone call work. What would she say? That she knew there was about to be an explosion because…because what? Wouldn’t nobody in they right mind believe a crazy old woman talking about carvings and armbands!
What could she…?
Will!
Will could…No, he couldn’t explain it, neither. Wasn’t time and nobody’d believe him any more than they’d believe her. Will’d have to go there. He’d have to go get them miners out his own self!
Then her racing thoughts screeched to a halt.
Go into the mine? Will? Wasn’t no way in the world Will’d go back into #7, askeered as he was of it!
She sucked in a breath that was a ragged sob.
Well, he’d have to, that’s all. Will had been askeered to tell her the truth, too, and he done it. It was either go into that mine or…
But Will and JoJo was up the hill in Jamey’s shed. They wasn’t in no hurry—no telling how long they’d be. She didn’t have time to wait for them to come back down to the house so she could send Will to the mine.
Granny’s heart stopped hammering. It beat slow, now. Everything around her slowed down, too, like the air was thick as pancake batter. It seemed to take a long time to think the thought; it also blew through her mind like a cannonball.
Granny would have to go up to the shed and get Will!
If she didn’t… if she couldn’t, Jamey Boy and all the other miners in #7 would die.
THE GOOD LADIES from the Coal Mining Museum in Benham had compounded Hob Bascomb’s misery by telling him he couldn’t smoke inside the tent they’d set up for the memorial ceremony. So on top of being nervous, he was about to have a nicotine fit. All he could do was fidget, stand on first one foot and then the other, jumpy as spit on a griddle.
Them ladies wasn’t standing around, though. They was hustlin’ to get everything finished up for the ceremony that was supposed to start right at noon.
Hob looked out over what the ladies had put together and he had to say they’d done a right nice job. The best thing they’d done, of course, was borrow the big tent from Wheeler’s Funeral Home in Pineville “just in case” it rained. It had sprinkled off and on since around three o’clock this morning. Hob knew because he’d been up at three. And now it was coming down like a big dog.
The ladies had set a flatbed tobacco trailer, like a raised-up stage at the far end of the tent they’d pitched in the parking lot in front of the mine entrance. They’d put some kinda material—looked like white bedsheets—all around the bottom of the trailer. To hide the wheels, he guessed. And then they’d got red-white-and-blue streamers and draped them around the trailer on top of the sheets like popcorn strings around a Christmas tree.
There was steps—one of them porch things that fit on a trailer house—leading up to the back of the stage. Up on top, all they had was a couple flower arrangements, a black music stand and a stand-up microphone. You got up on that stage all by yourself, folks wouldn’t have nothing to look at but you, like you’s an ant they was trying to set afire with a magnifying glass.
Hob’s stomach rolled. He’d already took enough Pepto-Bismol to turn his eyeballs pink; couldn’t take no more or it’d set up in his belly like Sackcrete and he’d never have another bowel movement as long as he lived.
Out front of the trailer-stage, the ladies had made displays on bulletin boards where they’d arranged pictures of the 27 miners, with their names underneath. Blurry snapshots or school pictures, a lot of them, but you could mostly tell who the men was. They even had some of the tags the miners’d put on the board that morning. The coal company had give those to the families, but some of them got lost. Or got burned up—like Bowman’s and Ricky Dan Sparrow’s tags.
The most impressive thing the ladies done had been installed on the concrete at the mine entrance a week ago, but nobody except the miners had seen it yet. It was a plaque—kind of like a tombstone only made out of metal—that said something like: “Twenty-seven miners lost their lives in Harlan #7 on October 16, 1980. May they rest in peace.”
A crowd had begun to gather in front of the tobacco-trailer stage—maybe 25 people. But it was early yet. The ladies had lined up preachers to open and close the doin’s in prayer, of course. Then they’d got the Harlan County Judge Executive, and the county’s state senator and representative to speak. You could pick them out; they was the only ones here had ties on. They’d also got the outside foreman who’d been on duty that day to talk and Beau Grissom, head of Big Sandy Mine’s rescue team who’d pulled Will and Lloyd out. Them ladies being from Brenham, they probably didn’t know Will was home or they’d have asked him to talk like they done Lloyd.
Yeah, Lloyd.
Hob couldn’t make no sense at all of his run-in with Lloyd that morning. Justine Hinkle told Hob more than a week ago that she’d asked Lloyd to talk at the memorial and he’d turned her down. But this morning, Lloyd’d told Hob he hadn’t brought his lunch to work because he was going to speak at the ceremony.
Soon as Hob seen Justine, he’d asked her about it again, didn’t let on Lloyd had said nothing.
“Lloyd said no,” she’d said. “’Bout bit my head off, too.”
And speaking of biting heads off, Lloyd near decapitated Jamey Sparrow soon as he seen him. Didn’t nobody yell at Jamey. He’d hollered at the boy that he shouldn’t be here, that he’d ought to go home.
What was that about?
More than anything else, though, was how Lloyd had looked. Hob couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly, but something was off, bad off. Lloyd’s little bitty eyes was…was the eyes of a crazy man! Hob didn’t know better, he’d swear Lloyd Jacobs’d done lost his mind.
Hob lifted the sleeve on his starched and pressed dress white shirt to reveal the face of his watch. Here it was less than half an hour before this shooting match was supposed to start and he still hadn’t come up with a speech. If something didn’t come to him when he got up there, what he had to say wouldn’t have to be shortened none to fit on his tombstone.
A squalling sound that set Hob’s teeth on edge blared out from the stage. The suit-and-tie judge executive stood like a rooster in front of the microphone and a too-loud voice boomed into the fresh autumn air.
“Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Is this thing on?”
Hob glanced toward the mine entrance. He’d read somewhere that soldiers felt like he sometimes did. Called it survivor’s guilt. Miners was like soldiers. They was tight because they risked their lives together every day—depended on each other. Hob had lived all these years with the memories of fellow soldiers he should have died with.
There was days he wished there was some way he could make up for that. This here was one of those days.
CHAPTER 34
GRANNY DIDN’T GIVE herself time to think about it. If she’d thought about it, she’d have froze up solid—wouldn’t have been able to move nary a finger.
She turned from the table and ran fast as she could to the back door and out to the porch. The rain was coming down hard now, so heavy she could barely see the back of the garden. Thunder cracked, then rumbled like somebody was rattling a piece of tin. Fat raindrops battered the roof of the trailer, the ground and the trees, making a noise like applause.
Soon as she stepped down off the porch to the top step, two things happened. The rain hit her, and she hit a wall, real as a brick fence. So real she liked to fell back from it and landed on her backside.
Her heart rattled in her chest, raced like a coal train heading down the valley. For the first time in her life it occurred to her she was an old woman and if ever there was a time to have a heart attack, now was it. She fixed her mind on taking just one step. She put her foot out and bit down so hard in concentration a tooth caught a bit of her lip and she tasted blood in her mouth.
She made it down off the first step to the second and was instantly soaked to the skin. The sudden chill of the cold rain raised goose bumps all over her body.
Why didn’t you get a raincoat, you mow-ron?
Water poured down off her head into her eyes so she could hardly see. Then she noticed a funny, mewing sound like the Jewett’s cat made that time it had kittens on Granny’s back porch. Where was that sound—?
Why, it was from her own throat, that’s where! She was making it, whimpering, about to cry. She had to grab hold of the railing alongside the steps to keep herself from jumping right back up on the porch.
She didn’t bother to try to convince herself this was all foolishness, that there was no real danger, nothing to be askeered of. She’d told herself a thousand times it was all in her head. Of course, it was all in her head—where else would it be? Everything was in your head; it was being in your head that made it real.
This was real.
She shook so hard she could barely hold onto the railing, but she put her foot out to take another step. Then pulled it back like she’d stuck it in hot oil.
Now, she was panting. Tears probably ran down her face, too; no way to tell with the rain coming down like somebody was pouring water on her out of a washtub.
She put her foot forward again. Made it down one more step and her heart pounded even faster. She was down far enough now that the wind hit her, blew the rain at her like bits of gravel and wrapped her soaked dress around her like a wet sheet.
This wasn’t getting easier; it was getting harder! The farther she ventured from the top of the porch, the farther out past the circle she stepped, the bigger the terror grew.
She started to cry, sob, but the roar of rain around her ate up the sound. Then she threw her head back so the raindrops smacked her in the face and hollered out in a tear-clotted voice. “Please, God. Help me!”
A heartbeat later, she felt a warm presence beside her. No, it wasn’t no angel, unless angels stunk like a wet dog. It was Bucket. He just stood next to her, right up against her leg. The dog that hated to get wet, used to hide under the bed he was so scared of storms...just stood there.
With a trembling hand, she reached down and took hold of the dog’s collar.
“Jamey Boy,” she gasped. “Bucket, go find Jamey.”
The dog started down the steps; Granny held on and was dragged down the steps along with him. He splashed into the puddle at the bottom and turned toward the trail around the garden. When Granny stepped into the puddle, water came up past her ankle and the mud sucked her shoe off. But Bucket kept going and so did she.
The wind lashed her with raindrops like a cat-o’-nine-tails. It was so open, empty and vacant out past the circle. Like her heart and her life and her soul felt when she come back home alone for the first time after the explosion. She had wandered from room to room like an old dog looking for its master. Then it got real bright in the house, as if all the lightbulbs was car headlights. She went into the kitchen and she could smell fried chicken. And there was Bow! He sat at the table, his napkin tucked into his shirt at the neck, a fork in his fist the way he always held it, like he planned to attack anybody tried to get to the chicken breast before he did.
In the living room—a little bitty thing with a lumpy couch—Will and Ricky Dan had the pieces of Ricky Dan’s shotgun on the floor all around them. Ricky Dan was showing Will how to clean the gun. And they was laughing. Them boys was always laughing.
Why had she so dreaded coming home? Home was where she was belonged. Home was where Bowman and Ricky Dan and Will was at. And as she stood there in the middle of the living room, the pain in her heart faded and was gone. For five seconds, maybe ten, everything was right with the world. She let out a huge sigh of relief.
And then it vanished. Poof. With a little sparkle like a soap bubble, the fantasy was gone and she stood alone in the living room. It was dim and chilled and wasn’t no smell of nothing except wilted flowers. Her Bow wasn’t waiting in the kitchen. Ricky Dan wasn’t there on the living room floor. They never would be again. Not ever. They was dead. Gone. Vanished under Black Mountain.
She’d stood frozen as the realness sunk in; sickening pain punched her in the belly hard as it done when they said they wasn’t looking for survivors no more. They wasn’t even looking for bodies. They wasn’t looking at all. After the mine blew that last time, it was too dangerous, wasn’t right to risk a live man’s life to find a dead man’s body. And there wasn’t no bodies to find, anyway. The rescue team from Hard Scrabble seen that much before they run back out. The fire in the coal seam at the face of Harlan #7 was burning twice as hot as a crematorium.
The raw, ragged pain had sliced her open like she’d only that minute felt the ground commence to shake under her feet. She’d felt absolutely empty; all her insides was gone. Wasn’t nothing at all in her belly, under her bones, except wind blowing through with a whistling sound. And the empty had terrified her.
The empty terrified Granny now. But it wasn’t the empty inside her this time; it was the empty outside. The big, empty world was so huge she couldn’t breathe.
With every bit of will and strength she possessed, she gripped Bucket’s collar and staggered along through the storm beside him, around the edge of the garden and onto the mud-slick trail leading to the shed.
She was certain that if she let go of Bucket’s collar even for an instant, she would die.
JAMEY SET VALVLEEN’S cage down in the break next to the end of the belt line just as the steel teeth of the continuous miner dug into the coal seam at the face. Two shuttle cars waited to haul the coal from the miner to the feeder, where it would be crushed and slowly fed onto the conveyor belt for transport out through the center of the mine’s three shafts. The belt line was like a rubber band stretched on rollers that ran in a continuous loop. As the belt line greaser, it was Jamey’s job to keep those rollers lubricated; the friction of a belt sliding across locked-up rollers could cause a fire. He also shoveled up coal that had fallen off the belt and loaded it back on.
It wasn’t the most high-risk job in the mine, but it was more dangerous than it might appear. Mashed, broken and mangled fingers were common among belt line greasers who didn’t watch what they were doing around the five-pound rollers. Jamey knew better than to get distracted, but he couldn’t help it today. He couldn’t stop thinking about Lloyd. Why’d he act so funny? He didn’t want to hear about the arts Jamey’d made with the piece of jet he’d found in Big Sandy—how come? It was like Lloyd didn’t want to see him at all, like it upset him something fierce that Jamey’d showed up for work.
Jamey put down his grease gun and stepped over to ValVleen’s cage. He didn’t like closing her up in there like she was in jail, but without she was in a cage, they wouldn’t let him bring her into the mine.
“You think Lloyd’s mad at me about some’m?” he asked her, his voice loud to carry over the rumble of the miner and the clatter of the coal. She’d been particularly cheery today, sang to him and JoJo in the car all the way down the hill. “Maybe I’d ought to say sorry even if I don’t know what I done. Ya think?”
She cocked her head to one side and tweeted. But the noise ate her reply. Jamey shrugged and went back to work. The noise in the mine didn’t bother him. Like static on the radio, it filled up his mind so there wasn’t no room for thoughts. And sometimes thinking was tiresome; it was good to let go of it for a while.
His mind was all full up with static when the shuttle driver arrived with a load of coal for the feeder. But Jamey’s headlamp happened to land on the right spot and he seen it. The surprise jolted his mind awake.
Must have been some trick his eyes played on him. Headlamps did that in the dark, made you see things wasn’t really there. Still…
He put his grease gun down again and moved where he could get a better look. And his eyes hadn’t played no trick on him. It was there, just like he thought it was. He made his way around the feeder, turned down the last break, came up behind the shuttle car, and spoke to the driver.
“Can I be so bold as to ask where it was you got that thing?” Jamey pointed to the ribbon tied around the miner’s upper arm.
“You didn’t get one?” the man said. “They’s givin’’ em out all over town yesterday. Folks is wearin’ ’em to the memorial service today. They was a box of ’em sittin’ inside the door of the lamp house this mornin’. You didn’t see it?”
“No sir, I didn’t for a fact. Could I see yourn?”
“Shoot, you can have the thing, Jamey.” The shuttle man reached up and untied it and held it out to him. “Your daddy and granddaddy was two of the men died when she blew 20 years ago. You’d oughta be proud to wear it.”
Then the man put the shuttle in reverse, backed up and turned around, and headed toward the continuous miner for another load.
Jamey sat down with a plop in the dirt and stared at the ribbon. It was black, with the number 27 printed on it in silver letters. And Jamey’d seen that ribbon before. Oh, yes sir, he had surely seen that ribbon before! In the arts he finished last night, the one he made from the piece of jet Lloyd give him. The miner in it wore an armband just like this one.
She knew the answer to the question before her mind asked it, of course. Wasn’t no miner wearing an armband with a 27 on it when they went down into Harlan #7 that day in 1980!
Them armbands was just for the twentieth anniversary service. The only time a miner’d be wearing one was today.
The explosion Jamey Boy’d released from the rock wasn’t the one that happened 20 years ago; the explosion in the carving was today!
Her thoughts started to run crazy, jump ever which way. She’d only felt this scared one other time in her life and that time 27 men had died. She’d known then, too. A few seconds before the boom and roar, she’d known.
But maybe she had more than a few seconds now! Maybe there was still…
Time!
The big miner in front was wearing a watch. She squinted at it, could just make out the detail. It said 12:18, the exact time Harlan #7 had blown the first time.
She looked at the clock. Straight up eleven-thirty. Forty-eight minutes.
She could warn them!
How?
Wouldn’t no phone call work. What would she say? That she knew there was about to be an explosion because…because what? Wouldn’t nobody in they right mind believe a crazy old woman talking about carvings and armbands!
What could she…?
Will!
Will could…No, he couldn’t explain it, neither. Wasn’t time and nobody’d believe him any more than they’d believe her. Will’d have to go there. He’d have to go get them miners out his own self!
Then her racing thoughts screeched to a halt.
Go into the mine? Will? Wasn’t no way in the world Will’d go back into #7, askeered as he was of it!
She sucked in a breath that was a ragged sob.
Well, he’d have to, that’s all. Will had been askeered to tell her the truth, too, and he done it. It was either go into that mine or…
But Will and JoJo was up the hill in Jamey’s shed. They wasn’t in no hurry—no telling how long they’d be. She didn’t have time to wait for them to come back down to the house so she could send Will to the mine.
Granny’s heart stopped hammering. It beat slow, now. Everything around her slowed down, too, like the air was thick as pancake batter. It seemed to take a long time to think the thought; it also blew through her mind like a cannonball.
Granny would have to go up to the shed and get Will!
If she didn’t… if she couldn’t, Jamey Boy and all the other miners in #7 would die.
THE GOOD LADIES from the Coal Mining Museum in Benham had compounded Hob Bascomb’s misery by telling him he couldn’t smoke inside the tent they’d set up for the memorial ceremony. So on top of being nervous, he was about to have a nicotine fit. All he could do was fidget, stand on first one foot and then the other, jumpy as spit on a griddle.
Them ladies wasn’t standing around, though. They was hustlin’ to get everything finished up for the ceremony that was supposed to start right at noon.
Hob looked out over what the ladies had put together and he had to say they’d done a right nice job. The best thing they’d done, of course, was borrow the big tent from Wheeler’s Funeral Home in Pineville “just in case” it rained. It had sprinkled off and on since around three o’clock this morning. Hob knew because he’d been up at three. And now it was coming down like a big dog.
The ladies had set a flatbed tobacco trailer, like a raised-up stage at the far end of the tent they’d pitched in the parking lot in front of the mine entrance. They’d put some kinda material—looked like white bedsheets—all around the bottom of the trailer. To hide the wheels, he guessed. And then they’d got red-white-and-blue streamers and draped them around the trailer on top of the sheets like popcorn strings around a Christmas tree.
There was steps—one of them porch things that fit on a trailer house—leading up to the back of the stage. Up on top, all they had was a couple flower arrangements, a black music stand and a stand-up microphone. You got up on that stage all by yourself, folks wouldn’t have nothing to look at but you, like you’s an ant they was trying to set afire with a magnifying glass.
Hob’s stomach rolled. He’d already took enough Pepto-Bismol to turn his eyeballs pink; couldn’t take no more or it’d set up in his belly like Sackcrete and he’d never have another bowel movement as long as he lived.
Out front of the trailer-stage, the ladies had made displays on bulletin boards where they’d arranged pictures of the 27 miners, with their names underneath. Blurry snapshots or school pictures, a lot of them, but you could mostly tell who the men was. They even had some of the tags the miners’d put on the board that morning. The coal company had give those to the families, but some of them got lost. Or got burned up—like Bowman’s and Ricky Dan Sparrow’s tags.
The most impressive thing the ladies done had been installed on the concrete at the mine entrance a week ago, but nobody except the miners had seen it yet. It was a plaque—kind of like a tombstone only made out of metal—that said something like: “Twenty-seven miners lost their lives in Harlan #7 on October 16, 1980. May they rest in peace.”
A crowd had begun to gather in front of the tobacco-trailer stage—maybe 25 people. But it was early yet. The ladies had lined up preachers to open and close the doin’s in prayer, of course. Then they’d got the Harlan County Judge Executive, and the county’s state senator and representative to speak. You could pick them out; they was the only ones here had ties on. They’d also got the outside foreman who’d been on duty that day to talk and Beau Grissom, head of Big Sandy Mine’s rescue team who’d pulled Will and Lloyd out. Them ladies being from Brenham, they probably didn’t know Will was home or they’d have asked him to talk like they done Lloyd.
Yeah, Lloyd.
Hob couldn’t make no sense at all of his run-in with Lloyd that morning. Justine Hinkle told Hob more than a week ago that she’d asked Lloyd to talk at the memorial and he’d turned her down. But this morning, Lloyd’d told Hob he hadn’t brought his lunch to work because he was going to speak at the ceremony.
Soon as Hob seen Justine, he’d asked her about it again, didn’t let on Lloyd had said nothing.
“Lloyd said no,” she’d said. “’Bout bit my head off, too.”
And speaking of biting heads off, Lloyd near decapitated Jamey Sparrow soon as he seen him. Didn’t nobody yell at Jamey. He’d hollered at the boy that he shouldn’t be here, that he’d ought to go home.
What was that about?
More than anything else, though, was how Lloyd had looked. Hob couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly, but something was off, bad off. Lloyd’s little bitty eyes was…was the eyes of a crazy man! Hob didn’t know better, he’d swear Lloyd Jacobs’d done lost his mind.
Hob lifted the sleeve on his starched and pressed dress white shirt to reveal the face of his watch. Here it was less than half an hour before this shooting match was supposed to start and he still hadn’t come up with a speech. If something didn’t come to him when he got up there, what he had to say wouldn’t have to be shortened none to fit on his tombstone.
A squalling sound that set Hob’s teeth on edge blared out from the stage. The suit-and-tie judge executive stood like a rooster in front of the microphone and a too-loud voice boomed into the fresh autumn air.
“Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Is this thing on?”
Hob glanced toward the mine entrance. He’d read somewhere that soldiers felt like he sometimes did. Called it survivor’s guilt. Miners was like soldiers. They was tight because they risked their lives together every day—depended on each other. Hob had lived all these years with the memories of fellow soldiers he should have died with.
There was days he wished there was some way he could make up for that. This here was one of those days.
CHAPTER 34
GRANNY DIDN’T GIVE herself time to think about it. If she’d thought about it, she’d have froze up solid—wouldn’t have been able to move nary a finger.
She turned from the table and ran fast as she could to the back door and out to the porch. The rain was coming down hard now, so heavy she could barely see the back of the garden. Thunder cracked, then rumbled like somebody was rattling a piece of tin. Fat raindrops battered the roof of the trailer, the ground and the trees, making a noise like applause.
Soon as she stepped down off the porch to the top step, two things happened. The rain hit her, and she hit a wall, real as a brick fence. So real she liked to fell back from it and landed on her backside.
Her heart rattled in her chest, raced like a coal train heading down the valley. For the first time in her life it occurred to her she was an old woman and if ever there was a time to have a heart attack, now was it. She fixed her mind on taking just one step. She put her foot out and bit down so hard in concentration a tooth caught a bit of her lip and she tasted blood in her mouth.
She made it down off the first step to the second and was instantly soaked to the skin. The sudden chill of the cold rain raised goose bumps all over her body.
Why didn’t you get a raincoat, you mow-ron?
Water poured down off her head into her eyes so she could hardly see. Then she noticed a funny, mewing sound like the Jewett’s cat made that time it had kittens on Granny’s back porch. Where was that sound—?
Why, it was from her own throat, that’s where! She was making it, whimpering, about to cry. She had to grab hold of the railing alongside the steps to keep herself from jumping right back up on the porch.
She didn’t bother to try to convince herself this was all foolishness, that there was no real danger, nothing to be askeered of. She’d told herself a thousand times it was all in her head. Of course, it was all in her head—where else would it be? Everything was in your head; it was being in your head that made it real.
This was real.
She shook so hard she could barely hold onto the railing, but she put her foot out to take another step. Then pulled it back like she’d stuck it in hot oil.
Now, she was panting. Tears probably ran down her face, too; no way to tell with the rain coming down like somebody was pouring water on her out of a washtub.
She put her foot forward again. Made it down one more step and her heart pounded even faster. She was down far enough now that the wind hit her, blew the rain at her like bits of gravel and wrapped her soaked dress around her like a wet sheet.
This wasn’t getting easier; it was getting harder! The farther she ventured from the top of the porch, the farther out past the circle she stepped, the bigger the terror grew.
She started to cry, sob, but the roar of rain around her ate up the sound. Then she threw her head back so the raindrops smacked her in the face and hollered out in a tear-clotted voice. “Please, God. Help me!”
A heartbeat later, she felt a warm presence beside her. No, it wasn’t no angel, unless angels stunk like a wet dog. It was Bucket. He just stood next to her, right up against her leg. The dog that hated to get wet, used to hide under the bed he was so scared of storms...just stood there.
With a trembling hand, she reached down and took hold of the dog’s collar.
“Jamey Boy,” she gasped. “Bucket, go find Jamey.”
The dog started down the steps; Granny held on and was dragged down the steps along with him. He splashed into the puddle at the bottom and turned toward the trail around the garden. When Granny stepped into the puddle, water came up past her ankle and the mud sucked her shoe off. But Bucket kept going and so did she.
The wind lashed her with raindrops like a cat-o’-nine-tails. It was so open, empty and vacant out past the circle. Like her heart and her life and her soul felt when she come back home alone for the first time after the explosion. She had wandered from room to room like an old dog looking for its master. Then it got real bright in the house, as if all the lightbulbs was car headlights. She went into the kitchen and she could smell fried chicken. And there was Bow! He sat at the table, his napkin tucked into his shirt at the neck, a fork in his fist the way he always held it, like he planned to attack anybody tried to get to the chicken breast before he did.
In the living room—a little bitty thing with a lumpy couch—Will and Ricky Dan had the pieces of Ricky Dan’s shotgun on the floor all around them. Ricky Dan was showing Will how to clean the gun. And they was laughing. Them boys was always laughing.
Why had she so dreaded coming home? Home was where she was belonged. Home was where Bowman and Ricky Dan and Will was at. And as she stood there in the middle of the living room, the pain in her heart faded and was gone. For five seconds, maybe ten, everything was right with the world. She let out a huge sigh of relief.
And then it vanished. Poof. With a little sparkle like a soap bubble, the fantasy was gone and she stood alone in the living room. It was dim and chilled and wasn’t no smell of nothing except wilted flowers. Her Bow wasn’t waiting in the kitchen. Ricky Dan wasn’t there on the living room floor. They never would be again. Not ever. They was dead. Gone. Vanished under Black Mountain.
She’d stood frozen as the realness sunk in; sickening pain punched her in the belly hard as it done when they said they wasn’t looking for survivors no more. They wasn’t even looking for bodies. They wasn’t looking at all. After the mine blew that last time, it was too dangerous, wasn’t right to risk a live man’s life to find a dead man’s body. And there wasn’t no bodies to find, anyway. The rescue team from Hard Scrabble seen that much before they run back out. The fire in the coal seam at the face of Harlan #7 was burning twice as hot as a crematorium.
The raw, ragged pain had sliced her open like she’d only that minute felt the ground commence to shake under her feet. She’d felt absolutely empty; all her insides was gone. Wasn’t nothing at all in her belly, under her bones, except wind blowing through with a whistling sound. And the empty had terrified her.
The empty terrified Granny now. But it wasn’t the empty inside her this time; it was the empty outside. The big, empty world was so huge she couldn’t breathe.
With every bit of will and strength she possessed, she gripped Bucket’s collar and staggered along through the storm beside him, around the edge of the garden and onto the mud-slick trail leading to the shed.
She was certain that if she let go of Bucket’s collar even for an instant, she would die.
JAMEY SET VALVLEEN’S cage down in the break next to the end of the belt line just as the steel teeth of the continuous miner dug into the coal seam at the face. Two shuttle cars waited to haul the coal from the miner to the feeder, where it would be crushed and slowly fed onto the conveyor belt for transport out through the center of the mine’s three shafts. The belt line was like a rubber band stretched on rollers that ran in a continuous loop. As the belt line greaser, it was Jamey’s job to keep those rollers lubricated; the friction of a belt sliding across locked-up rollers could cause a fire. He also shoveled up coal that had fallen off the belt and loaded it back on.
It wasn’t the most high-risk job in the mine, but it was more dangerous than it might appear. Mashed, broken and mangled fingers were common among belt line greasers who didn’t watch what they were doing around the five-pound rollers. Jamey knew better than to get distracted, but he couldn’t help it today. He couldn’t stop thinking about Lloyd. Why’d he act so funny? He didn’t want to hear about the arts Jamey’d made with the piece of jet he’d found in Big Sandy—how come? It was like Lloyd didn’t want to see him at all, like it upset him something fierce that Jamey’d showed up for work.
Jamey put down his grease gun and stepped over to ValVleen’s cage. He didn’t like closing her up in there like she was in jail, but without she was in a cage, they wouldn’t let him bring her into the mine.
“You think Lloyd’s mad at me about some’m?” he asked her, his voice loud to carry over the rumble of the miner and the clatter of the coal. She’d been particularly cheery today, sang to him and JoJo in the car all the way down the hill. “Maybe I’d ought to say sorry even if I don’t know what I done. Ya think?”
She cocked her head to one side and tweeted. But the noise ate her reply. Jamey shrugged and went back to work. The noise in the mine didn’t bother him. Like static on the radio, it filled up his mind so there wasn’t no room for thoughts. And sometimes thinking was tiresome; it was good to let go of it for a while.
His mind was all full up with static when the shuttle driver arrived with a load of coal for the feeder. But Jamey’s headlamp happened to land on the right spot and he seen it. The surprise jolted his mind awake.
Must have been some trick his eyes played on him. Headlamps did that in the dark, made you see things wasn’t really there. Still…
He put his grease gun down again and moved where he could get a better look. And his eyes hadn’t played no trick on him. It was there, just like he thought it was. He made his way around the feeder, turned down the last break, came up behind the shuttle car, and spoke to the driver.
“Can I be so bold as to ask where it was you got that thing?” Jamey pointed to the ribbon tied around the miner’s upper arm.
“You didn’t get one?” the man said. “They’s givin’’ em out all over town yesterday. Folks is wearin’ ’em to the memorial service today. They was a box of ’em sittin’ inside the door of the lamp house this mornin’. You didn’t see it?”
“No sir, I didn’t for a fact. Could I see yourn?”
“Shoot, you can have the thing, Jamey.” The shuttle man reached up and untied it and held it out to him. “Your daddy and granddaddy was two of the men died when she blew 20 years ago. You’d oughta be proud to wear it.”
Then the man put the shuttle in reverse, backed up and turned around, and headed toward the continuous miner for another load.
Jamey sat down with a plop in the dirt and stared at the ribbon. It was black, with the number 27 printed on it in silver letters. And Jamey’d seen that ribbon before. Oh, yes sir, he had surely seen that ribbon before! In the arts he finished last night, the one he made from the piece of jet Lloyd give him. The miner in it wore an armband just like this one.
