James Curtis sat staring at the
wall, his thoughts tumbling over one another in no particular order. He had
assigned himself guard duty on his dad’s bed in the middle of the night an hour
after Hardrock Dodrill and Boney Butcher called Doc Vance from the Grille,
drove Thirl home, and then carried his bloody body into the house. James rose
to his feet, numb and irritable. He stretched and stumbled to the front room
where he fell into his dad’s favorite chair, facing a magnificent ten-point
buck’s head hanging on the wall. A buck they’d hunted for two years, until
Thirl bagged him the Thanksgiving before last. His dad killed it, and he sketched it.
Charcoal drawings from the time he was old enough to hold a pencil collected in
boxes in his mother’s chifforobe. A framed sketch of the live buck hung on the
wall next to its dead head. He hated hunting; killing anything that moved
repulsed him.
James had ridden to work with his dad like he did
every morning. It was called morning by the men who worked that shift, but to
James it was still night, dark and cold and silent. He could hear his dad’s
muffled voice, along with his mother’s, as they said their good-byes. The sound
of his dad’s boots pacing the kitchen floor while he waited for his lunch
bucket haunted him.
Together, he and his dad walked out
of their soot-coated house. They crossed the front yard, along with dozens of
other men crossing their front yards wearing hard hats with lamps attached to
the front, carrying lunch buckets the size of toolboxes. A mass of men leaving
in their pickup trucks and cars, their mouths already chewing plugs of tobacco
to lubricate their throats against the gritty coal dust.
A
first shift supervisor, his dad had worked for Elk River Coal and Lumber as
long as he could remember. Mining provided a good living for his family, he’d
said, and it would do the same for James. Proud to be a miner’s son, James
Curtis followed as expected. He’d worked the mines from the day he graduated
high school, never giving his parents a notion he wanted to leave the
mountains. He’d been a company man from the day he was born.
As a little boy, his mother had educated him in the
importance of coal and how it kept food on their table and heated every home in
the country during winter. “Why, without coal and the miners that bring it to
the surface,” she’d said, “America is no better than some dying country in
Africa with starving children.” James waved to his mother every morning,
stopping at her flower garden—a giant truck tire laid flat and painted white.
James had positioned it next to the dogwood tree in the front yard, a tree
she’d insisted be planted the day he was born.
But it was his dad that squeezed
his hand every morning without saying a word. A quick grasp just after turning
the key in the ignition, keeping his eyes straight ahead. He’d never talked
about their work or the dangers of it. His grip was a fast second of
assuredness that everything was going to be fine—today. It was their secret,
one they shared man to man.
James leaned his head back against
the old chair and closed his eyes. He could smell his dad’s scent of hair tonic
and lye soap. Drifting between sleep and memory, he saw himself as a child
being lifted onto his dad’s shoulders in the Thanksgiving Barn. His dad’s large
leathery hand covered his entire back. He remembered being made to sit still on
a hard church pew, playing with the flexible watchband peeking out from under
his dad’s sleeve, how the gold had worn off, and how it pulled at the hairs on
his arm. His dad sucked peppermints, and whistled old country tunes when he
drove the car. On his dresser, he kept a pickle jar full of change. Each night
his dad emptied his pockets—nickels, dimes, and pennies into the jar, landing
with tinny pings. They were the sounds James listened for as he drifted off to
sleep.
Yesterday, after they’d arrived at
the mine, James Curtis walked behind his dad through a few wisps of smoke left
hanging in the air—the last puffs of his dad’s cigarette. He turned and mumbled
to his son. “Tell your mama I’ll be home late; I have a League meeting after my
shift.”
His dad was fine then, and now he
wasn’t.
He couldn’t recall how long he’d
been sitting there. James got to his feet and walked three steps to the gun
cabinet. Selecting a twelve-gauge shotgun from the rack and a box of shells
from one of the bottom drawers, he shoved three shells into the magazine of the
gun. Then he jacked a shell into the chamber and engaged the safety.
James Curtis paused, peeled off his
Elk River Coal and Lumber Company cap, and tossed it on the buck’s right
antler. Grasping the shotgun in both hands, he opened the back door and slipped
out, out of his mother’s line of sight.
~~~
Doc Vance stood, checked Thirl’s
pulse one last time, then packed his medical bag. “Keep that wound clean and
dressed. Send James Curtis to the office if you need me. Your lucky husband
should be fine. Shove these pills down his throat for the next few weeks. We’ll
watch for infection. A few more inches and that bullet would’ve severed a main
artery in his leg.”
The old doctor hadn’t stopped
talking since he arrived minutes after Thirl was laid on his bed. “You know,
the League is a legal bargaining agency for Bradley’s employees. That committee
was formed to create the company’s welfare plan for its own workforce. I helped
to put that committee together. That League’s a fine a group of men as God ever
made. The League of Widen Miners is company, sure, but it offers medical and
retirement. Don’t those fool strikers remember the mine was open two and three
days a week during the Depression even when the other mines were shut down?
Don’t they remember that?”
“Lord, Doc, they’ve been trying to
strike here since I was a girl. You’re really worried this time, aren’t you?
How long do you think this one will last?”
“How long’s hard to say. As long as
it takes. As long as the United Mine Workers provide their strike fund. John
Lewis and Bill Blizzard are behind this one again, bigger and better organized
than the last strike. I’m afraid it’ll get more violent before it’s over, as
long as their morale doesn’t crack.”
DeDe set her coffee cup on the table by Thirl’s bed.
“I believe I’ve told you, I’m not from Widen. My family came here from Matewan
to get away from the reputation of that town, the violence—and death. Daddy
died here, in Widen, from black lung back in ‘44. Mama … she passed from black
lung too … from thirty years of washing Daddy’s clothes.” DeDe smoothed the
front of her bloodstained blouse, her stare drifting through the windows and
then back to Thirl. Her voice was strained and soft. “My daddy believed Joseph
Bradley owned the safest mines in the state; that’s why we moved here. But the
mines will kill us all, eventually.”
Every man in her life had been or
was a miner, including her son. They all learned the speech patterns of the
coalface. In response to the slightest tap of a pick or a shovel, the mine
communicated. Sighs, hisses, pops, squeaks, groans, crackles, gurgles—each
sound spoke to them and warned of underground water, a weak wall, or a methane
leak. Her own father once told her if the mine choked and found itself about to
crumble, it shuddered first then screamed like a woman in childbirth.
But to DeDe, a long strike was as
dangerous as a cave-in. “I’ve seen the killing a strike will bring. I’ll
protect my own.” Her face already beginning to sag, the carefully groomed hair
already beginning to gray, the eyes already receding into a calm, dark
indifference most people chose to see as insight. She never wore makeup. DeDe
looked down at her bitten half-moon fingernails, then twisted her thick copper
hair into a knot and anchored it at the private part of her neck with bobby
pins. She picked up her pocketbook.
Everybody
in town knew she kept a gun in her purse, including Doc Vance. She walked back
into the kitchen, gripping it against her chest. Doc Vance followed on her
heels.
“DeDe! Now you listen to me … I won’t
have you or any other woman in this town in harm’s way. You let the men handle
this. The company’s recruited its own force. Thirteen good and loyal company
men, I’ve heard. Sworn in as deputies by the County Sheriff to guard the town.
Stay out of it, DeDe, I mean it.” His stare like two grimy nickels and his
tone—stern, “You tell the rest of the women in town, stay close to home and
keep their young’uns in the house after school. I’ve always been fond of your
family. Why, it was just yesterday I delivered James Curtis in this house.”
“That was over nineteen years ago.
I believe you stood by us when we buried a stillborn son five years later. I’ve
had enough heartache, Doc.”
Doctor Vance nodded, avoiding her
eyes, then gathered his jacket and medical bag. “You know management’s secret
weapon when there’s a strike? It’s the women. Mama goes a few months with only
gut paste gravy and biscuits to fix for supper, the old man’s hangin’ ‘round
the house drinkin’ and yellin’ because the kids’re sick and cryin’ and there’s
dirty clothes everywhere and he’s gone most evenin’s to a union meetin’ or
finishin’ his shift on the picket line, comin’ home tired, cold, and
dirty—stinkin’ of liquor. Drives every women I know crazy. They’ll settle
because their wives’ll make them settle.”
DeDe could only nod in return. She
picked up his hat and led him to the door. She was the granddaughter of a
much-revered Baptist minister who had also worked in West Virginia’s coal mines
at the turn of the century. Surely that should count for something with God.
DeDe smiled deceptively and handed the doctor his hat. “Vengeance is mine,
saith the Lord of hosts.”
“You just remember that,” he said
as the screen door spanked shut behind him.
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