Coal Dust On My Feet ~ part 5

~~~January 1953~~~

Winter came and stayed. Blizzard followed blizzard, each day gray with a fierce wind from the North. The hollows were deserted of man and beast, empty as any wasteland; the creeks were a perilous pile of ice. Coal trains couldn’t get through, water pipes cracked; all of West Virginia was locked in, the air as brittle as kindling.

Snow fell at daybreak. Later a charcoal film would cover the day-old snow. January’s drifts banked the windowpanes before it let up, the streets leveled, and the mountaintop above Widen faded like smoke. When the storm petered out at noon, the town lay steeped in fog—the ground-hugging kind that usually follows snow in valleys where coal camps nestle between the mountains. Fog by itself did not deter the citizens from carrying on with their lives, but fog with snow was something else. A person stayed inside, worn down by cold trips to the outhouse and restless sleep. Beneath this rag-and-bone sky, the only shadow cast was the violence of the strike. The snow smothered every inch of ground where the land bordered Buffalo Creek.

James Curtis followed a deer path over the mountain. Rabbits scattered into thickets of rhododendron. Bobcat tracks pocked the snow. He threaded his way over and through the mountain trails with less difficulty than a sliver of soap through his fingers. Her love pulled him like a solar eclipse—breathtakingly beautiful, spellbinding, and able to make him blind. Blessed with a young man’s body, the coal dust had yet to bite at his insides. Passion and pleasure waited for him at the end of his path in a feather bed, in a secret place, a place they could be alone. A place where they’d made a pact to meet one night a week. Savina would tell Odie she was staying with Hephzibah, and Odie would never check on her for that one night, especially in Colored Holler.

The tiny cabin was warm and dark, and smelled of wood and pine. Once occupied by escaped slaves, it lay hidden under thistle brush, pine boughs, and rhododendron for the past hundred years. Jabo told stories of how it had been a small farm hidden in the hills of the federal state, long before Widen and its coal was an idea in the mind of a young man named Joseph Bradley.

Succumbing to his wife’s nag, Jabo allowed the two young lovers to use it. The Kellys loved Savina. A white girl who had claimed them as her best friends. Nobody but Savina ventured into Colored Holler. Mama Ola, Jabo’s mother, had tended Savina’s sick bed months ago, bringing Hephzibah with her. The women became friends. An unusual relationship in Widen, which Odie Ingram tolerated and for which James Curtis was forever grateful. A relationship only a few families in Colored Holler knew about.

Savina had scrubbed the cabin until the skin on her hands bled raw. Highpockets and Percy, Jabo’s sons, assisted James in making repairs to the cabin for the better part of three weeks, turning it from a shack into a one-room hideaway complete with a working fireplace, feather bed, table, oil lamp and a chair.

Careful not to be followed, James wended his way up a steep and snowy hill, eyeing the thicket of pines that held the cabin in its midst. He stood quietly for a moment, breathing deeply, his breath pluming in the frigid air. He picked up his heavy snow-covered boots, one after the other, stepping over and crunching into two feet of snow that blanketed the area. Smoke curled out of the chimney; she was already there. Savina’s footprints, followed by her dog’s, left a trail for him to follow. Rascal barked when James Curtis opened the door.

“Hush, boy … it’s me … shut up, boy.” The old beagle panted and whined; his tongue, as pink as raw bacon, hung out of his mouth.

            James Curtis stomped the slush from his boots and walked over the threshold, tall and strong, like an oak tree covered with snow. Breathless, his nose dripped and ice crusted his hair. His cheeks were as red from the cold as maple leaves in autumn. James felt his chest and stomach constrict in a slow concussion of affection at the sight of her. She had told him he was always rushing her, pushing her into bed. His plans to keep the conversation light and move a little slower faded with each glance at her face.

He smiled, took off his coat and boots, laying them near the fire that warmed the room and cast a throbbing red glare on the bed. But her words fell soft on his heart like winter snowflakes.

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said. “There’s fresh bread and butter I bought at the store this mornin’. And some candy bars … and I threw a couple Cokes out back in the drift.”

            His love for her kicked him hard in the chest. All he could utter was a squeak.

Savina stood by the fire, wearing the thin gold band she’d pulled out of its hiding place. A wedding ring he’d bought her from the Sears and Roebuck catalog. She wore it only in the cabin. Her faded dress hung below her knees and the pink of her elbow showed through the hole in her sweater. But James Curtis imagined she could wear a feed sack and be beautiful. Except most of her dresses weren’t much better than the one she had on. His mother had offered to take her shopping in Summersville on more than one occasion, but Savina had always refused. It wasn’t her apparel he cared about anyway. After they were married he’d make sure she had better dresses than the threadbare garments she owned.

Her face was flushed from the fire. Tears started in her eyes, but she blinked once and they were gone. Still breathless, James cupped her chin and pulled her hair back. He lifted it from her back to the top of her head and kissed her bare neck. Her face was so pretty. An angel face with a perfect nose and round cheeks, big wide blue eyes like her father’s, and full lips that melted him with her kiss. Her hair was pretty, too, a light coppery brown, a shade lighter than his own, shining near the fire like a new penny.

Her head barely came to his armpit. The first time he laid her naked on a blanket in the woods, Savina’s adolescent body splayed out tiny and shapeless on the ground. He had made love to her at sixteen. Her body was like a child’s: no hips, bony legs, and breasts the size of fried eggs. But her breasts and hips had rounded and become ample in the two years they had been meeting secretly at the cabin. He looked forward to her eighteenth birthday. In five months he would remind Odie of his intent to marry his daughter, no matter how the strike turned out.

Savina slipped her shoes and socks off and sat on the floor. She propped her feet on a dry log, pulling her knees up to her chin. Her dress rode up, exposing her white panties. They glowed in the dim orange light of the fire. James sat down beside her crossing his legs, trying not to touch her. Suddenly, her hands were on the buttons of her dress.

Next to the heat of their blazing fire, the two wordless lovers stepped out of pools of clothes left on a makeshift wood floor, springing for the warmth of the feather bed and mounds of quilts.

James’ hands skimmed over her skin. Her nails dug into his back and urged him closer. He found he could not think at all. His body, long and lean, moved over her tiny frame. This was not their first time, but his need for her was as continual as the snow falling outside the cabin’s window. His touch as light as the promises he whispered. She followed his lead through the moment when he was certain he would not stop to do what was right, and by the time their limbs were tangled together, James could not recall even one fornication scripture.

He kissed her until she was shaking for him to settle. When he did, when his mouth came over hers, she arched into him and closed her eyes. James moved as if nothing existed but the darkness of the cabin. Then, just as he could not hold on any longer, he was suddenly forcing her to look at him. “Nothing will ever keep me from you,” he said.

She smiled and he filled her.

Their bodies lay woven together, rocking to the rhythm of their own love song and fiddle tune. Savina had lost every inhibition her world had bestowed upon her. Their world existed only in secret. She fell asleep heavily in his arms, curled up against him. He tried to memorize the way she held her mouth, the way her dimple twitched when she slept, and the crooked part in her hair. Just like his mother’s. He smelled her on his skin.

The moon rose full from behind the ridge, its light casting bright shadows of trees on the snow. He held her petite hand up to the pink sliver of moonlight that fell diagonally across the quilt, illuminating the tiny gold band. He smiled again. Someday, he could call her wife and she could wear the ring in public. He held it against his lips, forgetting everything but Savina and the path to Colored Holler.

~~~

            In the early morning, the clouds broke open to clear sky and bright sun. The snow began to melt as it dropped in clumps from the bent limbs of trees; the sound of water ran in the creeks again. They lay under the warmth of quilts for some time, spooning and drowsy.

Savina inched back the covers, slid out of bed, careful to walk around the few floorboards that moaned in the morning's cold. She laid a log on the empty grate. Pulling a quilt off the bed she curled up next to the hearth and poked at the red coals, hoping the sparks would ignite the log.

            His voice was so quiet, it tipped over Savina’s shoulder.

            “Stop thinking, it gets your mind all tied into knots.”

            She jumped. “You scared me. And I ain’t thinkin’.”

            “All liars will burn in the lake of fire … ain’t that what Pastor Jessie says?”

            “In that case, we’re gonna fry.”

            He tried to swallow around the knot that had lodged in his throat. The truth sat in his stomach like something indigestible—a stone, a nickel. “In a couple months, this will all be over, maybe sooner. We’ll be married and on our way to Ohio. I’m sure I can get a job with one of the rubber companies in Akron. We’ll come back to visit, you and me and all our young’uns … it’ll work out, wait and see.”

A flicker of doubt crossed her face. Savina couldn’t speak.

James crawled out of bed and stoked the fire hot so Savina could dress and not freeze. She was always cold. She hated winter. After pulling her sweater over her dress, Savina stepped into a pair of leggings made of thick wool and lined with flannel. She sat back down on the bed and smoothed her dress over the Confederate gray fabric.

            “What are you laughing at?” she asked.

            “Where’d you get them things?”

            “They were Mommy’s. Stop laughin’. They’re warm.”

            “Sorry.”

            “No, you’re not.”

            He squatted down in front of her at the edge of the bed, his limbs hinged like grasshopper legs. “They just remind me of how old-fashioned you are.”

            “I thought you liked that about me.”

            “I do. I love that about you.” He took her hands and kissed them, then sang two lines of her favorite hymn, “I’ll fly away …”

She stood and pulled his head into her breast. “It’s better when your daddy sings it.”

“Lady, you ain’t marrying me for my singing.” He kissed her one last time. “I’m late and I have to go.” He stood, pulled his jacket on and watched her take off the gold band. She hid it again, under the stone beside the hearth. It would lie there until next week.

“There’s going to be a meeting at the Grille this morning and Daddy wants me to go with him. Wants to make sure I’m not being swayed by the strikers.”

            “When’s it gonna end?” Savina tucked her scarf inside her coat and pulled another over her head as James held the cabin door open for her.

            “Not soon enough. FBI says the union is violating the civil rights of miners. They say it’s a federal offense to hinder anybody from going to work. I heard they been telling the strikers to get themselves a lawyer.”

            Savina pulled on her gloves. “Daddy said some of the men are askin’ for their jobs back. But I say the strike ain’t gonna end as long as the UMW gives the strikers free groceries. Only about fifty men left at the top of the hill.”

            “The worst fifty,” James said.      

            “Daddy’s just blind. He’ll come around, soon as we’re married. He won’t want hard feelin’s between the families. ‘Specially with him and your daddy bein’ old friends.” She giggled. “James Curtis, what are you doin’?”

            “Making a snow angel. That’s what you are, Savina Ingram soon-to-be Nettles. A snow angel.” He had fallen back into the drift by cabin’s door, his legs and arms moving like a cartoon character in the snow.

            It didn’t occur to her not to get her dress wet. A second later she joined him in the snow, flapping her arms and legs up and down … creating her own angel, while Rascal, revived by the cold, barked and jumped through the drift, enjoying the romp.

            Laughing, James pulled her up.

            He looked down at the snow where their bodies had laid side-by-side, perfect angel depressions in the earth. Savina stepped over them with the utmost care, and seeing how careful she was, he stepped over them, too, and then hugged her while their clothes were frozen, covered with ice crystals up and down their bodies.

~~~April 1953~~~

            The color of old bones, the sky appeared cold and lifeless. Some of the trees hadn’t bloomed yet. The bare, gray maples and elms behind Widen were topped with tight red buds. From a distance they stained the hillsides a ravenous dark pink.

            Thirl had recovered slowly over the winter, but his limp dictated his need for a cane. He’d gone back to work after Christmas as the picket line dwindled and the terror eased up, spreading itself into the surrounding countryside. When Odie’s barn burned down the first week in April, Savina lit out the next morning to tell James.

            “We lost two horses and our cow. The tractor was blown up. Daddy’s been excused from the picket line for the week. I have to get home before he knows I’m gone. Lord, he’s taken to carryin’ his gun ever’where. Even to the outhouse. He’s guardin’ the farm, like some ole’ chicken sittin’ on her nest of eggs. It’s doubtful he’ll spend much time joinin’ the strikers on the line. He’s sure some poacher’s gonna kill the rest of his horses and burn down the house. If I’m out of his sight for long, he comes lookin’ for me.”

James Curtis ran his hand through his auburn hair, tarnished from the mine’s dust of working a double shift. He kissed her softly. Her mouth tasted of milk and berries. “I can’t stand this any more. Why can’t we be together, like we planned?”

            “Won’t be for a while … not ‘til this damn strike’s over.” Savina said. “He knows when I leave for Colored Holler and he knows what time I’m supposed to be home.”

            DeDe overheard Savina’s last statement from inside the house. She opened the screen door to serve her a glass of lemonade. All hugged up on the porch swing, Savina and James sat up straight as DeDe sat the glass on the railing and smiled.

“Thank ya, Missus Nettles,” Savina said. She eyed the glass but pulled her heels up to rest on the swing instead, wrapping her arms over her knees and smoothing her skirt to her ankles.

            “Why are you going to Colored Holler, Savina? If you don’t mind me asking.” DeDe noticed the sadness stuck in the corners of Savina’s eyes, like little bits of sleep.

            Savina and James looked hard at each other, but she found her answer and quickly blurted it out. “You know old Mama Ola and her daughter-in-law, Hephzibah … they’re my best friends.” She took a sip of her lemonade and stepped over her words with caution. “Hephzibah cleans the Bradley’s house over in Dundon and washes Mister Bradley’s laundry. Mama Ola’s son, Jabo, he fixes things ‘round the house for Mister Bradley’s wife. Jabo retired from the mine last year, with thirty years of service.”

            “How does she get over to his house? I know Jabo don’t drive.”

            Savina scooped a mosquito off her arm and rubbed it between her palms. She hesitated, avoiding DeDe’s eyes. “Ever notice how mosquitoes are like little butterflies, so dainty and easily broken?” She took a deep breath. “Mister Bradley’s man picks her up. And sometimes I ride along to help her. Every other day or so. Jus’ to make a few dollars and help Daddy make ends meet.”

            DeDe nodded then walked back into the house. She wouldn’t ask how she got to be friends with Hephzibah or Mama Ola. Or why. Most folks in Widen stayed clear of Colored Holler.

Coal Dust On My Feet ~ part 4

“Deanna? Where are you, honey?” Thirl twisted his head, his eyesight blurry in the dim light of his bedroom. He had a dream of himself in a coffin with pennies on his eyes. The undertaker had placed the wooden box on sawhorses in their front room. He stretched his arm down to his leg—still there—remembering what happened. He felt like he’d been sawed in half. Thirl had prepared himself for a mine disaster all his life. He wasn’t prepared for a bullet.

From his bed, he focused on the burning coal in the stove. Like the red eyes of a black dragon squatting in the middle of the front room with its tail sticking in the chimney, it blew its hot breath into the house. Sitting defiantly on its asbestos-sheathed-in-tin mat, the cast iron dragon waited for an opportunity to strike. Thirl closed his eyes again. They felt hot. His mouth was hot. He felt sick. He sensed something staring at him and turned his head slowly. On the bed beside him laid his wife’s sock monkey. It had always made him laugh. He tried to smile, but the pain wouldn’t allow it.

“Deanna, you in the kitchen?”

~~~

DeDe had kept vigil for three days, more in than out of her tiny bedroom. Preparing the oven for corn bread, she’d just fried a handful of cornmeal in her iron skillet before the batter could be poured. James Curtis would be home soon to check on his daddy. No one had eaten a bite the past three days. She had pulled herself away from Thirl’s bedside to cook something besides the pinto beans that simmered on the stove, a food offering from her neighbor, Pearle.

Hearing her husband stir, she crept in and turned on the light. One naked bulb overhead shot off a feverish discolored glow that failed to find the corners of the room. Daylight had faded and the room darkened into roundness, like standing in the bottom of a well ... or a mine.

            Thirl’s gritty face, lined with a telltale track on each cheek, gave only a hint of his agony. “You’re awake.” DeDe put on a smile she pulled from her sleeve and sat down on the bed’s edge, wiping his brow with a cool cloth. “Here, take this pill. Doc Vance said it’d help. You’ve been shot, but I suppose you know that.”

            Thirl fought an impulse to gag. Choking, he attempted to swallow the large pill.

            “Sorry, darlin’, but Doc said …”

            “Don’t care what Doc said,” he gagged again. “I can’t swallow pills … never could. You know that. And turn that damn light bulb off.”

            “Don’t get pissy with me,” she whispered. “I don’t want to be a widow just yet, so if you don’t mind you’re gonna take the pill whenever I give it to ya.”

DeDe stood and turned off the light. The glow from the front room seeped into Thirl’s bedroom as she lit a kerosene lamp and sat it by his bed on a small table. Its light barely touched Thirl’s head. But she sensed he preferred it.

            Thirl sipped at the water glass she held at his lips, then asked, “How bad is it?”

            “You’ll live. But you’re gonna limp a while.”

            “I mean the strike.”

            “Strikers cut off the town at the top of the hill. James Curtis says he’s not sure yet if there’s enough men to keep the mine open, and how many of them live out of town.”

            “Tell James Curtis to stay away from the line, it’s dangerous.”

            “Shhh. You rest.” She wiped his head again, watching his strength fade. “James is a man now. He knows how to take care of himself. You taught him well.”

            “No, honey, if he’s got any good in him, it’s from you.”

            DeDe wrung out the cloth in a chipped spatterware bowl. “Odie threw him off his farm.”

            “So Odie’s strikin’… I figured as much.”

            “It was Odie that saved your life. Drove your car to the Grille away from the danger. Hardrock and Boney were closing the place up. They brought you home. You’d lost a lot of blood.”

            “Odie was my best friend, once.”

            “I know.”

            “I should’ve taken you and James Curtis to Oregon. We could’ve bought some land with my cousin after the war. I’ve wasted my life, DeDe.”  His eyes flashed with determination not to cry.

“We don’t waste life. It wastes us, darlin’.”

~~~October 1952~~~

            Finding nearly five hundred of its workmen still available, The Elk River Coal and Lumber Company, which remained completely shut down during the first week of the strike, resumed limited operations. But resumption brought Ed Heckelbech, UMW organizer, to the picket line and the violence began again. Jonas Zirka and his pickets commanded the only road into Widen and continued to cut off non-strikers who lived outside the town. All traffic in and out ceased.

            As a warning to the few company men attempting to cross the picket line, the strikers yanked out the drivers and dynamited their empty cars. After that, any man attempting to cross the picket line found themself rolling down Widen hill inside their vehicle. A dozen strikers stood guard to pick up any company man's car, shake it, and give it good toss down the mountain.

            Odie spent his share of time on the picket line. Most nights were quiet. Only twice had he thrown rocks and bricks at cars. He’d helped to roll Delmar Tuller’s pickup down the hill but the scab had managed to limp away. The company's fruitless efforts to call the law proved the state troopers sided with the strikers. Each time they were notified of an incident they arrived at the top of Widen hill, tipped their hats to the picket line with a smile, and headed back to Charleston--reporting no disturbance. If not for the company armed guards, union sympathizers total takeover of the coal camp would've come by no surprise.

But the strikers’ biggest victory was halting the train and forcing its passengers to unload. Odie wasn’t near the car where he’d heard Zirka beat up a man and forced him at gunpoint to get off the train. Nevertheless, Odie stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the picketers who had dynamited the railroad trestles at Sand Fork and Robinson. He’d been part of the crew uprooting telephone posts, cutting a quarter mile of line into short pieces, and successfully isolating the town.  Widen families went hungry for the first time in over a decade as Odie and the rest of the strikers placed a firm chokehold on the coal camp.

~~~

Stepping on generations of leaves, Odie perched himself on a log with a straight shot into the switch house. Guards had been posted to prevent the entry of possible saboteurs, but it was clearly a war now. A war with no help from the law for Bradley’s company. The Attorney General and Governor had been voted into office with union votes, not company votes.

Determined to shut the mines down, the strikers hid in strategic positions. Cutting the electric was Odie’s idea. From the surrounding hilltops, rifle bullets went whining into switch houses that controlled the electric circuits into the mines. Contemplating his aim, Odie twitched as Josephine’s words shot into his mind like a silver bullet meant for his heart. She loves the boy, Odie. I weren’t but her age when I married you.

            He’d worked his wife into an early grave. It was guilt that caused him to spoil his girl and let her go off with James whenever she wanted. But he needed her at home. The place was falling apart without her. Snatching Savina away from James Curtis wasn’t going to be easy.

Savina had missed plenty of school the past year. There’d be no going back to school for her, not until the strike was over at least. Maybe not even then. She had new responsibilities now, bigger ones than high school and dances and shopping trips to Charleston.

Odie fired his last shot, taking out the electric in the mine.

Since coal could not be hauled out, the mine would close once again. Odie reached into his pocket for his tobacco pouch. He stuffed a plug into his lower lip and hid in a grove of rhododendron until darkness covered him like the walls of the mine.

~~~

“You’re from that little shithole town, Widen, right?” The man bagging groceries eyed the two men in front of him warily.

Harry Gandy, Joseph Bradley’s operations boss, and Red King, loyal company man, found an old logging trail over the mountain and managed to get to Charleston to buy food, filling Harry’s car to the brim.

            “Yeah,” said Red. “We’re from Widen.”

            “What you doin’ buyin’ groceries here?”

“We’re on vacation, just thought we’d stock up on the way to the beach.” Harry tipped his hat and snickered as Red paid the bill.

The carload of food had to be unloaded at the first blown-out bridge by human chain like a bucket brigade passing bags of flour, beans, and bacon from hand to hand. Filling a railroad motor coach that had luckily been left in operating condition between the two blasted bridges, each man and woman worked in hushed solidarity, spilling not one word or grocery sack between them.

At the next destroyed bridge, they repeated the same process before the daily shipment finished its journey into Widen. At both transfer points the protective rifles of company guards pointed in every direction. Over the weeks, Harry Gandy continued to sneak in carloads of food, unloading, passing contents hand to hand, and always under the watchful eyes of a man with a high-powered rifle in his hands.

~~~

            Thirl stood by and grinned while townsfolk, the non-strikers, filled their wheelbarrows and sacks with groceries. Taking nothing for himself, he thanked God for the oversized vegetable garden his wife insisted she grow every year. A garden that took up a third of the back yard. And he was grateful for the fruit cellar she’d made him dig years ago. He’d been quarrelsome and nearly refused.

I’ve dug enough dirt for Bradley, I don’t need to be doin’ it in my own yard. It shamed him to think how contrary he’d been. She always knew things he didn’t.

Thankful for the hog DeDe made him butcher every year, Thirl had also stopped complaining about the chickens in the back yard behind several feet of chicken wire. Chickens, as far as he was concerned, were on a level not much higher than rats. He preferred deer meat and squirrel. But the store no longer stocked eggs. Collecting them from DeDe's hens that morning, he stopped complaining about anything to do with his wife.

DeDe’s pantry was full of home-canned jars of raspberry and blackberry jams and jellies, pickled beans and corn. His house had turned into a small eatery. She fed those most desperate. Her breakfasts of bacon, eggs, and biscuits with sorghum molasses filled the bellies of many company men and their families over the next few months. Like angels singing in the rafters, tin forks and knives rang against plates, and the sound of chairs pulled acrossed the worn linoleum filled the tiny kitchen most mornings.

At sunrise, the smell of bacon and coffee drifted into his bedroom along with the mournful songs of the Carter Family on the radio. Thirl knew he was lucky he was to have her. Even propped up against the refrigerator with her arms crossed watching people eat, she looked fetching. He sipped his coffee and gazed at the freckle on her forehead beneath the zigzag part of her hair. Her doe eyes melted him, made his chest and brain feel like corn mush. As the day wore on, the sensation hardened to a prickling along his spine, then to a low hum in his abdomen. He’d thought about her cooking and he thought about her naked—in equal amounts of time.

She was his gift from God. Because she knew things. Odd things. It wasn’t the first time his wife had told him of a coming flood or the imminent death of a healthy neighbor. She’d predicted a famine the year before. And then there was the day DeDe dropped her dusty beans on the porch because she’d ‘seen’ Josephine fall dead in her kitchen, gripping her heart over five miles away, Thirl never doubted her again. But he was never sure if she knew how much he loved her.

Coal Dust On My Feet ~ part 3

           

            DeDe Nettles was a pistol. At thirty-nine, she carried a .38 Smith & Wesson and could shoot straight. When she slipped it into the pocket of her apron it felt heavy, like a ball and chain. Yawning, she shuffled out to the back porch for some fresh air. She stretched and leaned over the railing hearing … she wasn’t sure. “Could be raccoons trying to get to the chickens.” Voices—someone’s in the yard. “The whole world’s gone crazy.”

She scurried back into the kitchen and locked the door behind her. It was the first time she’d turned that lock since she’d married Thirl and moved into the house on Nicholas Street. After pouring another cup of coffee, she walked to the front room to rest in her overstuffed chair. A chair Thirl had bought her for Christmas. He brought it in on the train from Charleston. The same year he purchased their first refrigerator and added the bathroom to the back of the house.

Before she sat down she smacked the chair. An impulse from living in a coal camp, the dust that flew out of it determined her next cleaning day. She was a small woman and felt like a child each time she sunk into her chair. The first time she took a seat and saw her reflection in the windows, she laughed and said she looked like a redheaded kewpie doll with no legs.

Life’s sorrows showed in her brown eyes, Thirl had told her. DeDe had seen first hand the hardships of mining life on women, and she was no exception. Every woman she knew aged quickly. DeDe’s smiles were few and far between, reserved only for special moments, and mostly for James Curtis. Up close her skin was a vague meshwork of lines and wrinkles, like the peel of an orange, only smoother. Petite, but often the largest presence in the room, her physical size often went unnoticed. She was bound to protect her own with as much commitment and passion as Joseph Bradley when he decided to build his coal empire in Widen.

Thirl teased her, how she could testify about her sanctification one night and shoot a perfect game of pool the next. DeDe recruited every child on Nicholas Street for Sunday school. She never missed a church service. And everybody knew she loved her boy. James Curtis was her prize possession.

For all her religious dreams, visions, and premonitions, she headed the ladies prayer group every week, specializing in prayer for the safety of miners. Some folks said she had the “gift.” Her grandma had it, and so did her mama. A sense of knowing the future, of hearing what could not be heard by normal folk. A direct line to the Almighty. She didn’t gossip, but when she spoke—folks paid attention.

DeDe’s hand slipped into her pocket; her fingers clasped the cold metal of her gun. With her other hand she reached out to the bookcase beside her chair and lifted the ancient picture of her grandfather, turning it in the dimly lit room, tilting it this way and that, gauging the severity of his lifeless face. He was God’s minister, and yet she wondered if he heard the mine scream before his head snapped toward the explosion and the rumble of the fireball—before he was incinerated. Or maybe he never saw it coming. Maybe he was buried by tons of earth without warning. Maybe his bones were crushed, his organs split open, his senses annihilated, his life wiped out before he had a chance to understand what was happening. But she doubted it.

~~~

The coal camp sprawled over the bottom of the hollow some sixty miles northeast of Charleston, the state capital. The road to Widen was hilly, twisting and narrow. A broken road with ruined shoulders and potholes. A yellow sign at the top of the steep hill that dropped into Widen warned, HILL. Somebody scratched it into the word, HELL.

At the bottom, all along its length were small houses, occasionally a large one, set back from the road at the edge of the mountain. A twisting octopus of streets swirled through the valley, not the typical plaid grids of flatland towns. Although the valley was wide, as they typically were in that part of the country, one road and one railroad led in and out of town. Thunderous coal and passenger trains rode the rails and filled the valley with the sound of screeching brakes and shrill whistle stops. A loose-plank bridge near the Grille rumbled with a clap of thunder each time a vehicle drove over the creek below that collected beer bottles, candy bar wrappers, and cigarette butts. No streets or alleys were paved; that was only for folks in cities like Charleston and Huntington. Widen’s streets were covered in slag coal or dirt.

The town was alive with coal. The Company’s huge gob piles, ominous heaps of mine waste with their guts ablaze, filled a person’s nostrils with the pungent odor of struck matches. Over thirty feet high, the graceful slopes of loose coal and sulfurous dirt glowed a soft orange. The tipple’s steam rose like the breath of a monster. A place where coal was screened and loaded into railroad cars, the tipple demanded the town’s attention and tribute. Its silo, locomotive shed and repair shops hugged the company’s railroad yard.

A company town; Joseph Bradley and The Elk River Coal and Lumber Company owned it from tipple to barbershop. Despite the company store, school, post office, bank, movie house, medical dispensary, YMCA, baseball park, and 310 dwellings, Widen was first and foremost a coal mine.

            The trees may not have been straighter in Widen, the grass greener, the sky bluer and the mountains more purple and majestic, but when the mine was producing, it often seemed so. On fine mornings the locals liked to tell each other that, indeed, God covered His black gold with these hills, this place—first.

            But the fine mornings had ended. During the first weeks of September after the mine closed down, the town’s inhabitants remained behind closed doors, clothed in fear. The school closed, the Grille closed, and even the post office closed the day after the strikers dug in and parked their cars, sons, and guns at the top of the road into Widen.

~~~

Inhaling the hills of his childhood, James Curtis watched Odie Ingram skirt the timber at the far end of the east pasture mounted on a young, edgy bay colt. Huge maples, oaks and hemlocks towered over everything, standing still in full foliage on the mountain behind his farm.

Odie worked hard in the mines and he worked his horses hard. James had been welcome once, but he had no idea what Odie would say to him now that they were on opposite sides.

James leaned his shotgun against the fence. He knew most of the younger men had sided with the strikers—he wasn’t taking any chances. They were boys he’d gone to school with, like Cole Farlow. Cole was known for his hot head and short fuse. It stuck in James’ memory the day Cole spouted off that if there were ever a strike, he’d shoot a kiss-ass company man faster than a nigger-lover.

But James knew if the strikers had tried to kill his dad, they’d shoot at anybody. He respected his dad’s position. He’d never side with the union even if he did share a few union sympathies. His love and loyalty to his family far outweighed any feelings for or against the union. Beyond his duty to honor his parents, however, he loved Savina with his soul, and today he wanted to explain that to her father—hoping to keep his place in Odie’s house as his future son-in-law.

James Curtis suspected Odie liked him well enough, but he'd made it clear. Savina could not marry until she was eighteen. It was her daddy’s stubbornness, Savina had said. James, in an attempt to be amiable, respected Odie’s condition. But deep down, James believed Odie would never allow Savina to marry him. James anticipated an eventual elopement. Many couples in Clay County married early, but Odie had an innate fear of being alone since his wife died, so James agreed to wait hoping time would ease his anxiety.

Odie rode high in his saddle, appearing taller than he was. Through the mist of daybreak, the dreamy scene played like a western picture show. In the distance on his favorite colt, Odie checked the mares for signs of illness or accident. The horses fanned away from Odie and the colt. Quick in the morning chill, the mares puffed funnels of breath and shook their heads at the inconvenience.

Odie was not a company man. He worked the mine for one reason and one reason only—to pay off his farm and to raise quarter horses. Odie rode up to the barn then jumped down and hitched the colt to a post, nodding to James, acknowledging his presence. When he ambled toward the back of the house, James shivered; a chill ran the length of his body. Gazing up to the dreary sky, winter was on its way … the leaves were changing, like the rest of his world.

James walked toward the front of the peeling, sagging farmhouse. A pack of spittle-flinging dogs barked and paced back and forth on the porch. Chickens roamed freely. Savina quit trying to fix up the place after her mother died. The yard was covered with junk. Rusted bedsprings, empty Pennzoil cans, wet newspapers, bald tires, corroded truck parts … it looked like the house had vomited its insides.

Odie kicked open the screen door and lifted his gun from his side. Gray drizzle peppered his skin as he stomped down to the bottom broken porch step. Mud and manure covered his boots. A smile ticked briefly at the corners of his mouth like a small spasm and he pulled at his ear with his free hand. Their eyes met with awkward glances. Odie began to stare at James with the eyes of someone who thinks he’s about to be told a fact he already knows. His teeth were clamped shut, his top lip drawn back in that smirking snarl.

James recalled what his daddy had said about Odie a few days ago. That he changed amazingly little over the last thirty years. Except for paunchiness around his middle and the loss of some of his hair, he was the same nice boy he’d gone to school with. James considered the fact that his daddy didn’t really know Odie.

“Morning, Mister Ingram. Savina in the house?”

“I figure she’s down by the crick.”

James Curtis nodded and headed toward the direction of the creek.

“James Curtis!” Odie cocked his rifle.

James froze, feeling Odie’s hot stare burn the back of his neck. He turned around. “Sir?”

A twelve-gauge aimed at his head revealed Odie’s message before he spoke it. “I don’t want you comin’ ‘round here any more. I don’t want you seein’ my Savina agin.”

Up to now, James was unafraid of Odie’s intimidation—it was the attempt to keep him from Savina that left him weak-kneed. “I have a right, Mister Ingram. I have a right to see her. We agreed.”

Odie’s blue eyes blazed, considering this. “Comp’ny men have no rights on my property.”

“Mama thought you’d feel that way. Said to tell you to remember who helped you on the farm last year when Josephine died.”

Odie lowered his gun, by only an inch or two. “I don’t need remindin’. You tell your ma—Thirl and me are even. Ask Bonehead and Hardrock. Ask ‘em who drove Thirl’s car to the Grille last night. With him in it passed out and bleedin’ like a stuck pig. I don’t owe your daddy nothin’, boy. He helped me when Jo died, and it was me that saved his life last night.”

James opened his mouth but nothing came out. Except for his eyes, Odie had become a colorless man. His pale skin, gray hair, gray stubble, dirty gray pants and jacket, and gray cigarette smoke swirling between his fingers matched the shades of gray in his voice. Pockmarks and small scars marred his face. Small cauliflower ears poked out from the sides of his head. The tip of his left ear, which he tugged at whenever he felt uneasy, was cropped, and his nose lay flat against his face—the result of shoeing an uncooperative horse some years before.

Despite his unattractive features, coarse speech and rough manners, he possessed a keen intellect and a profound capacity for observing the world around him.

James stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and shrugged. “You and my daddy been mining together since you were my age.”

Odie cleared his head and throat, coughed, then spit a plug of phlegm at one of his dogs. “Boy, you ain’t tellin’ me what I don’t know. Your daddy and me spent years together in them deep-dark-dank holes in the ground. Goin’ in before sunup and comin’ out after sundown … never saw daylight for weeks. That cage dropped us like rocks hundreds of feet into them black holes. Ever’ day we’d walk toward the tipple together with our dinner buckets, givin’ the comp’ny another day’s labor, never knowin’ if we’d come home.” Odie lowered his gun further.

“Anybody ever tell you the definition of slave labor, son?” Odie flicked his cigarette to the ground. “It’s coalminin’. Men that work a job where they risk their lives ever’ minute and at the end of the pay period owe more to the comp’ny store than they made. Debts don’t die with ‘em, neither. They’re passed on to their children. It’s time the union come in, make things better, work less hours, stricter safety rules … you heard Zirka … time to let some of the younger fellers in on them committees. You need to join us, James. Time we make some of the decisions.”

“Daddy said Joseph Bradley has the highest safety standards in the state. That he kept the mine open during the Depression so the men could feed their families. Daddy said Bradley pays as high as union scale.”

“Your daddy has his opinion about Bradley, I have mine. Bradley owns the damn bank. He owns us, boy. You think about that. We cain’t take a shit unless Bradley approves it. Now I’m telling you to get off my land. You best hope the union gets in, then maybe we’ll talk agin. Otherwise … Savina is off limits to you, son.”

Coal Dust On My Feet ~ part 2



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.

Coal Dust On My Feet ~ part 1

~~~Widen, West Virginia, September 1952~~~

              No one knew how long the strike would last.

~~~

Bullets whizzed past Thirl Nettles’ head. Bolting for cover, he leaped into his 1940 Plymouth sedan. His right leg throbbed with a red-hot searing pain all the way up into his groin. Only moments before he’d left the League of Widen Miners meeting, strolled past the tipple and began whistling, “Walking The Floor Over You.”

            “Thirl! You okay?”

            “I’ve been hit!” He slid down on the seat and pressed his hand on the wound, the inside of his car spinning around his head.

            “Hold on!”

            The pain was like nothing he’d experienced before. Not just a pain—an explosion like a live grenade thrown into his body. It couldn’t be contained. It spread and expanded, searched for ways to escape the confinement of his skin. His flesh vibrated with it.

            Hearing his heartbeat in his ears, he glanced down at his legs. Dark, warm blood soaked his pants. For a moment, he was sure they were his dad’s legs, the day they carried him out of the Macbeth mine explosion—dead. Thirl remained crouched down and motionless on the seat as more rifle fire struck his car, until dark was the only hand he had to hold before he passed out.

~~~

Dawn arrived, sifting its dull light through DeDe Nettles’ lace panel curtains. In the front room, the coal stove grumbled and ashes rattled into the ash pan. The morning was miserable cold, raw and damp, the kind of damp that ate into your bones and sucked out the marrow. It had rained for two weeks straight. Buffalo Creek ran high, its steep banks muddy and slick.

            Thirl didn’t know who had come to his rescue. He opened his dark eyes to find a blurry Doctor Vance hovering over him. The other side of the bed was still made, the pillow tucked neatly under the chenille spread. Groggy, Thirl heard the doctor’s voice before he passed out again.

            Doctor Sherwood Vance, a wide, solid stump of a man, bald and nearsighted behind wire-rimmed glasses, worked the bulge of muscles in his jowls to and fro, all while he muttered mostly to himself, but partly to DeDe.

“Bastards ... low lifes. Miners, they call themselves, but they have no loyalties, not to their town, not to their country, not even to each other. They call themselves godly men but they’d sell their souls for a wooden nickel and a plug of tobacco. They talk like politicians, up one side and down the other. No respect for the League tryin’ to make life better for them. What do they expect when somebody like Jack Hamrick goes berserk in the mine! He deserved to be fired!”

DeDe pulled the blanket over her husband to keep him warm. She had combed back his oiled hair and washed the coal dust from his face the best she could. He’d kept a trim figure all these years despite his diet of fried potatoes, bacon, sausage, and squirrel. And daily helpings of molasses and biscuits. The man ate for enjoyment, like most men that worked in a coal mine.

DeDe watched their son, James Curtis, pull his legs up to his chest and sink into the bottom of his dad’s bed. He stared at the blood on the floor. At nineteen, he stood as tall and lanky as Thirl and shared his unreadable dark blue eyes and constant smile. But where his dad’s hair exuded the color of brown mountain clay, James Curtis had inherited her burnt red locks, often appearing as if they’d been dipped in honey when the sun hit at the right angle.

DeDe gave her son’s shoulder a soft hug, pulled off his cap and kissed the top of his head. Until that moment, she had no strength to ask questions. Her immediate concern was to assist the doctor in keeping her husband alive. But anger bubbled just under the surface of her constraint, searching for a way out of her mouth. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, then followed the doctor into the kitchen to prime the pump. Tears dripped down her cheeks as she watched Doc Vance lean into the sink and scrub her husband’s blood off his hands.

All the nights she lingered near the sink while Thirl washed up after work in her tiny kitchen, stripped to the waist, mine dirt covered him like shoe polish. He’d dip his arms over and over in water up to his elbows, scrubbing with a wire brush and hard granite-like soap, turning the water black. She thought she’d never again see the true color of his skin. Black coal dust collected in the creases of his neck and in the wrinkles of his face. To DeDe, her husband’s hands looked like black bear paws. She knew he was proud to never have lost a finger. Thirl had told her he regarded non-life threatening professions as jobs for women and men with too much education. She saw him as a person who’d been unknowingly thrown into a world between heaven and hell. She’d heard the Catholics had a name for it. But unlike everybody else in the coal camp, he was content in the place he stood—never expecting God to give him more. Even if he damn well deserved it.

A sob caught in her throat. Her voice and stare were equally painful. “What happened, Doc?”

Doc Vance scrubbed then dried his hands on a clean towel. “Thirl was there when Harry Gandy fired Jack Hamrick last week. You know Jack and Opal? I believe they attend your church.”

“Don’t recall his face. I know his wife.” She wiped her tears with the cuffs of her blouse, then motioned for him to have a seat at the kitchen table.

            “The way I hear it, Hamrick went plum crazy last week when asked to work in a trackless section of the mine where a new machine was bein’ given a tryout. Hamrick flew into a rage, shoutin’ the job was unsafe and that the company was tryin’ to kill its men. Damn fool, took a pop bottle, broke off the end, and slashed a gash an inch long in his supervisor’s cheek. Took me an hour to stitch him up. You got any coffee?”

“I’ll make some,” she said. After rinsing out cups, she filled the coffee pot with water and Maxwell House, and then turned the electric stove on high. While it perked, DeDe began scrubbing found blood off the table with jagged sweeps of her arm. Her elbows pumped sharply. She sniffed more tears back in her head, but didn’t speak.

Doc Vance removed his blood-spattered glasses and wiped each lens slowly. “I wasn’t there when Gandy fired Hamrick. But I walked into Gandy’s office tonight right after the League meeting. Thirl had just left. Nobody expected miner retaliation. After all, it’d been a week since they’d fired Hamrick—but seems Jonas Zirka, a troublemaker in my mind, got everybody all stirred up. When problems come to the mine and things look bad, there’s always one man who thinks he’s got all the answers and is willing to take command. Usually, that individual is crazy. This time, it’s Zirka. Hamrick needed firing. But Zirka’s gonna use it and some other lame issues to try and bring in the union again. Lies are an infectious disease. I think Zirka contracted it from some fat cat in the UMW. Anyway, I heard the gunfire. So did Gandy.”           

DeDe stormed back into her husband’s sick room and glared at her son. “Get a message to Mister Gandy. Make sure he knows it was your daddy that’s been shot. Use the phone in his office to call the sheriff.”

“Ain’t no use calling the sheriff, Mama. Picket line’s done been formed at the top of Widen hill. Doc’s right. Zirka’s behind it. All that noise last night, those car horns blowing and moving through the streets? Strike’s on. I was with Savina last night. When I took her home, it was Odie who told me ‘bout Daddy. I wanted to go straight to the sheriff. But her daddy said the law won’t come unless somebody’s dead ‘cause Widen is all private property, owned by Joseph Bradley.”  She knew her son saw no point in holding back the truth, even from a woman.

“Odie said he’s gonna strike.”

“Then you get a message to Savina’s daddy. Tell Odie he best remember who helped him with his farm last year when Josephine died.” She gave her son a maternal once-over that made him instinctively straighten up from his slouched position on the bed.

“Yes, Ma’am. Next time I see Savina.”

“Your girl, Savina, she’s welcome here James, but Odie’s not gonna allow your skinny company butt on his property.”

“No, Ma’am.”

She watched James lower his gaze to her bare feet. They were filthy and spattered with blood. A few of her pretty red toenails were chipped. They were to attend a church sing in Gassaway tomorrow. She was going to wear shoes with her toes sticking out. Two nights before she had held a bottle of red nail polish in front of Thirl, and he smiled. “Real pretty,” he’d said.

Doc Vance carried two cups of coffee in from the kitchen. With his elbows fanned out and his eyes on the cups, he glided up and handed her a cup, stiffly easing himself down on the chair beside her. They continued the vigil beside Thirl’s bed, watching his chest rise and fall with each breath, as if at any given moment the body would change from a wounded man to a dead corpse.

“Odie ain’t too bright,” said Doc. “The man has only two more years of work to gain a pension, but decides to strike. Told me he ain’t gonna go on paying fifty cents a month to that no ‘count company League. Damn black throat. Since the rules of pension eligibility require twenty full years of service, of which Odie already has eighteen, he’s throwin’ away $1,200 a year for life to save twelve dollars. The man sleeps with his head up his ass!”

... to be continued

A Coal Miner's Granddaughter Remembers

Wash day at Grandma King's house was long and grueling, especially in the winter. I still recall the smell of Grandpa's wet clothes. The stench of the mine refused to budge from the heavy denim. This picture threw me back to those wash days ... when life was simple ... when I was a bitty girl who played among the wet sheets and blue denim hanging on the line.

I loved those days, and my coal mining grandpa. The picture above was taken long before he walked hunched over from working years in the mines. I was born a coal miner’s granddaughter. That fact inspired the story COAL DUST ON MY FEET. I never dreamed one day I would write about Widen, West Virginia. The town that had so haunted my childhood was once involved in a reign of terror between labor and management that has been said to be the longest and most violent coal strike in the history of our country. As a child, I was only privy to bits and pieces of these stories.

I dug deep into the crevices of my memory. I tunneled through pages of old picture albums Daddy and Mama kept stored away for years, and found what I was looking for. My grandparent’s wedding photo. Looking at it, I realized the miners of West Virginia and their children didn’t romanticize their lives. They lived them, surviving the best they could. The outside world didn’t exist much past an occasional radio program or newspaper article. For many years, time stood still in the hollers and mountains around Clay County. Life for my grandpa, Troy Jennings King, consisted of his wife Gussie, five children, and a job … mining coal for the Elk River Coal and Lumber Company.

As a writer, I returned to West Virginia, to Widen, and immediately began to develop a powerful attachment to the place. Over the next few months I learned more about the town, and discovered that my family had deep roots there. Several generations of Kings and Samples were born and lived in Clay County, all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

A short time later, I learned of the role my grandpa played in the Strike of 1952, siding with the company that had been loyal to him through the Depression. Grandpa always said, "We Hardshell Baptists don't sell our souls that easy." But the family was split on both sides.

COAL DUST ON MY FEET is a very real story … in some ways. The strike did happen. Jack Hamrick, Ed Heckelbech, Bill Blizzard, Charles Frame, John Lewis, Jennings Roscoe Bail, Governor Marland, and Joseph Bradley were real people who either lived in or near Widen, and were associated with the strike. Otherwise, the story and remaining characters are fictional, created from my imagination purely for storytelling purposes. But the violence from September 1952 to Christmas Eve of 1953 is legendary, and the men who were killed and maimed live on in the memories of their families to this day.

Families were torn apart, cousin against cousin, father against son—and the union, though it failed to break the back of the company, changed things. Eventually, the company closed its doors. In its day, 3,000 people lived in the coal camp of Widen. Today, there are less than 200. The town folded up except for the post office and a few that refused to leave—some of them are my relatives.

From these threads of family history, COAL DUST ON MY FEET was woven. It is a tale of love and betrayal, forbidden passions and long-buried secrets, of one woman’s struggle with her heritage and with her God—and the ancient bridge where the real and the supernatural meet.

But most intriguing to me personally as I wrote this story was the possibility that I had come by my stubbornness genes honestly, and that I was more like my grandparents than I ever dared to think. I dedicated this story to them.

In the coming days, I'll post excerpts from COAL DUST ON MY FEET, one of my favorites from Southern Fried Women. I hope you enjoy it.

Blessings to you and yours.

The Journey Never Ends

Yesterday was an exciting day!

We're booking signing and speaking engagements, although not everything is confirmed, we're making headway on the book tour. A tour that looks as though it will take Michael and I around the country this time. From sea to shining sea.

My book trailer is looking fabulous and I'm so pleased. Lots of good news there!

And ... drum roll, please ... Televenge is an Editor's Pick from BookExpo America 2012 from the Library Journal Review. http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/07/books/editors-picks-from-bookexpo-america-2012-from-magick-to-bbq-backlist/

I think back to the days when I just wanted to pull my hair out. Writing at 3 a.m. when the rest of the world slept. The day a few experts told me the book was just too long ... "cut it in half!" "make it a trilogy!" "You're not Nora Roberts, nobody's gonna publish a book this long by a debut novelist!"

The day my watch stopped, the hairdryer started on its own, the TV started when I walked past it, and the bathroom door locked and I couldn't get out ... all on the day I decided not to shorten the book, to stay true to my heart, and to keep certain chapters in the book.

I recall the day I changed the title, but couldn't get used to it, and changed it back. The seventeenth draft. The twenty-second draft. The printers I wore out just printing copy for my readers.

The critiques. Oh, those blasted critiques that sent me reeling! But in the end, shaped the story into crisp prose, shutting the mouth of the author, and never stopping the reader.

Crying over this chapter and that character. Debating on whether or not to dig that deep into my own story and rewrite it. And I remember the day I cut out a character, taking out five chapters in the process. It felt like a funeral.

The day I bawled my eyes out when I typed, The End. But it wasn't the end. It was only the beginning of a journey that has carried me to where I am today. Ready to start the next book.

Well. After the marketing and promotion of Televenge. And a few more good days like yesterday.

Blessings to you and yours.

And on this Farm she had some Grandchildren!

Ei-Ei-OOOOO!

The Miracle of July 4th

What we celebrate with picnics, apple pie, and fireworks--the colonials gave their lives for. If you love history as I do, you know the horrific fight the early Americans endured so that we could swim in freedom. As you relax around your pools on this hot summer day, just breathe a word of thanks to those who not only gave their lives, but the lives of their families as well. These gallant men who fought with General George Washington, lost battle after battle in unbelievable conditions. Discouraged and disheartened, thousands of men, women and children fought and died to give us the freedoms many of us take for granted.

I do love this holiday. It's summertime at its best. Parades, the grand old flag flying high above the local high school band marching down Main Street, tractors pulling homemade floats, ice cream cones and watermelon. It's a day off work. A day to relax with sparklers for the kids, and a cold beer on the lawn. Baseball, a firey hot sun, and running through the sprinkler. We seem to have become so distanced from the reason we celebrate the 4th, that I wonder if we had the choice would American History be an optional course in our school systems?

Fortunately, American History remains mandatory in our schools. But most of us memorize enough of it just to pass the course, seldom pondering the extreme sacrifices made for us to celebrate July 4th.

The strategic battles, the brutal hand-to-hand combat, and the children that were slaughtered in the process makes me weep. The starving mass of men that turned the tide of war to eventually knock the British to their knees was nothing less than divine intervention. In my humble opinion. As I study more about the birth of our nation, I'm constantly amazed at the odds against us. Out-numbered, out-maneuvered, and out-smarted in one battle after another, I can't image the heart of General Washington. What was it that moved him forward?

One retreat after another, some men wore rags on their feet in horrific winter conditions. It took six weeks just to get a message across the ocean. There were few roads, faulty guns sent by the French, and food for the army (if you could get them to enlist) consisted of salt pork and flour.

You want to talk about miracles? July 4th is a miracle.

Remember that as you load your plate today with hot dogs and potato salad.

Just for a minute ... think of those colonial fallen families and say thanks.

Then go enjoy your fireworks!

Blessings to you and yours.

No Guarantees For The Writer

UGH, I certainly don't like to go this long between blog posts! But we're getting down to the wire, three months to go before the book launch! TELEVENGE, the dark side of televangelism.

I've been working closely with my publicist at Smith Publicity and my publisher at Satya House, setting up media interviews, booking the launch party, and writing byline articles ... the list is endless and it includes a great deal of time on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and whatever else I can put myself on. The final edits have to be completed before the actual book goes to print, and I'm already working on the next novel ... yes, folks, by the time I lay my head down at night, I've worked twelve hours or more.

The TELEVENGE book trailer is in the works, I'm booking speaking engagements from Ohio to North Carolina to Georgia, and back up the east coast into the Philadelphia area, and my publicist tells me the response to their initial pitch to the media was overwhelming!

I'm hoping all the book buyers at the BEA in New York City are enjoying their advanced reading copies. Hundreds of uncorrected proofs are out there, and this writer can only hope for the best at this point.

When you've done all you can do, poured your heart and scraped-thin soul into your book and then into promoting it, you have to put all the negative thoughts surrounding the publishing industry out of your head. Yeah, you know the odds. Any writer with half a brain who spends any time on the Internet knows the tough road ahead. The thick skin needed for the journey. But we persevere anyway, don't we? What choice do we have?

There are no guarantees. I know that.

It's all I've ever wanted to do. Sure, we crave some measure of success. But this life, my career as a writer, I'm already living my dream. Harper Lee couldn't be any happier than I am at this moment.

I'm already blessed.

Blessings to you and yours.