Hardcastle (11 page)

One man, scarcely thirty and all but toothless, asked, “In whichwise is this contract different from the ones I done already signed?” Other men wanted to know if they were still going to get their twenty-two and a half cents a ton. Few of the men were able to read the document, or even tried. Perhaps half could sign their names. The others made their marks, and Music copied their names below and witnessed their marks with his own signature.

Now and again there were houses without a wage earner, where a widow woman lived. Kenton Hardcastle charged no rent or utilities for allowing them to remain, but he paid no compensation either. These women, too, had to sign or make their marks on the contracts. In one such house, where the front porch was broken and sagging and they had to go around to the back to get in, a young woman who looked no more than seventeen opened the door. She had her hip cocked a little to one side to accommodate the small child who straddled it. She also looked so angry that, for a moment, Music was struck dumb; but he came to himself, ran his finger down the checklist of names on Regus’s clipboard, and said, “We’re lookin for Mrs. Merlee Taylor.”

“Who’s come, Merlee?” someone asked from another room. In the next moment a woman appeared in the doorway; a woman bent nearly double upon herself, who looked up at Music from beneath her widow’s hump like a turtle peering out from under the dome of its shell. Her gaze could mount no higher than Music’s belt buckle.

The young woman, however, stared him directly in the eye. “Ain’t nobody, Aunt Sylvie,” she said in a voice so bitter and flat Music felt his heart shrink. She turned and handed off the child to the old woman, who, withered and bent as she was, could not hold the infant to her breast, but merely support it before her under its tiny arms as though she might be teaching it to walk.

“Give it here,” the young woman said to Music, and he gave her the contract and pencil. She signed her name, propping the contract against the doorframe and handing it back at once.

Music said, “Thank you, ma’am.”

She shut the door in his face.

Behind him Regus fingered the hair growing out of his shirt collar and looked at the ground, his neck and ears red. His eyebrows rose as though he might offer some word, but he merely tucked the quid of tobacco into his cheek and spat, turned on his heel, and went on toward the next coal company shack. Music followed behind.

Two contracts later, when they were done and walking toward the powerhouse, Regus’s neck and ears began to redden again, as though a low-watt bulb had been switched on just beneath his skin. “A couple of years back, her husband was down at the commissary,” Regus said. There was no question who
her
was. “He picked out some little ole head kerchief for her and stuck it in his pocket, don’t ye know.” Regus shook his head and sucked his teeth. “The story I heard was that the son-of-a-bitchin mine guard shot him down on the spot.”

“Hellfire,” Music said, “nobody kills a man over a kerchief.”

“Wouldn’t want to think so, would you?” Regus said. “But as to that, I saw one miner kill another over a goddamned game of marbles.”

“On purpose?” Music said.

Regus snorted, jets of fog billowing from his nostrils in the cold air. “He shot him twice in the head with one of them little snubbed-off thirty-two pistols.”

“Yeah, but a goddam kerchief?” Music said.

“That’s the story I heard,” Regus said. “Some far kin of Hardcastle, the mine guard was. Little crazy. Taken it personal, like the man was stealin outten his own pocket. Thought he owned the place cause his kin did, I reckon. Heard he yelled out, ‘I seen ye, I seen ye,’ and shot the young feller down without further word ner caution.” Regus tugged at the hair at his throat. “Was that mine guard’s job that I taken, after somebody shot half his head off one night.”

They had stopped walking and were standing on the bridge over the river. “Who shot him?” Music asked.

Regus cocked his head, raised his eyebrows quizzically, and spat off the bridge into the river. “The dumb son of a bitch,” he said, “could have been might near anybody. They found him a-layin right yonder,” he said, nodding toward an iced-over rock his bright tobacco juice had splattered. “He claimed he never meant to shoot the young feller. Meant to shoot the floor twixt his feet to scare him. Now I’ve seen all kinds,” Regus said, “but I never met the man who was so poor a shot as to take the bottom of a man’s heart off when he was aimin betwixt his feet.” Remote and preoccupied, Regus looked at the river where the mine guard had been found, then away at the hazy, blue-grey mountains rising against the sky, and finally at Music until whatever sober thing had been in his face was gone. “Such a feller gives us gun thugs a bad name, whichever way you look at it,” Regus said at last. “The worse yet, if folks was to believe we couldn’t hit within five feet of where we wuz aimin.”

The humor behind Regus’s eyes seemed all wrong, but it was there—calm, steady, insisting on its right to color whatever it might choose. Regus sighed and steam billowed from his nostrils. “Less us see what kinda grub Momma put in the dinner buckets,” he said. “We done already worked more this mornin than we’ll generally work in a week. This here job, ole Bill Music, is mostly a matter of standin around lookin mean.”

Why, you low son of a bitch
, the robber had said, looking down on Music where he lay just on the fringe of consciousness, legs helter-skelter upon the sidewalk and curbing of Maxwell Street and one all-but-oblivious hand feeling his head where, already, there were knots the size of goose eggs. The big man had passed Music’s shoes to the smaller man, folded the twenty-dollar bill into his shirt pocket, and jumped into the middle of Music’s chest.
Maybe
, Music said to the big, shabby man, wherever he might be,
maybe so
.

That evening when Music and Regus had begun to take turns with the watch, Music went to the commissary and had Cecil grind him a pound of coffee. Having received official notification that Music was a mine guard and taking alarmed, sidelong glances at the bulk of the Walker Colt under Music’s coat, Cecil was very quick and nervous about filling Music’s order, talking nonsense all the while in a frightened, hopeful effort toward comradery.

Music carried the warm, fragrant bag of coffee around to the back door of Merlee Taylor’s coal company shack and knocked; but when the door opened, it was the old woman who stood before him. She did not speak; she simply stood absolutely still in the doorway, bent over upon herself like an ancient question mark.

“Here, missus,” Music said, trying to give her the bag of coffee. “Please,” he said, for she seemed not to understand and made no move to take it.

The young woman appeared then, her dress front unbuttoned nearly to the waist, her sweater pushed off one shoulder so that the child she carried could nurse.

Music was instantly embarrassed.

The young woman glared at him. “Ain’t we seen enough goons fer one day?” she said. “What do ye want now?”

“Please,” Music said to the old woman, shoving the coffee at her; and when, at last, her long, bony, crooked hand turned palm up and received it, Music backed away and was gone. The smooth white flesh of the girl’s breast, the pink ellipse of her nipple a shade lighter than the pink of the baby’s lips, stayed behind his eyes, so that it was difficult for him to see how to walk.

7

THE LATE SHIFT

NO MINER HAD said more than two words to Music since he’d hired on. But Gay Dickerson and Worth Enloe were not ordinary miners. They were company men. They ran a Jeffry Short-Wall machine on the night shift, undercutting coal faces in the various rooms so that miners could shoot the coal and work it out the next day. Perhaps because they had steadier and better-paying jobs, they weren’t so bitter and close-mouthed. Still, Music was surprised when, a week after he had hired on, the two of them squatted at the entrance to the drift mouth and passed a little time with him. They chewed and spat and spoke of days when mining coal was a proper occupation; and Music, leaning against a coal car, the pistol grip of the huge old Walker Colt sticking out from beneath his coat and over his heart like a pump handle, was happy to listen.

“Hit use to take a right smart of skill to get coal,” Worth Enloe said. Tirelessly he sat on his heels. The pucker of forever grimy skin around his ruined eye twitched where once a powder charge had gone off in his face. “These fellers that is now and gets their five ton wouldn’t have dug two in them days. Weren’t no undercuttin machines and weren’t hardly no special crews.” Worth Enloe spat and his blind eye twitched. “A man had to lie on his side and undercut the coal face with a pick, and when he went to bore holes fer his shots, why, there weren’t no electric drill. He taken an auger and braced hit agin his chest and turned her by hand. He knew jest how much powder to use to get the job done, and he packed his dummies right. Clay dummies and not airey old bug dust like these fools. Why, the proper miner could break down a coal face so hit could be worked to advantage,” Worth said. “He done hit all. Laid his track, done his cleanup and dead work, knowed how to set props so the top didn’t come down on him …”

“Hit’s the goddamned farmers and niggers what mostly get killed ever whipstitch, cause they don’t know how to mine coal and ortten to be back in no drift noway!” Gay Dickerson said. Music could see that Dickerson had wanted to get a leg in the conversation for a long time, but something about the older man’s slow, brooding voice had kept him out, just as Worth’s silence kept Dickerson from going on. The silence, the twitch of skin around the ruined eye where coal dust had been blown into the flesh beyond the reach of years of scrubbing, seemed to say there was a different point to be made.

“Back when the labor was all by hand,” Worth said at last, “there wasn’t no lack of work for a proper miner. The coal brung a good price so a man could make a decent livin. But when the smell of money gets out, you don’t know what’s gonna come callin from downwind. Hell, operators come from all over and started tryin to mine coal up ever little creek and holler. Hmm,” he said and shook his head and spat, “ain’t no tellin how many coal seams have been ruint by folks that didn’t know nuthin bout minin. Cain’t nobody get the coal outten lots of those mines now. Trouble is, fer ever operator that come down here to mine coal and get rich, they was a hundred poor sons a bitches throwed down their plows and started diggin it fer him. Lots of them operators went bust and then went on back where they come from, but most poor miners didn’t have nothing and nowhere to go, ner a dime to get there.” Worth’s bad eye twitched. “They’re still right here in the coalfields. They’s too many miners, and too many machines a-gettin the coal too fast, so hell, hit ain’t worth nuthin.”

“They’d be a proper livin yet for what few real miners is left,” Gay Dickerson said. “Lord knows they ain’t many real miners. No old-timey miner would load the crap these fellers shovel into coal cars. You ort to watch the rock and slate that comes outten this here drift. You ort to watch how many times they got to shut the tipple down cause the slate pickers can’t keep up with it.”

Music rolled himself a cigarette while Worth and Gay listed the multitude of things that had gone wrong with mining. The machines, which not only got the coal too fast but made the work more dangerous, so that a man was as likely to get electrocuted or mauled by some damned machine as he was to get killed by a slate fall or an explosion. The unions, which were often crooked and took more in dues than the men ever got back in benefit; which made trouble and called strikes, got folks fired and caused scabs to get brought in who stayed on in the coalfields when the strikes were broken because most of them didn’t have any place to go back to either. The state mine inspectors, who came around and got bribed, or who didn’t get bribed and shut down a mine for one reason or another and threw everybody out of work. The operators, who underbid one another to get contracts and then took the money out of the miner’s wages in order to be able to sell the coal for next to nothing. The government, which, whether local, state, or federal, always threw its weight against the miner if there was trouble. The damned housing. The goddamned commissary.

Finally, they came full circle, back to mining itself, which, they conceded, some way or other got in a man’s blood and unfit him for anything else, never mind that it would break him, and cripple him, and starve him out besides. Worth Enloe’s bad eye twitched many times in succession, and all at once Gay Dickerson stood up and stepped on the heel of his right rubber boot with the toe of his left, and, drawing his naked foot out of the boot, showed it to Music. There were no toes on the foot except for the big one. “I was sixteen when I let that happen,” Gay said cheerfully. “Already had me a wife and two youngins. Went to sprag a wheel on a full coal car and didn’t get the sprag stick jammed in right, and the damned thang run over my foot. My workin buddy felt the car bump and says to me, says, ‘What in tarnation wuz that?’ and I says, ‘Why, nuthin, just only the coal car run over my foot; didn’t hurt.’ ‘Great God on the mountain, son,’ he says, ‘yer hurt whether ye know hit or don’t.’ He come around and commenced to get me out of my boot but seen it was full of blood and left off. He laid me out atop a coal car and called the driver and tole me, when I got outta the drift, to git to the doctor quick. But I never. I walked on back to my house and set down to take a look. I wuz surprised, I tell ye, when I saw they wadn’t nuthin but little ole tags a skin holdin four of my toes on. Felt lucky I’d had my foot on the rail in sech a way as to save the big’un. My wife jist nearly fainted when she seen hit, but I sent her off for her sewin shears to cut the damned thangs aloose.” Gay Dickerson laughed and turned his pale foot this way and that, looking at it in the electric light at the entrance to the drift mouth. “Now you may think I’m a-guyin ye, but hit never hurt until I commenced to cut them little flaps of skin that was along the bottoms of the toes.” With a quick motion of his head he spat a stream of tobacco juice a good ten feet to one side. “My wife couldn’t stand hit, don’t ye know, and run right outten the house. But boy, I’ll tell ye, I’se just as glad she were gone, fer cuttin them toes off hurt like fire. You wouldn’t think it, but by the time I got that first toe cut aloose, they wuz beads of sweat the size a buckshot popped out on my forehead.” Gay shook his head at the memory and giggled, put his boot on again, and squatted as before. After a moment, as though it were an unimportant afterthought, he mentioned that some years later a slate fall had broken his pelvis.