Whisper Hollow (20 page)

He looked up at her the way a dog awaits a treat, his bitterness momentarily forgotten. “You been keepin’ up with me?”

She nodded. “You may not be aware of this, but John and I are no longer living together as man and wife. Even so, I spoke to him not very long ago on your behalf. I asked him why you haven’t been promoted in spite of all your years of faithful service.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “I thought you said you didn’t know I was back home.”

“I didn’t want to appear overeager.” She smiled again, then opened her hands. “I’m sorry. I was unable to convince my former husband to take up your cause. And in fact, I’m deeply ashamed
to say, I think he might in fact be one of those who have prevented your rise.” She looked down and then back up from beneath her eyelashes. “Perhaps it’s partly because he’s jealous of you. He may know, on some level, that I’ve always had a deep … affection … for you. Perhaps that’s even why he asked me for a divorce.”

Liam’s mouth fell open, but it was a moment before he spoke. “You have … affection … for me?”

Myrthen straightened her back. No need to take it too far. “Liam, do you realize that God is revealing to you His judgment upon Blackstone Coal Company?”

He cocked his head slightly. “God’s revealing what?”

“Liam!” She slapped the rock with the palm of her hand. “Pay attention. I’m telling you! God has chosen you. He has chosen both of us. Who are you to question Him?”

He scoured his cigarette onto the rock. “So what are you saying? I’m supposed to go blow up the mine?”

She shifted away from him to hide the pounding of her heart through her clothes. “If that is what God wants you to do, then what choice do you have?” A hint of a smile. He looked away.

“It don’t sound like a good thing. I don’t understand. I mean, I wanted to do it. I … I want to do it. Serve those bastards right. But what if somebody got hurt? Somebody innocent? Guys I worked with, what, fifteen, twenty years? Good guys, some of them. I wouldn’t want them to get hurt. Except maybe them who’s been keeping me down.”

“You don’t know who is innocent and who is not. That’s for God to know. And God will protect the innocent. Remember the story about the three men King Nebuchadnezzar tosses into a furnace for refusing to bow to him? No? Well, when he looks into the fire, he sees not three but four men, and none of them burning. The fourth was God’s angel, sent to protect them because they were righteous before the Lord. And God will protect the innocent, Liam. You don’t need to worry.”

Slowly, he began to bob his head. His eyes searched the ground, looked left and right, a sign he was thinking things through. Myrthen watched her idea, like a minnow on a hook, sink itself into the soft contours of his mind.

Just like that, she could be rid of them both.
Thank You, Lord.

After some time, Liam stopped his unconscious nodding. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Maybe you’re right.”

She patted him on the hand. “Sometimes there is evil inside people that you can’t see. It’s like a coal seam buried deep underground. You don’t see it, but God sees it. He knows. And he wants them to be punished. You’re doing the right thing, listening to God,” she said. “Go now, and pray. Come back and meet me here on Wednesday evening. Father Timothy makes house calls then. I’ll help you, Liam. I’ll help you make a plan. I told God I would.”

The voice of God, yes, he could hear it now. How had he mistaken it for anything else all this time? His mind was swirling with penance-turned-permission, his cousin’s impossibly delicate skin, being chosen, being seen, those Blackstone bastards with money running out of their trousers like the liquid wrath of angry bowels.

He hadn’t thought to wonder if there was something in it for her.

She stood up, their meeting adjourned, and smoothed her skirt in a practiced sweep. “Don’t tell anybody else about this. God chose you and only you. Other people might not understand. You hear?”

“Yes,” he said, then dipped his head and added, “I always had affection for you, too.”

“Wednesday. Seven sharp. We’ll make a plan.” She walked a few steps up the path toward the doors of St. Michael’s, then turned. “And one more thing,” she said, straightening her back. “Stay out of the cemetery.”

Three weeks later, John and the rest of the crew on the Number Seventeen’s day shift spilled out of the cold darkness of the pit into an October afternoon so clear and bright their voices trilled off the exposed mountain face.

“Hold up, Gibby!” said a middle-aged half-Polish, half-Italian miner named Mooska. “My old lady’s goin’ to visit her mother this weekend,” he said when he caught up with him. “So poker night at my place tonight.” Mooska nodded at two others, Willit and Bullseye, who’d turned around while they were walking. “You’re in, right?” They both nodded. One of them said, “I’ll call up Jonesey. I think he’s got a honey-do list but maybe he can get out of it.” They chuckled, happy the workweek was done, a weekend of liquor and cards ahead, their smiles like cracks in dried mud on their dirty faces.

John Esposito walked past them with a long stride and a wide smile. “Hey, Johnny,” said Mooska with a tip of his chin. “Poker night. You in?”

“No thanks, boys,” John said with a smile. “I got other plans.”

“You and your other plans,” said a guy who’d been called Sugar so long that even his wife of two decades didn’t know
his real name. “One of these days we’re gonna figure out who ‘Other Plans’ is.”

The day crew collected around the mine office, their sooty faces tipped, grateful, toward the sun, lighting and dragging on cigarettes and talking before they went inside the small shower shack to clean up before heading home. At the same time, the miners going onto the second shift drifted in with dinner buckets swinging. In the changing room adjacent to the office, they each had a wire basket that hung from a cable, where they stored their clean clothes while they were underground and left their belts and hats when the shift was over. The two crews overlapped — those on the way out taking off their filthy overalls and steel-toed, mud-slung boots, and those going in putting theirs on. Eventually, all the wire baskets would be raised to the ceiling, where they’d remain untouched for at least the next eight hours.

Most of the men ended up with nicknames while they were still rookies wearing red hard hats. Going underground with a crew of colorfully named brethren gave them a sense of camaraderie, belonging, a feeling of comfort in a dangerous place. But there was one miner whose nickname never stuck: Walter Pulaski, strong and serious, with a neck that seemed to push his lower jaw forward and turn his mouth into a muzzle. When he first went into the mines, some cheeky upstart gave him the name Tiny. Walter was genial enough about it, but whenever someone tried to use it, it slid off and landed in the dirt. Eventually, they simply called him Walter.

He was among the men coming on for the second shift that day. Walter had been an electrician for the first half of his career, then promoted to foreman a decade ago. He’d demonstrated he was good at running things smoothly underground: initiating swift and decisive action, bearing pressure without complaint, influencing the men without persuasion.

Abel, Walter’s eighteen-year-old son, was there, too. He was still a red hat, a bright young man and quiet like his father. Because Walter liked to keep watch over him, they always worked the same shifts. From the time Abel was a small child, Alta had spoken to him of what she knew of the world beyond Verra’s blue ridges. She told him stories of her aunt Maggie and uncle Punk, conjured their elegant life in New York City and their travels to exotic locations such as Paris and London, California and Texas. It all sounded vaguely frightening to him, especially when his mother’s expression grew tense and animated in the telling. Instead of inspiring Abel to consider his other options, his mother’s stories only served to tether him closer to the confines of home. He knew all along that he’d follow his father underground, and come home black-faced and tired — God willing — each evening to his own small family of three or maybe four. To her credit, his mother never voiced disappointment in his choice if she ever felt any.

Stanley Kielar, a twenty-seven-year-old electrician, came into the changing room just as the rest of the second-shift crew were rolling their clothes and hoisting them into the wire baskets. His dinner bucket dangled at his side and his shoulders slumped forward. Ever since his son, Eagan, had fallen ill several months before, Stanley hadn’t been the same. His robust frame looked slighter, his hair thinned. The skin around his eyes bagged like an old man’s. It was obvious he was lacking in sleep, had been for months. But today, there was a different kind of restlessness in his demeanor. A weight-shifting sag to his gait. He pulled on the string to lower his basket of work clothes without so much as a hello.

Walter walked over to him. “How’s your boy doing?” he asked.

“They say he won’t get much better,” Stanley said, staring at the coal-dusted floor. “Thanks for asking.”

Walter nodded and put one hand on his shoulder. There wasn’t much more he could say. “See you outside.”

“Got some extra work needs doing this weekend, boys,” Walter said to the commingled crews. “Need to lay track, set up some more stoppings. Anybody wants overtime, shift foreman for tomorrow needs ten, eleven men.”

Walter held a clipboard and the stub of a pencil, nodding in response to each of the men who raised their hands: Babe Scardava, Stinky Lipersick, Piggy Kochran, Duck Luleck, Bones Krempeley, Pie Eye Del Vecchio, Cross Newcomb, Prairie Slack, Trout Palumbo, Fossil Zulcowski, Pops Langloss, Gibby Governsky, and finally, without looking Walter in the eye, John Esposito.

Standing just outside the loose knot of men was the electrician on Walter’s shift, a red-haired and nervous man named Liam Magee whom they called Sparky. When Liam saw John raise his hand for the next day’s dead work shift, he chuckled out a black lungful of smoke.

Walter counted the names. “Thanks, boys. Be safe tomorrow.” He went inside the small office and laid the clipboard on the desk for the mine foreman. Then he picked up his carbide headlamp, his gas tester, and his dinner bucket. He tipped his head toward the mine and said to Abel and the others going in, “Let’s go.”

Willit, Mooska, Gibby, Sugar, John, and the other day-shift crew nodded their goodbyes and set off down the mountain.

Liam lagged behind the others as they headed underground. Stopping just outside the mine entrance, which was only eight feet tall and opened into the side of the mountain like the gaping maw of a sleeping giant, he finished his smoke. He watched the crew start to climb aboard the mantrip that would take them more than a mile into the mountain to the face where
they’d be working. Above their heads hung a hand-painted message:
A GOOD SAFETY RECORD MEANS HAPPINESS FOR ALL
,
SO KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK
,
MEN
.
BE CAREFUL
.

Liam squinted at the sign through a final hard draw on his cigarette. Then he chuckled to himself once more, flicking the butt, still smoldering, to the ground.

Walter’s production crew in the Number Seventeen worked hard that night, trying to haul out as much coal as they could. That slick and filthy stuff upon which their lives depended — made from the dead flora of peat bogs buried under three hundred million years of pressure and decay — ran through the mountains of West Virginia like the veins inside the miners themselves. Some of those men were on fixed salaries of sixteen dollars for an eight-hour shift, but most were paid by the ton loaded. An extra ton of that clotted mountain blood could mean an extra pair of shoes for a growing child, an extra pound of meat for a crowded dinner table.

Battler, who yelled because he was nearly deaf, worked up front. He was the miners’ favorite machine man because he was best at cutting the coal, making it easier and faster for the men shoveling it up. There was an art to running the machine that gnawed away at the bottom part of a seam of coal with its sharp-toothed cutting chain, and sheared away a space between the seeping wet floor and the rest of the face. Then workingmen like Suds and Dixie came in. They bored holes and tamped in the powder that would explode the overhanging coal into chunks like fist-sized diamonds, never letting themselves think too hard about the fact that the entire mountain was pressing down almost upon them. They’d shovel it up as fast as they could, loading it into a waiting coal car. When the car was full, one of them would drop in his check — a round piece of metal
that identified the loader so he’d get credit for the work once it was weighed. Hawk, the brakeman, would couple up the cars into a small train, and Petey, the motorman, would drive it out fast as a river through the cool, dank shafts, past the power station that electrified the whole operation, all the way to the tipple, where it was weighed and washed and driven away by steam engine to power factories and plants and homes all over the Mountain State and beyond.

Walter checked his watch. Tipping his turtle-shaped headlamp up — never higher than chin height, so as not to blind a man in the darkness with sudden light — he shouted out to the men. “Shift’s over. Let’s go.” Then he lifted his lamp toward the golden door.

Cramped and bent from eight hours of stooping labor, they climbed into the mantrip that had whooshed them to the mine and now spilled them back out into the dark night.

Liam said aloud, as he’d practiced, “Damn it all. Tomorrow’s dead work, ain’t it?” Dead shifts were for maintenance, not for mining.

Walter turned. “Yeah. What’sa matter?”

Liam made a show of sucking on his fresh-lit cigarette, then tossing it to the ground and stamping on it. “I forgot to put the batteries on. They’re gonna lay track, they’re gonna need ’em charged up in the morning.”

Walter nodded. “You go on. I’ll do it.”

Liam raised his small-fingered hand. “My mistake. I’ll take care of it. ’Sides, you got a wife waitin’ for you home in bed. My whiskey ain’t frisky, she can wait a while.” He chuckled low.