A coal mine is a singularly ugly place, she thought, especially in winter. There was barely any snow left on the ground, just a few piles here and there, frozen solid, ice cubes of coal dust and mud and hydraulic fluid. Pieces of machines lay everywhere, some with giant teeth to literally chew the coal out of the rock. It wasn't quite cold enough for the mud to freeze solid though, it covered truck tires and shoes, the blacktop of the road was slick with black icy mush that was half coal dirt. The wind whipped a few flakes of snow around, took the smoke from their lips as soon as they blew it out.
“How long's it been now?” her mother asked, again. She asked at least once every ten minutes.
“Six hours, forty minutes,” she answered, looking around to see if she was right. It seemed time would hurry up, an hour before she knew it, and then ten minutes would seem an eternity.
“Seems like the Twilight Zone, hard to tell, idn't?”
The women nodded their heads, the men just looked at her, .
“Ya'll comin' back in the office? Get some coffee, a sandwich?” the superintendent offered.
“Yeah, I'm just gonna smoke one more cigarette,” one of the women, a wife, said. “I'll be back inside in a minute.”
Janine couldn't stand to go back in the small trailer that served as the office at the mouth of the mine. It smelled of kerosene and sweat and burned coffee. There weren't enough folding chairs, so the women sat while the men stood, everyone listened to the CB radio.
“I'm gonna go warm up in my car,” she said. “Just sit for a couple minutes.”
She got in the car and started it, pointing the heat straight at her feet and face. The radio was on, she switched it off and listened to the fan blowing hot air around the interior.
She tried to decide what she should think about. When he left this morning, it was just the same. “Love you.”
“Love you too, be careful.”
No point thinking about that. Their wedding? Nothing remarkable. The day they went skinny dipping and decided to get married? She had fingered that memory enough for a lifetime, those thoughts seemed almost boring.
Her mind kept going back to the night he told her he had pawned her grandmother's rings.
“You don't want them to repossess my truck, do you?” he asks, his face red, his chest heaving. “Cause that's what's gonna happen if we don't make that payment.”
“We? What happened to you? You're the one that got paid two days ago, where's the money?”
“I told you I didn't work any that week,” he says, angry.
“Then were the hell did you go everyday?”
“Don't matter now, does it? Don't matter a damn.”
She put her hands in front of the vents so her fingers would thaw. She had left her gloves in the trailer and her hands felt like they been cold for days. She watched her hand reach over, apparently of its own volition, and open the glove compartment. The fingers dug underneath the insurance papers and the owner's manual to the stereo, packets of salt and ketchup fell out into the floor of the car. When her hand found the manila envelope with Meekum Coal printed on the corner, the thumb gripped it and pulled it out, turned it over, laid it in her lap.
She pulled out the health insurance papers, safety training booklets, a carbon copy of his W4s. On the bottom was the life insurance policy, she scanned over it, came to a list on the back. If her husband died of cancer, she followed the dotted line, she and her children would receive $35,000. If he died in an accident, $50,000, if that accident was on the way home from work, and determined to not be his fault, the policy paid $65,000. Skip to the bottom, if he died at work, inside the mine, through no fault of his own ….......... $500,000.
She squeezed her eyes shut and shoved the papers back in the glove compartment, slamming it closed.
“Hey baby, oh I've missed you,” her husband, then her boyfriend, rolls over, his eyes barely open. The bed is next to a window. Outside it is morning, snowing, and the light is diffused by the white sheets and blankets, he seems to glow. He pulls her to him, wraps arms and legs around her, smiling.
“You can't miss me, I've been here with you all night,” she laughs, presses her ear to his chest, listens. He is so warm, as if his body is radiating heat just for her. He speaks very softly, almost a whisper.
“But I was asleep, I missed it, I missed being with you.”
She pulls her head away, looks into his face. He is completely sincere, she doesn't know how she knows this. She laughs as she rolls onto her back, pulling him on top of her.
Her hands were finally warm, she could almost fall asleep in the car, just for a minute, she was suddenly so sleepy. She leaned her head against the window, closed her eyes. TAPTAPTAP. It was the mine superintendent, motioning her to come on, hurry. She started to simply close her eyes, lay the seat back and sleep, but no, he was running into the trailer. She turned the car off and followed him.
There were several men in the trailer, members of the mine rescue team, covered in oily dirt, their eyes rimmed with black, like a punk rocker or a Pharaoh. They waited until everyone was in the trailer.
“We got down to Three Section, some of the self rescuers were gone but we didn't hear anything,” one of the team explained. “Our monitors went off, but it hain't real real bad. The water's raisin' pretty fast.”
She waits for a summary. They will tell her where her husband is, detail the plan to bring him out, and then execute that plan. Like some TV movie, this is where the music swells and a montage begins, preparations, equipment, they go into the mouth of the mine, come out with her husband, dirty and grateful.
But they just stood there, looking at their boots.
They called it a raft, but it's really just a bunch of logs lashed together with yellow nylon rope stolen from the mine. The river is barely moving, it's so hot and humid their skin is sticky as soon as they get out of the pick-up. They put all their gear, which consists of a cooler of beer, a tackle box, fishing rods and plastic bags with cigarettes and a lighter, on the raft and push off from the river's edge. They float, not bothering to fish much, mainly drinking and talking, laying back and turning red.
When they can't stand the heat any longer, they find a deep spot in the middle of the river and jump off. Her feet hit the bottom, toes sinking into the slime. She pushes off, her head breaks the surface of the water and he is treading water next to the raft. She swims to the shore, he pulls the raft and drags it out of the water. They sit, catching their breath.
“We can bring the kids here, when they're big enough,” he declares.
“Whose kids?” she wonders if he said something while her head was underwater.
“Well, ours, of course. But we'll need a boat,” he turns and looks at her, takes her face into his hands.
“We'll need the kids,” she whispers.
“We'll make 'em,” he tells her. “They'll be beautiful.”
She went home to check on her children. One was asleep in her bed, her fat little behind up in the air, face smashed against the mattress. Her three year old was watching Sesame Street and eating cereal. Her sister looked at her when she came out of the bedroom, searching for a clue as to what to say. Of course, there wasn't anything, so she simply hugged her with one arm.
“It's been a long time,” she said..
“Remember those miners in Pennsylvania? They were underground for days, Jennine.”
“Yeah, you're right, I'm just tired and scared, I suppose. I swear, that man has been hard on me, ya know it? On top of all the other shit, now he goes and does this.”
“Hey, you were the one hellbent on having kids, not me,” he tells her. “Ain't my responsibility. You want to go to work? I'll stay home and take care of 'em, you go crawl between two rocks and bust your ass.”
He sits down and stares at her, daring her to contradict him. She does not, they are, in fact her children, and she will be damned if she will act as if they are a burden.
“Well, I'm going to take a shower while Timmy's asleep, if you could listen for him to wake up.”
She stands in the shower, exhausted, her muscles relaxing under the hot water. She hears the baby over the noise of the spray.
“Janine!” her husband shouts. “He's up!”
She walks into the living room where her husband sits, covered in coal dirt, with her clean pink baby on his lap. She picks up her son and goes into the bedroom. She refuses to let her husband see her cry.
When she got back to the mine, no one was in the parking lot. She went directly into the trailer, everyone turned to look at her when she opened the door.
“We didn't want to drill down along side the shaft,” a member of the rescue team was saying, “but we think it may be the best thing to do.”
He drew a diagram on a dry erase board showing the angle of the shaft going down into the mine and the path the drill hole would take. She looked out the window just in time to see a TV satellite van pull into the lot, and a very clean, very neat women in sensible shoes and a low cut sweater get out.
“Looks like channel three's here,” she said. “One of ya'll gonna have to talk to 'em.” She looked at the Meekum officials, each of whom stared at one another in turn.
“Its gonna be a long night,” the superintendent said.
“Timmy! Daddy's going to work, you want to kiss him goodbye?”
She puts a sandwich and an orange in her husband's lunch bucket, thinks again, takes the orange out to peel it. He doesn't like to touch it with dirty hands any more than he has to. She peels the fruit and puts it into a plastic bag, puts it back in his lunch.
“Bye Daddy,” Timmy says, reaching his chubby arms up towards his father. He picks up the child, kisses his face, his head.
“Bye Bubby, take care of Mommy for me.”
“I will Daddy.”
“And your baby sister, right?”
“Yeah, I'm the daddy when you gone, right?”
“When I'm gone, you da man!”
He kisses her, he is gone.
She used some of the kids' construction paper to draw a diagram for her family illustrating the plan to drill down into the mine. Her mother and mother-in-law seemed to think it was a sound plan. Her father seemed dubious, but didn't say anything, to express doubt would be to say he didn't think her husband would survive, and that, of course, was unthinkable.
Her parents were at the mine, her mother-in-law in bed with Deidre, her baby. The other children slept together in the king-sized bed in her bedroom. She found herself writing a column of figures, how much was owed on the mortgage, the cars and various other debt. The total was less than $500,000, but she didn't even let her figures get to that point, she took the crayon and made concentric circles over top of the numbers and let herself, finally, cry.
Her father-in-law lies dying, and although he has been seriously ill less than a week, he has been drifting in and out of consciousness for three days. Her husband doesn't know what to say to his father when he rouses, so he just stands there saying, “I'm here Daddy.”
When his father wakes, her sister-in-law gets a cool cloth and wipes his face, talking to him about baseball. It's October, World Series time, and his beloved Reds are playing. She tells him the scores and who has batted and who is on deck. It calms his father while her husband just stands there, mystified. She follows him out to where he sits in the waiting room crying. He isn't crying because his father is dying, he is crying because he doesn't even know how to talk to him, when it is so obvious.
'How selfish,' she thinks, 'he's dying, and you're feeling sorry for yourself, and you don't even know it, that's how deep it runs.' She sits down and puts her arms around him, pitying him.
The news stations had been eclipsed by the networks, all set up in Waynesboro, with its one hotel, fast food places and a Wal-Mart. There were strange faces all over town, which added to the general unease. These people would be gone tomorrow, everyone who lived here knew, but what was happening here would become part of who they were. Waynesboro will no longer be the name of a small town, it will be the name of a mine disaster. As Janine pumped gas, a reporter came up to her, a woman who looked vaguely familiar.
"Excuse me, aren't you Mrs. Murphy?" the reporter lady asked, whipping out a notebook.
“Yes, I'm Janine Murphy.”
“You have a husband at Meekum, he's in the mine?” the reporter seems to be fact checking herself.
"Yeah, I suppose you want to know what it feels like to have a husband stuck 1000 feet underground, no air and water rising, right? You want to know if this is the fear we live with every day, how the stress affects rednecks. Show your viewers some gripping uncertainty?"
"Actually, I was just wondering if you had a digital picture you could send us to run with the stills we got at the mine today," the news lady said. She tore off a sheet of paper. "This is my producer's email address, if you find one, we'd appreciate it."
She got back into her rental car and drove away.
They have just bought their house, it is empty save for some home canned peaches left in the kitchen and boxes of old tablecloths in the closet. They walk through the rooms, planning where they will put the couch, where the Christmas tree will stand. They want to make love in the house, but they decide to wait for the bed. Instead, they lay on the carpet and plan.
"And when we're old," her husband says, "we'll have the grandkids over for ice cream in the summer, out back. But not all the time, we'll want to be alone a lot."
"What if we don't make it?" she asks, in a I'm-kidding-but-not-really kind of way.
"Oh, we'll get old, and take care of each other," he says.
No, I mean what if we aren't together when we're old, what if we break up?"
” Why would you ask that?" He doesn't say it accusingly, he is genuinely curious.
"No reason," is her answer.
They were standing on the track at the portal. The press has been pushed back, but their lights still shine on the mouth of the mine. The sound of the mantrips gets louder, closer to the surface. They know some miners have survived, some have not. Nine men were behind the fall, four have died. She is in the back of the group of wives, not really feeling anything at all. She is cold, she wants to get warm, that is her only conscious thought.
The mantrip comes out, several men get out, the whites of their eyes is the only part of their faces she can make out. She walks toward the men, looking for her husband.
Ruth Webb is a columnist and reporter for a very small newspaper in Central Appalachia who is trying her hand at short stories, with the obligatory novel in the works.
Her fiction has previously been unpublished.
ISSUE:
W I N T E R
2011-2012
ART FEATURE:
An Introduction
to Deltiology
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