A Misty Mourning (21 page)

“Yeah,” I said and sunk my teeth into the pizza. Wonderful.
“Mine is candles. Light the place with nothing but candles and everything looks better. The whole world seems to fall in place and all is right. From a stupid candle.”

We were quiet a moment while we ate our pizza. “Baby keeping you up?” she finally asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I think he's laying a weird way. Everytime I lay down he sits up or something like that. So, I'm just not laying down.”

“That's fine for a while,” she said. “You gotta get tired eventually.”

“I have an incredible amount of energy, Ms. Tyler. I think my mind just shuts off the valve that says it's tired. Either that or I've convinced myself I'm a failure if I don't get thirty hours out of every day. It's a sickness, I'll grant you.”

“I was like that in college,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? Where'd you go?”

“SIUE.”

“SIU . . . Edwardsville? You went to Edwardsville? In Illinois?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“That's just across the river from—”

“St. Louis. Yes, I know.”

“That's interesting,” I said. “But you're originally from here?”

“Yes.”

“So, then. . . tell me what it was like.”

“What what was like?” she asked.

“In the coal town. Tell me what it was like to live under the Secret Service known as ‘the company' I've not read a whole lot, and believe it or not, my grandparents have told me very little,” I said.

“What makes you think I can tell you?”

“I think that the ‘story' you've got involves the coal company. Or something along those lines. I think you know more than anybody else that's here and willing to talk to me.”

She smiled and flipped her hair over her shoulder with the hand that wasn't holding the pizza. “You sure you're not a reporter? You're awfully good at this.”

“At what?” I asked.

“At asking the perfect questions,” she said.

“I don't think so,” I said. “I think I'm just incredibly nosy and just ask all the questions I can think of. Eventually one of them will be right.”

“Give yourself more credit than that,” she said.

“I suppose it's from tracing my family tree. You come to a dead end so many times on the same ancestor that eventually you start asking yourself some of the more improbable questions to try and solve the puzzle,” I said.

“Like what? Give me an example,” she said.

“Okay. . . like, I had this ancestor whom I could track to the census in 1860. His last child was born in 1863. After that he disappeared. I assumed he died, but because of the years, I couldn't get death records, and I could not find him in any cemetery around. Now, because it was the area that is now West Virginia, and because of his age, it never occurred to me that maybe he died in the Civil War. We all know that plenty of West Virginians fought in the Civil War, but because of its stance
against
the war, it actually became the state that it is today. My mother always told me West Virginia didn't fight. I found out later that isn't exactly the truth. But what happened was this. I found out my ancestor
had
gone off to war, and he died in a prison camp in Illinois. Thus, he was not buried anywhere in West Virginia. But because I eventually asked the improbable question, I found out that several other ancestors or ancestors' siblings fought in the war,” I said and took a drink of water.

“On my dad's side, there was this ancestor who just dropped off the planet after 1861. Not one person ever mentioned that he'd fought in the war. Not one. And my great grandparents knew him personally. So I checked it out, and sure enough. He not only fought but died in it. It changed my whole way of thinking. Anytime I
come across an ancestor who just dropped out of sight with no death record or will, I check to see if that was the year of a war. Any war. I can't tell you how many times this has helped me.”

She'd stopped chewing and was staring at me.

“What?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious.

“You should see yourself when you talk about your family tree. You get this glazed look in your eye, like you're visualizing the charts and stuff. You actually see your ancestors, don't you?” she asked.

“Don't be silly,” I said and blushed. It was true.

“Don't deny yourself that. That is passion. That is what makes the world go around. Not love. Not money. Passion. It is passion that drives everything,” she said. “It proves you are one of the living.”

“My point being,” I said, “that I suppose I carry some of that over into my real life. If I come up against a wall, I just back up and go at it from a different angle. Or I parachute down on it. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“Oh, completely,” she said.

“What made you want to be a journalist?” I asked.

“Same thing. Absolute burning desire to know everything. And if you tell me I can't know it, it pisses me off so badly that if I have to steal to know what I'm not supposed to know, I will,” she said.

“Wow,” I said, impressed with her confession. “So, then. You'll understand when I ask again. Tell me what it was like to live in a coal town.”

She smiled and prepared to tell me what I wanted to know.

B
efore the beautiful Sherise Tyler would tell me anything, she went and got herself another Rolling Rock and lit up a cigarette, apologizing again for smoking in my presence. I assured her that as long as she opened the window, I would breathe shallowly.

“I always feel bad when I read those statistics. You know, the ones that say some ten thousand children are admitted to the hospital every year because of second-hand smoke,” she said. “I feel bad until it's time to light up another cigarette, and then I feel bad for me. I'm terribly selfish.”

“Maybe you just can't commit to quitting,” I said.

“And admit I'm weak? I'd much rather be selfish,” she said.

“Okay, selfish it is,” I said. “Feel better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

For some strange reason I knew that she was wanting me to agree with her on this. It was some sort of penance. She admitted her guilt. I agreed. And then she could move on.

“Seriously, though. If it were bothering me too terribly much, I'd go get a gas mask or something,” I said, joking.

She laughed finally, ready to move on to telling me all about life in the coal town of Panther Run. She tied her long silky hair
in a knot, something I've only been able to do once in my life when I was very young and my hair was long and straight. She pulled her feet up under her and took a drink of her beer. I had a big sparkling glass of ice cubes and water.

“Okay,” she said. “First of all, your life was the company's. Throw out whatever patriotic notions you've got about freedom of speech and the freedom to go anywhere. Throw out the insane ideas that men are created equal, they get equal pay for an honest day's work, they have the right to improve their position. It didn't exist.”

“Go on,” I said.

“First off, the miner was paid by the carload. Not by the hour or even by the day. Which meant that the operators had any number of ways to cheat the miner. Which is why so many of the miners began bringing their sons in to work alongside them. To try and produce more coal,” she explained. “Which enabled all the money to go into the one home.”

“How did the operators cheat the miners?” I asked. I should have been taking notes, but I wasn't about to run upstairs to get my notebook and pencil. I had a feeling she was only going to talk for so long and that was it. I didn't want to give her time to think about it and change her mind while I was upstairs.

“Well, one of the ways was that the company got all of the coal that was knocked off or fell off the cars. See, the miner would load a car and put his number on it, and then it would go and get weighed, and that was how he got paid. The company kept anything that fell or got knocked off. That was coal that no miner got paid for, the company got it free and clear. In some cases, the operator would change the shape of the car to hold more coal. So instead of the miner taking a day to fill it up, he might take a day and half or two days, but still get paid the same amount of money.”

“Well, that's crappy,” I said. “How fair is that?”

“Fair? Throw it out. That word is not in the miner's dictionary,” she said.

“Oh, sorry.”

“Forget it. Second, the operators would enlarge the holes in the screens so that larger and larger pieces of coal would fall through, and these pieces were the company's, free and clear. And the operators weren't beyond rigging the scales,” she went on. “See, that's why the owner/operators didn't want a union. Because the union would threaten the operators' ability to make a profit except through the efficient production of coal. But that's neither here nor there at the moment.”

“What else?” I asked and took a drink of water.

“The biggest way the company really stuck it to the miner was by using what was called ‘scrip.'”

“Scrip? What was that? Some kind of bad coal or something?”

“No,” she said and put her cigarette out in the empty pizza box. Okay, that was gross. “Scrip was bogus money.”

“Bogus money. Forgive me if I'm sounding really stupid. It is one-thirty in the morning,” I said. “What do you mean, bogus money?”

“Miners were issued scrip instead of money. And scrip could only be used at the stores, doctors, barbers, and so on in town. And guess who owned the stores and barbershops and doctors?”

“The company?”

“Bingo. The company owned everything in the town. They owned the houses that the miners lived in, so who did they pay rent to? The company. In scrip. The company owned the doctor and his office. So who benefited from the miners' use of those establishments? The company,” she said. “The store carried everything from fresh produce to furniture, all with excrutiatingly high price tags. The miner was forced to patronize the very places owned by the company because his scrip was no good outside of the coal town.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said and held my hand up. “Isn't that a felony or something? Isn't that against the law?”

“Yes.” That was all she said. She did not elaborate.

My head hurt thinking about the horrible cycle that those people had been in, the desperation they must have felt.

“What's more, the company made the miners sign contracts stating
that they could be evicted after ten days' notice. There are stories of how peddlers would come through the town selling produce or something, and the superintendent or his henchmen would throw their wares into the river. They didn't want the mining families to patronize anything or anybody other than the company.”

“How would they be able to anyway if they were paid only in scrip?” I asked.

“Because sometimes their wives would make money from other things, like sewing or housecleaning in the next town. Or sometimes it was strictly a barter or trade. You know. I'll give you this brandnew pair of socks if you give me a pound of tomatoes,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “I understand.”

“Do you?” she asked. “The superintendent was the one in charge of all of it. He decided who would be evicted or who wouldn't. He decided everything. You know, it's hard to get ahead when every dollar you earn is in turn given back to the very company you're breaking your back for.”

“How horrible,” I said. “How did they ever break the cycle?”

“They either didn't or the union came town by town, company by company. The union opposed forced buying in the company stores and cheating on weighing and that sort of thing. Plus, there were an awful lot of miners' daughters who never married.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Meaning, they saw what their parents went through. They lived in a coal town; who were they gonna marry? Coal miners. They saw with their own eyes what kind of life that was, and so they stayed unmarried or else in the middle of the night they'd just run off and never come back. Thus breaking the cycle.”

I thought about Clarissa Hart taking off after the lynching of the company's superintendent. “Where would they go?”

“Most likely Charleston. Follow the river, and you end up in Charleston. From there you could catch a train or barge to anywhere. If you had the money. Some just walked until they dropped, and that's where they stayed,” she said. “It's quite suffocating to be
the child trapped in your parents' nightmare. Almost as suffocating as it was to be a miner.”

“Wow,” I said. “I can't thank you enough for all of this background. I had no idea.”

“That's just the tip of the iceberg. Things are a whole lot better for the miner today. But think about the living conditions back then,” she said. “The entire town was covered with a thin layer of coal dust. There were explosions and there was the risk of cave-ins. Most of the time mothers sent their boys, starting at eight years of age, off to that blackness known as the mine. They'd be carrying their lunch pails of food that the rats would most likely eat before they could get a chance to.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think I've heard enough. I probably won't sleep tonight, and it won't be due to my back for once.”

She smiled and downed half of her bottle of beer. “And then there were the deaths.”

“D-deaths?”

“Every family in a mining town could boast at least one son or husband who was dead or maimed. If your husband was a miner, you knew that when he went off to work, he might not come home.”

“Sort of like a cop's wife,” I said.

“Very much,” she said. “Except it's much more honorable to be killed in the line of duty while saving damsels from ne'er-do-wells than to be blown to bits in a coal mine. Or buried alive.”