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Harlan County Horrors (6 page)

BOOK: Harlan County Horrors
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Edgar knocks away another thick shard of night with the pick
and retrieves it from the cavern floor. This hunk drips like the
rest, covered in the thinnest sheen of what they all can only think
of as ice. Unseen vapor, like breath, rises a far piece beneath the
earth to unhurriedly freeze again within the unending walls of
coal. It is so fucking cold, it burns through gloves and skin,
through bone. Through everything, Edgar dumps the shard into his
pushcart, then bends to retrieve his pick. The movement is as
natural as breathing, and the blood and ooze from his blisters
trickle and tickle down his wrists.

A
foot away, Riley Spurlock lies slumped with his back against one of
several roof-support timbers. Dropped lifeless like a discarded rag
doll. He’s left the mine just twice in the past week and has spoken
only in gibberish. He hasn’t moved in hours and holds the pistol up
to his own face, just above the bridge of his nose, just like he’s
prayin. He’s been sitting like this for hours now. The Colt his
father’d brought home after time with Company F and the 47th. He’s
shown it to Edgar many times before. It’d killed two Rebels in
Tennessee, Spurlock has claimed, and shot a few rounds at the
“battle” of Catron’s Creek. But the river’d been too high that day
and nothing much had come of that. Catron’s Creek…can almost see
it. Can’t remember exactly when he, himself, has last seen home.
Ever since they’d opened the new quarry, after the very first
wagons and gondolas were filled. When the mules and pony wouldn’t
budge no matter how hard you beat them. When they noticed there
weren’t any rats down here. When some of the men didn’t never come
back. He’s heard some things, gossip, but don’t really know. Not
really. There is still too much to be done here.

The
old Colt finally fires.

When the pushcart fills again, Edgar will need to roll it over
Spurlock’s legs.

3.
Humilitas

Company camps were empty of anything not directly related to
coal. Every building, every tool, and each living soul. The Freedom
K.Y. Coal Company was founded in 1914 and managed a dozen such
camps along the Wallins Creek and down through Puckett Ridge. All
combined, the company employed just over one hundred men, pulling
in sixty thousand tons year, and was in land negotiations to double
that in 1919 [Note: It never happened. Freedom K.Y. Coal Company
closed that same Spring.] In most camps, there was a three-story
tipple at the head of the hollow where coal was collected from
different mines and sorted by quality and size into coal gondolas
for shipment down the W & B.M. railroad. Everything else grew
out from that. The ancillary train tracks and donkey trails. The
piles of slack coal. The one-room company store and miners’ houses
that dotted both sides of the hollow. The houses, each one painted
yellow with red trim, were always brushed over in a fine coating of
coal dust. Sometimes black, but the next glance a strange yellow,
like when you smash a lightning bug. It depended on how the
sunlight caught.

The
community church, in what had been the flagship camp of Rockport,
was above the tipple and painted white, yet always looked grey. On
Sundays, miners from the other surrounding hollows walked or
wagoned many miles to reach it. Families marched into the camp on
the rails to keep out of the mud, on tracks that still ran right
next to the old church. Boys sometimes played among the cars there,
pulling the L-shaped brakes for a hiss of air to get nasty stares
and a scolding from any nearby men. If too much air was released,
the car could simply roll uncontrollably back to the bottom of the
tipple where someone might be killed. This miniscule possibility,
naturally, was part of the boys’ excitement while their mothers
gossiped at the water pump and smaller children played for a short
bit before heading home again. Further above the tipple were
several two-story homes called “Silk Stocking Row,” where
management and their families lived. Beyond that, only more
trees—the leaves of which gave the barest trace of turning—and more
hills.

There, the boys sometimes spied Black Shepherd, a shadowy
muleskinner who could run his team of Percheron horses up any
hollow in any weather in half the time as the next best carrier in
three counties. He lived in the hills alone and came into camps
only to pick up and deliver company supplies and shipments from
other villages in his wagons and high-runner sled. [Note: Court
records in Lejunior say he was also a bootlegger.] He was either
part Cherokee or part Shawnee. Or part black man, maybe. Either
way, the man had never set foot in a coal mine, would only once in
his life, and yet his skin was always as dark as night. Most, even
the men who’d worked with him, considered him a bit of a monster. A
man best to keep away from. The bigger boys sometimes yelled
“nigger” and threw railway rocks toward him, but none was ever
close enough to hit. He just stared back and usually moved on again
whenever church started.

Reverend Enoch Osborne said when church started. For seven
years, he’d given the gathered coal camps sermons such as (to name
only a few):
Rules
for Thinking Alongside the Good Book, The Fixed Costs of
Resurrection, Dancing with The Prince of Lies, The Value of Souls,
The Virgin Birth of Evil, The Seventh Hallelujah, Fasting and
Faith, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Vanquishing the
Cardinal Sins, Accepting Our Divine Responsibilities,
and something called
the
Contest of
Souls.
Osborne
often spoke a hundred words in a single slow breath and always
pronounced Hell as
‘Ayell
with
two syllables and without the H. “That weeeeah, my brathes and
sistas, may altogaytha of the same mind and conformnity with the
Church and Holy Bible, if they shouldda term anythin’ to be black
which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought, in like manner,
pronounce it to be black, for we mus’ without-a-doubt believe the
Speerit of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Speerit of the Church, by
which Speerit we are’all governed and directed from the damnations
of ‘Ayell to the Lord’s Salvation, be the same!”

Originally from Tennessee, Osborne was a stocky Baptist who
chewed Shoe Peg tobacco and could spit it in your eye from twenty
feet away. He’d once accused Owen Ledford of adultery in front of
the whole congregation and actually shamed the man into a public
confession. He’d whipped Solomon Fouch once while simultaneously
scolding the parents for neglecting his Christian upbringing. There
was a rumor he’d stabbed a man in Nolansburg. Even the roughest
boys lined up quickly when he finally stepped outside to call
everyone into service

Still, one Sunday in September, Osborne could not get their
Salvation started on time. Some of the adults had been arguing. And
their voices, despite Osborne’s reproach, eventually grew louder
and more violent into the biggest shine anyone’d ever seen. Men
threw punches. Someone’s jaw shattered when a large rock was
thrown, and others wrapped a dirty rag around the man’s head to
hold it in place.

The cause had been the men from Mine Three. The few who’d
actually shown up for church. Others remained working back in the
mine and, after the commotion was settled, Enoch Osborne gave the
whole congregation a three-hour sermon regarding the Sabbath.
Before that, however, all eyes were on these four men. They
were
wrong
. All
four still wore their work clothes, each filthier than the last.
Stiff with dried sweat. Drenched in coal. Their faces and arms
darker than Black Shepherd’s. Like walking shadows. Hair greasy and
matted with dirt. Disheveled. Unshaven. From the smell, clearly
none had bathed in a week or more. Some had cuts on their hands and
faces. One face covered in red oozing cysts.

Their wives and children embarrassed, certainly. The rest of
the congregation both dismayed and appalled. Reverend Osborne riled
to a chilling silence. The four men themselves, it was later
recalled, didn’t seem to care at all. As if they hadn’t the
faintest idea what everyone else was fussing about. Didn’t even
fight back when the hostility started. Ultimately, they were driven
away. Back to their own camp, their families in tow but at a
distance.

When church was finally over that day, the rest of the
congregation stepped back outside. One boy, who walked alone with
his mother and sisters because his father was one of the men still
working, and his brother was home sick, noticed this: Black
Shepherd still in the woods above the church. The criminal
muleskinner who looked like he was made from coal. He’d not moved
in three hours and was still watching them all.

4.
Temperare

Edgar has not eaten in thirteen days.

His
shirt and jacket drape oddly now, and the bones of his clavicle and
sternum show. The exact shape of bones in his arms and wrists show.
Here a while back, his pants slipped off. Skin collecting at his
knees and elbows.

The
chill of wet coal courses through his whole body. He drops another
handful of coal at the mouth of Mine Three and then shambles back
toward the darkness below. His body needs nourishment again. The
grass and bushes just outside the mouth of the mine are already
picked bare.

He
does not know that the word Hell—or
‘Ayell
as his minister often calls it—derives from
primordial sounds like
helle
,
hellja
, and
hölle
, and from the Hebrew word
sheol
. Or that these words, forgotten words created by a
dozen different lands, all translate easily to mean "hole" and
“cavern” and "hollow” and “to burrow.” Or even that each and every
one also has a secondary meaning: “to hide.” He’s never heard these
words before. And yet, he understands.

Two
others already squat over the bloated mule carcass.

Flies coat its putrid flesh and their green eyes glint like
mysterious African jewels.

He
kneels.

5.
Caritas

The
boy hides in the woods. He knows about bobcats and bears and
panthers and wild hogs. And Indian ghosts and witches. He is more
afraid of home.

Mother does not talk anymore. His sisters just cry and are
filthy. His brother is still propped in one of the chairs on the
front porch. Sits there each day and night. Never moving, like
something resting in its crypt. And no one else will move him. It
rains on him. The
bandages on his arms are sticky and yellow. The porch floor is
still stained black like coal. Their father does not
return.

Their hollow is twenty-six miles from the main road. They have
eaten all of the canned food. The train does not come anymore. He
hears that the mines are shut down until further notice. That
management in Rockport says it is only typhoid.

Another man walks into their house a week ago. Mr. Schaffer. A
Hungarian who doesn’t speak any English. He is completely naked and
looks just like a skeleton. Deep black sockets for eyes and a
jawbone and skull etched just beneath his coal-blacked skin. He
takes food and sleeps in their parents’ bed. He leaves after a few
hours, taking their only milk cow. Two days later, it is another
man. The boy does not know him and he hides in the latrine behind
the house. For two days he hides and does not even come out when he
hears his sisters screaming. They, and his mom, and the man are not
there when he finally comes out.

He
runs to find his father but all of the men at the mines and
wandering about camp now look the same. It takes another day before
he finds the two small fingers on a left hand clipped off just
above the knuckles. He finds them on a man he does not truly
recognize just outside the mine. His father is a night thing,
completely covered in ancient dust from miles beneath the world.
The clothes tattered and black. Bones already protruding in barbed
angles out of his coated skin. His father does not recognize him
either. Just stares as he would at any boy, any thing, any lump of
coal.

The
boy is now hungry and roots in a cold stream for
crawdads.

It
has rained, a biddy drownder that fell on him all night, and a
dense fog rises in the surrounding hills. On mornings like this,
his father used to say that the groundhogs were making coffee over
a fire. He misses his father. He misses setting rabbit boxes in
holes with his brother. And tying Mother’s sewing thread around
June bug legs. And playing to hunt for Indians with his friends.
And then pretending to be Jesse James. And his mother’s chocolate
gravy. And spending a single coin of copper scrip at the company
store for a chilly imp or birch beer and some peanuts. Making silly
faces at his sisters. He misses the whole world.

He
reaches back into the icy water and turns another rock.
Not
hing. He thinks
of the
wives' saw
that you can turn a horsehair into a snake by putting it under a
creek rock.

Just like his father turned when they put him under the
earth.

This is precisely what the boy is thinking about when
Black Shepherd grabs
him.

6.
Castitas

Females were herded into the mine. Each woman and girl placed
into two clumsily crafted pens there. Those who tried to flee were
killed there in the dark.

BOOK: Harlan County Horrors
8.28Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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