The Blackstone Commentaries (12 page)

“It's not my place to comment on Mr. Lamb. You can hire a private solicitor if you're not satisfied.”

“And spend more money. Yes,” she said as though confirming one more disillusionment, though for the moment she sounded more bewildered than disillusioned. “We're not trying to make you feel bad. We didn't ask for this to happen, Sheriff Dugan, and we don't like debt. It hurts people. Takes away their freedom and pride. You've got to know that—you've seen the consequences. You've seen it more than we have, we understand that. We've made our mistakes, but we've been trying very hard to live within our means.”

It wasn't self-pity. Hearing her, her matter-of-fact acknowledgment, felt like history, he thought, and more—a postmortem on a lot of beliefs, justice especially.

XII

Dugan

Alabama
.

“You can shut the door behind you,” he told the Carvers as they left, then after a moment looked up from the papers on his desk to find Loretta still there, looking at him, a quietness and sympathy in her look that were disturbing, like knowledge.
What the hell?
he wondered, irritated. Before he could speak, she turned and closed the door softly behind her, leaving him to the silence of the room.

It rained for most of a week
, he recalled, and what had finally come clear that day wasn't fear—at least not fear as most people tended to think about it. Yet a cave-in that buried his uncle alive—that left a scar on a hillside he could still see today if he went and looked, even with the brush grown in after almost fourteen years—had to occur before what he, Dugan, had not just tried to suppress over the years, but entomb alive, was irrevocably unearthed: the shame of having been born and raised poor. That shame in turn had been made doubly worse by the shame he felt feeling any shame at all, because of the love and respect his uncle had shown
him, treating him like one of his own children, offering him everything he could, especially courage and honesty. His uncle never had much else to offer, and had labored brutal hours for the little there was.

For all that, his uncle hadn't even looked gentle. A person had to withstand piercing eyes and congenital mistrust to find the mirth and kindness that Dugan had come to know implicitly. His uncle had been a quiet man, and soft-spoken when he spoke. Dugan couldn't remember him ever raising his voice, but he'd known never to cross him. Where he grew up, quietness was not unusual and not necessarily a virtue.

On that day, standing in the rain while people dug in the hillside, he'd felt the shame suddenly grow like an abscess. He'd smelled it in himself and become terrified it might burst through the wall of his soul and spill onto his clothes for everyone to see and smell in all its disgusting ugliness—all over the uniform of an official highway patrolman of the state of Alabama. But he had kept watching, outwardly unreadable and unmoved, as he'd always appeared to others, and would the rest of his life except to a very few, like Drusilla. And maybe Loretta Carver. All the time, the rain, his uniform and slicker, the hat on his head and the pistol on his hip had weighed him down, conspired to bury him then and there.

At first, friends and neighbors had stood with him just below the entrance to the mine, what had been a small hole in the side of the hill about fifteen feet above them until the “pillow” of coal, rock and earth separating it from another mine right above it collapsed. It was like someone had wounded the side of the hill with a chisel. Those friends and neighbors had expressed hope, it being just the
face
of the mine. He'd known it was the only reason they were there at all. People weren't usually dug out. There was no point.

After a while, they had just left him alone and focused on the work, though his being there hung over all of them, like he represented their dread, too. Then he heard a cry.

Standing a few feet from him were some official-looking men in suits and dressy raincoats who had come up from the capital, Montgomery, for the first time ever that he could remember. And to this day, he didn't know who had called them and how they'd gotten there so fast. But because he was a trooper, they'd shaken hands with him as soon as they arrived, let him know who they were. Until that cry, they'd huddled apart from everyone
else, trying to look at ease, even in control, like they had every right to be there, even though they didn't belong. With that cry, they shuffled to get a better look. They also moved closer to Dugan, as though he might protect them from whatever horror awaited. Or from the other onlookers, the ones who did belong there. He was the law. The Montgomery men obviously had no idea why else he'd be there; they didn't bother to ask.

That cry was not exultant, and he had to make himself look, knowing what he would see. The result couldn't have been otherwise, for things didn't happen any other way around there, and never had. What he had to look at would not just be his uncle's corpse. What was about to come clear was the way his life had become its own denial—that's how he put it to Dru a couple of years later—just by being there in uniform and standing for the law.
Whose law?
he would ask himself.
And what have I really been standing for?
Those two questions just about killed him before that day was over. But before that could happen, he had to embrace everything he hated.

And what in hell am I standing for now, right here in Blackstone County, fourteen years later?

“Wagon mines,” they still called them, though they hadn't been real wagon mines for years. Back then, in 1958, a farmer might find a seam of coal on his land and hire some men to dig it for him. Or a man would have a small company and hire men to dig. Or he'd just dig it for himself. There were big mines nearby, too, and a commissary up the road a few miles where the biggest mine had closed down by then. But that biggest mine hadn't been a wagon mine—they'd used electric locomotives in that one, with bare wires overhead that would kill a man. The big companies had begun to dig holes with drag lines and huge power shovels from the top down—virtual canyons, for a three-foot seam of coal.

Sometimes his uncle had worked for people. Sometimes, like that day, he mined on his own. “He wasn't too far in, Charlie,” one of the men, pale and gangly with thickly corded arms, who didn't look like he ever ate enough, said quietly when Dugan climbed the hill beside him.

People called them wagon mines for the wagons that once ran into those mines, sometimes pulled by regular mules and sometimes by itty-bitty ones, or by whatever it took, because often the seams of coal were so thin, two or three feet high. Many of the mines were one-man operations.
By Dugan's time, though miners still used breast augers and dynamite at the face, they'd gone to shaker pans to remove the coal, and the mules and wagons were a memory. All the same, he remembered thinking that day,
I can't believe this, I can't believe it's 1958 and there's an outcropping of coal someone found and went in to take out, and it's 1958, not 1858 or 1758, or 1558, for that matter, because what's really changed?

The companies that owned the big mines also owned the mineral rights everywhere, it seemed, so if you didn't work for the company directly and wanted to mine and worked for yourself, which became more frequent once the big underground mines started closing, because the company owned the coal to start with, you
still
worked for the company, as an independent, of course, a free man, the company paying you only for the extracted coal. How you did it was your own business, as were the consequences. No regulations to pay for, no benefits: for the companies, the coal was cheap and profitable.

His uncle was ghostly white when they pulled him out—what you could see through the black on his skin. With his flared, dust-packed nostrils, he'd looked like some giant, undernourished, mutant vole accidentally unearthed, his fingers still spread as though to hold back the falling rock and dirt. They carried his uncle down the hill past the crude wooden hopper he'd built into the hillside, a truck waiting at the bottom of the hopper for the next load. The truck was half full, a '47 Chevrolet with a dump body, no doors and a cracked passenger-side windshield gone milky in the middle, aimed downhill. Later that day, it would have taken its load to the yard down the road where the railroad left coal cars. Eventually it did anyhow, the price of that coal about all that was left for Dugan's aunt.

Dugan had gone into one of those mines only once, as a child. He was never supposed to. He figured his uncle would beat him silly if he caught him, his uncle who never beat him or any other child at all, who possessed a surprising gentleness where children were concerned, as though only in them was that which was truly lovable, possibly even holy, even if it was short-lived. The mine had been just a little over two feet high and pitch dark. All he'd carried was a flashlight, and the farther he'd gone in, the more he'd thought he could feel the earth above him, the weight of all the trees, the roots reaching to grab him in that tiny hole. But it had been the smell that finally got to him, a damp smell of the earth, a smell of something
unstable as life itself, only it was death, too. Deep in that hillside, the light had given out and paralysis had gripped him. He'd just known he was going to die there, that he would never get his arms and legs moving again.

The first gulp of fresh air, the first bit of daylight between his legs as he'd flailed his way backwards praying to Jesus and God, promising the world to both and nothing to himself, had hit him like he'd been born again. He had not lived until that moment, and all these years later he was still convinced of that. Coming out of the nightmares that had haunted him for months afterward, the cause of which his uncle must have guessed, he would count how many times his uncle must have torn his way out when a ceiling collapsed, surviving, spitting, terrified, unable not to go back because it was his work, what he did best. Too, there was pride in his uncle's knowing that few had the courage to do it at all, and that no man on earth could order him in there.

It paid just enough for the men to survive and raise families, because there were still enough of those hand-dug burrows and men willing to work them, and enough coal in the ground, despite the fact that the big, deep mines had closed, that the railroad was willing to maintain its spur track and haul the coal away. Though it hadn't looked that way at all, in his imagination he'd see his valley like pictures of mud cliffs where thousands of birds dwelt, swallows or something, all those mines you wouldn't think could produce peanuts but filled entire coal trains.

The federal government wouldn't make it against the law to dig in those little mines until around 1968, but maybe that was because no one knew they existed before then, or at least believed it. He often wondered.

After his uncle was found, the men in the suits from Montgomery moved away to confer among themselves. They signaled to Dugan to follow close, as though he, in his highway patrolman's uniform, was some kind of talisman, like he was theirs and they could say whatever they wanted in his presence and feel safe.

A representative of the company was also there that day, though not the soft kind of man in a suit, already shrill with disclaimers, that the Montgomery people half expected and knew how to handle. No, it was someone everyone who lived there knew too well. He was a heavyset, jowly man in khaki pants and shirt, wearing a battered fedora with his slicker.
He wasn't unlike the rest of the miners except for his ruddy, wind-burned face and his bulk and the look in his eyes that was cold, even murderous, but not contemptuous. The silence that always seemed to surround him couldn't be breached even in the imagination. He ran the yard behind the chain-link fence into which the locomotives eased the big black coal cars, and he paid the miners their tonnage.

But the Montgomery men didn't know him and evidently didn't care. “You, there!” they called, like he was some kind of servant. “You with the railroad?”

“No.”

Not “No, sir,” Dugan noted at once. Just “No,” the man's eyes as cold and murderous with that bunch from Montgomery as with everyone else. It wasn't even personal. But the men in suits didn't see the look because they didn't have to. They didn't care. They had protection—Highway Patrolman Charles P. Dugan himself and whatever else made them the government.

Dugan had known that yard boss most of his life and knew he'd always been miserable. The miners and their families always handled him with extreme care.

“Are you with the company, then?” one of the Montgomery men asked. “These boys work for you?”

“They work for themselves. We supply the market.” The man was like a fighting dog, a pit bull maybe, Dugan thought while he stood there in his uniform watching, the image of obedience and law and order. He watched that yard boss disdain the men from Montgomery, even if they disdained him equally. Dugan didn't like the man, but he wasn't afraid of him either—he'd sometime before concluded he could handle him if he ever had to, he just couldn't hesitate if the time came. No matter the man's bulk, he'd seen that the yard boss possessed the astonishing swiftness of reflex any creature has that lives in brutality. It was, if nothing else, the inescapable result of limited expectations, Dugan thought. Men like the yard boss were the most dangerous kind, or so he'd concluded at the time. They had to be restrained by threat because they were no longer able to do the reflection needed to believe in and submit to any laws but those of superior force and pain. That was all they'd ever known. Any instinct for something
kinder had long ago been kicked out of them; they learned early to not even whimper.

But that day, Dugan had come as close as he ever did to sympathizing with that yard boss, even admiring him, because the man hadn't budged before those Montgomery people, hadn't cared what power they believed they had. He'd known his job, and what they thought hadn't mattered a goddamn lick.