Harlan County Horrors Read online

  It's 1918, September 6th. Both men move strangely tonight. Father stares at his thick hands and lower arms as if he's never seen hands or arms before, slowly turning them over and over and over again. His mouth hangs kinda open as he smoothes the water and soap over the earth-blackened skin, stroking more than cleaning up, then touching his dirty cheeks and chin like a blind man as the barrel's cold water trickles down to carve tortuous grey rivers down his blackened neck and chest. The brother cleans just the opposite and scours his skin like he's whetting an axe blade or sanding a small piece of wood. Patches on his arms and a few knuckles are already scraped red. Other areas remain ignored, still completely black with coal dust. He hasn't even taken off his jacket or hat yet. Neither man speaks.

  Something happened in the mine, the boy decides, studying the two. The grimy face blank beneath the leather bill of his father's dirty cloth cap. Empty. The fiery man's eyes queerly sleepy tonight. Dead. His mouth, hands. Must have been something Bad. Another overhead collapsed, maybe, slate fall, shattered sandstone. Or a runaway coal gon careening down the track back into the mine. Someone probably got killed. Lost a hand. Some other miner's face half-smashed. His father always comes home extra quiet on these nights. The two smallest fingers on his father's left hand are clipped off just above the knuckles, a story from twenty years before. Who this time? Some other father or brother.

  The boy watches and waits without a sound. Eyes the lightning bugs emerging in the dark woods just behind the tracks that run parallel to his house. Thinks of his upcoming chores. Dragging the fire, letting the cat back in, blowing out the oil lamps, resetting kindling for the morning. Ordinarily, his father leaves him a small piece of cake or some horehound candy to find in his lunch bucket and nibble on while waiting during their nightly ritual. But there is no lunch bucket tonight. Forgotten back at the coalmine, looks like. Another sign something has happened. When he is twelve next summer, he will go to work with them. Ten hours a day. Sure is hungry. He tries to sniff dinner cooking inside. The hog fat dripped on the skillets. Fried potatoes, maybe. Biscuits. He smells only the usual wood smoke and coffee. Something else on the cool dusk air now. A funk. The stink of old sweat. His father and brother, sour. Like they are sick.

  Finally, his father shuffles away from the barrel into the house. He passes the boy without a word. The barrel has not taken away the smell, though his brother continues to scrub away. Scraping at the skin. The boy watches him for awhile, thinks of asking him What Happened, but then moves from the porch, too. His brother hasn't even looked at him. Inside, his father has taken his usual spot at the table as Mother bestows cornbread and a bowl each of soup beans and fried potatoes. The girls sit in their chairs waiting for prayer to begin. And for their brother outside.

  The boy slides into his chair and studies his father more. The man has placed his hands up on the table as if waiting for food, but the food is already there. His eyes move again to his hands, stare at nothing. "Somethin' happen?" his mother asks. They wait together but no reply comes from the man. "Darryl?" she tries again.

  "Cold," his father replies finally and rubs his thumbs against his fingers.

  "What's that?"

  "It's still so god damned cold." Rubbing, rubbing.

  "What's that boy doing?" His mother moves on from Somethin' Happen, gets up from the table. "The gravy's what's getting cold now. Paul? Paul!" She moves straight for the porch.

  Their father just stares at his hands and the boy passes quick looks of confusion with his sisters. The older one stifles an insolent laugh.

  Screaming. Their mother is now...screaming.

  The boy jumps. The smiling sister's eyes now as big and bright as a carbide lamp. Their father has not moved. His face the same. Untouched. More shrieks from the front porch. But his father accords dead eyes. Nothing. The boy slips from his chair. Outside, in the darkness, his mother is now sobbing. Gasping for air. He stands in the frame behind the screen door measuring her sounds. Mother has fallen back and collapsed against the chairs where he watches his father and brother each night.

  His brother still lingers over the barrel, and the light from the house casts through the door onto him, the boy's own shadow hiding some of it. At first, it just looks like his brother has put his work shirt back on and that the shirt's sleeves are ripped. Dangling loosely between his elbows and wrists.

  Then the boy understands it is flaps of skin. Hanging over the barrel. Uneven shreds between other lumps of dripping muscle. His brother's fingers even now gouging into the other arm. Scrubbing. Ripping. The porch floor is spattered in small round shadows. His brother's eyes are narrow and glassy with determination. He is might nigh smiling. The wailing by the chairs doesn't even sound like their mother anymore. Inside, his sisters are now crying. A flash of glistening wet bone. Still, his brother...washes.

  A hand on his shoulder, pushing him aside. His father. Moving out to the porch. He would...his father only reaches for his earth-stained overalls and hat. Dresses. Pays no attention to his oldest son at the barrel at all. Mother's wailing has ceased, her silence somehow even worse. The boy clings to the doorframe to steady himself. His father grabs a lamp and empty lunch bucket, ignoring the snapping of his firstborn's fingers. The boy and his mother watch together as the man steps slowly off the porch into the emergent darkness. His lumbering shadow moves slowly west toward the head of the hollow, back toward the mines. No words spoken.

  The boy's brother steeps both arms fully in the barrel, and rain water and blood flow as one over its sides. Mostly blood. The puddle grows out slowly toward the boy and shapes across their porch a shimmering black stain.

  It looks just like coal.

  2. Industria

  The newest run within the Number Three Mine has a bad overhead, and the water is ten inches deep in some spots. Three dead mules litter the low-sloped tunnel. None of that seems to matter. It's quality coal and, even without the mules, most of the men are still pulling out ten tons a day at fifteen cents per ton. Yesterday, Edgar'd pulled fifteen from the earth, dragging each load topside himself after they'd killed the mules. Hadn't gone home when the company steam whistle blew for second or third shift. There's still too much to be done here. The whole earth stuffed, pregnant. Bloated with coal.

  He isn't the only one working extra shifts for the Freedom K.Y. Coal Company. Digging until he just caint stand another minute. Replacing some of the others who haven't yet returned. Tunnels are crowded with miners shuffling past this way or the other with picks and carts. It is more than two miles to the surface. Some carry single lumps by hand. Many of their lamps have already burned out, and men keep on working in total darkness.

  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.