Harlan County Horrors Read online

  Rough and tumble and full of hope, his little brothers, much younger than he, played without a moment's care. John and Mark, named from books of the Bible, often left Ernest feeling like the odd apostle out. John wore only blue jeans, his feet buried in earth as he ran a fire truck into a mound of dirt. Mark, who'd left one side of his overalls unfastened and drooping off his shoulder, paused at the wooden steps and stared at an overturned truck.

  Laundry---consisting of overalls and thick shirts---bowed the line from a tree to the trailer and shaded Gene Mayfield as he tinkered with his still. Other than the creases in his forehead, he had a smooth, jowly face. A cigarette was nestled behind his ear, though he hadn't smoked in over a decade. A reminder of who he used to be, it doubled as a constant test of himself. His left hand missed a thumb, though it wasn't immediately evident past his long fingers. He had been born in the house, delivered by a horse doctor, and had never been beyond the hills and proudly declared so.

  "Got your chores done?"

  "Yes, sir," the boys answered as a Greek chorus of innocence percolating mischief.

  "We got no sorry people around these parts. We ain't goin' to fool with 'em." Poppa turned to Ernest. "What about you? You ready for tomorrow?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I know you don't feel all good about this, son, but a man's got to do right by his kin. Muck is in your blood. Minin' was good enough for your grandpa, good enough for me, and good enough for you."

  "I know, sir." The mine would one day kill him, as it had his grandfather and as it chewed away at his father.

  "All right then." The words had an air of finality to them.

  Not self-reflective by design or intent, Ernest he knew he wasn't destined for much. He didn't dream of becoming a doctor or lawyer. Not a president or astronaut. He knew his place and wasn't about trying to upset the natural order of things. A lesson hammered home by Grandpa, he knew he had to be about his family first. Maybe his kids would be good enough to go to school.

  As if sensing commotion, Faye Mayfield came around from tending her garden out back and gave a gruff wave to the boys. They ducked into the kitchen only to bound out the door moments later eating ketchup sandwiches. Ernest sat on the porch, content to watch the boys play tin can alley. Faye leaned over him---her eyes, cold and grey, tired but strong, echoed a face fraught with worry---and placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.

  "Where have you been?"

  "Fishin' with Uncle Russell."

  "That man never was much good, but he's kin." She offered him a sandwich, but he waved it off. "Only yesterday, you were swimming in the water hole. A chubby little thing, your britches pulled up."

  "Momma, I'm fit to work and we need the money. It's a fine job. Good enough for Grandpa, good enough---"

  "I know, I know." Ernest knew he didn't have to explain it to her, though he tried to hide the bitterness in his voice. "Momma, you ever get the feelin' like you...I don't know...just didn't fit right?"

  "These are good men. They done real good by us."

  "I know, but sometime I just feel called to somethin' else," he said, though his place was beneath the earth. Muck was in his blood.

  "You should listen, then. At least hear yourself out."

  Dog started to howl as if it talked to the dead.

  Sleep eluded him, as it often did. His thoughts drifted down to a place of blackness, and like a line cast into a pond only to be pulled out again, his mind stirred in a fitful approximation of rest. A dark swirl of ideas and images passed for dreaming: a waking paralysis, a glimmer of grey floating above the deep waters of his thoughts.

  The morning was already hot, the air thick with the promise of rain. Spun with his own momentum, an inexorable foreboding pulled Ernest into its spiral as he and his father pulled up on their mule and wagon. The mine at Bob's Creek was technically across the main road and up the hollow at Mary Helen. The previous mining company had quit its operations after carving out all of the easy coal. The men knew they were doing little better than scavenging now, but desperate times---and a desperate company that pressured its managers to not let any complaints or regulations irregularities climb any higher than plausible deniability allowed---called for desperate measures.

  A two-room shed doubled as a washroom, consisting of a shower room and a dry room; street clothes and work clothes left to dry dangled from hooks above them, dozens of lynched bodies suspended from chain nooses. Mining belts, wool socks, gloves, steel-toed boots and headlamps with names emblazoned on the sides stocked the shelves. Only once Ernest had changed into his gear did the initial trepidation wear off enough for him to face the mine.

  The high voltage cables and the roof bolts heavy with rock dusting made for a forbidding entryway. However, Ernest felt his fear a healthy one. Electricity, dust, gas, explosives, machinery accidents; there were a lot of ways to go. The shaker conveyer advanced the coal, a tongue lolling out of the mouth of the mine shaft. Thick black glasses hooked around the jutting ears of Dewey Elkins, his face black with soot except for his eyes and teeth. His face was a filigree of wrinkles and forlorn crags; black gaps winked along the bottom of his smile. A slug of brown spittle from his mouthful of chew stirred the cicadas. Next to him sat Kenny Jenkins, the lone Negro of the bunch, swapping sandwiches and exchanging jokes. Dewey remarked for all to hear that he "didn't trust a man who ain't a little black," obviously his favorite joke describing his friendship with Kenny. With his thick sideburns and easy smile, Kenny surveyed Ernest, then the men exchanged furtive glances.

  "Don't worry, son," Gene reassured him. "Sometimes new folks make us a mite testy. When you're down in the mine, your life depends on the man next to you. So they need to know they can count on you. They'll come around to you."

  "I guess." The men's cool reticence didn't bother Ernest. He wandered past the men as he strapped his gear back on.

  "It's not so bad," Kenny said without facing him, as if talking to the cave walls. A massive individual, his broad white-toothed smiled dispelled any quiet menace about him.

  "You get used to it?"

  "I won't say that. But my family's gotten used to food on the table and jobs're scarce 'round these parts."

  "I just wanted more."

  "I know, kid." He walked toward the elevator. "The muck calls."

  The mine was as small and decaying as the town itself. Ernest didn't intend to work there very long, though he feared that was what his father had told himself, and his father before him. With each step toward the shaft, hope drained from his life. Only the vaguest idea of a future smoldered in his young mind.

  The elevator car creaked as it wobbled to life, a shuddering start as it lowered. For most of the morning, he wandered about near the mouth of the shaft, crouched within its four-feet-high confines, slowly acclimating himself to the low mine. Never straying toward the depths promised by the shaft, Ernest watched it descend. The steeply slanted roof prevented him from standing fully up. In a squat shuffle, the work, while not overly arduous, after years would take a toll. The tedium of their labors---no deviations from the daily rituals, no promise of higher opportunities---reduced, drained, and broke strong, vital men. Their good cheer masked dilapidated spirits, a resignation to their lot in life; meat puppets waiting to be ground by the company.

  Momma packed the lunch and probably would have brought it down herself if women coming underground weren't considered bad luck. Bologna between slices of white bread protruded from a sandwich bag. He fished for the canteen of coffee from his metal lunch bucket to wash it down, hating the taste of each. Yet eating among the rest of his crew, each sharing similarly bland meals, made him feel like one of them.

  "You scared, boy?" Dewey was a thick, no-nonsense man with hard eyes and silver stubble. Up close, his crooked yellow teeth---two uneven rows---were still stained with fresh brown spittle. Grey chest hair sprouted in tufts above the fall of his shirt. He spoke with a lethargic drawl.

  "No." Ernest turned to Gene, who stared straigh
t ahead and drank his coffee. He'd have to make his own way without Gene's help.

  "I can smell it on you. Don't let no fear demons get in the way of doing a good job." Dewey was now the superintendent, but he regaled Ernest with tales of how he used to cut timber to hold up the ceilings, before the roof bolters, and dug up coal with a number four shovel for eighty cents a ton. He'd joined the United Mine Workers in 1948 for ten dollars and had carried the card with him ever since...reminding Ernest of his grandfather.

  The thing about his grandfather was that Ernest had hated him and everything he stood for. His grandfather had been a breaker boy at age nine, breaking larger blocks of coal with a sledgehammer or picking rock or slate from coal as it left the mine. He'd graduated to a trapper, who closed and opened the doors to allow the coal cars to travel in and out of the mines---since the doors had to be closed to direct the airflow to the working face---still an unpaid apprentice in order to gain the experience. Ernest hated the way the old man had assumed he was just as simple-minded. A killer of dreams, drumming into him to aspire to nothing higher than mining.

  He'd died of black lung. The mines had killed him. Ernest spat at his feet.

  "You okay, son?" Dewey asked.

  "All of the stories you heard and dreams you ever had are true."

  Dewey held an odd frozen rictus of a smile on his face. "What about the nightmares?"

  "Especially the nightmares."

  "You're a very odd boy. Not at all what I expected from Gene's boy."

  "I get that a lot."

  Muck was in his blood.

  The desolate mine shaft stood, a festering sore among the landscape. The machines continued to pound. The wind picked up and the rain scourged the mouth of the mine. The drill struck from above, boring deep beneath the folds of sifted earth to find where the coal seam ran. The agitation of his heart, the racing of his blood, the asthmatic seizing of his breath---Ernest attributed his state to his deprivation of decent sleep, not to the opening in the earth. A mouth locked open in an eternal scream only truly understood in the night. The elevator compartment closed in on them, the thick wire mesh clamping shut like a jaw. The compartment rattled to life and then lowered. Over seven hundred feet of granite stood between them and daylight. The elevator opened into an expansive chamber: a crude coring of rock and a patchwork of beams and braces. A series of tunnels, capillaries carrying the flow of coal, sprang from the main shaft. Occasionally rapping a sounding rod against roof to determine the safety of the shaft, Dewey, with the regular rhythm of a sonar ping, dug holes every twenty feet.

  "He's digging test holes," Gene answered Ernest's unasked question. "If he got a trickle of water, we'd shut things down. Danger of tunnel collapse."

  "It's like being buried alive. Like we're already dead." Ernest placed his palm to the stone wall. It thrummed with life.

  "Miners expect death every day," Gene broke his reverie. "The air tastes sweeter. Your mother looks as good, or even better, every evenin' I make it home."

  The darkness held a sumptuousness to it. The air smelled loamy and sweet. Ernest knew a sense of home within the craggy vestibule. Filth crusted under his fingernails. Dust mixed with sweat, formed a grey grime. He wiped his face, smearing himself in earthen war paint.

  Ernest prepared to plunge his shovel into the ground, then suddenly froze. To the man, the miners stopped moving. They knew something had gone wrong before the sirens went off. The subtle shift of earth, the barest tremor, like exposed skin under a sudden cool breeze. The cavern shuddered, a cascade of stone and dirt followed by an explosion of dust. Earthen veins opened as a rocky tumult collapsed, leaving plumes of smoke.

  "No!" someone cried, his voice distorted by the cacophony of stone.

  Ernest huddled against the craggy rock; the song of a cave's silence exaggerated the noise of shadows. Every distant plink, every choking breath or stifled cry, every despondent moan, every shuffling, every shift of scree, landed in Ernest's ears with the force of exploding dynamite. Within the wan light of his headlamp, he stooped, cramped by the low ceiling, and he peered into the dark recesses, the sacred depths of the cavern. The feeder shaft was reduced to a bottled up earthen intestine. Many of the honeycombed passageways had collapsed. Twisted and corroded, the metal skeleton of the elevator crumpled under its own weight. Sparks jumped, ethereal will-o'-the-wisps, until the power finally shut off. Cut off from outside, the winds, cold and distant, and rain beating like the plaintive wail of a mother along a casket faded to a brittle memory.

  Ernest's jaundiced lamp dulled to a burnt orange glow; the light withered before the towering shadows as the failing battery sputtered. The outcropping of rock formed small chambers, barely man-sized nooks, which cut off their freedom in degrees. A faint groan emanated from the pool of cloying darkness. Something sparkled in the faint reaches of his light. Ernest inched along the claustrophobic enclosure, the passage reduced to a slot as rock scraped him on either side.

  "Poppa?"

  "I'm all right." Sprawled under the rubble of rocks, Gene propped himself up on his elbows. Bruises the shape of rotted apples dotted his skin, his body battered in a mosaic of wounds. His helmet was slung at a peculiar angle, his eyes wide and lost. His breaths came in spastic, shallow bursts.

  "Can you move?"

  "Yeah."

  "What happened?" Ernest hooked him under his shoulder and helped him up. Suddenly the man he called "Poppa" seemed very small.

  "Top was bad."

  "But it had been inspected."

  "My ass 'it had been inspected.' The company's gonna have the rock fall cleaned up before the inspectors ever get here. But they'll pay for this. It's our way. Someone does harm to kin, even if it takes years, blood is avenged. 'Blood for blood.' "

  "'Life for life.'"

  "It's all about kin. Come on, let's keep moving. The mine's no place to leave your ghost."

  "I think I heard someone this way."

  "It's all right to admit you're scared, son."

  "I'm not."

  The image of dust in the lone lamp beam added to his mounting dread, each breath becoming more and more of a struggle. He flashed his light about the cavern, scourging the shadows, then paused to listen and gain his bearings; each tunnel was identical to the last. The writhing darkness scattered the frail light of his beam.

  "Who's that?"

  "That you, Dewey?"

  "Gene?"

  "Yeah. Me and the boy."

  His face an ashen lump, Dewey was an echo of the man Ernest knew, frozen in terror with the dawning realization he was dying alone and in the dark etched in his eyes. The rocks had collapsed onto his waist and pinned him. His breath came in hitching gulps.

  "My rheumatism seems to be actin' up."

  "That might be the rocks on top of you," Gene said. They both forced a chuckle.

  "I sure could use me a cigarette."

  "I hear these things are bad for your health." His hands trembling, Gene put a cigarette in his mouth, though he wouldn't light it even if he could for fear of another explosion. The taste of the tobacco in his mouth seemed to be enough.

  "Tell my girl---"

  "Tell her yourself."

  A knot rustled in Dewey's throat. His chest stopped moving. Ernest brushed against the sandpaper scrape of his face and closed the man's eyes.

  A wail over the unsteady pounding of his heart broke the viscous silence. Ernest swallowed hard at the hollow howl of grief and abandoned hope. The endless darkness undid the men who lay trapped and dying in the dark. The scent of gunpowder charged the air. With a nod, he led Gene toward the sound. Despite the hunch of his posture, he found a foothold and inched his body forward. His fingers dug along the unforgiving rock walls. Scarred rock. His fingers scraped across the stone, studying the braille of the crevice. Runes, primitive calligraphy etched into the walls, each crevice a sarcophagus of stone. The passageway canted upward into an unfolding network. The black dust of coal reduced them to walking silhouettes.

/>   Ernest stopped abruptly. Gene trundled past, not noticing the niche in the cave wall, then sidled up alongside him. Rats, finely arranged in a crude geometry. Their bellies gnawed through, their furry bodies in varying states of decay. The state of deformity pregnant with meaning. The sense of otherliness, of transition, brought to fullness upon entering the caves. The susurrous, indefinable noises brought a measure of comfort.

  "Poppa, somethin' bad happened," Ernest whispered, overwhelmed by the reverence demanded by the room.

  "I know, but we'll get out, you'll see. I bet the rest of the men are already halfway through to digging us out." Gene's arm dangled at his side.

  "No, not this. To Uncle Russell." Ernest spoke with a grave sincerity.

  "What happened?"

  "We were fishin'. Sittin' there like we always did, feet dipped into the water, lines cast out. Not expectin' to catch anything---we never did---it was just our excuse to be out in the air. In the light."

  "Go on."

  "Poppa, it was like a fox raised with hens. They might play nice at first, but eventually the fox will remember it was a fox, and the hens weren't its playmates, but its prey. One moment we're sittin' there laughin'; the next, he suddenly looks like...food."

  "What did you do, boy?" Poppa grew even smaller in bearing. Pale, thin, and soft.

  "I didn't do nothin'. All of a sudden, his fishing line got tight. We stared at each other, stunned that we caught anythin'. He grabbed his rod with both hands, screamin' about what a fighter it was. Maybe a ten pound catfish. A shadow crept across the water. Next thing I know, somethin' yanked Russell into the water. He fought. Water splashed everywhere, a churn of pink bubbles, and then it stilled. The thing in the water...all I remembered were its eyes. Cold and grey. And I ran."