Big Stone Gap (10 page)

I can hardly wait for Friday because it means Iva Lou is coming through with the Bookmobile. I wanted to call her at home, but I didn’t because I wanted to tell her about Mario da Schilpario’s picture in person. I can’t wait for her to come to town, I’m too nervous and excited, so I drive down to her first stop in the Cadet section, just south of town, where she is parked by the side of the road. Iva Lou is sitting in the driver’s seat of the Bookmobile, eating a sausage biscuit. I holler from my car window, “Are you alone?”

“Nobody showed up yet. It’s slow as Christmas.”

I park my car next to the Bookmobile and join her. “I think I found him. Mario.”

“Lordy mercy!” she shouts, and jumps up and down. The Bookmobile rocks back and forth like a boat.

“Careful, Iva. We’ll flip over.”

“Honey-o, don’t worry. This old thing doesn’t have to last much longer.”

“Why? Is the county springing for a new one?”

“No. But old Liz Taylor is gonna have a fried-chicken dinner over to the Coach House when she’s here to raise money for our very own library. This could be it, Ave. The Big Time.”

I sit down on my snap stool. Why does this upset me? Am I that attached to this truck full of books?

“I know you love this unit, but a library! Imagine all the books we can git if we git a whole big building!”

“You’re absolutely right. I am being selfish.”

“The state said they’d match whatever she came up with. Can I put you down for a couple of tickets to the dinner?”

“Sure, sure.”

“It’ll be fun. We’ll get Theodore for you, and I’ll scrape up a date. Lyle Makin has been chasing me of late, and I just might let him catch me. He’s nice and he’s got a good suit. But, Lord, forget all that. Tell me about this man you think might be your daddy.”

I show Iva Lou the book; she scribbles down some notes.

“Sanka?”

This time I accept her offer. She pulls a sack out from a shelf and offers me a pink coconut snowball from the dry-bread store. I take it, tearing off one small piece at a time as I tell Iva Lou about the night I found my father in the book. She listens intently, following my every word.

Big Stone Gap has never been so atwitter. Theodore is in constant rehearsal for the halftime show; Nellie Goodloe has taken over the organization of the library fund-raiser chicken dinner; and I’m writing letters to government agencies in Italy, gathering information about Mario Barbari. It’s as though the Blue Ridge Mountains around us have been peeled back and we’re being discovered by a larger universe. This is equally thrilling and troubling. There is something comfortable about life the way it has been; who am I to upset the cart?

With all that’s happening to me in my private life, the responsibilities of the Pharmacy still need tending to. I’m inspecting a new shipment from Dow, Fleeta is manning the cash register, and Pearl is doing inventory on our medical supplies when the familiar mine whistle blows. The coal mines are closing for the day; soon town will be filled with truckloads of men returning home for supper. I look out over my little staff as I fill prescriptions, and I feel very secure. Then the whistle blares three times in quick succession. It’s not the whistle of the day being done; it’s an emergency whistle. Something bad has happened up at the mine. We kick into automatic mode. Fleeta helps me out of my white jacket and into my Rescue Squad vest, and I grab my first-aid kit. I hear a horn—it’s Spec—and I jump into the ambulance. The whistle blares three more times. Spec cannot drive fast enough.

We speed up the mountainside to the mine. The road is not paved, it’s pure gravel; we kick up dust and are pitched to and fro in the grooves carved out by coal trucks. The smoke on the entrance road is thick and gray, which confirms my suspicions that there has been an accident inside.

The first thing we do is pull up to the check-in hut, which is close to the mouth of the mine. Here each miner, before he starts his shift, leaves a silver tag bearing his name. He wears an identical tag on his belt, so his whereabouts are known to the company at all times. In an emergency we rely on these tags for a head count. There are three tags left on the board; only they remain inside the mine: A. Johnson, R. Harmon, and J. MacChesney. I take a breath. “Come on, Ave. We ain’t got all day,” Spec says as we move to join the other Rescue Squad staffs.

There are four “holes,” or entrances drilled into the side of the mountain. One entrance leads the miners to their work areas; one is for the conveyor belt, which transports the coal out; and the other two are for ventilation. There is a high level of methane gas underground, and the slightest disturbance can ignite it. There is no smoking allowed inside, but pockets of deadly gas can ignite without warning. Inspectors check the methane levels throughout the workdays and nights, but the miners travel as far as five miles into the mountain; there is always the threat of danger. As we get closer the smoke becomes deadly black, so the explosion must be deep. Rescue squads from the surrounding towns pull in around us. I see station wagons from Appalachia, Stonega, Norton, Coeburn, and Wise.

Spec and I await orders from the mining supervisor, who is on the radio to survivors in the mine. The stretchers are filling up fast. Most of the injuries appear to be from smoke inhalation. Hopefully, the situation inside is not too bad. In our favor: This is a new mining site, so the construction within is modern.

Spec and I are told to join the unit from Stonega. I can’t see because of the smoke, but it wouldn’t do much good anyway. The supervisor shows us a map of where the explosion took place: at the third level, about five miles into the mountain.

When I trained for the Rescue Squad along with volunteers from across the county, we toured a coal mine. I remember looking forward to it, like a field trip. We dressed like the miners: one-piece coveralls; rubber knee boots; the hard hat and light; and the belt to which we attached a power pack for the hat light, an ID tag, and a mask to convert carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide in case of an explosion. Miners are required to wear safety goggles; everyone does. It is also recommended that the miners wear a protective cloth mask while they work to decrease the inhalation of deadly coal dust, but most find it difficult to communicate and work while wearing a mask, and since they are not convinced that a mask prevents black lung anyway, they usually skip that step.

I had romanticized the underground, thinking it would be cryptlike and eerily beautiful. Instead, it felt ominous from the moment we climbed into the transport car. The cars are shallow, tin canoes that hold about ten people. The entrance ceilings are low, so you lie down most of the trip; on a deep excursion it is nerve-racking and uncomfortable. The only person who is allowed to sit up is the driver; he operates the car on the tracks with a wooden pole connected to the electrical lines rigged on the ceiling. There is not much conversation during the ride, but there is a lot of chewing and spitting. The men chew tobacco to keep their mouths wet, as the air is very dry within the mine. The temperature remains about fifty-five degrees year-round.

I thought the interior of the mine would be black, like dirt, and well lit. Instead, the main source of light is our hats, and the walls are white. After the coal is extracted, the miners spray the walls with a white rock dust that is nonflammable, so in case of fire the mine won’t turn into an oven, roasting its own coal.

Our guide explained that each car carries a work crew to a particular area. Advances in technology introduced a machine called the Continuous Miner, which actually extracts the coal from the wall. The work crew is there to load the coal onto a conveyor belt, once it has been extracted by the machine. After an area is mined, a crew places timbers on the sides and walls to create channels and shore up the walls so they don’t collapse; then the roof-bolt operator and his team come in to bolt the ceiling with giant screws so the men can dig more deeply into the mine and extract more coal. The roof-bolt operator has one of the most dangerous jobs; more miners are killed by rock slides than by explosions. The guide explained that these men have superior hearing, and the slightest cracking sound is a signal to move his men out immediately. There isn’t much to be done in a serious rock slide, except try to excavate the men. In an explosion, you hope they can crawl out the shafts to safety, if they can see their way through the smoke. The other threat to the miner is flooding. A man called the pumper travels through the mine during the shift and pumps out water, as there is no way of predicting underground water sources.

I remember feeling I would suffocate as the car plunged deeper into the mine, and I became more fearful as the tunnel behind us became a black river with no end. The dimensions of the mine kept changing, too. Sometimes it seemed almost large, like a cavern, and then the car would push through to a space so tiny, my arms could reach from one wall of the tunnel to the other. I never felt that I could hold my head up without getting whacked by a beam or a crossbar.

There were constant reminders of impending doom: gas meters that would sound when noxious fumes were emitted from the earth; machinery programmed for automatic use that could go off without warning and cause injury; and then, of course, the dust. You can taste it, and when you breathe it into your nose, it is a little like trying your first cigarette. At first it seems foreign and you resist it. But eventually you forget about it. Coal dust penetrates the skin and fills the lungs, causing all sorts of diseases—the least of them cancer, the worst of them black lung, all of them painful, protracted illnesses that cause slow death. The thing that surprised me the most was the sound inside the mine. It was deadly quiet. This was a feeling of being buried alive. I wondered how the men do it each day. I couldn’t.

Coal miners in general are practical men. I get to know them long after they quit the mines and are on black lung benefits. That’s when they need their meds, and believe me, they need a lot of them. If it isn’t the lungs that go, it’s repetitive injury to the joints from the picking, the loading, the hauling, and the lifting. In the same way that the mountains are depleted of coal, the men are spent by taking it from the earth.

Mining is a family tradition; usually sons follow fathers into the mines, and their sons will follow them. There are amazing stories of bravery, and I think of them as I stand and await instructions. In the 1930s, Wesley Abingdon was a local hero because he refused to give up during an accident—he took the train car, threw the men into it, pedaled out, threw the men out, and went back for more. He saved about thirty men that day, and those thirty men told their thirty families, and so on. Wesley gained saint status in these parts.

A couple of years ago there was an incident that upon repeating sounds like a folktale, but I witnessed it, so I can tell you it is absolutely true. It was late spring, and the mountains were just coming into their green. The whistle sounded, and we assembled, just as we have today, to assist in the rescue. The supervisor had determined that all the men were out but one: Basil Tate, a young miner, was still unaccounted for. The problem with explosions is that it is very hard to determine the cause until after they happen, so they are very hard to prevent. Fire and smoke are wily as well, and a good miner figures this out and works with it. The mine rescue team was deciding how to proceed, how to find Basil, when a rumbling was heard from deep in the mine. It started out softly, but it sounded like it was coming toward the exit. I will never forget what happened next. The rumble became a blast. Dirt and black smoke poured out of the entrance, and then we heard a pop. We looked up, and there was Basil Tate, flying through the air like a human cannonball. The explosion had created a vacuum, with Basil in it. Then fire propelled the fumes—and Basil—like stoking a cannon to fire. The crowd watched the spectacle in awe. Was he alive? We followed the body up over the hill and down the mountainside. Basil landed by the creek, on soft mud. We were certain he was dead. When we got to him, he was unconscious, his body contorted in an S shape. We could tell from his position that he had broken his neck and his legs. But there was still a pulse, so we wrapped him up carefully and called for a chopper from the University of Virginia to fly him out for emergency surgery. Basil was in a body cast for close to two years, and now he works the box office at the Drama. We call him the Miracle Man.

The mining supervisor, a buttoned-down city type, not from these parts, shoots me a look that says, “What are you doing here?” Spec picks up on this and tells him, “She’s with me.” I ask an intelligent question about the explosion, and the foreman’s brow relaxes like he’s decided I’m okay and can stay and be of some help. He is a foreigner, too, but that’s where the similarity between us ends. His demeanor and condescension are a perfect example of why locals don’t like these company men. They come in with an attitude.

As explosions go, this does not appear to be a bad one. There is no fire yet; the smoke is from a power gash near the mouth of the mine. The mining foreman is trying to explain the location of Level Three to the company man when I look up and see Jack Mac crawling out of the air vent with Amos Johnson. I hear a scream as one of the wives runs toward her husband. She is held back as the rescue team from Coeburn tends to him. I run toward Jack Mac as he turns to go back into the mine. The foreman shouts at me to stop him. Jack Mac turns and looks at me. I tell him, “Rick is still inside.” Two of the company engineers try to stop him, but he throws their hands off of him and goes back into the mine. The foreman chews me out for releasing information and tells me to stay behind the line and wait for the injured.

The worst thing about these accidents is the lag time between men going in and men coming out. The waiting periods are filled with silence and some muffled weeping. For the most part, folks don’t cry; accidents are an occupational hazard, and there is no sense worrying until something actually happens.

Spec is miffed at me because he’s been rendered impotent by my big mouth. Spec likes to get in the middle of things, and now he is a sideliner. Twenty minutes go by. Still no Jack Mac. I feel horrible guilt about this. Why did I tell him about Rick? Couldn’t I have left it up to the company men to come up with a rescue solution? Didn’t I know that Jack Mac would never sit and wait for them to do something? A hand is placed on my shoulder. I turn and see Sweet Sue with a look of total terror on her face.