a clear view of that dark opening - eight feet wide and little more than six feet high. In shadow now, it was just an inky smudge against the hillside.
Back when he was working in Number 6, Benny sometimes would imagine the portal was a whale's mouth and he was Jonah, about to be swallowed up. A cable was stretched across the entrance, bearing a warning sign that read: “Danger. Keep Out!” The sign had been put up the previous September, not long after Benny got a pink slip in his pay envelope. All it said was, “No. 6 Mine will be shut down until further notice.”
There was never an official explanation, but a story in the Charleston Gazette quoted the mine manager as saying the closing was due to “changing market conditions.”
Rumors had been floating around for weeks that a shutdown was coming. But nobody ever imagined it would be permanent. Nobody imagined the company would just close the door and walk away for good.
“Danger. Keep Out!”
They're not just shittin', Benny thought, envisioning the dark, narrow passageway that sloped back into the mountain before plunging straight down 200 hundred feet into a maze of low, dank tunnels stretching out for hundreds of yards in all directions. It was definitely a dangerous place. Dwayne had lost his arm down there. Charlie had lost his life, and so had lots of other men including Benny's maternal grandfather, James Carson Early. He was killed in a 1928 explosion that left a dozen widows and more than 20 fatherless children. It was just one of the periodic mine disasters that had ripped through Appalachia since 1900, terrible events that pretty much were accepted as the price of doing business in the coal industry. An example of the industry’s attitude had been made crystal clear in the early 1970s when, in the wake of the collapse of a poorly designed coal waste dam, which led to the deaths of more than 100 men, women and children, a coal company spokesman called the tragedy “an act of God” in an obvious and callus effort to shift the blame away from the company’s negligence and put it in the lap of the Almighty.
Yet, despite the danger, the dust and the darkness, Benny missed the job. Sure, he missed the big paychecks; but he also missed sitting around with the men in the lunch hole, trading sandwiches and shooting the shit. He especially missed the sense of urgency and purpose, the noisy machines, the banter of the section crews as they pulled together to meet their production quotas.
He even missed the occasional fights.
More often than not, the fights were about little or nothing, just a way of blowing off steam and releasing built-up tension. Sometimes, however, they were about women. Benny had had several fierce battles in the lunch hole and had the scars to prove it. And while some of those fights stemmed from actual transgressions, some were simply the result of his reputation as a ladies’ man. For a time, back in high school, everybody called him Butch Cassidy because of his faint resemblance to Paul Newman, even though Benny’s hair was dark and his eyes were hazel, while Newman had much lighter hair and famous blue eyes. Also, at 5-foot-11 and 190 pounds, Benny looked more like a linebacker than the wiry outlaw Newman portrayed in “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.”
Dwayne was still thinking about the mine war.
“I’m pretty sure it was 1920,” he said. “Can you imagine anybody just walking off and leaving a nice building like that?”
Benny shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they'll come back someday. There's still plenty of coal left under these hills. The mine office is still in pretty good shape, too. But it won't be for long, not unless somebody does something about that washed-out corner.”
He pointed to a section of the foundation that was being undercut by a small runoff stream. The rivulet, now just a summer trickle, joined with several others further downstream to form Cabin Creek, a shallow, trash and rock-strewn stream that snaked some 12 miles down the hollow before emptying into the Kanawha River a few miles east of Charleston, the West Virginia state capital. The creek’s name harked back to the days when squatters' cabins dotted the lower part of the hollow.
That was before the coal companies arrived. After pushing out the squatters, the companies began building a series of small communities composed of rows of identical plank houses. The first coal camps went up a few years after the turn of the century and soon were occupied by a mixture of job-hungry Negroes who came from Virginia and were willing to risk their lives in the mines, and the impoverished eastern European immigrants who were arriving in droves and, like the first generation of free blacks, also were eager to provide the back-breaking stoop labor needed in those early mining operations. Recruiters would meet them at the docks in New York and Philadelphia and bring them straight to Cabin Creek, where they worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week.
It was an era when the coal seams were blasted with dynamite charges and then shoveled into small hopper cars pulled by mules. Safety was an afterthought and probably wouldn’t have been thought of at all except that explosions and roof falls tended to halt production and threaten profits. The mules and miners were expendable as there were always plenty more animals and immigrants available to go into the mines that were being sunk into the hills and hollows across the region.
Everything was automated by the time Benny entered the mines. The coal mined by his fellow workers was shaved from the seams by large, electric-powered machines that then pushed the coal onto conveyor belts that took it outside to the tipple, where the rocks and dirt were sifted out before the cleaned coal was loaded onto railroad hopper cars. Long gone were the shovel-wielding miners who had blasted the seams with dynamite and the mules that had transported the coal from the mine.
Initially, in the earliest days, the coal from Cabin Creek was put into bushel baskets and loaded onto barges bound for Cincinnati and other points downstream, via the Kanawha and Ohio rivers. It later was shipped out on the rail cars, with most of it going northward to fire the Pittsburgh steel mills or provide electricity for the growing industrial cities of the Northeast.
Sitting on the truck bed, Benny wasn’t thinking about those early days; instead, he was musing about the role gravity played in coal’s formation. After all, it was gravity that had pressed all those endless layers of rock and silt down onto the giant, prehistoric plants that, ever so slowly over eons, had been transformed, first into lignite and then into bituminous coal, known as “soft coal.”
West Virginia, which later broke away from Virginia in 1863, during the Civil War, was still part of The Commonwealth when it was first discovered that vast deposits of coal and natural gas lay beneath the region’s wild, heavily forested hills and hollows. The first commercial mining ventures began in the late 19th Century, some 20 years later, a time when the new state was still thinly populated. The early settlers of western Virginia were mainly poor Scotch-Irish immigrants who had begun drifting into the region in the early 1800s. Looked upon as ignorant heathens by the wealthy, slave-owning Tideland residents, these “hillbillies” lived off the land and supplemented their meat-heavy diets with edible wild plants and the few vegetables they were able to grow in the narrow, winding hollows. They also made corn whiskey and produced a crop of first-rate fiddlers.
The first miners were paid in company script, private money minted by the coal companies. Script could be redeemed only at the issuing company’s store, which also would give credit to the miners, many of whom wound up “owing their souls to the company store” as noted in Tennessee Ernie Ford’s popular song several decades later. Those men who sought better working conditions or disputed their credit account, often were fired and ejected from their company-owned homes, thus subjecting themselves and their families to the prospect of starvation in a one-industry region that offered few social services.
Benny stood up and stretched. “I'll bet that old building would last another 50 years if it wasn't for us termites and that runoff ditch,” he said, pulling Dwayne to his feet. “I've got my wind back now. Let's go look for those virgins.”
