“I promise.”
Benny watched in the rear-view mirror as Junior leaped onto the truck bed, grabbed the torch and leaped back down again, seemingly without effort.
“I don't believe gravity affects that boy at all,” he said, starting the engine.
They bumped down the narrow hollow, hemmed in by the steep, green hills rising on either side. The creek was on their immediate left. A long row of crumbling stone foundations poked through the weeds on the right. Behind the foundations was a smoldering black slag heap 20 feet high and half as long as a football field. Thin, acrid curls of smoke seeped from its surface, like steam escaping through the pores of some giant, sleeping beast.
A visiting reporter had once described the smoking gob pile as a “black volcano from hell.” But to the folks who lived along Cabin Creek, it was just part of the landscape, a stinking, worthless pile of discarded rock and slag that sometimes, when the wind blew wrong, made it hard to breathe. There were slag heaps all over the hollow, but this was the only one that was burning at the moment.
It wasn’t uncommon for these smoldering refuse piles - they would ignite, go out and then reignite from time to time - to claim the lives of the unwary, especially on cool nights. The victims often were young boys who had scraped together a few beers and snuck off to clandestinely drink them while perched atop the gob piles for the warmth they emitted. But this cozy refuge also gave off toxic fumes that eventually would overcome their victims, whose scorched bodies would be found the next morning, looking like the mummies pulled from the Egyptian pyramids. Later, federal grants eventually would be used to remove these toxic eyesores but not before they had made their contributions to the coal industry’s continuing body count.
Benny and Dwayne had driven a little over a mile when Dwayne said, “Russell's got no call to talk like that, especially about his own brother.”
Benny waved him off.
“He's an asshole. Forget it.”
“But, you'd think...”
“Dwayne, I said forget it. You know how Russell is. He only cares about Russell; he’s always been that way, least long as I can remember.”
Dwayne paused, and then said, “Benny, you think they'd really flood the hollow?” I mean, there’s still lots of coal under these hills? And lots of people live along the creek, especially down at the lower end. The old folks like my mother, your dad and Grandma Early, why they've lived here for years and years. You think they'd run them off and flood their places?”
Benny couldn't imagine his grandmother letting anybody run her off of Cabin Creek. His earliest memories were of being curled up in her featherbed, snuggled against her while she told him for the umpteenth time about how the coal company gun thugs had evicted her, her husband and their children, including Benny's dad, from their company-owned house.
She would always start out by saying it was the dead of winter. Then she would tell how the company thugs came in and started grabbing her things. He could remember her exact words: “They set us out in the middle of the road. They even shoveled the hot coals from the stove and put them in a bucket. We all huddled around that bucket out on the road until them coals burned out.
“After that, I decided if I did just one thing in this life, I would own my own home. And I do, thank the Lord.”
Benny would invariably shiver as his grandmother recalled that terrible winter and how she had awakened many mornings in a tent, with frost in her hair.
He had never seen his Grandpa Early, who was killed a few years before Benny was born. But Benny felt as though he knew his grandfather because his grandmother had told him so much about him. How he'd fought the coal operators who tried to keep the union out of Cabin Creek, how he borrowed a top hat two sizes too big to wear the day they got married, how he'd always liked his eggs fried hard, same as Benny liked his.
There was at least one photograph of his grandfather in every room of the house, even the bathroom. His grandmother talked to them as she went about her day. “Carson,” she'd say, she always called him by his middle name, “we've got to get out and get those `taters planted 'fore they go bad.” Or, she might discuss the peculiarities of a new boarder or the some news event, like how the latest war was going or how much she liked the Kennedy brothers, even if they did talk funny and were Catholics.
Benny had grown up in that house. His mother had died in an upstairs bedroom when he was two, giving birth to his little sister, who had died the following day. Marvin never remarried. He worked in the mines and Grandma Early took in boarders. They kept chickens and raised a big garden. There was always enough to eat.
No, Benny decided, not even the United States Army could move his grandmother out of that house.
“Well,” Dwayne said, “what do you think?”
“Nah, they wouldn't flood this hollow. There's too much coal left under these hills. The companies would scream bloody murder, and we all know the politicians are scared to death of the coal companies. They've owned every governor since I can remember and this new one ain’t any different.”
Benny waved his beer at a small, hillside cemetery. “Another thing. There are lots of people buried up here. It'd be way too much trouble to dig up all those graves and then have to find another place to put 'em.”
Dwayne nodded. “That's where I'm buried, you know.”
“Your arm's buried there, not you, shithead.”
“Well, my arm's part of me, ain't it? It's buried beside my little sister, Rose. My mother put up a marker, didn't she?”
“Of course. That's all anybody talked about that summer. They said you'd lost your arm and your mother had lost her mind. Hand me that other beer.”
Benny hated to think about Dwayne's accident. He still got the creeps, imagining him down there alone in the dark, while the conveyor belt slowly chewed his arm off. Dwayne never talked about it, unless he'd had a few beers. It hadn't hurt much, just sort of like a big electrical shock, he'd say. But nobody believed that.
People hearing the story for the first time would ask why he didn’t yell for help. “Yell, hell!'' Dwayne would say, his eyes widening. “I screamed 'til I couldn't make a sound, but nobody could hear me over the noise of that goddamned mining machine. Besides, I was way back by myself, a good quarter-mile from the section crew.”
He had been shoveling up loose coal around the conveyor belt when a belt wheel spindle hooked the flap on his coverall sleeve.
“My hand was caught before you could say `John L. Lewis.' Then, the damned belt started pulling me in, inch by inch,'' he told Benny the first time they talked about it.
Conveyor belt accidents weren't uncommon in the mines. In fact, another boy down the hollow had lost an arm the same way as Dwayne, only he'd broken his arm three times during the half hour he was held prisoner, trying to keep the belt from pulling him all the way in. Finally, when there was no more bone left to break, he'd taken his pocketknife and cut away the last strands of muscle and skin from his shoulder.
“It was either that, or have the goddamned belt eat me alive,” he'd said one night down at Ida's.
Dwayne opened the beer and handed it to Benny. “You still havin' them dreams? The ones about the belt?” he asked, tossing the bottle cap out the window.
Benny
