at a welcome touch. In these green days you could climb the steep Cumberland Rise to the plateau west of town and find the mountain restored to its truest appearance. Humped emerald against the sky, its hollows lay daubed in shadow, and at its foot the land flowed lush to the coast. The country spoke more vividly in these green months, like a voice cured of its long catarrh. The land seemed caught in fresh remembrance of how things had been in the beginning, in the age when mastodons plodded its swamps, long before the Spanish came with their yellow grass. The land bodied forth its remembrance.
In this season the earth felt more a home than ever the rest of the year. I plunged headlong into the autumn, sank to my ankles in mud, played in shoulder-high grasses. The country was already green when in December 1870, at barely seven years old, I went happily to work in the Black Diamond breaker.
That place was a hive of boys inside. We sat on slats astride chutes and hunched over a dark current of coal and slag, snatching at it with bleeding hands. Dust stirred thick up to the rafters and the rock in the machine’s teeth screamed calamitously, like a dozen trains smashing into each other at full bore. The clamor blurred our vision and made us brace our limbs stiff. Our ears numbed, but still that jelly of sound went on tensing each wire and plank in our bodies. We bound our mouths with kerchiefs to screen the palpable air. We crammed our cheeks with tobacco to keep the dust out of our throats.
Somehow the monstrous roar was worsened by the lack of light. The few high windows stood filmed with dust, and up there upon the thick beams that stabled the roof only a choked glimmer fell. We would watch that minuscule light sometimes, in the seconds between tumbling loads of rock, when the clouds thinned and began to part in the air. Then the squeal and crash of rock again and the rubble pouring down between our legs and the big cloud dimming everything.
I took to my work in the breaker. The haze in which I bent my head for hours, the black pollen of the earth which coated me so profusely that I stood every hour to slough off its weight: there was something in all of it to which I felt akin.
Within weeks I’d forged a strong camaraderie with most of the boys, but with one particular fellow the sincerity of friendship ran deeper from the beginning.
Not long before I started, the watchman Boggs had become breaker-foreman. Regularly—if not hourly—I’d feel the sting of his quirt at my kidneys, his rod would whack my knuckles, or he’d slap one of my insensible ears with a brawny palm. In a steer-like voice he’d bellow: “No idle hands!” or: “Head down, hard at work!” or: “Back is straight, miss the slate!”
One day as the black rubble poured down between my knees, a stream of slate skittered in from the next chute. I glanced over to find the boy next to me sitting straight on his plank. He arched his back and stretched his arms above his head in flamboyant languor, his slight knees jutting outward. He was a little fellow, with lean pocketed cheeks and eyes ringed in shadow like a badger. His kerchief hung loose about his throat, crumpled under a white mouth that flashed a coy smile my way. He kicked up another spray of slag, and the chunks of slate went bounding into the troughs around him. Then that naked smile vanished as the boss’s rod crashed down across his shoulders. He coiled over and took another thump at the small of his back. Even with the rumble of rock I heard him wheeze. Then Boggs’s phlegmatic growl: “Back is straight, miss the slate!”
The boy’s hands shot to work again and Boggs stepped back. I kept at my labor, resisting the impulse to turn my head. In my periphery I saw the foreman standing watch just behind us. For a long moment he was motionless, then finally he swiveled to pace to the end of the row, and I stole a glimpse at my broken neighbor.
The boy shot back an impish look. His grimy cheeks were veined pale with tears, but his smile flashed again. I thought I saw him wink, and then he was glancing down the row at Boggs. He stood fast with a big rock in his grip and flung it hard across the breaker. It struck the boss at the shoulder and burst in a spray of dust. Boggs spun around and came charging along the row of chutes. But Thomas Motion was already bent again to his labor, his bare fingers gliding over the rubble. Involuntarily my head snapped to the side. Boggs spotted the quip of my neck and thrust a blunt finger at me.
“Witherow!”
I bore his rage whenever he was unsure.
Without a word I stood and put out my hands, palms down. The force of the rod sent my arms whipping back like halter ropes yanked by a stud horse. I sat again and worked with dead hands. Left no choice but to sight what my fingers could not sense, I fought the welling tears. I did not turn again to Thomas, but I heard his voice.
“He’s a bastard,” he said.
I NEVER LOST MY APTITUDE FOR BREAKER WORK, HOWEVER RAW MY time in that place was. I met the darkness and the apocalypse of noise without resistance. Maybe I was built a little of blackness, a little of Nature’s bewitched side. The dead breaker boy Edward Leam skulked in that place, but this did not disturb me. New carloads came clattering at the back of the grinders and tumbled through the raucous chomp of the teeth and I heard the snapping of child bones. The loads rumbled down and I saw vertebrae spilling from the jaws of the machine. I saw rib and heel and hipbone, femur and thumb clattering in the coal and slate beneath me. The wave of black dust floated upward and grew umber in the thin light, and I saw it as Leam’s blood, dried and crushed to powder and mingling with coal dust, billowing out to bathe us. Leam was present every day like this. Every day he coated my person. Every day I snatched from the current his dismantled bones. And it wasn’t strange to feel what I felt: that I was reconstructing him somehow.
In the evenings when the whistle blew and the grinders groaned to a stop, I joined father as he stepped out of the throng of surfacing miners. We walked toward home, the sky black and starry overhead, our breath steaming. In my first week at the breaker he came to me—dark against the darkness—and drew from a shadowy pocket a white handkerchief and rubbed my face roughly till the kerchief was indistinguishable against all the other blackness. He said: “Well, Ash, are you changed?”
I tongued a hunk of tobacco from my jaw and spat it to the ground. “No, sir.”
A gray smoke rose from the chew. Father looked to it. “I know the necessity of that tar, but your mother needn’t.”
I nodded my understanding.
We walked down the grade of the company yard toward Main Street, where the light of the two whale-oil street lamps glinted copper.
“You’re strong, Ash. If nearly a week’s work hasn’t changed you, it may be you’re fitted for it, though I’d sworn no man was—and no boy at that.”
“But you’re fitted for it, father.”
“No I am not.” He stopped and cinched my arm in his deadlock grip. “And neither may you be. You have yet to crawl low after all. No man’s fitted for it. We endure. Me and all these men.”
He loosed my arm and stepped away. We went down into the flat hollow and to our house.
Father had felt this country’s allure like the keen draw of a woman. Every young man holds to an illusion willingly so long as it bolsters his courage in the face of a big intractable leap—so my father must have envisioned America as an illimitable plateau of soft earth pocked endlessly with shafts. He was among the first in that long race of deceived fathers, hungry for vision, who have so regularly peopled this country since its birth not long ago. But this has never marred his character for me. Both he and mother were pilgrims of a kind. And for a while anyway they found a sort of happiness despite their troubles.
Mother
