at my shirt buttons. Soon I stood naked and shivering in the knee-deep tub. I splashed handfuls of water on my front side while mother poured from a pitcher over my shoulders and back. I watched the black cake turn brown on my belly and arms, spreading into lines of grain before sliding off.
Mother circled to my front. In a brief, dread sigh she said: “Hands.” I turned the palms up to her like stolen goods.
My first night home from the breaker she had started at the rawness of my fingers. Now she studied nightly the cracked bulbs of index and thumb and tall-man, worrying to cleanse the crusted blood free and stave off infection. She squinted into my flat palm, webbed with lines where the filth would not scrub out. She bent each finger to discourage the swelling and keep movement. When I winced, she drew up her breath as if she’d pricked her own hand while sewing.
“It’s brutish,” she said to father. “It’s not only a gloveless boy that can pick slate.” She cupped my skull in her strong fingers and pushed my head down to clean my ears. “You could do it in mittens, couldn’t you?”
I rolled my eyes up to her and saw she was smiling.
“Yes mama, I could.” That pleased her.
I WENT TO SCHOOL AT NORTONVILLE SEMINARY. I AND THE OTHER breaker boys, knobbers, nippers, and spraggers all took our lessons each night in the lamplit schoolhouse on the hill. After a twelve-hour day bending over slate and rubble we had our baths and our suppers and then bent over our desks, composing prose exercises, working out grammar, and figuring equations with our blackened hands while the night edged into deeper, cooler darkness.
During the daytime hours, as we labored at our mine work, the schoolhouse bristled with children from New York Landing. They came up in the passenger car at the rear of the coal train because there was no school down where they lived. They left their carvings in the desktops for us to run our hands over. We thought of them as strange and simple, their lives lackluster—down in the flats by the water. Ours was a cosmopolitan township, a community of stoic and well-rounded people. What kind of folks could they boast? In my desktop, chiseled in narrow slanting letters, was the name J. G. Cobalt. This person wasn’t real to me.
Our school prefect was Gregory Evans: a dwarfish man with big yellow eyes that seemed to roll like marbles in their sockets. He talked in a soft way through his pinched nose, dolling out lessons like forgettable sermons and throwing a lamp-lengthened shadow over our desks.
Josiah Lyte taught the elder students of the seminary. I encountered him often, though I was not yet under his charge. As school let out and a flood of kids followed the path of light that spilt downhill from the schoolhouse door, the curious apprentice would stop me with one waifish hand at my shoulder. Always he fixed me with a protracted gaze, his nervy pupils scaling me from head to foot.
“Young Witherow,” he said one night. “How are your studies getting on?”
“Fine, sir, thank you.”
I watched my schoolfellows scatter down the hill without me.
“Does Mr. Evans please you?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Of course you wouldn’t tell me if he did not.”
“Did not what, sir?”
“If he did not please you. Mr. Evans. As a teacher.”
I was silent. We stood in the half-light of a schoolroom window.
Lyte leaned toward me and murmured: “He’s a nincompoop and a terrible little grouch of a fellow. That’s what you wish to tell me, isn’t it?”
I faltered from answering. My feet stirred in their boots, but I did not move.
Lyte snickered. A stream of breath poured from his nostrils. He drew a finger along the brim of his hat as he looked up through the night air. “Well,” he said, “though I’d favor that judgment of character myself, I can tell you that Mr. Evans knows his teaching. Learn from him. Learn well. Then you’ll be prepared for my lessons.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He says you excel in his class. Not that I’d have doubted it.”
For a long minute he stood gazing down the hill into darkness. I was unsure whether I might take my leave. He looked on the verge of speaking again at any moment, so I hung there in that dim light before him. Finally he turned to enter his classroom, gesturing for me to follow. From a row of shelves behind his desk he brought out a small book with a marbled cover, an ancient-looking thing, which he placed in my hands. “Here’s reading for you,” he said. “A special lesson.”
I squinted at the book. Faded characters on the spine read: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Arthur Golding.
“I’d much rather you had it in Latin of course, but there’s no helping that. Mr. Golding will serve you well enough.”
The volume felt soft as kidskin in my hands, its edges turned in with use. The covers were fragrant with the yellow smell of ownership.
“Seeing as you’re to be my pupil soon,” said Lyte. He stood back from me grinning, as though measuring the effect of his gift.
I thanked him and bade him good night and started down the hill toward home. In the darkness below, the Main Street lamps burned reddish, and in the valley lay a glinting stitchwork of house lights.
{3}
DIM DAYS AND DARK NIGHTS—TIME ROLLED PAST IN THIS PLAIN equilibrium and only Sundays were punctured by light. I began to wear the darkness in my skin as father did—coal dust creeping through the slits and cracks of my hands, wandering under translucent flesh, spotting me. Around this time I also came to know the more furtive shadows—the shadows within, around which my body was closed like a canister; the shadows without, which lent me form like enveloping satin.
One night I moved alone through the darkness toward home, a schoolhouse window glowing high on the hill at my back. Only sound told me where I walked: the subdued thud of my feet in the dirt, then the rustle of grass—but was I in the grass?
From nowhere, a body slammed into mine. Stiff limbs forced me to the ground and my books tumbled into the blindness. The pages made a fluttering noise. I heard wild laughter and the scuffle of feet as the figure released me and stood.
“You’re a cinch, Witherow!”
“Motion, is that you? Thomas?”
“It’s like you just ask to be thrown down!”
I sat up and tried to distinguish his shape. I made out a slight contrast in the blackness.
“That’s how Boggs can whale on you like he does,” Thomas said. I felt him close beside me, sitting down in the dirt. “But you’re smart for that I think. It’s stupid to fight some things. Sometimes you shouldn’t fight.”
I saw a gray plume in the air and began to will his face into form. I could make out an outline. A brow and nose and mouth.
“Why’d
