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animal.”
    â€œHe took your side of the fight, Mr. Holt. You’ll have to admit that.”
    â€œI don’t have to admit anything of the kind,” Holt replied. “God save me from friends like Flecker. Murder isn’t our fight. Not one bit. Nothing but trouble comes from the kind of thing Flecker did. We would have dealt with those detectives in our own good time and in our own way.”
    â€œStill you have your own armed guards, don’t you? If you carry a gun, then it means that you are prepared to use it.”
    â€œDefense is one thing. Murder is something else. If everyone in this country who carried a gun used it, there’d be no one left alive. A gun is a simple thing, Al, but there’s nothing simple about this situation down here in West Virginia. What do you know about coal miners, Al?”
    He was calling me by my first name, and I was pleased and flattered. His voice was rich and vibrant, and already then at the age of twenty-eight, he used his voice with all the skill and command of a trained actor. At that time, I was a sharp and cynical kid, but I could not have been bought for money; if I had anything that was strong inside of me, it was some sense of integrity in my work and in what I wrote. If Ben Holt had taken any other tack, it might have turned out differently, but he left me room to summon my own annoyance as I told him that I didn’t know a damn thing about miners and had never seen one before today.
    â€œWho the hell has?” He grinned unexpectedly. “Nobody knows a damned thing about the miners except the miners. Nobody gives a damn for them except the miners. Let me tell you this—it has never been any different for five thousand years. Give or take a few centuries. That’s when men began to grub in the earth and dig metal, and that’s when a miner became expendable. Do you know what has changed?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œThey killed them quick then. A miner was good for two years—or three. Today it averages out ten to fifteen.” Laura McGrady and her mother, Sarah—the mother in her middle forties then, but dry and old, her hands gnarled with arthritis—were listening and staring at Ben Holt, who said to Mrs. McGrady, “That’s right. It’s an old trade, Sarah. I read every word I could ever find that was written on it.” He turned to me. “I’m a miner, Al. You want to write about me, interview me—well, that’s the first thing to begin with. I’m a miner. It doesn’t begin with a man—it begins with the kid, he sucks it in, like the milk from a bottle, if he’s lucky enough to have milk in the bottle. He goes to bed with it and he wakes up with it. Other kids wake up in the daylight. The miner’s kid wakes up before the day breaks. You don’t have privacy in a miner’s house. He lies in bed and listens to his father dress in the darkness. The mother—well, she’s been up an hour, got the stove going and the pan on the stove and into the pan whatever there is. My goodness, was there ever a miner had enough to eat for breakfast, enough to take him down into the black belly of the earth and give him strength and courage, damn all the doors to hell—was there ever enough? Now you tell me, Sarah?”
    She had been listening to him, her daughter next to her, listening to the controlled yet passionate flow of speech that was such a strange mixture of the ordinary and the poetic; and now she shook her head and replied, “No, Ben, never enough, not nearly.”
    â€œOh, I’ve seen miners that kept their bellies full for a while,” he said. “Sure, Al—there have been times when Pennsylvania miners worked long enough to stock up the pantry, but not in West Virginia. These people are first cousins to hunger. They’re the poorest, proudest lot in the country, so help me. Would you believe that these are the richest coal fields