The Coalwood Way Read Online Free PDF Page A

before I went to the first grade, and in the books my parents kept stacked in the upstairs hall, I found a new world past Coalwood and its mountains. I fought pirates with Jim Hawkins, flew above a crystal sea with Wendy and the Lost Boys, went down the Mississippi on a raft with Huck and Jim, and became one of the last of the Mohican tribe. I had an almost insatiable need to act out the adventures I found in the books I read and formed elaborate games with my boyhood friends, especially Benny Brown and Roy Lee. When we were pirates, we tied bandannas around our heads, hammered together wooden swords, and built rafts, terrorizing mostly the crawl-dads in the creek. “Avast there, wench! Serve us some rum!” I yelled at my mother one time from the creek as she came into the backyard to hang up sheets on the clothesline.
    “Wench, is it?” she said, laughing. “I think a certain young man’s been reading a little too much
Treasure Island.
”
    “Arghhhh! I’ll see ye keelhauled!” was my reply. I was good at staying in character even under the stress of reality.
    After I’d seen the Disney television show about Davy Crockett, the miners trooping home after the day shift became Mexican soldiers. I gave the signal and we boys rose up over the walls of our Alamo of sticks and boards and let fly with horrendous gouts of imagined smoke and fire from our broomstick muskets. The miners, having played parts in my sagas more than once, comprehended their roles immediately and staggered and clutched their chests before righting themselves and moving on down the valley. Benny Brown would usually volunteer to play the last Mexican horde and let me pretend to swing my Old Betsy musket broomstick at him, knocking him down a hundred times before finally I’d collapse, moaning with patriotic fervor for Texas, which I took to be someplace down south. Benny’s father died of dust silicosis, and according to the rules of Coalwood, he and his mother had to move on. I still missed him.
    In 1954, my father became the mine superintendent in Coalwood, and my mother, brother Jim, and I moved down to what was known as the Captain’s house. The coal company tipple, where the coal was brought out, sorted, and loaded into coal railcars, was a mere hundred yards from our house. As I watched the miners go up and down the path that led to the tipple grounds, I thought they looked like soldiers in the newsreels, except instead of carrying rifles, they swung cylindrical tin lunch buckets as they marched, their black helmets shining in the sun or sparkling in the rain. My dad was, in many ways, their general, plotting strategy and tactics against an unyielding foe, the mine itself. Coalwood’s miners proudly dug the finest bituminous coal in the world, all of it shipped to the steel mills of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Dad said that without Coalwood and the towns like it, there would be no steel, and without steel, there would be no United States as we knew it. He took it as his personal and patriotic responsibility to keep the coal heading north. Every day, even though he didn’t have to, he went to the face where the coal was cut from the seam. There he could see the results of his daily plan. There, also, microscopic coal dust produced by the continuous miners filled the air and coated the men. In 1957, Dad was diagnosed with black spots on his lungs, but he still kept to his daily routine of going to the face. When he coughed at home, my mother’s eyes would fill with worry. She knew very well lung spots never got smaller, only bigger.
    Both of my parents had come to Coalwood from Gary, another McDowell County coal camp. The two towns were separated by twelve miles, two mountains, and the philosophy of Mr. George L. Carter, Coalwood’s founder. When Dad graduated from Gary High School, the Great Depression was in full swing and he found himself among many young Gary men, quietly desperate to make a living wage. Coalwood must have seemed like