The Coalwood Way Read Online Free PDF Page B

job at the mine, the company’s rules required him to move out of town and take his family with him. If a man was killed, the rules still applied—two weeks to get the funeral done and get out. But with the houses sold, men who had quit or were cut off could hunker down where they were, defying the mortgage company. Within a few months of the sell-off, there were rumors that Coalwood had families up Six Hollow going hungry. This had never happened to us before. Coalwood was surrounded by poverty-stricken towns like Gary and Bartley and Berwind, towns where the mines had closed or were choked by strikes and where families lined up every week for the commodity food handouts from the government. But Coalwood had always been an oasis of prosperity in the county. Every day, I heard people in town worrying over what was to become of us. Dad especially worried about it over the supper table at night. It seemed to me that ever since his father had died, Dad had been suffering one worry after another.
    In the fall of 1958, Poppy had developed a rampant colon cancer too far gone to do anything about. Dad had survived the same cancer five years before, but his father was older and weaker. It was to be the last insult to a man who, in 1941, had both of his legs cut off in the Coalwood mine. What was left of him after his accident slumped on a chair where someone put him. He never had a wheelchair, didn’t want one, refused to use it when Dad got one for him. As a small child, I was terrified of the old man I called Poppy. He had moist blue eyes, stringy arms, and a toothless mouth, but it was his legless lap that gave me nightmares.
    Mom said Dad blamed himself for Poppy’s accident. It was Dad who had convinced Poppy to leave his job in Gary and come and work for the Captain. It was only a few months after moving to Coalwood that Poppy was standing in the gob at the turnout of his section when a loaded coal car jumped the track, took down the row of posts he had just put in, and slid over him. The razor-sharp wheels of the car sliced his legs off at the hip. It was said that Poppy stayed awake during the whole thing, even while he was carried from the mine. Dad was one of the men who bore him out. He had to listen to his father beg over and over for someone to finish him off.
    For a full day, according to the Captain’s orders, Poppy’s legs were left in the gob where he’d been run over. A sign was nailed to a post. It read: a man lost his legs here because he stood too close to the track. From what I heard, the Captain’s sign worked. For a long time, no Coalwood miner stood anywhere near any track, and the spot where Poppy lost his legs was avoided most of all. Poppy’s legs were taken out and buried somewhere up on the mountain behind the mine, but the sign remained for some weeks until it disappeared. Mom said Dad had taken it, maybe the only time he’d done something against the Captain’s orders, and chopped it up for firewood.
    Poppy, whose real name was Benjamin Venable Hickam, was a well-read man. After his accident, he read nearly every book in the county library until the pain of his lost legs forced him onto the paregoric. A woman who lived up near Panther kept him well supplied with Dad paying for it and delivering it as needed. After he got on the paregoric, Mom said Poppy never read another book.
    Dad had found his father a little house up Warriormine Hollow and saw to the monthly rent. Every other Sunday, Mom and Dad and Jim and I visited Poppy and my grandmother, whom we kids called Mimmie, as meek and quiet a woman as I ever knew. When we came to visit, she spent most of her time at the cooking stove and then sat silently at the table during dinner not eating, her hands folded on her lap. Her oval face was always placid, but it seemed to me behind her mask there was something awful going on. One time Mom encouraged me to show Mimmie a model airplane I’d built out of balsa wood. She sat down and handled it,