Beneath the Apple Leaves(8)
Until they stopped.
Carolien Houghton’s hands dropped from her son, her eyes fixed upon the mine’s mouth that would announce her husband’s fate as if with words. Only smoke pillowed now. Nothing more. Nothing.
Carolien Houghton collapsed to her knees.
CHAPTER 5
Lily Morton carried in the firewood, the splinters scraping against her forearms. She loaded the logs into the already-stacked fireplace. The flames jolted up the chimney flue, her face burning with the rush of searing heat. Claire and her husband, Frank, were in town and Lily didn’t have much time.
The cardboard boxes were already disintegrating, layered in dust and taped at the corners. She picked out the old photos first, tossed them in the fire, the sepia edges browning and curling, the faces cremating. A cry erupted from her throat and her hands trembled with urgency. Get out!
She lifted the box and shook the contents out into the flames: letters, ancient promissory notes, old deeds, scraps of scribbled paper. Get out! The tears choked as she banished the ghosts. They haunted her, lingered in the old house and clawed at her while she slept. Her skin itched with the curses and she wanted to throw her dress into the sparks, to run naked to the forest, without memories, without thorns.
The papers—her family’s slim, ugly history—turned to ash and blew near the rug. Lily was born a Hanson, forced to become a Morton after her sister married. Branded by both, the names seared into her skin and scarred her flesh. Get out! Hanson. Morton. Ugly men and ugly lies now melting in the fires they started.
Lily picked up the iron poker and stabbed at the logs, shoveled the charcoaled reminders beneath the burning wood. Her tears stopped. The smoke filled her nostrils and tasted like burnt cedar in the back of her throat.
She sat in front of the fire. She didn’t blink and her eyes grew dry and she was glad for it. She was tired of the tears. People grieved all the time; this she knew. They mourned the loss of family, of lovers. But the wounds healed over time. But for Lily, the grief was reversed. She did not ache for what was taken away but for what was never given. And for this, she did not know how to heal.
The old Ford pulled into the lane, the engine parts shouting and grunting like an old married couple. Lily tucked the loose hairs behind her ears, put another log in the fireplace and went to the kitchen to start dinner.
CHAPTER 6
Ninety-eight miners were killed that day. The fire started from the kerosene torches placed along the mine walls. Kijek had dropped the bales of hay down the hoist to feed the animals stationed underground. A daily habit, except a torch slipped from its bearing and ignited the hay. The miners had their escape route blocked. The dynamite exploded. The workers were suffocated or blown to bits, their bodies disintegrated. Kijek died trying to save his mules. James and Donald McGregor and half the young men from the baseball team were killed. And Frederick Houghton’s remains could only be identified by his brass miner tags.
The same day as the accident, the call for new miners was sent out across the state. Widows and mothers of the deceased were given thirty days to vacate the housing unless another male in the home was old enough to take a spot underground. And so, a week after his father’s funeral, Andrew Houghton placed his new brass tag around his neck, overlapping the black and warped one of his father, and followed Frederick Houghton’s footsteps into the mine.
“I won’t have you picking coal. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You never come down here again. Promise?”
“Yes, sir.”
The memory of those words snapped like brittle sticks as Andrew broke the vow he had made to his father so long ago. And Andrew knew with each sickening step he took into the pit Frederick Houghton writhed in despair.
Weeks and months passed in unfiltered darkness. There was not enough air in the caves and Andrew’s lungs starved to expand, the weight of the ground above making him claustrophobic, nearly driving him insane. He worked next to the new miners, dark men who kept to themselves and picked at the endless black walls that glistened like oil in the lamplight. And Andrew shoveled the shiny black rocks into the cars, rocks that stunk like poison and crumbled to a fine dust that choked the throat. But it was the lack of air that plagued him. When he opened his mouth to bring in more the coal dust gagged, and when he kept his mouth closed he thought he might pass out. So, he buried his mouth in his shirt and concentrated on each inhale, one after the other, until his ten-hour shift was completed for the day.
He would not pick coal. He would not be owned by the mine—the words he had recited since childhood. And here he was, underground. But he would not stay in this pit. Andrew shoveled harder, wheezed against the coal dust in defiance. He was better than this. He would not allow a future that stretched plain and dark; a future that would swell with little more than black rock, shoveling and loading, of hunched and broken spine, of cherished and waning sunlight amid a world of darkness. And it was this knowing that kept him from dying every time his body drowned and sank beneath the earth.
Aboveground, full winter swept into Fayette County subtly as if called forth through the grief of tragedy. The air was cold without snow, a gravel-colored sky with hard wind. Andrew finished his shift and came home, dropped his boots and coat on the narrow porch before entering the house. His mother spoke rarely now, only insignificant details about food or bills, topics that dropped from the tongue mechanically. She wasn’t confined to work underground, but Carolien suffocated just the same.