The kitchen stove was a squat iron box with a cracked damper that whined whenever the wind came down the draw off Pine Mountain. Long before the dark broke over the hollow, Martha was out of the bed, her bare soles taking the sting of the cold pine floorboards. She shook the grates, scraped the gray clinkers out into the pan, and fed the belly of the stove with cedar splints and three heavy lumps of coal Tillman had carried home in his canvas coat pockets the evening before.
When the iron top began to hum, she set the blue enamel coffee pot right on the eye and stood leaning over the rising heat, blowing into her hands.
Behind the faded quilt that cut off the sleeping corner, Tillman let out a long, heavy groan. The tick mattress rustled—stuffed tight with dry corn shucks that crackled under his thirty-eight-year-old shoulders every time he rolled.
“You’re going to stir the young’uns,” Martha called, not looking back from her table where she was working lard into a wooden bowl of flour.
“My back feels like an old work mule took a notion to kick me and then sat down on my ribs to rest,” Tillman grunted. He swung his legs out into the room, sitting on the edge of the frame in his yellowed union suit. His thick dark hair stuck straight up on the left side where the pillow had pressed it. He was broad across the shoulders, built thick through the wrists and neck from years of driving an auger and swinging a heavy pick, but his face had drawn in around the cheekbones over the last couple winters.
He leaned down, reached for his heavy leather work boots sitting beside the doorframe, and yanked them on over his grey wool socks without bothersome unlacing. The leather was stiff, caked in dried yellow clay and coal slurry, cracked wide across the toe caps.
“Don’t you drag them filth-dirty boots across my clean floor, Tilman Pursifull,” Martha said, her voice dropping down low into her chest as she turned with a wooden spoon in her hand. “I mean what I say. I’ll take the skillet to your shins.”
“They’re just shoes, woman,” Tillman said, pulling his mouth into a half-crooked grin as he stomped his heel down to seat his foot. The heavy iron-shod heel hit the pine boards with a solid, flat clack-thump that rattled the tin cups on the shelf. “This house ain’t built of glass.”
“It’s built of wood I scrubbed on my knees with lye water till my knuckles were raw,” she shot back, setting her fist against her hip. Her flour-sacked apron was tied tight around her waist over her dark calico print. “And you walk through it like an ox coming into a barn.”
Tillman stood up, towering over her small frame, and stepped up behind her. He smelled of old tobacco, cold sweat, and the peppermint oil he kept in his coat pocket for his bad teeth. He wrapped his big, callous-rough hands around her waist, pulling her back against his belly. “You’re mighty feisty for this early in the morning, Martha.”
“Move off me, Tillman. Coffee’s going to boil over and scorch.” But she didn’t pull away right then. She let the back of her head rest against his chest for three long breaths, feeling the hard, steady heat of him before she pulled a rag off the nail to move the pot off the flame.
They sat on low cedar benches to eat—warm biscuits split wide with a spoonful of dark sorghum molasses and a greasy strip of salt pork. In the bed in the corner, the little ones were still asleep under two thick quilts, their breathing soft and even. Out the glass pane of the front window, the company camp was taking shape in the gray dawn: rows of dark four-room board-and-batten houses clinging to the bench of the hill along the L&N tracks, all painted the same dull oxide red, looking like pig troughs lined up in the mud.
Tillman reached into his bib pocket and pulled out a small, hexagonal brass coin with a hole stamped through the middle. He rolled it over his broad knuckles; it gave a sharp, thin clink against his pocketknife.
He slid it across the oilcloth table toward her.
Martha picked it up. Stamped right into the face of it were the deep letters: COLMAR COAL CO. – 50¢ – IN MERCHANDISE ONLY.
“Need some lard,” she said, looking down at the metal in her palm. “And a peck of meal if they got any that ain’t full of weevils. If there’s a copper left over, I might get two yards of red ribbon for the little girl’s hair.”
“Don’t go stretching it,” Tillman warned, chewing slow on a biscuit. “Store clerk down at the commissary told me yesterday we’re already eighteen dollars behind on the ledger for house rent and coal haulage. If the shaft stays open full five days this week, I’ll draw some actual greenback cash come payday. But till then, that brass is all we got to eat on.”
Martha’s eyes cut sharp across the table. “You don’t need to tell me what’s on the ledger, Tillman. I’m the one making three cups of flour do the work of five. I know what we got and what we ain’t got.”
Tillman looked down at his tin plate, a dark flush rising up his neck. His folks had been mountain farmers back in the old days up near the river—living on timberland and bottomland where a man could raise his own corn, run his hogs through the oak mast, and owe no man a copper cent. But as the coal companies bought up the mineral rights across the mountain ridges, the old ways of farming had slipped away, generation by generation, until there wasn’t enough clear ground left to feed a growing family. Now here he was four hundred feet under Pine Mountain, hauling out the black guts of the earth so some big man in Louisville could set by a warm fire.
He pushed his bench back and stood up, reaching for his heavy duck-cloth coat. “I didn’t mean nothing by it, Martha.”
She softened just a bit, stepping up to him as he picked up his brass carbide lamp and his tin dinner bucket. She reached up and brushed a fleck of dry black coal dust off his shirt collar—dust that stayed in the seams no matter how many times she boiled his shirts in the zinc tub out back.
“Keep an eye on the roof today,” she murmured, her dark eyes looking straight into his. “That rain we had Tuesday always makes the slate greasy.”
“Slate’s always greasy,” Tillman said, trying for a grin that didn’t quite make it. He leaned down and kissed her cheek—her skin smelled of lard soap and woodsmoke. “Mountain’s been standing there since God made it.”
“Don’t you talk foolish,” she snapped softly, but she let her hand rest on his wrist for a second.
The heavy clack-thump of his boots echoed off the porch boards as he stepped out, then dulled down into the mud as he hit the camp road.
The hollow was awake now. The air had the sour, bitey smell of soft-coal smoke pouring out of a hundred metal chimneys. Up and down the row, men were coming out of their doors, caps pulled low, brass lamps clinking against their tin pails.
Tillman caught up with Harlan Hoskins, who lived three doors down. Harlan was older, his back bent over from thirty years of double-jack drilling, his chest wheezing every time he took a hill.
“Cold enough to freeze the tail off an iron dog,” Harlan spat, throwing a yellow stream of tobacco juice into the frozen weeds.
“It’ll be warm enough once we get back to the face,” Tillman said, turning his collar up. “Boss said we’re moving into the fourth entry east today. Low coal.”
“Low coal,” Harlan grumbled, shaking his head. “I hate crawling on my belly like an adder. My knees feel like somebody poured river gravel into the joints.”
“Least the pay’s the same,” Tillman said.
“Pay?” Harlan let out a short, dry bark of a laugh. “What pay? You work two weeks, they hand you a handful of brass tokens, take three-quarters of it back for the doctor fee, the blacksmith, and the company store, and tell you you’re lucky to have a roof over your head that don’t leak when it rains.”
“It’s money to buy flour,” Tillman said quiet-like.
“It ain’t money, Tillman. It’s brass. You can’t spend it nowhere else except right here at their store, buying their rotten bacon at their price. My boy Silas is talking about taking off for Knox County to cut timber.”
“Timber’s hard work too,” Tillman said, his mind wandering back to the kitchen, to Martha standing by the stove with her hair pinned up and her arms white with flour.
“Hard work in the sun,” Harlan said as they reached the mine portal—a dark, timber-framed hole cut right into the foot of the ridge. “In the sun, Tillman. A man can see what’s coming at him when he’s out under the sky.”
They stopped at the rack to fill their carbide lamps. Tillman unscrewed the bottom cup, checked the gray granules, dropped in a couple spoonfuls of carbide from his pouch, and poured water into the top from the wooden bucket. He struck the flint wheel on his sleeve. A bright, blue-yellow jet of flame hissed out behind the brass reflector on his cap, throwing a sharp round light against the rough oak timbers of the entrance.
He bent his head, stepped out of the gray morning, and walked into the hill.
The world changed right there. The cold snap in the air died off, replaced by a heavy, damp heat that smelled of wet slate, old mule manure, and wet coal dust. The quiet of the mountain was gone, swallowed up by the low rumble of iron wheels on the track far down the entry, the drip of sulfur water into the ditches, and the creak of the heavy oak props bowing under the hill.
Tillman walked down the main haulage road, stepping across the iron rails, ducking his head where the roof dipped down low. By seven o’clock, he was at his working face in the fourth entry.
The seam was barely four feet high. Tillman had to lay down on his side in the damp dust, swinging his short-handled pick with hard, flat blows to undercut the seam.
Clack. Clack. Clack. Steel hitting bituminous coal. Shards of glossy black stone flew into his face, settling into the creases of his eyes, getting under his fingernails, filling his throat with a dry, bitter dust that made him spit black. Every few minutes, he’d stop, push his cap back, and wipe his forehead with his sleeve, leaving a thick smear of grease across his skin.
Around nine, his buddy Jesse—a boy from up on Stinking Creek—came crawling up the entry pushing a low wooden coal car.
“They’re short on mules today,” Jesse grumbled, sitting back on his heels and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Driver said one of the jennies got her leg caught in a frog down on the main line. We’re going to have to push these cars ourselves if we want to get our tonnage.”
“We’ll push ’em then,” Tillman said, not stopping his pick. “I ain’t going home with half a turn.”
“You’re a driver, Tillman,” Jesse laughed, pulling a twist of home-cured tobacco out of his pocket and biting off a hunk. “Martha got you working on a tight lead-line?”
“Martha’s got good sense,” Tillman said, pausing to grin in the flickering light of their lamps. “She knows if I don’t haul twenty tons this week, we’ll be eating dry corn bread and clear water till Christmas.”
“She’s a good woman,” Jesse said softly. “Brought my sister some of that pickled shuckbeans when she was down with the flux last month. Don’t find many neighbors like that no more.”
“She’s stubborn as an old mule,” Tillman said, but his voice was soft. “Always telling me how to walk, how to eat, how to keep my dirty boots off her floor. You’d think I was a ten-year-old boy.”
“That’s just how women are,” Jesse said. He stood as tall as he could under the four-foot slate roof and looked up at the ceiling over Tillman’s head. He took his pick handle and gave the rock a tap.
Thump. Thump.
The sound was dull and hollow.
Jesse frowned, his eyes narrowing under his cap. “Sounds mighty drummy right there, Tillman. You put a prop under that?”
Tillman glanced up at the slate ceiling. A thin line ran through the gray stone three feet back from where he was picking. “I’ll set one as soon as I clean out this bottom coal. Just got two more scoops to pull.”
“Set it now, Tillman,” Jesse said, stepping back toward the car. “That slate in four entry is greasy. Comes down without no hollering.”
“Five minutes, Jesse,” Tillman said, leaning back into his work, his shovel scraping loud and dry against the bottom rock. “Just let me get this car loaded.”
Up on the hillside, the day moved slow.
Martha stood over the wooden wash tub behind the house, her sleeves pinned up past her elbows, rubbing Tillman’s second pair of overalls against the zinc board. The water was dark gray and thick with homemade lye soap, but the coal dirt stayed down in the seams of the denim like it was dyed in. It took three changes of hot water—carried two buckets at a time from the hand pump in the alley—just to get the water clear enough to wring out.
Beside the porch, her three-year-old girl was sitting in the dirt, playing with a doll made out of a dried corn cob wrapped up in a rag of red flannel. Her six-year-old boy was throwing rocks at an old lard tin, his shoes already wearing thin at the toes.
Mrs. Hoskins came walking up the path, carrying a small stoneware crock covered over with a clean rag.
“Brought you a mess of that sauerkraut,” Sarah Hoskins said, setting the crock on the porch bench. She sat down with a heavy sigh, holding her side. “My knees are telling me we’re in for a big rain before nightfall.”
“It’s already clouding up dark over the ridge,” Martha said, standing up straight and wiping her wet hands on her apron. She pushed her hair back from her face. “Thank you for the cabbage, Sarah. I’ll bring your crock back tomorrow.”
“How’s Tillman’s back holding up?” Sarah asked, her eyes cutting down toward the black smoke pouring out of the mine’s chimney at the bottom of the hollow.
“Complaining, same as always,” Martha said, a small smile pulling at her mouth. “Says he’s getting old.”
“Thirty-eight ain’t old,” Sarah said, her voice dropping down quiet. “But the mine makes ’em old fast. My Harlan looks sixty, and he ain’t but forty-two. It’s the dark, Martha. A man wasn’t meant to spend his days under the dirt.”
Martha looked down at the valley. From the porch, she could see the mouth of the mine—just a tiny black box cut into the foot of the ridge. She could hear the faint, hollow clatter of the tipple sorting coal, the iron screech of the cars being slammed together on the siding.
“He’s headstrong,” Martha said, her thumb tracing the hem of her apron. “I tell him every morning to watch the roof. He just laughs and tells me the mountain’s been standing there since the flood.”
“They all laugh,” Sarah whispered. “Because if they didn’t laugh, they wouldn’t go down that hole.”
They stood there together, two women bound by the quiet thing that lived under every tin roof in Colmar. You didn’t talk about it over the fence. You didn’t speak it out loud because speaking it felt like inviting it into your front room. You just washed the clothes, cooked the beans, kept the young’uns quiet, and listened for the sound of boots coming up the path when the five o’clock whistle blew.
Underground, it was near noon.
Tillman and Jesse sat on an empty timber block in a crosscut where the air moved a little, their carbide lights turned down to tiny blue pinpoints to save the gas. They had their tin pails open between their knees.
Tillman pulled out a cold biscuit stuffed with fried apple butter and a hard-boiled egg. He bit into it, the sweet apple taste mixing with the grit of coal dust that stayed on his teeth no matter how much he spat.
“My little girl Mary,” Tillman said, his mouth half full, “she took her first real steps last night. Right across the floor to where my boots were sitting.”
“Did she now?” Jesse chuckled, leaning his head back against the coal rib.
“Picked up one of them heavy old boots,” Tillman said, a bright grin breaking through the black dust on his face, “and tried to put her little foot right down in it. Fell flat on her tail and laughed like it was the funniest thing in this county.”
“She’ll be wanting real shoes of her own before long,” Jesse said. “Takes good money for shoes.”
“I’ll buy ’em for her,” Tillman said, his jaw setting hard. “She ain’t going barefoot like I did when I was a boy up on the creek. I’ll work double shifts if the boss’ll let me. I want her to go to school down in Pineville. Learn to read out of a real book. Maybe be a schoolteacher.”
“A schoolteacher,” Jesse said, thinking on it. “That’d be something, wouldn’t it? A miner’s girl teaching school.”
“She’s got the sense for it,” Tillman said. He snapped his lunch pail shut with a sharp clack. He stood up, stretching his arms till his knuckles brushed the stone ceiling. “Alright, Jesse. Let’s go set that prop and pull that last car before the trip driver comes back.”
They crawled back into the working entry. The air felt thick now, heavy and dead, smelling of damp shale. The mountain was making small, dry clicking sounds overhead—a strange, subtle movement in the rock.
Tillman picked up his shovel, bending his knees in the narrow space. “Hand me that jack-prop, Jesse.”
Jesse turned to reach for the oak timber sitting five feet back in the entry.
There was no big roar. No sound like thunder.
Just a short, sharp crack—followed by a heavy, wet thud that shook the floor under their knees.
The air blew out in a sudden gasp, knocking both their carbide lamps off their caps, killing the flames instantly.
Darkness came down like an iron box.
“Tillman?” Jesse hollered, his voice thin and high in the pitch-black. “Tillman!”
Nothing answered except the small, dry rustle of fine dust settling onto the coal floor.
At four o’clock, the clouds had come down off Pine Mountain, gray and heavy with rain. Martha was on the front porch, taking down the damp overalls off the line, her fingers cold.
The three-year-old was sitting by the door frame, dragging her cob doll across the floorboards.
Down in the hollow, the mine whistle blew.
Martha stopped, three wooden clothes pins held in her mouth. She looked down at her small brass pocket watch she kept in her apron. It wasn’t five o’clock. It was an hour early.
The whistle didn’t blow its long, steady quitting blast. It blew three short, hard shrieks that cut straight through the gray rain.
Up and down the row of houses, doors began to open. Women came out onto their porches, pulling shawls over their heads, standing still, looking down the hill toward the drift mouth.
Martha didn’t move. She stood on her porch, holding Tillman’s damp overalls against her apron.
Down the camp road, three men were walking up the incline. They weren’t running. They were walking slow, their heads down, their lamps dark on their caps. Harlan Hoskins was in the middle, his face white through the coal dust, his cap held in his hand.
Martha watched them come up the wooden steps of her path.
She didn’t holler. She didn’t drop the clothes. She just stood there on the pine floorboards she had scrubbed that morning, watching Harlan’s eyes as he reached the bottom step and stopped, unable to look up at her face.
“Martha,” Harlan said, his voice cracking out dry. “Martha, the slate…”
She didn’t hear the rest of the words. She didn’t need to hear them.
The rain began to hit the tin roof overhead, a steady, flat drumbeat that filled the quiet hollow.
That evening, after the neighbors had come and gone, after the children had been fed their cornmeal mash and put to bed under the heavy quilts, Martha sat by the iron stove alone. The fire had died down to a low red glow behind the cracked grate.
The kitchen was quiet.
She sat on the wooden bench, her hands folded in her lap, looking across the dark room toward the front door.
Beside the threshold, the pine floorboards were clean and bare. There was no yellow mud tracked onto the wood. No smell of peppermint or damp duck-cloth coat.
And from the porch outside, no heavy iron-shod boots came stomping down to break the silence.
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