Blackness ran from her. Her shaking legs sent the cascading water down in a zigzag, visible as the blackness coalesced into thin lines, shivered, and fanned out. She reached down and rubbed her thighs in rapid strokes, trying to calm them, but they shook of their own accord. The vibration moved up into her chest, filled her with a soft tremor that made it hard to breathe at her normal pace. It demanded speed, rumbled within her.
Years later, Kip was sure, everyone would remember where they were when the shaking began. At the end of her shift, when she made her way up from the mouth of the mine with her lunch pail banging up against her backside, the day had seemed almost normal. But, when she got out of the shower, and made her way down to the union hall, the men would be gathered around the scratched wood tables, their shoulders hunched with intensity, combing through the day. They would sift through the piles of normalcy for the one omen, the strange turn of phrase or unspoken ache in their bones which portended things to come. Had she felt it? Or was the relief of seeing the sunlight after eight hours of tight darkness the normal release?
Maybe they would even blame her for good measure, even though she hadn’t been underground when it happened. She was still fairly new. Only six weeks had passed, and when the continuous miners quieted during the lunch break, whispers drifted up the shaft: bad luck to have a woman underground. Lucille would be spared that at least, she hoped. Wasn’t it enough that the mine had taken her, swallowed her up?
“Wash up with us, hon,” Gerry called after her. She ignored him and walked past the shower house, which thanks to her and Lucille was now co-ed. “We don’t bite,” he said, then chuckled. “You wanna give your babies nightmares?”
“I’ll wash up at home,” Kip replied. She straightened her back and continued walking, lengthened her stride imperceptibly to carry herself down the hill to her truck--it used to be her husband’s truck — parked down in the dirt lot just a few seconds faster.
That was when the shaking started, and Kip bet if you asked Gerry now what they had been talking about, he’d weave up something about how gassy the coal seam was, how he’d tested methane every ten minutes instead of every twenty. Something like that which demonstrated foresight but not negligence.
The moments the ground rumbled before the explosion ripped out of the mouth of the mine lasted long enough for everyone who felt the trembling rise up through their feet and into their tightening chests to feel a sense of dread, and to think, if only briefly, about the last big explosion just down the road in Hyden a few years back. It was long enough for Kip to remember the burning she felt in her legs as she ran up the steep hills, trying to get to the mine while the Finly company men pushed her back and assured her they were doing everything they could to rescue the men. And it was long enough for her to remember how even though her chest had been so numb with fear that she could hardly draw a breath, she screamed at that Finly man. Didn’t he know? Her husband was in there. And then she’d shoved him to the ground.
But once the explosion had torn out of the earth, sending a pillar of black smoke cascading off the hillside before dissipating high into the sky, there was no more time to think, and no more time for showers as the men rushed out of the bath house, still pulling on their trousers as they ran up to the mine. Kip dropped her lunch pail and ran back up the steep slope, her long, elegant strides out of sync with the crazed fear that raced from her heart.
“How many men are down there?” the company man asked. The foreman who’d been sitting with him in the trailer confirmed with Hank, the ancient steward who could hardly bend into a seam anymore but who couldn’t retire because couldn’t no one win a grievance without him: eighteen.
“Eighteen men,” declared the foreman.
“And Lucille!” Kip screamed from her spot at the back of the group. She pushed her way to stand beside him. “Lucille’s down there too.”
“Yep,” said the foreman. “We’ve got her.”
“This is why shouldn’t no women be underground,” Gerry said. “They’re bad luck.” He coughed as the wind blew the smoke back toward them.
Smoke and anger burned Kip’s face inside and out. The coal dust and soot at least would hide the deep shade of red that always spread from her neck up her face in tendrils at moments like this. The ground continued to shake and the fire raged too hot to fight it.
“Wasn’t no women underground at Hyden,” she said. “Not at Mannington either.”
He cut her off. “Don’t make this a women’s lib thing.”
The moments after explosions pass slowly, no matter how quickly onlookers’ hearts race. And then, even as the seconds move on with agonizing passivity, the hours speed up. Oxygen burns so quickly. And when it is safe, they will start bringing the bodies up.
The shower fell across her back.
Even though the water ran black, some of the coal dust refused to be dislodged. Wherever she rubbed her skin, it swept out behind in a mesmerizing pattern that afforded her new shadows. It flowed from the roots of her hair down to her lips. On the tip of her tongue, the taste acrid, bitter. If she’d had a choice, she’d have waited on the stone in sight of the mine and watch the rescue teams work long into the night. There were no survivors, but she’d have waited nonetheless. She’d have waited until they brought up Lucille’s body. They’d know it was her: her frame was so small, and she always wore that obnoxious belt buckle. Gaudy, fake gold that she kept shined and polished.
Instead, Kip went home, loaded her kids in the back of the truck so she wouldn’t have to speak to them, and drove the two miles over to Lucille’s place. She drove carefully around the deep ruts in the road, slowing as she approached the small house. The summer had been dry, and she didn’t want to kick up too much dust. Lucille’s dad had a hard enough time breathing as it was. And he must have been feeling awful today. He must be hooked up to the oxygen machine, Kip thought as she searched for his frail outline on the porch, or he would have forced a neighbor to drive him up to the mine.
Kip turned off the engine but took a moment to gather herself before opening the door. For her kids, solemnity could still be expressed through play, with serious games of rescue — from the tree, from the crawl space, from the center of the wood pile —and they clamored out of the bed of the truck in search of Lucille’s daughter Joan, who was almost nine, the same age as Kip’s middle son.
After her husband was killed, she lied and told her children he was only in the hospital, and that they’d be able to see him as soon as the burns were better. Then she’d sold her wedding ring, the only family heirloom that had once belonged to her husband’s great-grandmother, so she could send them off to a summer camp in Tennessee while she buried the body. She wrote them daily letters fabricating details of his recovery, and was so convincing that they asked to visit him right away when she picked them up at the Greyhound stop. When she’d finally admitted the truth, they didn’t believe her. Marie, her oldest, insisted. Look, she said, pulling the letters from her duffel bag, it says here he went for a walk outside yesterday.
Maybe he did, honey, Kip had replied. Maybe he did. After that, she made their meals each day but didn’t speak a word to them. Not until they’d run down the road and asked to sleep at Lucille’s house because they thought their mother was possessed.
When Kip finally made her way into the house, she found Lucille’s father, Allen, hooked up to his oxygen machine and sitting on the couch with tears streaming down his cheeks, dripping down to his shirt when they reached the sharp edges of his cheekbones.
“Did they pull her out yet?” he asked.
Kip shook her head.
“Joan doesn’t know yet.”
She sat down beside him, gripped his thin wiry hand with hers, callused and blacked with dust. She never had time to wash up, and now it seemed almost frivolous. She tightened her grip as Allen struggled for air. The oxygen could help counteract the black lung, but with the added tightness of grief it seemed almost too much. Outside, the children screamed, and the house groaned as they tunneled through the crawl space. Eventually, they would have to know, and it couldn’t wait much longer.
“You should go wash up,” Allen said finally, not letting go of her hand.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “Lucille only got the shower put in last month.”
Kip tried to smile. When she loosened her grip, he reached his hand over hers. “Don’t go back into the mines, Kip.”
“I have to,” she said. After her husband died, she’d worked down at the diner by the highway to get by. Thirty-five dollars a week had soon left her destitute.
“The mines will swallow you,” he said. “Think about your kids.”
“I will,” she replied, then pulled away. He said it so softly, like it was such an easy choice: die in the mines, and her kids would lose her; lose the house, have the kids go hungry, and she’d lose them. Each day underground was like beating the devil at a game of hell, she knew that. But hell seeped out of the mines too. Like the coal dust. And it coated everything and never washed off. Their whole valley was cloaked in it, and maybe the wind swept it away too, off to far off places: Washington, Philadelphia, Richmond. But there was no way to be sure.
The shower was a wondrous thing. Lucille had invited her over to use it two weeks back, but with all the overtime, the visit had never happened. Kip had running water in her small bungalow, but no shower. Each night she drew up a bath and steeped herself in the water until it chilled, turned a deep shade of grey as she worked the dust off her skin and out of the roots of her hair. No matter how hard she scrubbed, the sallow grayness lingered.
It felt grotesque to stand there now, the black streaming off her like washing away death. When she scrubbed at it, she swore she could hear the scream of the coal, and the harder she scrubbed, the more her skin burned, and she imagined Lucille, struggling to breathe as the fire raced up the shaft, burning up the air, leaving only heavy black smoke in its wake.
Black dust or red fire: the coal always took you in the end, no matter how many showers you took.
But she would tell the children a nicer story that night, with Joan tucked in beside her own daughter. The girls loved the Cinderella story and made her tell it again and again. She knew when they played, they called up to the birds in case one of them might transform into a fairy godmother who could remove the grey wash from all their clothes. The coal infiltrated everything, even childhood. Everything, that was, except the stories. She had watched her own daughter, only last week, hold her rag doll close and dance in careful steps around the yard, avoiding the puddles like they might be other dancers. A regular girl who became a princess: it was a beautiful story, and it had a happy ending, with bright palaces and shimmering dresses. But that was not how stories ended here. Here, the prince didn’t search out his love. The story flipped on its head: the woman chased him up the slopes, rifled through piles of rubble in search of that one defining feature that could hold fast on a corpse.
The day’s story would be retold again and again: a warning, a myth, told in cautious tones on porches as the sun dropped behind the mountains. And as the memory of Lucille’s body grew more distant, as it became easier to forget how difficult it was to sing through her favorite hymn at her funeral, and how her daughter had tried to wrench up the lid of the coffin, it would be easier to blame her. Inexperience. Too small. Too weak. And women shouldn’t be electricians anyway.
There were no survivors to save her reputation, and she was an easy target. But just last week another explosion, and no women or new miners had been involved. The earth was indiscriminate, the way it swallowed them up, and just as relentless. The company would say she’d been careless, and carelessness resulted in a spark and that’s set off the explosion. They would say she dug her own grave, and maybe if she’d known her place, this whole sorry business could have been avoided. So many miners seemed to dig their own graves.
Kip had lost track of how long she stood in the shower. Her legs kept shaking until she relented and sank to the slick bottom of the tub. The shower felt more like the rain she was accustomed to now, less uniform, heavier. And it grew colder. She had exhausted the hot water supply. She switched off the water, reached for the towel, and wrapped it around her chilled shoulders. The water drained, almost clear, but her skin was still tinged grey. She twisted her legs side to side, extended them upward and rested her toes against the tiled wall to see if perhaps it could all be blamed on the dingy light. But the more she examined herself, the clearer it was: marked, she decided. They were all marked. And maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the coal dust at all.
Trish Kahle writer and labor historian based in Chicago. Her work has received the Rondthaler fiction prize and the Niven Prize from the Center for Women Writers. She can be reached at trish.kahle@gmail.com.