Catherine Young
Coal Year
"Here I come a rumbling, rumbling, Please may I come in?
Now my coal is tumbling, tumbling, Tumbling in the bin."
-The Coal Man song
~Fall~
"Coal Man's coming today," says Mama as she pulls the broom in swift, short strokes across the kitchen floor. I prance on bare tiptoes over the marbled turquoise linoleum tiles, its tidal pools swirling at my feet. I sway as I cross to the rag-rug islands in front of the stove, sink, and the back door.
It’s September, and it’s still green down our hollow, but Mama's anxious to have the coalben filled. Who knows when a cold spell might come? Already in the gathering dark of evenings the clouds sail in, dense purple-gray, meaning cold is coming. This morning, though, is sunny and warm. That's hard on Mama. As much as she longs to take a walk, she stays home, waiting for the Coal Man.
In midmorning, I hear the coal truck – a large, loud monster. It pounds down our steep street and comes to a slow metal-screeching halt in front of our house. All of the coal trucks have screeching brakes – no matter whose you hire. This one is blue, coated in a film of oily black so thick that the name on the door is unreadable. From my front porch rail perch all I can do is watch. Mama has told me to stay away from strangers.
The Coal Man jumps down from his truck and comes around the back of his rig.
"You call for coal?" he shouts and flashes a gap-tooth grin. He drops a cigarette on the street and crushes it with his heel.
I nod, then turn and run for Mama. "Coal Man's here!" I shout, banging the front screen door. "Mama!"
She takes off her apron and descends to the basement to open the coalben door, then climbs into the nearly empty coalben beneath the porch at the front of the house. She pushes the three-paned glass window outward, propping it open with a stick.
I return to the porch cautiously now, feeling exposed. I stay behind the rail, my arms wrapped around the white-painted pillar to watch. The Coal Man pulls his truck out perpendicular in the street and then jockeys the truck into position. Backing the truck over boulevard grass and sidewalk, the Coal Man bumps his truck against the cinder-cement wall. He leaps from the cab, and lets the door slam shut, pulled by the downward slant of the hill. The tilt is stunning. From the rack at the truck’s bumper, the Coal Man pulls out boards and rocks to prop the wheels at the front and back of the truck to keep it in place. Back to the cab he goes, raises the truck bed, and races to the back end for the ramps. He slides oily black steel ramps across the yard, hooking one end to the back of the truck. The other end pushes into the coalben under the front porch. It's tricky getting the truck in just the right place so that once the ramps are out, they go straight to the little window. On Grandma's street, the coal truck has less of a tilt, but her coal man has to ramp over her hedge. Oh, her coal man grumbles if her hedge hasn't been trimmed low enough.
Coal Man wastes no time. Up goes the little chute door at the top of the ramps and out comes the coal: a rattling, rushing torrent of black diamonds. The downpour is deafening, and all I can see is a blur of black.
Coal Man checks the flow of coal at the ramp's top. Confident of the constant stream, he leaves the truck and goes around to the back of our house, to the basement door. I follow. His long strides take him quickly across the basement floor to the coalben where he watches the coal come in. Grabbing a shovel and hopping over the half-planked wall, he flings coal left and right to fill the corners of the room. As the bin fills, the space between the coal and the ceiling shrinks, and Coal Man's head hits the porch joists. Out he comes, and he and Mama put in the next planks. As the coal continues filling, Mama adds more planks until the plank wall is now as high as Mama's collarbone – as high as it will be all year. Later, Mama will shovel the coal surface level so that it will be easier to work with. Coal Man wipes his face on his filthy sleeve and heads back outdoors.
As Mama hurries upstairs to find the money envelope, I follow her.
"Mama, where did he get the coal from?"
"What do you mean, where?"
"Where did he get it from for the truck?"
"From the breaker. You know," she gestures with her hand, "from the breaker – down in the Flats," she says, and hurries to her bedroom closet. She reaches into the small, dark space and retrieves the worn electric company envelope marked COAL. From it she takes and counts the sixty-three dollars it has taken all year to save up for this expense. She sighs, puts back the envelope, and carries the cash away downstairs.
I don't like breaker buildings. Breakers are towers of blackness, surrounded by blackness – the mountains of culum dumps towering over them. Each one is a lopsided black building shaped like a stack of alphabet blocks, with one little last block off-center on top; many-windowed – or it would be many-windowed except most of the panes are broken. And the whole place clatters so loud. When Dad took me down to the breakers in the Flats along the Lackawanna River, we had to shout to one another – you can't get close to one and still talk. Though I couldn't see inside the building, I was terribly frightened of it. The breaker building stood dark and tall, and there was something about it I sensed was really bad – but I couldn't name what it is. Dad told me there used to be breaker boys who sat inside breakers in the cold and dark along metal chutes, breathing coal dust and sorting coal. Sometimes they came away maimed. But that was a long time ago – when my dad's dad was a boy. Now there are only machines inside. I still don't understand how it all works.
"But Mama, how do they get the coal into the truck?"
Mama waves her hand in the air as if brushing away a fly. "I don't know, Honey. I've never seen how. Ask your dad." Then she dashes out the door.
With an oily black broom, Coal Man sweeps the last of the black diamonds from the truck bed through the chute. Sparse beads of coal rattle down the ramp and sound the end of the downpour. Coal Man pulls up the ramps, stacks them back on the truck, and hangs up his broom. He wipes his hands on a rag before pulling out a receipt book from the cab. Mama brings up the cash and hands it over. As the truck heads out into the street and grinds uphill, Mama pulls the prop from the coalben window. The coal year has begun.
`
~Winter~
"I got to shovel coal," Mama says each winter evening after pouring the thickest portion of hot coffee from the bottom of the chrome percolator. She sets her white porcelain mug at the end of the table and crosses to the cellar door. At the cellarway landing she pauses and takes the coarse navy cardigan from its nail. It is one of Dad's fireman sweaters shrunk too small for him to wear. Mama is happy to have it to protect her from the chill of the cellar in wintertime. She flicks on the light at the bottom landing. "It's so damp," she says to herself as she descends the wooden stairs. Even though the bulb is lit, the cellar is shadowy dark. I follow close to Mama, daring the night demons to get me while she is with me.
Across from us, the square steel furnace lies in wait, a rumbling beast. All day, all night, the grinding sounds of the furnace beast in the cellar seeps through our floors. A humming, throbbing, crackle-crunching sound as if the beast has teeth. Ours is a newer model furnace. Its mottled blue-steel coat is smooth and shiny, its corners rounded with silvery chrome. Beside it sits its source of sustenance: anthracite coal in a black metal drum, the hopper, attached by a black iron umbilicus. I pause beside it and listen. There it is – a crunching sound. Something is eating the coal in there…some kind of animal…
"Mama, why does it make that sound?"
"What sound do you mean? The burning?"
"The sound in the tube…"
"Oh. It's the worm." (This is what she always says. It makes no sense.)
"A worm? You mean worms?" I see in my mind's eye worms moist and wiggly…
"No not like the worms we dig up for fishing at the mountain lake. It's a giant screw, like. It pulls the coal into the fire."
A giant screw turning day and night, pulling coal to the roaring belly of the beast. I stare at the tube trying to imagine its insides. This furnace is alive; I can feel it, though no one else seems to notice.
On one end of the furnace is the peephole above the ashcan door. I can slide the cover sideways to see if the coal is burning. It always is. Always. But not always orange flames – sometimes blue flames like the ones on the kitchen gas stove, or on the culum dumps. Peeping into the furnace frightens me. The beast might catch me for spying and devour me, too… Instead, there's a shout.
"Get away from there! It's hot. What are you doing?" Mama stares at me. I quickly slide the cover back in place.
"Dad checks it sometimes…"
"Leave it alone."
⁕
Sometimes the beast is a warm bosom for baby animals. When we find abandoned tiny bunnies outside in spring, or fledgling birds injured by our tomcat, Dad tenderly packs them in a low cardboard box. He tries to feed them, then after tucking rags around them, he places the box on top of the furnace to keep them warm through the night. "We'll see if they make it," he tells me. Each time I pray hard at my bedside for their protection, and pray to find them well in the morning. "Dear Jesus..." I begin as I cross myself, pleading on their behalf. But each time when morning light comes we descend into the basement to find our babies stiff and cold, and I weep of a broken heart. The beast is no mother. It offers no fur or downy feathers or quick heartbeat. Its smooth steel skin coats a belly that makes ash and belches sulfur smoke.
Our blue beast is not nearly as frightening as Grandma's. In her tiny house, the narrow wooden plank steps lead down from the door in the kitchen to two low-ceilinged dirt-floored rooms. Right there, close to the bottom of the steps, lies Grandma's beast.
A she-beast, so clearly: a narrow waist defining her broad circular bosom and hips. She, plastered with a coat of flaky asbestos, yellowed and stained with age like old women's teeth. So raggedy. A snow of ivory asbestos lies all around her on the black dirt. She, with a black iron grill for her belly and inside, behind the isinglass window, her flames flicker wildly, consuming coal, casting orange pointy lights on the gray whitewashed walls. No worm for her umbilicus. No umbilicus. Dad and his brothers alternate the job of feeding her each day, hand shoveling the coal into her belly. Ravenous, she takes it all, reducing it before another morning into large flaky ash clumps. Nothing we kids can imagine in our black-and-orange Halloween nightmares can match the horrific image of Grandma's basement beast, consuming.
When I asked Mama about why the coal in Grandma's bin is so much bigger than ours, she told me it was because it was Chestnut size coal and that we use Pea coal at our house, and that different sizes of coal have different names – Pea, Chestnut, or Buckwheat. To me, they don't look like any of those things.
Mama crosses the basement floor to the coalben, and near its door quickly slips into worn fireman boots, shoes and all, not bothering to close the ladder-shaped buckles. Setting the hodpail aside, she swings open the coalben door. Mama reaches in with a shovel, pulling the rattling Pea coal forward toward the planking. Coal rolls down from the sides and piles up against the door. Urged by the shovel, coal rattles and rolls like beads unstrung. Mama stabs with the shovel and flings the coal out, spraying it into the hod with a BANG! She rocks forward in the floppy boots. She stabs, flings, and BANG! Two shovels-full fill the hod. Mama leans the shovel against the plank wall and crosses the floor to the hopper, dumps the hodpail, and heads back for more. As Mama races with the hod, I stretch up on tiptoe and peek into the hopper. Ever-so-slowly the coal swirls and slides downward into the worm, and then into the belly of the furnace. A coal landscape left is behind in the hopper: an upside-down conical mountain of air – a negative sculpture of the conical culum dumps that cover our landscape everywhere. BANG! Mama continues her race. Nine times she crosses. Nine hods to the hopperful and now she tops it off for the night. Done. The hopper is full level.
"Come on," she says.
Greasy blackness covers Mama's hands and sweater. She slips out of the rubber boots, crosses back to the steps. I follow closely at her heels, and slip ahead of her on the stairs to leave the dark basement behind. At the top landing she takes off the navy sweater and puts it back on the nail. Satisfied to have her chore done, Mama sighs and reenters the kitchen and the world of light. She reaches for a washcloth to remove the coal dust from her face and hands, then reaches for her mug on the table. She takes a good slurp of her now-warm coffee. I look into the chrome mirror of the percolator. In the percolator shines all the world behind us – a cellar door, the pantry and backdoor, the rag rugs ashore along the bottoms of the doors keeping the cold drafts out.
~Spring~
Ashes fill our landscape everywhere – from the mountainous piles of burning culum, to the cinders lining our alleys, to the coal ash spewed from our furnace beast. Grandpa, Mama's Tha, stands with tarry ashes falling from his cigar. He sifts coal ashes through his fingers as Dad and I stand with him in his enormous garden.
"You put ashes like this, eh?" He grunts the question to me and Dad. We squat with Grandpa looking at mounds of powdery gray dust beneath each plant. A fine coat of coal ash covers the dark green leaves at each thick-stemmed plant. I don't know what my dad really thinks, but he listens by looking downward, showing respect to his father-in-law, the patriarch. "You put ashes...No bugs," says Grandpa. He nods to agree with himself. His tomatoes are round, firm, and luscious. We haul two full bushel baskets away from Grandpa's garden. At home Dad sprinkles more fine coal ash on the tomato plants Tha had given him. I can smell and taste the lemony, sulfurous ashes as I stroke the hairy tomato plants.
Ring around a-rosy,
pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
"Why do we fall down, Mama?"
Mama scrunches up her face as she puzzles the answer. "It's death, like," she says to me. "Ashes of death, you know. Like Lent ashes, where the priest says, remember? 'Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.'"
We dust the edges every day. Coal in the basement beast turns to ash: white, black, rust, and gray. Ashes fall inside the furnace grate to the waiting square metal can below. Mama pulls the can out every two days or so, scraping the cement floor with the heavy load. Ash dust always comes out in a cloud and fills the basement air. It seeps upward through the floorboards to live with us; dust around the edges of the living room carpet. The carpet only covers the unvarnished middle of the wooden floor, so Mama has to clean the yellowy varnished floor around it every day. Crawling on her hands and knees, she orbits the threadbare wool carpet, so worn that its red-blue-yellow paisley design is mostly a crisscross of amber straw, sometimes revealing the brown wool felt mat beneath. With a damp cloth rag, Mama wipes away the fine powdery coal ash. But she cannot wipe it all away. Fine ash from the bones of coal fills the air we breathe. Dust within us; dust all around us.
*
Trash day, ash day. Our blue furnace beast gives us ashes to tote. On a sleety winter day, Mama puts on her wool coat and rubber boots. I do the same. "Come on," she says. "It might turn to ice." She means the weather. Her fears of falling outdoors while toting ash cans hastens her steps. Her twisted left arm reminds her to be cautious. And if she broke it again, the doctor told her at the state hospital, she could lose it. We descend to the cellar and cross the cement floor to the furnace. Below the peephole on the furnace beast is its ash door: wide, heavy, and latched with a chrome handle. Mama bends down and swings it open. "Watch out!" she says, pushing me back. With a grunt she pulls on the rectangular loop of steel wire and coaxes the can out the opening. She drags it onto the hollow carved into the cement floor from the scraping of many heavy cans, and it lands with a bump on the uneven floor, a fine cloud of white ash rising up to meet us. I look for live coals burning orange amid the black cinders. They fill me with delight, these dark jewels.
Just two of us, mother and daughter, lift the can in unison with a grunt. My side of the can is much closer to the ground than Mama's. She doesn't mind. Without my help she'd have to drag the cans through the basement as well as the length of the house to the street. She has me, though, and so we struggle together. The huge heavy can puts little more space between us that a bushel basket. We sway, we grunt, we scrape and bruise our legs against the can's metal edges as we wobble across the basement floor. We squeeze through the door one at a time, and lift the can up the step to the walk at the side of our house. It is an awfully long way to the street at the front of the house. By now it's pelting sleet, but it melts as soon as it hits the cinder-cement surface. All along our house’s cellar wall, the lily leaves lie wilted and ice coated. High above them, long icicle daggers hang precariously from the eaves. We are wary, but we cannot look up from our burden. We must concentrate. We must look ahead, trying to keep our rhythm lest we scrape the heavy can against our legs.
When we reach the front wall, we go up three large cement steps to the landing, then leave the safety of its flat surface to cross the steeply sloping sidewalk and boulevard. We begin the crossing, walking gingerly in case of unseen ice. I'm on the downhill side this time, and it's dreadful. I drop my end. The can tips, mimicking the slope of our hill, and the ashes slide downhill within the can. Mama straightens up suddenly with an angry scowl on her face until she realizes that we've gotten our usual positions mixed up. She moves around to the other side of the can. "Come on," she says, more gently, and we try to lift again. "Huh," we say as we pull upward. Just a few more steps and we plunk the can down next to the street. We back away from the rising dust puffs out of habit, but the steady sleet has already quenched it. Returning quickly, we head back to the basement for the remaining cans and the one wet paper grocery bag of trash.
An hour or so later, big men come with the ash truck. I watch from Mama's bedroom window as the men slow the truck in front of our house. The man in back takes a can with his two big hands and with one strong swift motion lifts it up, flips it to dump the contents, and bangs the can down. He empties the others as quickly. So rough and so strong.
*
At morning's end, Mama picks up the now dented cans and carries them back the length of the building to the basement beast.
~Summer~
August is hot, humid, and rainy. Mama heads for the basement to ready the bin for the coal year's end. Dressed in work overalls and firemen boots and armed with a shovel, Mama gets ready to climb in. She buckles the latches on the boots this time. Behind her in the only jeans I own, orange pedal pushers, and a huge man's flannel shirt, I reach for my small red snow shovel. "No," says Mama, "Here. Take this one. Your shovel's too small." She hands me a long, rounded scooping shovel, the one with the missing corner. It's taller than I am by half. "It's got a tight handle," Mama says. She steps over the low planking, into the bin, and reaches out a hand for me. Holding onto her, I swing my legs as best I can over the plank wall and drag my shovel with me.
Mama and I stand side by side on the bumpy surface of coal. At this time of year, it's hard to get enough coal in one stab to fill the hodpail. With the coalben almost empty, we begin to see the cement floor. Mama and I pull the coal away from the corners and toward the door. The shovel's edges bounce against the coal, which clatters and cascades like beads. Our arms are shaken with each pull. It's so loud. Slippery, too, as we try to work around the coalben. And with each movement, the air fills with coal black dust. We pull and pile coal. We pant. We scrape bottom and rattle our shovels until our teeth chatter and our heads ring.
*
Done. The silence is stunning. The light through the small glass windows shows the rising powder of black coal dust. Outdoors, in the world of light and summer heat, cicadas buzz. We stand in the silence of the coal-dark ben, covered in sooty black, huffing. We breathe the blackness into our bodies, and sigh, satisfied with our work.
~Buried~
"What should we do?" my best friend, Nita, asks.
Mama is outside mowing grass with the push mower. Nita is in the house with me. Mama thinks she can leave us alone together. At the age of eight, Nita is two years older than me.
"We could go in the attic and play house," Nita suggests.
We climb the stairs to the second floor, and then up the attic stairs. The attic has been our playhouse all fall through winter, but now in spring as we reach the top of the stairs, the heat held under the roof takes our breath away. It feels as if we've walked into the furnace room at school.
"Oh!" says Nita. "This won't work. It's too hot.
"The basement is cooler."
We head down to the basement. Nita looks over to the coalben door.
"Let's…go into the coalben!"
"Yeah. Let's!"
Deep down, we know it's a place we're not supposed to be, and that makes the choice more exciting.
We slip on the oversized, floppy firemen boots, unhook the coalben door, and climb in over the planks. The bin is half full – just the right amount of coal for us to stand on without bumping our heads on the bottom of the porch floor. Coal tumbles downhill beneath the floppy boots as we climb the slope towards the window. We giggle and run faster; the coal slides down even faster.
We jump on top and slide down like we imagine kids on hay piles in a farmyard, though the sharp-edged coal bruises our bottoms and legs through our pants. We roll and sift coal through our hands; bury our legs as if we are in beach sand. Laughing, we toss coal upward. It comes down with the sound of hard rains. Our hands, our clothes, our faces get a shiny black sheen. Exhausted from laughing we fall back onto the slope of coal until we hear a voice.
"Where are you?" Mama calls. We can hear her muffled voice outside the stone wall. We are stunned into silence. We hear footsteps on the porch above us. Then we hear the footsteps through the house. Nita and I stare wide-eyed at each other. Nita pushes her glasses back up on her nose.
"WHERE ARE YOU?" Mama's shout comes from the top cellar landing. We cannot get our buried feet out from the coal quickly enough to grab the door and shut it, even if there was a handle on our side. We hear Mama stop on the long steep descent to the basement. "You're NOT in the COALBEN!" We hear the panic edge her voice.
Sheepishly we come to the door and she gives us what for.
"What are you doing?" Even through her shock and horror Mama goes quickly through her list. "Look at your hair! Your pants! You got coal in the boots! And you got coal pushed to the far end where I can't reach it! It has to be shoveled back. All my work! And now I have to do it over. And…," Mama pauses, her eyes wide, "you could have been buried alive!"
Nita climbs out slowly and doesn't look back at me. Mama sends Nita home, too angry and scared to say another word to her.
It's a tearful trip to the clawfoot tub upstairs for me – an extra bath for the week. After a harsh scrubbing and some harsh words, Mama sends me to bed until supper.
*
In my bedroom the hot tears fall. It isn't any worse, I justify to myself, than what my uncles did! When they were kids they climbed into the mile-long train tunnel down the street. No one was supposed to go there. A train could come, and it did! And lucky for them, they found a hollow in the wall to pile into when the electric locomotive came.
That was bad. Or the times they threw wooden factory crates with iron straps onto the electrified third rail to watch them blow up. They blew out all the signals down the line. That was bad. At least we didn't stop any trains.
*
Nita and I never go into the coalben together again, but a few years older and farther afield we continue climbing and sliding. Up and away from our houses and yards in the hollow, up the mountain nearly to the top, we find our way into the woods to an old slagpile, three stories high. It is our very own secret pile, next to a hollowed-out building with rusty machinery by a pond. Though it is an abandoned mine building, my imagination sees it as an old-fashioned mill with millpond, just a bit run down. I feel happy and safe to be there.
On the slagpile we slip and stagger to our heart's content. There are, among the millions of fragments of broken rust, gray, and black rocks, some fossils. Nita and I become hunters, combing for treasure. A fossil print in stone. Perhaps pawprints, or insect imprints, or even plant images. We are unsure what we might find – until I discover something. It's a sharp-edged piece of slate: gray on one side, and rust-colored on the other. And on the russet face of the rock shard, there is a shallow black imprint of a plant. Mimosa-like ferny leaves. I hold the shard in my hand and look at it in wonder.
"What did you find?" Nita calls from farther upslope. She comes close, leans over, and pushes her glasses back against her nose. "How did you find it?" I gently stroke the image with my thumb and part of the image begins to rub off. The print, so durable, has lain hidden for millions of years; has been blasted from the layers underground, yet can be rubbed away by my fingers.
"How did you find it?" Nita asks again. I shrug. It's as if I've found something alive. I smile and put it in my pocket. "Where were you?" she asks. I point to the spot. Nita begins pawing through the shards.
I walk halfway up the slope and around to the right. I stop, look down, and see a very black, thin, smooth shard. Something about it calls to me. I turn it over to find another fern fossil – this one a very narrow leafy image. It gives off a faint shine against the smooth grain of the rock. I'm not sure if I can tell Nita this time.
"No fair," is what she says when she catches up to me. For the rest of the afternoon, Nita finds no fossils and grumbles. Without much effort, I notice certain shards, turn them over, and find more fossils. It is as if I can hear them. I don't tell Nita about this, for I can't explain my kinship with the dark prints.
Coal Year is an exerpt from the book-length memoir,
Black Diamonds, Blue Flames: A Childhood Colored By Coal
Coal Year was published in Kestrel, Volume 37, Spring 2017
and was nominated for Best American Essays
Coal Year
"Here I come a rumbling, rumbling, Please may I come in?
Now my coal is tumbling, tumbling, Tumbling in the bin."
-The Coal Man song
~Fall~
"Coal Man's coming today," says Mama as she pulls the broom in swift, short strokes across the kitchen floor. I prance on bare tiptoes over the marbled turquoise linoleum tiles, its tidal pools swirling at my feet. I sway as I cross to the rag-rug islands in front of the stove, sink, and the back door.
It’s September, and it’s still green down our hollow, but Mama's anxious to have the coalben filled. Who knows when a cold spell might come? Already in the gathering dark of evenings the clouds sail in, dense purple-gray, meaning cold is coming. This morning, though, is sunny and warm. That's hard on Mama. As much as she longs to take a walk, she stays home, waiting for the Coal Man.
In midmorning, I hear the coal truck – a large, loud monster. It pounds down our steep street and comes to a slow metal-screeching halt in front of our house. All of the coal trucks have screeching brakes – no matter whose you hire. This one is blue, coated in a film of oily black so thick that the name on the door is unreadable. From my front porch rail perch all I can do is watch. Mama has told me to stay away from strangers.
The Coal Man jumps down from his truck and comes around the back of his rig.
"You call for coal?" he shouts and flashes a gap-tooth grin. He drops a cigarette on the street and crushes it with his heel.
I nod, then turn and run for Mama. "Coal Man's here!" I shout, banging the front screen door. "Mama!"
She takes off her apron and descends to the basement to open the coalben door, then climbs into the nearly empty coalben beneath the porch at the front of the house. She pushes the three-paned glass window outward, propping it open with a stick.
I return to the porch cautiously now, feeling exposed. I stay behind the rail, my arms wrapped around the white-painted pillar to watch. The Coal Man pulls his truck out perpendicular in the street and then jockeys the truck into position. Backing the truck over boulevard grass and sidewalk, the Coal Man bumps his truck against the cinder-cement wall. He leaps from the cab, and lets the door slam shut, pulled by the downward slant of the hill. The tilt is stunning. From the rack at the truck’s bumper, the Coal Man pulls out boards and rocks to prop the wheels at the front and back of the truck to keep it in place. Back to the cab he goes, raises the truck bed, and races to the back end for the ramps. He slides oily black steel ramps across the yard, hooking one end to the back of the truck. The other end pushes into the coalben under the front porch. It's tricky getting the truck in just the right place so that once the ramps are out, they go straight to the little window. On Grandma's street, the coal truck has less of a tilt, but her coal man has to ramp over her hedge. Oh, her coal man grumbles if her hedge hasn't been trimmed low enough.
Coal Man wastes no time. Up goes the little chute door at the top of the ramps and out comes the coal: a rattling, rushing torrent of black diamonds. The downpour is deafening, and all I can see is a blur of black.
Coal Man checks the flow of coal at the ramp's top. Confident of the constant stream, he leaves the truck and goes around to the back of our house, to the basement door. I follow. His long strides take him quickly across the basement floor to the coalben where he watches the coal come in. Grabbing a shovel and hopping over the half-planked wall, he flings coal left and right to fill the corners of the room. As the bin fills, the space between the coal and the ceiling shrinks, and Coal Man's head hits the porch joists. Out he comes, and he and Mama put in the next planks. As the coal continues filling, Mama adds more planks until the plank wall is now as high as Mama's collarbone – as high as it will be all year. Later, Mama will shovel the coal surface level so that it will be easier to work with. Coal Man wipes his face on his filthy sleeve and heads back outdoors.
As Mama hurries upstairs to find the money envelope, I follow her.
"Mama, where did he get the coal from?"
"What do you mean, where?"
"Where did he get it from for the truck?"
"From the breaker. You know," she gestures with her hand, "from the breaker – down in the Flats," she says, and hurries to her bedroom closet. She reaches into the small, dark space and retrieves the worn electric company envelope marked COAL. From it she takes and counts the sixty-three dollars it has taken all year to save up for this expense. She sighs, puts back the envelope, and carries the cash away downstairs.
I don't like breaker buildings. Breakers are towers of blackness, surrounded by blackness – the mountains of culum dumps towering over them. Each one is a lopsided black building shaped like a stack of alphabet blocks, with one little last block off-center on top; many-windowed – or it would be many-windowed except most of the panes are broken. And the whole place clatters so loud. When Dad took me down to the breakers in the Flats along the Lackawanna River, we had to shout to one another – you can't get close to one and still talk. Though I couldn't see inside the building, I was terribly frightened of it. The breaker building stood dark and tall, and there was something about it I sensed was really bad – but I couldn't name what it is. Dad told me there used to be breaker boys who sat inside breakers in the cold and dark along metal chutes, breathing coal dust and sorting coal. Sometimes they came away maimed. But that was a long time ago – when my dad's dad was a boy. Now there are only machines inside. I still don't understand how it all works.
"But Mama, how do they get the coal into the truck?"
Mama waves her hand in the air as if brushing away a fly. "I don't know, Honey. I've never seen how. Ask your dad." Then she dashes out the door.
With an oily black broom, Coal Man sweeps the last of the black diamonds from the truck bed through the chute. Sparse beads of coal rattle down the ramp and sound the end of the downpour. Coal Man pulls up the ramps, stacks them back on the truck, and hangs up his broom. He wipes his hands on a rag before pulling out a receipt book from the cab. Mama brings up the cash and hands it over. As the truck heads out into the street and grinds uphill, Mama pulls the prop from the coalben window. The coal year has begun.
`
~Winter~
"I got to shovel coal," Mama says each winter evening after pouring the thickest portion of hot coffee from the bottom of the chrome percolator. She sets her white porcelain mug at the end of the table and crosses to the cellar door. At the cellarway landing she pauses and takes the coarse navy cardigan from its nail. It is one of Dad's fireman sweaters shrunk too small for him to wear. Mama is happy to have it to protect her from the chill of the cellar in wintertime. She flicks on the light at the bottom landing. "It's so damp," she says to herself as she descends the wooden stairs. Even though the bulb is lit, the cellar is shadowy dark. I follow close to Mama, daring the night demons to get me while she is with me.
Across from us, the square steel furnace lies in wait, a rumbling beast. All day, all night, the grinding sounds of the furnace beast in the cellar seeps through our floors. A humming, throbbing, crackle-crunching sound as if the beast has teeth. Ours is a newer model furnace. Its mottled blue-steel coat is smooth and shiny, its corners rounded with silvery chrome. Beside it sits its source of sustenance: anthracite coal in a black metal drum, the hopper, attached by a black iron umbilicus. I pause beside it and listen. There it is – a crunching sound. Something is eating the coal in there…some kind of animal…
"Mama, why does it make that sound?"
"What sound do you mean? The burning?"
"The sound in the tube…"
"Oh. It's the worm." (This is what she always says. It makes no sense.)
"A worm? You mean worms?" I see in my mind's eye worms moist and wiggly…
"No not like the worms we dig up for fishing at the mountain lake. It's a giant screw, like. It pulls the coal into the fire."
A giant screw turning day and night, pulling coal to the roaring belly of the beast. I stare at the tube trying to imagine its insides. This furnace is alive; I can feel it, though no one else seems to notice.
On one end of the furnace is the peephole above the ashcan door. I can slide the cover sideways to see if the coal is burning. It always is. Always. But not always orange flames – sometimes blue flames like the ones on the kitchen gas stove, or on the culum dumps. Peeping into the furnace frightens me. The beast might catch me for spying and devour me, too… Instead, there's a shout.
"Get away from there! It's hot. What are you doing?" Mama stares at me. I quickly slide the cover back in place.
"Dad checks it sometimes…"
"Leave it alone."
⁕
Sometimes the beast is a warm bosom for baby animals. When we find abandoned tiny bunnies outside in spring, or fledgling birds injured by our tomcat, Dad tenderly packs them in a low cardboard box. He tries to feed them, then after tucking rags around them, he places the box on top of the furnace to keep them warm through the night. "We'll see if they make it," he tells me. Each time I pray hard at my bedside for their protection, and pray to find them well in the morning. "Dear Jesus..." I begin as I cross myself, pleading on their behalf. But each time when morning light comes we descend into the basement to find our babies stiff and cold, and I weep of a broken heart. The beast is no mother. It offers no fur or downy feathers or quick heartbeat. Its smooth steel skin coats a belly that makes ash and belches sulfur smoke.
Our blue beast is not nearly as frightening as Grandma's. In her tiny house, the narrow wooden plank steps lead down from the door in the kitchen to two low-ceilinged dirt-floored rooms. Right there, close to the bottom of the steps, lies Grandma's beast.
A she-beast, so clearly: a narrow waist defining her broad circular bosom and hips. She, plastered with a coat of flaky asbestos, yellowed and stained with age like old women's teeth. So raggedy. A snow of ivory asbestos lies all around her on the black dirt. She, with a black iron grill for her belly and inside, behind the isinglass window, her flames flicker wildly, consuming coal, casting orange pointy lights on the gray whitewashed walls. No worm for her umbilicus. No umbilicus. Dad and his brothers alternate the job of feeding her each day, hand shoveling the coal into her belly. Ravenous, she takes it all, reducing it before another morning into large flaky ash clumps. Nothing we kids can imagine in our black-and-orange Halloween nightmares can match the horrific image of Grandma's basement beast, consuming.
When I asked Mama about why the coal in Grandma's bin is so much bigger than ours, she told me it was because it was Chestnut size coal and that we use Pea coal at our house, and that different sizes of coal have different names – Pea, Chestnut, or Buckwheat. To me, they don't look like any of those things.
Mama crosses the basement floor to the coalben, and near its door quickly slips into worn fireman boots, shoes and all, not bothering to close the ladder-shaped buckles. Setting the hodpail aside, she swings open the coalben door. Mama reaches in with a shovel, pulling the rattling Pea coal forward toward the planking. Coal rolls down from the sides and piles up against the door. Urged by the shovel, coal rattles and rolls like beads unstrung. Mama stabs with the shovel and flings the coal out, spraying it into the hod with a BANG! She rocks forward in the floppy boots. She stabs, flings, and BANG! Two shovels-full fill the hod. Mama leans the shovel against the plank wall and crosses the floor to the hopper, dumps the hodpail, and heads back for more. As Mama races with the hod, I stretch up on tiptoe and peek into the hopper. Ever-so-slowly the coal swirls and slides downward into the worm, and then into the belly of the furnace. A coal landscape left is behind in the hopper: an upside-down conical mountain of air – a negative sculpture of the conical culum dumps that cover our landscape everywhere. BANG! Mama continues her race. Nine times she crosses. Nine hods to the hopperful and now she tops it off for the night. Done. The hopper is full level.
"Come on," she says.
Greasy blackness covers Mama's hands and sweater. She slips out of the rubber boots, crosses back to the steps. I follow closely at her heels, and slip ahead of her on the stairs to leave the dark basement behind. At the top landing she takes off the navy sweater and puts it back on the nail. Satisfied to have her chore done, Mama sighs and reenters the kitchen and the world of light. She reaches for a washcloth to remove the coal dust from her face and hands, then reaches for her mug on the table. She takes a good slurp of her now-warm coffee. I look into the chrome mirror of the percolator. In the percolator shines all the world behind us – a cellar door, the pantry and backdoor, the rag rugs ashore along the bottoms of the doors keeping the cold drafts out.
~Spring~
Ashes fill our landscape everywhere – from the mountainous piles of burning culum, to the cinders lining our alleys, to the coal ash spewed from our furnace beast. Grandpa, Mama's Tha, stands with tarry ashes falling from his cigar. He sifts coal ashes through his fingers as Dad and I stand with him in his enormous garden.
"You put ashes like this, eh?" He grunts the question to me and Dad. We squat with Grandpa looking at mounds of powdery gray dust beneath each plant. A fine coat of coal ash covers the dark green leaves at each thick-stemmed plant. I don't know what my dad really thinks, but he listens by looking downward, showing respect to his father-in-law, the patriarch. "You put ashes...No bugs," says Grandpa. He nods to agree with himself. His tomatoes are round, firm, and luscious. We haul two full bushel baskets away from Grandpa's garden. At home Dad sprinkles more fine coal ash on the tomato plants Tha had given him. I can smell and taste the lemony, sulfurous ashes as I stroke the hairy tomato plants.
Ring around a-rosy,
pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
"Why do we fall down, Mama?"
Mama scrunches up her face as she puzzles the answer. "It's death, like," she says to me. "Ashes of death, you know. Like Lent ashes, where the priest says, remember? 'Ashes to ashes; dust to dust.'"
We dust the edges every day. Coal in the basement beast turns to ash: white, black, rust, and gray. Ashes fall inside the furnace grate to the waiting square metal can below. Mama pulls the can out every two days or so, scraping the cement floor with the heavy load. Ash dust always comes out in a cloud and fills the basement air. It seeps upward through the floorboards to live with us; dust around the edges of the living room carpet. The carpet only covers the unvarnished middle of the wooden floor, so Mama has to clean the yellowy varnished floor around it every day. Crawling on her hands and knees, she orbits the threadbare wool carpet, so worn that its red-blue-yellow paisley design is mostly a crisscross of amber straw, sometimes revealing the brown wool felt mat beneath. With a damp cloth rag, Mama wipes away the fine powdery coal ash. But she cannot wipe it all away. Fine ash from the bones of coal fills the air we breathe. Dust within us; dust all around us.
*
Trash day, ash day. Our blue furnace beast gives us ashes to tote. On a sleety winter day, Mama puts on her wool coat and rubber boots. I do the same. "Come on," she says. "It might turn to ice." She means the weather. Her fears of falling outdoors while toting ash cans hastens her steps. Her twisted left arm reminds her to be cautious. And if she broke it again, the doctor told her at the state hospital, she could lose it. We descend to the cellar and cross the cement floor to the furnace. Below the peephole on the furnace beast is its ash door: wide, heavy, and latched with a chrome handle. Mama bends down and swings it open. "Watch out!" she says, pushing me back. With a grunt she pulls on the rectangular loop of steel wire and coaxes the can out the opening. She drags it onto the hollow carved into the cement floor from the scraping of many heavy cans, and it lands with a bump on the uneven floor, a fine cloud of white ash rising up to meet us. I look for live coals burning orange amid the black cinders. They fill me with delight, these dark jewels.
Just two of us, mother and daughter, lift the can in unison with a grunt. My side of the can is much closer to the ground than Mama's. She doesn't mind. Without my help she'd have to drag the cans through the basement as well as the length of the house to the street. She has me, though, and so we struggle together. The huge heavy can puts little more space between us that a bushel basket. We sway, we grunt, we scrape and bruise our legs against the can's metal edges as we wobble across the basement floor. We squeeze through the door one at a time, and lift the can up the step to the walk at the side of our house. It is an awfully long way to the street at the front of the house. By now it's pelting sleet, but it melts as soon as it hits the cinder-cement surface. All along our house’s cellar wall, the lily leaves lie wilted and ice coated. High above them, long icicle daggers hang precariously from the eaves. We are wary, but we cannot look up from our burden. We must concentrate. We must look ahead, trying to keep our rhythm lest we scrape the heavy can against our legs.
When we reach the front wall, we go up three large cement steps to the landing, then leave the safety of its flat surface to cross the steeply sloping sidewalk and boulevard. We begin the crossing, walking gingerly in case of unseen ice. I'm on the downhill side this time, and it's dreadful. I drop my end. The can tips, mimicking the slope of our hill, and the ashes slide downhill within the can. Mama straightens up suddenly with an angry scowl on her face until she realizes that we've gotten our usual positions mixed up. She moves around to the other side of the can. "Come on," she says, more gently, and we try to lift again. "Huh," we say as we pull upward. Just a few more steps and we plunk the can down next to the street. We back away from the rising dust puffs out of habit, but the steady sleet has already quenched it. Returning quickly, we head back to the basement for the remaining cans and the one wet paper grocery bag of trash.
An hour or so later, big men come with the ash truck. I watch from Mama's bedroom window as the men slow the truck in front of our house. The man in back takes a can with his two big hands and with one strong swift motion lifts it up, flips it to dump the contents, and bangs the can down. He empties the others as quickly. So rough and so strong.
*
At morning's end, Mama picks up the now dented cans and carries them back the length of the building to the basement beast.
~Summer~
August is hot, humid, and rainy. Mama heads for the basement to ready the bin for the coal year's end. Dressed in work overalls and firemen boots and armed with a shovel, Mama gets ready to climb in. She buckles the latches on the boots this time. Behind her in the only jeans I own, orange pedal pushers, and a huge man's flannel shirt, I reach for my small red snow shovel. "No," says Mama, "Here. Take this one. Your shovel's too small." She hands me a long, rounded scooping shovel, the one with the missing corner. It's taller than I am by half. "It's got a tight handle," Mama says. She steps over the low planking, into the bin, and reaches out a hand for me. Holding onto her, I swing my legs as best I can over the plank wall and drag my shovel with me.
Mama and I stand side by side on the bumpy surface of coal. At this time of year, it's hard to get enough coal in one stab to fill the hodpail. With the coalben almost empty, we begin to see the cement floor. Mama and I pull the coal away from the corners and toward the door. The shovel's edges bounce against the coal, which clatters and cascades like beads. Our arms are shaken with each pull. It's so loud. Slippery, too, as we try to work around the coalben. And with each movement, the air fills with coal black dust. We pull and pile coal. We pant. We scrape bottom and rattle our shovels until our teeth chatter and our heads ring.
*
Done. The silence is stunning. The light through the small glass windows shows the rising powder of black coal dust. Outdoors, in the world of light and summer heat, cicadas buzz. We stand in the silence of the coal-dark ben, covered in sooty black, huffing. We breathe the blackness into our bodies, and sigh, satisfied with our work.
~Buried~
"What should we do?" my best friend, Nita, asks.
Mama is outside mowing grass with the push mower. Nita is in the house with me. Mama thinks she can leave us alone together. At the age of eight, Nita is two years older than me.
"We could go in the attic and play house," Nita suggests.
We climb the stairs to the second floor, and then up the attic stairs. The attic has been our playhouse all fall through winter, but now in spring as we reach the top of the stairs, the heat held under the roof takes our breath away. It feels as if we've walked into the furnace room at school.
"Oh!" says Nita. "This won't work. It's too hot.
"The basement is cooler."
We head down to the basement. Nita looks over to the coalben door.
"Let's…go into the coalben!"
"Yeah. Let's!"
Deep down, we know it's a place we're not supposed to be, and that makes the choice more exciting.
We slip on the oversized, floppy firemen boots, unhook the coalben door, and climb in over the planks. The bin is half full – just the right amount of coal for us to stand on without bumping our heads on the bottom of the porch floor. Coal tumbles downhill beneath the floppy boots as we climb the slope towards the window. We giggle and run faster; the coal slides down even faster.
We jump on top and slide down like we imagine kids on hay piles in a farmyard, though the sharp-edged coal bruises our bottoms and legs through our pants. We roll and sift coal through our hands; bury our legs as if we are in beach sand. Laughing, we toss coal upward. It comes down with the sound of hard rains. Our hands, our clothes, our faces get a shiny black sheen. Exhausted from laughing we fall back onto the slope of coal until we hear a voice.
"Where are you?" Mama calls. We can hear her muffled voice outside the stone wall. We are stunned into silence. We hear footsteps on the porch above us. Then we hear the footsteps through the house. Nita and I stare wide-eyed at each other. Nita pushes her glasses back up on her nose.
"WHERE ARE YOU?" Mama's shout comes from the top cellar landing. We cannot get our buried feet out from the coal quickly enough to grab the door and shut it, even if there was a handle on our side. We hear Mama stop on the long steep descent to the basement. "You're NOT in the COALBEN!" We hear the panic edge her voice.
Sheepishly we come to the door and she gives us what for.
"What are you doing?" Even through her shock and horror Mama goes quickly through her list. "Look at your hair! Your pants! You got coal in the boots! And you got coal pushed to the far end where I can't reach it! It has to be shoveled back. All my work! And now I have to do it over. And…," Mama pauses, her eyes wide, "you could have been buried alive!"
Nita climbs out slowly and doesn't look back at me. Mama sends Nita home, too angry and scared to say another word to her.
It's a tearful trip to the clawfoot tub upstairs for me – an extra bath for the week. After a harsh scrubbing and some harsh words, Mama sends me to bed until supper.
*
In my bedroom the hot tears fall. It isn't any worse, I justify to myself, than what my uncles did! When they were kids they climbed into the mile-long train tunnel down the street. No one was supposed to go there. A train could come, and it did! And lucky for them, they found a hollow in the wall to pile into when the electric locomotive came.
That was bad. Or the times they threw wooden factory crates with iron straps onto the electrified third rail to watch them blow up. They blew out all the signals down the line. That was bad. At least we didn't stop any trains.
*
Nita and I never go into the coalben together again, but a few years older and farther afield we continue climbing and sliding. Up and away from our houses and yards in the hollow, up the mountain nearly to the top, we find our way into the woods to an old slagpile, three stories high. It is our very own secret pile, next to a hollowed-out building with rusty machinery by a pond. Though it is an abandoned mine building, my imagination sees it as an old-fashioned mill with millpond, just a bit run down. I feel happy and safe to be there.
On the slagpile we slip and stagger to our heart's content. There are, among the millions of fragments of broken rust, gray, and black rocks, some fossils. Nita and I become hunters, combing for treasure. A fossil print in stone. Perhaps pawprints, or insect imprints, or even plant images. We are unsure what we might find – until I discover something. It's a sharp-edged piece of slate: gray on one side, and rust-colored on the other. And on the russet face of the rock shard, there is a shallow black imprint of a plant. Mimosa-like ferny leaves. I hold the shard in my hand and look at it in wonder.
"What did you find?" Nita calls from farther upslope. She comes close, leans over, and pushes her glasses back against her nose. "How did you find it?" I gently stroke the image with my thumb and part of the image begins to rub off. The print, so durable, has lain hidden for millions of years; has been blasted from the layers underground, yet can be rubbed away by my fingers.
"How did you find it?" Nita asks again. I shrug. It's as if I've found something alive. I smile and put it in my pocket. "Where were you?" she asks. I point to the spot. Nita begins pawing through the shards.
I walk halfway up the slope and around to the right. I stop, look down, and see a very black, thin, smooth shard. Something about it calls to me. I turn it over to find another fern fossil – this one a very narrow leafy image. It gives off a faint shine against the smooth grain of the rock. I'm not sure if I can tell Nita this time.
"No fair," is what she says when she catches up to me. For the rest of the afternoon, Nita finds no fossils and grumbles. Without much effort, I notice certain shards, turn them over, and find more fossils. It is as if I can hear them. I don't tell Nita about this, for I can't explain my kinship with the dark prints.
Coal Year is an exerpt from the book-length memoir,
Black Diamonds, Blue Flames: A Childhood Colored By Coal
Coal Year was published in Kestrel, Volume 37, Spring 2017
and was nominated for Best American Essays
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