Excavation

Chapter 15

Joe Manors climbed aboard the Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer using leg and arm muscles that seemed to creak with every movement. Not a moment too soon: the day foreman was staring down at him from his yellow pickup on the edge of the embankment. Fool was going to slide over the lip someday; here he was ridin’ everybody’s ass about safety all the time and the man himself was a walking accident. Wouldn’t break Joe’s heart none if the truck took a high dive.

He’d barely made it; he was pretty sure the foreman would use just about any excuse to get rid of him. The foreman didn’t like hiring the local men for his crew—that was well known—but it was hard getting people to work this far back in the woods. Joe felt satisfied that he’d be hard to replace.

Foreman was talking to Mr. Emmanuel now. Then the two were laughing, looking like idiots when you couldn’t hear the sound of the laugh. Joe set his jaw and warmed up the engine a few minutes, then started up the cut.

Joe had seen pictures the Nole Company PR people had taken of the Big Andy for some of their slick company magazines and advertisements. To show how well they were taking care of the land they were stripping, to show that it didn’t look as awful as everybody said.

The problem was the pictures were of the south side of Big Andy, with Simpson Creeks just out of view, hidden by one of the smaller ridges. They hadn’t stripped there at all, yet. All the stripping had taken place on the north side, eating into the base and side of the mountain like a bad case of tooth decay. Sometimes Joe got nervous when the big augers started working sideways into one of the exposed coal seams; he imagined them boring right into the backyard of Charlie Simpson’s store. Big Andy was becoming a shell pretty fast, like one of those fake western towns in the movies, with no back to them.

It was a shocking change… coming into work in the morning. You’d be walking up the mountain, under the trees, the earth so alive with small animals and growing things you couldn’t help but feel a little better about things. Then you’d cross that all-too-visible line near the top of the ridge… and suddenly you’re on the moon, and you could swear there hadn’t been life here in a million years.

Ninety-foot cliff walls and piles of gray rubble and great scars in the earth. Joe had never seen anything like it anywhere else in the world. While in the service he’d seen burnt and bombed-out areas in Vietnam that had shaken him badly, just to look at, but even those places had more life than the strip mine. Spoil banks hundreds of feet high, drifting like old vomit down to Big Andy’s base. Snapped-off trees and boulders as big as cars—some of the blasting had sent boulders like that dangerously close to farmhouses further downslope. Pools of acid water when it rained. Erosion so bad it was like the ground just melted under the mildest rain. Baked deserts and frothy white sulfuric streams containing no life whatsoever, not even the hardiest. Avalanches thundering across land that had been farmed a hundred years and more.

Joe was all a part of that—he had to admit it—but a man had to eat, and these days if he was going to live in the Creeks, he’d have to work in the mine. There was just no other way.

Joe’d spent some time in Cincinnati as a welder, making good money, but he hadn’t lasted a year in the city. He still had a wife and daughter up there somewhere, who wouldn’t leave. But he didn’t fit in; few of the people from Appalachia in the big cities did, and they ended up in their own “hillbilly ghettos.” At least in the Creeks he knew everyone, knew everything that was going on. That gave him a feeling of some control. In the city a man didn’t control anything. And he didn’t even understand his next door neighbor.

Once they knew you were a newcomer in the city, they seemed to think you were out to breathe their air. And the only way to see more than a hundred feet ahead of you was to look straight up. You didn’t get a chance to build anything in the city, to make anything. And everything there already had a name. You could walk miles around the Big Andy and not find anything with a name.

Couldn’t keep pigs or a cow in the city; most times you couldn’t even have a cat. You got buried under cement.

So you came home to these hills that your great grandfathers sold right from under you for fifty cents an acre, to the mine owners’ lawyers with their fancy contracts and their “long deeds,” and then you went and sold yourself to the children of those mine owners. You got black lung and hoar cough, but at least you died where your daddy died.

It made Joe angry. It made most of the people Joe had ever known angry as spit, but it was the kind of angry you learned not to do anything about. You buried it when you buried that rich topsoil under tons of rock with the dozer blade. And it made you just a little crazy. Made you look as old and scarred as the land itself.

Stripping was a simple process, really. It was possible for a very few men with the right equipment—and without all the hazards usually accompanying tunnel mining—to reduce prime forest and farm land to bare rock in a relatively short time. The speed of it was scary sometimes: you wouldn’t have thought all that destruction could happen that easily.

Some PR person for one of the coal companies had come up with a pretty clever plan for explaining away the ugliness of it sometime back in the seventies. He thought the devastated areas would be of interest to tourists one day; the coal companies could provide guided tours. It had been a big joke among the locals as to whose devastated area was worth most as a tourist attraction.

Mr. Emmanuel had to admit that Joe was a pretty good worker. Watching him down there on the dozer, it looked as if the man were actually attacking the ground in frustration and rage. Whoever said mountain people were natural conservationists didn’t know what he was talking about.

He still had that feeling of being watched. And once… a shadow… like a bear? He wasn’t sure. Could have been a man. He was just getting paranoid, like everybody else.

He wondered about what the Parkeys had said about that Reed Taylor fellow. A man like that—his entire family wiped out by the flood—might hold a grudge against Nole coal. He was young, rash… he might have revenge in mind.

Mr. Emmanuel tried to remember exactly what Reed Taylor looked like. Dark black hair… it was all he could remember. Why couldn’t he remember any more?

He looked around at the workers on the embankment, down in the cut, on the other slopes. They all wore hard hats. He couldn’t tell their hair color.

As Joe drove up the cut, he noted how much the area was beginning to resemble some giant washboard, each cut backed by a small ridge of waste material.

At the crest of the cut, just like the cut a highway made in the side of a mountain, there was a ridge with a few trees on it, and a razorback of exposed rock. Joe knew that that grassy area around the trees was thriving with all kinds of life; he was terribly aware of that every day he began work, and his first task every morning on the job was to put those kinds of thoughts out of his mind.

He dropped the blade into the edge of the soil, moving forward and skinning the topsoil off the layer of clay beneath. The bloom came up almost immediately—small pieces of carbon flaked off the coal vein far beneath. It was a rich area.

As the blade cut deeper, the topsoil peeled off in waves, like giant plow furrows, but Joe wasn’t planting this morning. As he approached one of the old trees, he could see the branches trembling, then the tight net of roots began pulling from the ground, then the whole tree began to topple, branches breaking, roots groaning against the strain.

Every so often he would push the mass of debris and uprooted trees over the side of the mountain, where it joined a steadily growing pile of refuse below.

The dozer blade was like a knife, cutting through everything. Small animals cascaded off both sides of the blade track; grapevines and ferns and all manner of vegetation were torn out of the ground and crushed.

A couple of days ago Doris Parkey had made suggestive remarks to Mr. Emmanuel. At least he thought they were suggestive. The woman might be so ignorant and crazy she didn’t really know what she was saying.

He wondered if he could make love to such a woman. Anything was possible, he supposed. But she had a large, strong husband. A beast of a man… hardly human, really. And Mr. Emmanuel didn’t want to risk a physical confrontation.

But what was he thinking of? He didn’t want the Parkey woman… he couldn’t.

Something moved in the brush and loose gravel behind him. But when he turned… he could see nothing.

Scraping away and scraping away at all that awful aliveness in the Big Andy. That wrinkled maze of ridges. Like skinning some creature alive. Sometimes Joe had this nightmare that after scraping away at Big Andy’s massive body for years they’d finally reach his insides… reach something. He didn’t think he wanted to be there when it happened. There were lots of places on the Big Andy he’d never been, woods so thick and entangled they were almost impassable. It agitated him just to think about running a dozer into those areas… no telling what might get turned up.

A squirrel dropped from a moving wave of earth and was pulled under the dozer. Joe gritted his teeth and plowed on.

Toadstools, moss, dandelions, rusted farm tools, somebody’s spectacles, a fox skeleton, churned under by the giant blade. Joe gritted his teeth and plowed on.

Once he was finished with the bench there’d be a “high-wall” of some sixty feet straight up. They’d have to detonate to get it down to size. Occasionally there’d be one tree left, a patch of grass. Most of the time that seemed worse than not having anything left at all. Joe tried to be extra clean about it, and not leave anything.

Someone was definitely here who did not belong. Mr. Emmanuel scanned the ravaged hillsides nervously. A moment before he’d caught a glimpse of a shadow at the edge of the woods where Joe Manors was stripping. But he hadn’t quite been able to make it out. Dark hair? Or bigger than a man… an animal? He couldn’t be sure, he just couldn’t be sure.

Joe watched, mesmerized, as the dozer blade cut through a nest of field mice, a few rotted logs, rich humus containing a variety of small creatures. The earth groaned and the machine seemed to be groaning back.

Joe felt the blade snag on something, gave the dozer more power, and was satisfied despite himself to see the mound of earth, rock, and vegetation he was attacking break into three pieces. Brush began tumbling off the ledge above him. He looked up to see the large brown head with dark eyes resting on top a moving ridge of earth, moving toward him…

The bear… he cried out and tried to pull the dozer loose of the mound. But the machine’s movements only caused further decay of the embankment—the head was coming closer, looming. And suddenly it fell through the open cab and was in the dozer with him.

Joe looked down cautiously. It was Buck’s head—Charlie’s old dog—the flies at it thick and heavy.