Magic Time

Chapter Three

WEST VIRGINIA-7:52 A.M. EDT

At the velvety, experimental touch on her cheek, Wilma Hanson opened her eyes. Paws tucked up neatly under him, Sebastian was sitting on her chest.

She sighed. “Good morning, Sebastian.”

She had long suspected the big cinder-gray tom of watching for the first movement of her eyelids. Most mornings, her first awareness-even before the whistle went off at the mine on the other side of town-was of Sebastian’s hefty weight walking up the length of her body and settling himself on her chest, and then, if she didn’t respond, putting out a paw and tapping her nose. Breakfast?

The purring in her ear informed her that Dinah had returned to being a hat, sleeping on the pillow just above Wilma’s head. And that soft little rumble at her right hip would be Imp. “I suppose it could be worse,” she said aloud and made a move to turn over. Sebastian climbed down, offended, and leaped gracefully off the bed, followed immediately by Rhubarb, Anastasia, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mortimer and Spartacus. “I could have St. Bernards.” She put on her bathrobe and padded to the kitchen, trailed by the rest of the gang: O’Malley, Isabella, Theodora, Clinton, Fish and Tara of Helium. Dinah remained where she was, for she was old and arthritic, but she mewed to remind Wilma that she wanted breakfast, too.

The house on Applby Lane was old, the kitchen large. Back when there’d been any money in the family-or in Boone’s Gap-there hadn’t been such a thing as air-conditioning. Wilma had left the door onto the sun porch open last night, and the room was drenched with early sun and the scent of morning, the fresh tingle of the air still bearing the scent of mountains and the woods. When she was a girl growing up in this house-back when dinosaurs walked the earth-the woods had been right out the backyard, and she and her tribe of sisters sat on the steps and watched the fireflies on hot summer nights. During the coal boom of the seventies the Applby Mining Corporation had put a trailer park there for its workers, and about three-quarters of the spaces were still occupied, mostly by retirees. There was a little shopping center just beyond.

Even so, you could still smell the woods on a summer morning.

Wilma smiled, a tall, rangy, gray-haired woman in a pink chenille robe, and knelt to portion out can after can of Friskies onto fourteen plates. The eight o’clock whistle blew at the mine, a groaned carpe diem-summer half over, and what had she done of all she’d planned to do before kids came back to her classroom in the fall? Four sisters yet to write those long letters to-though of course Hazel was of the opinion that all of them should get computers and communicate by e-mail. Weeds luxuriated between the long rows of berry canes across the back of the enormous yard. Many, many books yet unread. She’d kept up her work at the Senior Center, that was something. But mostly she’d just walked the green Allegheny trails to this or that hidden hollow, to spend a magic afternoon listening to folks sing old songs, tell old tales. She’d worked some on her weaving, relaxing into the rhythmic thump of the huge loom Hazel had built her in the living room, the cats all watching in fascination and reaching hesitant paws out to catch the shuttle.

Time and summer, like shining gold cupped in her hands.

Her smile faded a little as she thought of her pupils. Not so happy a time for most of them, with not enough work even for their parents. The town council of Boone’s Gap had been trying, since Applby had mechanized the mine ten years ago, to get a garment factory in town; there were a couple of small shops where wives could augment their husbands’ welfare checks, but that was all. Despite government efforts to widen and improve roads, there still wasn’t much tourism, and the one motel in town didn’t boast the amenities apparently indispensable to folks from Philadelphia or Baltimore or Washington.

A pity, she thought, looking out into the green stillness of yard and sunlight and berry canes. A thousand pities, that people couldn’t live in this magical beauty untroubled; that you had to weigh the sweetness of the morning and the rumpled velvet grandeur of the mountains towering over the town against the need to feed your family, the need to make a living, to make something of your life.

A thousand pities that this beauty was the only thing you had to trade. And so many traded it for a life in the cities.

She shook her head, her heart hurting for those sunny-hearted sixteen-year-olds who wouldn’t be in her classroom when school convened again in the fall. At times she had a sense of standing on a stream bank, watching the flashing water leap past her: a glimpse and it’s gone.

She had made a choice long ago, and, in spite of the meager pay that she augmented with weaving and quilting, she told herself she was content. Nieces and nephews, students and cats. Sitting on the bank of the stream of time. She smiled at the morning, wondering what the day would bring.

“Fred!” Bob Wishart reached out from the bed where he lay as his brother came into the room. “Fred, you came!”

“I’m sorry.” Fred touched him, looked down into his face-round, fair-skinned and soft, a familiar, comforting mirror of his own-and then around at the big first-floor bedroom of their mother’s house. It was the only room large enough to contain the softly beeping battery of respirators, filters, monitors. The blue-flowered curtains were open, showing the fence cloaked in honeysuckle whose smell almost drowned the faint whiffs of antiseptic; the light dimmed the green watching eyes of the surge suppressors and backup batteries that clustered around the feet of the life-support equipment. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t come before, when this happened.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Bob’s smile, his joy, was like standing happily naked in summer sun. Bob had always been the twin to take life as it came. “You wrote the checks, anyway. God, what would Mom and I have done if you hadn’t come through? And you’re here now.”

“I’m here now.” Fred settled himself by the bed in the old purple plush chair that had always graced the living room. Someone must have carried it in here for Mom to sit in.

It was good to be back. Good to be home. Funny-when he’d left this place, fled to Stanford and the promise of more than the University of West Virginia could teach, it had felt like escaping prison. Even his love for Bob hadn’t outweighed the sense of suffocation, of being trapped in this small town and this dusty house; held prisoner by their mother’s nameless fears. He wished he could embrace his brother, but Bob lay tangled in the ghastly sterile spiderweb of tubes and monitors and stanchions bearing IV bags, as he had lain for ten weeks now since the accident. Thank God indeed for the money the Source Project paid, the money that had been ready when word reached him, to provide the care Bob needed without requiring their mother to stay at the hospital in Lexington to look after him.

She wasn’t strong. She had relied on their father to deal with the world, and when he’d died, abandoning her as Fred had later abandoned her, she’d relied on her boys. Going away among strangers would have terrified her, killed her, maybe. Yet Fred knew she wouldn’t have abandoned her son.

It was enough-almost-to embrace Bob in his mind, his thought. And Bob, looking up smiling from the pillow, returned the hug with his eyes and his heart.

After the nightmare of the past few years, what had been stiflingly provincial now showed its true nature: safe and familiar, the heart of his self. In the peaceful sunlight of the bedroom the guilt he’d felt-the sense that he, Fred, should have been the one in the car when that truck roared around the corner in the dark-dissolved, like dirty grease in those time-lapse dish soap commercials they’d seen as children.

He was the one who could help. Who’d save them both.

Fred reached out with his mind, his heart, his thoughts, as if to draw the whole old house around him like a comforting blanket. The sounds and scents and the way the boards of the upstairs hall creaked, the cracked glass of the sun-porch window, the huge old Populux stove in the kitchen, everything. . Every memory of their childhood. The taste of every cookie they’d eaten in the cluttered kitchen and the smell of the attic dust.

He could give it back to Bob. Come back to it himself.

It was good to be home.

Hank Culver put his head through the dispatcher’s office door. “Anything I need to know before we go down, Candy?”

She checked the line of Post-it Notes stuck to the edges of her monitor-not that she needed to. Plump and curly-haired Candace Leary had been dispatcher at Applby Mining Corporation since long before they’d computerized, before there’d even been phones down into the mine. I’d have to stand at the top of the hole and shout, he’d once heard her telling Mr. Mullein’s secretary-Norman Mullein was son-in-law of the original old bastard whose name was on the mine. I thought it was heaven when they got us a couple tin cans on a string.

The secretary had half-believed her. There wasn’t a tram that left the downcast or a malfunctioning sprinkler pipe she didn’t know about. “You’re still developing the main panels in Twelve?”

He had been all week. “It’s still looking good. The seam’s about four feet thick and pretty level-maybe a little dip. Floor and ceiling look good.”

“Good deal. The geology boys’ll be glad to hear it.” She checked the status board. “Everything clear. Hillocher’s crew is starting to retreat out of Area Ten.”

“Good. Thanks.” As he clumped down the porch steps of the little office and crossed the dust-blackened gravel and mud that lay between it and the pithead, Hank checked his helmet light and his radio and touched the lumbar pack where he stowed the spare batteries-including an extra nick-cad for the radio, which weighed a ton. He’d paid for the extra battery himself, not trusting the one the company provided. In spite of all the union’s griping, the company tended to go cheap on equipment and keep it longer than they should. Back in the mid-sixties, when he’d started working at the old Green Mountain shaft on the other side of town, he’d gotten into the habit of buying as many spare parts as he could afford and carrying them in his lunchbox.

Twice, in those days, he’d been caught in cave-ins, once seen his brother Gil half-crushed when the face collapsed. It had taken the company hours to even locate them and nearly two days to dig them out.

Though Gil had survived-he’d been back at work in six months and had worked for Applby until emphysema got him in ’88-it was not something Hank planned to ever let happen again if he could help it.

Men were coming out of the locker room to crowd around the pithead elevator, gray coveralls still damp from yesterday, clumsy-footed in boots and kneepads. Sonny Grimes stubbed his Marlboro on the elevator doorjamb and with the other hand fished a pack of smokeless from his coverall pocket, chewing even as he tucked the half-smoked butt behind his ear. “The fuck you lookin’ at?” he demanded, when Hank put distance between himself and the inevitable spit to come.

“My mama was frightened by a cow in the pasture,” said Hank. “Gave me a complex.”

“Fuck you.”

A few feet away Ryan Hanson was twisting his body into a corkscrew in an effort to demonstrate Hideo Nomo’s pitching style to Gordy Flue: “Kicked the Braves’ ass that one year.”

“Bunch of Japs,” opined Grimes and spit tobacco on the cement floor. “Damn dumb game anyway. Give me football.”

“You like those guys in the spandex britches, Sonny?” asked Gordy, getting a general laugh and another “Fuck you” from Grimes.

Ryan grinned, ridiculously like Wilma when she was nineteen, the year Hank had first proposed to her. Her brother-Ryan’s dad, Lou-had been only fourteen then, a towheaded kid picked on by the bevy of long-legged girls that comprised the Hanson family; Hank remembered playing sandlot ball with him in a weedy field behind the old pit-head. Remembered Wilma in the first miniskirt the town had ever seen (and not all that mini, compared to these days), somehow managing to make it look prim, as if she were laughing at herself. Long slim legs in what looked like a mile and a half of stocking.

“Whole National League’s got Nomo’s timing down now,” added Gordy, as the car doors slid open and the men crowded in.

They continued to argue amicably about baseball as the elevator headed down, not really wanting to think about the endless drop in darkness, the rock whizzing past outside. Everybody talking and thinking about something else with the adeptness of long practice. Young Al Bartolo was showing pictures of his son to Tim Brackett, who was grinning his big slow brilliant gap-toothed grin with the cheerful understanding of a man who’s felt the same high at seeing the little red monkey face of his own child seven times before: “Gina all right?” he asked, and Al nodded.

“She’s fine. It was only a couple hours, and them Lamaze classes she took at Adult Ed work like a champ. Her mom’s over there now, helping her out.”

And Tim’s bright brown eyes in the electric dinginess seemed to say, Wait till his eyes track for the first time, and he looks at you. Wait till the first time he reaches out and grabs your finger. Wait till the first time he throws a baseball to you, or comes into your room at night because he’s had a bad dream and he’s scared. Wait till you see him graduate high school with honors. You’re on the road, my friend, but you don’t know what happiness is yet.

A good man, thought Hank. Not very bright-not the way Ryan was bright-but good.

The doors opened to the yellow blear of electric bulbs, the smell of earth and rock, of coal and mud. The damp touch of cold air on the cheeks. Up close to the downcast the company had put in sprinklers to keep the dust down, and it even worked, though everyone still came out of the mine looking as if they’d been spray-painted, and Hank still spit black and blew black out of his nose for hours after he went off-shift. Still, it was far better than it had been when his father had worked for Applby before him.

There was a little electric tram, like a string of golf carts, to haul everybody out to the coal face, and that was an improvement, too. Hank recalled places in the Green Mountain diggings where the coal bed was thin, the men had had to be trundled through tunnels on a conveyor belt with their tools between their knees and the rock seven inches above their prone backs. The headlamps of the men, and the single glaring light on the front of the tram, glittered on mud and wet rock on the conveyors that bore the coal back to the downcast, flashed on the puddles dripped from the pipes. Glistened on the coal.

And beyond those feeble lights, night blacker than the coal.

By the time they got to the new main, the conveyors had started up in the areas behind them, and in the distant mazes of rooms and pillars machinery started to buzz and clank as other teams got going. No sprinklers here, just the smell of the rock dust that lay like dirty snow on the floor to keep the coal dust down. At least the seam was thick here, nearly five feet. It meant he could stretch his back, if he got down on his knees to do it.

The uneven ceiling pressed down overhead, making the steel props seem feeble and small. The darkness, too, seemed to press in close from all sides, as if the headlamps made a watery wall, a weak denial of some inevitable fact.

Hank’s father had been a miner. He’d started each day with a shot of whiskey; ended it with half a dozen more.

Hank understood.

Almost more than the fear of explosions, fear of the roof falling in, or of a boulder loosening from the ceiling and squashing you. It waited for you, that darkness.

In a way it was worse that there were so few men, that so much of the work was done by machine. Not just because of all the men Hank knew who’d been laid off, whose families had been on food stamps for three or five years, who were trying to make ends meet on what their wives could earn. As Al disappeared to chart butt entries in the new section and Sonny loafed over to his loader, Hank felt an uneasiness that had nothing to do with the logistics of coal or manpower. In the sixties and seventies there’d been lots of guys down here, lots of friends. Voices to keep the silence at bay.

“C’mon, Hank,” Sonny called out as Hank methodically checked over the shearer. “The fucker was all right when you left it yesterday. What you think, the fairies came and fucked with it while you were away?” Hank ignored him. Diesel-okay; hydraulic fluid-okay; oil levels-he checked everything about the big, grimy yellow world-eater before he hit the switches that woke it to deafening life.

Sliding back and forth, chewing at the coal face, the black seam between the gray. Spewing rock and mud and shining black lumps onto the greasy shale floor for Sonny’s loader to pick up, to start their long journey back to the top of the ground. Tim’s headlight swooping and swaying as he shoveled. Shadows dipping, reaching like monster hands.

Ryan and Roop McDonough angled the metal supports upright, wedging them with hunks of shale or working them into shallow drilled sockets in the floor, and Hank thought, It’s no good pretending. No good trying not to think about the weight, and the dark, and the silence.

They were close to a mile down. If the world ended, they wouldn’t know a thing about it until they went back up again.