Laurence Learner
ECCLES NO. 6
Working the seam in a West Virginia coal mine
THE ECCLES COAL TIPPLE and shafts stand like a row of gigantic shanties, black with
soot against a mountain of gray slate, above tens of coal cars and a wide webbing of steel
track. The few houses still left in Eccles are scattered haphazardly along the road and up the
hillside behind the tracks. The town has a grocery store, a gas station, a few beer taverns, and
a union hall, but if a passerby doesn’t drive over the tracks and up to the mine, and come
upon all those late-model cars parked in the dusty lot between the mine and the gob pile, he
might figure the mine was about played out.
The fact is there’s more work in the Eccles mine now than there’s been in twenty years, and
most afternoons several men can be found leaning against a railing outside the office waiting
to ask Ted Sprague, the mine superintendent, for a job. It’s best to be there about four o’clock
when the shift changes and Sprague is certain to be up out of the mine. Often his face is as
black as any miner’s, and he can be recognized only by his hard hat, which is white while the
others are black. Sprague will nod at the waiting men and one by one tell them to come back
next week. This is the custom in the coal fields of southern West Virginia. Even if a mine is
sorely in need of new workers and the man is the son or brother or cousin of a miner already
in the mine, he is told to try again next week, and the week after next, and the week after that,
until he sees the job not merely as a means of earning a wage but as a privilege. Finally, if a
man has not been taken on elsewhere, Ted Sprague scribbles out a note to the head clerk
(“Woodworth, this man is for the third shift No. 6 Eccles”) at Winding Gulf Coal in Tams, a
dozen miles away, and tells the man to report there the next day.
At Tams the new man is signed up, sent for his physical and X ray, and told to report to
Eccles No. 6 at 11:00 P.M. The Eccles operation consists of two mines, one directly below
the other; No. 6 is 150 feet under the surface, and No. 5, 450 feet under. The coal from both
mines is brought up out of the ground at Eccles, but the men who work No. 6 enter the mine
from another shaft a good mile and a half away. To get to No. 6 they take an unmarked gravel
road that juts off the highway just before Eccles. The miners drive slowly, nosing through the
night on a road arched with tall trees, until far below in the hollow, they see a few squares of
light piercing in darkness, then make out the gray outline of a cinder-block building and the
mine shaft itself, and hear the deep whine of the fan that sucks stale air up out of the mine.
The cement stairway into the building at the mouth of No. 6 opens into a narrow room
containing a recharging rack hung on either side with double rows of miners’ lamps. Before
their shift the miners squeeze by looking for their lamps or getting Cokes from the machine.
Just before going down into the mine, each miner goes to the board next to the door, takes the
octagonal metal stamped with his name and check number, and moves it from “Out” to “In.”
If during the shift the mine should explode, trapping some of the men below, the board would
tell its tale with a certainty and simplicity that no time clock or punch cards ever could.
“You new?” a miner asks.
“Yes, I guess I am.”
“Well, you wanta see Harry. He won’t be here till 11:20 or so. So you kin git dressed, if you
want.”
The main door off the entrance opens into the bathhouse. The room is as tall as a small
auditorium and has wooden benches, cement floors, and walls painted a pastel green
underneath a layer of coal dust. Along the ceiling hang pants and boots and underwear and
socks, tied onto or set into wire boxes that are pulled up to the ceiling on pulleys and chains,
where a large heater purges the clothes of their dampness. The floor is streaked black with
soot and cluttered with crumpled newspapers.
The men are coming off the second shift now, mingling with those arriving for the third.
Those just out of the mine have faces covered with coal dust. Some are ebony, their heads
perfect lumps of coal, and they jostle and josh with the third shift men in jeans or slacks. It is
the last day of the week, and the long underwear the third-shift miners put on is sooty and
soiled. Their socks are grimy and their work pants and shirts are so dirty that by the time they
have put on their safety belts and buckled red battery packs to them, attached lamps to their
hard hats and pulled on jackets, they are almost indistinguishable from the second-shift
miners.
Some of the thirty miners on the “hoot owl” shift are in their fifties, grizzled and balding;
others are scarcely twenty. One new miner is so fat and pigeon-toed that he waddles up from
the parking lot; another is rail-thin, weighing less than 140 pounds. In their mining clothes
the men stand transformed. The fat man’s bulk is shrouded, and the thin man gains
substance; the older men appear years younger and the young men attain maturity.
Harry Flatts, the foreman, is plump and soft as a feather pillow and has skin pink as the first
sunburn of summer. In his slacks and print shirt he might well be the assistant manager of the
local A&P. Yet in light-blue coveralls and white safety hat, with a methane lamp hooked to
his belt, he becomes a figure of assurance, a shy man who knows and understands Eccles No.
6 as few men do.
“I’ll see ya later,” Harry says to the new man and goes into the foreman’s office. He pays no’
special attention to the new man; last month a man on his first night was left standing on the
surface. Tonight, though, Harold Barnes, a strong union man, decides to watch out for the
newcomer. He remembers perfectly well the fear and apprehension he felt eight years ago on
his first trip down into the mines.
“Ever work in a mine before, buddy?”
“No.”
“Well, it ain’t so bad. Ain’t so bad at all. Guess we might as well go down.”
Seven men push into the elevator, banging their lunch pails against the side, and stand joking
with each other as the carriage drops 150 feet below the surface. The elevator opens into a
large cavern with cement walls and a single exit, a small door no larger than the hatch of a
submarine. Because of the partial vacuum created by the fan, the door must be forced
vigorously until it pops open. The miners enter a long, well-lit, cavelike room where they sit
on benches waiting until it is time to go into the mine. Now a man has a chance to stuff a
chew of tobacco into his mouth, or a wad of gum or some ramps, the putrid-smelling onion
that grows wild in the West Virginia mountains. At midnight and not one minute before, the
miners get up, pop the other door open, and walk into the mine.
The seam rules the mine
THE MAIN PASSAGEWAY is perhaps fifteen feet wide and up to thirty feet tall. The walls
and ceiling are coated with whitish rock dust, a limestone mixture that by law must cover 65
per cent of the mine’s surface. In some places, though, coal shows through, rich and black,
shining with a metallic gleam. An occasional 150-watt light-bulb illuminates the passage.
Two small mine trains—flat-topped electric motors and several deep coal cars—stand on the
tracks waiting to pick up their “man trips.”
The hoot owl shift usually has two crews mining coal. The rest of the men bring in supplies,
apply rock dust, and in general get the mine ready for the day shifts. Most of the men have
the same job each night; as regular miners, they have worked in a mine for at least six
months and have taken the five two-hour classes that lead to a miner’s certificate. The newer
men, the trainees, can be shuttled around at will. On the hoot owl they usually end up as
laborers.
This evening Harry tells four of the trainees to get on a vacant motor, including in a nod of
his head the new man. Three of the men jump on top of the motor and the fourth man
squeezes in beside Harry. The motor bolts forward, accelerating up to thirty miles an hour.
The electric rod sparks as it moves along the open trolley wire a few feet from the heads of
the three trainees. As the motor moves from one section of the mine to another, leaving the
main track, one man has to keep jumping out to throw the track switches. At places along the
main track, the roof of the mine is so high that the motor seems to be rushing through a
splendid natural cave, but then suddenly the roof plunges downward, so low that the riders
are wise to keep their chins resting on the hot metal surface of the motor.
The motor stops at the entrance to a section that is not being worked tonight. The track does
not run up to the face where the coal is mined, but only to the end of the conveyor-belt
system that carries coal down from the face. When coal is being mined a man known as the
boom boy sits here watching to see that the coal is feeding properly off the belt into one of a
line of coal cars. Every few minutes he yanks a switch to pull another empty car up under the
boom. Harry reverses the direction of the belt so that two of the trainees can ride to the far
end and catch supplies that will be sent back. It is no mean task to jump on the three-footwide nylon belt, since the tunnel in which the belt travels is only four feet high. The belt
travels at about four miles an hour; in getting on, a rider had better fall forward on his belly.
If he tries to jump on, his feet may be pulled out from under him, his hard hat might fall off,
and the cord that runs between his head lamp and battery pack might get caught in the rollers,
strangling him.
The mine is not designed to get a miner comfortably and pleasantly to his work. Its only
purpose is to get the coal out, and the seam itself is the final ruler of the mines. Here it is the
Sewell seam, a rich four-foot layer of soft coal that runs through much of West Virginia, and
at the face and in the belt tunnels that is how tall the mine is. In other mines near Eccles the
seam is twenty-seven inches high, and the miners spend their working lives on their knees,
bellies, and backs. A coal seam is like the frosting between two layers of cake. Tunnels are
blasted or clawed into the relatively soft substance, and the chunks and bits are then sent
back down the tunnel and up the shaft to the top. Only in main passages and at the beginning
and end of belts are pieces of the rock itself blasted away to make the mine higher.
Eccles No. 6 is less than five and a half feet tall at the point where the new man and another
trainee are lifting supplies onto the moving belt. It would be labor enough unloading two cars
of bagged rock dust and another of limestone blocks in the best of conditions, but here the
task becomes terribly difficult. The new man tries to toss the fifty-pound bags from the car to
the belt, but he cannot stand up enough to brace himself, so he cradles the bags clumsily in
his arms and lurches toward the belt. Once the bags nearest the belt are gone, the men must
get into the car. The new man, huffing loudly, stands in the car, his back almost parallel to the
roof, and with contorted motions throws the bags toward the belt. John Thompson, the other
man, works differently. He is a bear of a man, clumsy above-ground, but here there is grace
and intelligence in every move. He is a trainee, but he is already mine-wise. He works on his
knees and swings the bags onto the belt in clean, even motions.
“Hey, buddy,” John says, “you’d better slow down. The way you’re goin’, you’re not gonna
last the night.... Look, if ya don’t mind me tellin’ ya, it’s sure a lot easier if you’d swing your
arms like this ... gotta make a machine outa your body.”
The new man tries. His arms are not quite strong enough to swing the bags up over the side
of the car. No matter how he works his spine aches. Many of the old-timers say that a man
never really gets used to such work—it goes against the ways of the body. A miner will learn
to pace himself, to use his body to best advantage, but he never manages to make the work
natural or normal or easy.
When the job is finished and the other two trainees have ridden back down the belt, the four
men sit beside the tracks nibbling their lunches and swigging long drafts of water. The men
call each other by their first names, or occasionally by a nickname or the last name alone;
often they do not know a man’s other name. The language of the mines has its own laws and
logic; even if a miner has learned grammar from a schoolteacher, he soon begins to speak
like the rest of the men.
One of the trainees looks down at the new man’s boots. “Buddy,” he says, “you best get
yourself some black maskin’ tape, en ‘fore ya come down wrap it ‘round your boot tops.
Them laces come untied, they kin git caught in the belts en pull ya under.”
“That there trolley wire’s another thing ya gotta watch,” Richard says. “It’s got 250 volts and
it kin knock ya right off your feet. Kin kill ya.”
It is good to sit and rest and talk, but even in this the mine is a tough taskmaster. The
temperature in Eccles No. 6 is a damp fifty degrees, about right when a miner is actively at
work, but at rest, especially if a man is soaked with sweat, he soon becomes chilled. Usually
the men working supplies don’t have that long to rest, since Harry knows how long a job
takes. While they wait they can tell where Harry is by listening to the voices on the amplified
single-circuit telephone system that runs throughout the mine.
“Harry, Harry Flatts. Calling Harry Flatts.”
“What the fuck is it now, Willis?”
“We got a motor off the track.”
“Well, get it outa there first thing. I’ll be down.”
“Six right boom boy. Six right boom boy.”
“Yeah. What you want, Beard.”
“Why’s the belt off now, Charlie! We gotta run some coal, buddy.”
“We’re outa coal cars. They’re bringin’ ‘em up now.”
“Harry, Harry, I’m havin’ a hell of a time with this here belt at B panel boom.”
The miners listen to the phone and know what is happening all over the mine. It makes of
each shift a single organism, with tentacles stretched thousands of feet up the various tunnels,
each one pulling down coal and sending it back to the elevator at the base of the Eccles
tipple.
EVENTUALLY, THE MEN SEE the beam of Harry’s head lamp as he approaches along the
tunnel. They gather together their lunch buckets and jump on the motor that will take them to
another section, where they are to help fix a conveyor belt. When they arrive, Moonshine, an
old miner, is waiting, his face charcoal, spitting tobacco juice from ruby lips. He looks like a
blackened praying mantis, a creature of the mines who never goes above but sleeps atop
warm motors and nibbles constantly on rabbit meat, baloney, Sunbeam bread, and ramps. He
often does, in fact, “double back,” working two shifts in a row, and the mine is as much his
natural habitat as anywhere else.
Moonshine has worked the mines for twenty-five years, and though he earns no more than
other miners, he is part of an acknowledged aristocracy within the mine. He is a wizard with
belts and motors, and his way writh a shovel approaches art. He does not shovel regularly
anymore, as he did when he first came into the mines and a man was paid according to how
many cars of coal he loaded. But it was then that he learned his craft. Now he is shoveling
coal away from the belt. He kneels and, using his left hand as a fulcrum down near the blade,
tosses great shovelfuls of coal back over his right shoulder, and then, scarcely breaking
rhythm, he switches hands and heaves coal over his right shoulder. In three minutes he does
what would have taken a novice a good ten minutes. All the while he jokes, asking the other
miners how often they can get it up for their old ladies.
The belt has to be fixed before morning, when the section is to be worked. The men walk a
few feet up the tunnel to the broken section. Moonshine, holding extra nails between his
teeth, nails one end of the belt to a wooden board. Now Harry starts the motor, which
shudders as it surges forward, struggling to move the slack belt. The men, standing on either
side, grapple with the belt, trying to pull it together. But it is still a foot short and the motor is
smoking furiously, so the men let go. The belt jumps back and rises in the air, a lashing
tongue. Time and time again they try. treating the motor as if it were some cantankerous draft
horse, giving it no quarter, ignoring the smoke and the whining sounds, until finally, after a
dozen tries, the two ends come together. In an instant, Moonshine drives a metal rod through
hooked teeth on the belt, fastening the ends as tight as a zipper.
It is time for dinner and the men sit munching sandwiches and drinking water. They say little,
but they belch and fart—the coal dust, sucked down into their stomachs, often causes terrible
gas pains. Some of the miners chew a whole package of Rolaids a night. Harry does not give
the trainees their full half-hour dinner break, but the men say nothing, and they ride off in the
motor to pick up two carloads of sand. The sand is used to give the motors traction when they
cannot get up steep grades. While it looks innocent enough, the white sand is a cause of
miners’ silicosis. The motormen know perfectly well that when they use the sand they should
wear a respirator, but most of them don’t bother.
The trainees, who are shoveling sand from two coal cars into boxes alongside the track,
working rapidly in a cloud of white dust, should wear the respirators as well. Only John has
bothered. The plastic respirator, similar to an anesthetic mask, contains a one-eighth-inch
thick feltlike filter that cramps the breathing, so that when a man is working hard he has to
gasp urgently for air. No one questions whether the respirator works though; up at the face, if
a miner wears the mask even for half an hour, he finds that the white filter has turned dark
gray.
IT IS ABOUT SIX O’CLOCK NOW; the pace increases and the men sprint forward,
working harder than they have all night, driving themselves toward 7:30. The trainees are to
unload three more cars of rock dust and Harry pushes the motor nervously ahead. Once again
John and the new man stay at the belt head, working silently, bent double. After a few
minutes John notices that the new man is staggering and no longer can throw the bags onto
the center of the belt. He says nothing but begins to throw the bags into a pile at the end of
the car. The new man gets off and, taking the bags from the pile that rises just above the edge
of the car, heaves them in a single motion onto the belt. Except for his blackened face, the
man is completely white with rock dust.
Both men work slowly now, their faces clenched in grimaces. When they finish John kneels,
head down, arms resting on the side of the car, and does not speak for several minutes. The
other man squats in the coal dust, head in arms.
It is time to leave, past time even, and when Harry returns, the men scurry out of the section
and start up the tracks to the main shaft. They walk tall, stretching their spines, and bolt
through the pressurized doors and into the elevator. At the surface the doors open quickly and
the morning rushes in, enveloping them, and they walk through the waiting day-shift miners,
mirror images of themselves.
The miners pull down their baskets, strip off their soggy clothes, and walk into the common
shower. The water hisses out of a dozen shower heads, beating a rigorous tattoo onto the
backs and stomachs of the naked miners. The men joke with each other and stand there
letting the steaming water run down their bodies. The coal dust does not come off easily
though. The bars of Ivory soap given out each Sunday, in accordance with the union contract,
do little good. It takes a strong liquid detergent to cut the dirt, so each man brings his own
plastic bottle, which he squirts into his washcloth. The men scrub and scrub for ten or fifteen
minutes, until their faces and necks are rubbed nearly raw. There are no short cuts, no simple
ways to get rid of the dust and grime; when the men leave Eccles No. 6 they know that,
except on Fridays, they will be returning to the mine in about thirteen hours. Yet they leave
looking as clean as white-collar workers. Only one or two of the old-timers always seem to
have a bit of coal dust behind their ears or around their eyes, and they have lived in mining
camp towns where sooner or later almost everyone gave in to the dust.
Darkness beyond simile
THE DAYS FOLLOW ONE ANOTHER with inexorable monotony, and the time between
shifts dissolves into fragments of heavy sleep. The mine becomes the only place there is.
Finally, however, the man and his body make their uneasy peace with the mine, and the man
begins truly to become a miner.
Bill Beard throws his leg up over the side of the coal car and jumps in. “If it ain’t one damn
thing, it’s another,” he says, and spits tobacco juice on the floor. Old Beard is always bitching
and no one pays him much heed. He’s probably the best section boss in the mine, or so the
men think, and they’re glad enough to be on his crew.
The eight miners ride to a distant section and get out. Charlie Richards, the boom boy, walks
over and turns the belt on and the other men jump on, one after another, riding twenty or so
feet apart. It is a long ride up the tunnel, so the men lie down with their aluminum lunch pails
in front of them. The trip has an eerie beauty to it—the head lamps in a long even line,
breaking holes in the darkness; the belt humming over the rollers, a lulling sound; the walls
white as if the tunnel had been cut through a mountain of snow; the other tunnels, gray and
mysterious, leading off the belt passageway, old sections where forty, maybe fifty years ago,
miners worked with mules and picks.
A red light warns that the belt is nearing its end and the men silently get up on one knee,
hands forward, like sprinters at the start of a race. Suddenly, for a moment, the ceiling is a bit
higher, and the men spring off the belt onto the hard surface of the mine. There are no electric
lights here. The only illumination comes from the miners’ head lamps and the headlights on
various pieces of equipment. It is fatiguing to focus on a single circle of light for hours on
end, but the miners are thankful their headlamps are so reliable. If their lamps should go out,
they would be immersed in a darkness beyond simile, where the eyes seem not to exist
anymore and a man feels the blackness with his toes and belly as much as with his head.
The men head up the wide tunnel to a spacious room that is still four feet high. The walls and
ceilings have been rock-dusted; in places the floor is ankle-deep in grayish, powdery coal. At
the far end of the room—at the face—the four-foot-high seam of coal is visible, glistening
when light shines on it, so rich in appearance that it seems probable the coal is to be used as
jewelry or as the coinage of the realm, not merely to stoke the furnaces of power plants.
Directly in front of the coal stands a continuous miner, the squat hulk of a machine that in the
past twenty years has revolutionized coal production, helping to replace several hundred
thousand miners. The continuous miner eliminates awls, drills, cutters, explosives, all the old
procedures and later refinements. In a sense, the principle behind the $100,000 machine
recalls the eighteenth century, when miners clawed out the coal with picks; and their wives
and children, naked to the waist, crawled through the tunnels on their hands and knees,
pulling the coal out in bushel baskets.
Jack McDonald, the continuous-miner operator, sits on a low, flat seat on one side of the
machine. Along the front of the miner runs a row of discs that look like railroad wheels fitted
with flattened bits. The discs move up and down the face of the coal, the bits chewing into
the wall, ripping the coal out, pulverizing it into small chunks and pebbles. The machine then
scoops the coal up and feeds it back along the center of its body into shuttle cars, each
capable of carrying about five tons of coal.
The electric shuttle cars are essentially long metal boxes set on wheels and trailed by electric
cords as thick and black as water snakes. Hank Told and Jimmy Feldson, the two drivers, sit
not six inches off the ground on running boards. They cannot see above the car to the far
side; they do not even have full vision ahead. And they must steer the skittish cars through
passageways little wider than the cars themselves. Upon approaching the conveyor belt they
have to watch out for the tailpiece man, and when they raise the car’s snout over the belt,
they must align it perfectly or much of the coal will spill onto the ground.
The tailpiece or cleanup man, usually a fairly new miner, has to keep the ground underneath
and around the belt shoveled clear of coal. If he is lazy, the shuttle cars will have to climb
over heaped coal to get to the belt. The tailpiece man must work steadily, shoveling quickly,
getting out of the way when the headlights of a shuttle car bear down on him. Another, more
experienced, member of the mining crew works the roof-bolting machine. He drills holes up
through the loose-slate ceiling and into the firm strata of limestone above. Then he uses the
machine to screw long steel pins into the holes, bolting the roof tightly to the rock above. The
roof bolts take the place of wooden support pillars, and although old miners miss the popping
sound of the timbers just before the roof falls, the roof bolts have proven much safer.
A member of Beard’s crew also has to maintain the burlap curtains that form an air tunnel.
The tunnel carries a vigorous draft up to the face and back out of the mine, taking away the
deadly methane gas that the continuous miner frees as it chews ahead. Beard himself carries a
safety lamp; its small flame will flicker upward if the air contains much methane, but the
lamp isn’t easy to keep lit, and the men don’t pay much attention to it. They know the Eccles
mine hasn’t blown up for years. The last time was back in 1948, late in the afternoon, when
an explosion in No. 5 shook up the fifty or so men left in the mine. Before that, in 1926,
nineteen men died in a blast; it would have been worse but the explosion took place in the
evening, when most of the miners had already left. Back in April 1914 the men were not so
lucky. At 2:30 in the” afternoon No, 5 exploded, blowing limbs and bodies to the top of the
shaft, scattering smoldering timbers on surrounding hills, and shattering windows in Beckley,
seven miles away. In all, 186 men died, still the second greatest disaster in West Virginia
mine history.
WHEN THINGS ARE GOING RIGHT, Beard often kneels at the end of the belt for hours,
watching the buggies spill their coal onto the belt, dust billowing up like oily smoke, the
coal-laden belt heading down the tunnel into darkness. Sometimes he will snooze, his head
tucked between his legs, lulled by the harsh sounds of mining—the buzzing rectifier, the belt
humming throatily as it turns round the drum at the tailpiece, the loaded shuttle cars groaning
up to the belt, and in the distance the high whine of the miner. If these sounds should change
or stop he will look up, shake his head, and find out what’s wrong.
Beard does not order the miners around. He has spent close to thirty years in the mines and
he knows better. He is a tall man, but far too thin, his skin draped over his body like ill-fitting
seat covers. Here he is vigorous and alert, but outside the mine he wears the face of an old
man.
He watches out for his men and if a man does right by him, Beard will go out of his way for
the man. In the past weeks Beard has been having trouble with Bob Telford, the tailpiece
man. Telford has been in the mines for a good eight months but it hasn’t taken. Like many
young miners, he served his stint in the Army and then ended up in the mines because that’s
about the only place to earn a decent wage—around $9,000 a year. All Telford does is talk
about his $4,700 Z28 Chevrolet Camaro with its Hooker Headers, Goodyear belted tires, and
fancy cams; or how he and his brother got drunk on some good moonshine and woke up the
next morning sitting in their car in the middle of the highway. Telford is always going off
somewhere. One night the fire boss, who’s in charge of mine safety, found him sleeping
under a pile of loose slate and reported him. Beard would never report a man, but he was glad
enough when a few days ago he got a new tailpiece man, a Yankee who came down to work
in the mines. Now, at least, he can send Telford up to help at the face.
Beard walks over to the new man, sits down beside him, and talks:
“It ain’t so bad, is it, son? You know when I came into the mines my only equipment was a
number four shovel. I just stood there en shoveled. Shoveled ‘bout ten tons o’ coal a day. Got
paid forty cents a ton. Truth is, I wish I was in that tailpiece job now. It ain’t bad at all. You
get it down, boy, you just watch it, you just sit there, en the only thing you gotta worry ‘bout
is not goin’ asleep, en you’re okay. Might git kinda monotonous, but it ain’t a bad job at all.
“Now this fella Telford, he just comes up here ta earn his shift. That’s all he cares ‘bout. He
was up here one night. Him en his buddy, they was on the side there. En a rock caught in the
belt. They was asleep, both of ’em, en it stopped the whole belt. You just cain’t have any o’
that. Just have ta watch out.
“But it ain’t a bad job here. The mines. When I tell ya how it used ta be, it ain’t bad at all.”
The belt stops abruptly and Beard walks over to the phone and calls down to the boom:
“Whatsamatter, Charlie!”
“We’re outa coal cars.”
“How many we got now?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Sheeet.”
The section is almost always down for an hour or so each night. If it’s not the miner needing
oil, it’s a frayed cord on a shuttle car, a rock caught in the belt, or a coal car off the track. The
section boss can’t do much about the stoppages; sometimes they last three or four hours, but
in the end, he’s the one who’s held to account if the coal doesn’t get mined.
“That damn Charlie,” Beard says, “he’s bin goosin’ that belt all night long. Cain’t get us coal
that way.”
“How many cars we got?” Jimmy asks as he nudges his shuttle car up to the silent belt.
“Thirty-four.”
“Not bad, considerin’.”
The other miners come in as well. A couple of the men piss against the wall and everyone sits
down in a semicircle on bags of rock dust or against the side of the shuttle car and eats his
dinner.
“I was workin’ over there,” Beard says, mentioning another mine, “’en this here slate comes
fallin’ down. Missed me, but this little ole piece, it weren’t nothin’ really, flew off en cut my
ear open. It was bleedin’ like hell, en the men thought I was dead. They saw all that blood en
they just ran outa there fast as they could go. ’Nother time my ole buddy, Woody Hanson, he
was a foreman there too, was workin’ en a piece a slate fifty-four inches thick fell on ’im.
The men ran outa there. We all came back en there was Woody lyin’ there. Usin’ them jacks it
took us two hours to get ‘im outa there. Every time we moved that slate Woody’d groan en
scream. Got ’im up to the surface and Woody’s sayin’ how he’s feelin’ fine. En ole doc gives
’im a shot en Woody dies.”
“Figure that there shuttle car’s ’bout as dangerous as slate,” Hanks says. “Gotta keep your
hands in all the time.”
“I broke my hand like that,” says Jimmy, the other shuttle car driver.
“It’s easy enough ta do.” says Jack. “Once I was drivin’ along up there. Lost my brakes. En
smashed inta the side, knocked hell outa the battery box. Woulda lost my hand if ita bin
there.”
“My daddy lost his hand,” Telford says. “It was run over. He knew he was hurt en he came
out. Looked down at his hand, en his hand weren’t there anymore. They went back, got his
hand, en sewed it back on. But now it’s just about useless. Just hangs there.”
A man can figure that three or four times during his years in the mines he will be injured
seriously enough to lose time at work. But the accident has to be serious for a man to stay
home. One veteran miner, who last month lost five of his toes while riding on the side of a
motor, is in Appalachian Begional Hospital, but the tailpiece man is working with a finger
that two weeks ago was broken in two places by a cinder block.
THE MINERS DON’T LIKE just to sit around. They take pride in mining a lot of coal and,
anyway, there’s just so much one man can say to another. By the time the belt starts up again
it’s nearly 5:30. The men work in earnest now, pressing themselves and their machines. The
shuttle cars groan up to the belt one after the other. The tailpiece man is lucky to get a dozen
shovelfuls of coal onto the belt before the next shuttle car comes lumbering down on him. He
is tired. But he feels a part of the crew—of the machines, much like great prehistoric insects,
dominating and subduing the very earth; and of the men, dominating and subduing the
machines.
Buggy after buggy of coal goes spilling onto the belt and down the tunnel, guided on its way
by Beard, shouting directions to the shuttle car drivers. The men waste neither movements
nor words now. Shuttle car after shuttle car moves up to the belt, till it seems the mine will
soon exhaust its treasures, ton after ton. Then the shuttle cars and the continuous miner stop.
It is 7:25.
“How many’d we get, Charlie?” Beard calls down.
“Eighty-one.”
“Not bad,” Hank says.
The men grab their lunch buckets, put on their jackets, and jump on the belt. They ride close
together, ten or so feet apart, and they joke and talk their way down the tunnel. At the boom,
where hours before they walked up empty tracks, now they squeeze by car after car after car
of loaded coal, and standing up tall hurry up the main passageway and out of the mine.