A week later, as Mom had feared, the Football Fathers had themselves a proud little suit. The championship game was only a week away, so it was necessary to press the court to act fast. Three days after it was filed, a state judge in Bluefield took one look at the case and threw it out of court on a technicality. There was no precedent, he wrote, for a private organization to sue a state entity in his court. The championship game was held as scheduled in Charleston, and the season was officially over. Jim was so mad he locked himself in his room all day, except to come downstairs to eat and watch television and talk to some girls on the home telephone. I kept out of his way, retreating to a chair in the living room to read Dad’s latest Newsweek.
“I’m glad it’s over,” Mom said, watching Jim stomp morosely up and down the steps.
“We’re going to appeal,” Dad said from his easy chair. He was reading the paper. “We’re going to go over that judge’s head.”
“But the game’s been played!”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Dad replied.
Mom went into the living room and stood over him. “What principle? It’s high-school football!”
Dad turned the page, as if he had just finished an article. I noticed, from my position, that he had turned to the comic page, which he never read. When Mom kept looking at him, he finally said, his eyes still firmly planted on the funnies, “This is man’s work, Elsie.”
“Maybe so, Homer,” Mom replied, “but this woman is telling you it’s going to lead to disaster.”
“We’ll see,” he said, stealing her phrase.
WINTER came to West Virginia late that year. It was a splendid fall; the leaves kept their bright burnt color well into November, and the sky turned a pale but pretty blue, like a robin’s egg. Just before Thanksgiving, the first of the cold fronts from Canada finally reached us, and the trees abruptly dropped their leaves and turned black and skeletal. Winter storm clouds scudded in, got snagged on our hills, and stayed. Everything just seemed to turn black, brown, and gray after that.
Coalwood had its routine for the beginning of winter, just as it did for every season. Mrs. Eleanor Marie Dantzler, the wife of Mr. Devotee Dantzler, the company-store manager, started to plan her winter piano recital, an annual social event. Company coal trucks made the rounds of the houses, stocking the coal boxes. The Coalwood Women’s Club built a float for the Veteran’s Day parade in Welch. In 1957, Jim and the other football boys wore Marine uniforms and pretended to be raising the flag on Iwo Jima. A lot of veterans were seen sobbing on the Welch streets as it went by. Just behind the Coalwood float, the Big Creek band marched, with me proudly playing the snare drum, one of five drummers in a line. Standing with Mom on the curb, Dad clapped and cheered the Coalwood float as it went past. His eyes were on Jim the whole time. Before I got there, he turned to talk to somebody behind him and didn’t see me as I paraded past. “Attaboy, Sonny,” I heard Mom call above the rat-a-tat-tat of my drum.
THE union leader in Coalwood was a man named Mr. John Dubonnet, a classmate of my parents at Gary High School. During World War II, many Coalwood miners, including my father, were exempted from service because of the need for coal in the war effort. Mr. Dubonnet could have probably also stayed in West Virginia, but instead joined the Army. While he was landing on Normandy, my dad was opening up a new part of the mine, an incredibly rich vein of “high” coal, so-called because it was so thick a man could stand straight up in the tunnel left after its removal. By war’s end, the Coalwood mine was a lucrative little operation, envied across the county. That was when the UMWA finally turned its attention to Mr. Carter’s mine. The labor peace that Coalwood had enjoyed for more than fifty years came to an abrupt end. When Mr. Carter resisted the union’s attempts to organize, the union ordered a strike. In retaliation, Mr. Carter instituted a lockout, closing the mine to everybody. There was some pushing and brawling around the tipple and rumors of gunfire up the hollows. To calm things down, President Truman sent in the United States Navy to reopen the mine. After six months of military occupation in Coalwood, Mr. Carter was forced to sign a contract with the union and, soon afterward, sold Coalwood in disgust. The Captain, and my father, stayed behind.
In the decade that followed, an edgy peace between labor and management settled on our town, broken only by intermittent strikes, usually quickly settled. The Coalwood operation became even richer. When the Captain retired, my father, at the Captain’s insistence, took over his position of mine superintendent. Since he was only a high-school graduate, many people in Coalwood—and in the union and the steel company that owned us too—thought my father was not qualified. Dad set out to prove them wrong by the sheer volume of his work and application of every particle of his energy and intelligence. He also continued to carry the Captain’s vision of the town long after nearly everyone else had forgotten it.
By 1957, most of the old union leaders had followed the Captain into retirement, and a new crop was eager to show their worth to the rank and file. Mr. Dubonnet was one of them, quickly rising to lead the Coalwood UMWA local. Although nobody noticed it until it was too late, having Mr. Dubonnet and my dad on opposite sides was a prescription for conflict.
As Mom had predicted, one day in early winter Dad stood outside the tipple and called out the names of men to be cut off. A national recession was under way, steel orders were reduced, and Coalwood was producing more coal than the steel company needed. Twenty-five men were cut off from the company. The phrase was apt. Not only were the men separated from their work, they were cut off from their homes, credit at the company stores, and identification as a Coalwood citizen. The miners cut off were required to leave their houses within two weeks. A few of them surreptitiously moved up past Snakeroot and built shacks along the fringe of the woods, hoping someday to be rehired. My father was later ordered by the steel company to bulldoze them out, but he never did. The church put together baskets of food at Thanksgiving and Christmas for these families. For the first time I could remember, I heard little children were showing up in Coalwood classrooms needing clothing and food.
After the cutoff, the union local, not certain what else to do about it, threatened to strike. Mr. Dubonnet showed up on our doorstep one evening and Mom answered his knock. “Why, John, come in!” she exclaimed, evidently pleased to see him. I was sprawled on the rug in the living room, reading The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt. He had written a lot about the rocket his heroes were voyaging in, but nothing on how it worked. That was a disappointment.
“Elsie,” Mr. Dubonnet greeted her grimly, taking off his black helmet. He stayed on the porch. “Is Homer home?”
Dad was in the kitchen, probably getting an apple. After his cancer was cut out of him, the doctor had prescribed as many apples as he could stand, and he ate a lot of them. Dad came to the front door. “You want to talk to me, Dubonnet, come see me at my office.” He said it in as mean a tone of voice as I ever heard him use.
“What’s gotten into you, Homer?” Mom gasped. “Please come in, John!”
The union man stood his ground. “It’s okay, Elsie. Homer, could you step outside? We need to talk before I go down to the union hall for the meeting.”
Dad frowned, but went out and closed the storm door behind him. I couldn’t hear what was being said between him and Mr. Dubonnet, but I got up and came into the foyer so I could watch. Mom gave me a disapproving look and I retreated back to the living room, carefully positioning myself to where I could still see what was going on. I remembered that Mom, Dad, and Mr. Dubonnet had all come out of Gary. I also recalled that Mr. Dubonnet had been the valedictorian of their class and a star football player. It had never exactly been said, but I think Mr. Dubonnet had even taken my mom out a few times way back then. After a while, Dad opened the storm door to come back inside. “The company’s given you a good job, a house, and a decent