Benny had grown up in that house. His mother had died in an upstairs bedroom when he was two, giving birth to his little sister, who had died the following day. Marvin never remarried. He worked in the mines and Grandma Early took in boarders. They kept chickens and raised a big garden. There was always enough to eat.
No, Benny decided, not even the United States Army could move his grandmother out of that house.
“Well,” Dwayne said, “what do you think?”
“Nah, they wouldn't flood this hollow. There's too much coal left under these hills. The companies would scream bloody murder, and we all know the politicians are scared to death of the coal companies. They've owned every governor since I can remember and this new one ain’t any different.”
Benny waved his beer at a small, hillside cemetery. “Another thing. There are lots of people buried up here. It'd be way too much trouble to dig up all those graves and then have to find another place to put 'em.”
Dwayne nodded. “That's where I'm buried, you know.”
“Your arm's buried there, not you, shithead.”
“Well, my arm's part of me, ain't it? It's buried beside my little sister, Rose. My mother put up a marker, didn't she?”
“Of course. That's all anybody talked about that summer. They said you'd lost your arm and your mother had lost her mind. Hand me that other beer.”
Benny hated to think about Dwayne's accident. He still got the creeps, imagining him down there alone in the dark, while the conveyor belt slowly chewed his arm off. Dwayne never talked about it, unless he'd had a few beers. It hadn't hurt much, just sort of like a big electrical shock, he'd say. But nobody believed that.
People hearing the story for the first time would ask why he didn’t yell for help. “Yell, hell!'' Dwayne would say, his eyes widening. “I screamed 'til I couldn't make a sound, but nobody could hear me over the noise of that goddamned mining machine. Besides, I was way back by myself, a good quarter-mile from the section crew.”
He had been shoveling up loose coal around the conveyor belt when a belt wheel spindle hooked the flap on his coverall sleeve.
“My hand was caught before you could say `John L. Lewis.' Then, the damned belt started pulling me in, inch by inch,'' he told Benny the first time they talked about it.
Conveyor belt accidents weren't uncommon in the mines. In fact, another boy down the hollow had lost an arm the same way as Dwayne, only he'd broken his arm three times during the half hour he was held prisoner, trying to keep the belt from pulling him all the way in. Finally, when there was no more bone left to break, he'd taken his pocketknife and cut away the last strands of muscle and skin from his shoulder.
“It was either that, or have the goddamned belt eat me alive,” he'd said one night down at Ida's.
Dwayne opened the beer and handed it to Benny. “You still havin' them dreams? The ones about the belt?” he asked, tossing the bottle cap out the window.
Benny shook his head. “Nah, it's been a while. Listen, I’ll drop you off at Mary's. I'm gonna stop for some gas before I go on home.”
FIVE
Picture Hodges waved as they pulled up to the pump. A tall, stooped man with a sunken chest and high, narrow forehead, he was Mary's second husband, her first husband having been killed in the mines. Picture's full name was Picture Perfect Hodges. Everyone had called him P.P., until the day his picture appeared on the front page of the Charleston Gazette. It was the day after he'd returned from what he said was a fishing trip up on Elk River.
The photo had been taken at a fiddling contest over at Spencer the day before. There he was, plain as everything, standing behind a group of musicians, his arm around a woman. After that, P.P. became Picture, a man who no longer went on unaccompanied fishing trips.
Dwayne jumped out as soon as the truck stopped. “See you later, Benny,” he said, waving to Picture as he walked up the steep hill leading to the house his family had lived in for more than 40 years.
Picture rose from the bench next to the door. When the weather was good, he spent most of his time on the bench, gossiping and watching the traffic. Mary ran the store. Picture had slept in his truck for more than two months after the newspaper incident. “Did'ja see Russell?” he asked Benny. “He was here lookin' for you.”
Benny finished pumping the gas and began cleaning his windshield.
“Russell must'a found you. He didn't stay up the hollow very long. Came through here a while back, drivin' like a bat out'a hell. Didn't even honk as he went by.”
“Yeah, he found me,” Benny said, turning to go inside. As he opened the door to the store he noticed some joker had marked out FOOD STAMPS and scrawled CASH on the “WE ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS” sign.
Probably Junior, he thought.
A plump, gray-haired woman was leaning on the counter, staring at a tiny black and white TV set atop the cash register. She glanced up, nodded and turned back to the TV.
Benny picked up a loaf of white bread and a package of spiced ham, then checked to make sure the beer cooler really was on the blink.
“Russell find you?” Mary asked as she rang up his stuff.
“Sure did.”
“Well, what'd you think about him getting married? Who would have thought it, after all these years?”
Benny stared at her for a moment. “He never mentioned anything about it to me.”
She shook her head. “Well, I'm right surprised. He said his wife used to work with Ruth at that mattress factory. She's from somewhere down South, near the Tennessee-Kentucky line, I believe he said.”
On the flickering TV screen a man and a woman stared solemnly at one another. The man was talking but the sound was down so low Benny couldn't hear what he was saying. Whatever it was, the woman didn't like it, because she suddenly put her hand over her mouth and began to cry.
“Marriage should be good for Russell,” Benny said, picking up his groceries. “I'd say it will be a real learning experience for him, having been a bachelor all these years.”
“What do you hear from Ruth and Billy?” Mary asked. But Benny was already out the door.
Picture looked up from the bench as he strode by. “Did'ja hear about the dam?”
Benny nodded vaguely and climbed into the truck. He drove off, leaving Picture standing beside the pump, mouth agape.
The news of Russell's marriage occupied Benny as he as he drove down the hollow, paying little attention to the road. He could have driven it blindfolded and had driven it blind drunk more than once. The creek was still to his left, but twice as wide now as further up toward the mine complex. He passed a row of houses, all that remained of the old Blue Sulfur coal camp. Among them was Ruth’s family’s house, a blue, one-story affair with a small front porch.
The houses had been built in 1915, during the early days of World War One, a time when coal was badly needed for industrial production. Then came the 1930s and The Great Depression, a time of great suffering and depression on the creek, a time when men were lucky if they worked two days a week. Later, in the early 1950s, Blue Sulfur had sold off the houses, a move that came shortly after it closed the company store. The store was no longer profitable now that the miners had cars and could shop at area supermarkets where the produce was fresher, the prices cheaper and the selection much greater than that offered at the store.
Blue Sulfur was one of the companies that had fought hardest against the union. The new governor’s grandfather was one of the founders. The grandson grew up on the family estate in New York and moved to West Virginia after college, using his grandfather's money to finance his political career.
At one time, the Blue