“And still the child was lost,” she said. “But yours won’t be anything as bad as that. Yours wants to come, so don’t shudder, sweet.”
Mother’s head thrashed on the damp pillow. Years later she told me: “I just had to give myself up to her, shadowy though she was. And she delivered me well, but I was happy to have her gone.”
Finally at dusk I was born. Father—who knelt by the bed with his left hand cracking in mother’s grasp till the knuckles nearly broke, and with his right hand wiping her nose, which bled as eagerly as her womb—he said the room seemed to tremble at my coming. But both my parents assured me that once I kicked free of the belly I glowed with a healthy infant-light which healed the nine-month malaise.
They named me Asher. I never learned why, but now I think it a good name for someone born in the night amid culm banks and black-water drainage bogs.
It means much that Sarah Norton delivered me. With her callused pagan hands, she gripped my knuckly arms, yanked me from blue amniotic to gray November night, lifted me wailing, slashed my cord, swaddled me, and imparted to me something unreckonable. I still do not understand it fully, but I’ve always listened to its reverberations. They say the woman delivered six hundred infants in her lifetime, and in a quiet ritual of hers she planted a cottonwood tree for every one of those babies. Dreaded apothecary of secret medicine, maven of birthing and its converse—even now I often have visions of her: hunched in hillside greenery, breaking up the moist earth to set my own cottonwood seeds in place, then patting the soil firm with extra care.
AS SOON AS I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO WALK AND TALK, MOTHER SENT ME out by morning to climb the banks and pick the shards of coal from the slate and shale. I would sometimes get up with father and go with him and the men just as far as the banks, then watch them shamble on toward the works, dark shapes before the dawn. The squeak and thud of boots, the rattle of lamps, the glassy shake of the mule riggings, voices murmuring in Welsh. The men spoke of adits and pillars and collars and goaf, talked of the fire-boss, who seemed to me a kind of magician. Boys not much older than I tromped along the road with them, their mouths thick with tobacco. One day I would walk to the pits myself. Patience was hard. I could barely muster disinterest in the face of marvelous words like fire-boss.
The culm banks were known to shift without warning. A child picking coal always hazarded stumbling into some disguised cavity, unsettling the whole mound, and ending up entombed under the chunks of slag, all air squeezed off overhead. The company had issued plenty of warnings to this effect—tales of boys gobbled up in the dumps for their thievery, as if by the unforgiving mouth of justice. But always leery of the company’s tight-fistedness, mother saw straight through the moralistic pretext of such warnings and relished the subversion of sending me out with an empty pail.
So I scurried up the jagged banks and combed the lumped tops for the chunks with the dull sheen. Those were the coal. The slag gave rise to a blackish dust that caked my shins and fogged my mouth. Shadowy taste. From atop the banks I could see over most of the buildings along Main Street, gossamered with dark smoke. And almost parallel to Main Street: the railroad, car after car jittering up and down its incline.
Now and then I ducked over the backside as a brakeman rode by, or I lay flat on the rubble when a watchman patrolled below. Spread there with my chin chafing on slate, I watched the sun splinter atop the hills and pour its first light into our valley.
Father, for the trouble these culm pickings posed him should the bosses learn of them, opposed them with a stance of high ethics. But mother knew her husband feared the company, and worse—was willing to bow to its stinginess. She sent me out despite him. Like Elidyr of the Welsh legend, who stole the gold from the Little Folk, I only sought to do my mother’s bidding.
In all my mornings at the dark banks I was collared only half a dozen times, but always by the same captor: an irascible watchman named Boggs. The mottled Irishman was arrogantly alert at his post. I believe it delighted him in some sadistic way to ensnare me and other coal pickers—and he had a brutal grip. “Witherow!” he would bellow. And if he had not yet locked my eyes, I would try to creep down the back of the bank and come running out the side opposite him. But flight was futile, for not long after I’d reached home and ditched what little coal I’d found, Boggs would come swaggering up to our stoop. Finding mother at work in the yard, he would proclaim in his curious official manner: “Abicca Witherow, your young Asher has pilfered sellable goods from the Black Diamond Company, the return of which I herewith demand.”
Then the charade would begin, variations on a scene familiar enough to seem scripted.
“Mr. Boggs,” mother might say, smoothing out her apron or pressing a forearm to her brow—tired gestures intended to show that the watchman was interrupting something important, “my husband, as you well know, is a miner in one of your shafts. He tells me the Black Diamond Coal Company conducts its business with the utmost care. He’s right in this, isn’t he? And he tells me that when the cars are lifted from the shaft their coal is sifted and sorted to determine waste as waste and goods as goods. That’s what that god-awful breaker house is for, isn’t it? Now, as long as the company knows waste for waste well enough to litter our town with big black dumps of it, then we folks who have to live next to the ugliness should be entitled to use what the company cannot.”
“But Mrs. Witherow, your son has trespassed—”
“And as far as I can tell, Mr. Boggs, you’re trespassing now: coming uninvited onto my property to point your finger at my son.”
However many times Boggs came up against it, mother’s iron will never failed to stun him. And though in all legality our house and the land it stood on was the company’s property, not ours, invariably he’d be too rattled to recall this fact, let alone address it.
“Now if you’ll let pass Asher’s infraction,” mother would say, “I’ll let pass yours, so long as you make haste at once.”
And away along the railroad Boggs would go, as soon as he’d made an awkward bow.
After such a scene, word of mother’s brusqueness would travel all along the circuit of company employees. From the mouth of Boggs it would pass down to the floor of the shaft within the afternoon, finally reaching father’s ears in mutated form. The events having swollen to the level of hyperbole, he would come home at night ready to admonish her.
The other workmen chided father for his wife’s distemper. He confessed his predicament to mother, begged her to allay her eccentricity a little. To this she always listened quietly, her jaw locked, and father never knew whether she meant to take his dilemma to heart.
David Witherow was a young man when he came to Nortonville. Narrow-chested and wiry, he worked with a gritted nerve at the longest and deepest of rooms in the vein. He wore a mustache and long beard and spoke in a hushed, bearded voice, peering through eyes the jade hue of polished quartz. His hands were wide and tough as paws, the skin flecked black on the fingers and wrists, tiny flakes of coal spotting the knuckles. Coal followed the sweat furrows in his brow too, streaking beneath the skin in faint lines like letter paper. Beside mother he cut the figure of an unlikely mate. She was a thin woman, but big-boned and hardy. She wore by habit a vague scowl which spread clear in the most luminous smile when he spoke kindly to her.
My parents had come from Monmouthshire, Wales, to the Diablo hills with all the high ideals of people in exodus. Jolting in the westbound stage from Stockton, they watched the mountain swell upon the horizon—the sun cresting the peaks like a burning bush. In the Carbondale valley they found a ragtag township. A new railroad snaked through high grasses, the tracks trestling up to a humpbacked bunker house. A few wood-and-nail structures leaned along the main street amongst a few fine brick ones. Noah Norton’s house towered on a hillside beyond the smokestack, and a number of miners’ cottages dotted the edges of the valley.
Mr. Norton himself secured my parents a room in George Scammon’s lodging house, and the next morning father went to work as a haulier on the Mount Hope