One day as the black rubble poured down between my knees, a stream of slate skittered in from the next chute. I glanced over to find the boy next to me sitting straight on his plank. He arched his back and stretched his arms above his head in flamboyant languor, his slight knees jutting outward. He was a little fellow, with lean pocketed cheeks and eyes ringed in shadow like a badger. His kerchief hung loose about his throat, crumpled under a white mouth that flashed a coy smile my way. He kicked up another spray of slag, and the chunks of slate went bounding into the troughs around him. Then that naked smile vanished as the boss’s rod crashed down across his shoulders. He coiled over and took another thump at the small of his back. Even with the rumble of rock I heard him wheeze. Then Boggs’s phlegmatic growl: “Back is straight, miss the slate!”
The boy’s hands shot to work again and Boggs stepped back. I kept at my labor, resisting the impulse to turn my head. In my periphery I saw the foreman standing watch just behind us. For a long moment he was motionless, then finally he swiveled to pace to the end of the row, and I stole a glimpse at my broken neighbor.
The boy shot back an impish look. His grimy cheeks were veined pale with tears, but his smile flashed again. I thought I saw him wink, and then he was glancing down the row at Boggs. He stood fast with a big rock in his grip and flung it hard across the breaker. It struck the boss at the shoulder and burst in a spray of dust. Boggs spun around and came charging along the row of chutes. But Thomas Motion was already bent again to his labor, his bare fingers gliding over the rubble. Involuntarily my head snapped to the side. Boggs spotted the quip of my neck and thrust a blunt finger at me.
“Witherow!”
I bore his rage whenever he was unsure.
Without a word I stood and put out my hands, palms down. The force of the rod sent my arms whipping back like halter ropes yanked by a stud horse. I sat again and worked with dead hands. Left no choice but to sight what my fingers could not sense, I fought the welling tears. I did not turn again to Thomas, but I heard his voice.
“He’s a bastard,” he said.
I NEVER LOST MY APTITUDE FOR BREAKER WORK, HOWEVER RAW MY time in that place was. I met the darkness and the apocalypse of noise without resistance. Maybe I was built a little of blackness, a little of Nature’s bewitched side. The dead breaker boy Edward Leam skulked in that place, but this did not disturb me. New carloads came clattering at the back of the grinders and tumbled through the raucous chomp of the teeth and I heard the snapping of child bones. The loads rumbled down and I saw vertebrae spilling from the jaws of the machine. I saw rib and heel and hipbone, femur and thumb clattering in the coal and slate beneath me. The wave of black dust floated upward and grew umber in the thin light, and I saw it as Leam’s blood, dried and crushed to powder and mingling with coal dust, billowing out to bathe us. Leam was present every day like this. Every day he coated my person. Every day I snatched from the current his dismantled bones. And it wasn’t strange to feel what I felt: that I was reconstructing him somehow.
In the evenings when the whistle blew and the grinders groaned to a stop, I joined father as he stepped out of the throng of surfacing miners. We walked toward home, the sky black and starry overhead, our breath steaming. In my first week at the breaker he came to me—dark against the darkness—and drew from a shadowy pocket a white handkerchief and rubbed my face roughly till the kerchief was indistinguishable against all the other blackness. He said: “Well, Ash, are you changed?”
I tongued a hunk of tobacco from my jaw and spat it to the ground. “No, sir.”
A gray smoke rose from the chew. Father looked to it. “I know the necessity of that tar, but your mother needn’t.”
I nodded my understanding.
We walked down the grade of the company yard toward Main Street, where the light of the two whale-oil street lamps glinted copper.
“You’re strong, Ash. If nearly a week’s work hasn’t changed you, it may be you’re fitted for it, though I’d sworn no man was—and no boy at that.”
“But you’re fitted for it, father.”
“No I am not.” He stopped and cinched my arm in his deadlock grip. “And neither may you be. You have yet to crawl low after all. No man’s fitted for it. We endure. Me and all these men.”
He loosed my arm and stepped away. We went down into the flat hollow and to our house.
Father had felt this country’s allure like the keen draw of a woman. Every young man holds to an illusion willingly so long as it bolsters his courage in the face of a big intractable leap—so my father must have envisioned America as an illimitable plateau of soft earth pocked endlessly with shafts. He was among the first in that long race of deceived fathers, hungry for vision, who have so regularly peopled this country since its birth not long ago. But this has never marred his character for me. Both he and mother were pilgrims of a kind. And for a while anyway they found a sort of happiness despite their troubles.
Mother had the washing barrel ready when we came in: warm water and pungent lye. Father drew back in the rocker and undid his boots while she rushed to me and began plucking at my shirt buttons. Soon I stood naked and shivering in the knee-deep tub. I splashed handfuls of water on my front side while mother poured from a pitcher over my shoulders and back. I watched the black cake turn brown on my belly and arms, spreading into lines of grain before sliding off.
Mother circled to my front. In a brief, dread sigh she said: “Hands.” I turned the palms up to her like stolen goods.
My first night home from the breaker she had started at the rawness of my fingers. Now she studied nightly the cracked bulbs of index and thumb and tall-man, worrying to cleanse the crusted blood free and stave off infection. She squinted into my flat palm, webbed with lines where the filth would not scrub out. She bent each finger to discourage the swelling and keep movement. When I winced, she drew up her breath as if she’d pricked her own hand while sewing.
“It’s brutish,” she said to father. “It’s not only a gloveless boy that can pick slate.” She cupped my skull in her strong fingers and pushed my head down to clean my ears. “You could do it in mittens, couldn’t you?”
I rolled my eyes up to her and saw she was smiling.
“Yes mama, I could.” That pleased her.
I WENT TO SCHOOL AT NORTONVILLE SEMINARY. I AND THE OTHER breaker boys, knobbers, nippers, and spraggers all took our lessons each night in the lamplit schoolhouse on the hill. After a twelve-hour day bending over slate and rubble we had our baths and our suppers and then bent over our desks, composing prose exercises, working out grammar, and figuring equations with our blackened hands while the night edged into deeper, cooler darkness.
During the daytime hours, as we labored at our mine work, the schoolhouse bristled with children from New York Landing. They came up in the passenger car at the rear of the coal train because there was no school down where they lived. They left their carvings in the desktops for us to run our hands over. We thought of them as strange and simple, their lives lackluster—down in the flats by the water. Ours was a cosmopolitan township, a community of stoic and well-rounded people. What kind of folks could they boast? In my desktop, chiseled in narrow slanting letters, was the name J. G. Cobalt. This person wasn’t real to me.
Our school prefect was Gregory Evans: a dwarfish man with big yellow eyes that seemed to roll like marbles in their sockets. He talked in a soft way through his pinched nose, dolling out lessons like forgettable sermons and throwing a lamp-lengthened shadow over our desks.
Josiah Lyte taught the elder students of the seminary. I encountered him often, though I was not yet under his charge. As school let out and a flood