For a long moment I stood mapping out the darkness like a foreigner. Finally I started again, hands out in front, creeping. In that blackness, distances stretched like dough. Yards unraveled from endless skeins.
Nothing but the sound of grass.
I stopped again and stood, listened, crept forward, strained to hear. Stood. Listened.
It seemed I spent long seasons alone in that blackness. Space stood open before me, unfenced and yet as impenetrable as a wall. Then I would get to fumbling in some bush or low-grown tree. In scattered intervals I heard scampering in the grass, the slinking of a skunk or coon, the tiny screams of bats.
Suddenly the earth sloped down, dropped away from my feet. In my mind the huge firmament unscrolled and I fell through that emptiness, my body cut loose of earth and tumbling up through air. With a step I was anchored again, that blind hollow behind me now. I tried to penetrate the darkness once more, listening.
Something thrashed in the field, momentarily growing louder, and Thomas tackled me from the darkness, threw me to the wet leaves.
“Too much trying, Witherow! You can’t try!” He dragged me up from the grass. “You have to move! You have to bolt like this!” His invisible fingers clamped cold over mine and he pulled me after him. I barreled across black earth—knees jarring as the ground leapt hard against my feet. Here and there the earth dropped into tiny craters and the wind burst from my lungs. Twigs lashed at my shoulders and neck as if the night itself had brandished claws.
“You have to travel! You can’t pause!”
“Thomas, wait!”
“Make yourself see it!”
He dragged me across a wide lake of nothing. I passed through envisioned trees. I tore my arms against brambles where I’d pictured only space.
Then, like fierce eyes opening in night’s face, the amber town lights winked below. Thomas released me. I could see him now, a flicker of darkness obscuring the light here and there. His voice was stark in the shadows, all its roughness embossed.
“So tomorrow you’ll teach me.”
“Yes.”
At that, I heard him careering down the hill away from me.
I stood a while in the dark after his sounds died out. I willed vision to come. But again there was nothing: only the moist brush of my own breath on my chin and neck. So I crept in blindness toward the lights burning below.
{4}
THOUGH OUR LIVES HINGED ON THE YIELD OF COAL, WE FOLKS OF Nortonville were really a people of shale and sandstone and lime. Geology is important. One can hardly know of what stuff he’s composed if he doesn’t know what’s underfoot. Was it one of the Concord philosophers who stated that the greatest achievements of civilization correlate directly to the areas with the most abundant deposits of lime?
In Nortonville, the high ridge to the south was a thick spine of sandstone. And our declivitous valley walls were monsters of Cretaceous shale, risen long ago from the floor of the sea. They plunged down to our very doorsteps from all sides, buckling into furrows and ravines. Only beneath these hills, shelled up amidst tilting strata of sandstone and lime, were our black diamonds. Brown diamonds really, for it was stove coal we mined: sub-bituminous lignite. Young coal. In it only a quarter of the carbon of the black anthracite they mined in the east. And yet this young stuff was hard-made.
Some fifty million years ago, before our mountain was formed, our region was a broad primordial swamp, stalked by great Paleocene birds and mammals. Green plants collected in the muck and were leeched clean of air, made brown and stiff. Death, in the shape of plant stuff, germinated in the still waters.
Then the earth rocked, rubble fell into the swamp, and the vegetation sank deeper under the weight. The rigid plant-ghosts vomited water and air again and turned to hard peat. Time crawled on, and death was pressured toward perfection. But up came our mountain. It heaved its vast shoulders through the old swamp, crushing the peat beds in its fervor of birth, and death’s black apotheosis was aborted. The mountain stood, flanked on the north by careening hills in which hard peat traveled at scattered intervals: brown coal, imperfect death, like blood crusted in a body. This lignite would turn to powder if blasted out, so our miners worked gingerly by hand with picks, chirp-chirping away in the dark.
Since the Clark Vein in which my father worked was hardly four and a half feet thick, he labored mostly lying on his back. He cleared those long, low rooms by picking discriminately at the jagged ceiling over him until it began to moan or creak, then he scuttled out of the way to let the coal fall.
Long, long formation. Then slow, slow extraction. And the end result of this huge process: lumps of turd-like coal that burned fast and dirty in less than an evening at the stove; a whole retinue of fleck-skinned laborers like my father; and long days of backache and bruising for the boys of the town. Nevertheless, our lignite comprised a full quarter of the coal burnt in San Francisco, and Nortonville prospered.
All the same, mother didn’t take well to my blue-striped knuckles. She turned my soaped hands over in hers, brushing her thumbs across the swelling. She locked up her narrow jaw. I could see the silent rage stoking in her breast.
Father stood by. “This was Boggs?”
I nodded to him. My tongue was sticking in my throat.
The blue rims of mother’s eyes burned fierce. “We don’t take their pay for bowing to this.”
“No we do not, that’s sure,” said father. “But this’ll take care in confronting.”
“—and never from an Irish hog for that matter!” mother spat.
Father drew up a breath and seemed to hold his tongue, looking long at me. He laid one black hand on the lip of the barrel and bent to mother’s ear. “I’ll have a word, Abicca. Don’t worry, I’ll have a word.”
“Better ten or twenty! As many as it takes to pierce the boar’s thick skull!”
“I will—”
“And if words aren’t enough, God help our distemper!”
“He meant to punish me,” I told them, shivering. “He thought he saw me pelt him with rocks.”
“And did you?” asked mother.
“No ma’am, I did not.”
Mother did not like it that both her men now came home covered head to foot in dust. After school each night she sat me down before bed and read earnestly from the gospels. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” And as I undressed and wormed beneath my blankets, she recited the old Welsh legend of the seventh son of Madoc, a cautionary tale. I cannot think of my youth without thinking of that legend, hearing mother speak it. Odd, how those old stories thrive in the blood, like a kind of body-memory. The legend and my life have become inseparable. I can almost feel the scraping end-wood at our sawbuck table, that ragged grain where I sometimes dug my fork. I can smell the salted musk of our pork barrel. Clear as anything, there is the hot cast-iron belly of our stove, which scorched the triangular burn deep into my left hand before I was yet a toddler. I still have the scar. Through nearly nine decades it has stretched on my aging skin and now it calls to mind some distorted parody of an Odd Fellows emblem. I touch the unpigmented mark and mother is telling the legend all over again:
“The seventh son was seven times blessed by birth and yet he succumbed to the lure of the gold stowed deep below the earth’s crust. Now, that gold was guarded by Arthur’s sleeping armies—everyone knew it. One could expect nothing good from awakening them. But the seventh son, clutching