The Well and the Mine Read Online Free

bring Grandma back to us.
    The whole town ran down the hill it was named for, with churches and houses a little farther up the hill, then all the shops lining Front Street. The railroad ran beside Front Street straight through town, with all the offshoot tracks or truck routes leading to the mines like so many legs and arms off a backbone. Galloway was the biggest company, and its commissary was on the corner of Front Street and Galloway Road, across from the Brasher Hotel. You’d head left up the Galloway Road for a couple of miles and hit the main mine. Or if you kept going a little farther down Front Street and turned right at the tracks, you’d curve around and find the No. 11 mine where Pop worked most of the time.
    Galloway was the pair of thick-muscled legs that moved the whole town, then there were the spindly little arms, local mines that didn’t have the staying power of Galloway. Howard Mine was up Fish Hatchery Road, and there was Brookside and Hope and Chickasaw, all with truck after truck packed with coal that ran down to the main depot, where the chute would empty the coal straight to the railcars. By 1931 those small ones were suffering, mostly shut down. Galloway struggled on with fewer men and fewer tons.
    My memories of that summer aren’t too clear. I remember a red-headed boy at school whose father had died the year before, that a beam had broken him nearly in half when it collapsed. I worried about that.
    The Warrior Coal Field, north and west of Birmingham, covering all of Walker County, was rich with coal deposits. A gift for a state that otherwise was mostly prying vegetables and cotton out of the land. But it was a gift with strings attached. Its coal seams tended to be thin and broken up, so it was harder to mine. Too much slate and shale meant cleaning the coal took more time. So more men picking and loading and more men washing and sorting. All that came together to mean that ten men in Alabama produced the same amount of coal that three and a half men could produce in Indiana.
    I read that when I went away to college. I assumed they didn’t want to publicize that in Alabama. Sort of demoralizing.
    I worried off and on as a boy, afraid of things that were really just shadows in my head, not full-out ideas or images. But I knew we were on the edge of something. That Pop was between us and falling. Just falling and falling until we smashed into some terrible bottom that people only whispered about.
    Accidents happened all the time. I remembered when Pop broke his jaw, and we all knew he could barely see out of his right eye anymore. Plus he’d broken both arms and a leg and both his ankles and torn something in his back. That was all before I was born. I wouldn’t have known about any of that if it weren’t for Mama asking him about the aches sometimes. He just kept quiet about it and pretended he was in one piece.
    But I knew it was likely he wouldn’t come back through the door at night after he left in the morning. And then I’d be the man. Some boys my age were already in the mines. Pop wouldn’t let me. He said I should go to school.
    I couldn’t figure out how I’d get the money to support the family if something happened to Pop. Needed to be twelve, maybe eleven, to get a paper route. I could’ve gotten paid to stack shelves at the commissary, maybe to deliver orders. I could do a man’s work at the mines at twelve if I lied a little. But that wouldn’t have been good enough. Not if Pop was killed before then. I thought Virgie could get a teaching job somewhere way out in the country, even without teacher’s college maybe. Tess was too little to do anything. Nobody would hire a little girl.
    We had the farm and the milk and the chickens. That would feed us. Might have to let go of the electricity. Could always sell the car.
    Nothing ever did happen to him, nothing dramatic or sudden or tragic. But I never felt like I was away from the edge of that cliff until long after I was