The Bluestone Review 2020

The Bluestone Review 2020

Prose

the wooden kitchen floor near the ‘warm morning’ stove for his evening bath. He would be covered in coal dust while swallowing the steaming coffee and smile with his racoon eyes. At times, Thomasena would daintily help me pull his muddy boots off. We would never even touch the belt because that might jinx us or him. I couldn’t exactly remember if I had brushed against it earlier that morn- ing when I stumbled a little while putting on my brogan shoes with a light fog in the air. Boy, you could really make the sides of the number three tub sound off if you were gassy during your bath. “Bet you pay attention the next time when your daddy tells you something.” My older half-brother by three years Dickie just rolled his eyes and snickered. We shared the same mother as Dad had courted and married her a couple of years after her first husband was killed in the mines in nearby Mingo County. Looking around at Thomasena she stuck her tongue out at me. I just knew she had ratted me out. If she had just been a boy, I might have wrestled her down on the ground, but Mama Gertie’s wrath would be worse than my pap’s. I dared not try and rubbed my sore butt cheeks and smiled. The Collapsed Tunnel By Hannah Reeves July 20, 1900 This story is one that I have kept locked away in the deepest parts of my heart for a long time. After the incident, the town was shut down, and the mine closed, so I thought I had no reason to share this with anyone. But I realize now that I do, and after all of those years, the truth has been slowly eating away at my sanity. Survivors guilt, most will say. You see, fourteen men and one woman were killed that day. Who knew that only ten or so out of a few dozen support beams had been put up properly? Not those miners. Not anyone. Fifteen people died, and it was my fault. The miners watched as boulders fell from supposedly sound supports and crushed them. The woman in the mines was my daughter, and had it not been for Lewis, she never would have been in the mines that day. No one should watch as everything is falling around you, death everywhere, and yet you somehow survive. I was trapped underground for three days and three nights, staring at the corpses of my daughter and her lover. When a rescue team pulled away boulders blocking the way out, I shouted out to them that I would never, ever again pick up a piece of coal or be forced to go down a mineshaft again. When I was finally free of the prison of my own making, I took my distraught wife, and we moved away, to a place where I would never have to hear the words ‘mine’ and ‘collapsed’ again. Now that Eliza has joined Alice and Lewis in Heaven, I must come to terms with the fact that it was my fault that the tunnel collapsed that wretched day. I never laid the supports right.

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