Black Mountain Hymn

Chapter 1: Company Houses

The rain had been falling for three days when Loretta Hobson found the blood in her washtub.

Not her own blood. Calvin's. He'd come home from the mine at half past six, twelve hours underground showing in every line of his body, and he'd dropped his shirt into the tub without a word. She'd seen the dark stain spreading through the water before she saw the gash along his forearm—a four-inch tear where a timber brace had splintered and caught him as the ceiling sagged in the number four entry.

She didn't scream. She didn't gasp. She wrung the shirt out, set it aside, and fetched the iodine.

"Sit down," she said.

Calvin sat. He was a big man, broad through the shoulders and narrow at the hip, built the way the mountains built men who worked inside them. His face was still black with coal dust, and the whites of his eyes looked startling against it, like two moons in a dark sky. He held out his arm without complaint.

"They didn't shore it right," he said. "The whole section's been creaking since Tuesday. I told Jessie Combs we ought to report it, but he said Slade would just dock our pay for the time it took to fix it."

Loretta poured iodine along the wound. Calvin hissed through his teeth but didn't pull away.

"Jessie Combs is a fool," Loretta said.

"Jessie Combs has five children."

She wrapped the arm with a strip of clean cotton, tying it off with the quick efficiency of a woman who had done this many times before. Cuts, bruises, burns from the blasting powder. Once, a broken collarbone when a coal car jumped the track. She kept a medicine box under the bed, stocked with whatever she could afford at the company store—which was never enough, and always too expensive.

Outside, the rain hammered the tin roof of their house. It was a four-room box perched on a muddy hillside in the town of Dodd Hollow, one of thirty-six identical houses owned by the Boone-Logan Coal Company. The walls were single-board construction with tar paper over the cracks, and when the wind blew hard, you could see daylight through the seams. In winter, ice formed on the inside of the windows. In summer, the heat collected under the tin roof like a living thing and pressed down on everyone beneath it.

Rose was at the kitchen table, working her way through a McGuffey's Reader that Loretta had bought secondhand from a peddler who came through the hollow twice a year. The girl was eight years old, small for her age, with her father's dark hair and her mother's gray eyes. She didn't look up when Calvin came in bleeding. She'd learned not to.

"Mama," Rose said, "what's 'con-se-quence'?"

"It means what happens after," Loretta said. "The thing that comes because of the thing before it."

Rose considered this. "Like when Daddy goes to the mine and comes home hurt?"

Calvin laughed, a short bark that had no humor in it. "That's about right, Rosie."

Loretta put the iodine back in the medicine box and slid it under the bed. She stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the rain and the muddy road and the other company houses climbing the hillside like a row of gray teeth. Smoke came from every chimney. Somewhere a dog was barking. Down in the hollow, the tipple of the Boone-Logan mine rose against the sky like a dark cathedral, its conveyor belt still running, feeding coal into the railroad cars that would carry it north to the steel mills and east to the cities where people burned it without ever thinking about where it came from or what it cost.

She was twenty-nine years old. She had been born in these mountains, in a hollow not five miles from where she stood, the daughter of a man named Hiram Slocum who had worked underground for twenty-two years before the black lung took him. She remembered sitting beside his bed in the last weeks, listening to him fight for every breath, the sound like a bellows with a hole in it. She'd been fourteen. Her mother had died two years before that—typhoid from the creek water—and after her father passed, Loretta had gone to live with an aunt in Williamson who took in laundry and read the Bible aloud every evening, the whole book cover to cover, starting again the moment she finished Revelation.

Loretta had married Calvin Hobson when she was eighteen, not because she loved him—though she came to—but because he had a steady job and a house with a cookstove, and she was tired of being a burden on a woman who made her feel like one. Calvin was a good man. Quiet, steady, strong. He didn't drink more than most. He didn't hit. He brought his pay home and let Loretta manage it, which was wise, because she was better with numbers than he was.

They'd had three children. The first, a boy they named Samuel, died at eleven months of whooping cough. The second, a girl named Ada, lived six weeks before a fever took her in the night. Loretta had sat in the dark holding the small body until Calvin came home from his shift and found her there. She didn't speak for four days after.

Rose was the one who lived. Loretta guarded her the way a miner's wife guards a canary—fiercely, knowing that the child's survival was the measure of everything.

"You hungry?" Loretta asked Calvin.

"I could eat."

She heated beans and cornbread on the stove. They ate in the yellow light of a kerosene lamp, the three of them at the small table, and for a few minutes the world shrank to the size of this room and these people and the sound of rain on tin, and it was almost enough.

The company store stood at the center of Dodd Hollow like a courthouse stands at the center of a town—not because it dispensed justice, but because everything flowed through it. It was a two-story frame building with a wide porch and a sign that read BOONE-LOGAN COAL CO. GENERAL MERCHANDISE in letters that had once been red but had faded to the color of old blood.

Loretta went there the next morning with Rose, carrying a scrip book in her apron pocket. Scrip was what the company paid instead of real money—paper certificates and small aluminum coins stamped with the company name, redeemable only at this store. The miners called it funny money. There was nothing funny about it.

A five-pound bag of flour cost thirty-five cents in the outside world. At the company store, it cost seventy. A pound of sugar was twenty cents anywhere else; here it was forty-two. Loretta had done the arithmetic many times. By her calculation, the company store took back roughly sixty cents of every dollar Calvin earned, which meant that his twelve-hour days underground were worth, in real terms, about four hours of labor at any other job in the state.

This was not an accident. This was the system.

The storekeeper was a man named Virgil Tate, who had the misfortune of being decent in a job that required him not to be. He was fifty, bald, with spectacles that sat crookedly on his nose, and he kept a jar of penny candy on the counter that he'd slip to the children when no one was watching.

"Morning, Miz Hobson," he said as Loretta came through the door. "Morning, Rose."

"Morning, Mr. Tate."

Rose pressed her face against the glass candy case and said nothing, but her eyes did the talking.

Loretta handed over her list. Flour, lard, salt, a tin of baking powder, a spool of thread. She watched Virgil tally the figures and felt the familiar tightness in her chest. Calvin's last pay had been fourteen dollars in scrip. After the store deductions for rent, coal for the stove, the doctor's fee—whether you saw the doctor or not—and the charges from the previous month, there was six dollars and forty cents remaining. Her list came to five dollars and eighty cents.

That left sixty cents for everything else until the next payday, two weeks away.

"I don't suppose you got any eggs," Loretta said.

"Got a few. Twelve cents the half dozen."

She shook her head. "Not today."

Virgil wrapped her goods in brown paper and tied them with string. As he handed the package across the counter, he leaned in slightly.

"Miz Hobson, I wouldn't normally say anything, but your husband's account—he bought some things last week that aren't on your list. Tobacco, mostly, but also—" He hesitated. "Also some ammunition. Rifle cartridges. Thirty-thirty."

Loretta's face didn't change. "How much?"

"Dollar eighty total."

A dollar eighty. That was eggs for a month. That was a new pair of shoes for Rose, whose current pair had cardboard stuffed in the soles to cover the holes.

"Thank you, Mr. Tate," she said evenly.

She took her package and Rose's hand and walked out into the morning. The sun was trying to break through the clouds, and the mud in the road was drying to a hard crust at the edges. Women were hanging laundry on lines strung between the houses. Children ran barefoot in the dirt. A mule team hauled a load of timber toward the mine entrance.

Loretta walked home without speaking. Rose, who had inherited her mother's ability to read silence, didn't ask questions.

The ammunition worried Loretta more than the money. Calvin owned a hunting rifle—most men in the hollow did—and he used it in the fall to bring home deer and turkey, which stretched the food budget in ways the company store never could. But it was April. Hunting season was months away. And Calvin had never bought ammunition at the company store before. He always traded for it with old Duff Marcum up on the ridge, who reloaded his own shells and sold them cheap.

So why was Calvin buying rifle cartridges in April?

She knew why. She'd known for weeks, the way a woman knows things in a coal camp—through the silences, the glances, the conversations that stopped when she entered a room. Calvin was going to the meetings.

The meetings had started in February, when a man named Amos Prewitt arrived in Logan County.

Pratt was not from here. That was the first thing everyone noticed, and in the coalfields of southern West Virginia, it was the thing that mattered most. He was from Scranton, Pennsylvania, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers of America, and he spoke with the clipped vowels of the north. He was thirty-five, lean, with a hawkish face and eyes that burned with the kind of certainty that Loretta associated with preachers and madmen—and sometimes couldn't tell the difference.

He'd come south because the UMWA was making a push to organize the non-union mines of Mingo and Logan counties, the last great holdout of the open shop in the American coal industry. The operators here had kept the union out for decades through a combination of economic control—the scrip, the company houses, the store—and outright violence. They employed private detective agencies, most notably Baldwin-Felts, whose agents served as mine guards, eviction enforcers, and, when necessary, assassins.

Amos Prewitt knew all this. He came anyway.

The meetings were held at night, in different locations—a barn on Hewett Creek, a church basement in Clothier, the back room of a boardinghouse in Sharples. Word traveled by mouth, carefully, because the company had informants everywhere. A man could lose his job for attending a union meeting. He could lose his house, his credit at the store, everything. Some men had lost more than that.

Calvin had gone to his first meeting in March. He hadn't told Loretta. She'd found out from Nonie Stovall, whose husband Emmett was also attending, and who was also furious about it.

"Emmett says this Prewitt fellow talks like he's got the answer to everything," Nonie told Loretta over the back fence one afternoon. "Says the union's going to change everything. Says the operators can't hold out forever." She snorted. "I told Emmett the operators have been holding out since before we were born and they're not fixing to stop on account of some Yankee with a big mouth."

Loretta said nothing, but she agreed.

That evening, when Calvin came home from his shift, she waited until Rose was asleep and then she said, "I know about the meetings."

Calvin looked at her. In the lamplight, his face was all shadows and angles.

"Who told you?"

"It doesn't matter who told me. I know."

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Things can't go on the way they are, Loretta."

"I know that."

"Then what do you want me to do? Just keep my head down? Keep taking scrip and saying yes sir and no sir and dying by inches?"

"I want you to stay alive."

"This isn't living."

The words hung in the air between them. Loretta looked at her husband—this man she had married, this man she had watched go underground six days a week for ten years, this man whose back was scarred from rock falls and whose lungs were already showing the first signs of the dust that had killed her father—and she felt something crack inside her, not breaking but shifting, the way the earth shifts before a slide.

"I'm not saying you're wrong," she said carefully. "I'm saying they'll destroy you. They'll destroy us. You've seen what they do."

"I've seen what they do when we don't fight back, too."

She had no answer for that. Because he was right. The question wasn't whether the system was unjust—anyone with eyes could see that. The question was whether fighting it would make things better or worse, and Loretta, who had buried two children and watched her father suffocate and lived her whole life in the shadow of these mountains, had learned to be suspicious of hope.

But Calvin kept going to the meetings. And Loretta kept lying awake at night, listening to the rain on the tin roof, waiting for the knock on the door that would mean the end of everything.

The knock came on a Tuesday in April.