The Stewards

Chapter 1: The Dead Mountain

The mountain above Cane Branch had been dying for forty years, and by the time it finished, most people had stopped noticing.

That was the way of it in Harlan County. You lived beside ruin long enough, ruin became wallpaper. The strip-mined scar ran three-quarters of a mile along the ridgeline, a crescent of exposed shale and black spoil heaps where the Coffey Coal Company had peeled back the earth in the 1980s, extracted what it wanted, and left the wound open like a surgeon walking out mid-operation. Rain turned the runoff orange. The creek that fed through town—Cane Creek, the town's namesake—carried enough dissolved iron and sulfuric acid to kill everything softer than stone. In spring, the water ran the color of rust. In summer, it barely ran at all.

Pastor Amos Greely knew the mountain the way a man knows his own bad knee: intimately, resentfully, and with the resigned understanding that it would never improve.

He stood at the window of the First Baptist parsonage on a Wednesday morning in early October, watching fog settle into the valley like something poured. The parsonage was a two-story frame house that had been white once and was now the color of old teeth. It sat across the gravel lot from the church, which was brick and slightly more dignified, though the fellowship hall roof leaked in three places and the baptistry pump had given out in August.

Amos was fifty-four. He had the long-boned frame of a man who'd been athletic in youth and was now merely thin, with deep-set gray eyes, a jaw that worked when he was thinking, and hands that were too large for the rest of him. He'd been pastor of First Baptist for twenty-two years, which meant he'd buried more of his congregation than he'd baptized. The math was not complicated. Cane Branch was shrinking. Had been shrinking since the mines started closing, since the pharmacy on Main Street became a Dollar General, since the high school sealed off its east wing because there weren't enough students to justify the heating bill.

Population: 1,940. Down from 4,200 when Amos had arrived as a young seminarian with a pregnant wife and the unearned confidence of a man who believed God had sent him somewhere specific.

God, it turned out, had sent him to a place that was slowly emptying.

"You're going to wear a groove in that floor," Kate said from behind him.

Dr. Katherine Greely—Kate to everyone in town, Dr. Greely to no one because formality felt ridiculous when you'd stitched up half the county—came down the stairs in her clinic clothes: dark slacks, a blue blouse that had survived three wash cycles past its dignity, and the kind of sensible shoes that announced their wearer had given up on aesthetics in favor of twelve-hour days on concrete floors.

She was fifty-two, compact, sharp-featured, with brown hair she kept short because she didn't have time for anything that required a blow-dryer. Her eyes were the same color as good coffee, and they missed very little.

"Paul's scan came back," she said.

Amos turned from the window. He didn't ask. He could read it in the way she held her coffee mug—both hands, close to her chest, like she was warming herself against something that had nothing to do with temperature.

"Stage four," she said. "Liver and spine."

Paul Tabb. Deacon Paul Tabb. Amos's oldest friend in Cane Branch, the man who'd helped him reroof the parsonage in '09, who'd driven Kate to the hospital when Eli was born because Amos had been stuck in Lexington at a conference, who sat in the third pew every Sunday with his wife, Donna, and sang hymns in a bass voice that could rattle the offering plates.

Paul was sixty-one. He'd worked the Coffey mines for twenty-three years before they closed. He coughed every morning like an engine turning over in cold weather.

"How long?" Amos asked.

"Months. Maybe six if the chemo responds, but—" Kate set her mug on the counter. "He won't do chemo. He told me yesterday. Says he's not driving to Lexington three times a week to feel worse than he already does."

"That sounds like Paul."

"It sounds like a man who's given up."

"It sounds like a man who knows what he wants."

They looked at each other across the kitchen with the particular silence of a married couple who had been having the same argument about stubbornness, dignity, and medical compliance for twenty years, applied to different patients each time.

The stairs creaked. Their son appeared.

Eli was seventeen, tall like his father, dark-haired like his mother, and possessed of the specific restless energy of a teenager who had decided that his hometown was a trap. He wore a flannel shirt over a T-shirt advertising a band no one in Cane Branch had heard of, and his backpack hung from one shoulder like it was trying to escape.

"Bus in ten," he said, crossing through the kitchen without stopping.

"Breakfast," Kate said.

"I'll grab something."

"Eli."

He stopped at the door, not turning. "Mom. I'm fine."

"You need to eat."

"I need to graduate." He said it lightly, but the weight was underneath, the way it always was. Eli's college applications were due in December. He'd applied to six schools, all of them far away. He wanted engineering. He wanted cities. He wanted a zip code that didn't feel like a headstone.

The door closed behind him.

Kate looked at Amos. "He's going to leave."

"I know."

"And he should."

"I know that too."

She picked up her mug again, drank the last of her coffee standing, and set it in the sink with the precise motion of a woman who had already moved on to the next task. "I'll be at the clinic until seven. Mrs. Dooley's coming in about her foot again, and I've got three opioid follow-ups this afternoon."

"I'll bring dinner."

"Don't forget the—"

"Salt. I know."

She almost smiled. Almost. Then she was gone, and Amos was alone in the kitchen with the fog and the mountain and the knowledge that Paul Tabb was dying and there was nothing he could do about it except be present, which was the hardest and most useless ministry he knew.

He turned back to the window.

The mountain sat above the town like a accusation, its scarred ridgeline visible even through the fog. Nothing grew there. Nothing had grown there in twenty years. The spoil heaps were black and bare, the exposed rock faces wept mineral stains, and the whole thing looked less like landscape than like something the earth had given up on.

Amos had preached about that mountain exactly once, in a sermon about restoration that had gone over poorly because half his congregation had worked the mines that killed it and didn't appreciate the metaphor.

He'd never preached about it again.

But he thought about it. Every morning, standing at this window, he thought about it.

What does it mean to pastor a place that's dying?

What do you say to people whose land has been gutted, whose bodies have been poisoned by the work that fed their families, whose children leave and don't come back?

What sermon covers that?

Amos didn't know. Twenty-two years in, and he still didn't know.

He put on his coat and walked to the church to prepare for Wednesday evening service, which twelve people would attend, and he would preach from the book of Job because Job, at least, had the decency to complain.

---

The clinic occupied a low brick building on the east end of Main Street, between the shuttered hardware store and a laundromat that was open three days a week. The sign out front read CANE BRANCH COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTER in letters that had faded from blue to a color that wasn't quite anything.

Kate unlocked the door at seven-thirty and was greeted by the smell that defined her professional life: antiseptic, coal dust embedded in the walls from decades of miners tracking it in, and the dry heat of an HVAC system that was older than her marriage.

She had one nurse, Jolene Prater, who was sixty and should have retired but couldn't afford to. She had a part-time physician's assistant, a young woman named Dani Shepherd from Lexington who'd come for a two-year rural placement and was now in year four because she'd made the mistake of caring. She had a waiting room with fourteen chairs, a reception desk, two exam rooms, a supply closet that doubled as a break room, and a budget that required the kind of creative accounting that would have impressed a money launderer.

The county's only clinic. Thirty miles to the nearest hospital. Forty-five to a specialist.

Kate's patient list for the day included:

Mrs. Dooley, seventy-three, diabetic foot ulcer, noncompliant with wound care.

Tommy Sykes, forty-one, black lung, progressive, on supplemental oxygen.

Jessica Brewer, twenty-six, abscess on her left forearm, almost certainly from injection, though she'd say she burned herself on a stove.

Three opioid follow-ups: men in their thirties and forties who'd been prescribed painkillers for mining injuries, gotten addicted, lost the prescriptions when the regulations changed, found heroin because it was cheaper, and were now on suboxone maintenance that they could barely afford.

Two children with asthma.

One teenager with a broken wrist from a four-wheeler accident.

And Paul Tabb, at four o'clock, to discuss options that weren't really options.

Kate hung her coat on the hook behind her desk and sat down. The desk was covered in files, lab results, insurance forms, and a framed photo of Eli at age eight, grinning with a missing tooth. She looked at the photo for a moment, then opened the first file.

Black lung. Tommy Sykes.

She'd been treating Tommy for three years. His FEV1—the measure of how much air his lungs could push out in one second—had dropped from sixty-two percent to forty-eight percent in that time. Normal was above eighty. Below thirty was end-stage. Tommy was forty-one years old and breathed like a man of seventy.

He'd worked the Coffey mines from age eighteen to age thirty-two, when they closed. Fourteen years of inhaling coal dust and silica in tunnels where the ventilation was whatever the foreman decided was adequate, which was usually not.

There was no cure for black lung. There was management. There was oxygen. There was the slow, grinding decline of lungs that were filling with scar tissue like a house filling with sand.

Kate wrote her notes, checked her supplies, and prepared for the day the way she always did: one patient at a time, one problem at a time, one small repair in a place where the damage was structural.

Jolene arrived at eight, bringing coffee from the gas station and the news that the Coffey family's old equipment yard on Route 119 had been sold to a scrap dealer from Virginia.

"Roy's not going to like that," Kate said.

"Roy doesn't like anything," Jolene replied, which was both unfair and accurate.

Roy Coffey was fifty-eight, the last of the Coffey coal family, a man who'd inherited a name that was stamped on half the damage in the county. His grandfather had opened the mines. His father had expanded them. Roy had watched them close, one by one, as regulations tightened and natural gas got cheaper and the seams thinned out. He still owned the mineral rights to most of the mountain above town, which meant he owned the legal right to a hole in the ground that produced nothing.

He was not a villain. Kate had to remind herself of that sometimes. He was a man whose identity was built on an industry that had poisoned the place he loved, and he couldn't figure out how to hold both of those things at once.

Nobody in Cane Branch could.

That was the town's central wound, deeper than the mines: the thing that had fed them had also killed them, and there was no clean way to grieve that.

---

Eli sat on the school bus and stared out the window at nothing.

The bus route wound through the valley, picking up students from hollows and side roads that didn't have names on any GPS. The driver, Mr. Combs, was seventy and drove like he was hauling dynamite, which meant the thirty-minute ride to the consolidated high school in Evarts felt like an hour.

Eli had his earbuds in but wasn't listening to anything. He was thinking about escape velocity.

Not the physics kind, though he knew that too—11.2 kilometers per second, the speed needed to break free of Earth's gravity. He was thinking about the human kind. The speed needed to break free of a place that held you not with gravity but with guilt.

His parents needed him. The town needed his parents. His father couldn't leave a congregation. His mother couldn't leave patients. And Eli couldn't stay without becoming the kind of person who stops wanting things, which was the same as dying, just slower.

He'd been working on his application essay for three weeks. The prompt was: Describe a challenge you've overcome.

The honest answer was: I haven't. I live in a place where challenges don't get overcome. They get endured.

He couldn't write that.

So he was writing about the time he'd organized a creek cleanup in eighth grade, which had been pointless because the creek was poisoned at its source and no amount of picking up tires and bottles would change the chemistry of acid mine drainage, but it sounded good on paper and that was what college applications were: sounding good on paper about things that didn't work.

The bus passed the turnoff to the old Coffey mine road. Above the treeline, Eli could see the scar—the strip-mined crescent, bare and black against the gray October sky.

He looked at it the way he looked at everything in Cane Branch: with the complicated love of someone who is already composing his goodbye.

The bus ground on toward Evarts.

The mountain sat where it had always sat.

Nothing, that morning, suggested it was about to change.