Original Sins by Lisa Alther

acceptance. So different from the noisy factory, the bustling town. An owl hooted on the ridge.
    â€œYou’d better stop off and say hidy to Lyle and them.”
    â€œI can’t this trip, Grandpa. I’m in a rush. But tell them I say hi.”
    â€œCome back when you can stay awhile,” his grandfather called as Raymond walked toward the car.
    Raymond could hear his father’s voice telling (as he had time after tedious time) about leaving Tatro Cove: “Somebody was going to drive me to the bus. As I walked down to the car toting my stuff in a paper sack, I saw Pa coming down the holler driving the cow. It was dusk, and lightning bugs was blinking all around him. On his hip sat my sister Inez, who was a little one-year-old baby then. She was dressed in one of them white knit gowns. She was smiling up at him and cooing, and he was just chattering away to her. The tears in my eyes was so thick I couldn’t hardly see to get in that car.”
    Maybe Raymond could reverse the process? Build a cabin, work in a mine?
    He parked near a tipple with Consolidated Coal painted on it. He photographed it, and the train cars being filled one by one with gleaming black chunks, and the huge trucks with names painted on their cabs that brought in loads from the small mines for cleaning and sorting. The men, in hard hats and work clothes, slapped each other on the back and yelled jokes over the din. It was hard work, honest work. Raymond found it appealing. His uncles and cousins were coal miners. His father and grandfather had been. He’d return to the family profession. This is where he would work! He would go down into the belly of the whale, and he would emerge changed. He would emerge a man!
    As he ran out of pictures to snap up above, he began to confront the fact that he would be spending the afternoon in the middle of a mountain. The previous year he had photographed some weeping widows after an explosion and cave-in in Southwest Virginia. He hoped no one would have to weep for him this afternoon.
    You get used to this, he assured himself as the electric car descended into the tunnel. But until you did, it sure did feel claustrophobic. This was probably how a baby felt being propelled through its mother’s birth canal: Until this moment, he hadn’t realized how good he’d had it where he’d been before. He became conscious of each limb, of how much he liked and used each hand and foot and arm and leg. What if a roof bolt came loose, and several tons of slate crashed down? His grandfather had lost his arm that way.
    He pulled himself together and asked the man driving the car to stop while he lit flares and snapped shots of the passageway and the tracks. On they went, deeper and deeper into the mountain, with only the long narrow tunnel connecting them to daylight
    He snapped—men running the huge continuous miner machines, loading and riding the conveyor belts, mending pumps in water to their knees, eating lunch as water dripped from the ceiling onto their sandwiches, placing roof supports. They ate away at the innards of this mountain like ravenous termites. And like a lacy termite-riddled log, was it possible the remains could collapse into powder?
    He rode to the surface, feeling vomited from the maw of a hideous beast. He photographed the men, blinking in daylight, their faces except for their eyes and teeth black as the coal seam they’d been working.
    In the showers, water the color of ink flowed down drains. The bodies under the showerheads were bent, twisted, scarred, and bruised. Fingernails were cracked and caked with black. The men coughed up, spit, and snorted out globs of black mucus.
    Raymond grasped the fact that he was a frail and cowardly kid. He wouldn’t be able to do this work even if he wanted to.
    His father, with his slicked-down hair and long sideburns, was lying in green work clothes on the living room couch watching “The Beverly Hillbillies”