The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips Page A

it and can it and cook it. No meat, but with Mama’s cooking you never noticed what wasn’t on the table.
    The men with no land, the ones living in mining camps or renting property, didn’t have that cushion. When the mines started closing, there was nothing to go on the table. No other jobs, either. And there was nowhere for those men or their families to go. Maybe a handout from a church or free meals from a relative, but that didn’t last. Day in and day out, as weeks stretched into months, what hungry people mainly did was starve.
    We didn’t see any of that. Not for a while. All Papa’s brothers farmed at least little patches of land, and Mama’s sisters had married men with clean white shirts who always had pens in their pockets.
    Lola Lowe’s boy Mark was my age, and he had a tough time of it in school. A lot of the really poor boys had the advantage of being tough and hard and mean as snakes. No one would mess with them. But Mark was always small, and he never seemed healthy. He just seemed poor and pitiful and uncomfortable, the kid who everybody’s mother told you to be nice to. And frankly nobody was too mean to him—there would’ve been no sport in it—but nobody sat with him or asked him to play ball, either.
    In third grade, he turned orange, like he’d been colored with a crayon. And he had a potbelly on him. That thin body, nothing but bones, but an inflated belly you couldn’t help but notice. He stopped coming to school, from embarrassment more than sickness, I think.
    It turned out all they had growing in the garden was carrots, and that was all he’d eaten for months. And then they had the doctor bills from all the tests run to figure out what had turned him orange. A few of Lola’s other children turned splotchy with rickets. By the time I graduated, she’d lost her four youngest. Different names to what killed them, but poor nutrition at the root of it. Mrs. Lowe handled losing the husbands a lot easier than she did the children. I barely remember her from childhood, but when I was in college, Mama started having me take Thanks giving dinner over to her.
    To me Lola Lowe was the stooped, thin woman who never said anything but “Fine head of hair on you, Jack. Thank you. And tell your mama thank you.”
    She was two sentences to me.

    Albert BIRDS KNOW FIRST WHEN THERE’S A STORM COMING up, and I could hear them hollering. I’d heard the cawing from the kitchen, and when I stepped out on the porch, I could feel the storm in the air myself, the wind whipping around the porch, smelling of electricity. The jays and crows and martins sounded their warnings to one another while I stayed out there, standing, waiting for the rain to hit. Nothing like the minutes before an electrical storm, all the force of it making the hairs on your arms stand on end, the trees nervous and shaking. I crossed my arms and waited until the sheet of rain slammed into the yard. The first line of lightning cracked. The birds went quiet, hiding.
    At shift change at 6 p.m., the men coming on told us both banks in town never opened that morning. Word got around quick that they’d closed without a word of warning to anyone. Doors locked, shades down, everybody inside just gone. Supposedly weren’t going to open again period. None of us at the site had any money in ’em anyway, but the town was chock-full of fellows banging on the doors trying to get their money. A few went over to Jesse Bridgeman’s house to bang on it for a while. Figured since he ran the bank, he was to blame. They banged for most of the afternoon, though, because he went home and killed himself early that morning. Wife died a couple of years before and kids were at school, so nobody noticed until finally one of the fellows walked around and peeped in the back window. Jesse was laying in a heap on the ground, hadn’t even sat down to pull the trigger.
    ’Course in ’29, banks wobbled and shook, businesses shut down all along Main Street. Went