The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips Page B

broke. Must’ve been a quarter of those storefronts boarded up. Didn’t make much difference to me. Mines stayed open—with a few less men put to work in ’em—and life went on. No better, no worse.
    I knew Jesse—not so as we’d do more than nod to each other in passing, but I’d thought he was a solid man. Didn’t under stand it. He had two boys and a girl, the youngest one of them about Virgie’s age. I didn’t know how you shrugged that off. Thought maybe it was different when there was money. Maybe the wife had rich parents who’d take care of the children.
    I’d been in a few accidents, but the only one that I thought I might not get out of was in No. 5, down at Chickasaw.
    I was loading then, shot the coal myself and then filled car after car. Like most things, your body fell into it after a while, scooping up the chunks of coal—slate, too, that’d be sorted out up on top. Didn’t get paid for slate. Hefting it all into the car, I didn’t hear a single voice, only coughing from time to time. Or the frustrated sound of a shovel hitting a slab of slate that wasn’t jarred loose. No clock, no such thing as time or minutes, only a shovelful and the next and the next. And you settled into the bosses’ system alright—how long didn’t matter, only how much. One ton per car. We filled them regular and smooth, me and Jonah, knowing to ignore the aches and soon enough they’d give up and quiet down.

    The prop under one of the blasts wasn’t set right, and the whole side of the tunnel caved. Floor and ceiling seemed like they met each other in the middle, and I was blinking the dirt and dust out of my eyes, spitting it out of my mouth, blowing it from my nose. When I reached up to wipe it off, I couldn’t move my hands. Buried in it to my chest. It didn’t take me half a second to figure out that was the first problem needed to be solved. First I worked on wiggling my fingers, getting them loose enough that I could start to twist my hands. Then I hollowed out a bigger space by circling my wrists. That freed up my arms below the elbows some, and bit by bit I could feel the earth breaking up below my shoulders. I kept moving and shifting, pulling loose the same way the cat ate the grindstone—a little at a time. Once I had my arms out, it got easier. Then I could use both hands like a dog digging up a bone to push the dirt away from my body. I carved out a space around me until I got to below my hip bones, then I heaved myself out.
    I had to take a few deep breaths before I could call for anyone. I’d heard grunts and shouts down the tunnel a ways while I was digging. I’d ripped a few fingernails off and had to tear off a piece of shirt to bandage my fingers up. They kept on bleeding, and a few times I tried to clear my eyes of the dust and got an eyeful of blood instead. Digging in a cave-in ain’t nothing like in a garden. The dirt was full of splinters and chunks of wood, coal and rock, a few bits of metal. Once I got to wrapping up my fingers, I saw my hands were bleeding from a few other places, so I wrapped them all up, sort of like loose mittens.
    I’d called to the others while I was bandaging. A few fellows answered back. They was mostly fine. We lost three men in that collapse, and one of them I saw his hand, glove knocked right off it, sticking up out of the dirt. The only part of him aboveground. But the rest of us did all we could do—started heading up. We had to lift a few beams that’d blocked the tunnel, and I gouged one of those empty fingernail holes good. Nearly screamed. End of the day, I don’t think the broken ribs hurt as much as the durn fingernails.
    I knew I was sore all over, and my side did pain me something awful, but I kept on—wasn’t no other choice. Once we were on the surface a doctor came and figured I had the broken ribs, plus my ankle had swole to the size of a ham. That was the start of my back trouble, too, I reckon. (Wasn’t ’til later that I near