Page 64 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. V #7

Acompany town in the coal country of West Virginia offered a bleak existence for a child growing up. The dust that sifted daily from the mine shafts settled into every crevice of our com- munity, painting it a thousand shades of gray. It seeped into our food, our clothes, our lungs—no scrubbing with soap or bleach or vinegar could banish it.
explored the hillsides and played practical jokes involving frogs and snakes on Susan O’Hara, and Mr. Barone let us listen to baseball games on the radio in the store.
The Legacy
My father came home every day from his shift at the mine gray-faced and exhausted, and collapsed into bed. Mother sewed our clothes by hand, cooked from scratch, and cleaned with an old straw broom.
Then one day, my father didn’t come home. ~
Our town, like the rest of the country, was gripped in the teeth of the Great Depression. Lean times dictated efficiency, and nothing was wasted. Mother patched pants until they fell apart, then cut them up to make patches for the next pair. When we had the luxury of oranges, we scraped the pulp and crushed the peels to make marma- lade. Dinner scraps became the next day’s veg- etable loaf.
After a period of mourning, we tried to return to our usual ways. But a living wage in a coal town was beyond the reach of anyone who couldn’t drive a pickaxe. The hard West Virginia anthracite defied all Mother’s efforts to put down roots.
At age five, I was assigned the job of collecting bits room’s only window, and the room was dark
of string and tin foil into large balls, which were except for a small table lamp. The overpowering
hoarded and meted out only as needed. I scoured reek of sickness engulfed me like the maw of a the neighborhood for wayward nails and screws, giant beast, turning my stomach: infection, sweat,
usable bits of wood or sack cloth. I stocked urine, alcohol.
shelves and ran errands for Mr. Barone at the company store, who rewarded me with the occa- sional tin of peaches or bag of flour.
Grandfather lay in bed, his skeletal body propped against a mountain of pillows, his covers gray and slick with sweat. In health he had been a frighten- ing presence, but in this dark and foul place he seemed a demon, his thin white hair wild about his knobby head. Ferocious eyebrows dominated his face and overwhelmed his small, sunken eyes.
But even in the worst of times, Mother found pen- nies to put aside for the future, against a day even harder than today.
It wasn’t all work. I found other children to play with, although we knew nothing of conventional toys. Old tires became our swings, our targets, and sometimes our roller coasters; discarded pick handles made excellent baseball bats; and the occasional frog or snake from the creek behind the mine kept us occupied for hours at a time. We
I shrank back and huddled in a corner while Mother and Grandmother sat at the bed in whis- pered conversation for what seemed hours. Finally, they rose. I turned to leave, but Mother stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.
55
“He wants to talk to you—alone.”
In the evenings, Mother and Father and I played Hearts or Slapjack or Canasta while violin con- certos from Mr. Halloran’s phonograph next door floated in the dusty air like echoes of a distant past.
Leaving was a bitter decision, since Mother’s fam- ily lived close by and Grandfather was in rapidly failing health. One dark September morning we stopped at their tiny cabin to say our last good- byes.
Grandmother opened the door to the bedroom and we filed in. The shade was drawn on the
bob beach