Mingo County War

You heard in the valley us coal miners is hard people?

You don’t know the half of it.

Before the union come to Mingo, the company sent up a bunch of hooligans from Baldwin-Felts, rough men toting guns and blackjacks.

They aimed to keep out the union.

See, they wanted to leave the coal price down at eighty cent a long ton, half of what’s paid to Pennsylvania miners.

They tried to put us out of our houses, but our sheriff Sid Hatfield stood tall.

Said they couldn’t do it.

Shot two of them Baldwin-Felts men dead as fried chicken.

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Since the late 1800s, the coalfields of the state’s Mingo, Logan, and McDowell Counties had operated under a repressive company town system. Workers mined using leased tools and were paid low wages in company currency, or “scrip,” which could only be used at company stores. Safety conditions were often deplorable, yet despite the efforts of groups such as the United Mine Workers (UMW), the mine operators had kept unions out of the region through intimidation and violence. Companies compelled their workers to sign so-called “yellow dog contracts” pledging not to organize, and they used armies of private detectives to harass striking miners and evict them from their company-owned homes.  On May 19, 1920,  members of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency arrived in the town of Matewan to evict union miners from houses owned by the Stone Mountain Coal Company. After catching wind of the detectives’ activities, Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman and a pro-union sheriff named Sid Hatfield raised a small posse and confronted them near the local train station. A verbal argument quickly escalated into a gunfight, and when the smoke cleared, seven Baldwin-Felts agents had been killed along with Mayor Testerman and two local miners.

The Hardest Job You’ll Ever Hate

Everything about the giant camp foreman said logger, from the flannel Pendleton buttoned tight around his tree-trunk neck to his sap-stained hands hard as rocks.

“War’s on,” he said around the pipe in his teeth, “so we’re hiring. Either of you logged before?”

“Not I,” said Hal, who was always more honest than smart.

I had to go along then, and shook my head.

“You can work for wages, three dollars a week. Or you can log Gyppo and get paid two cents the trunk foot. Experienced men usually do that. Harder. Riskier.”

I knew which one Hal would pick.

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Everything You Did Brought You To Now

You get used to living like this.

Focus on the present, but keep one eye on the horizon.

Mostly you need to be flexible.

Like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

I was on my way to Las Cruces when the van started making noise.

Just the latest chapter in a slide that started a long time before.

I have given a lot of thought to when things started going this way.

Notice I don’t say going wrong.

That would be presumptuous, even disrespectful.

Nobody knows yet how it all turns out.

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The Straw That Breaks The Camel’s Back

“I don’t see why you insist on making such a huge deal about this.”

“Because it is a huge deal, Lloyd. We lost power for a month. Half the trees in the city were knocked down and the rest look like they got chopped by a giant weed-wacker.”

“It was a huge deal, but now it’s not. They’re cleaning it up. Move on, I say.”

“I suppose next you’ll say something about spilled milk.”

“Look, I get that you’re upset. What I don’t get is all the drama. All the tears.”

“Because you never cry.”

“Not about this I don’t.”

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Drowned Kitten

She sets the steaming mug before me.

“Soon set you to rights,” she says. “You’ll see.”

My hands are shaking so badly I don’t trust them to lift the tea to my lips.

Instead, I bend to sip, pursing my lips against the heat.

“There’s a good girl,” she says.

“Get some nice tea in you and then we’ll see about finding you some dry things.  You’ll catch your death else. Soaked as a drowned kitten!”

She does not ask why.

I nod and sip, grateful for the tea and kindness, grateful my wet hair hides my tears from her.

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My Vision Is Not A Small One

The man pushed the piece of notebook paper across the desk. “Can she be built?”

I studied it. A kid’s pencil drawing of a circle bisected by a rectangle.

“You are best architect in Montreal, yes?” he said, his accent thick.

I gave my most gallic shrug. “Perhaps.”

“And yet you have no French?”

“My parents were from Toronto.”

He might have been smiling or frowning beneath the mustache. “I ask again. Can she be built?”

I pretended to study the drawing.  “How large?”

“Oh, large. Twenty or thirty.”

“Feet?”

He scowled. “Meters. My vision is not a small one.”

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Sixth Time’s The Charm

The judge was an old family friend or this probably would have happened sooner.

“I’m sorry, Stewart,” he said over the phone. “My hands are tied. Six months is the minimum I can give you. Have somebody drive you to the courthouse at 9AM tomorrow and you can remand yourself.”

One last fling, I told myself as I pulled my car into the Tik Tok parking lot at 6AM.

I sat next to the third-shifters and ordered my usual boilermakers, adding several for luck.

I don’t remember anything after that, but the cops said when they arrested me I blew .35%.

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The Words Will Come Later

The waitress sets a cup and saucer on the counter and pours it full of a watery brown liquid Enzo assumes is coffee.

She wears a faded dress with a chipped name tag he reads as she pours.

Dorothy. 

He turns this in his mind, unsure how to pronounce it.

He sips at his cup and grimaces. It’s acidic and weak.

Perhaps he ordered tea by mistake.

In Caltanisetta Enzo had been known for his eloquence.

He’d even been able to talk his way onto a New York-bound ship.

The menu is in English.

He’ll point and take his chances.

 

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Follow Car

The whole room tilted at a steep angle. I’d noticed the corner of the double-wide was crushed like a beer can. I guess the office was a salvage job,  one that’d fallen off a flatbed.

I stared across the slanting desk at last year’s calendar tacked to the warped paneling.

“Eleven bucks an hour for forty a week, or eleven cents a mile,” he said. “Your call.”

“And all I have to do is follow the truck?”

“It’s called a follow car. What do you think that means?”

“Which do you recommend?” I asked, knowing I’d take the other option.

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Objects In Motion

He stood in the shadows watching her through the window as she ordered from the waiter.

He watched her lips form the word martini. 

The waiter went away.

She fiddled with her napkin.

Her eyes scanned the empty restaurant before coming to rest on him.

He knew she could not see him, was in fact looking at herself in the glass, but the effect was disconcerting.

He watched the barman making her drink, watched him glance up in appreciation from time to time.

She was still so beautiful.

He felt the now-familiar desolation, fingered the plane ticket in his pocket.

 

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