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I’d made a bit of a show with the other workers on the way up, asking, “Where me work, where me work?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, stoop,” an older man at the front of the procession said, before going back to grumbling about losing money at cribbage.
A large man fell into step beside me. In fact, he fell into step so easily, I wondered if he’d had some kind of military training, or if close order drill was simply part of everyone’s childhood education.
“I show you, big fella. My name’s Olson. You have a name, I suppose?”
“Hickory,” I said.
“Ticky, more like,” the one who’d called me “stoop” said.
“How you know that?” Olson asked. “You and your mom had a groom through that fur, maybe?”
The man half rounded, then thought better of it.
“Awww, you’d just enjoy it if I beat you up some, Ollie,” he grumbled.
“The smaller the man, the bigger the talk,” Olson said, to everyone and no one.
The mining site was set into, appropriately enough, the crotch of a mountain pointing like an arrow toward the southernmost corner of the Coal Country. That was where most of the coal went that we produced: due south to the Georgia Control. A great pile of slag spilled down toward a creek, shale-colored pus running from the mountain’s wound.
Outside the gaping, semicircular mine entrance with its trolley tracks, electrical cabling, and ventilator stacks stood a humble building, the mine office, a ramshackle set of connected trailers with a single two-story red-painted wooden building glowering through windows like filthy glasses over the litter around it. On the other side of the mine-access road were a dumping ground for heavy equipment, some functional, some not, and a scrap heap of pieces of excavating gear.
I could fill pages describing Number Four, an ugly black mouth in the mountainside like a vast skull eye-socket, with
THEY WHO WORK WELL, EAT WELL
painted in letters in reflective yellow such as you see striping roads on the boulders above the mine entrance.
In tiny little felt-pen letters just inside, someone had scrawled:
Nothing to hope for now.
• • •
The stale air, the inadequate lighting, the antiquated machinery that required endless labor with shovels and picks and unpredictable blasting sticks—I could go on for pages describing the noisy activity of a coal mine run on a shoestring budget.
For the purposes of this account, a reader need remember only three things:
First, that the mine stood in a remote location; the single rail line that met it passed over two bridges and innumerable narrow cuts. To drive there, you bumped on railroad ties at the bridges, or took a doubtful jeep trail that challenged even the hardiest four-wheel drive.
Second, that it was sort of a dumping ground for misfits and malcontents, both of the Kurian Order and for Consolidated Mines, where blunder and inefficiency would do less harm. I believe I did not have a reputation for either, but I was put here to find out how I’d adapt to mine work. Perhaps they thought
I’d go insane underground and start in on my fellow workers. If it suited me, the Maynes Conglomerate might have moved me to a more important operation, and if it didn’t, I’d do minimal damage.
Finally, that Amiable Fise (pronounced so it rhymes with “nice”) worked there. I will tell more about her later, but in many ways she was the heart of Number Four.
The Olson fellow was kind enough to take me into the mine office, where I handed over the small amount of documentation the White Palace had given me. They took my picture (they had to do some rearranging of camera, light, and backdrop) and made a plastic identification card. Although it came on a lanyard, the foreman who gave me the tour showed me a little slot on a yellow safety vest where the card would fit. “You don’t need that dangling into machinery.”
I marveled at the picture briefly. There was no sense overplaying things.
I soon accustomed myself to the work. The ten-hour shifts of mining themselves were not so bad. They were good about issuing breaks regularly, and they kept water and hygiene necessities up near the coal face (as a new hand, I was put in charge of excretion, or the “honey bucket,” which went out with the slag); the workers usually spent only about half the day in the noise and dust of the actual coal face, doing the messy work of extracting. The rest was maintaining the rickety old equipment, rigging lighting and ventilation gear, or moving coal from inside to out through the conveyor chutes.
But reaching the coal face required a good deal of “travel”—often more than an hour to reach the spot for the day’s work from the mine entrance above, between waits for the elevator and walk-crawls to the face. Some of the tunnels were big enough to fit two cars abreast, but there were a great many mines that weren’t all that much bigger than the tunnels dug by convicts in prison-escape movies. For a larger figure such as me, it meant almost crawling on all fours through some of the tunnel branches. Neither I nor any of the miners was paid for travel. Idle time for breakdowns did not count, either, even if we were puffing in the unimaginable dark—a coal mine’s dark must be experienced to be believed—while waiting for the electricity to come back on. The foremen who kept track of such things for the management upstairs were generous about “correcting” time cards, though, for especially vexing circumstances.
When your shift finished, you crawled back, exhausted, and in my case praying the whole way that you would not meet some laggard late to the relief shift, which would require one of us backing up to a wide spot where we could squeeze by each other.
To add to the miseries of the travel, there were coal conveyors operating with a deafening clatter. Even with wadded-up bits of New Universal Church bulletins stuffed in your ears, you arrived at the coal face with a headache, or young boys and girls pushing or dragging four-wheeled “barrows” of coal to the nearest working conveyor. The Kurian Order often bragged that it took children off the streets and gave them an education. These children certainly weren’t on the streets, but their education wasn’t all that different from that given a dog or a lab rat: perform simple tasks repetitively and get your treat.
