Sky of Stone (9 page)

12

BIG JEB

A
S THE
lift dropped, I kept hearing a wheezing noise that sounded like a broken accordion. After a while, I realized it was coming from Big Jeb each time he breathed. Then Bobby started yammering, talking about college and how much he was looking forward to medical school. When he was asked, he allowed as how he made pretty much straight A’s all the time. He also said this was the second time he’d ever been in the mine, the only other time being a field trip when he was in the ninth grade. I just wished he’d shut up. My knees were quivering, and they might have even knocked together a couple of times. It was a long way down that shaft. I’d been down it twice before, once with my dad, another time with my friend Jake Mosby. This time, maybe because I was coming as a miner, not a visitor, I was scared, and Bobby’s chatter punctuated by Big Jeb’s wheezes weren’t helping me any.

When we reached the bottom, I started to get off the lift, but before I could do it, nearly every miner on it said:
“Turn your light on, boy!”
They seemed to get a lot of satisfaction out of saying it. Sheepishly, I turned the knob on my helmet lamp. Bobby came over and shined his light in my eyes. “Sonny, you’ve got to pay attention or you could get hurt down here.”

“I can take care of myself,” I muttered.

“You’d better.”

I’d just about had enough of Bobby Likens. “What’s it to you?” I demanded.

He kicked the dirt. “I guess I have to tell you. Your mother called the house last night and asked me to keep an eye on you.”

“What?”

“Your mother called—”

“I heard you.” So Mom knew what I’d done. That explained for sure why Dad was going to cut me off. Mom must have burned up the telephone line to him and then called the Likenses. But why hadn’t she called me at the Club House? If she knew I’d signed up to go to work, surely she knew I’d taken a room, too. The more I thought about my parents and their incessant battles and intrigues and manipulations, and how they tended to use me like a kickball, the madder I got. I contemplated jumping on the lift and going straight back up, but the men going off shift beat me to it. It rose out of sight.

“Look, Sonny,” Bobby said earnestly. “We’re not together today, so try to keep yourself from getting killed. Your mother would have my hide if you did.”

I glared at Bobby and then stomped off looking for Big Jeb. He was pretty easy to find, since his back was about as wide as the mine. When I saw him climb headfirst into a man-trip car, I climbed in next to him. Though the car was built for four men, it was a tight squeeze for just the two of us. Big Jeb opened his lunch bucket, withdrew the top part, and tipped the bottom to his lips, taking a deep gulp of water. He then let loose a wheeze so long that I wondered if it would ever end. Then, as soon as he had his bucket back together, he smacked his vast black lips and promptly fell asleep, each breath a rumble. Then I remembered I’d left my own lunch bucket in the lamphouse.

The man-trip lurched once, the wheels squealing, and we were off. No matter what else happened this day, I had sentenced myself to a shift without food or water.

At least I didn’t have to be with Bobby Likens. I could imagine what he’d have to say about my forgotten bucket. It would have been just like him to offer to share his lunch with me, too. I started a long, slow mental burn, and pretty soon I’d managed to transfer the worst qualities of mankind over to Bobby Likens, the conceited med school, straight-A’s creature that he was.

The man-trip rumbled on into the darkness, its wheels squealing and grinding every time it turned. I could smell the heat coming off its powerful electric motor. After a while, we stopped to let men get off, but Big Jeb kept sleeping. How was I supposed to know when we got to wherever we were going? If Big Jeb stayed asleep, maybe we’d keep going and going and . . .

I worked to get hold of myself. It was all so crazy.
What in God’s good earth was I doing in the mine!
We were picking up speed, really flying now. Shapes flicked by, wooden timbers white with rock dust. The man-trip rattled and squealed and lurched. At any moment, I expected it to jump the track and roll over and smash us all. I sure didn’t see how anybody could sleep aboard it, but Big Jeb never stirred.

A half hour or so farther down the track, we stopped again. My tailbone felt like somebody had just spent that half hour kicking it. I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything. Coach Mams back at Big Creek had once said, “It’s better to do nothing than the wrong thing.” At the time, I thought his advice made a lot of sense. I was always pretty capable of doing nothing. But as I sat in the darkness stuffed inside a steel cage with a man who was not only the size of a grizzly bear but pretty much smelled like one, too, I began to wonder if doing nothing might sometimes be the wrong thing, after all. Philosophy seemed to come easy to me inside a man-trip, especially since my mind was the only thing that could move.

The beam from a helmet light suddenly hit my eyes. “Big Jeb? Sonny? You awake? Come on out of there.”

“Yes, sir,” Big Jeb instantly answered. Ponderously, he swung his bulk to clamber out, pretty much crushing me against the man-trip cab. After he was out, I climbed out, too.

“Turn your light on, boy,” the man-trip driver said.

I hadn’t realized I’d turned it off, so I fiddled with my lamp until I got it working again. The driver pointed down the track. “Richardson said this is where the hoot-owl shift got last night. There’s posts, shims, and crib lumber stacked in the gob.”

“Yes, sir,” Big Jeb rumbled, and limped off, his head down, one huge arm behind his back, the other carrying his bucket.

Since I had no bucket, I put both my hands behind my back and plunged after him. After two steps, I straightened my spine slightly and promptly slammed my helmet into the roof. I was knocked to my knees, stars doing a little pirouette around my head. When they stopped spinning, I also saw that my lamp had gone off again. Before I could get to the knob to fiddle with it, the man-trip driver came over and helped me up. “Boy, if you plan on raising the roof of this old mine, you’ll need something harder than your head.” Then he added, with undisguised glee, “And you need to turn your light on, too.”

I pulled away from him and lurched on, still fiddling with my lamp. Big Jeb had disappeared somewhere in the darkness. I heard the man-trip locomotive behind me crank up and then the squeal of its wheels as it trundled away.

I had no idea where I was. After the noise of the man-trip faded, it became very quiet. I could feel a slight breeze in my face. I peered around with the feeble light from my lamp, trying to catch sight of Big Jeb. When I didn’t spot him, I held my breath and listened until I heard a distant wheezing. I headed in the direction I thought it was coming from and pretty soon found Big Jeb sitting placidly on a pile of thick timbers. By their size, I knew them to be the posts that were used to hold up the mine roof. “Yes, sir,” he said as I came up to him. I was beginning to wonder if he ever said anything else.

“What are we supposed to do, Big Jeb?” I asked, but he made no reply. Instead, he pried his lunch bucket open and sloshed some water into his mouth. Then he just sat there, breathing heavily. He was sick with the silicosis, I supposed. That was when gob, a mix of coal and rock dust, coated your lungs. The silicosis was not uncommon in Coalwood, but usually when you got it as bad as Big Jeb, you stopped working. Maybe because he had two families, he had to keep at it.

After a while I assumed we were waiting for something or somebody, so I took a seat up on the lumber stack with Big Jeb. Then, just as I got comfortable, he said, “Yes, sir,” crawled heavily off, and went wandering into the dark. I saw him stoop, and then he came up with an ax in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other. He walked over to a timber supporting the roof, ran his hand over it, peered at its top, then dropped the ax and swung the hammer into the timber as hard as he could. It fell down with a heavy thump. I waited for a million tons of rocks to fall on top of us, but, to my utmost relief, nothing happened. Big Jeb ran his hand over the lumpy stone roof, threw down the hammer, walked over to a stack of posts, and picked one off the top. Then he waited, still wheezing. When he looked over in my direction, I got the message.

I took one end of the post with both hands. He eyed me, then started walking, holding his end of the post with a single hand. I followed behind, managing a kind of bent-kneed waddle. When we finally got to where we were going, I dropped my end and stood up to stretch my back, and bounced my head off the roof again. Big Jeb didn’t say anything, just set the post into its place, then shuffled away into the darkness. Rubbing my head, I waited until he returned with a triangular-shaped piece of wood. He inserted it at the top of the post, then whacked it with the blunt end of the ax blade. The wedge tightened the post against the roof. “Yes, sir,” Big Jeb said, and then lumbered back to the stack of posts and sat down again. When I clambered up beside him, he was drinking more water.

I wistfully eyed the cool liquid. After he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and put the bucket away. We sat until I became restless. Big Jeb kept wheezing. It occurred to me that maybe he couldn’t do very much without getting out of breath. “How about I try my hand at putting up one of those posts, Big Jeb?” I asked him. “You just tell me which one.”

Big Jeb snorted, then scratched his chin languidly. “Yes, sir,” he finally allowed, and after a moment more of staring into the dark, he stood up and lurched off toward the line of posts going down both sides of the track.

I grabbed a post and waited for him to help me with it. When he didn’t, I dragged it after him. “I’m coming, Big Jeb,” I called.

My idea to do most of the work was apparently one that appealed to Big Jeb. For the rest of the morning, he would go to a post, swing his sledgehammer, knock it loose, then wait until I got the new one in place. Then he’d tap in the wedge and wait while I carted the old post away and picked up a new one. I kept forgetting the low roof. Pretty soon, my head took on a dull, permanent ache.

I don’t know how many posts we’d set before Big Jeb said “Yes, sir” again and lumbered back to his lunch bucket. He started pulling out sandwiches wrapped in heavy gray wax paper. I leaned against a rock-dusted wall and closed my eyes and just listened to Big Jeb grunt and wheeze and slosh and chew. Then there was a long silence and I opened one eye and found his light shining into it. I couldn’t see his face for the glare, but when I peered closer, I saw an apple in his hand, being tendered in my direction. I snatched it lest he change his mind and never tasted an apple so sweet! Then I saw he was also holding out the bottom pan of his bucket to me. “Thank you,” I said as I gulped the delicious wet water down my parched throat.

Big Jeb silently took his bucket back when I was finished, then hunkered down. Soon I heard him snoring, each exhalation a raw wheeze. I watched him until I felt a certain urge in my bladder and intestines.

I got up and staggered back into the gob. There were no bathrooms in the mine. I knew that much. You had to find whatever place you could that was out of the way. I wandered on, turning this corner and then that one until I felt as if I had reached a place decently far away.

Just as I finished my business, my helmet lamp faded, then went off altogether. My heart knotted. I was immersed in a darkness so black that I could almost feel the pupils in my eyes stretch as they tried to find some light.

I fiddled with the knob on my lamp, but nothing I did seemed to work. I took a step, waving my hands in front of me. Then I took another step and another until I touched the cool, dusty surface of a wall. I didn’t know which way to go. My heart started racing. I was lost for all time! Not only that, I was
hungry
and
tired
and
my head hurt
and soon, I thought, I’d be adding
dead
to that list.
Lost!

I started yelling. “Big Jeb! My light’s out! I’m lost!” The pitch of my voice started to rise. “Big Jeb!” I shrieked.

I listened, but I heard not so much as a sound, not even a scurrying rat, which, now that I thought about it, were supposed to be in the mine to the tune of about a million. Would they be after me next? I started to sweat, a trickle of it wandering down my cheek and startling me into slapping myself.

My cheek still stinging, I decided I’d better give myself a little pep talk. I could figure my way out. All I had to do was think like an engineer and put two and two together and see if I didn’t get four. I felt the movement of a whiff of air across my sweaty face. What did I know about the mine? For one thing, the giant fans on the surface pushed air down a multitude of shafts and kept the mine slightly above atmospheric pressure. I’d picked that much up just listening to Dad yell into the black phone over the years. Would they even bother to ventilate an old shut-down section of the mine? I doubted it. What I needed to do was move toward active air. That would be in the direction of the main line. That was my theory, anyway. I turned slowly, sensing the faint pressure of the air brushing my damp face. I kept turning. It was subtle, but I was pretty certain there was more air on my face in one direction than any other.

I walked slowly toward the air, stopping every so often to call out Big Jeb’s name. Finally, my aching eyes picked up an atom of light. Then I saw another one, and then a flash that lasted a fraction of a second. “Big Jeb!” I yelled.

“Yes, sir,” I heard him say, then I saw his massive shape coming at me. I’d never seen a more welcome sight.

“My light’s dead,” I said, my voice trembling.

Big Jeb slowly made his way to me, then, without warning, slapped the side of my helmet. He almost knocked me down, but my lamp came back on brighter than ever before. “Thank you, Big Jeb,” I said, even though my ears were ringing. He said nothing, just continued past me. I guessed he was going to do his business. I went back to the pile of posts and collapsed on top of them. Oh, I was having a fine day.