Michael Anderson

in great shame

Rural Pennsylvania, 1966

Creases form in the leather that separates us from the dust. Dust generated from the forced cracks of our pickaxes against the coal beds. A layer forms on our eye protection, we wipe it away with our leather gloves and it falls to the ground and forms a toxic carpet-like coating that we sink our boots into. When the shift ends and we all ascend back up the shaft, we cough into our hands to see how red we spit it. Luckily I have avoided this ailment, but like most of the people around me, I am of the belief that the particles that get past my mouth cloth are causing some kind of mental side-effect. I throw the cloth away every day because of how filthy it gets, doubling in weight by the shift's end. I am too tired to find another method, this method is free. Despite that, in my seven years of mining coal, I have never forgotten to put on a mouth cover. It’s imperative. Although I do inhale some of the dust, without it men die. Compared to the other guys down in the mine I am smaller in stature, frame, build. I’m lighter. I don’t pull as much coal as they do but I work just as hard so they keep me around. It’s hard to keep an appetite, my wife makes me a lunch to bring down that is protein-high so I don’t pass out and get buried. 

Most of the men down here are married. They fabricate stories of collapsing stone and fallen tools to excuse their bruises. This is a recent thing. We’ve been fighting.

Men are frustrated down here. No light, no rest, it’s a constant downward spiral into the earth with little reprieve but the small strained talk of the men around you. Strain, unending strain to keep their lives above the water. When someone gets hurt, they wrap their arms around each other and carry each other back up to the mine’s mouth and send them to the infirmary. The unofficial carrier was Harvey Pull, born and bred in Pennsylvania. He was a brute. A dumb brute at that, mean, violent, and shockingly tender. We don’t talk about it often but Lou Roots struck Harvey with his pickaxe once by accident and Harvey beat him so badly he became permanently disabled. Harvey was the one that carried him up to the mine’s mouth, descending back down once the medic received him. We all claimed that Lou was struck in the head by a stone, Lou could not claim otherwise. We were scared of Harvey and what he would do if we had told anyone what happened. Harvey was obviously rather thrilled by the experience, encouraging, shortly after, others to attempt to attack him. Birth of habit, because tried men did. They’d swing, they’d brawl, Harvey would pick them up and rip them to shreds. But the important distinction between the other men and Lou is that the other men got back up because Harvey wanted them to recover and try again. It was a fuse, one day either Harvey would kill everyone, or more likely, someone would kill Harvey.

One day there was a shift. Pat Brown wanted to fight Mike Troff. Mike Troff agreed and the two, under the watch of Harvey beat each other to a bloody pulp. It was decided that the loser was to punch the wall. At the fight's conclusion the men hugged each other, each other’s blood sticking to their bare chests, and they slept well that night. Better than they ever had before. There was a complete fulfillment of the heart. It was outside of anger and disdain, it was a stress relief, and the love of your brothers.

I watched from the back, generally. I watched as the other men in the mine would bring each other to the point of near death, they liked it so I liked it. It was all relatively a simple exchange, after the bouts for the day were finished we would finish our shift like there was no real discrepancy. I didn’t see it as an issue. I was reasonably unnerved when one day Harvey Pull asked to fight me.

Today

Scraping across the ground, Harvey had me by my right leg and dragged me across the dusty floor of the cave. I still had my  face covering on, it shattered my eye protection. Cut forming along the right half of my face, wounds filled with rubble. He set my right leg down and picked me up by the center of my shirt and spun me around him, crashing into the wall. I had the wind knocked out of me almost instantaneously. There were a flurry of punches, rather indiscernible from each other, and then one final blow to my head. It was lighter compared to the rest of the prior punches but it sent me completely to the floor. I came too with Harvey’s hand holding the back of my head, he was rubbing it and pulling his hand away to look for blood. There was none.

“He’s come to” Pat said from the dark corner of the cave. The other fifteen men in the room remained absolutely silent. “Thank god, thought he died,” someone else whispered in another corner. Harvey was sweating. My rib was broken. I told Harvey that my rib was broken and he poked it and I cried. He wrapped his tattered rag of a shirt around my chest and carried me to the corner of the cave and placed me down. I couldn’t really muster much of anything. I must look like I’m dying, Harvey is pale.

“I’m okay Harvey”

Not much noise from Harvey. He idly stares at me either waiting for me to stand or die. Neither, I stay seated. I stay strong and I sweat as my ribs bend. 

I pass out.

I come too, Harvey again with his hand on my head.

“Thought you died Arthur.. Thought you fucking died. I was scared shitless I thought you’d died and I killed you. I haven’t ever killed nobody Art- I got scared.” Harvey says.

Awfully tender coming from the oaf, he’s absolutely meant to kill some of these guys before but I guess this is the closest that he has ever come to actually doing it. There isn’t much hesitation in the moments of the fight, but I suppose in moments like that it’s pure instinct and little actual reason. Harvey has never struck me as the type of man to hesitate, he sees things very one-sided, a side of simple survival, no matter the opponent. There was no way, fist to fist, that I would ever be in a position to kill Harvey. I could kill him, but to be in that position is to think about it. Harvey can kill me without thinking about it. Really, a well placed punch from Harvey could kill me. That doesn’t require much thought. A well placed punch from me could put Harvey on the ground, there is not much thought there, but to go beyond that requires intent. In that position I would hesitate, and Harvey would never be in that position because Harvey kills with single strikes. There is a strict intention of the way that Harvey is holding my head presently, he is being extremely gentle.

“It’s okay Harvey I swear. I know you didn’t mean for that to happen.” It’s true I really don’t think he meant for this to happen explicitly, as mentioned. I think there is a primal and undeveloped part of Harvey that hopes for a fatality, although I don’t think it's conscious.

Harvey cries a little, this is a surprise. He doesn’t wipe his tears either. They fall into my mouth.

“What the fuck happened Arthur? Looks like you got run over by a car.”

“Some loose stone dislodged from the cave roof and struck me in the chest and head,” I responded. My wife looks concerned.

“You outta go and get your boss to pay for your doctor bill” .. “I can’t go to the doctor” .. “and why is that?” .. “I’d miss work” .. “You’d miss work? That's what you’re concerned about? .. “Yeah that’s what I am concerned about, I like to be able to stay in my house.” .. “I’m not saying you don’t” .. “I know” .. “What I’m saying is that we can afford you to have a day off, I work too.” .. “I like working” .. “In the mine?” .. “Yeah.” .. “You like working in the mine?” .. “Yeah.” .. “How long have you been working there now?” .. “Seven years.” .. “Well never once in those seven years have I heard you say you liked working in the mines.” .. “Yeah, well, things are changing.” .. “What things?” .. “Why?” .. “Well I’m happy things are changing and I’m curious what they've been doing down there to make you like working there?” .. “The guys and I have been getting along better, talking more.” .. “Really?” .. “Yeah” .. “Thats good, why don’t you invite some of them over for dinner some time?” .. “No. I don't think I’d want to.” .. “But you’ve been getting along?” .. “In the mines.” .. “That doesn’t translate to the dining room?” .. “No, I don’t think it would.” .. “Why?” .. “We get along in the mine. The kitchen and the mine are different.” .. “Why?” .. “It’s a different environment.” .. “Sure, I’d imagine. But you wouldn’t even get along if they came here?” .. “Probably not.” .. “Well why do you think that?” .. “Why?” .. “I’m curious.” .. “We’re stressed in the mines.” .. “You’re stressed?” .. “Yes.” .. “That make you get along better?” .. “Much better.” .. “Reason being?” .. “We rely on each other.” .. “You didn’t rely on each other before?” .. “We did, just quietly.” .. “Well, what changed?” .. “We started talking.”

She set her glass down .. “Well, I am happy for you guys! I talk to my coworkers and I couldn’t imagine working with them and not talking.”

“These men are brutish, we talk but I am not like them, honey. We don’t talk about life or anything like that, we talk about work and illness and rocks .. Those things don’t go well at the dinner table. Especially not your dinner table. They’re crass.” I respond.

“Are you crass back to them?” .. “No, not really. I swear because they swear, but that's the extent of it. I do enjoy listening though. I actually like it a lot. They’re funny in how they think.” We exchange. “How do they think?” she asks .. I think for a moment and say, ‘They think very simply, they don’t imagine much depth to things. Even menial things. If you miss your swing and a rock strikes them, it's because you don’t like them. That’s how they think. Very bland and transactional.”

She looks a bit confused for a moment, slightly amused. “You enjoy this enough to not go to the doctor? What do you enjoy about that?”

A striking question. This is the truth, but it’s a bizarre truth and I’m not even quite sure myself. But the truth is that I find the way the men exist in the mine very intriguing, extremely so. I wonder if people like Harvey and Mike have wives, I wonder if they speak to their wives like they speak to me? .. I don’t speak to my wife like I speak to them. A separate life.  I like to think that I talk to them the same, but under closer examination, I do not. The simple fact is, at some points, I lie to myself about the reality of things. Not to a serious degree, but for a while I didn’t consider myself to be anything like Pat Brown or Harvey Pull, I thought I was far more gentle, delicate .. I still believe I am more intellectual but recently I realized I’ve never spoken to them on the surface. So, really, I have no clue. A second social front scorches its way across the mine’s floor, resulting in the absolute erasure of the reality of things. Work had become not real life, it was a place we were sent away to to become someone else, or , in an inverse, revert back to our truest selves. I, at this point in time, cannot discern which one it is.

The next day, as I am hammering away at an overhanging protrusion of coal, Harvey comes behind me and taps me on the shoulder.

“How are you feeling, Art?”, Harvey asks rather tenderly.

“I’m feeling okay, Harvey, really. I don’t want you to worry yourself about what happened. I’ll be completely fine a week from now.”

Harvey nods, looking up at the overhang I was working on. He reaches up and hooks his mechanical fingers over the top of them. With some strained noise, the shelf collapses in front of us, a plume of soot raises into the air and I shut my eyes. For a few moments, in the dark, I hear things shift around. I open my eyes as my headlamp cascades over the falling settling noise, Harvey’s eyes are wide open. Some silence falls between us, something steams off in the distance and it echoes around the cave’s room. We both look down at the pile of rubble that sits next to us, Harvey reaches down and picks up a rather large chunk of it, he holds it up in between us.

“This is everything to me”, Harvey says. “I think that’s a terrible way to be. But, when it comes down to it, my life revolves around coal. I have tried so many times to find life elsewhere but I keep taking the minecart down here. Nobody hires an idiot, nobody loves a brute.”

“You’re not an idiot, Harvey,” I drum up.

“Thank you, but you don’t know me very well Arthur.” .. “Ask anyone, the truth is very plain.”

Harvey walked away after that moment and the day went onward. I worked largely alone and I would hear distant scraping from corners around corners, the wails of distant huffing men. It was bothersome today. 

I stir in my bed, knotting my legs around my wife who pushes me back to my side of the mattress until she gets upset.

“What the hell is wrong? You’re mixing up the blanket, you’ve been at it for hours. What time is it?” she asks.

“It’s late .. it must be two or three in the morning.” I reply.

“Well what is keeping you up?” .. “Are there any people at work you would consider stupid?”

Certainly she is pretty familiar with the people she works with. She works with her brain, not the environment that Harvey would work well in, or people like Harvey. But something about Harvey’s hopelessness about his intellect troubles me. He has to be wrong.

“No. I don’t think any of the girls are dumb. I think they’re all very smart actually, not one of them messes up very often, and when they do it’s not because they're stupid.” She says.

“One of the guys in the mine told me that nobody hires idiots” .. “Well I think he is right a little bit, I trust an idiot to mine coal but I don’t trust an idiot to keep a book or file a folder. But I also think mining coal is a job for a strong person, and a person with a lot of clear-headedness. I don’t know much of what it's like down there but I know I can’t do it.” And within that she stopped and looked over to me, some sadness behind a curtain in her eyes. Soon, we fell asleep.

I have been losing weight, I think my injury took a lot of energy to heal and I ended up losing around five pounds. Five pounds that I needed. I wanted to at least be able to keep up with the guys somehow, and if I started losing more weight I would get buried beneath the rubble. I started eating a lot more on the job, packing extra food to put a few extra pounds on but it resulted in a very arduously slow growth back to where I was. Tired of falling behind, I saved up and purchased a hunting rifle. I only purchased one box of ammunition because I wanted to do what some of the guys in the mines talk about sometimes. I wanted to kill and eat a deer, it seemed like the proper masculine thing to do. I spent my entire bonus, and beyond that, on the rifle. Cherrywood stock, black-steel barrel. Finally, six days after buying the rifle I got ready to take it out into the woods.

“Where are you going with that, to kill your boss?”

“I am going to go shoot a deer, we can cook it tonight.”

With a destructive eyebrow raise, my confidence shatters. She says “Do you even know how to shoot?” Remaining silent, I nod ‘no’ and sit down at our kitchen table. “Do you want me to come out with you? My dad taught me to shoot when I was younger, I can help you get used to it.” .. “I think I can handle it by myself, I can figure it out.”

I learned how to mine coal by myself. What is different about this? Seventeen misses later I returned home to a boiling pot on the stove, this failure was all but unexpected. 

Pickaxe strikes deep, stripping shale walls from their place crumbling to the floor like a falling deck of cards. I struck very little coal today, I was mostly opening a new strip for us all to get to work on. My headlamp glows orange today, bulb dying, the room lit up like a fire, orange glow descending upon pluming dust. There was a lingering silence on the ride up from the mine today. Harvey was sitting in front of me, and as we approached the mouth of the mine, the light of the setting sun shone around him, outlining the muscles of his arms. Such precision to it. Disboarding the minecart, I ask Harvey if he has ever gone hunting before.

“What kind of hunting? Deer hunting?” .. I nod ‘yes’ and he stops and thinks for a moment. “I haven’t shot in a while, but I remember how. My dad used to take me shooting.” He turns to me fully.

“He used to take me shooting and we would skin the deer together, taught me how to load and clean the gun, and how to hold it. How to track and how to not get too frustrated” .. He pauses and continues, “Yeah I remember that. Pretty good.” Mike Troff comes up behind Harvey and I, placing his rancid coal-rotten hands on our shoulders. “Hunting deer?” Mike asks. “Thinking about it.” I say. There is briefly a glow in Mike’s eyes. Glimmers birthed in animal blood. Mike's hands were made for hunting, thin and frail, slick enough to load the gun in but a blink of an eye.

“You hunt, Mike?” Harvey asks, turning his broad structure to him. Jealous. Harvey wipes his brow with the bottom of his shirt. “Yeah, every week. Do you?” Mike says. “S’been a while but yeah, used to with my dad.” Harvey replies. Like clockwork, Mike turns to me. “What about you, Art?” .. “I wanna learn to.” And from there, things change. Infantry. Army unit. What are we? Men. Men with guns. 

Like spiders leaning off the wall, floor-housed headlamps shoot light up on the underglades of watchful men's eyes, casting their shadow upon the tunnel walls like the imprint of atomized observers. Too familiar. Pat Brown’s front tooth chips on a jagged stone as Harvey places his boot on the square of his back. Chest right on a rough protrusion, a gash on Pat’s chest widens and Harvey looks up to the tunnel roof. Stepping harder.

“Let him up, Harvey!” a man shouts from the back of the line, men peering forward like a waterfall. Gradient of worry.

“You want up, Pat? Punch the wall.. Twice.” Harvey demands as he presses his boot down harder. Pat groans. This is the cruelest we've seen Harvey. Pat coughs, some red tint being added to the dust before his mouth. Nothing from Pat but a groan. Mike steps forward, concerned suddenly. “Harvey, let him up, damn it! What are you doing?” Harvey looks down, seeing the life leave Pat’s suddenly dying body. He finally lets up. Pat rolls over, heaving desperately, the wound on his chest travels down to his belly, decorating him completely down to the knee. Mike walks over to Pat, helping him out of his stupor, then going up to Harvey’s face, backing away when Harvey half turns to him, fists in a knot.

The headlamp on the ground sends Harvey’s shadow back into the cave's deepest veins. Face half lit, he looks down at Pat, still in a hunch. “Punch the wall,” Harvey says.

Danny from the back says in what is nearly a whisper, “Are you serious?” Harvey drags Danny by the hair and sets him next to Pat. 

“Either Pat punches the wall or you do it for him.” Danny looks around. Silence from the cowards. All of us. Danny starts with an “I-” but is quickly cut off with the downward pull of a rough hand grabbing his shoulder. Thrown to the floor he is then thrown back to his feet. Danny can only muster a nod ‘no’ .. The rest occurs in flashes, and above ground a moorhen cries among the dry reeds of the hills around the town. Pieces of Pat Brown’s fist pepper the minecart track, some small spiders finding themselves trapped in dollops of his blood and drowning in them. A train’s distant howl pierces the silence of the men returning to the surface, some with their shirts draped completely over their faces, only peering out through the armholes as the grime of the day seeps in. Some of them simply walk off into town still wearing their face clothes, boots kicking up something that was still. The day concedes with a whisper.

I walk through the door headfirst, the golden hours of the day slipping through the window and hitting my wife’s eyes. She doesn’t say a word, just a simple face of some concern. I stand still and we stare for a moment. “What is it, Tamarah?”

“There is blood on your shirt and on your face. Look at your eyes, Art. I don’t understand?” She lets out. “Harvey Pull smashed Pat Brown’s left hand between two rocks and ripped Danny’s hair out,” I state rather simply. “Didn’t expect that one even with everything that we’ve been doing.” .. She looks out the window. “Well what have you been doing?” .. “We’ve been fighting Tamarah, when we get frustrated down there we fight each other.”

A distant hound calls for its children, two of four return and the hound bows its head to the ground. Tamarah’s shock scares me, “you need to go to the police or tell your boss,” she says. 

“I can’t, it's not like that, I don’t want nobody to get in trouble.” .. “Is that what happened to Lou? You told me Lou got injured by the rocks- by the rocks falling on him!” .. I watch a fly tap against the window, and watch the droplets fall to the table from a sweating glass of water. Her head in her hands she stands up and walks to the door, I haven’t even the slightest bit of strength to stop her. “Where are you going?” I ask her. “I’m going to tell Maggie Roots what happened.. I can’t believe this, what the hell has possessed you all down there? You fight each other and you- you hurt each other?” she says through strained breaths. 

“You don’t understand! Nobody could’ve predicted what happened today! I- Nobody can stop Harvey you don’t understand!” .. A short breath and a long step outside. From the door she says, “I work with missus Roots, she works ten extra hours a week to care for Lou. Lou’s skin is fusing to the bed sheets.” She turns back to look at me, two fingers hooking her lower lip. “I’ll be back in the morning.” The sliding of the lonely sheets keeps me up at night. The hunting rifle glimmers in the moonlight seeping through the perforation in the curtain beside my bed.

Harvey greets me at the door the following morning, rifle slung around his shoulder. Mike Troff already claimed and trailing behind him. Sleep desperate in his eyes.

“I’m not sure I am up for it today Harvey,” I barely get out as Mike stands straight, practically yelling “sure you are!” Harvey looks back to Mike and then back at me with a forward shoulder. Crickets whining behind him as a breeze in the distance shakes a loose piece of siding. Silent exchange, there is a silent anticipation for me to step outside. Harvey’s knuckles are still discolored from the previous day. “Lets see that new rifle you bought, Art. Let’s see if new money kills deer any better.”

Harvey rubs his hand along the wood stock as we make our way through the parting flora, stepping over a decaying coyote carcass forgotten among the tallgrass by the forest’s edge. “Great quality, Art. This was a good choice.” I have nothing to say about hunting, I take a shot in the dark. “What happened to your father, Harvey?” He stops dead in his tracks, tagged. He visibly doesn’t think about this much. 

“He died in prison while I was in Europe fighting the fucking Nazis,” Harvey says looking above the grass away from me. Mike looks over, “why was he in prison?”

Harvey switches his grip on my rifle, holding it like he’s going to shoot it. He raises it, aiming down the sight, looking between us. He lowers it. “Walked into my uncle Reese’s house and shot his son, my cousin Marty,  in the heart because he called my mother a dirty whore, stole a few dollars too out of my father’s boot when he wasn’t looking.” Harvey says plainly.

“How old was your cousin?” Mike asks. The bugs hiss while we watch Harvey think. “He was sixteen. Sixteen and a mess, just like his father. The worst part is, I was sitting right next to Marty when he did it.. I still feel what was left of him sliding down to the floor on my side while I blinked bits of him out of my eyes. My father dragged me out of the house by my hair.” Harvey blinks and comes back to the present, glancing at both of us. He stays silent, looking up. Something patters off in the distance.

“A deer.” Harvey whispers. We track it down quietly and Harvey ushers for me to take aim at it. Wrapping his arms around me, he guides my shot with a tender grace. I forget about everything I have seen Harvey do. His mentorship in this moment teeters on innocence. “How do you feel about it, Art? I’m going to let go, you take the shot when you're ready. How do you feel about it?” .. I see the deer through the sight, perfect proportions on all sides of the crosshair, just begging to be taken down, young thing. For the first time I am seeing Harvey think about it, this is all and only intention, and for a moment, and for the first time, Harvey is not alone in something.

Wind howls through the cracks in Harvey Pulls unlocked front door, brushing past his unused two seat couch, weaving through his dry greying hair. Every night he sleeps like there is not even one issue. He listens tentatively to the snapping of branches on the Hemlock Tree in his back yard, still there and still just as healthy as when he moved in. When he wakes up he stares in the dirty mirror, and before him stares at a man. A fly lands on his chest, he grabs it and sends it out the window with a silent usher. He dresses consciously, and he thinks about the day before him. Later this day he planned on maybe making a coffee and watching out his window. He thought about, just possibly, writing something down.

But before that, only three feet behind me, a crack sends the front of Harvey’s strained neck into my hair. In the distance a bullet’s shrapnel undusts a bush and settles among the remnants of a rabbit skeleton. I turn around just in time to see Harvey fall to a hunch and roll down to the edge of the stoney creek. The sunlight bleeding through the trees and illuminating the blood now dancing in the water. I turn to Mike Troff, he has his rifle raised to me.

“What the fuck are you doing, Mike?” I ask, looking down the barrel of the rifle that Mike has owned for thirty years. The blood of animals, decades dead, hinting its tip.

“Pat killed himself last night, Arthur. Tell me I’m not justified in this, I dare you. He went home last night and stuck his head in the sink.. Kept in there until he left. I found him. I loved Pat, not like no brother but like my own. I kissed him. That's gone now.” Mike says through tears.

The sun sets between us as we breath to each other for nearly a half hour. Mike lowers his rifle. “You speak-a word-a this to a soul I’ll send you and your wife to hell before I do it to myself.” .. I only manage to nod. And as we walk, some distance between us, back to town, Harvey Pull’s body rests with its right arm floating in the creeks edge. Some memories of petting his childhood dog disappearing down the water alongside the sticks and leaves that lived and died around us. Somewhere a starving stray dog catches a scent. Glistening in the sun, but a man.