Deep River Burning (4 page)

“Some people call me Pilner.”

“Pilner? The Pilner that ostracized himself from society and now is supposedly either crazy, dead, or a ghost?”

“I guess somebody has the story wrong. I’m certainly not dead, which means I also can’t be a ghost. And maybe I am crazy, though I’m not sure what that means. I will live longer than they will. They who kill themselves with their greed. They are empty like the tunnels beneath Adena that heave and collapse as we speak.”

“So, you know about the mine fire?”

“I do.”

They looked at each other intently for a moment.

“Is that your cabin, over on Desert Ring Island?”

“It was until it was discovered by a group of men who were looking for a secret place to do things they didn’t want anyone to know about.”

“Do you live out here alone?” she asked quietly.

“I live out here, but I am not alone.” He paused for a moment and then said, “What is it that you want to ask?”

“What makes you think I want to ask you something?”

Pilner didn’t answer. Denver looked away into the swaying trees and wondered if Josh had ever run into this man.

“I’ve seen too much suffering in your world,” he continued. “What is best for everyone is sacrificed for the personal gain of a few. There is abuse of children and old people, desperation and addiction. All these things I have left behind of my own free will.”

“You are very brave.”

“I am just an old man who made a choice.”

Denver’s eyes narrowed as she thought about her own choices.

“There was a young man with you. Where is he?” Pilner asked.

“He was here a little while ago, but I wanted some time by myself . . . to sort through some things. At least there is no fire here,” she said, thinking to herself that running into the embodiment of the famed Mr. Pilner is nothing short of delightful serendipity, as if she had stumbled across a great secret thing. “How long have you lived out here, by yourself?” Denver sat down on a thick branch of a maple tree that must have fallen during a recent storm. The wood where the branch had cracked away from the tree looked clean and smelled fresh.

“Since I was a young man. I was much more able-bodied then, but I still manage.”

“What do you know about the mine fire?”

“I know more than most of the people in Adena will ever know,” he said looking up from his wood carving.

“What do you mean?”

“I was there. I was a bootlegger. Way back when no one had money. Hell back then, who wasn’t a bootlegger? The coal companies take the land, take all the coal, put you out of work, and then have nothing to say when they send you back to a cold house and nothin’ in your pockets but dirt. Adena would be nothing without the bootleggers. Some people considered them the heroes. They kept a lot of the coal and the money in the town. Then these big company men shipped the coal out to people who never heard of Adena. That’s how I got into it. We were just all trying to survive, and it felt better to do it on our own than being a slave to a company that didn’t care whether or not you had a pot to piss in.”

“Didn’t the bootleg coal industry also ship the coal to other places?” Denver asked.

“During its time, yes. There was enough coal to spread around then. The men took care of their families and neighbors first and then loaded the rest into trucks. Oh, the company coal dealers didn’t like it, but the bootleggers felt that they had just as much right to the coal as anyone else. I didn’t sleep much when I was young, and I used to walk the highway at night, and all night long the trucks would go back and forth. Full trucks leaving, empty trucks coming back in. What I want to know is, who gave just a few fat men the rights to all the coal? At one time it wasn’t so bad when there was leftover coal in the culm dumps. They broke it up and cleaned it off to make it look all shiny with the old processing. Before the machines, good coal was tossed away, and the people would pick the shiny coal out from the other rocks in the dumps. But the men still had their jobs then. When the mass processing began, the bootlegging became a way of life for half the town. Even the Catholic priests and police took the coal. Officials in coal towns were elected by bootleggers.”

“Did anyone try to stop the bootleggers?’

“The companies and their private police would find the bootleg holes and blow them up, but the next week, four thousand more holes would show up on company-owned land and private property. One time, in Gilberton, a cop who helped blow up the holes, found his car torn apart by dynamite. Sometimes men were arrested, but they weren’t kept in jail for very long, if the warden’s house was stocked with bootleg coal. I was arrested once and let go the next day.”

“Do you believe the bootleggers were heroes?”

“I don’t believe in any of it anymore. I think coal mining kills people. It kills some people quickly. It kills some people slowly. It wrecks the land and the mine drainage pollutes the waters. Then it all gets out of balance. What is a storm but the atmosphere’s way of trying to balance itself? We are all guilty of abusing and taking for granted the resources. The fire is trying to tell people that, but I’m not sure if anyone’s listening.”

According to Pilner, the type of coal that was mined beneath Adena was Anthracite coal, often called hard coal or blue coal because it burns with a small blue flame. She learned that Anthracite coal mining in Pennsylvania began as far back as the late 1700s when the coal was mined along the banks of the Susquehanna River where it was exposed at the surface. It was first used to heat iron for the manufacturing of nails needed for building homes. The Lehigh Coal Mining Company was the first known coal company in the region and on September 6th, 1869, the Avondale Mine Disaster killed one hundred eight men and boys who spent the final hours of their lives deep in the dark earth, far away from the sun.

She learned that more than thirteen thousand men, women, and children had lost their lives in Anthracite mines and on Thursday January 22nd, 1959, the Susquehanna River broke through a mine shaft and flooded a network of deep mines near Adena. The mine shaft was beneath the river, heavy with a hard winter ice, when the miners went too far and weakened the floor of the river. The frosty river broke through the rock strata and twelve miners took the black mine as their tomb. All were married, except one man. All had children, except one man. Most of the men had between twenty to forty years of mining experience. Known as the Knox Mine coal disaster, this event ended the deep coal mining industry in the region. It reminded Denver of the power of water to carve rock and clear space, to sustain lives, to take lives, and to change lives. The river flooded the deep, black underground coal mazes and pushed the humans out.

Before she really understood the history of coal mining in and around her hometown, it was easy to take sides. Everyone in town had someone to condemn. It was easier to deal with the anger if it had a target, if it had a face that could be demonized and stripped of its humanity.

The greedy coal robbers were to blame for stealing the pillars that kept the town stable. The careless men who burned the trash in the open pit where the exposed coal became ignited were to blame. The exploiting coal companies were to blame. For some, the target was God because God created the coal and God created the fire and sin brought the two elements together for the atonement of all. But Denver gradually discovered that the story of Adena’s coal was full of thorns and a web where a slight jostling on one side could be felt throughout the entire labyrinth.

When the machines and tools were created to make coal production faster and more efficient, miners lost their jobs. The men were replaced by machines. Many of these men had coal in their blood and had no training for another occupation. How would they heat their homes, pay their church dues, buy food for their families? The answer was underground, and as long as a man was able to dig a hole and excavate the hard, black rocks, he could survive and provide for his family. The bootleg coal business did more to sustain the town than the industries that shipped most of their coal to New York and New Jersey.

Denver listened to all of Pilner’s stories about eastern Pennsylvania’s coal fields. She even listened when he was quiet, to the sound of his breath, to the sound of his knife scraping the piece of wood the color of flesh. Somehow, being out in the woods taught her to pay attention to everything around her, and she liked this feeling of being alert and aware. Her attention turned to the left when she heard a rustling in the trees. Pilner was working quietly on his carving and didn’t seem to notice the noise, or at least he didn’t react to it. Denver peered into the trees. The leaves moving and twigs popping sounded like whatever was moving in the distance was bigger than a squirrel. She kept watch and expected to see the tan torso of a deer or two.

She saw a flash of black for a moment, and her heart began to pound. A few seconds later, a large black bear fumbled through the oak trees and stood staring at her, pointing her nose in the air sniffing and puffing. When the bear grunted, Denver slowly stood up feeling her knees shake and nearly collapse beneath her. She raised her arms and waved them above her head as Josh had taught her, but the bear was not the least bit intimidated.

The bear stood up on her hind legs for a moment and revealed the thick black fur of her underbelly where dried leaves and dirt clung. Denver noticed the size of her paws, the length of her claws, and felt the small boom on the forest floor when the bear lowered herself and stomped on the ground. From behind her tumbled a tiny cub, a waddling fur ball moving clumsily through the ferns and wildflowers. The small cub raised its nose to the air and sniffed and turned around and walked in the direction toward a deeper part of the woods.

Denver slowly backed away until she bumped into the log where Pilner was sitting. She stood up on the log and kept her arms extended as she waved them up in the sky and yelled “Go away!” She could feel the adrenaline pumping through her body, and she resisted the strong desire to run. She also wondered about Pilner. She couldn’t hear him behind her. He must come across bears all the time. Fortunately, the young cub that scampered away was the only concern for the mother bear, so she puffed once or twice more at Denver and then turned around and chased after her cub.

Denver felt herself breathe again as she lowered her trembling arms down to her side and sat on the log in order to calm down. The bear was just doing its thing, she thought to herself, just following its instincts. When she turned around to look for Pilner, he was gone.

Chapter 7

Home

Pilner was her secret. His mystery served the townspeople of Adena well, and she was afraid that if anyone knew he was alive and where he lived, he would be hunted and mocked until the light drained out of him. He would no longer find peace among the stands of timber and silver river fish. She admired his principled self-reliance, but there was a part of her that thought he was a coward for choosing to run away from Adena, rather than try to change it for the better. What good was his knowledge and philosophy if he hid it away on a river island?

Josh visited her again the second night of her camping trip, but it was not a social call. His arrival was not casual or curious, but harried and distraught as she heard him call her name loudly through the dark, tangled underbrush below the canopy of oaks and pines and maples. She thanked God that she had followed his advice about where to camp for the night because otherwise, it would have been impossible to find her. She heard him running through the brush breathing heavily with twigs snapping under his feet while a large spotlight bobbed a clumsy yellow light on and off the trees and trail. She called out his name, and he ran to her, collapsing breathlessly on her while she was in her sleeping bag. He held on to her neck tightly and kissed her mouth hard. She began to think he had lost his mind.

“Joshua! What is wrong with you?” He pulled his head from her shoulder and looked at her with fierceness and exasperation.

“There’s nothing wrong with me, Denver. It’s the rest of the world that’s gone crazy.”

“What’s wrong? What happened?” she asked. He looked like he was going to crumble into a fine, translucent dust that at any moment would be swallowed up by the drag and turn of the river. Tears came to his eyes as he delivered the news.

“Someone shot your parents, Denver. They’re both dead.”

“Knock it the fuck off Josh! What the hell happened?” she hollered.

He was weeping now and she knew he wasn’t joking.

Denver sat quietly and stared up into the forest ceiling that was just barely beginning to take shape in the dark blue dawn twilight. The first bird of morning could be heard in the distance, and she wished she could remember what kind it was, its call so melodious and crisp in the damp air. A squirrel on a small hill about three hundred feet away climbed up a tree, stopped for a moment, and then embarked on a tight rope walk on a narrow limb where a nut must have been nestled in the leaves.

Her body was stiff with rage as she felt a wild rush of horror and anger fill her body so that her skin was numb. Josh held her down to the ground while she wailed a scream that didn’t sound human even to her own ears as she felt it usher up from parts unknown to her and force its way through her body, burning the lining in her throat. She couldn’t tell if she screamed several times or if the same scream kept shooting back from the convoluted roots exposed along the carved riverbanks, from the trees, from the hillsides, until the scream finally shot to the stars and became lost in a universe of violent cries.

Josh took her back to Adena slowly at her request. She was in no hurry to accept this reality with visual confirmation. They had to stop several times along the way because she couldn’t control her sobbing that quickly turned to vomiting. Josh held her shoulders to keep her from shaking, and then he cradled her face in his hands to clear her drenched appearance. When he could, he managed the boat across the murky water, but he rarely took his eyes off of her.

Moving slowly over the water as they made their way back, a strange mixture of incongruent food smells merged and separated again on the slow currents of shifting morning air. The night before had been the last night of the Adena town carnival and the smell of cotton candy, funnel cakes, and grease still hung in the trees as the aroma conjured in her mind the sounds of loud motors running and the exclamations of children drowning out the murmur of adult conversation. Even as the images of brightly colored balloons, teddy bears, and a large table covered with small bowls of gold fish crossed her mind, Adena was as dark as its coal to her.

Josh and Denver pulled up to a house that was shrouded by cars and emergency vehicles. She stayed in Josh’s truck and bent down in the front seat. She wasn’t interested in being a spectacle for the world. Helena was waiting outside and ran over to Josh’s truck when she saw them drive up to the curb. If only Denver’s father would have announced his resignation sooner, then maybe he wouldn’t have been a target. Denver was sure of what happened. Her mother was just a witness. Her mother. When she pictured her in her mind, she thought she was going to die herself, right then and there, in the truck between Helena and Josh with her eyes facing the floor where she thought her final visual experience was going to involve a bait box and two packs of chewing gum. “This is the end of my life,” she muttered through tears.

She remembered odd things in that moment, like how her mother was thought to be a troublemaker when she was a young girl because she had red hair. “They said I would be a dangerous woman someday and that I couldn’t be trusted,” her mother had told her. “So one day I shaved off all of my hair, every last long piece of it and afterwards, I picked up one shining lock and held it in my hand like a red silk ribbon. It had a soft, gentle wave with an occasional streak of blond. When my sister Rosemary walked into the bathroom and saw the hair piled on the floor like the hot burning embers of a simmering campfire, she screamed a note so piercing to the ear that it was only a few moments before the neighbors stood at the bathroom door stunned at the smooth surface of my spherical skull shining under the ceiling light. That was the last time I surprised anyone. After I gathered my hair into a ball, I took it outside and threw it into the river.” Denver thought about how far that hair must’ve traveled before it dissolved and became one with the sea.

News travels fast in Adena. It wasn’t long before Denver saw cars and trucks pull up to the house, and people with stunned looks upon their faces slowly emerged from the caverns of their vehicles. They stood motionless staring at the house with the lights from the police cars and ambulance flashing across their bodies. Denver overheard the police tell Mr. and Mrs. Daniels, who owned a diner downtown, that they received a phone call from a neighbor reporting that gunshots were fired at the Oakley residence. She heard them asking for her. Josh and Helena heard them asking for her.

Josh slowly opened the door to his truck and held it open for Denver. She didn’t get out right away. She looked at him for a few moments, but somehow the front seat of the truck felt like a long tunnel, and she couldn’t bring herself to crawl out of it. Josh held out his hand, but she didn’t take it. He reached into the truck and took her left hand and gently pulled until she straightened her face and got out of the truck. People who saw her rushed over to her and wrapped their arms around her narrow shoulders. They wanted to help her. They said they would take care of her. They gave her tissues and looked at her with an expression of disbelief. A police officer approached Denver and asked her a few questions, but she didn’t have much to say. She recognized the officer’s face and knew that he was a friend of her father’s, but she couldn’t remember where she had seen him before, like so many of the people who were at her house that night, who looked familiar and strange at the same time.

The next morning should’ve been just another day, but the causes that seemed worth living for and fighting for the day before had scattered in the wind like dandelion dust. The police spoke to Denver again at Helena’s house where she had spent the night. She stayed with Helena for several weeks. College didn’t matter anymore. On really difficult days, life wasn’t just about getting through the day, it was about getting through the hour without jumping out of her skin or destroying the closest object to her. It was about controlling rage. Each consecutive moment was a milestone she survived, and she was grateful that she still cared about surviving at all.

She forced herself to eat, and to sleep whenever it would come. She held on to herself like a rag doll so she wouldn’t fall to the ground with her limbs ripped at the stitch. One can die of grief, she thought. It just disguises itself as an illness. An emotion can settle into some part of the body and then wreak havoc. But the only motivating force was her anger. The only peace she had was in her sleep, and not even then, for she had horrific nightmares that would string themselves together through the night like worry beads.

She finally left Helena’s house and went home in search of some part of herself she could gather from the wreckage. She missed home. Her parents left her the house, the house where she grew up, the house where she knew them, that stood outside of town where there was no mine fire. It was a nice house, not wealthy, not poor, but a house that could afford some rose bushes and a painted porch swing for summer evenings. She didn’t know if it was still home to her. How could it be? Helena couldn’t believe that she was going back to the house at all.

“How can you go back there after what happened?”

But Denver wanted to go back because, on some level, she thought she might find some aspect of them there in the house that would be waiting for her, something that she could hold on to, something left behind that would let her know that everything was going to be all right. Even if she was setting herself up for disappointment, it didn’t matter. She had already shut down in more ways than she knew possible, and the world continued to progress and move on through its charted course without her. She didn’t feel left behind. She didn’t feel abandoned, as if she was alone walking a tightrope without a net. Her net was gone. She knew that if she would fall, the descent would be much longer and the impact more painful now that her parents were gone. She had counted on them to be there for her on those days when all she could find were false friends and a handful of good intentions.

When she got home, it was there, the emptiness that she expected, the quiet, the cold of a cave where memories stirred from the walls like bats disturbed from their roosts, and the chords of silence she dreamed about at Helena’s house. Despite the hollow of its rattle and creak, she was glad to be home, but she spent very little of her time in the house. Her aunt was there to greet her, but she was a stranger to her. Aunt Rosemary lived in Florida, and this was only the second time Denver had ever seen her in her life. She resented that Rosemary was there to take care of her, as if Denver was a child who couldn’t look out for herself. She had become a woman, and she wanted to deal with her grief as a woman would, although she had no idea what that meant. She despised it when people felt sorry for her. Pity was an insult. She didn’t want to be babied or coddled. The more people looked upon her as troubled, whether the death of her parents warranted it or not, the more she ran away.

In the small patch of woods near her house, she found the solace she needed. As she was walking into a small opening in the trees, she saw a rabbit looking into a hole. When the rabbit saw her, it fled to a safe place behind a nearby tree. She walked over to the hole and saw sprinkled over a small pool of water that had gathered from the recent rain, a handful of flower petals. They had to have just been tossed into the hole because there were no flowers nearby. They were not yet submerged and their shape was not yet disturbed from the dampness. She looked around but did not see anyone, nor did she hear footsteps on the leaf-covered forest floor. The rabbit, however, stood half behind the tree, looking at her intently without moving. She smiled a little. It was a real smile, the kind that is never anticipated. What she didn’t know at the time, was that Josh was sitting on a tree limb directly above the hole and had dropped the petals he had collected from wildflowers into the shallow pool when he heard her coming. Josh often made Denver happy without her knowing it.