The Essay A Novel

Robin Yocum

Arcade Publishing • New York

Copyright © 2012 by Robin Yocum

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Datais available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-766-7

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication for Ronald E. Yocum 1934-2008.
The best man I've ever known

Acknowledgments

A

few weeks before my dad died, my mother read the first draft of this novel to him in the hospital. It was the first time in weeks that he wasn't focused on his illness, and I was glad he was able to hear this story. He was a great influence in my life, and I miss him every day. Dad taught me there is no disgrace in failure, and a bloody nose is rarely fatal. And, more important, when you are the recipient of a non-fatal bloody nose, wipe it off and get back in the game. These are pretty simple rules to live by, and they are invaluable if you want to be a writer.

I am extremely fortunate to have Colleen Mohyde in my corner. She is a tremendous agent and a tireless worker on my behalf.

My editor, Lilly Golden, makes the editing process remarkably easy. She is gifted with a keen eye and a light touch, which any writer would appreciate.

I have long relied on the artist skills of Jeff Vanik, the owner of Vanik Design, and I tip my hat for his great work on the cover of this book.

Prologue

S

andor Kardos has spent eighty-one of his ninety-three years on this earth working in a coal mine. His arthritic fingers have gnarled together in a single mass, twisting around one another like a young girl's braids. They have no singular dexterity, and he uses the mass and his thumb to pinch items like lobster claws. “I ain't playin' the piano anymore, that's for sure,” he tells me, laughing at his own joke until he falls into a coughing fit that turns his face purple.

He pronounces it “pi-anna,” and later concedes he had never played at all. He was simply going for the laugh. The cough is the result of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for the past eight decades—one million one hundred sixty-eight thousand cigarettes. “It's not a habit; it's a choice,” he says. Either way, his voice resonates like the grinding gears of a winch. “The doctor's always on my ass to give 'em up. He says my lungs look like two dead crows. What the hell? If that's the case, sounds like the damage is done. I'm ninety-three. Something's gotta kill me.”

Despite his arthritis, Sandor is surprisingly deft with his crustaceous hands. Clutching a fresh pack of smokes in his left hand, he uses the elongated thumbnail of the right and the few snagged teeth remaining in his head to open the pack and work a cigarette between his lips. With the thumb on his left hand, he spins the wheel of a Zippo and lights the smoke. After a deep drag, he presses a palm to his chin, pinches the butt and pulls it away from his mouth.

By his own admission, Sandor smokes too much, drinks too much, and given the opportunity, he would screw too much. “The problem is, I've outlived all my prospects,” he says.

His grandson, Greg, the loud one who has an opinion on everything, has just finished loading a dump truck full of coal and overhears his grandfather's comments. “How about the widow Birnbaum?” he offers. “She was trying to jump your old bones for a while.”

Greg has a knack for getting under Sandor's aging skin. There's a lot of good-natured ribbing that goes on at the mine, but Sandor thinks his grandson is a wise guy and, worse, lazy, because he drives the truck and refuses to go into the mine where the heavy lifting is done. “She's probably closer to your age than mine,” Sandor says. “Why don't you go service her?”

“Not me, pops. I'm a married man.”

Sandor grins. The boy has left himself wide open and Sandor counterpunches. “That didn't seem to be a concern when you were traipsing all over Vinton County with that slut Gloria Stephens.” This stops Greg in his tracks. The blood drains from his face, and then reappears in brilliant bursts of crimson on his cheeks and neck. His ears look like they will explode. “You didn't know I knew that, huh?”

Sandor shows his teeth in a victory smile as Greg scurries into the cab, but before he can fire up the engine Sandor continues, “If the old man knows, it's not much of a secret, is it? Your wife prob'ly knows, too.”

“You wouldn't know it now,” Sandor says, “but in the old days, when the coal mines and gas wells and timber mills were booming, McArthur was a jumpin' place. On Saturday nights, the ladies would come up from Portsmouth, if you know what I mean?” He winks. “For two dollars, you could get yourself a belly full of beer and go into the back room with one of the gals—made for a nice night.” He squints. “What's a prostitute cost these days?”

“I don't partake,” I say, “but I'd wager that it's more than two dollars.”

“Yeah, prob'ly so. The price of everything's gone up.”

It was a cool Friday in June when we visited the Kardos & Sons Mining Company, a deep shaft operation in Wilkesville Township in the southern part of hardscrabble Vinton County, Ohio.

Sandor Kardos tells me he was not much more than a baby when his parents left the northern Hungarian city of Gyor for southeastern Ohio. His earliest memory is of swaying in a canvas hammock in the steerage compartment of an ocean liner heading to America. As he tells me the story, he claims the swill and fetid human tang of the ship's bowels still permeates his nostrils. He was just twelve when his father Janos took him to the coal mine. He says he can hardly remember a day of his life when he wasn't at the mine. At twenty-two, he bought property and started his own mining company.

The company has ten employees—all Kardos males: Sandor, his two remaining sons, Lester and Pete, five grandsons and two great grandsons. (A ceiling collapse in Kardos Mine No. 3 claimed the life of Sandor's youngest son Benjamin in 1952. “I told that boy a hundred times to shore up the roof with pillars before he ran his bolts,” Sandor says. “But, he didn't want to listen. He was a hard-head, that one, and it killed him. A coal mine ain't no place for creativity.”)

Coal mining is brutal work, but the Kardos males, save for Greg, don't complain. They know they're fortunate to have the work. It's their heritage, but it is also a dying industry. They aren't rich, but, by Vinton County standards, they're doing quite well. They sell coal to locals, who still use it to heat, and supply Appalachian industries that still have coal-fired furnaces. Unlike many of their contemporaries, they don't drive to Columbus on trash night to scrounge for scrap metal or items to put in the perpetual yard sales along Route 50.

Sandor no longer works inside the mine. His leathery lungs and arthritis have restricted his duties to manning the traction line that hauls the coal cars to the surface of the slope mine. While technology has changed mining operations nearly everywhere else, the Kardos & Sons Mining Company hasn't changed much since he opened his first mine in 1931. The exception is the traction line, which is operated by a gasoline generator that replaced mules for hauling the coal cars out of the mine. “Too damn temperamental,” Sandor says of the mules. “And the sonsofabitches will eat you out of house and home.”

I like Sandor Kardos. He is the very reason why I'm in the newspaper business. I love capturing snapshots of individuals who have carved a life for themselves from the hardscrabble. And really, who doesn't want to be like Sandor Kardos? He's happy with his life, spry, still excited to get out of bed in the morning, enjoys a nip of whiskey, and at ninety-three years old is still thinking of ways to get laid.

Fritz Avery walks out of the mine at about three, two cameras and a bag of photo equipment draped over his shoulders. He is covered with a thin film of coal dust, and dirty rivulets of sweat streak the sides of his face. He is puffing for air.

As a news photographer, Fritz Avery has few peers. He works hard and consistently gets
the
shot when covering a story. In newsroom parlance,
the
shot is the poignant instant in time when human emotion and drama collide with the real world. It is the instant that a mother collapses in the courtroom after her only son is given the death penalty. The moment a Marine snaps off a salute after handing a veiled widow a folded American flag. Or the jubilant leap of a high school basketball player as a last-second shot hits nothing but net. Fritz has an incredible knack for capturing those scenes.

His considerable photographic talents aside, I can hardly stand to be around him. I like Fritz just fine, but he wears me out.

He talks incessantly, blathering in a high-pitched, squeaky voice that makes listening to him the equivalent of chewing on aluminum foil. He is a notorious gossip and can talk for hours on end. You don't really have conversations with Fritz, you just listen and nod. Reporters at the
Daily Herald
have been known to fake illnesses to avoid prolonged assignments with him. When Harold Brown, one of my colleagues on the
Daily Herald'
s projects desk, learned that I was going on a week-long assignment with Fritz, he asked, “Who did you piss off?”

Fritz and I are nearing the end of our week-long sojourn into the hills of the tri-state area of northern Kentucky, southern Ohio, and western West Virginia, working on a series of stories on Appalachia's dying coal mine industry, capturing in words and images those who spend their lives underground. Mining is hard, dirty work, and many live near the poverty level. Still, they singularly pray for a day when the country will again need their coal and men can return to the mines en masse. The Kardos & Sons Mining Company is one of the few bright spots of the week.

Later that afternoon, Fritz and I are on our way to the hotel in Chillicothe when we crest the knoll on County Road 12 just outside of Zaleski where the remnants of the Teays Valley Mining Company town are splayed on the hillside to our right. Most of the wood frame houses are bleached out and abandoned, but dogs and kids run amid a few where front doors stand ajar and gray smoke curls out of the chimneys.

“Christ Almighty, can you image living in a hellhole like this?” Fritz asks.