“But my father wasn’t a miner.”
“Yes, he was. Can’t die from black lung and not be a coal miner. It’s caused by the coal dust that gets in the lungs.”
“I know, but…” Cate didn’t finish the sentence. She knew what her own father did for a living, at least she had thought she did. “He had a motorcycle shop. I went to it when I was little. I remember.” She did remember, the visits stamped on her brain with a child’s impressionism. “The shop was dark and smelly and a little cold. He went there every day. I still have a T-shirt with the name of the shop on it. Mike’s Bikes.”
“Maybe he did that for a time, but Deirdre told me he was a miner.”
“You can’t be right. We had motorcycles parked out front of the house, all the time. People came to see him.” Cate flashed on the engines roaring. The black exhaust smoke. Her father’s greasy hands. “Maybe he became a miner after he left?”
“That’s not what Deirdre told me. Or what the certificate showed. She told me he mined and she wasn’t surprised when I told her what he died of.” Ed brightened. “Then she told me they were divorced, so I asked her out.”
“But my father wasn’t a miner,” Cate repeated, then remembered something. The small bathroom wastebasket at their house. Used Kleenex tissues stained with black dirt against the white. Don’t touch that!
“She told me no. Said she didn’t want to date anyone. She had her job, up at the school, and she was busy. I didn’t know then about the baby, of course. So I called her about fifty more times, and she finally gave up. Only woman I ever met with a will stronger than my own.”
For a second, Cate could almost hear something. An echo. The hack of a cough, first thing in the morning. A racking that wouldn’t stop. Was she imagining it? Was it the power of suggestion?
“We didn’t go out much in the beginning, but after a while we did, and always out of town. I told her she used to make me feel like we were cheating. I figured out it wasn’t your dad she felt like she was cheating on.” Ed slapped his leg. “Hold on, I’ll go get you those pictures. I keep the boxes in my little office.”
Ed shuffled from the room, leaving Cate with her questions. Why had her mother kept Ed a secret? Why had she kept her father’s job a secret? Then she realized the answer, with a start. She hung her head, and by the time Ed returned with a cardboard box, she felt overwhelmed by sadness. With one little fact, everything about her family was explained, once and for all. She reached for her cola and took a shaky sip.
“This is only the first box.” Ed set the box down and pushed back the strand of white hair that had fallen onto his forehead. “It could take all afternoon to go through them. That’s okay with me, if it’s okay with you.”
Cate looked up at Ed, who was reaching into the box and handing her a first stack of photos. “Well, did you figure out why they didn’t tell me about the black lung?”
Ed stopped the photo stack in midair, and his cheer vanished.
“My father had to have been a bootleg miner. That would explain it. He had the bike shop in the day, but he mined at night, right?”
“Probably.” Ed set the photos down on the coffee table. “Don’t judge too harshly, Judge. A bootleg miner was only a petty thief. A man who poached coal and undersold it, to make extra money on the side. It’s a tradition going back to the Molly Maguires.”
“But in Centralia, you know what it means to be a bootlegger as well as I do. As well as my mother did. Part of the reason the mine fire couldn’t be put out was because of the bootleg mines. Wasn’t that right? Bootleg mines didn’t show on the mine maps.”
Ed nodded, his lower lip buckling. “Yes. Bootleg miners did what’s called robbing back, working the mine the wrong way, back to front, chipping away the coal pillars that were left to support the mine roof. They took out the pillars, collapsing the mines. It made it impossible to stop the fire when the government filled the shafts with fly ash in the seventies, and again in the eighties.”
Cate felt a wave of shame. “She must have known he was bootlegging.”
“Of course, but it was extra money, and times were tough. Nobody liked the bootleggers, it’s true, but mostly they looked the other way. They hated the coal company even more. They couldn’t foresee the fire. That the bootlegging would jeopardize everyone. The entire town.”
“And a little baby,” Cate added, dry-mouthed. “No wonder she blamed herself.”
Ed fell silent, and she reached over and picked up the photos.
To meet the stranger who was her beloved mother.
CHAPTER 37
It was almost dark by the time Cate was back in the car, driving south toward the Holiday Inn in Frackville. Trees etched crooked black lines against the overcast sky, an odd gray-purple that deepened to ink behind the mountains. The temperature had dropped to twenty-eight degrees, according to the car thermometer, and the tires rumbled where cold tread met salted road. Only a few cars traveled Route 61, and there was an old black Continental behind her.
Don’t touch that
Cate had spent the afternoon looking at the photos Ed had taken. Her heart felt full and her head tired. An emotional exhaustion weakened every muscle in her body. Ed had served her a thick cheeseburger and a hot coffee, which revived her for the drive. He’d also given her a full box of photographs, and it sat beside her on the passenger’s seat, along with something else, something even more precious, which gave her a purpose.
Don’t touch that
Cate kept her foot on the gas as an old Continental switched into the fast lane to pass her. Her thoughts rumbled along. She would never have guessed that her father had been a bootlegger. Her mother had carried that pain to her grave, lying now beside the child whose death she believed she’d caused.
Don’t touch that
Cate bit her lip, driving down into the next valley, where it grew darker. She had always sensed the whispers about her and her mother, and thought it was because her mother wanted more for her. But maybe the gossip was about her father. Bootlegging couldn’t have been an easy secret to keep in a town of miners. No one would have been fooled by their secret; no one except their three-year-old.
The Continental switched lanes to get in front of her, its red taillights vivid in the darkness, two round red eyes against the black. Cate flashed on a fleeting memory. The red-eyed monster with the black face, her childhood fear. She’d seen it in her house, coming through the front door at night. She’d run screaming to her mother.
Just your eyes, playin’ tricks on you
Cate stared into the red taillights of the black car. It wasn’t a monster coming through their front door-it was a miner. Coming home from bootlegging, his face black with coal dust. His eyes red and irritated. Her father. It all made sense, jibing with what Ed had told her. So many secrets, consuming them all as a family, burning them alive in a town of fire.
A passing truck jolted Cate out of her reverie, and she decreased her speed, approaching Centralia. Steam rose like ghosts from the earth, and it killed her to think that her father had contributed to this calamity, and her mother had been complicit. She steered the car through steam, hot and wet enough to leave momentary condensation on the windshield, and began the drive up the hill to St. Ignatius Cemetery. She parked outside the gates, set her emotions aside, and cut the ignition, then grabbed what she needed, and got out of the car.
The frigid air hit her in the face, more brutally than it had this morning, and she walked up the center aisle of the graveyard, yanking her coat close to her neck and trying not to breathe. It was almost dark, and steam rose everywhere, rolling in eerie drifts across the marble gravestones and shrouding the stone crucifixes. Cate froze at a shadow behind the smoke. Then it was gone.