Reclamation almost never included cleaning up the landslides or moving the boulders or refilling the bench cuts. And hardwood forests were almost irreplaceable.
Joe looked behind him, at the way the cut had widened as it was stripped. Benches they called them, like places where a giant might sit.
Nothing much was ever going to grow here again; the topsoil was now buried a good thirty feet or more. The top layer was all rocks and boulders, bits of slate, pyrites, coal. Loose and sliding material. That coal and pyrite, now unprotected by surface rock, exposed to the air for the first time in millions of years, would begin to oxidize and combine with rainwater to make an acid runoff.
Joe had seen concrete foundations dissolve in contact with that runoff.
He knew people, his uncle included, who’d lost homes and good farmland to a coal waste landslide. Churches buried under forty feet of dirt. Boulders dropping through the roofs of homes. Plaster cracking from the blasting. The people still had their land, the lawyers claimed… all the companies wanted was the minerals. Of course, it still might get a tad difficult for the people living around the mines. The noise and dust and all.
“Polly-ticks and money,” the three words Joe’s father had always used to explain the reasons behind almost any situation. He’d say it about a dozen times a day, no matter what the subject matter. Joe figured now the old man had probably been right. Local communities and merchants depended on the mines for their living, and when the companies told them that new regulations would surely knock the mines out of business, it scared them; they put pressure on the politicians. And both the politicians and the judges depended on the companies as well. Joe guessed it just came down to a choice of evils: devastation of the land or abject poverty. Problem was, he didn’t see that many local people awfully wealthy from it
He had to laugh at himself. My, but wasn’t he feeling bitter today! He was going to have to stop this drinking every night, this staying up to all hours brooding, brooding…
But how was he going to stop… with all that had been going on… He couldn’t remember ever being so scared, not since he was real little, so terrified of noises whose source he couldn’t see, of the darkness, of the cold wrapped around the Big Andy just before morning, of the fog the cold brought with it like an ill-developed twin.
It wasn’t doing him any good ignoring her, so he finally let the image of the little drowned girl expand to fill his attention. That was the problem right there. She wasn’t his little girl, left back in Cincinnati, but she could have been. About the same age, build. And here she was floating around where she shouldn’t be, out of her grave…
As much as he thought about it, he still didn’t think he could have made any other decision. He would still have had to leave that city, come back home. He’d never really loved the girl’s mother; he was pretty sure she hadn’t loved him either. But then, as far as he knew, she’d never bothered to get a divorce, and that made him feel funny.
They’d both been lonely and afraid. She’d grown up in a county only eighty miles away, one of his own kind, and she’d been just as homesick as he, at first. They met right after he arrived in Cincinnati; she’d already been there four months. Married a month later. Then he left right after the baby was born—Annie, after his great grandmother.
But she wouldn’t go back; she’d started to like the city and there was no life for them back in the hills, she said. He didn’t want to leave the child, but a child belongs with its mother.
Seemed like he had made nothing but bad decisions in his adult life. Leaving a younger sister at home all by herself the night of the big Simpson Creeks flood while he went hunting—his parents out of town—coming back to find nothing left. Then leaving for Cincinnati because he heard there were jobs there, and his daddy dying because none of the young ones were around anymore, his mother following him six months after.
Then abandoning that little girl of his to come back to… seemed like nothing so far but headaches from too much drinking and having to suck up to the Nole Company bosses.
And this other, drowned little girl. Looked like he had come back to her. Pale eyes and skin so damp gray… so that if he were to touch her, the water would just ooze out of her.
He finished with the first stretch of backfill and pointed the dozer down the long incline that led into “Willy’s sinkhole.” The sinkhole was the final remnant of the first stripping operation begun here fifteen years ago. It got its name when the backhoe Willy Daniels had been driving suddenly disappeared from view while returning from the equipment yard, much to everybody’s consternation. One moment he was sitting up on that big orange grasshopper of a machine, grinning and swearing as he fought the gears, and the next he was gone in a cloud of white limestone dust. “We all figured the devil’d just got tired of waiting for him to come voluntarylike, you know?” Joe’s daddy used to say.
Then they’d heard Willy calling for help, and swearing worse than ever. When they ran to the site they found him, still on top of his machine, at the bottom of a limestone sinkhole; he’d fallen through the thin shell covering it. They’d pulled him out and he quit that very day.
So they’d worked around Willy’s sinkhole for years, backfilling the cuts around it. Now the company geologist said it was nice and solid under there, and they could fill in the sinkhole with no danger and forget about it.
Joe’d been elected. But he wasn’t taking any chances, despite what the geologist said. He was going to ease in slow. He’d heard reassuring words from geologists and safety inspectors before. Believing them too much was a good way to get yourself killed.
He took a load of waste dirt off a pile north of the sinkhole and crept forward as slowly as possible, listening as well as he could through the engine’s roar for any creakings or shiftings in the ground, staring at the ground so intensely he couldn’t blink, inspecting it for cracks.
As he reached the lip, he knew there was somebody down there.
A dark, small form, all stretched out… stringy hair. He killed the engine and jumped off the machine, running up to the lip without thinking.
But it was just a dark log, patterned with gray lichen, floating. Floating.
He stared down into the sinkhole. Water was bubbling up out of the ground all around the log. Cloudy, mineral or waste-laden water, bringing its own brand of fog up with it. Like the fog you might see capping the sinkhole early in the morning, before the sun could scour it out. Or like the fog covering the soup an old woman might cook up… for someone like Hansel and Gretel. He’d loved that story as a child. It had been damned important to him… couldn’t hear it told enough times. It had scared him near to death… but he’d loved it.
Audra thought she might have a secret admirer. It seemed silly thinking in those terms; after all, she was twenty-five years old. It was hard to believe. It was the first indication of any romantic interest since she’d moved back to the Creeks five years ago.
Sometimes she’d leave the cafe at five to take her walk before going back to her room, and there’d be someone standing over by the boarded-up hotel, standing in the shadows so she never could tell who it was, although she thought he was a young man, a little shorter than normal.
It was silly, but some nights she stayed up late, unable to sleep, trying to figure out just who it might be. Maybe it was someone she had known all her life, or maybe even it was Reed Taylor, come back to the town after a long absence just the way she had. Maybe they had a lot in common. Already he was making her feel like a high school girl again, and some of the tension that had built up over the past few days was leaving.