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My name is Krystal Lheureux. I'm twenty, I'm a sophomore in the nursing program at a college in
Huntington, and I'm making this page in the computer lab in the library when I'm supposed to be
studying pharmacology. My Pappaw was my mom's daddy, Bernard Dudley. He worked underground in the
coal mines of southern West Virginia for thirty-eight years, and he died at home on March 9 of
this year, of black lung, after three years on oxygen. He was seventy-three.
People who aren't from here think they know what a coal miner is. They've seen it on TV. They think it's sad, or dirty, or they think it's something from a long time ago. I want to tell you about one actual man, so you'll know better. He was the smartest, funniest, most stubborn person I have ever met, and he'd hate this page, and he'd print it out and show it to everybody at the post office. The Navy He was born in a coal camp in McDowell County, the fourth of seven kids, in a company house with four rooms and no bathroom. His daddy was a miner and so were all his uncles. In 1943, when he was seventeen, he talked his mother into signing the papers and joined the Navy, because he said anything was better than going in the mines at seventeen like his brothers. He served on a supply ship in the Pacific, hauling ammunition and food and mail out to the fleet. He saw the Philippines and he was off Okinawa in 1945, and that is about all he would ever say about it. He came home in 1946 with a tattoo of an anchor on his arm that Mamaw made him keep his sleeve down over in church for fifty years, and a way of folding a T-shirt so square you could cut yourself on it. Thirty-eight years underground In 1947 he went in the mines anyway. There wasn't anything else. He married Mamaw, Jean, the same year, at the Free Will Baptist church in the camp, and they lived in a company house like the one he grew up in, painted the same as every other house up the hollow. He started out on the track crew and then ran the motor for years. The motor is the electric locomotive that hauls the loaded coal cars out and the empty ones back, and the man trip, which is what carries the men in and out. He said being motorman was the best job in the mine because you could sit down. When the continuous miners came in and the company needed fewer men, he learned the roof bolter, and he pinned top for the rest of his career. That means he drilled holes up into the roof of the mine and put in long steel bolts to hold the rock up over everybody's heads. He was proud of that. He said he kept more men alive than any doctor in McDowell County, and he wasn't wrong. He worked for three different companies in thirty-eight years, because mines close. He worked daylight and evening and hoot owl. He worked in coal so low he had to crawl on his knees for a whole shift, and he had the knees to prove it until the day he died. He was in the union from his first day to his last, and his union card is in a frame on my mom's wall next to his Navy picture. He was out for the whole big strike in the winter of '77 and '78, nearly four months, the year before I was born. Mamaw says they ate a lot of soup beans that winter, and he never once complained about it. He carried a brass check with his number on it, 1147. When you go in the mine you hang your check on the board at the lamp house, and when you come out you take it back, so if there's ever trouble, they know exactly who is still inside by whose check is still hanging. He kept his last one on his key ring after he retired. It's on my key ring now. I touched it before every exam last spring. He retired in 1985, the year I turned six. Thirty-eight years. He used to say he'd spent more of his life under that mountain than on top of it, counting the hours, and he'd worked out the math on a napkin to prove it. The garden and the banjo When he wasn't underground he was outside. He kept a garden behind the house that was bigger than the house: half runner beans, sweet corn, Big Boy tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, and rows of onions straight as a ruler. Mamaw canned everything he grew. Every August their kitchen was a hundred degrees and smelled like vinegar and you couldn't find a place to set a glass down for all the jars. He strung beans on thread and hung them on the porch to dry for leather britches, which I thought was the funniest name for food I'd ever heard. On Sunday afternoons after church he played the banjo on the front porch, clawhammer style, which is where you strike down on the strings with the back of your fingernail instead of picking. He learned it from his uncle. He played "Cripple Creek" and "Shady Grove" and "Cumberland Gap," over and over, and the neighbors would come sit on the steps, and us grandkids would dance on the porch boards until Mamaw said we'd bring the porch down. His banjo is at my Uncle Wilbert's now. Nobody in the family can play it. My cousin Gabriel says he's going to learn. We'll see. The dinner bucket Around here "dinner" is the meal in the middle of the day, and a miner carries his dinner in a dinner bucket. Pappaw's was round, dented aluminum, in three parts: the bottom holds water, a tray sits on top of that for the food, and then the lid. Mamaw packed it every day for thirty-eight years. Usually two bologna sandwiches, a piece of pie or cake, and an apple, and cornbread when there was any left over. A miner never eats everything in his bucket. You always leave a little food and a little water in the bottom, every shift, because if the top falls in or something goes wrong and you get trapped, you'll need it. Every miner's kid in West Virginia knows that. And every miner's kid knows the other part, which is that when your daddy comes home, you run and get the bucket and look in it, because whatever he saved is yours. Pappaw made it a game. He'd save a piece of cake or a pack of peanut butter crackers, and under it there'd be a note, written in pencil on a scrap of paper, folded up small. For my mom when she was little, and then for all eight of us grandkids. After he retired he kept on carrying that bucket, to the garden, to the creek when he went fishing, to the VFW on Thursdays, and he kept on leaving notes in it for whichever grandkid got to the bucket first. My cousin Whitney and I used to fight over it on the porch. They said things like:
I have about forty of them in a shoebox. Mom has more. When he went on oxygen in 1996 he stopped going much of anywhere and the bucket went up on the shelf over Mom's kitchen sink, and it's still there. Nobody's opened it since he died. Mom says there's one last note in it. She won't look, and she won't let anybody else look either, and I think she's right. The last three years The doctors found the black lung in the late eighties, but he kept on gardening and fishing until about 1995, when he couldn't walk to the end of the garden without stopping. In 1996 he went on oxygen, at first only at night and then all the time. He had a big tank in the living room and fifty feet of clear tubing so he could get to the porch, and a little tank on wheels for church. He complained about the tubing every day of his life and he was right, it's terrible. He named the big tank the Superintendent, because it told him where he could go and how long he could stay. I learned to check his oxygen when I was seventeen. I learned to count his breathing and to tell when his lips were too blue and to call Mom. I didn't know it then, but that's why I'm in nursing school. I want to work in a lung clinic someday, back home, with miners and their wives. I want to be the one who knows what she's doing when somebody's Pappaw can't catch his breath. He died at home in his own bed, the way he wanted, with Mamaw and Mom and Uncle Wilbert there. I drove down from school that night and got there an hour too late. Mom says he asked where I was and she told him I was on the road, and he said I'd better not be speeding. I wasn't. Okay, I was. At the funeral the men from his old local came in their union jackets and stood along the wall of the church. One of them, Sidney Gregor, who ran the bolter with him for eleven years, told me he never once worked under a bolt my Pappaw put in that he didn't trust with his life. Then he said, "He was a good one, honey," and went and stood back against the wall. That's as much as a miner says, and it's everything. If you're from here If you knew Bernard Dudley, from the camp or the mines or the Navy or the VFW, please write me. I'm collecting everything. If you're a miner's granddaughter too, write me anyway. I bet you've got a dinner bucket on a shelf somewhere. And if you're not from here, read Pappaw's Words, so you'll know what a man trip is and why I get mad when people make jokes about West Virginia. |
