THUNDER ROCKED THE VALLEY, rattling the windows in their frames. No, not thunder. Doc Moo stepped outside and found Sid at the little bench in front of his and Jessie’s shop, where he kept a constant game of checkers going with Ed Chambers from the hardware store, his best friend.
They nodded politely at him. “Doc.”
Before Moo could reply, the mountains thundered again, heavy enough to jostle a man’s heart in his chest, to rattle the pistols at his sides. Sid and Ed barely looked up from the board.
“Tug boomer,” said Ed.
Sid nodded. Dynamite.
The Mohawk tipple had been blown apart, the shattered planks and beams fluttering down like feathers and falling leaves. More mines were dynamited that week. Messages. In the tent colonies, the explosions were whooped and cheered, as if the roof-beams of heaven were cracking over droughted land. Men hooted and hollered from the hillsides; they yawped and trilled. They felt the weight of their debts lightening with the flying debris, as if the company ledgers had been blasted into oblivion, vaporized. Some had. Their hearts felt buoyant in their chests. They felt, for a moment, made of more than muscle and blood, skin and bone. More than strong backs and dirty hands for King Coal.
They’d gained the upper hand. They patrolled the streets of the company towns and occupied the ridges above them, smoking cigarettes and holding rifles in the crooks of their arms, each walking tall like Sid himself. Beneath their watch, the headhouses were dark-windowed, cold. The coal lay safe in the mountains. They could feel their leverage, their momentum, swelling like a tectonic force beneath their feet. Finally, the coal companies would have to reckon with their demands. An eight-hour workday, a joint commission to mediate labor disputes, the right to elect their own checkweighmen at each mine.
They walked taller. They felt lighter, as if the great thumb of King Coal weren’t squashing them so hard into the ground. They were no longer beasts, bent-backed and voiceless, to be used up and spat in the dirt. They were men.
Sid and Ed kept up their game, their pieces scraping across the board.