THEY HATCHED IN THE predawn glow, miners creeping forth from pale canvas tents and ascending into the hills. Strings of men with patchwork coats and bolt-action rifles, pushing through laurel slicks and crawling over fallen trees, man after man after man. A chatter of rain through the trees and their boots slipping in the muck. Their quiet, muttered curses.
Mierda. Cazzo. Gówno. Shit.
They climbed high enough to look down on the company-owned towns sleeping along the river, the square little roofs and whispering stovepipes and duckboard streets arrayed like the neat, miniaturized world of a model trainman.
A world once theirs.
Those roofs had once sheltered their own families, who now lived in mud-plashed tents that skirled and flailed with every weather. Those black-bellied stoves had cast the aural warmth of marriage nights and Christmas mornings. Their own stockings had hung from those mantels. Their babes had been conceived in those beds; their wives had sung old ballads and hymns from those small stoops.
Now other men slept in those same beds, in the shelter of those hard roofs and milled plank walls. Scabs. Men from out of state, whose labor kept the mines smoking on the hillsides, the coal carts and conveyors trundling toward daylight. The company ledgers in the black. Kept the Union miners sleeping in canvas tents, their demands unmet. Their wives dull-eyed with hunger, their feet dark-slopped with mud. Their children’s faces gaunt, so they could see their little skulls pressing through the skin, creeping toward the surface. Their grandmothers shivering, hacking in the damp air of the tents.
Below them, the dawn light crashed down through the valley, striking along ridgelines and searing down railroad tracks, making the muddy streets of the mine towns glisten like the trails of garden slugs, their nightly goings left bright and new on the dawning world. The Tug Fork River shone like a giant thunderbolt between the blue hills, rippling beneath glowing banners of mist.
A sight so pretty it hurt.
The miners swiped the rain from their eyes and propped the barrels of their rifles on mossy logs. They sighted on the tarpaper roofs far below, waiting while the telegraph lines were cut and the blowers wet the tips of their cow horns. It had been nearly a year since Smilin’ Sid faced down the gun thugs in Matewan. Nearly a year since they’d been evicted, their possessions hurled into the muddy streets, their families forced to live in stinking canvas tents, in the slop and cold.
Long enough.
The wail of the first horn pierced the dawn, high and eerie, like the call of some ghost or beast of myth, and the Tug Valley erupted.