My short story, They Were the Lucky Ones, was awarded the third place as an honorable mention at the writer’s conference Write on the Sound in 2023.
They Were the Lucky Ones
Only a moment before they bent down to get hold of the same body did the Irishman and the Serb encounter each other. Through the flickering oil-wick light of the lamps, they gave one another a single quick glance, enough to assess the age and strength of the other.
There were fewer than two hundred miners left in town after most single men took off with the first thaw. Some indebted to the Company store for buying dry goods to winter over, some to the mining widows in whose houses they slept alongside a trail of the widows’ hungry children. There was nothing to be done about it when most of them worked a week a month ever since the fall. Even bending to eighty cents per ton of coal was insufficient to get them work.
With so few people in town and everyone waiting their fates around the Company offices, one would think that the Irishman’s and the Serb’s paths would have already crossed. But they did not. Not up to now.
As they bent down to the body, neither man flinched at the sight. The Irishman got hold of the legs, and the Serb lifted the torso with its bowl-shaped chest. The dead man’s head wobbled on the Serb’s stomach, the crack in it scratching him through, ingraining a paste of blood and coaldust into his one good shirt. Neither the Irishman nor the Serb thought of getting into their mining clothes at the thunder
of the explosion. Like the others, they just ran to see.
The quiet in the pit seemed nearly impossible with so many men milling around, moving boulders to dig-open collapsed tunnels in search of the others. Even the usual hacking coughs followed by spitting black out of all those lungs stayed suspended.
The man who pointed at the body when they climbed down the shaft tried to stabilize the dead man’s head. He held the cheeks with his palms, gently almost, avoiding the cracks, as if expecting the dead to yelp for pain.
The Irishman and the Serb stepped towards the opening. No other man did. Despite the firedamp threatening to suffocate them, despite a possibility of another cave-in, they stayed down. No one wondered at that.
The Irishmen and the Serb were silently grateful to be spared the worst of it. It was the father they were bringing up. The son who had skipped school in the morning for a chance to work was already being wailed over up above.
They hoisted the body up the shaft.
The thick afterdamp dust that covered the mouth of the slope like a piece of coal fully cleared when the two men and the body came up. The rain was heavier now. And the people, so many people, as if the whole world descended here in the muddy, wet cold.
They braced themselves, but the howls still chilled the marrow through their bones. The sounds of mourning, identical in all languages of this immigrant coal town.
When they laid the father next to the son, the widow took a handkerchief from her pocket, embroidered and starched snow white. Hopeful and unexpected, pure beauty in this mire. It reminded the Irishman of someone he heard speak in Leadville when he just came to America and lied his age to get into a mine. “Life should be beautiful,” the person had said. Like this handkerchief, the Irishman thought.
But then the widow wiped the soot and blood off of the younger dead face with it, and then the older. When the mangle came out in full, she shook her head, “No, no, no.”
All at once, as if possessed, she stood up, cleaned her own face with the same handkerchief leaving a trail of the mine on it, and then declared for all to hear, “No. These are not my husband and my son. They are not.”
The crowd’s gasp came out as one.
The widow scooped the babe from her young daughter’s arms. “Children, come, we must get dinner ready. Your father and brother will come hungry soon.” And she marched off.
Her eldest son now, about eleven years old, looked at the Irishman and then at the Serb, right into their eyes. Daring them to make the present untrue.
The two men, independently of one another, recognized coal dust in this boy’s veins. His birthright. His future. Then they looked at each other, the Irishman and the Serb, and saw a reflection of a common thought: their own sons, should they ever have means to marry and have them, would live this, just as well.
After the children slouched off following their mother, the two men took deep breaths filled with rain and stepped back into the shaft. The last they saw before they went down were the faces of the men, a sturdy lot, weep like children. The sight surprised them both. In all the woe they had left back home, all their siblings’ deaths, grown men never cried.
As they went down, the Serb clutched his pocket in terror. But he felt it there, the leather sheath with his grandfather’s carving knife inside it. The one thing he has from back home.
Then they were down and the quiet hit them again. Another body ready to be hoisted up.
–
It was past midnight when the ten bodies were washed and dressed for wakes. It just happened that way that the Irishman and the Serb had worked as a team all day long. Lifted up three of the ten bodies and washed two together. Through it all, they exchanged only a handful of words. In the sea of newcomers from who knows where in Europe, no one could tell how much English was understood. But the two of them, they understood each other.
They understood resentment in the harsh squeeze of the sponge on the dead men’s arms, rubbing their skins for grime and blood. These men, they had families to cry over them.
–
When they finally stepped outside of the Town Hall that served as a morgue, their good shirts with stains not even their wives, if they had them, would scrub out in three boiling waters, the Irishman said, “I’m off… Going to make me a homestead.”
The Serb listened.
“Get enough to find me a wife… have a family.” He bent down and scratched the soil with his thick brown-lined hands. “Soil here, it’s good. You can grow apples.”
The Serb looked at the soil. Then he frowned, took a deep sigh, coughed the miners’ cough and nodded. “Yuh.”
They split, each to his own boardinghouse, the wailing in the air following them through. They got up before sunrise, independent of each other, and tied their bindlestiffs. They met in front of the mine and then walked through the forest towards the river, almost smelling their home pines in Ponderosa’s bark. The wailing echoes faded in their ears.
“I heard this man when I was a young lad,” the Irishman broke the silence. “I gave fifty cents to hear him speak in Leadville. This man, he had a golden handle on his cane and a sunflower in the breast pocket of his purple velvet coat. He said…” The Irishman stopped and cocked his head as if trying to confirm in his mind what he was about to say. “He said, ‘life should be like art, beautiful.’” He looked at the Serb. “’Life should be beautiful,’ he said.”
The Irishman looked around to the mountain with the serrated edge behind the forest. It was still completely white with snow.
The Serb thought of the wakes they left behind.
Then the Irishman’s face turned angry, confrontational. “I want to live it. A beautiful life.”
The Serb took a deep breath and bent over where he stood. He selected a hand-length piece of bark from the forest floor and flipped it over to the inner side, smooth and moist. He took out his carving knife and grounded the bark solid in his palm.
The Irishman followed his every move. The knife’s wooden handle swapped images of a house and mountains as the Serb worked it. The blade’s crisscross pattern glinted in the morning light.
Within a few scratches, an apple, all with a stem and a worm, came to be. Then the mountain with a raggedy top like the one the two men faced. The aroma coming out of the bark overtook the air. The Serb blew the wood curls off, thought again and then added a sunflower. He offered it to the Irishman.
The Irishman blinked, sighed, felt the grooves under his fingers. “Beautiful.”
The Serb wiped the knife against his pants, re-sheathed it and put it back into his pocket. He swung the bindlestiff over his shoulder and started walking, the Irishman next to him.
The two men, not much older than the dead boy, they walked and walked.