short story

Hal Emerson sat in the hard wooden pews next to his parents, his eyes half-closed, his ears registering the rise and fall of the preacher’s voice like the drone of a bee on a hot summer day. He fought sleep. Aaron Starnes snored from the row behind him. Suddenly, his ears perked up as he heard these words:
      “Ask the animals and they will teach you; or birds of the air and they will tell you; or speak to the earth and it will teach you; or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this. In His hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”
     For years afterward, as he walked through the woods, Hal heard the words in his head, Ask the animals, and they will teach you; or birds of the air and they will tell you; or speak to the earth and it will teach you; or let the fish of the sea inform you. He felt a peace in the forest that he never found in church. A peace that filled up the silences between the trees, stirred up the wind, unleashed the cleansing rain.
     Hal sent away for a field guide of plants so he could tell the purple ash from the sugar maple. He learned the names of the birds and knew which plants and mushrooms were edible and which would make you sick. He wanted to know all of nature, to name and order it, to honor it, to be of its number.
     As a teenager, he would wake up early on Sundays to spend time in the woods. He rested against the base of an old oak, as the sun shining through the canopy of trees made patterns on the forest floor. The forest was so alive, while the people at church seemed lulled into some kind of a trance, offering automatic responses and singing in monotonous unison.
     He’d taken Alma through the forest on their third date. He was pleased that she marveled at the spider web and let Hal put a shiny beetle on her hand, where it rested on her finger like a piece of jewelry. When he saw the reverence with which she looked at a field of wildflowers in the clearing, he knew she was the one for him.
     As a young father, he would take his son Mark into the woods, but Mark seemed uneasy there. He would flinch at the sound of a tree branch breaking and shy away from touching plants. Hal was disappointed, but he knew enough not to push it on the boy.
     His grandson David was another story. They would walk through the woods for hours and Hal would point out the May apples and show David how to find morel mushrooms under the trees. Like Hal, David seemed to breathe easier outside. Hal watched David’s long, delicate fingers pinch off the tops of mushrooms. He saw himself in David, saw how much the boy noticed in the woods.
     David had taken up drawing and would show Hal beautifully rendered drawings of lady slipper and foxglove. David wanted to be an artist. Hal worried that the world and its disappointments would harden David.

At 74, Hal Emerson didn’t have any illusions about nature any more. He’d lived long enough to see both the beauty it brought and the damage it could do. Though he seldom talked about it, he’d seen nature violated by man and saw the cost of it. He had lived to see a thriving town transformed into a tarry plain in minutes.
     Faith had abandoned him the day of the breach and from that day forward Hal abandoned faith. After the breach, he believed in something different, in randomness and chaos hidden amidst the perfect order of the trees, in the irrevocable damage that man could unleash by his carelessness, in the primacy of change.
     For years, Hal kept the story of the breach to himself. He quit going to church. He’d walk in the woods alone and stare up at the face of the mountain, remembering that day. It took a stranger with a camera to get him to tell the story.

Hal was walking the Fire Tower trail in Blenheim Woods late Wednesday morning. The narrow path was marked by faded strips of red ribbon tied to trees and arrow marks carved into the wood, but Hal had walked it so many times he had memorized the changes in terrain, where the path went from smooth to rocky, where the ground rose and fell.
     The trail ended at a 48-foot steel tower. Stairs zigzagged up the interior of the tower to a platform with a small room atop it. There were 65 steps. Hal had counted them when he was young and climbing them was easy. The room had windows that opened out and a single wooden chair. Hal had spent hours there over the years watching the sun cast shadows on the mountains.
     Hal made his way up the stairs and was surprised to find a man already on the platform. The man had dark hair, longer than was the style in Slocum, intelligent eyes and a close-cropped beard. He wore a camera around his neck. The man stepped forward and offered his hand.
      “Jasper Macks. Pleased to meet you.”
      “Hal Emerson, likewise. I didn’t expect to find anyone up here on a weekday. I thought most folks would be working.”
      “This is my work. I take pictures. I’m working on documenting rural America at the bicentennial.”
      “Good luck. Between the filling stations and the fast food restaurants there’s not much left.”
     The man with the camera nodded.
     The two men stood on the platform looking at the forest below, the sun shining on Lake Devon and Mount May in the distance.
      “It’s beautiful out here,” said Jasper.
     Take a closer look at the mountain,” said Hal.
     The mountain was missing its peak. Hal remembered the mountain when it was whole. He recalled looking at its peak against the blue sky from this very spot as a boy, how he’d wanted to climb the mountain and see what lay at the top.
      “Those are some serious scars,” said Jasper. He raised his camera and took a series of shots. Hal wondered if those photos would make it into the hands of people who lived far away, maybe even into a magazine.
      “Strip mining. They take the mountain apart to get what’s inside.”
      “What happens to the people who live below it?”
      “If you have some time, Jasper, I can tell you all about that.”

When I got out of high school I wanted to be a forest ranger, but my father wanted me to become a bookkeeper and carry on the family business. The thought of being penned up in an office every day made me sick to my stomach. When my father refused to pay the fee for me to apply to be a ranger, I bundled up some clothes and headed out toward Piketown.
     Piketown was a mining town at the bottom of Mount May, a narrow crowded valley that ran along a creek bed. It was ugly there. The houses were close together and placed willy nilly. There was a thin layer of coal dust that settled over everything, The dust was so bad that people couldn’t put there washing on the line to dry.
     The mining company was always looking for workers. I planned to work just as long as it took me to earn the money to pay the ranger fee. I figured it would take six months.
     After I signed up at the mining office, they sent me to stay with the Carson family. They lived in a standard issue company home, three rooms up and three down, so small and quick-built it looked like I could knock it over with a good sneeze.
     Lilly Carson was a force of nature. Folks leaned on her. She taught her twin boys manners and responsibility. At five, Luke would sweep the porch and Greg would take out the trash.
     Jack Carson was a former miner. He became the town preacher after his arm got caught in a cave-in. His arm was in awful shape, scarred and shriveled, but on Sunday he would stand in front of the congregation and raise it up to heaven right alongside his good arm. Week after week, I saw him offer up his pain to Jesus. Jack was born a believer and died a believer.
      At night, the family would gather to play dominoes Jack would shuffle them one-handed, his rough hand gliding over the shiny tiles. He was a good player. He offered me salt peanuts and showed me how to drop them into a bottle of Coke. The Coke would fizz over the top of the bottle and the children would laugh.
     My room was on the first floor next to the Carson’s bedroom. At night I’d hear him say his prayers.
      “Dear God, please watch over the miners and their families, the company men whose mine gives us bread and our home. Please look out for Hal and show him the way as he takes on his new job. Bless Lilly, Greg and Luke. Thank you for the many blessings that grace this house. Amen.”
     I’d never heard anyone pray for me before and it felt strange knowing that he spoke my name to God each night. I prayed for them too, quietly, in my mind. I was still praying back then.
     After the kids went to sleep, we would sit around the kitchen table and talk. The Carsons thought of Slocum as the big city. They wanted to know all about my plans to become a ranger. Later, after I’d been there for a while, Jack would ask me to help pick out bible quotes for the homily.
     Late one night he told me about the accident that messed up his arm.
      “If you go down below, you need to watch out, Hal. A rib roll got me; a big chunk of coal came loose from the wall and buried my arm. I couldn’t move it, not one bit. My crew had just gone down the next shaft. I called out again and again, but no one answered. I didn’t worry, I felt a peace like nothing I’d every felt come over me. I wasn’t alone. He was with me.”
      “Still and all I couldn’t stop looking at my arm under the rock, how my hand sticking out from the bottom felt like it belonged to someone else. For a long time I was too numb to feel the pain. Finally someone came. I passed out while they were working my arm free. When I woke up, I was in the hospital with a wrecked arm and a new calling.”
     His story scared me. I expected to go underground, but when I reported for work they asked me if I could drive a dump truck. I was grateful that I’d be able to see the sun, hear the birds, and breathe the air. I didn’t think twice when they loaded my truck with slate and had me drive it to the holler and dump it along with the mounds of slate that formed the first of three rickety dams.
     The treatment plant just above the dam pumped a steady stream of coal sludge into the area. It was a thick black mess that left stains on my shoes. The sludge was in the water too. Still, I was glad to be the man above ground driving the truck and dumping the slate, rather than the men below cutting it out.
     I’d been working for three months when the rains started, slow and steady for five days straight. I’d never seen a rain like that. It just kept coming. At night, Luke and Greg were restless and would wrestle on the floor. I sat them on the kitchen chairs and taught them to arm wrestle. That kept them focused for a few hours. The boys wanted to play, but the holler was a sopping mess. I was off work because the dam was too water-logged for the dump trucks to drop off a load. Still the company kept draining water from the preparation plant into the dam.
     Folks started getting edgy. Jack and a few other fellas went to look at the dam on Saturday afternoon. The company folks drove them away, saying there wasn’t anything to see.
     I took a trail that went alongside the mountain and was able see behind the dam. There had been a slide that blocked a haul road below the dam. Water was building up behind the third dam while the company men worked furiously to build a diversion ditch and install a pressure pipe. That night it kept on raining. After the dominoes and arm wrestling, Jack gathered us around the kitchen tables and we held hands while he prayed for an end to the rain and for the safety of the town. I kept thinking of the passage from Job and what the animals would say if we asked them.
      “Sleep easy tonight my friend,” Jack said. “For your life is in the hands of the Lord.”
     Blind faith. Have you ever had complete faith in something, Jasper?
     I woke to the roar of rushing water. I yelled to Jack and Lilly and ran to the back door. There was a wall of black water heading for the house. They came down the stairs each holding a boy and I yelled for them to go back up. As they headed up the stairs the house came down like it was made of Popsicle sticks.
     I went under. It was eerie. Even through the black water, I could see the shadow of the kitchen table where we had played dominoes as it was swept away. I came up to the surface, gasping for air, looking for signs that Carsons were still alive. I could hear screams and the sounds of homes being unmoored and trees uprooted.
     I saw Jack and Lilly downstream holding onto Luke. I heard a voice to my right. Greg was ten feet away. I reached out to him. Our hands met. I pulled him close. We were all drifting in black water along with wood and furniture, houses swept off their foundations, cars. I pushed Greg’s face into my chest as the body of a young girl, still in her pajamas, floated by. Then an old car came floating down and hit Jack. It knocked him under the water. I could hear Lilly and Luke screaming as they were carried away. I never saw them again.
     The water smelled of chemicals and rotten eggs. I can still remember the cold and the sting of being hit by debris that floated by. I saw kitchen chairs, televisions, baby clothes, a tattered flag, a dead turtle covered in sludge. Greg reached for the turtle and I pulled his hand away.
     Greg and I drifted until we came upon a bank. We sat there waiting for the water to recede. Greg’s eyes were full of fear. I called out, but there was no one to hear me. We were completely alone. I couldn’t find God in the sky or the trees or the roiling water. I couldn’t stop watching the water. The land felt foreign, like it belonged to someone else.
     I heard Greg speak low, under his breath. I heard him say, “. . . speak to the earth and it will teach you; or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this.”
      “No, Greg,” I said. “It was the people that did this.”
     Later, the newspaper said Andy Bruton had been coming off the hoot owl shift just in time to see a wall of water moving through the broken dam, taking out the two smaller dams, a storage shed and two dump trucks. One hundred twenty-five million gallons of water swept through town taking everything in its path.
     The company folks called the disaster an act of God. Later, when I had to testify, I said, “I never saw God drive the slate truck in the holler. I did that.”
     My sin was well-documented. But, the commission was stacked with mining folks and politicians. They built bigger damns with bigger runoff pipes. Hired new guys to haul the slate. For a while, I couldn’t sleep if it was raining.

Hal came into himself. He felt the wind blow and the saw the tress swaying below. Jasper was looking at him with rapt attention.
      “What happened to Greg?” asked Jasper.
      “He went to live with relatives in Charleston. He’s a lawyer now.”
      “And you?”
      “I came back home and became an accountant. Numbers are easy. They stay in their columns.”
      “Did they ever rebuild?”
      “Folks came back and built on the hillsides. For some, the holler was all they’d ever known. The mining went on.”
     The man with the camera looked at the mountain and back at the lines on Hal’s face.
      “May I?” he asked and he held up his camera.
      “Sure,” said Hal.
     Hal looked at the camera. He heard the click of the shutter. He saw the lens, remote and unblinking, taking his measure.