Chapter 2

Ester received notification of the cave-in by telephone thirty minutes after it happened. At one-thirty in the afternoon she was standing outside the mine with Carl Blanchard’s young wife Faye and eight other wives, as the general manager of the mine briefed them on what he knew. He didn’t know much; and because methane levels were so dangerously high, no one could enter the mine to learn more.

“All I can tell you,” the GM said, “is that there was a roof collapse in the section of the mine your menfolk were working. Six men have come out of there so far, so we have hope.”

Ester called home at four; her son answered the phone. Drawing on her inner strength, she kept her voice calm and emotionless.

“I’m at the mine, Jericho. There was a cave-in, and your daddy is missing. You take care of your sisters and I’ll be home as soon as they find him.”

Jerry had questions but, like the mine’s GM, Ester had no answers.

The ventilator fans eventually dissipated the methane and dust enough for a rescue/survey team to enter the mine at a few minutes after six in the evening. The three men exited the mine an hour later with grim looks on their faces and huddled with the General Manager. After a ten minute conference, the mine manager walked over to the cluster of anxious wives.

“I wish I had better news, ladies,” he said, “but I don’t. The cave-in where your men were working is so large it has compromised the integrity of the entire section, and it is too dangerous right now to mount a rescue attempt.

“We will have more help from the state Department of Mines and the federal Bureau of Mines tomorrow. Since nothing is going to happen until then, I suggest you all go home, try to get some sleep, and come back in the morning.”

Ester explained everything to her children when she arrived home. The girls were especially scared and distraught. They cried and clung to their mother and brother. She could tell Jericho felt the same as his sisters, but he kept his emotions in check and stoically helped comfort the girls.

Ester was at the mine early the next morning. She and the other wives watched silently as cars full of strangers arrived from the state and federal government and disappeared into the mine manager’s office. At ten o’clock, two men clutching a handful of maps jumped into a forestry service four-wheel drive truck and drove up the steep logging road that wound to the top of the mountain. A few minutes later the mine manager, the union shop steward and three men she didn’t recognize entered the mine.

The group that went into the mine returned in an hour. The pair that went up the hill were gone an additional thirty minutes. By then, it was almost noon and the news media had arrived by the droves. To avoid the relentless questioning, one of the foremen moved the wives and family members to the mine’s office building and let them wait in a classroom. At one o’clock the mine manager and a few other grim faced men entered the classroom. The manager moved to the center of the room and cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry folks but I have bad news. The section of mine where your loved ones are is so compromised it is impossible to get to them. And even if we could we are certain that it wouldn’t be a rescue, we would just be recovering their remains.”

He pointed to the men with him.

“This is Mister Bristol; he is from the West Virginia Department of Mines and Mister Isaksson is from the United States Bureau of Mines. You know John Finney our shop steward and this gentleman is Mister Chezowicz; he is a geologist from the US Geological Survey. The collapse in the mine was big enough that equipment thirty miles away on Buck Mountain, recorded it as a major seismic event.

“It was Mister Chezowicz who discovered how big the fall was when he scouted around up on the mountain for a possible site to drill down to Coal Room Seven. He found that it wasn’t a ceiling fall, it was a half-mile square section of the mountain that collapsed onto that room.

“Given the facts, we all reluctantly agreed that we would not put any more lives in jeopardy and Mister Isaksson ordered that section of the mine to be abandoned and sealed...”

Ester was jerked out of her reminiscing by the persistent voice of her son.

“ ... Mama ... HEY, MAMA ... you okay?”

Ester gave him a small, embarrassed smile.

“Sorry, Jericho, I was just wool gathering. Hand me that hatchet, please. I bet Ben Chaney will give us three or four dollars for these ribs. You know how he likes to barbecue.”

Both Ester and Jericho were reserved and quiet people so there was no extraneous conversation as they worked. Butchering the pig by rote they were both lost in their thoughts, thoughts that were very similar as they reflected on their current situation.

Ten men were lost in the Pitchfork Mine disaster. Three of them, including John Roy and Carl Blanchard, were members of Antioch Baptist Church. The church held a memorial service for the miners the Saturday after the accident. It was a sad and solemn service made even more poignant when Oliver Trundle, a miner that worked at the Pitchfork, sang Merle Travis’ ‘Dark as a Dungeon.’ Travis, the son of coal miner himself, was hugely popular amongst the coal mining community.

The lament was eerily appropriate to the grim circumstance of the tragedy the congregation was mourning. Two stanzas, the first rarely performed by Merle, were especially relevant:

The midnight, the morning, or the middle of day,
Is the same to the miner who labors away.
Where the demons of death often come by surprise,
One fall of the slate and you’re buried alive.

And the last verse:

I hope when I’m gone and the ages shall roll,
My body will blacken and turn into coal.
Then I’ll look from the door of my heavenly home,
And pity the miner a-diggin’ my bones.

Reality set in the Monday after the memorial. Ester was home with her children and her sadness, when a man knocked on the door. He was from the United Mine Workers of America with a check for three thousand dollars, a one-time death benefit that the union paid to the widows of miners. The man also told her what was available to her from Social Security. When he left, Ester dug out the family’s bank book and bills. Then she sat down at the kitchen table and for the first time thought about the financial implications of John Roy’s death. She and John Roy were savers and had a little over twenty-eight hundred dollars in the bank. She did some figuring and came up with a plan.

The next day she went to town and deposited the check from the union in the bank. Then she used the money from the death benefit and some of their savings to pay off the house and her car. When she left she still had nine hundred in saving and owed not a penny to anyone. She had agonized over keeping the car but in the end she couldn’t part with her little baby blue 1962 Ford Falcon station wagon. The car was John Roy’s gift for her thirty-seventh birthday. It was the only new car they had ever owned.

Wednesday, Ester drove down to the Social Security office in Charleston. The good folks there helped her file the paperwork for her widow’s pension and the two-hundred-fifty-five dollar burial benefit. Her pension figured out to one-hundred-eighty dollars a month: sixty dollars for each of her three children. The monthly pension was twenty dollars less than John Roy had brought home every two weeks, but Ester reckoned it might be enough for them to get by.

Ester was partially right in that with a little help from the government surplus commodities program, she could feed her brood and pay the utility bills. It was the unexpected expenses that slowly eroded their savings. In September it was school clothes for her children. Then in October her car needed tires; in November it was a tank of fuel oil and property taxes; and even a lean Christmas further ate into their reserves. January was okay but February made up for it when the well pump burned out and Sears charged them a hundred and fourteen dollars to replace it.

Ester broached the subject of finances at the dinner table on a Sunday evening in early May.

“We are down to only a few hundred dollars in the bank, so I am going to get a job.”

After a minute of silence, Ruth asked the obvious question.

“Doing what, Mama?”

“Well,” Ester replied, “I was a waitress before I married your Daddy, so I guess that’s what I’ll look for.”

Finding a job was easier said than done for a woman in rural West Virginia. She tried every restaurant and diner in town without any luck. As a last resort she stopped by the Wagon Wheel Restaurant and Supper Club out on highway 19 right at the county line. The Wagon Wheel sat in the middle of a cluster of businesses with a Texaco service station on one side, and the Hide-a-Way Motel on the other. The Wagon Wheel was a restaurant with a bar attached from Monday through Thursday. But on Friday and Saturday nights, it was a notorious honky-tonk supper club with a bad reputation. The Wagon Wheel did a brisk business because Manfred County, less than a quarter of a mile away, was dry.

It took her eyes a minute to adjust to the dimly lit interior of the restaurant. The place was deserted at ten on a Thursday morning except for a man in a white apron standing behind the bar lethargically polishing a cocktail glass. The man looked up as Ester approached.

“Hello,” she said, “I was wondering if there was a waitress job available.”

The man shrugged and put the glass he had been polishing into an overhead rack.

“Mister Cabrini does the hiring, ma’am. Have a seat, and I’ll let him know you’re here.”

Ester perched on the edge of a tall bar stool and looked around curiously. The last time she had been in a bar was before she married John Roy. The place was huge. It was easily ten times the size of her uncle’s restaurant back in Cherokee. The bartender returned in only a couple of minutes and ushered her into the club manager’s office.

Mister Cabrini came out from around his desk when she walked in. Cabrini was a tall, handsome man wearing a sharp dark blue suit. Ester thought he looked a lot like Dean Martin.

“Good morning,” the man said, “I’m Jack Cabrini.”

His voice, she notice, was rich and deep without a trace of accent. Ester held out her hand and he grasped it lightly in his. His after shave smelled manly and expensive. The handsome man made Ester feel as if she were a naïve young girl.

“Umm, Ester ... Ester Donavan,” she finally managed to say.

Cabrini released her hand that she didn’t remember him holding, led her to an arm chair in front of his desk and gave her a warm smile.

“Nice to meet you, Ester,” he said. “Have a seat and tell me what I can do for you.”

“I came to apply for a job as a waitress Mister Cabrini. I am a hard worker and I have experience working at my uncle’s restaurant.”

Cabrini frowned.

“I’m sorry but we don’t have any open positions in the restaurant,” he said.

Ester nodded dejectedly.

“No one else does either, it seems ... well thank you for your time anyway, Mister Cabrini.”

When she rose to leave Cabrini looked her over again. Ester was a handsome woman with a very nice figure.