Coal Miner’s Son

The day Gertie blew, I watched my father leave for work like I did every morning. It was called morning by the men who worked that shift, but to me it was still night, black and cold and silent except for the far-off rumble of the cokeovens as their doors were thrown open and the infernos inside them roared. I could see them clearly from my bedroom window, strung across a distant hillside, the mouths glowing red, then going dark in a steady rhythm like the blinking of a hundred fiery eyes watching our valley.

The Pennsylvania coal mines that fueled the American industrial revolution created hundreds of small mining towns. Almost every man in these towns worked at a mine or worked in a company that supported the mines, such as the nearby flatbed truck company. Many sons joined the mines as soon as they were of age, but many parents also hoped their sons would work in cleaner and safer jobs.

The mining jobs were terribly dangerous. As the coal was mined, it left seams of methane gas that built up until it took only a spark to explode. As always, the corporate owners were willing to cut safety corners for profit, and federal mine safety legislation appeared only in 1941, decades after the terrible disasters that left hundreds of men dead. The first paragraph of the novel, above, mentions ‘Gertie’ — the nickname of the mine — and the next word, ‘blew’, suggests what happened to Ivan’s father.

This is the background for Tawni O’Dell’s second novel, Coal Run. The book is named after the small mining town in which the narrator, Ivan Zoschenko, grew up, and where his father worked in the mines while his mother raised Ivan and his sister Jolene. The explosion has decimated the men of the town, and that fallout remains 30 years later, as the remaining miners lose jobs to mine shut-downs or automation.

During the booming coal-town days when Zo was a child, the [community gathering place] was always filled with miners and their families. When she was a grown woman, it was still filled, but this time only with the families.

Ivan’s father was from Ukraine, and had served in Stalin’s gulag before finding his way to the United States. There is a sad-funny story where his mention of a ‘camp’ leads his American dinner hosts to assume it was a summer camp, and their shock when he says

The worst would be the radiation poison, of course. It’s what killed most of us.

Ivan, it turns out, has just returned to Coal Run after 15 years in Florida, but he is far from forgotten. Everyone greets him with

Well, if it isn’t the great Ivan Z.

Ivan had been a celebrity: star football player in high school, star at Penn State, and drafted by the Chicago Bears in their glory days, before it all went south when he destroyed his knee in an accident. Unable to imagine an ex-celeb life without football, he vanished to anonymity in Florida. What brings him back is the news that Reese Raynor, in prison for putting his wife in a coma, is to be released.

Ivan is a self-destructive character, an alcoholic torn by guilt for reasons which slowly become clear in the novel. It’s an interesting choice for a female author to write in a male voice, but it’s familiar territory for O’Dell, who did it just as well in her earlier novel Back Roads.

As always with O’Dell’s novels, there is a very strong sense of place. Every character seems like someone the author has known well, and the descriptions of the surroundings 30 years after the mine explosion are powerful. There are still mine fires burning deep inside the earth which are impossible to put out.

The smell of sulfur hits me, a smell like a hundred struck matches mixed with a dozen rotten eggs. [..] Wisps of white haze crawl in and out of the tops of his boots and snake up his legs. On wet days like this one, the cool water makes the hot ground steam. [..] the dead forest surrounding the junk. Some of [the trees] have broken free of the weakened soil and toppled over; their charret root systems look like snarls of barbed wire.

Jolene, Ivan’s sister, is one of the main characters in the novel. With three children from three different fathers, she is still a beauty who turns heads, and an unapologetically and dramatically sexual person. To distract a drunken man with a gun, she pulls off her dress. When annoyed by the sarcastic comments of Val, the Vietnam vet, about her career in beauty pageants, she removes her shoes and stockings and throws her panties at him. Her clothes tend towards the short, tight and flamboyant, to the point where her middle son calls an outfit her ‘man-candy dress’. Jolene was hard for me to understand at times, but she still seemed very authentic.

Another lovely character is Dr Ed, who has cared for the townsfolk for decades with cunning as much as medicine. When people don’t bring their kids in for checkups, he goes to their houses and distracts the drunks while he vaccinates the kids. When he sees a drunken woman with kids in a store, he moves her car so she can’t drive drunk, and calls her sister to come pick her up.

Less realistic seemed the romance that springs up between the polished, gorgeous, capable Dr Chastity Morrison and the broken-down, hapless, guilt-ridden alcoholic Ivan. Some of the mysteries, like why a gentle man would break his son’s nose, seem pretty obvious. The multiple threads of this story are wrapped up neatly, but perhaps the endings were a little too conveniently pat.

These are minor issues, though, and this novel about guilt and redemption in an economically depressed town reminded me of Richard Russo’s trilogy, also very much worth reading.

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