Marlin

This is from my current project. An historical novel set in West Virginia.

MARLIN

by

James Robert Smith

The school teacher came up the mountain from the abandoned rail that had once run to the town of Thurmond. These days there wasn’t much left of Thurmond. Just enough of the place so that you could understand that once it had been a thriving small city of some importance. It was vacant and empty now, like all of the other spots in the gorge that had once run rich with the spoils of coal and timber.

And if Thurmond was only a ghost town of empty buildings and no humans, the place the man now wandered in was even less. The structures were gone. Even the coke ovens and machine houses. These days there were merely strings of bricks scattered in the leaf litter and small chunks of concrete foundations fading into the soil, eaten away by the tart chemistry of slightly acidic rain.

The teacher was looking, as he always seemed to be doing, for bits of history of his native state. If you’d asked him why he sought out the ghost towns and forgotten communities marked only by toppled chimneys and weed-grown cemeteries perched on perilous slopes crumbling inexorably into the river, he wouldn’t have quite been able to tell you. It was just a mania he had to be able to verify the stories he heard told on the lawns of church homecomings on summer evenings by old men and older women—people who might have actually seen those faded villages in the days when they’d still clung to the steep Appalachian mountainside, made rich from hardwoods as they were felled by the timber barons; or by the rich, black coal sucked out of the rocky matrix like hot marrow from giant bones.

Sometimes he would take some little bits of the vast store of knowledge he’d collected and he would dole them out to one or another of his students. He taught kids, mainly 13-year olds in the Beckley Middle School. Sometimes he’d encounter a youth who seemed bright enough and curious enough concerning their shared county and he’d mention one of the places he’d found due to a description from an old-timer, or had visited because of a curious dot on a faded quadrangle map. Mainly, though, he kept it all to himself.

It was summer—moist and hot and green; but his feet made the leaves crunch beneath his tread as his boots took him through poison ivy and doghobble and young heath plants vying for space beneath a canopy of trees that had reappeared in the seventy-five years since the last of the land’s resource thieves had robbed the place. All the people having fled, having gone, that land had restored itself to a semblance of the wilderness it had been, doing its best to hide the scars that had been inflicted upon it.

He was searching for a spot where he’d been told you could still find the foundations and some of the twisted iron wreckage of an abandoned coal tipple halfway up the face of the gorge. If you knew where to look you would find it where four hundred feet below you the New River flowed inexorably toward the sea; and six hundred feet above you that same gorge raised sheer cliffs a hundred feet tall, pale and stark against the sky, where today young people from Midwest cities ventured into this West Virginia patch of poverty to pit their muscles against the vertical rock in contests of skill—themselves against gravity and physics.

Ahead, he looked up and saw a vast sprawl of giant boulders. It was a place where one of those sheer faces had peeled away under the inexorable onslaught of rain and ice and the pull of the center of the Earth. Pausing, he drew a faded black leather notebook from the pocket of his shirt of yellow and brown flannel and he lovingly folded back the cover and the soft, tattered pages and he stopped when he came to six lines he’d scrawled as he’d listened intently to one Cornelius Keener, a retired lineman eighty-nine years of age who had a sharp memory of what the gorge had been like in the fading days of coal baron commerce.

Keener had even been able to describe the toss of giant rocks that had fallen and tumbled, wrecking the tipple and leaving it as a mass of shattered metal walls and twisted iron legs. The verbal description had been so intense that the sketch the words had inspired him to illustrate were strikingly similar to the scene that faced him as he craned his neck to take it in.

“Spot on,” he said to the wind. Because there was no one else there in this place among the trees and the rocks.

Taking a deep breath he headed up again, this time tackling the slope straight on and not bothering to walk careful switchbacks that made for more steps but fewer gasps of warm air wadded like mist beneath the overarching limbs of oaks and ashes and hickories.

Sure enough, just as he’d been told, he saw what was left of the tipple going to flaky rust and smashed by the hand of time, being pulled relentlessly into the embrace of Mother Earth. He put his foot on a vast sheet of iron pierced with no fewer than six windows, now gaping glassless and empty, showing only rotting leaves going from brown to black. He wondered where the steel had been produced, where the ore that spilled it had been dug, from how far it had been brought to be part of the vast machinery that had itself torn coal out of the belly of the ground only to be shipped away to create the heat to turn more iron ore into steel to be shipped somewhere else—perhaps back here, even!

It was over thoughts such as that—the silliness of the human crawl across the globe—that he felt he might actually understand the urges that brought him to record his discoveries onto the pages of his little notebooks and to file them away in his inquisitive brittle mind only rarely to share with others. He rarely met anyone who would even give a damn should he bother to relate his findings.

“Howdy,” a voice said to him.

The man looked up to where he thought the words came and saw nothing but a particularly giant boulder—roughly the size of his own house, he figured. Someone had spoken to him, greeted him. He folded his notebook and put it back in his shirt pocket and turned, looking for the one who’d greeted him.

“What air ye a-lookin’ fer,” the voice addressed him again. And this time, after he’d turned 360 degrees, he looked up and saw the owner of those low, bass tones.

The man was a fellow dressed in overalls of stiff, blue cloth. Not denim, exactly, but something like it. His feet were bare. No boots. No shoes. The soles of his feet were clean, pale, and there was only dirt on his heels—as if he’d been lying down, napping in the forest loam, and had only just stirred to acknowledge company. The other wore a wide-brimmed hat that was once red but now gone to dull rust like iron clay. It was felt, obviously, and not cloth or leather; and it could not hide the spray of pale, wild, wiry hair that sprouted out from under its roof, tinged with some indications of the blackness that had once adorned the other’s elderly, wrinkled, bearded face. That beard was of those same wild dimensions, having seemingly never felt the touch of razor or scissor.

“Hello,” he said back to his audience. His first thought was that this man was perhaps as old as Keener, who’d given him the directions, and maybe as knowledgeable of the history of this locale. The curious fellow certainly looked the part.

“I cain’t tell ye nothin’,” he said. “I’m sleepin’,” he continued, seeming both prescient and nonsensical.

“You don’t appear to be sleeping,” the teacher said to the curious man sitting high above him on the edge of the enormous boulder that had tumbled and rolled four hundred vertical feet from where it had perched for perhaps 10,000 years, waiting to be pried loose by thawing and expanding ice.

The stranger for the first time peered directly down at the man. His eyes were dark and hidden beneath the shadows cast by the brim of his felt cap. “Come on up closer so I kin talk to ye.” When there was only a pause, he added, “Come on, son. I won’t cut ye.” And then he laughed, a small cackle.

The teacher peered intently at the old-timer. He noted the relatively tall frame, but sparseness of the fellow’s mass. He could detect no gun, no weapon that might threaten him. Feeling a little foolish for his suspicion, he pressed on, walking up and veering to the left until he was threading his way among the boulders. In a couple of minutes he was stepping up to the stranger, seeing no weapon, no bulge of steel hiding in the copious folds of the other’s overalls. There was nowhere on the bare rock to conceal a gun or a blade. So he felt confident.

“Ye came up here to see the coal tipple,” the elder stated.

“Yes.”

“When did it come down?”

The teacher sat on a shard of rock opposed to the stranger so that they could face one another, eye to eye unless you counted the fact that because of the hat he could not see the other man’s eyes. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I talked to a man who only told me where it was, not when it fell.” He looked around at the forest, as if it might be some kind of time-gauge that could give him a clue. “If I had to guess, I’d say 1920 or so. When the coal was first beginning to play out.”

“No, not 1920. I come right here to this spot in nineteen and thirty-seven and it was still here. Still standin’ and still processin’ coal.” A thin right arm, weathered and angular with the bone beneath that thin layer of crude matter around it, pointed to a spot a hundred yards away. The teacher saw that the speaker’s hands were fine, the fingers long and thin, the nails in need of trimming but clean, almost polished. “Cables run up here from the river and the shovels passed coal down to the rail yonder at the bottom and dumped the sorted stuff right in cars.”

He peered at the old man, trying to figure his age. There was no way he was more than eighty-five or so. That meant that in 1937 he’d have been two or three years old. The teacher could not hide his smile. He was at a loss for something to say, because the first things that occurred to him would be to laugh or to accuse the other of being confused (at best) or a liar.

“I can see that I don’t know how long I been sleepin’,” he said.

The teacher shook his sleeve free of his watch and peered at the face. “It’s only noon,” he said. “What time did you fall asleep?”

There was a sigh. It almost sounded like a snore. “I told ye I’m sleepin’ now,” he said.

“You don’t look asleep.”

The old man stared hard at the teacher, his eyes still hidden by that annoying shadow.

“Whar air ye from?”

“Beckley,” the teacher said. “I’m a teacher there. Eighth grade biology. But I like history. It’s my hobby. Which is why I’m out here climbing up to see what’s left of this old coal tipple.”

The wind blew, rattling new oak leaves, one against the other, millions of them.

“Beckley. I remember that place. Went there onct. With my friend, Art. Didn’t like it. Not a bit.”

“I like it okay,” he replied.

“What about Turkey Know?”

The teacher didn’t answer for a second or two. The pause seemed to upset the stranger.

“It’s gone, ain’t it?”

The teacher could not quite recall the last time he’d even heard anyone mention the odd name of that ghost town.“Turkey Know was one of the first towns to be abandoned when the coal and timber played out,” he said. “Last family was gone by 1939, from what I’ve read. Nothing left of it now, unless you count a few house foundations and the odd pipe sticking out of the ground here and there.”

“Should o’ knowed,” the old man sighed. “They was a girl there that I thought was fire. She made my heart sang like a harp. I wisht I could o’ kept her with me, but she wudn’t mine to keep,” he added. “But she were a fire girl, for certain.”

The teacher smiled. He rarely met anyone who spoke that pure Elizabethan Appalachian dialect anymore. Fair was pronounced fire. Where was said as war. And so on. Only a few like this man, who grew up in the most isolated coves seemed to speak it as purely as this, these days.

“No one left in Turkey Know, and nothing really even left of the place,” he informed the man in the overalls. “Finally, he asked. What’s your name?”

A bit of a smile played across the other man’s lips. Or seemed to beneath the cover of wiry gray hair sprinkled with those few lingering lines of darkest black. “Marlin,” he said. “My name is Marlin.”