#ellenville

The eldest son had a good head on his shoulders; went back to the lowlands to get a piece of paper for machines, and he married a girl from the hills with coal in her blood. The youngest worked the mine. He was quick with his hands and quicker with his boss’s whistle and by the time John Greystone died, there were over one thousand people in Ellenville covered in coal dust when the day-whistle blew.

Once the eldest brother had his own John – John the III – the brothers knew about the ironstone in the hills just north of Ellenville’s valley and the town bloomed. It all became John III’s empire to run.

John III took a wife from the lowlands, a sweet little thing who loved the hills and wanted to escape the flat planes. However, she found the mountains of Ellenville to be dry, heartless, and her new husband too obsessed with building the Greystone legacy to worry about homemaking, or the homemaker; so Mrs. Martha Greystone found herself with three children and a mostly-empty manor. She named them John the IV, Rachel, and Mira. When they were old enough, John was set to the ironstone shafts. Rachel and Mira were deemed nimbler on the mostly-mechanized coal slopes.

The coal pit had grown like a canker on the south side of town. The first John Greystone had called it the Pothole Mine. They dug down 1000 feet in an open pit until the miners hit 50 feet of useless slatey rock and the coal vein dove deep into the earth. John III planned to dig after it eventually, but growing the pit west and east was easier and much more profitable. They stoped the sides of the pit, steam shovels biting fifty-foot staircases from the rock walls. Stoping was more an upgrade than feature inherent to the mine since men with picks had done the initial work, but it was important to keep the walls of the pit from collapsing. John II had emphasized it before he died. He had planned the stopes the whole length of the valley; fifty-foot steps were enough to keep the walls steady.

But he’d never considered rain, because it didn’t rain much in the Ellenville valley.

It rained three days and four nights until the valley smelled like wet silt and dirt and the water poured off the crusty ground into the Pothole mine. The pumps to keep water out of the mine bottom filled with cobbles and rubbish and had to be cleaned out with half a dozen steam shovels, day and night.

“Too much water,” Mira kept hearing the men say as they struggled into their galoshes for day shift. They hissed through their teeth when they looked out the window.

Usually, Mira and Rachel went with the shovel manager and sat with him for half the day, but Mira found the new steam shovels arriving on the train much more interesting. She stayed with her father, looking at the bright steel workings and checking off the parts on the list.

She remembered feeling the rumble underneath her feet before the bone-aching crack hit her ears. She remembered the boys and men at the shop turning a sickly olive color too – her father included. But John III did not turn green after they checked their shop stability; not when the day shifters returned with hollow faces and a few pieces of the bodies. He didn’t turn green when a boy Mira knew from across the street, her age, was brought up headless. He didn’t even turn green when what was left of Rachel was brought up, crushed against mangled machinery remains.

They buried her that Saturday, sky still weeping and half the town weeping with it. Six feet, no casket, because her body was half-engine.

The rest of them were Rachel’s ghosts, floating about the house with pale faces and red eyes. In her late-night waifish wander, Mira looked in her father’s office and saw his green face looking over the quarterly profits.