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November 2008

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DEADLINES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR AND DARK FICTION, will be released in November of 2008! Visit www.cometpress.us

The Death of Lester Williams
by Ty Johnston

There are some things folks up here in the mountains just don’t talk of. The only reason I’m tellin’ you this is because I’m on my deathbed and my soul is heavy. Whether the good Lord gets me or not, I don’t know, but I want this off me before I have to face him.

I’m going to tell you about Lester Williams and how he came to die. You’ve probably heard bits’n’pieces of it over the years, but you’ve never heard the truth. Oh, there’s folks that thinks they know the truth, but they don’t. Only me, Lester and maybe Doctor Hundley knew what really happened. And the good doctor has been dead forty years or more now.

It was the late ’30s. I was just a pup then, little more than a boy. I’d only been outta school a few years and back in them days up here a boy usually didn’t last longer than seventh or eighth grade at most because he needed to work. And the only work up here in them days was in the coal mines.

I first met Lester down in a mine. It was down a holler near Sand Gap. We were both workin’ hole nine for the Champion Coal Company but I’d only been with the comp’ny a few weeks, as Lester had been with ’em three or four years at that point.

Lester Williams was a big man, stood near six and a half feet tall, but he didn’t have lots of muscle. Kind of a lanky fellah. He had this big mess of dark hair that all the womens loved. He weren’t much older than me at the time, maybe in his early twenties, and the girls in town would point at him and giggle because they thought he was handsome. Lester didn’t mind it none. He liked being the center of attention for them girls.

I wouldn’t ’xactly say Lester and I was ever buddies. We hung out a few times at the Gas’n’Sip, but that was about as far as it went. That is until he started datin’ my younger sister, Cora, back in ... oh, I guess it would’ve been the summer of ’36 or thereabouts.

Cora was a sweet young thing, and a looker too for just bein’ sixteen years. She’d had plenty of young suitors comin’ by mom and pop’s old place since she’d been twelve.

But Lester Williams apparently won her heart over like no other fellah ever had. I think she fell in love with him the very first time he came by the house to see her. They sat out in front of the house next to that rusty well pump that had never worked right. Nobody up at the house could see what they was up to, since Mom had planted a bunch of roses there.

Sometimes me and a buddy or two of mine would sneak down there to catch ’em kissin’. You know how young men are; we’d make fun of ’em and sing little stupid songs about ’em and so on.

Now they went on datin’ for at least five or six months before it suddenly came to a quits. That caught everybody by surprise. There’d even been talk of marriage by some folks. I tried to get Cora to tell me what happened, but she wouldn’t say anythin’. She’d just close her mouth and give you a dark look as if to say “Mind your own business.” I didn’t think much of it at first, but then one night I found her cryin’ on her bedsheets. I tried and tried to get her to tell me what was wrong, but she just kept cryin’ and tellin’ me that I wouldn’t understand.

Bein’ a boy, I let it stand at that. Men aren’t ones to talk about their feelings, and though it was a little odd and scary, I could at least understand my sister’s wanting to be left alone.

She’d been broken up with Lester three months when father found her hangin’ by a hemp rope from the second story of the barn, her wrists split open with a crooked, rusty nail found at her feet.

No other woman was ever able to break my heart after that.

Doctor Hundley came around with the funeral home man to pick up Cora’s body. There weren’t much he could do at that point. She’d been dead for several hours by the time dad found her, he said.

There was all kinds of cryin’ and carryin’ on from the women folk when they took Cora away. I was plum mad, but I didn’t know who to be mad at. I was sure all this had somethin’ to do with Lester, but I didn’t know what to do.

Father did. After Cora was gone, he sat in a corner with a jug of moonshine until late into the night. He was quiet, never saying a word or lookin’ at anyone. He just sat in his corner and stared into another corner. Finally, sometime after midnight, he put down his jug and stood. The fire from the wood stove glowed in his red eyes and I’ve never seen such anger in my life since. He crossed the room and took down the old double-barrel shotgun he kept above the front door.

The other children were asleep but momma was still up. She’d spent the night softly cryin’ on her and dad’s bed in the front room. When she saw dad reach for that gun she started screamin’ somethin’ fierce. I’d never seen my olders argue until that night and it was more than frightening, especially with dad holdin’ that old shotgun.

He kept yellin’ that he was goin’ to go over and teach Lester Williams a thing or two and momma kept a cryin’ and screamin’ that she didn’t want to lose another member of the family, this time to either a bullet or jail.

Finally, after a good long while of me bein’ scared and tryin’ to hide in a corner, dad settled down. I think he just got worn out with all the drinkin’ and stayin’ up late and mom yellin’ at him and all. He put away the shotgun and hugged momma and started cryin’ himself. It was the only time I’d ever seen my father shed a tear; even when momma died seven years later he didn’t bawl and carry on.

The next day was the funeral. Mom and dad had wanted it that way. I think they wanted to get all the pain over with as soon as possible.

Hundreds of folks showed up, and like any good Baptist funeral it was quiet and somber. The only drinkin’ done was by a few of the old timers out in the woods behind the funeral home.

At the cemetery the quiet came to a halt as mom and my other brothers and sisters started cryin’ again. Through my own tears I watched dad bite his bottom lip until blood was pouring down his chin. He put an arm around momma and tried to hug her, but it was no good. She nearly fainted and it took me and dad to hold her up when the casket was lowered into the ground.

When it was over and we were walkin’ back to the truck, Doctor Hundley came over to my father and asked to speak with him. Dad and I got the others put in the truck and I was goin’ to go with him, but the doctor asked to speak with dad alone. I was a little sore about that, but dad told me to wait in the truck so I did.

When dad came back to the truck he looked more tired than a man who’d spent a whole day down in the mines. His eyes didn’t seem to focus and his hands shook somewhat. I offered to drive the way home. Usually he’d put up a fuss, but this time he just sort of nodded his head and I climbed behind the driver’s wheel.

It was a few days before I found out what the doctor had told father. I wasn’t supposed to hear about it, but late one night when they thought all of us kids had gone to sleep I heard father tell mother. The doctor’d said Cora had been four months pregnant when she died.

I cried myself to sleep that night, but they weren’t tears of sadness. They were tears of anger.

I swore vengeance on Lester’s head a few times, but it never amounted to much. It weren’t that I was scared of Lester, it was ... I don’t know, I just felt it really didn’t matter one way or another. I could kill Lester or I could not kill Lester and the world would keep right on turnin’, whether I was dead or in jail or not. I never spoke to the man again and me and the rest of the family would cross the road to be away from him when we went to town once a month in McKee.

Time passed. It was summer again. I was still workin’ for the Champion Coal Company but they’d moved me further south to hole number six near Tyner. As my luck would have it, Lester Williams was also moved over to hole six.

I tried to stay away from Lester, especially when we were down in the holes. I was scared I wouldn’t be able to control myself if he said something to me while I had my pick or shovel in hand.

Me and Lester worked with twenty or so other boys in that mine for a month before the accident happened.

There was one main shaft that broke into three at hole six. We were working the center shaft that day and it was about ten in the morning when I was sent up to fetch the water pail so the workers could have something to drink. We hadn’t been doing any heavy digging yet that morning, mostly placing dynamite charges at the far end of the shaft. I was just outside the cave and headed to the foreman’s shack when the explosion knocked me off my feet.

For a second I was stunned. I couldn’t do anything put lay there. But finally I came to my senses and ran back to the mine. I don’t rightly know what happened, but I guess a stick of the dynamite must have gone off, which must have set off the rest we’d planted. The main shaft was intact but littered with dirt and rock from the ceiling. The center shaft and the one on the right were completely closed off. The shaft on the left seemed clear.

I tried yellin’ to see if anybody was still alive and for a few seconds I thought I heard someone yell out. It sounded as if they were far off, like at the bottom of a well. I yelled a few more times and clanged some of the rock with my pick, but I never heard nothin’ again.

I tried to dig a little but saw quickly that it weren’t no use. There was nobody above ground to help me. Even the comp’ny foreman had been down below.

I ran out to the foreman’s shack and found the keys to his old Ford truck hangin’ on the wall next to his desk. I drove as fast I could into town for help.

By lunchtime half the county must have been at the mine. There were the sheriff and his deputy and the two firemen with their beat-up, red truck. Doctor Hundley was there. A bunch of other miners had heard what’d happened and had come over to help. People were comin’ from all over.

At one point the sheriff was beginning to put together crews to dig the men out of the mine. Once he had some men together, he walked up to me and asked “Which shaft are they down?”

It must have taken me only a second or two to answer, but it seemed like a thousand years passed in that time. I made the hardest decision in my life and I said “They’re down the right shaft.”

The sheriff nodded and he and his men went down the mine to start digging while I sat alone next to the foreman’s shack.

When darkness came that night, they were still digging. Not so much as a miner’s head lamp had been found. But that was how I knew it would be.

I took some time digging in the mine, but around midnight I finally went home. I couldn’t sleep that night.

The next day the sheriff told me they’d dug as much as they would. After digging all night they still hadn’t found anything and hadn’t heard anyone yelling or digging. The mine was to be closed off and wouldn’t be worked anymore.

There were funerals for weeks after that and I attended every single one of them. I figured I owed it to the rest of the boys that had been down there.

I’ve had sixty years to think about all this. Most of those boys were probably killed when the dynamite blew, or for my soul I hope they were. But I was sure I’d heard someone yell out when I had gone down after the blast. There must have been at least one or two still alive down in that blackness and cryin’ for help. I had heard them. And I’d let them all die just so as I could have my vengeance upon Lester Williams.

May the Lord have mercy on me.