Part 50

Over in Johnson County, adjoining Floyd, where Walter Scott Harkins had an eye for timber, his young friend was being twitted for a different reason. "John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo," they'd string out his long name, "when you're cooped up in the poorhouse or the lunatic asylum, you can't say we didn't warn you to quit digging around trying to find a fortune under the ground."

But young Mayo, like his friend Harkins the lawyer, would only say, thumbs hooked in suspenders, "He who laughs last, laughs best."

Some of his youthful companions continued to poke fun but John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo turned them a deaf ear. On foot he trudged endless miles when he was a poor lad, or rode a scrubby nag along the Warrior's Path, always seeking coal deposits, pleading with landowners for leases and options on acreage he knew to be rich in minerals. He surmounted seemingly impossible barriers, even having legislation enacted to set aside Virginia land grants. He tapped hidden treasures, developed the wealth of the Big Sandy country that had been locked in mountain fastnesses for centuries. Through his vision, thriving cities blossom where once was wilderness.

The United States Geological Survey shows one eighth of the total coal area of the nation to be in this region; it supplies nearly one quarter of all the country's bituminous coal.

PUBLIC WORKS

Only in recent years has the mountaineer begun to forsake his cove, however unproductive the earth may be, for the valley and public works. Indeed mountain folk long looked down on their own who sought employment at public works, mines, lumber camps, steel mills. They decried any employment away from the hillside farm, because it meant to them being an underling. No mountaineer ever wanted to be company-owned. Leastwise none of the Wellfords of Laurel Creek. But Clate, youngest of Mark Wellford's family, lured by the promise of big cash money, decided to quit the farm and take his wife and little family down to the foothills. "There's a good mine there, pays good money, and there's a good mine boss on the job," so Clate was told. Some two years later Clate, a weary figure, emerged one evening from the company commissary. His face was smudged with coal dust. A miner's lamp still flickered on his grimy cap. He carried a dinner bucket and the baby on one arm. Over his shoulder hung a gunnysack that bulged with canned goods and a poke of meal. At his heels followed his bedraggled, snaggle-toothed wife, a babe in her arms and another tugging at her skirts. Her faded calico dress that dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet the rounded arms--her sleeves were rolled to the elbow--looked youthful.

Clate halted a few minutes to talk to another miner, a boy in his teens. "What'd you load today?" the younger asked after casual greetings. "'Tarnal buggy busted a dozen times, held me back," Clate complained, shifting the dinner pail and the baby. "Always something to hold a man back." "I'm figuring on going to Georgia," the young lad sounded hopeful. "Got a buddy down there in the steel mill. Beats the mines any day." He saw some young friends across the street and hurried to join them.

"Come on, Phoebe!" Clate called over his shoulder to his wife, "get a mosey on you. I'm hongry. And 'ginst you throw a snack of grub together it'll be bedtime. An' before you know it, it's time to get up and hit for the hill again." He plodded on up the winding path to a row of shacks. His little family followed.

The row of dilapidated shacks where the miners lived was clinging to the mountain side at the rear, while the fronts were propped up with rough posts. They were all alike with patched rubberoid roofs, broken tile chimneys, windows with broken panes. Rough plank houses unpainted, though here and there a board showed traces of once having been red or brown. Between the houses at rare intervals a fence post remained. But the pickets had long since been torn away to fire the cookstove or grate. There were no gardens. Coal companies did not encourage gardening. Miners and their families lived out of cans, and canned goods come high at the company's commissary.

A tipple near the drift mouth of the mine belched coal and coal dust day after day. When Phoebe--you'd never have known her for the pretty girl she used to be far back in the Blue Ridge--rubbed out a washing on the washboard, hung it to dry on the wire line stretched from the back door to a nail on the side of the out-building, she knew that every rag she rubbed and boiled and blued would be grimy with coal dust before it dried. What was she to do about it? Where else could the wash be hung? Once Phoebe thought she had found the right place. A grassy plot quite hidden beyond a clump of trees. She put the wet garments in a basket and carried them off to dry, spreading them upon the green earth. But no sooner had she spread out the last piece than a fellow came riding up. "What's the big idea?" he demanded, shaking a fist at the garments on the ground. And Phoebe, from Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek, never having heard the expression, mumbled in confusion, "I'm pleased to meet you."

"Don't try to get fresh," the fellow scowled. "Don't you know this ground is company-owned? The big boss keeps this plot for his saddle horse to graze on. Pick up your rags and beat it!"

She understood from the gesture the meaning of beat it and obeyed in haste.

There was little room to stretch up a line indoors, though she did sometimes in the winter when the backyard was too sloppy to walk in. Clate Wellford's was one of the smaller shacks, a room with a lean-to kitchen. The others, with two rooms, cost more. Besides there were other things to be taken out of date's pay envelope before it reached him; there were electric light, coal, the store bill, and the company doctor.

"None of my folks have been sick. We've never even set eyes on the doctor," Clate complained to the script clerk on the first payday.

"What of it?" the script clerk replied. "You'd be running quick enough for the doctor if one of your kids or your old woman got sick or met with an accident, wouldn't you? The doctor's got to live same as the rest of us."

So the miner stumbled out with no more to say. Sometimes he'd vent his spleen upon his wife. "You wuz the one that wanted to come here! Wisht I'd never married. A man can't get nowheres with a wife and young ones on his hands." And the wife, remembering the way of mountain women, offered no word of argument.

When the owners of the coal operation came from the East to check up output and earnings they didn't take time to make a tour of inspection of the shacks. Certainly they had no time to listen to complaints of miners.

Lured by the promise of big money Clate Wellford, like many other mountain men, forsook the familiar life of his own creek for the strange work-a-day of the mining camp.

Back on Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek there was always milk a-plenty to drink. Bless you, Clate knew the time when he'd carried buckets full of half-sour milk to the hogs. How they guzzled it! Here there was never a drop of cow's milk to drink. You got it in cans--thick, condensed, sickeningly sweet. Couldn't fool the children, not even when you thinned it with water. "It don't taste like Bossy's milk," the youngsters shoved it away.

What was more, back on Shoal's Fork there was always fried chicken in the spring. All you could eat. Turkey and goose and duck, if you chose, through the winter and plenty of ham meat. There was never a day date's folks couldn't go out into the garden and bring in beans, beets, corn, and cabbage. He'd never known a time when there were not potatoes and turnips the year round. The Wellfords had come to take such things for granted. But here in the coal camp you could walk the full length of the place from the last ramshackle house on down to the commissary and never see a bed of onions and lettuce. The shacks were so close together there was no room for a garden, even if the company had permitted it.

"That's company-owned!" the boss growled at Clate that time he was trying to break up the hard crusty earth with a hoe.

"I've got my own onion sets," Clate tried to explain. "My folks fetched 'em down."

"Who cares?" the company boss snarled. "What you reckon the company's running a commissary for? The store manager can sell you onions--ready to eat."

So the miner didn't set out an onion bed.

Again, Clate found some old warped planks outside the drift mouth of the mine; he brought them home and was building a pigpen. The mine boss came charging down upon him.

"What you doing with the company's planks?"

The frightened Clate tried to explain that he had supposed the wood thrown aside was useless and that he was making ready for the young shoat his folks meant to bring him.

"What you suppose the company would do if every miner packed off planks and posts that he happens to see laying around?" he eyed Clate suspiciously. "We'd soon shut down, that's what would happen. And as for meat. You can buy sow-belly and bologna at the commissary." There was something more. "If you want to keep out of trouble and don't want a couple bucks taken out of your pay, you better get them planks and posts back where you found them!"