“What My Father Heard,” by Larry Bingham (Fiction ’06)
2006 fiction graduate Larry Bingham‘s essay “What My Father Heard” was recently published in the Appalachian Review. Read an excerpt below:
What My Father Saw
My dad was twenty-five years old when he saw a man die. He didn’t hear or see the slate roof fall, but he heard Bonsell Robinson scream. It happened in 1967 inside the Beatrice Coal Mine in Keen Mountain, Virginia, where my dad worked. He was just starting out, five years into a job he would do for the rest of his work life.
At the time of the roof collapse, my dad was a buggyman. His job—to make sure the buggies, or shuttle cars, that carried coal to the beltline were full. He had just moved up to buggyman from stoper (“stow-per”), one of the deadliest jobs in an underground mine. The stoper stands up wooden posts and drills bolts into the slate roof to keep it from caving in, so the excavation can advance deeper into the seam. It takes two men to do the work. Together they auger into the rock above them using a tool that looks like an upside down jackhammer.
My dad was glad to get off the stoper job. Not only is it one of the most dangerous, it’s also one of the hardest. It’s the position given to miners newly hired, or new to a mine, to see if they’re tough enough to survive.
To survive in the mine, Dad had to get used to working deep inside the earth. He had grown accustomed to crouching in dark, narrow tunnels and listening to the rumble of bedrock, like distant thunder, as it shifted and settled around him. He was used to sloshing through cold, standing water and breathing in air dirty with coal and rock dust. What he wasn’t familiar with was the primal sound of a man dying.
The day the roof caved in, midway through the third shift, Dad had been spelled out by another miner so he could eat his dinner. Mom used to pack his bucket with an Armor Treet meat sandwich, a thermos of black coffee, Vienna sausages, a Little Debbie snack cake and a tin of Del Monte fruit cocktail. That day, he found a dry place to sit and ate with three other miners, 100 feet away from where the stopers were setting timbers, when Bonsell Robinson screamed—an animal sound, like the yelp of a dog when it’s been kicked.
Dad and the other men rushed over to find Bonsell pinned to the ground, his chest and waist crushed under a rock the size of an armchair and weighing thousands of pounds. The other stoper wasn’t touched.
The entire Beatrice mine shut down for twenty-four hours so state and federal authorities could investigate. All the miners climbed into the mantrip, the railcar that carried them back to the surface, and the machines sat idle. Dad drove home on barren, pre-dawn roads unable to stop thinking about what he had seen. And heard.
Beatrice reopened the next day for business as usual. Because somebody had to do Bonsell Robinson’s job, the foreman tapped the last man to work as a stoper—my dad. It was one of the hardest shifts he ever pulled.
Fifty years later, I ask him why.
He sighs. How do you describe how it feels to step into a dead man’s shoes?
I imagine the fear he must have felt. I wonder if he prayed to God to keep him safe. Did he bury himself in the work until it was over? Did he feel like he was playing Russian roulette?
My dad is not a man who talks easily about his feelings, but the death has never left him. He can still see Bonsell Robinson crushed under that big slab of slate. He can still hear him scream.
There’s something else my dad won’t ever forget. A few days before he was killed, Bonsell Robinson got religion. When the men ate their dinner together, deep inside that dark mine, all Bonsell wanted to talk about was getting saved.
As if he knew death was coming for him any minute.
Read the full essay here: https://appalachianreview.net/2019/09/20/what-my-father-heard/
