And on that day he walked the dirt road from the patch past the colliery toward the entrance of the shaft, the only light visible coming from the breaker with its multitude of filament bulbs inside and outside and along each apparatus that drove it shining brighter than any constellation any man or boy who labored within, around, or below that breaker would ever see, and he could hear it, alive and throbbing with its steady heartbeat throb that pounded away while he slept, pounded away when he woke, pounded away the length of every day there was work in that mine, he even remembering as a boy, sick in bed in the clapboard patch house and gazing out the window at the behemoth, asking his mother if it would ever stop, and without turning to look at the structure that hulked there lit and monstrous against the banks of culm and Blue Mountain hills and sky, she said, When all creation has ceased to groan, Ondro, when all creation has ceased to groan, and he walked around the ruts of water iced over on the road, the mountain to the east a shale silhouette against the graying sky, and he could see their outlines standing and waiting by the headframe, the miners, their butties, and Ruka, the one-armed Ruthenian who worked the lift, all of them waiting for the inside boss to give the signal and the cage to rise, and he yawned in the cold and quickened his step and put the bare hand that did not carry his growler inside his overalls because he no longer carried the big sprag he used to carry when he went down as a spragger, and he looked up again at the men as he approached the line and in those few feet realized he could see them more clearly, though he knew each one of them from the mine, could see the hats they wore with their lamps yet unlit at their peaks, the canvas coats on their hunched shoulders that even in the lightlessness still shone an inky black, and their own tin growlers, some of which he knew had beer in them and nothing else and which they carried by handles creaking like signs hanging in the wind outside the company store, could see them as he approached in the first morning of the last year of the decade there would be mules and cars stopped by sprags and lamps lit with carbide wicks in that mine, and he shivered in the coat that did not fit him anymore, yawned again and looked ahead at the mountain face materializing in the dawn, the patch having gone to sleep under skies overcast and threatening but waking to a front that left only a wind blowing in sharp gusts, and he fingered the beads of the rosary in his pocket, the rosary his mother had given him for his birthday the year after his father died, and he thought maybe there was time to say an Ave Maria to himself as he approached, but he walked faster and hoped the signal would sound as soon as he took his place in line
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From Mule Boy by Andrew Krivak. Copyright © 2026 by Andrew Krivak. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: www.blpress.org. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
