I
Let us not forget how the rails came to Big Shoal
on the strong back of the Negro, the Italian and Hungarian,
on the sunbaked shoulders of the mountain men
of Kentucky and West Virginia;
When chimneys smoked with breakfast fires
and a town woke to the rumble of the C&O Mallet
in a dawn that rose swift as fog from the river.
II
Once blood ran quick in the vein
and Big Shoal lived,
burning in the power lines pole to pole
from the train depot to the boarding house,
from the brass’s plumbed and shingled court
to Snake-eye Williams’ whitewashed shack.
Once men walked in steel-toed boots
from Coal Run to Big Shoal,
from camp house to lamp house
and life squirmed in the cool belly of the mountain,
in the copper wires, motors and shuttle cars,
in the breasts of young men and old,
working the thin seams in lamplight and glittering dark.
III
Once women kneeled bedside in the long nights,
prayed over the bean kettle and wash tub
in the long days.
Once mothers rocked babies on a screened porch,
breastfeeding in the dappled shade.
IV
Name’s Pegleg—Pegleg Younce,
all I been called since ’41.
I was braking on a Jeffrey for Arnie Bates.
It was twenty minutes till quit time,
boss wanted one more car.
We heard the top a-working
and seen the rats a-running.
There was no time to pray.
I got off light compared to Arnie—
Death hung in the mine for the next six months.
You could feel it—and smell it,
my hand to God.
V
Mother’s hair is warm,
but Father shakes me awake,
smiling with black face and white teeth.
His rough and tender hands
holds a bag of steel marbles
and a cake saved from his dinner pail.
Mother’s hair is warm, and I sleep.
VI
We was coal miners, and river rats, too.
Big Shoal, Kentucky, was named for the river
the way Aladdin Coal was named for a lamp.
Some say a magic lamp—
damned carbide lamp if you ask me.
The Big Sandy was our highway in and highway out.
We boated it, fished it, swum it, cussed it—
and baptized the saved in its muddy waters.
Company and the river thought they owned us—
our money spent nowhere but the company store.
What we had was one another—
always somebody staying all night,
bringing a pie or a mess of greens,
tending to the sick or settin’ up with the dead.
Some things money can’t buy.
VII
Night comes down the mountain.
Rawhead and Bloody Bones
lurks in the tipple’s long shadow.
I feel safe,
riding the hip of my young mother,
mocking the hoot owls in the dark oaks.
VIII
Uncle John
plays the boarding house square dance,
singing like Bill Monroe.
A merry swain in company store clothes,
sharp creased khakis and starched shirt,
he walks his girl to Coal Run hill
in the June night heavy with honeysuckle.
IX
Turned home on the river
my father’s a good mariner with an eye to the sky,
holding a new Crosley radio
tender as a lover.
Windows rattle and toes beat time
to “The Wabash Cannonball.”
John dances barefoot on the rough pine floor
and Acuff’s happy hoboes squall
until above the merry din is heard
a distant clarion call.
X
I ride my red tricycle on the long porch
until the train comes.
Father and Grandpa Gus help carry the cot.
Mother’s blue hands are raised against the sun.
My new brother is red as a rat,
the life cord curled on his belly like a cabbage worm.
XI
Show fare is 30 cents at the New Drive-In.
We walk the tracks to Little Shoal,
grown men and women, boys and girls
perched like pigeons along the rails,
scanning the dark newsreels of the Great War
for the face of Uncle John.
We laugh at a bouncing Mickey Mouse,
pretend we hear the muted six guns
of Gene Autry and Randolph Scott
in the moon-white plain of a summer night.
XII
When Elmer Hicks got into the 440
old Doc Wheeler rode from Pikeville on a handcar.
Elmer was already gone when he got to him.
The power had done broke his neck.
He was a big healthy young man
with a wife and two little boys.
He’d just bummed me for a chew of tobaccer
five minutes before it happened.
Some things a man just can’t forget.
XIII
Christmas Morning.
Mother shows me reindeer tracks
on the rooftop’s melting snow.
Daddy’s gray work sock hangs from the mantle,
heavy with candy and nuts from the North Pole.
Old Santa has brought an electric train,
a smoking C&O Mallet with a red caboose.
I shoot my Gene Autry cap pistol and Daddy “falls dead.”
Three men carry Grandpa Archie
from the boarding house frolic to the head of Big Shoal.
The Patilla’s, red-cheeked and bundled,
sing the carols of their new country.
XIV
I was there when they pulled the last man trip,
I helped them take the equipment to the outside
and load it on a rail car going north;
seen the men come out the drift mouth for the last time,
heads hanging, carrying their dinner buckets.
Some of the camp houses was already empty.
We all shook hands, turned out our lights
and went our separate ways.
XV
Aunt Mag and Cousin Jo
were wearing grass skirts when the tipple burned,
souvenirs from the soldier boys.
Make-believe Hula’s with a cheap Kodak,
They caught the day, the hour, the blazing sky,
the stone faces and folded hands,
the unwilling bowing timbers
that farewell summer of ’49.
XVI
Forever stilled in black and white,
an old picture framed and forgot
awaits the stranger’s chance remark:
“I knew this place of smoke and flame;
I knew this time of darkness and burning light.”
/
G.C. COMPTON is a three-time winner of the Appalachian Heritage Plattner Award for Writing Excellence, winner of the George Scarbrough Poetry Prize, the Kudzu Poetry Prize, and the New Southerner prize for both fiction and poetry. He is the uncle of Appalachian author Sheldon Lee Compton and lives in Pike County, Kentucky with his wife Sharon.