Remnants
By Kyle Owens
A cloud choked evening sky funneled its dull hue of various grays into the slits of squinted eyes. The trees stood raw in the dank air of constant drizzle while the-
“This is the tipple I was telling you about. It’s all grown up now. They’d load up the cars here and send ‘em all over the country. When I was little, I seen a line of railroad cars stretched out all the way down around that bend there waiting to be filled up with coal. See that conveyor belt? Come here, you can see it better over here. See it? It stretches one mile from there all the way back to the top of the mountain. Now how would you have liked to have been responsible for putting that together back in the 1930s?”
The wind winged up the southern edge of a tin roof which echoed its beating sound on batten over the vast-
“I was here the day Tom Ferguson fell off the top of that coal silo there. Me and my dad were standing outside the fence, I guess right over there, and were watching ‘em work on it. It was at its full height that it’s at now. I guess they were just finishing up some work on it and he fell right off of it. He landed about where that shed is over there; of course, it wasn’t there then. He hit so hard that he made an indention of about three feet into the ground. And that’s hard ground too. I seen him hit. And when he did, a bunch of green stuff splattered out of him. I didn’t even know that a body had green stuff in it. Did you? I sure didn’t. I never forgot that day, but Lord knows I tried.”
Faded and torn newspaper pages breezed the ground. Soda bottles and fast-food wrappers littered the weed tangled ditch that-
“Tom had a wife and three kids. It was hard on ‘em to make ends meet and such. Harder than we thought, turned out. About a year after it happened his wife shot all three of her kids and then shot herself in the head. She shot ‘em while they were asleep. Can you believe that? What would possess a person to do something like that? I mean- I know it’s rough and all, but still, that’s no reason to shoot and kill your kids.”
The old man wiped the back of his neck with his opened hand and it hung there like a still life painted in-
“Just some people can’t deal with things like that and they snap. I played with the oldest boy too. Even ate supper at their table a couple times. Just makes you think, don’t it?”
Ribbons of steel, rusted from the core out, stood at a slant inside the-
“That building over there was the ‘Jay Walkers’ store. Let me tell you, the coal company didn’t like that one bit. No- they tried everything they could to get them out of business, but they wouldn’t leave. They wanted everybody dependent on the company store. Mom would take us there every Saturday when she could. She would babysit and she’d get real money, not that company scrip that the coal company paid out. She didn’t want anything to do with that stuff.”
Insects piled the air as they circled about the puddles inside filtered shadows and-
“They had a baseball glove in there and me and my brother would go and covet that thing every time we went in. We’d take turns putting it on and pretend it was ours and such. Well, we went in there one day and it was gone. Some rich family bought it, I guess. It was like the end of something. I almost cried over it. You know how kids can be. They don’t always have the best perspective on life.”
A fire hydrant, with chipped red paint and sharp indentions, lanced the landscape at the corner of a-
“Over here they had a funeral home, but it burned down. They said a bunch of tramps was living in it after it was abandoned and one real cold night, they had started a fire in a barrel and it got out of hand and burnt the whole thing down. Ain’t nothing left of it now ‘cept memories. Looky here, it got so hot that it even melted the pavement.”
Wild grasses and bald dandelions spaced about the cracked and broken sidewalks that lined both sides of the abandoned-
“Oh- there’s something else I want to show you. Hop on in the truck here and I’ll take you to it. Won’t take but a minute. I promise.”
Passing fields, splayed with barns of rust and grey, attentioned the eye. Massed leaves, dirtied and faded with washes of weather, scrambled about the -
“This is the mining camp that I grew up in. The coal company built all of these houses here. Down there on the end, see that large white building? That’s the company store. You could go in there and buy things with the company scrip. Couldn’t use the scrip anywhere else, just at the company store.”
Two truck doors slammed the silence. Buildings stood barren of all hope and-
“This house here is where I lived. First time I’ve been here since- gosh, I’d say thirty years. I wonder if it’s safe to go inside?”
The door opened in halts and jerks with the push of a shoulder. Its damp wood swelled the jamb causing the-
“Man, this brings back memories. Watch yourself now. This room here was the living room. Me and my brother would play board games in the floor in front of that window while Dad read the paper. He’d always yell at us to be quiet because we always got a bit out of control. One of us was always cheating. And to be honest it was usually me doing the cheating.”
Laughter pillowed the air for the first time since-
“I was hoping to go upstairs and see my old bedroom, but looks like the stairs have collapsed into the basement. Sort of put an end to that thought, didn’t it? Maybe we can go in over this way and see what’s left. Watch your step around that hole.”
Shoes gingerly tapped the torn linoleum and-
“Here’s the kitchen. I want you to look- that cook stove is still here. I can’t believe it. Mom hated that stove. It used wood so in the summertime she’d scald with sweat just pouring off of her. The first thing she did when she moved out of here was get her an electric stove. No more wood stoves for her. No, buddy.”
Pallets of loose ceiling boards fingered about the air in a realm of-
“The eatin’ table was setting here and I’d sit in this spot and look out the window at that big hemlock in the backyard there, but it looks like the wind toppled it over or something. You know we used to climb that tree when we were younger. My brother climbed all the way to the top of the thing and when he got down, Mom switched him good. He had her scared completely to death while he was up in that thing. I could see her shaking when she was yelling for him to get down out of there.”
Eyes span time and thoughts caress the-
“I guess we better get on out of here. We may have done tempted our fate too much as it is.”
Spider webs vibrated softly in the stirring movement of the-
“Looks like it finally stopped drizzling. This house over here was mine and my brother’s best buddies. Our bedrooms faced each other there on the second floor, see those windows there? So, at night we’d open the windows up and talk to each other. We’d even do it in the winter time and that would make both our parents mad as could be. Close them windows and stop letting the heat out. You think I’m made of money? I can still hear ‘em.”
Laughter, the slap of hands, the thoughts of-
“Yeah, this brings back a lot of memories. Almost all of ‘em good too. But when the mine shut down everyone had to leave and find work somewhere else. When coal mining is all, you’ve done ain’t a whole lot of other things you’re trained to get into. Not many other jobs require walking in the dark on your hands and knees.”
Steps of yesterday weighed his mind as-
“I wonder where everybody went?”
The sun was beginning to part its last glows of ember through the lower edge of sky now. The clouds were skimming away like the forgotten waves of a gentle wake. The quarter moon reflected breaths of light and shadow onto the down below as the dark slowly drowned the day away.
Kyle Owens is a writer and comic strip artist living in Wise, Va. He has published several stories in the magazine Adventures and sold a short story to Loft Books. His work can be seen on X at @KyleOwe02309720.