Chapter VII continued.Springhill.

My cousins lived out in the land below the hill.You could see the new prison from where they were living,a big building encompassed by fence and wire,and set aside from the rest of town.It was compensation for the loss of mines,where hard and hard up,largely unskilled men could draw wages.

They lived on a rough,gritty patch of ground,in an old and used up house without paint.Nothing much grew about there except some hay that went unharvested,and some trees,farther back.There was honeysuckle too,tangled among the other growing things,but unseen.It would vie with smoldering coal for the attention of the senses.

Uptown was pretentious,with it's town clock.It was the face town tried to show the world,pristine white churches and tended lawns,and decent,even grand houses and mature and ancient trees.But the land below the hill was a mining town,with coal no longer king,but instead a deposed monarch whose reign was past.

Feet told the whole story of town.My cousins were unshod,and I watched them,wondered why they were allowed to run about without shoes.Each toe pad collected small circles of blackness,each heel became a sooty crescent of ground in grime,each nail a tiny crescent moon,under which grit gathered,The ones fortunate enough to have well formed arches would have a splotch of white or pink down the middle of the sole.Skin,thickened and iron hard,before they ever went to school.

Later,in the car my mother asked"How do they run around like that all the time?" In my mother nothing sounded like disapproval unless you listened hard.You would miss the criticism,were it there at all.But you could detect the move of her eye to a naked and soiled foot,and later,the question,"How do they run around like that." And it made me think how every few months we would go down to Main Street,back in Moncton,walk into a shoe shop or two,checking for the best deal.In each shop a man in a modest suit would come out and carefully measure our feet,then hurry off into a back room,returning with a box of perfectly fitting shoes.And we would go out into the night,into church shadowed downtown,then ride off into our clean white house,returning again in another few months.

Coal burned all the time in the lower part of Springhill. Sometimes you could see the smoke hanging close to the ground,or like dust motes in a cars headlights.Even though coal was no longer coming out of the ground,it defiled the air.It drifted from a heap of mine slag,down where the mines used to be.Some time ago it had caught fire,and burned for years.At night it would glow,and I once asked my grandfather,while we were passing if that was Hell.Dark on a moonless night and smoking,it seemed Hellish to me,and I was always happy to pass.It's sulfurous miasma would rasp at my nostrils,causing them to flare,and,after a time a vice would tighten at my temples,unless we were gone to some other place.

I thought of the coal smoke as a kind of a ghost.Had I only known. Springhill felt to me like a deeply haunted place,with apparitions coming up out of the ground,and sailing around in the dark,on  thin clouds of smoke,looking down at passing cars and coal tarnished buildings and asking to be remembered.Asking not to be left nameless.

The living  too,seemed to wear a dark veil,not by choice,but because they could never really escape it.You could see it,spotting the leaves of garden vegetables,streaking painted houses,and settling darkly on cars after the rain.And all the dresses of the housewives appeared somehow darker,lank and drooping,unlike in other little towns all about.The young girls looked slightly rough and thin,and you would have to look hard for their prettiness,as they would stand about,smoking,seemingly saying,in the harsh,plain speech of miners "Black Lung,you can't catch me."Defiant.

Sometimes you would hear people cough.My grandfather would cough up black mucous,into a paper cup,hacking away lung cells,dissolved,sometimes streaked pale red.Men would gather,down by the liquor store,down in The Junction,and I could hear their voices,like sand paper,asking for a dime,bent in the back,and looking forward to what they had to look forward to.Their livelihoods gone,they searched for ways to ease the pain of being too old to change and not ready to die.Their backs were bent,their insides dissolving,and they could never escape coal,the deposed monarch.

All things that live,live in the shadow's  cast by other things,and so Springhill became a character,personified,and you could see and know the people it brought forth,and know why they were,and how they were.