Cold Stairs
Mark Petersen
Copyright 2011 Mark Petersen
Cover designed by Kyle Stevens
Special thanks to my friends and family, specifically Bill Whalen and Jeff Stanford.
Also, much thanks to Jeff Mann and the Virginia Tech English Department for recognizing me with an award.
This story is dedicated to those brave men and women who provide our country with coal and energy.
It is also dedicated to the people of Eastern Kentucky, thank you for a great summer.
***
Harlan County, Kentucky is a land steeped in tradition, legend, and lore. It is a land where men are tough and death is brutal. Daily, men risk their lives in the sulfurous, black bowels of the earth to produce coal, the lifeblood of the region. Black and brittle, the coal is drawn out of the ground on grisly steel conveyors in exchange for the blood and sweat of men. Extraordinary men, who descend into and rise up from hell countless times. Men who work under the watch of Death, who may at any time use his scythe to pry a slab of slate from the roof to seal a miner’s fate.
In the short time I was there I seldom saw the sun. The mountains cast a shadow across the land for most of the day. The few hours the sun did shine, I spent inside those mountains. I worked in the mines, underneath the mountains, in darkness darker than the darkest of nights. I will never forget the stories I heard. I heard stories of murder and riots, fires and floods. I heard stories of great men, stories of evil men, and stories of ghosts. I present to you one such tale, as told to me by a Harlan coal miner.
***
He awoke with a throbbing headache; his entire body ached. He was dizzy and fighting for breath. If it wasn’t so bright he might have assumed he had been buried alive, but as his eyes slowly began to focus he came to realize he was lying on a hardwood floor. Face to face with a hardwood floor. He turned his head over with great pain to see not a mound of dirt over his body, but his leather recliner, all torn and bent out of shape. He grabbed the banister at the bottom of the stairs with both hands and pulled himself out from underneath the wreckage. He stood up slowly, still dizzy, and rubbed his hands over his arms and legs assessing the damage and making sure nothing was broken. The gash in his leg was still running; the cut looked fresh. He must have just fallen.
I fell down the stairs. Well, that made sense. He had fallen asleep upstairs and now he was downstairs.
I fell down the stairs in my sleep. That made considerably less sense. He had never sleepwalked as far as he knew, and somehow the chair had fallen with him. In fact, he remembered he had set the chair up in the corner of the room opposite the stairs. The more he thought about it, the less sense it made. His head throbbed.
I seem to be ok. I better go stop the bleeding and wash out these cuts. He took a small step toward the bathroom and lost his balance. He felt dizzy and slightly nauseous.
Oh God! I might have suffered head trauma, should I be standing? Who’s going to help me? I’m home alone in a new house and I don’t even have the phones hooked up yet! He began to panic.
“My name is Ryan Tucker. I am 22. I live in Harlan County Kentucky. I’m a drafter at the coal company. I’m engaged to Ronnie. My father bought this house as a wedding gift.” Suddenly he realized he was speaking out loud. Noticing his speech was clear and his memory was intact reassured him. He took a deep breath and made another step towards the bathroom. His head still throbbed, but the dizziness was clearing up a little. A few more steps and he clicked the light on and stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes were still, not darting everywhere like he supposed they might if his head was seriously hurt. His pupils seemed appropriately dilated. He guessed he was fine. After a glass of cool tap water most of the dizziness went away and the headache began to subside. He cleaned up his cuts and inspected his bruises. Stepping out into the foyer he remembered the strangeness of the situation.
I fell down the stairs in my sleep! He glanced upstairs at the dormered wooden ceiling of the upper bedroom. Other than a few scuff marks on the stairwell walls everything looked perfectly normal.
I loved that chair, dammit. Ryan kicked at the splintered wood and torn leather that had been his chair and winced in pain. Carefully climbing around the chair Ryan made his way upstairs and looked around. It was empty, as it had been last night (excluding the chair he lugged up before falling asleep, of course). There was nothing suspicious or unusual about the room at all. He poked his head in the small bathroom and closet. Again, nothing. He turned to head back downstairs and felt a cold chill run the full length of his spine, beginning on the lower back and pushing up past his head, making his hairs stand on end. He could feel a pit form in his stomach and his throat lock up. His heart thudded in his ears as he strained to hear, afraid to turn to see what was behind him. After what felt like a full minute, but was probably closer to two seconds, Ryan mustered up the courage and spun around. Nothing. Just the wood floors, warm yellow walls, and sunlight bursting in through the banks of windows.
What was that? Am I that paranoid? I’m like a child afraid of monsters in the closet. Ryan always tried hard to be a man like his father, Jim. Ryan had a job, and now he had a house, and it wouldn’t be long before he had a wife. He had to be a man, but every now and then he felt like a boy underneath it all. He felt like he was just pretending, fooling the world. A lot of the time he could fool himself too. It was only when he jumped at monsters or daydreamed about being a super hero that he realized it was just an act. He looked down, there were still goose bumps fading on his forearms.
Grow up Ryan. Jim wouldn’t be such a pussy. Jim was a big man, a hard man. He worked his whole life in the mines and still seemed to have many more years to go. At first glance, Jim looked like he was pretty fit for his age: muscles bulging out his white tee shirts and a youthful spring in his walk, but when one realized he was only forty he looked old. Jim wore an old face, weathered by the pressures of raising an unplanned child right out of high school, his career in the mines, and all the beatings he got as a kid raising hell with his buds as a teenager. Jim was tough as nails. Ryan wasn’t. Ryan never raised hell, he never even got in trouble at school. In fact, he had done exceptionally well in school. He even made it into college and attended a full year before dropping out. It wasn’t that his studies were too hard, he just didn’t fit in. He hated being away from home and he didn’t see the sense in wasting his father’s money doing something he hated. Jim pulled some strings at work and got Ryan a job doing CAD work in the office with the white collar boys. It paid well and suited Ryan a lot better than mining. He wasn’t like Jim.
Ryan sighed and gathered up the remains of his chair and put them by the curb with the trash.
After a quick breakfast Ryan washed up, hoping to make himself more presentable. Jim was coming over to help him move stuff upstairs and Ryan didn’t want to explain how he’d gotten all banged up. After a shower he looked a lot better, but the bruises were still plenty obvious. Ryan prepared a lie as he continued unpacking cartons in the kitchen waiting for his dad. About halfway through unpacking the first carton, Ryan heard Jim’s fist rapping on the door. Ryan shouted, “Come on in!” as he stood up and walked toward the foyer.
“Well, what do you think of the place?” Jim said, looking around with his hands on his hips, obviously proud of the gift he had gotten his son. It wasn’t especially large, but it was in good condition for having been built during the coal boom in the 1920s. It was made completely of brick, with a recently re-shingled roof. After entering the front door one was greeted with stairs leading up, a small living room to the left, and a powder room and small laundry to the right. Behind the living room was a small kitchen with a
n even smaller sunroom towards the back. In the other corner was a small bedroom with its own small bathroom. Upstairs was one large bedroom with its own bathroom and a beautiful gabled wood roof. Topping off the property was a large yard backed by lush forest.
“Oh, it’s great Pop. Incredibly generous of you. It’s perfect and I know Ronnie is going to love it.” Neither Ryan nor Ronnie were supposed to know about the house before the wedding, but Jim had told Ryan early and gave him a key so he could get moved in. Ronnie still hadn’t seen the place.
“It’s a nice place, I’m quite impressed myself. Looks even better with furniture in it.” Jim plopped down on the couch in the living room. “Looks like you got a little banged up there, boy.”
Ryan said the lie he’d