The Essay A Novel Read online

  Robin Yocum

  Arcade Publishing • New York

  Copyright © 2012 by Robin Yocum

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Datais available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-766-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication for Ronald E. Yocum 1934-2008.

  The best man I’ve ever known

  Acknowledgments

  A

  few weeks before my dad died, my mother read the first draft of this novel to him in the hospital. It was the first time in weeks that he wasn’t focused on his illness, and I was glad he was able to hear this story. He was a great influence in my life, and I miss him every day. Dad taught me there is no disgrace in failure, and a bloody nose is rarely fatal. And, more important, when you are the recipient of a non-fatal bloody nose, wipe it off and get back in the game. These are pretty simple rules to live by, and they are invaluable if you want to be a writer.

  I am extremely fortunate to have Colleen Mohyde in my corner. She is a tremendous agent and a tireless worker on my behalf.

  My editor, Lilly Golden, makes the editing process remarkably easy. She is gifted with a keen eye and a light touch, which any writer would appreciate.

  I have long relied on the artist skills of Jeff Vanik, the owner of Vanik Design, and I tip my hat for his great work on the cover of this book.

  Prologue

  S

  andor Kardos has spent eighty-one of his ninety-three years on this earth working in a coal mine. His arthritic fingers have gnarled together in a single mass, twisting around one another like a young girl’s braids. They have no singular dexterity, and he uses the mass and his thumb to pinch items like lobster claws. “I ain’t playin’ the piano anymore, that’s for sure,” he tells me, laughing at his own joke until he falls into a coughing fit that turns his face purple.

  He pronounces it “pi-anna,” and later concedes he had never played at all. He was simply going for the laugh. The cough is the result of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day for the past eight decades—one million one hundred sixty-eight thousand cigarettes. “It’s not a habit; it’s a choice,” he says. Either way, his voice resonates like the grinding gears of a winch. “The doctor’s always on my ass to give ’em up. He says my lungs look like two dead crows. What the hell? If that’s the case, sounds like the damage is done. I’m ninety-three. Something’s gotta kill me.”

  Despite his arthritis, Sandor is surprisingly deft with his crustaceous hands. Clutching a fresh pack of smokes in his left hand, he uses the elongated thumbnail of the right and the few snagged teeth remaining in his head to open the pack and work a cigarette between his lips. With the thumb on his left hand, he spins the wheel of a Zippo and lights the smoke. After a deep drag, he presses a palm to his chin, pinches the butt and pulls it away from his mouth.

  By his own admission, Sandor smokes too much, drinks too much, and given the opportunity, he would screw too much. “The problem is, I’ve outlived all my prospects,” he says.

  His grandson, Greg, the loud one who has an opinion on everything, has just finished loading a dump truck full of coal and overhears his grandfather’s comments. “How about the widow Birnbaum?” he offers. “She was trying to jump your old bones for a while.”

  Greg has a knack for getting under Sandor’s aging skin. There’s a lot of good-natured ribbing that goes on at the mine, but Sandor thinks his grandson is a wise guy and, worse, lazy, because he drives the truck and refuses to go into the mine where the heavy lifting is done. “She’s probably closer to your age than mine,” Sandor says. “Why don’t you go service her?”

  “Not me, pops. I’m a married man.”

  Sandor grins. The boy has left himself wide open and Sandor counterpunches. “That didn’t seem to be a concern when you were traipsing all over Vinton County with that slut Gloria Stephens.” This stops Greg in his tracks. The blood drains from his face, and then reappears in brilliant bursts of crimson on his cheeks and neck. His ears look like they will explode. “You didn’t know I knew that, huh?”

  Sandor shows his teeth in a victory smile as Greg scurries into the cab, but before he can fire up the engine Sandor continues, “If the old man knows, it’s not much of a secret, is it? Your wife prob’ly knows, too.”

  “You wouldn’t know it now,” Sandor says, “but in the old days, when the coal mines and gas wells and timber mills were booming, McArthur was a jumpin’ place. On Saturday nights, the ladies would come up from Portsmouth, if you know what I mean?” He winks. “For two dollars, you could get yourself a belly full of beer and go into the back room with one of the gals—made for a nice night.” He squints. “What’s a prostitute cost these days?”

  “I don’t partake,” I say, “but I’d wager that it’s more than two dollars.”

  “Yeah, prob’ly so. The price of everything’s gone up.”

  It was a cool Friday in June when we visited the Kardos & Sons Mining Company, a deep shaft operation in Wilkesville Township in the southern part of hardscrabble Vinton County, Ohio.

  Sandor Kardos tells me he was not much more than a baby when his parents left the northern Hungarian city of Gyor for southeastern Ohio. His earliest memory is of swaying in a canvas hammock in the steerage compartment of an ocean liner heading to America. As he tells me the story, he claims the swill and fetid human tang of the ship’s bowels still permeates his nostrils. He was just twelve when his father Janos took him to the coal mine. He says he can hardly remember a day of his life when he wasn’t at the mine. At twenty-two, he bought property and started his own mining company.

  The company has ten employees—all Kardos males: Sandor, his two remaining sons, Lester and Pete, five grandsons and two great grandsons. (A ceiling collapse in Kardos Mine No. 3 claimed the life of Sandor’s youngest son Benjamin in 1952. “I told that boy a hundred times to shore up the roof with pillars before he ran his bolts,” Sandor says. “But, he didn’t want to listen. He was a hard-head, that one, and it killed him. A coal mine ain’t no place for creativity.”)

  Coal mining is brutal work, but the Kardos males, save for Greg, don’t complain. They know they’re fortunate to have the work. It’s their heritage, but it is also a dying industry. They aren’t rich, but, by Vinton County standards, they’re doing quite well. They sell coal to locals, who still use it to heat, and supply Appalachian industries that still have coal-fired furnaces. Unlike many of their contemporaries, they don’t drive to Columbus on trash night to scrounge for scrap metal or items to put in the perpetual yard sales along Route 50.

  Sandor no longer works inside the mine. His leathery lungs and arthritis have restricted his duties to manning the traction line that hauls the coal cars to the surface of the s
lope mine. While technology has changed mining operations nearly everywhere else, the Kardos & Sons Mining Company hasn’t changed much since he opened his first mine in 1931. The exception is the traction line, which is operated by a gasoline generator that replaced mules for hauling the coal cars out of the mine. “Too damn temperamental,” Sandor says of the mules. “And the sonsofabitches will eat you out of house and home.”

  I like Sandor Kardos. He is the very reason why I’m in the newspaper business. I love capturing snapshots of individuals who have carved a life for themselves from the hardscrabble. And really, who doesn’t want to be like Sandor Kardos? He’s happy with his life, spry, still excited to get out of bed in the morning, enjoys a nip of whiskey, and at ninety-three years old is still thinking of ways to get laid.

  Fritz Avery walks out of the mine at about three, two cameras and a bag of photo equipment draped over his shoulders. He is covered with a thin film of coal dust, and dirty rivulets of sweat streak the sides of his face. He is puffing for air.

  As a news photographer, Fritz Avery has few peers. He works hard and consistently gets the shot when covering a story. In newsroom parlance, the shot is the poignant instant in time when human emotion and drama collide with the real world. It is the instant that a mother collapses in the courtroom after her only son is given the death penalty. The moment a Marine snaps off a salute after handing a veiled widow a folded American flag. Or the jubilant leap of a high school basketball player as a last-second shot hits nothing but net. Fritz has an incredible knack for capturing those scenes.

  His considerable photographic talents aside, I can hardly stand to be around him. I like Fritz just fine, but he wears me out.

  He talks incessantly, blathering in a high-pitched, squeaky voice that makes listening to him the equivalent of chewing on aluminum foil. He is a notorious gossip and can talk for hours on end. You don’t really have conversations with Fritz, you just listen and nod. Reporters at the Daily Herald have been known to fake illnesses to avoid prolonged assignments with him. When Harold Brown, one of my colleagues on the Daily Herald’s projects desk, learned that I was going on a week-long assignment with Fritz, he asked, “Who did you piss off?”

  Fritz and I are nearing the end of our week-long sojourn into the hills of the tri-state area of northern Kentucky, southern Ohio, and western West Virginia, working on a series of stories on Appalachia’s dying coal mine industry, capturing in words and images those who spend their lives underground. Mining is hard, dirty work, and many live near the poverty level. Still, they singularly pray for a day when the country will again need their coal and men can return to the mines en masse. The Kardos & Sons Mining Company is one of the few bright spots of the week.

  Later that afternoon, Fritz and I are on our way to the hotel in Chillicothe when we crest the knoll on County Road 12 just outside of Zaleski where the remnants of the Teays Valley Mining Company town are splayed on the hillside to our right. Most of the wood frame houses are bleached out and abandoned, but dogs and kids run amid a few where front doors stand ajar and gray smoke curls out of the chimneys.

  “Christ Almighty, can you image living in a hellhole like this?” Fritz asks.

  I stare at the sad enclave, not answering until it is well in our rearview mirror. “Actually, Fritz, it’s not too hard for me.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I grew up in Vinton County.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  It’s a delicious little nugget for Fritz. It isn’t gossip, per se, but it is inside information. He has a glimpse into my past, a little tidbit he can drop during his next gossip session back in the photo department.

  I nod and point to a rusty white and black street sign peppered with buckshot. “I grew up right there, on Red Dog Road.”

  Fritz hits the brakes as we are flying past the dirt and pea gravel lane. We are the only car on County Road 12, so he puts it in reverse and turns onto Red Dog Road. “I can’t believe this is where you grew up. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I shrug. “I just did.”

  We drive up the road a quarter-mile to where a two-story home clings to a hillside of foxtail and milkweed. Many of the asphalt shingles that had previously covered the walls of the house had rotted off or blown away, creating a gray and black checkerboard effect. I point again. “There’s the old homestead.” Across from the house stands the gob pile, a man-made mountain of red dog, the sulfur-laced red ash that remained after the mining companies burned their coal dumps. A short distance up the road, just beyond the next crest, is a reclaimed dump generously called the Turkey Ridge Wildlife and Nature Preserve. In my childhood, killing rats at the dump made for a fun afternoon.

  Fritz parks the car at the bottom of a steep, rutted incline that would be accessible only with a four-wheel drive vehicle. “Want to take a hike up and check it out?” I ask.

  Silly question. He won’t pass up the opportunity for anything.

  We climb the hill, following the path between sticker bushes that hook our pants and rip away. Fritz is out of breath halfway up the hill. He points to a snake sunning itself on a rock. “What kind of snake is that?”

  “A milk snake.”

  “Are they poisonous?”

  “Extremely,” I say.

  He hurries up the path, occasionally glancing back at the harmless reptile.

  The house appears to be slipping off its foundation and the front porch sags under its own weight. The front door has been torn off its hinges, and every window is busted. It’s been years since anyone lived here. We walk through the downstairs, the floor boards groaning under our weight, glass crunching under our shoes. A soiled mattress is on the living room floor amid empty beer cans, reefer nubs, and spent condoms. Fritz snaps photos along the way.

  When we return outside, he says, “It must have been a lot different when you were living here.”

  It seems like another lifetime ago, but the memory is clear. “No, Fritz, not really.” I look around. The garage has burned down and the storage shed has collapsed upon itself. “Come on, let’s get back to the hotel and get something to eat.”

  Six weeks later I had completed the series of stories. I was in the photo department with Fritz and our editor, Art Goodrich, reviewing a selection of Fritz’s photographs that were to run with the stories.

  “Did he tell you he grew up in that part of Ohio?” Fritz asked Art.

  “That’s not germane to the story,” I said.

  “It might be,” Art said. “I didn’t know you were from southern Ohio? How come I didn’t know that?”

  “That’s what I asked him when he told me,” Fritz said, anxious to let Art know that he had inside information. “We’d been roaming around those damn hills for an entire week before he said anything about it. He showed me the house where he grew up. It was this little thing stuck back on a dirt road in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.”

  Art Goodrich and I had worked together at the Daily Herald for more than ten years. He had been a reporter on the political desk before his meteoric rise to editor of the paper. We’d always gotten along, but aside from playing on the newsroom softball team together, we’d never had a particularly close relationship. “Come over to my office when you’re done,” he said.

  It was after 5 PM when I walked into Goodrich’s office. He popped up from behind his desk and said, “Let’s go grab a beer.” It wasn’t a request. We walked across K Street to the Longhorn Bar & Grill and took seats at the corner of the mahogany bar.

  “Do you know what stuck with me about your series of articles?” he asked. I shook my head. “It was the fact that no one ever seems to leave that region. No matter how bad things get, no matter how long they’ve been out of work, people just stay put. That one family has three or four generations of men working alongside each other in the mine and not a one of them has any desire to leave.”

  “People get comfortable with what they know, I guess.” I sipped at a beer. “You live in this l
ittle cocoon and you’re not really aware of what’s going on outside of southern Ohio. Most of them were content to work in the coal mines like their dad and grandfathers.”

  “Was your dad a coal miner?”

  “No. He worked in a sawmill mostly. Timber was a pretty big industry.”

  “How come you didn’t end up there?”

  “I got lucky, I guess.”

  “What’s that mean—you got lucky? I don’t think that someone who grows up in abject poverty and ends up on the projects desk of the Washington Daily Herald is just lucky.” I smiled and shrugged. “How does a kid from southern Ohio end up a writer and not a coal miner?”

  “I don’t know, Art.”

  “Of course you know. You were there. I want to know how you got from there to here. I want to hear your story.”

  “That would take a while.”

  He signaled for another round of beers and asked for two menus. We ordered steaks and I told Art Goodrich how I had escaped the hollows of southern Ohio and ended up on the special projects team at the Daily Herald. When I had finished, the grease on our steak plates had congealed and he was downing the last of his carrot cake. “That’s a great yarn,” he said. “You should put that down on paper. In fact . . .”

  He pulled his cell phone from the inside pocket of his suit coat and pounded out a sequence on the keypad. Art’s brother-in-law was an editor with a New York publishing house, and within a month I was offered a contract to write my story. Art suggested I take a sabbatical to write it, but I declined. It was, after all, my story, and I didn’t need to do a lot of research.

  My story is not unusual. People escape poverty every day. We live in a country where freedom makes that possible. What makes my story different is the fact that I didn’t do it alone. I was fortunate enough to have met someone who had both faith in me and the patience to show me I needn’t be constrained by my environment or my surroundings. I was shown a path that I could not have discovered alone. And for that, I am forever grateful.