Trapped Under Coal Valley

By Terry Brazier

On a cold February morning in 1908, the ground under Coal Valley, Illinois, trembled as an earthquake opened the earth, collapsed mining tunnels, and created chasms and fissures as deep as five hundred feet below the rolling hills. It would forever be known as Coal Valleys great cave-in.

Thirteen men lay trapped for three months as tensions rose among the townspeople, rescuers, and families of the trapped miners. One rescue attempt after another failed due to aftershocks, weather, and just plain bad luck.

The dangers were great below ground, but the twisted minds of some of the towns inhabitants made the danger even greater at the surface.

A story of adventure, suspense, greed, romance, fantasy, and redemption that will leave the reader wondering who or what was actually trapped under Coal Valley. Was it just the miners, the apparitions that they faced, or was it the underground dwellers whose intelligence was advancing at such a rapid pace that they were preparing for their place in the sun?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504915915

Terry Brazier

Terry Brazier earned his B.A. in psychology and M.B.A. from the University of Missouri. After graduation, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps. His professional career spanned forty years in systems analysis and application programming for a variety of industries and major computer manufacturers. He lives near St. Louis, MO.

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© 2015 Terry Brazier. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/11/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1592-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-1591-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015909002

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Historical Background

Mines Haunted By Spirits

Brain Power

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Epilogue

The Greatest Gift

A Secret Is Revealed

A New Assistant

A Bully Transformed

Remembering What Might Have Been

Love Blooms Anew

The Ghosts Of The Coal Valley Mine

The Ending Or A New Beginning?

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to that hardy bunch of souls who toiled deep within the earth risking life and limb to bring us that ugly black solid fuel of vegetable origin that we owe our very existence to as a nation – Coal.

By 1900, coal comprised about 95 percent of all fossil fuel energy production. Our appreciation goes out to these tough individuals and their families for providing the fuel required for the world’s thriving commerce. In many mining communities, the entire family, father and sons became miners. This was not due to merely job availability but to a staunch pride in what they were doing. Sons were proud of their fathers. If their fathers were miners, the sons wanted to become a miner like dad. It was an honorable profession which required tough men.

The miners knew the hardship of shrinking coal fields and the implementation of more advanced equipment, both of which resulted in fewer miners having jobs. In 1914 at the peak, there were 180,000 anthracite miners; by 1970, only 6,000 remained. Most out-of-work miners moved to the cities to find work or back to the hills where they started. The city of Glen Carbon was more fortunate than some cities as it had a lucrative farming industry; and neighboring towns, like Granite City, had manufacturing facilities where the miners could work.

Perhaps the greatest monuments to the coal industry are the towns that sprang up in their wake and now are lasting tributes to the labors of these early coal miners. Although, the mines may be gone, the towns that they created are forever re-inventing themselves to stay vital and strong in today’s economy and the economy of tomorrow.

One such town, Glen Carbon, Illinois, was and is such a town. It was the writer’s privilege to have lived there and to borrow some of its early history as a setting for this novel.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Sheila Martin, the former Museum Coordinator at the Glen Carbon Heritage Museum, for providing historical information pertaining to the Madison Coal Corporation and St. Louis Press Brick Company and for a tour of the museum. It made one feel like a time traveler going back more than a century to a much different time. I would recommend visiting the museum to anyone interested in the history of Glen Carbon and the industries that made it what it is today. The museum is located in a century old school house at 124 School Street on a picturesque hill just several blocks off Main Street.

The author wishes to extend a special thank you to his brother-in-law, John Elliff, who has been a respected resident of Glen Carbon for more than fifty years, an active parishioner of St. Cecelia’s Church, and a member of the Police Pension Board for Glen Carbon. John gave the author a guided tour of the past sites of the mine and brick companies where traces of their existence remain today. John and wife, Dolores, actually live on a private roadway that was used by the St. Louis Press Brick Company to transport their clay.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PROLOGUE

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The location for this story is the mythical town called Coal Valley. Its namesake, Glen Carbon, Illinois, actually exists; although, all events and happenings are the creation of the author. The author used many of the historical facts of Glen Carbon such as the Madison Coal Corporation and the St. Louis Press Brick Company that gave the town its prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a backdrop for this fictional account of the greatest mine disaster to hit the Coal Valley Mine.

The Madison Coal Corporation was considerably more fortunate than the Coal Valley Mine. Although, the loss of life wasn’t entirely avoided in the real life mine, they never had a disaster of such a magnitude as the fictional version.

The name of Glen Carbon refers to its early claim to fame as the Valley of Coal, and their logo consists of the silhouette of a coal miner to remind residents and visitors, alike, about their history. Many coal mines existed in the area of Illinois, and the Madison Coal Corporation was the largest employer in Glen Carbon. Its seven layers of tunnels followed the numerous veins of coal and extended underground to a depth of more than 500 feet. The three separate mines were within walking distance of the downtown and residential area. Its largest Mine No. 2 opened in 1891 and at its peak had about 350 employees. Madison Coal Corporation’s entire mining operation was closed for business in 1931 because of competition from Peabody Coal, or so the rumor goes.

Along with the mines, the St. Louis Press Brick Company was another large employer in Glen Carbon. It opened in 1884 and made bricks from the shale clay from the bluffs. Its claim to fame was the fact that they supplied all the bricks used in the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. It closed up shop in 1906 due to a fire.

In 1892 with a population of 400 people and less than two square miles in area, the townspeople voted to incorporate Glen Carbon into a village.

Businesses such as a general store, theatre, ice cream parlor, a butcher shop, a bottling company, saloons, and doctors’ offices were established. A school and several churches were built; and organizations such as a volunteer fire department, German singing society, baseball teams, and fraternal organizations were founded.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Glen Carbon was a coal-producing city like its neighboring cities. The country depended on coal for its energy supply, and Madison County ranked fifth in coal output for Illinois. In the early 1900s, Glen Carbon continued to grow to a population of about 1100 because of the prosperous coal mining business. Glen Carbon also had a farming community, as did the surrounding towns. European immigrants such as Bohemians, Italians, Germans, Polish, Irish, Welch, and Russian were also attracted to Glen Carbon.

Glen Carbon was different from most of the surrounding towns because it was a Company Town. The Madison Coal Corporation and the St. Louis Press Brick Company owned much of the land. Both companies built saltbox type houses for their workers to rent. The coal company owned about 100 homes for their workers. The Madison Coal Corporation was a very benevolent company. They donated land for churches, parks, and a village hall. It provided recreational facilities such as tennis courts, playgrounds, and baseball diamonds. They worked for the good of the village.

The Glen Carbon of today is a marvelous community across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. It is a thriving city of 12,947 people as of 2013, bordered by the cities of Edwardsville on the north, Troy on the east, and Collinsville on the south.

Upon entering the community from the Interstate, it is a Mecca for the usual retail stores and eating establishments with few shops remaining that were indigenous to the area just a couple of decades ago and that have survived the influx of regional and national competitors.

The pastures and farmland have been eaten up by urban sprawl; and for the most part, the urbanization of the rural area was done in a tasteful and aesthetically pleasing manner. Glen Carbon’s Main Street and historical area haven’t changed very much. Many of the old saltbox homes that were owned by the local coal mine and rented to the miners still stand as a testament to days long past.

In our story, Seth had to visit the Edwardsville Library to find books on Zoology that were of interest. He hoped in 1903 that some day his hometown of Coal Valley would build a library and his wishes were fulfilled in 2004. Glen Carbon opened their new library on Main Street adjacent to the town’s historic covered bridge amongst the saltbox homes built in times long past. The library incorporates the towns mining history in its lighting fixtures resembling coal mine lamps and its exposed wood beams and rafters. It’s a beautiful structure and worth visiting. It was awarded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Library Journal’s Best Small Library in America in 2010.

Structures and memories exist of both the mining and brick businesses still to this day. Homeowners are still reminded of the early history. Families purchasing homeowner’s insurance must include mine subsidence insurance in their policies because of the old tunnels that exist below the town. It’s not unheard of for sink holes and structures in neighboring communities, above tunnels created by other mining companies, to begin to sink – not common but it does occur. Glen Carbon has been fortunate, however, that the Madison Coal Corporation always practiced good mining techniques and left enough coal in the form of pillars to support the roof, so subsidence never became much of an issue in Glen Carbon.

The author was fortunate enough to have lived in Glen Carbon for the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was early enough that he remembers the slower pace of the town with its numerous railroad tracks intersecting the roads throughout town. During the late 1880s, several railroads were built that passed through the Glen Carbon area as the result of the coal industry. The roadway and railroad tracks flirted with the base of the hills that meandered through the Main Street area of Glen Carbon and provided a convenient way to move coal to other communities. There are very few railroad tracks remaining; and they, now, go either under or over the automobile thoroughfares. Beautiful bike and walking paths have replaced other old rail lines.

When writing a book of fiction, the author often asks himself the question over and over again – what if?

Thus, from such questioning, the author writes a book that is enticing to the reader. For the book you’re now holding, the author asked the questions, what if we could go back in time to the early 1900s and visit Glen Carbon in its coal mining glory days. What if, besides the miners down deep in the earth, other things were capable of living down in the depths? What if an earthquake twisted and cracked the earth trapping miners and their mules and unleashing other underground inhabitants; and what if, in the final analysis, there were more humanity in these underground dwellers than in some of the so-called humanity living above ground. What if …?

MINES HAUNTED BY SPIRITS

Stories abound of mines haunted by spirits and ghosts. Mines are such scary places with their history of gruesome tragic accidents, explosions, and trapped men suffocating by poison gases. Some of the ghost stories have to do with tiny children who years ago toiled in the mines until their frail bodies succumbed from the labor and lack of fresh air. Stories abound how they haunt the caves.

On more than one occasion, miners observed a blue glowing light, the size of a child, moving around in the tunnels ahead of them. There are legends told by old miners of balls of blue light, which moved around in the tunnels until they reached the surface where they floated off into the sky.

The mules that toiled in the mines were notorious and respected for their strange instinct for self-preservation. Many mules lead miners to safety with their foreboding of impending disaster. It’s true that their senses of smell, hearing, and perhaps feelings of earth tremors may be more highly developed than a humans and had something to do with their seemingly psychic behavior. Perhaps, too, they can sense a presence when their human counterpart ignores it because the feeling seems to have no basis in fact. The old phrase, Trust your intuition, could apply here.

It’s been said that if ghosts don’t exist in coal mines, then they don’t exist at all. Does the reader believe it possible that he or she could have a visitation by a loved one as they bid their final farewell? In other words, do you believe in ghosts or spirits?

A 1992 Harris Poll found that 35 percent of adults in America believed in ghosts. An astounding 42 percent believed they had spoken with or seen dead relatives. The writer has to admit that he believes because while he slept, he received a visit from his uncle he hadn’t seen in years; and the next day, he learned of his uncle’s passing.

Continuing with the what ifs, what if spirits and ghosts were possible down in those tunnels under Coal Valley? Moreover, if they did exist, would they be malevolent of benevolent?

BRAIN POWER

It’s been said that human beings only use ten percent of their brain. Others argue that it isn’t true. They say human beings use all of their brain, just different parts of it at any point in time. Regardless of whether you say it could be utilized more fully or more efficiently, just imagine if through random evolution, some creature, not necessarily human, learned to utilize more of their brain more efficiently because of its changing environment. Could they be as smart as a human or could they be even smarter?

In addition, what if the basic mechanics of the brain could be altered? Perhaps, one such variable might be explained by the metaphor used for the first computers that relied on something called virtual memory before the advent of the modern super computers with their millions of separate processors or memories. When computers only had one memory, they would dynamically divide various tasks and jump from processing one task to another giving the impression that it was doing more than one thing at a time. It was up to the user to tell the computer which tasks ought to have the higher priorities, thus allowing the computer to finish the higher priority tasks faster than it would otherwise.

The early computers sound a little bit like the human mind in that they had only one processor but they were required to do simultaneous jobs. Just as a person has only one brain but he tries to perform more than one task at a time like drive a car and talk on the phone. Both the computer and brain have to time-share to get the job done.

There are reports that the human male thinks about sex once every seven seconds whether he wants to or not – that’s 7200 times a day, assuming he gets a full 10 hours of sleep! Pretty astounding if it were true. In a recent study, Ohio State University researchers gave men a clicker; and they were asked to hit the button every time the thought of sex came to mind. Their study showed that the average man had 19 thoughts about sex in a day. As inexact as such a study was, let’s assume the correct frequency is somewhere between these extremes. What if through evolutionary influences, the human male could avoid these interruptions. Using something similar to virtual memory, he wouldn’t have to waste the memory cycles and could concentrate on the tasks at hand. Wouldn’t it appear to an outside observer that the individual was a faster thinker and, therefore, more intelligent?

In referring to the brain, to say anything is impossible simply denies fact. The regaining of function of stroke victims demonstrates the redundancies found in the brain to discover new pathways for physical and cognitive function.

Professor John Lorber, who held a research chair at Sheffield University in England, released a paper in Research News in Science more than thirty-five years ago regarding his observations on a series of hydrocephalics that throws into question many traditional notions about the brain, both in clinical and scientific terms.

There was a student at the university with an IQ of 126, gaining first-class honors degree in mathematics, and appeared socially completely normal. The student was a hydrocephalic with only a fraction of the normal brain tissue. His cranium was filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid.

The case is nothing new to the medical world. However, the question is how can someone with a grossly reduced cerebrum not only move among his fellows with no apparent social defect but also reach high academic standards? Posing another question, how is it that an individual with one side of the brain severely distorted can show no expected one-sided paralysis?

Physicians not so long ago lacked instruments to detect brain waves. The fact that we weren’t able to detect something did not prove its absence.

Many questions exist that, hopefully, will allow the reader to imagine some unlikely scenarios regarding creature intelligence. Just remember the old adage that real life can be stranger than fiction.

1

July 1903 Coal Valley, Illinois

Seth’s eyes nervously searched the surrounding hills for any sign of movement. The July afternoon sun baked the nearby bricks lying in the drying area, and the air was humid with just a bare hint of a breeze. Seth’s short shirtsleeves were soaking wet with perspiration from wiping his forehead. His wet sleeves had begun to cling to his armpits giving off a ripe odor of sausage and limburger cheese from his lunch mixed with his crusted perspiration.

He knelt down and pried the foliage apart from the tangled weeds circling a cluster of rocks near the brick drying area. The weeds gently swayed like the delicate fingers of a ballet dancer. His hand fell upon a squirming, furry object; and he felt the tongue of the creature on his palm. A small squeak permeated the thick afternoon air. Seth fondly grabbed the creature’s body and slowly stroked its underside – more squeaks.

Seth asked in a soft voice so no one would hear, Have you been a good boy, Albert?

The rat stared up at Seth and seemed to understand. At least Seth thought so, and the affirmative nod of Albert to Seth’s question further reinforced Seth’s belief.

Seth gave Albert a hunk of leftover cheese from his lunch and placed him back in the small depression within the cavity between the rocks. He replaced the leaves and branches to camouflage Albert’s hiding place once more.

In a loving voice he said, Take your afternoon nap, Albert, and I’ll get you on the way home tonight.

Seth Jessup was fourteen years old. He was small for his age. He wore his brown hair long over his ears until his dad decided it was time to have it cut. His dad performed the trimming duties with a pair of sheers his father had used on him as a boy. His most distinguishing characteristic was his eyeglasses that sat atop his rather beakish nose and slightly magnified his bright brown, intelligent looking eyes. He had long since got used to the other boys calling him four eyes. He’d just remark, All the better to see you with; four eyes are definitely better than two.

He had quit school to work in the brickyard. The company was hiring anyone that wanted to work including kids that lied about their age but looked like they could handle the physical demands of the job. The company employed over 300 people. In less than one year, St. Louis would be the site for the World’s Fair; and the Coal Valley Press Brick Company had gotten the contract to furnish all the bricks for construction of the structures needed. Twelve kilns were operating at full capacity. It was hot and dirty work but not unlike most of the jobs in the brickyard when by the end of the day, a worker might lose several pounds to perspiration but gain five percent of their body’s weight in wet clay clinging to their limbs and torso. His job was that of an off-bearer, someone who removed the filled moulds from the moulding table, took them to the drying area, removed the bricks from the moulds, and placed them on a level bed of sand. Then he would return the mould to the table and wet and sand it to receive the next brick from the brick moulder.

The temperer, Carl, was delivering a load of clay from the pug mill or soaking pit. This was where the clay was prepared to the correct consistency with the help of mules walking the endless path around the mill.

Delivery of the clay to the soaking pit came from a bluff nestled in the hills about one-half mile southwest of the brickyard. A steam shovel was excavating the shale pit located at the base of the rolling hills that made up the topography in the area. In the early days, men used a pick and shovel to excavate the clay before mule and wagon transported it over dirt roads to the pug mill. Truck transport was beginning to replace animal power. The roadway was hilly, twisting like a snake and full of potholes with shale trucks too heavy to be traveling them.

After checking on Albert, Seth had just returned the mould to the moulding table when Carl said derisively, Hey, squirt, don’t forget tonight about seven o’clock.

Carl Hoff was nineteen with a straggly growth of beard and long, stringy hair drawn back in a ponytail that dangled over one knotty shoulder. His pencil thin physique and six foot frame belied his agility and strength that were required to be a temperer at the brick company. He had been the temperer since his promotion from off-bearer several years earlier. It was even dirtier work than Seth’s job, but it required more skill as Carl made sure the clay received the correct preparation to obtain the perfect consistency for the moulding process.

Seth never forgot what Carl had told him about the wet clay being your friend. Carl had said that he purposefully covered himself in clay to keep himself cool and sunburn free. He had attended a Barnum and Baily Circus when he was kid; and while he was exploring the Big Top from the back lot, one of the elephant keepers said the elephants liked to wade in the mud to keep themselves cool. With Carl’s slim frame, it really didn’t take him long to spread mud over himself. Some of the other workers accused him of keeping the same mud on for weeks. Carl would get angry and say, I take a bath every week whether I need one or not. Seth tried to emulate Carl and his mud ritual; but his mother, Barbara, would have none of it and made him go to the flooded shale pit to clean himself off before she’d allow him into the house. Seth decided it was too much effort but he still thought it was a good idea.

Seth watched as Carl delivered the wet clay to the assistant brick moulder who was called the clot. The clot prepared a lump of clay and gave it to the brick moulder who was the key to the operation and the head of the team. The brick moulder and his assistant would stand at the moulding table for the entire day making 3500-5000 bricks each day. The brick moulder took the clay and rolled it in sand and dashed it into the sanded mould. He would then press it with his own hands. Seth enjoyed watching him and the skill it took to form the bricks with his hands with such consistency and in such large quantities.

Seth eyed Carl and waited until he had unloaded his clay. He didn’t want the moulder to take notice as he’d scream at him for not keeping his mind on his work. When Seth thought he was out of earshot, he asked, Carl, Any chance of having a couple cold ones tonight?

If you think you’re worth it kid, Carl sarcastically said. You better make good on your promise or else."

The older boys at work had just accepted Seth as a drinking partner.

I will, Carl. You’ll see, replied Seth.

Seth’s age had been a factor in the other boys allowing him to drink with them. It wasn’t a matter of any minimum drinking age as there were no laws as such. A kid could only get into trouble if he got drunk and became unruly. It was more of a concern that he wasn’t yet old enough to appreciate a good brew and that it would just go to waste.

The other boys didn’t know that he had developed a taste for beer early on and had started drinking beer long before any of them. Seth had fond memories of his visits to his Uncle Jake’s home when he was just a little kid about three or four. The first thing he would do, while the adults were busy greeting each other, was to sneak onto the storage area by the back door where no one could see him. It was there that Uncle Jake and Aunt Elizabeth stored their empty and unopened beer bottles. He would lift each empty bottle to his lips and drink the last of the warm dregs. The thought never occurred to him to open a fresh bottle. In his defense, though, he was just a dumb little kid.

Most of the day at the brickyard, Seth worked by himself with the periodic visits to the brick moulder to pick up a new supply of bricks to be dried. The brick moulder was quite a bit older than Seth so there was no camaraderie between them.

The older people at the brickyard: the brick moulders, the steam shovel operators that mined the clay, and the guys that fired the bricks didn’t have much to do with him. They were all married and had families and were always talking about their kids.

Seth’s most loyal buddy that he spent the most time with was a friend that no one knew anything about, not even his parents. He just happened to find him by accident one evening while he was looking through the old trash dump. The musky scent of rodents pervaded the fenced grounds of Coal Valley Waste Management. In the far corner of the property, animals had dug a hole under the fence – probably, wild dogs seeking a meal. Seth found it easy to slither under the fence and poke around in there in the evening. You never knew what you might find. One time he had found a neat pocketknife with a pearl handle.

There was one particular night, though, that stuck out in his memory above all the others. The temperature had been dropping precipitously since the afternoon sun began to be swallowed by the earth. The night air, thick with mist and laden with the fragrance of crops and vegetation, was drifting in. It was then that he heard a commotion and happened to see Mia, one of Henrietta’s cats that had found a nest of rats. The mother rat looked like it had put up a gallant fight, but Mia had exposed the buried nest and managed to kill the mother rat and eight of her brood. Mia was just about to finish off the last of the youngsters when Seth arrived and gave her a good swat with his foot before she could bite off the baby’s head.

Seth took the pink, blind, and still hairless baby home with him, fed it milk through a tiny eyedropper, and started to carry it around with him in his shirt pocket. It seemed to be smart enough to lay low when it detected other people present. When it became too big for Seth’s shirt pocket, he carried it to work in his lunch pail and then made a little hole with camouflage surrounding it near his work place. When no one was watching, Seth would visit it throughout the day, pet it, and give it a little attention. At quitting time, Seth would gather it up and they’d go home together. Albert, the name that Seth selected for him, was turning out to be quite smart.

Seth and his friend played games together. Albert loved to play hide-and-seek. Seth would give Albert a minute to hide and then announce, Ready or not, here I come. Because Albert was so small and could hide in really small places, Seth seldom found him.

Seth would make a big show of looking for him and then act like he was really mad when he couldn’t find him. He would say, Okay, Albert. I give up. Show yourself.

Albert would scamper out from his hiding place all excited, jumping up and down, and even turning a few summersaults. To reward him, Seth would rub his belly. Albert made squeals of delight as he rolled on his back.

When Seth was with his human friends, they liked to talk about girls and the next practical joke they would play on the miners. The youth at the brick company didn’t share the same good will that the adults at both organizations enjoyed. The Brick Tile and Terra Cotta Workers Alliance and United Mine Workers Association actually worked closely with one another. The brick company used the shale from the mines in the construction of the bricks, and the brick company aided the mine in eliminating a worthless byproduct of coal production. It was a symbiotic relationship. Seth and his friends at the Coal Valley Brick plant didn’t like several things about the miners. They made more money because they had a stronger union than the brick company, and the Coal Valley Coal Company treated them better. It was cooler underground and they even had ventilation fans. If those weren’t enough reasons to be jealous of the miners, the younger mine workers were all ass-holes.

Yea, thought Seth with anticipation. The new practical joke that he had planned would get those little farts’ attention. The brick boys would finally get even; and more importantly, he would earn the respect of the older brick boys and Carl.

2

Seth was anxious to meet with his work buddies that evening, but he had some preparations to make. First, though, he had to take a hot bath in the old washtub in front of the fireplace. To conserve on the time needed to pump more water and to heat it over the fire, he would always allow his father, Pete, who had returned from the mine, to take his bath first. After his dad was finished, Seth would allow some of the dirt to settle at the bottom and then he’d hop in the tub. The arrangement worked quite nicely. As soon as he changed into some clean jeans and T-shirt, he crept under his parents’ company home to retrieve his secret weapon.

Seth had dug a pit in an area about eight feet by three feet and two feet deep and then placed a wire cage he had constructed inside of the hole. He removed the thin blanket from its top to reveal a brown wave of motion underneath. He had been raising the rats for the past eight months and had caught the original six rats in traps he had made and placed around the city dump. He was hoping to get a mixture of both sexes and figured correctly that he would, by sheer chance, have at least one male and one female. He had read about rats in several zoology books he’d found at the Edwardsville Public Library. It was one of the oldest libraries in Illinois having been chartered in 1823 and about a thirty-minute bike ride from his home in Glen Carbon. Some rich guy named Andrew Carnegie had just donated a bunch of money to make the library even bigger. Seth enjoyed visiting the library every couple of weeks and looked forward to their new renovation. He hoped, someday, Coal Valley could have its own library.

His rat research had revealed that you could tell the sex of a rat by checking out their underside. Female rats have 12 nipples on their chest while the males have very large testicles for their size. Brown rats became sexually active at four months, and they could have as many as 2000 descendants from a single pair of rats if left to breed unchecked for only a