Hammerton

By Greg Tuck

Hammerton is a mining town in West Virginia. Built in a naturally formed crater, it is only accessible via a train tunnel. A mine collapse in the late nineteen forties saw the community reduced to poverty. Rather than leave the only community they had ever known and fearing the outside world, they chose to live on government welfare. A young boy, having lost his father and brother in the collapse, was sent out into the world at the tender age of seventeen by his grieving mother. His return upon her death twenty-five years later, sees him thrust back into the same bigotry and ignorance he thought he had left behind. A major gas leak and some startling evidence he finds helps to unlock some of the town’s mysteries and also to re-examine his own life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greg Tuck
• Release date: Jan 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215718544

Greg Tuck

I am a former primary teacher and principal, landscape designer and gardener and now a full time author living in Gippsland in the state of Victoria in Australia. Although I write mainly fictional novels, I regularly contribute to political blogs and have letters regularly published in local and Victorian newspapers. I write parodies of songs and am in the process of writing music for the large number of poems that I have written.

Book preview

Chapter 2

I walked up to my mother's place on the edge of town. Behind the dust crazed windows, furtive eyes peered through the scrim curtains. I looked straight ahead and didn't acknowledge them. I knew they were there and if I had turned to stare, the curtains would close quickly and blinds would be pulled down. It was the way of these people. They didn't wish to appear nosey but were desperate to know what was going on. They knew my mother had died. Word had come back via the train after she had left on her last journey on it. Somehow my mother had known that it was time and taken that last ride to the hospital that would be her last link with those who were still living. I'd arrived at her bedside a couple of hours too late to say goodbye. She'd died much as she had lived the last third of her life, alone. These people, behind their shrouded glass, had meant nothing to her and her to them even though she had taught many of them. They had adored her at school and then under pressure from their families had shunned her after school and once they left school entirely. There were times when I felt as guilty as they should have felt. This was not a community, but more a group of inmates trapped in a prison of their own making. A community is a living and breathing organism. Members interact and support each other. Without that social structure in place, a group of people are just individuals destined to be devoid of humanity. My mother had seen that. She had chosen to stay here because two of the loves of her life, although dead and buried deep in the hillside, couldn't be left alone. I on the other hand, she had decided, needed to experience what a real community was like.

My mother was my only teacher and in fact the only teacher in the whole town up until her death. That was a sore point with so many people. Most students ended up with eight years of education, solely delivered by her. They left as soon as they could and were drafted to the mine or to become miners' wives. That was their lot in life. I knew that my mother taught them about the world beyond and other opportunities, but that learning was quickly undone and rebuked as soon as students went home. That was not the case with my brother and I. We were being taught beyond the compulsory eight years. We were being encouraged to think more broadly and to aim higher. When my eight years were up, my mother took me on as her teaching assistant. It was a nominal position, but it not only kept me out of the mine. It allowed me to delve deeper into the books that surrounded us every day.

My brother wasn't quite as enamoured with learning as I was, but my parents were just as keen to see him explore the world. He had only gone to work in the mine to build a grubstake to live on once he exited the tunnel out into the real world. A few more months and he would have bid Hammerton goodbye. As it was, all his efforts and savings were my ticket to freedom. I hadn't wanted to accept the money he could no longer use. I was determined to make my own way. I didn't receive much as my mother's assistant and only found out later that the school only received money to pay for my mother. She was carving off some of her salary to pay my wages. In the end I relented and my brother’s partial grubstake was added to mine.

Of course, when the accident at the mine happened, there was an enquiry and a court case. Families should have received compensation for the loss of their loved ones, but the lawyers, like vultures, picked the carcass clean. There were slim pickings even for them, as the mine company filed for bankruptcy, only to set themselves up somewhere else under a new name. People in Hammerton who had insurance had bought it through the mining company and lost all chance of any payout. I reflected years later, that the company paid miners poorly anyway and then had the gall to take some of that back in the form of premiums for insurance that would never ever be paid out. The people of Hammerton never protested because either that was the way it had always been done, or because they had no real alternative employment available. There was no union in Hammerton and no government official to complain to. The mine owned the land the town was built on and, in essence, they owned the people who lived there.

Mum clashed horribly with the mine superintendent over what she taught. He just wanted ignorant workers for the mine. He felt that they needed to know just enough to work the machinery and to put their signature on forms that would sign their lives away. He threatened to have her sacked on more than one occasion. Dad didn't intervene, I thought, because he would be sacked if he had. Mum explained to me later, that was not the reason. He knew she could more than hold her own. Her killer punch was for her to resign. No other teacher would be found to teach in such a place and without a teacher and a school in place, government officials would arrive and see what was going on. When I read that in one of her letters after I escaped, I wondered why she just didn't resign anyway, so that the officials could fix up the working conditions and force the mine owners to provide facilities that were in line with, or even the bare minimum of those that the rest of the country had. I never asked her. Perhaps she didn't fully understand the power she wielded, or maybe she didn't want to be seen as the instrument of sudden and controversial change that would have made us even more seen as outsiders.

I think loyalty to my father played a big part. He had given up so much to be with her. His choice had left him with no friends and no social life. I knew it was a price he willingly paid, but he had a very sad existence outside of our home. The long exhausting hours at the mine he spent, never entered our minds, because, once the grey dust had been washed from his face and his clothes changed, no tiredness was shown to us. He was far from being a touchy-feely parent and he was very strict, but there was a warmth and a sense of humour that my brother and I lapped up. We never stayed up late. There was no set time for bed. We learned to watch our father's eyes. If they struggled to stay open, we knew it was time, because he would never sleep while we were up. Six days in a row at the mine sapped the energy from his body and we were told from an early age, that it was unfair to demand more of him than his body could realistically give. We knew he would give it unbegrudgingly, but our mother was right, it would have been unfair.

He never smoked and never drank after they were married, she would say. She hadn't demanded it, but he had decided to do that so he could provide her with life's luxuries as she would call them. A perfume bottle, a hairbrush and once even a gold-plated pen for her writing. He would also spoil us with little trinkets and some handmade toys. These were my prized possessions and I hoped they were still in my mother's house. I had no family to give them to, but I needed them for me. I needed them to remind me of the good times I had as a child, because looking back, it all seemed as bleak and as grey as the scarred hillsides that enclosed Hammerton. In exchange I would leave my mother’s ashes that I now carried in a sealed urn in my suitcase. These ashes I would scatter at the entrance to the mine so that she, dad and my brother could be reunited. This was the real reason for my silent pilgrimage. The people of Hammerton did not deserve the honour of my mother’s return even in this form, but my family did. As for my remains when my time came, well, there would be no-one to bring them home and certainly home wasn’t here.

I walked past the only church in the town. The church where we were not welcome. That had been made plain by all of the ministers that had been in charge of the church since way back. One of whom had refused to consecrate my parents’ marriage. They instead had a civil celebrant marry them on the station platform as he passed through. One of the porters on the train and the engine driver acted as witnesses to the horror of the locals. That, Mum had said, was the longest stop that a train had made at Hammerton and she seemed quite proud of the record as she told me that story when I was able to understand a little more about prejudice.

We had not grown up irreligious though, merely sceptical of people’s interpretation of religious texts. The holier than thou who attended church on Sundays were hypocrites in so many ways on the other six days of the week. Mum had said that a person’s morals and ethics should be more than just words and promises. They should be lived. My brother and I would bend the rules until they nearly snapped but we knew not to go too far. Dad’s belt was an awesome thing that kept us in check. We never felt it, but the threat was there and Dad never backed down on any threat made to anyone. I never heard him threaten Mum once though. I had heard the yells and screams in other houses in our street as adults waged war on each other, but our home was almost an oasis in a desert of abuse caused by alcohol. The mining company could have stopped it all by banning alcohol. There were few places to hide any moonshine stills that might pop up. However, the mining company owned the store that sold alcohol and it was a chance for them to regain some of the wages that they paid their workers.

There was no law in the town as such. The mining superintendent was the law and as far as he was concerned, if things happened that didn’t interfere with miners turning up to work, he would let it slide.

These memories came flooding back just from seeing the buildings that framed the streets of my childhood. It would be extremely hard to walk into my old house, but it was something that I had to do. It was not to show the locals that I wasn’t scared or the cry-baby that I had been taunted about being. I needed to close the door on a life that had haunted and shaped me. At forty-two, it was time to let go of the past. I wasn’t sure how I would cope though. The house was one thing. Going up to the mine entrance to pay respect to my brother and father would be harder. By far the most difficult thing would be leaving my mother here. I would do that on my last day. It would take me all that time to summon the courage to do scatter her ashes and say goodbye. Twenty-five years ago, I had left her behind too, but then there was the possibility of coming back. Now, there would be no coming back and I would be truly alone in the world.

Chapter 3

The silence was what struck me the most. No-one was out in the streets at all. Eddie's of dust swirled from my feet. The same dust cushioned the noise of my tread. It was eerie, almost foreboding. I had grown up with noise. The noise from the diesel engines that drove the crusher echoed around the valley and then there was the grinding of the rocks themselves. A smaller engine drove fresh air into the deep recesses of the mine. These went non-stop when I was a child as shifts worked around the clock day and night. The mine manager argued that night and day didn't matter underground so no bonuses were paid for those who rarely saw daylight. The noise would rip through your bones and even the walls of our home were no real barrier.

Our house was closest to the mine, not by choice. The mine superintendent allocated the houses. His and the manager's were the furthest from the mine entrance where the sound was much less. They were not beset with the grey dust that permeated everything. Dad had less of a walk to the mine but we paid a price for that. Mum tried her best to wash our clothes clean, but inevitably a grey film covered them. When the mine started to get reduced profits, one shift was cancelled and that allowed eight hours to wash and dry. The cancellation of the shift meant that across the board, every worker had reduced hours and reduced pay. Because my mother worked, Dad's hours were cut the most. At least that was the reason given. Everyone, including my brother and I, knew the real reason why. 

Now there were no shifts and those that lived in Hammerton survived on welfare. I made sure that my mother before she died had more than others. I had plenty to spare. I knew that she would never accept cash so every so often there would be a special parcel for her at the station. I had taken on Dad's promise of giving her life's luxuries. The parcel was always marked with LL on it, just as Dad had done with his gifts to her. She knew the significance of those two letters and I was pretty confident that she wouldn't just give away the contents. There was really no-one in the town who deserved them. Mum would never say an ill word about any of those living in the town, but that didn't mean she didn't think them. I hoped that no-one had seized the opportunity when Mum was taken to hospital, to ransack the house. If someone had, then there would be hell to pay. I was not without contacts in the outside world on both the wrong and right side of the law.

A door partially opened on a neighbour's house, but was quickly shut again. I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the front steps to my old home and didn't break stride. To do so would have been a sign of weakness. More than once I had been told don't let the bastards win. That was to do with dealing with bureaucrats, but was quite appropriate here in Hammerton. They probably prided themselves on their ability to tease and humiliate when I skipped town, thinking that their bullying had scored a victim. I was not about to be bullied anymore. I may not have been the success that I had aspired to, but in my education, my work, my salary and my humanity most of all, they were well beneath me. I would brook no interference with what I had to do.

Given the strength of my self-belief, it was difficult to understand why I was shaking as I pulled open the screen door that I last went through twenty-five five years ago. A couple of deep breaths and closed eyes helped. I wondered given the outside of the house which had barely received any maintenance in years, whether the interior would be as unkempt. Had my mother lived in squalor for the last few years? Major twinges of regret for not returning earlier resurfaced. I took from my pocket a freshly pressed handkerchief and appeared to be dabbing dust from my face. In reality, the tears rolling down my cheeks were bring hastily mopped up. Mum would have been devastated if someone caught me crying. That was to be done with family and well away from prying eyes.

It was an enormous relief when I entered the sitting room of this four-room house. It was as I remembered it, except for the fine layer of dust that covered everything. Mum's chair was slightly more threadbare but still near the hearth. Dad's chair was much larger but unlike other males in the town, his was the same distance from the fire as Mum's. He was ahead of his time or maybe he just thought that women were people too and any discrimination was not justified. I half expected Mum to walk into the room and tell me to sit in Dad's chair, like she always did after Dad died. I never did. That was Dad's and always will be. Even when I take it and the rest of the furniture with me when I leave in a week's time, the chair would he Dad's and be placed in a pre-eminent spot as would Mum's in my own home. I'd even cleared space ready for them.

Although it was nearly midday the room was dark. I flicked the light switch. There was no power. The company was still cost cutting and once Mum had died, had probably been quick to cut off all utilities. I opened up the thick heavy drapes and after the dust from these settled a bit, light streamed in creating rainbow sparkles as the light hit the floating dust particles. My mother had called them little soaring jewels and my brother and I used to race around trying to seize these treasures for our queen, our mum.

The rest of the house consisted of a hallway that ran down the middle. Mum and Dad's bedroom was opposite the sitting room. I peeked in there. The giant bed looked remarkably small now, even though it was the same bed. I guess kids' perceptions get modified as you get older. The back two rooms too hadn't been touched. The room I had shared with my brother, made me smile as I remembered the antics we would get up to there as children. Mum and Dad knew that we mucked around well after bed time. We would hear them tiptoe down the hallway over the bare creaking boards and we would dive under our thin blankets and pretend to be sleeping. We thought we were giving Oscar winning performances, but Mum told me when I was fifteen that they had a very clear idea of what was going on. As she said, the walls have ears. The interior lining boards provided little to no insulation when it came to heat, so sound would carry well beyond our room. When she said that, it dawned on me that if we