1842 Deep In The Cold Heartland Of Pennsylvania Mining

1842 Deep in the cold heartland of Pennsylvania mining country, draining into the mouth of the murky Susquehanna, nestled in the rocky, ridged mountains of the Appalachians, there is Schuylkill County. Huddled masses of textured red, blue, and pale olive shales defiantly keep watch like ancient gods, fine-grained sandstones the proud relics of once-mighty kingdoms long since conquered by civilization. Coal fields, blackened with precious anthracite, scar the somber greenery, and generations of poor Irish and German immigrant laborers have sweated in their bottomless mine shafts and white-hot smelting pots, cutting deep into the soft earth, stripping naked her bony carbonate ore. Pottsville is the county seat, and to its west is Minersville, a scant village of under fivethousand souls. Harsh is life in Minersville. Time-worn women wash endless laundry in the numbing outdoors. Ragged children play in the soggy, disheveled streets. Shabby horse and carriages ceaselessly relay coal from the fields. Stained factory stacks cough poisonous smoke into the colorless sky. Almost daily, an ill-fated workman is injured or killed in the shafts. A mother knows not if her son will return unharmed, or return at all. Wives are made widows. Children are made fatherless. In one of several humble brown cottages on Quality Street lives Thomas James Fitzpatrick and his family. Thomas has an oldest son, of whom he is proud. This is my story. On a bleak and bitter winter day in 1822 I was born, the fourteenth of February. The haggard sun rose and fell the same as he had on the thirteenth of February. My father worked in the mine from sunrise till sundown as he had on the thirteenth of February. My mother, heavy with child as she was, still worked the kitchen, still baked bread and washed sheets and carried water as she had on the thirteenth of February. I arrived suddenly and without patience, forcing myself unforgivingly into the world, filling my aching lungs with as much cold air as I could swallow. I cried. My mother cried. My father cried. Quality Street cried, nay, rejoiced, for Tom Fitzpatrick had a firstborn son. My father held a feast in my honor, as his father had for him, and as his grandfather had for his father. Every dusty inhabitant of Minersville seemed present, celebrating this marvelous occasion. For the Irish, a birth and a death are the most important events in life. You really only see all your neighbors, all together, when someone is born and when someone is dead. What you do in between coming and going is your own business, but your friends have the right to welcome you at the start of your life and bid you farewell at the end. My father gave countless toasts, pint after pint of blustery Irishman boastings. When my son grows to be a man he will would be double the man his father is, if Tom Fitzpatrick has any say in the matter. My mother beamed, glowing with happiness and contentment at the merry scene. She nodded graciously as one by one her visitors congratulated her and wished her much health and prosperity. They christened me Daniel Augustus Fitzpatrick; Daniel, the prophet who had withstood the den of lions. A strong name, a brave name. A man could be proud of a son named Daniel. Father Fogerty blessed me with holy water (in between liberal libations of fire water) and christened me the newest and loudest member of the parish.

Everyone laughed and smiled and sang and joked, a welcomed respite of joy in their dreary lives. The next morning they would go back to their mine shafts and their smelting pots and their baking and their washing, but tonight they would eat, drink, and be merry, for Tom Fitzpatrick had a firstborn son. You see, a son is a future. Children are a man’s legacy, his only lasting stamp upon this earth. When he leaves this earth he can say, I have left something to commemorate my stay. My seed shall complete what I could not. A daughter, Mary, was born a year later, but was delivered dead in the womb. My mother never speaks of it. My brother, Edward (named after my father and his father) was born when I was three, in 1825. Edward is the favorite son, the good son, intelligent, mild-mannered, bookish, fond of Shelley and Keats and long contemplative walks in the forests, pondering the alignment of the planets and the futility of human existence. My first sister, Elizabeth, was born when I was five, in 1827; my second sister, Ellen, was born when I was seven, in 1829. They are good girls. Elizabeth, dark-haired and demure, is the mature one, wise beyond her years, always at my mother’s side in the kitchen or at the spindle, of quiet spirit and gentle manner. Elizabeth is a mast, guiding the ship when Mother is tired and weary, which is frequently of late. She will make a good man a good wife. Ellen is the spirited one, like a young colt prancing about for all to admire and praise. She plays the harpsichord and takes lessons for a quarter-piece in the parlor of the vicar’s wife. Ellen, rambunctious, mischievous, lively little Ellen, makes us all laugh. I sometimes think this house would be a graveyard were it not for her sprightly little ways and cheery smiles. She calls me Augie, which she knows infuriates me. The youngest child, Stephen, was born in my twelfe year, in 1832. Born partly lame, a deformity of his right leg, he is small and sickly, but the sweetest child you could encounter. There is a special place in my heart for Stephen. He never has a cross word, a harsh tone, always kind and caring. He bears his burden with a smile and an uncomplaining spirit. And he looks up to me, which I sometimes cannot bear for my unworthiness. He calls me Danny. No one else in the family calls me Danny. Mother and father and Elizabeth call me Daniel, and Edward calls me Dan, if he calls me at all. But little Stephen--my God, when I think of him now. He is a dear boy. I began work in the mine in my thirteenth year, as do all eldest sons in Minersville once they come of age. My father woke me at sunrise. Get up, boy. There’s work to be done. Mustn't be late on the first day, you know. Make a good start, lad, and it will go easier for you with the boss. I staggered groggily out of the refuge of my warm sheets into the frozen battlefield of the icy early morning, the rough planks of the wood floor the enemy’s first line of attack. In a daze, I hurriedly threw my clothes on and swallowed the cold cornbread and milk my mother, still in her nightshift and wrapped in a blue shawl, handed me before stumbling out the door into the menacing fog. I shall tell you, a mine is hell. Villainous clouds of soot and coal dust invade your senses, choke your lungs, blind your eyes, grit in your teeth, and the masks issued do little to repel their assault. The pervading blackness and coffin-like spaces produce a mild fear to raging panic to the uninitiated. I began to realize how truly wonderful and miraculous light is, and learned to savor

every last fading sliver of the sun’s rays as the earth ingested me into its cavernous womb. The stale air became more precious the farther down the shaft the descent into the inky abyss. The miner lives in constant fear for his life. Mine fires, caused by coal breakers made from wood timbres catching flame, break out regularly, and one is lucky to escape without a burn or worse. Deadly explosions, triggered by pockets of gas embedded in the coal escaping and striking an exposed lamp or some careless use of dynamite, may happen at any moment. Such an existence numbs the mind, causes a man to lose all regard for his soul, only the immediate safety of his body. The miner is constantly dirty, his fingernails permanently blackened, his hands discolored, his face perpetually stained. He may go home and bathe with the hottest of water, the harshest of soap, scrub until he can swear his skin is scraped off and he can see bare bone, but the clinging soot, that malevolent scum, will not wash away. A miner is a prisoner, and I sometimes think I would rather occupy a jail cell than work a mine shaft. On my first day in the mine, a boy of nine was killed. I do not know his name, but the memory seared my brain. While manning three loaded cars to the surface (a task for a grown man twice his weight and years) he slipped from off the top and fell under the heavy cars and was crushed. I watched as the workmen labored to remove him from under the cars, but his small frame was badly mangled, and as time passed his injuries began to slowly take his life. I remember he did not cry out in pain or scream or pray or ask for his mother, uttering not a sound or word. He only stared empty-eyed and serene, almost as if he welcomed his approaching fate, thankful for the respite. I imagined he smiled faintly once at me, which scared me worse than the gruesome scene. When at last removed from the wreckage and laid upon the cold hard ground, his bruised, broken body was limp and his eyes frozen, stone-dead. That face. My God, that face. I studied it, a lump rising in my throat. Swollen and bloodied, yet almost happy, content. I shall not forget that twisted, angelic death-mask as long as I shall live. Hours upon hours must have passed that first day of work, drop upon drop of sweat fallen to the ground, but I cannot recall them. I imagine my father must have showed me the inner workings of the mine, given me my first task, introduced me to his grizzled workmen companions, ate lunch at the first whistle and resumed work on the second. But I cannot remember. I only remember something my father said as we trudged home that day through the muddy streets as I stared silently at our dirty boots. Shame a young lad like that should meet such an end so quickly. But such is life in the mines. Learn to stomach it, boy. I nodded my head and said nothing. Learn to stomach it. We ate dinner at the same time as if nothing happened, read from the Book of Leviticus like every first Monday, and retired at the usual early hour. I lay in my bed silently, thinking of that face. Suddenly, I began to softly sob. I made not a sound, but the tears began gliding down my cheeks like falling stars. I know not whether I wept more for that little boy or for myself, knowing his too could be my fate. Many times since that day I have dreamt of that boy, this grim, tranquil visage appearing before me and fading like a phantom.