Under Ground

The plane stretches over thick clouds that churn and bury the blue below. The airline attendant hands me a warm towel to wash my hands, as if I am someone of importance, as if first-class means I deserve to be called by my name, given fine linens and glass plates. I take the towel and rest it over my eyes.

My cousin Cathy is dead, and I am on my way home for her funeral. Days before, my Aunt Audrey sobbed on the phone and mentioned a car, an accident, her sleepy daughter, but later my own mother called and said, “Maybe, but the police are calling it suicide.” It is not like our family to name our problems, to give them labels. We do not say post-traumatic stress syndrome, clinical depression, alcoholism, domestic abuse. We say: He hasn’t been the same since the war. She is a little blue. He doesn’t know how to hold his beer; he never did. Well, yes, he hit her, but they always did fight like cats and dogs. We say accident.

I am a little pregnant. My pants stretch at the waist, but the button still holds. Recently, I moved 1,000 miles away, far from the Midwest, far from the gray skies, the corner bars, the grain bins, the flat land of farms and fields. Far from those I love. I think about the word “home” and how it still means where my mother lives, even though I have not lived with my parents for ten years. I am too tired to write in the notebook in front of me, to remove the cloth from my eyes, so I silently chant “where is home, where is home, where is home” so I may remember to write about it later.

I am working on a book for my unborn child. I secretly believe I carry a girl. I believe I will tell her my truths, and they may become her own. The writing is not going well. The truths wiggle under my words. I stretch them into categories, pin them onto the boards of the white page. And still they move, my points the sharp spears that miss the center.

Cathy is—was—just 41 years old. Her life was one of secrets: she was a social worker in a faraway, frozen city, a daughter who rarely made it home for Christmas, a single woman with a tan line on her ring finger. Cathy learned to be silent from her mother. My daughter must learn to speak from me.

Cathy and I shared grandparents, her father and my mother siblings. Our grandfather, a coal miner, died of black lung decades before I was born. My mother was 17 when he died. She never fully recovered. He was the one who loved her best, the one who sang baritone and carried her on his shoulders, the one who taught her that history is about people and pain and promise and all of it matters, all of it should be remembered. He was the one who looked around his family, the mines, the town, and took an oath at 12 years old to never drink. He kept this promise his entire life. When he walked into a bar with the other miners, the bartender put on a pot of coffee. He drank it black.

When he was 18, my grandfather left his home in Scotland—and the mines where he had been working since he was ten—to come to Springfield, Illinois. The money was better in America, but the conditions were worse. Water up to his waist, broken picks, dim lanterns, and no way to see if the haulage was coal or slate or sulfur. “You could chip away all day,” he told my mother, “but when you brought it out into the sun, there was nothing worth anything there. You had to dump it all back into the gob.”

No miner disputed the need for a union. The men worked in the black, armed with picks, searching for coal seams, buried in dust that would one day kill them if...