A Pastor and Part-Time Security Guard Wonders about the Work Ethic

Poetry A Pastor and Part-Time Security Guard Wonders about the Work Ethic Every minister in Masontown is half time, even the priest. My congregation’s mostly older folks on fixed incomes. There’s one coal miner still working, some on disability, a couple nurses, an electrical engineer at the power plant near Morgantown, and one man retired from the mines. When they shut down the coal-fired power plant at Hatfield’s Ferry, October of last year, that took a lot out of this community: barge traffic off the river, truck traffic off the roads, more than a hundred men laid off. Environmentalists did that. They say coal pollutes, even though the company constantly tries to improve the stacks, nothing’s good enough for them. I say gas is good for this place. On the Honsaker farm by the church, twin boys—Bob and Ronny, Bob just died— had a dairy, but they couldn’t keep it going. People just don’t want hard work. Now there’s ten Marcellus wells on that farm. A lady at church left some land to the twins, and there’s a Marcellus well working on that farm, too. My son tended wells for Atlas then moved up. I ran into a guy at a wedding last Saturday who tends wells, and he loves it: drives around in a company pick-up, gets outside, makes good money an’ that. My barber’s grandson worked as a mechanic, up route 119, refitting army tanks, but that plant closed, so he tends wells now, too. Since the mines shut down and the Clairton mill closed people here have to travel for work. My neighbor gets up at four to be on a gas job by seven in Butler. When kids graduate from high school, they have to leave. Maybe Christianity & Literature 2016, Vol. 65(3) 368–369 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0148333116632687 cal.sagepub.com that can change now with natural gas. Of course, there’s the ones who don’t know how to work. I heard of contractors who pick guys up at their homes on the way to a job so the lazy bums won’t leave the site at lunch time! We’re raising my daughter’s kids because their dad’s no good. You see these guys up at the mall standing around, holding up their pants. Come on now! How you gonna’ get a job like that? Oh, I’ve got plenty of things to keep me on my knees. ß Julia Spicher Kasdorf Author biography Julia Spicher Kasdorf is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University and author of three collections in the Pitt Poetry Series, most recently Poetry in America. She is currently working with a photographer on a project to document the human and environmental costs of unconventional gas drilling (fracking) in northern and southwestern Pennsylvania, where she grew up. Poetry 369 ...