The Coal Life: Poems

The Baptist Steeple

The Baptist Steeple “Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.” —John Winthrop I could hear the Italians and Greeks blasting the overburden, dropping trees for roof chocks from the hill where I would steal my first kiss and, later that year, pour blood from my first buck. “We must be a beacon for the lost and poor,” our preacher said. “Idleness is Hell; it’s time to unload your burdens into the plate and build a steeple higher than Winthrop’s hill.” My mother, who’d traded clacker for bills at thirty-percent penalty and still got more flour in town than at the commissary, and my father, who’d worked two shifts a week extra at the tipple, taking off Sunday shifts to pray for forgiveness and to wash the crucifixion and red flowers of hope annealed in high windows, forgot their debts and the company bills. The next year, I started picking coal from the spoils for our stove. After church, the members built scaffolds and with hammers and nails, their forearms wormed with veins, climbed closer to God, while Catholic men led blind mules to the veins of coal underground. Our preacher said, “It’s their choice, like the scaffolds heretics chose to bear.” The steeple never rose above the spoils. 6 ...