Chapter One
The Morning Shift

The steam whistle pierces through the gray light of the pre-dawn. 
The whistle carries over the autumn mist, over the rolling hills 
of the Columbine Mine, and back home to Lafayette. *Little Dorothy 
will be headed to school now*, thinks John Eastenes. His wife 
Bertha knows the Columbine blows its whistle ten minutes before 
the school bell back in Lafayette, so it helps keep Dorothy on 
time. 

The black wood beams of the Columbine Mine's tipple rise over the 
work line. Most miners took it as a given that it would fall over 
on them someday, most likely on their last day of work. Eastenes 
hopes not; he has other plans.

Eastenes has stood in the work line for the past three days, and 
not once has his number been called. Three days in the work line, 
with his dented lunch bucket rattling against his overalls in one 
hand, and a pickax in the other hand, the old wood worn shiny from 
years in his iron grip. He needs the work. Last night, he prayed 
that his number be called, with a follow-up prayer made on the six-
mile walk to the Columbine. 

What worries Eastenes is that even if the Lord Above is on his 
side, the arithmetic isn't. Work today would put him fifty cents 
closer to buying that dress for his daughter, Dorothy, and the 
lady at Scholes Mercantile said the dress would be very much in 
style this Christmas. The problem, from what the guys had told 
him, was that he'd be lucky to work another dozen times before 
Thanksgiving, and he'd still be short. Scholes wasn't extending 
any more credit to miners, not when they're all up to their eyes 
in debt already.

"Number 27! Eastenes!"

The big, red-headed Greek behind Eastenes gives him a nudge. The 
foreman calls again:

"Last time, Number 27! John Eastenes!"

Eastenes raises his pickax. "Right here, foreman."

The mine foreman sticks his thumb toward the cage, that creaking 
freight elevator that lowers miners into the shaft. Eastenes 
straightens his hard hat and walks forward.

"Thank you, sir!" Eastenes says to the foreman. "I really needed 
this one. I'm buying my little girl a new dress--"

"Get in the cage, will ya?" says the foreman, "and get yer hearing 
checked. I'm not calling your name three times any more."

The foreman drums his fingers on his clipboard. *Every year*, he 
thinks, *these miner's names get stranger*.

"Number 41!" calls the foreman. "Rene Jacques!"

A hand raises up from the line. *"Oui, monsieur!"*

Rene Jacques steps forward, swinging his breast auger and lunch 
bucket. The auger's drill bit along is almost as tall as Jacques 
himself, and both items still have the initials of Jacques' 
brother Frank etched into them. Even the metal auger has worn 
smooth where Jacques has held it for so many years. He remembers 
the Fire Boss in Louisville, handing the tools over the day after 
his brother's funeral. If he showed up the next day, he could have 
them--for half-off, of course. 

The Greek behind Jacques watches the little Frenchman walk off, 
rolls his eyes, and drops his tools to the ground.

"Hey! Foreman!" yells the Greek.

The foreman shakes his head. "I said 'Jacques', not 
'Spanudakhis'."

Spanudakhis takes a step forward, and the temperature of the line 
rises one degree. It was dangerous to hold up the process. 

"Foreman, the mines closed for the summer. I just spent the last 
of the savings. With winter coming up, well, how do I say it? I 
gotta work!"

The foreman turns away, nose to his clipboard. "If we call your 
name, you'll work today; and for the record, you worked last 
week."

"Yeah, but six credits a week's not cutting it!"

The foreman spins around and gives a blood-freezing glare. There 
were rumors that the foreman had been an enforcer down in the 
Creede casinos, and could kill a man six ways at any moment. They 
said he sharpened the sides of his clipboard, slicing a miner's 
throat before the miner could make a move. 

"You think this is some Mother Cabrini charity, Spanudakhis? If I 
can get you work, *I'll get you work!* Now get back in line."

For a second, Spanudakhis thinks about leaving. Then he sees, with 
his mind's eye, a family running up to the top of a hill beyond 
their small village in Crete. They are racing to meet the mailman 
with a sack of letters hauled by a donkey. What would his letter 
say? Would it say sorry, but he'd failed?

Spanudakhis retreats back into the crowd. He feels the glares of 
the other men for wasting their time. At the back, he sees 
something: a woman standing by the front gate of the camp. *Just 
my luck*, thinks Spanudakhis, *a woman at the mine*.

The foreman returns to his captive audience and says "We can use 
two more people today."

The crowd stands alert, wondering how desperate they'll need to 
be.

"The coal seam on level three has been more productive than we 
expected," says the foreman. "You'll be moving an extra coal 
cart... with the old mule."

The crowd murmurs with curses and minced oaths from every tongue 
from every corner of the world. A young man steps forward.

"Pepe? *That* old mule?" says the young man. "It won't let anyone 
near it!"

Jacques has heard the commotion and hollers back to the crowd. 
"*Mise en garde, copain,* my brother died by one of those mules. 
Shame on you, foreman, risking our lives with that beast.

"It's an extra half-credit per day" says the foreman. He points 
his clipboard at the young man. "You're Jerry Davis, right? The 
rookie. You take this shift, you might not be a rookie no more."

Davis grimaces. At twenty-one, his teeth are already graying from 
the chewing tobacco. It's the only thing that keeps him alert 
through the twelve-hour shifts, and the only thing that will let 
him fall asleep afterwards. 

"I worked a shift with Pepe last week," says Davis. "The monster 
can barely pull a cart, it's so old." The other miners nod, and 
Davis adds, "Get a new mule, cheapskates!"

"Buy a new mule?" sneers the foreman. "You're all wet. All right, 
three-quarters extra credit."

Davis hears heavy footfalls behind him and sees Spanudakhis 
lumbering toward the cage, pick, shovel, and hard hat swaying with 
each step. He stops next to the foreman.

"When the old mule's heart gives out," says Spanudakhis, "and the 
coal cart runs over me, who will pay for the funeral?"

The foreman returns a cruel smile. "I'll read a Greek poem at your 
wake, how about that? The cage will be back up soon."

Spanudakhis walks toward the cage. Davis calls after him, "You're 
a bigger man than me. Or maybe you're just dumber. I'll try for 
the next shift, maybe the mule will have keeled over and died by 
then."

The foreman heads for the office, and that was that. The Columbine 
Mine had found its work for the day. Anyone who attempted an 
appeal by knocking on the office door risked a swift strike to the 
teeth for trespassing. Employment at a coal mine was no guarantee 
of consistent work there. The remaining miners head back to their 
cottages inside the mine camp, or back to the nearest town. Some 
left to try their luck at the State Mine a mile north.

The Columbine Mine is the crown jewel of the Rocky Mountain Fuel 
Company, the second-largest coal outfit in the state. Located far 
from other cities, the company had built its own town. Within the 
Columbine Mine's perimeter fence was a complete city, with 
tenement housing, a post office, a schoolhouse, a church, general 
store, a mess hall, a gambling den, and a house dedicated to the 
world's oldest profession. The mine even printed its own money, 
called *scrip*, which could only be spent at a store owned by the 
company. Coal mines shut down during the summer months, when no-
one needed to heat their homes. A miner came back in the fall with 
mountainous debt, pushing down like a blacksmith's anvil on his 
back.

A miner's debt began the moment they first set foot on company 
property. Immigrants came to America from all over the world, and 
they came with little money. A coal miner needs tools, which were 
not given but sold. Since they had little money, the price of the 
tools was deducted from their first paycheck. Miners needed a 
place to stay, so they usually rented a company house, made of 
four plywood walls and a tin roof. The rent was also deducted from 
their pay, as was the food they needed to survive, and the liquor 
that looked more and more appealing the longer they worked. 

If a miner ever managed to pay off these debts, he was paid in the 
scrip, which became worthless scraps of paper outside of the 
Columbine's gate. It prevented a miner from ever saving up real 
money, in case he wanted to leave.

When the miners lined up on pay day and looked out past the 
perimeter fence, the world beyond the Columbine felt a thousand 
miles more distant than the vast oceans they had crossed on their 
way here. 

Spanudakhis joins Jacques and Eastenes at the cage door. Jacques 
has his hands clasped together, looking toward heaven.

"Brother, I miss you every day," says Jacques, "but I'm not quite 
ready to join you. Keep us safe today."

Spanudakhis looks up, too, "Yeah, what he said."

They stare ahead at the cage door. The Columbine's mine shaft goes 
down hundreds of feet and is slow to the surface, bringing up 
eight grown men and four tons of coal.

The Greek shrugs. "Who knows? Maybe even old mules have their good 
days."

"Then there's hope for you yet" says the Frenchman.

They laugh, but not much.

Spanudakhis glances over his shoulder. The woman he saw earlier is 
still standing by the mine gate. "Hey, who's the woman?" he asks. 

"I don't know," says Eastenes. "I've seen her talking to my wife 
Bertha before."

"It's not good to have a woman at a mine," says Spanudakhis. "Bad 
luck. Damn bad luck."

Jacques scoffs. "Says who? Back home in France, things were so 
desperate, they had men, women, and children picking coal in those 
tunnels."

Spanudakhis pokes Jacques on the shoulder. "*Says who?* Says me, 
frog! One time, down by Aguilar, a little girl ran into the mine, 
yelling 'Daddy, you forgot your lunch bucket!' Next day, roof 
caved in, crippled four men. God can be cruel like that. It's bad 
luck, and lemme tell ya, luck's all we got most days."

Jacques raises an eyebrow. "If it were up to me, friends, it'd be 
nothing but women down in that darkness." Eastenes stifles a 
laugh, running a thumb over his wedding band.

A loud *ka-chunk* almost send the men off their feet as the cage 
reaches the surface and the door slides open. Eight miners step 
out; they're so black with dust they look like minstrels from one 
of the movie shows, brilliant white eyes piercing through dark. 

The miners leave behind a massive mine cart in the cage, brimming 
over with coal. The door closes again, and the cage moving up into 
the mine tipple's top level, where it's tipped over (hence the 
name), and the sorting begins. The coal is sorted by size for 
delivery to comes, rail yards, or the Lafayette power plant, where 
it will run street lights as far off as Larimer County, sixty 
miles away. 

One soot-caked miner lets out a bad cough, and pulls out a 
handkerchief to wipe off his face. Layers of soot wipe away, and 
soon Spanudakhis, Jacques, and Eastenes recognize the man.

Jacques raises his auger. "Why if it isn't Johnny Kid Mex!"

Eastenes laughs, "Son of a--" he catches himself, "John! John 
Ortega!"

Slow, aching hands rise from Ortega's side to lift off his hard 
hat. It falls to the ground. Johnny Kid Mex is short, almost as 
short as Jacques, but his muscles seem ready to launch him far 
over the hills. He laughs and shakes his head.

"There's no 'Kid Mex' here, friends, I'm just putting in a day's 
work." Ortega collapses against a pile of crates, stretching and 
wincing. 

"I thought you were working dawn-to-dusk," says Spanudakhis. 

"No, dusk-to-dawn" says Ortega.

"Shoot," says Jacques, "I'd take half-pay to work a coal room with 
you. You always have the other guy's back."

Ortega shrugs. "I know any of you would have mine."

The bell on the cage door rings; the miners underground want to 
send more coal up and go home.

"What's it like down there today?" asks Eastenes. The miners trade 
work hazards like boys trade baseball cards.

"Stay out of Room Seven," says Ortega. "The Fire Boss said it was 
fine for the night shift, but all night, the ceiling was cracking 
and groaning like a pine tree about to fall. The coal seam in Room 
Five is two feet off the floor--" he grits his teeth as he cracks 
his back, "I was picking on my side for six hours. Let some short, 
*muy bajo*, do it. Someone like him. Ortega points at Davis, over 
by the pleasure hut. Davis is trying to peek through the windows, 
but they're painted black.

Ortega looks over at the miners. "Are you three the only ones left 
to go down this shift?"

Eastenes smirks. "What do you think this is, Johnny? Some..."

"...Some Mother Cabrini joint?" says Ortega. "*Ay mio*. Enjoy your 
day, fellas, and *buena suerte*."

As Ortega leaves, Spanudakhis looks confused, and Jacques informs 
him that *suerte* is what the Greeks would call *tychi*.

"Oh. 'Luck'," says Spanudakhis. "That's what I'm tellin' 'em, 
luck's all we got."

Ortega watches the three men enter the cage. The door slams shut, 
and cables and pulleys lower them deep into the earth. Ortega 
hates falling asleep during the day, with the noon sun clawing its 
ways through the holes in the bedroom shutters. The night shift 
was the only way he could make sure he'd see his kids before his 
head his the pillow. He would hug his kids on their way to the 
Columbine camp's schoolhouse, and his wife Mary would be boiling 
water for his morning bath. Coal miners were the untouchable 
caste, the filthy foreigners in their filthy camps, and yet Ortega 
could not name one miner who didn't bathe every single say. The 
job demanded it.

Ortega had noticed the woman standing by the office. Every fool 
wanted to take on a prizefighter, and Ortega had trained himself 
to know when someone wanted a few words. He passes his family's 
cottage and walks to the side of the office, where this stranger 
is waiting. The coal dust follows him in a low, trailing cloud. 
He'd be glad to wash up sooner rather than later.

"Is there something I can help you with, seÑora?" he asks.

"Are you John Ortega?" asks the woman. "I know your wife, Mary. 
She told me you're new here."

"We moved up from Pueblo last year," says Ortega. Came to find 
work." Ortega watches a few miners come out of the camp's general 
store. No work for them today, and now in more debt.

"The other miners seem to think well of you," she says.

"I used to box" says Ortega.

"And since your face is still together," says the woman, "not a 
bad boxer, I guess."

"Featherweight champion of the Rockies," says Ortega.

The woman gives a polite nod, and Ortega wonders what her angle 
is. Over in Lafayette, the old men who went to the Templo de el 
Cordero used to call the town's founder *El Madre*, the Mother, 
firm but generous. The woman before him has that same quality.

The woman speaks. "We heard the miners in the southern counties 
are going on strike."

Ortega was afraid of this. "*Si*," he says.

"Three thousand on strike so far," says the woman. "It might come 
up north, too, and with winter on the way, it's going to get 
tight, and fast. We'll need to ration out food and clothing, and 
with your popularity among the miners, I'd like to know if we can 
have you on our team."

Ortega sighs. "SeÑora..."

"...Beranek," says the woman.

"*SeÑora* Beranek, there is a reason I did not stay in the 
Southern Coal Field. I came here to work. I have four children of 
my own."

"Oh..." says Beranek. She stares down at the muddy ground.

"But, if I cannot work," says Ortega, "I can help others. 
*Ayudamos mutuamente*. I have family in the mining camps around 
here. Perhaps I can get them to help with... food and clothing?"

Beranek smiles. "That would be wonderful. Your wife said you were 
a good man. Partners then, Mister Ortega?"

Beranek extends a hand. Ortega looks back at the dark tipple of 
the Columbine mine, shrugs, and gives her hand a vigorous shake. 
Clouds of dust fly off his shirt sleeve. When he lets go, Beranek 
forces a grin, and as she turns away, she pulls out a handkerchief 
of her own.

Ortega laughs. "A retired boxer and a housewife. We're regular 
charity tycoons like Rockefeller, *si*?"

"A team-up for the ages," says Beranek, wiping off the coal dust.

"Do you have any children, Mrs. Beranek?" asks Ortega.

"Yes," she says, "sixteen."

"Oh, then he's old enough to work at--" Ortega stops. "Wait, you 
have one child who's sixteen, or you've... *made*..." Ortega 
counts on his fingers, his eyes growing wide.

Beranek bends down an inch to make eye contact. "Are you all 
right, Mister Ortega?"

Ortega sighs. "Yes, it's just... I thought ten rounds in the ring 
took stamina, but... *ay mio*, you may have me beat!"

"We're tough folk in the Northern Coal Field," says Beranek, "do 
try to keep up."

Ortega watches Beranek leave through the front gate of the 
Columbine Mine, and heads back to his family's cottage for bath 
and bed.