My kitchen sink had been backing up for months, and I was tired of pouring that eye-watering drain cleaner down it every other week and getting nowhere. So I finally broke down and called a plumber, nice young fella, showed up on time, seemed to know his business. I figured he would run a snake down there, charge me a hundred dollars I did not really have, and be on his way by lunch. An hour later he was standing in my kitchen white as a sheet, asking me to leave my own kitchen.
His snake would not clear, kept hanging up on something deep in the line under the house. So he said he would have to get under there and pull the old drain pipe, that houses this old around Beckley all have trouble. Fine, I said. I made him a glass of tea and left him to it.
He went down through the crawlspace access. I could hear him working, grunting, the clank of his wrench. And then it all went quiet. Real quiet. The kind of quiet that makes the back of your neck prickle before you even know why.
He came back up through that access hole holding something in his gloved hand, careful, out away from himself. His face had gone gray. He looked at me and told me, real even, to please step out to the front porch and take my coffee with me.
I thought the worst. Of course I did. You hear a man go silent under your house and come up gray-faced holding something at arms length, your mind does not go anywhere good.
It was not a terrible thing. It was a dangerous thing, which is different.
Wrapped in oilcloth, tucked up on a floor joist where somebody had put it on purpose a long time ago, were six sticks of old mining dynamite. Sweating, unstable, the kind that gets more likely to go off the older it gets, not less. This is coal country. Half the men of my fathers generation kept a stick or two around for pulling stumps and blowing ditches, and thought nothing of it.
That plumber did not run. He did not panic in a way that would get us killed. He carried it out to the middle of the yard slow as a man can walk, set it down soft in the grass, and called the county, and they sent people who took it away and made it safe.
Then he sat on my porch step and shook for a while, and so did I.
The house was my grandfathers before my fathers. A miner, thirty years underground, dead of the black lung before I was grown. It was him, near certain, who tucked those sticks up under the house and forgot them, the way you forget a thing you meant to use next spring. They had been sitting under my kitchen floor my entire life. Under my children when they were small. Waiting.
The plumber would not take a dollar. He said finding it was payment enough, that he would rather do that than the alternative. I bake him a pie every couple of months now. He has got a standing order.
Lady, that pipe can wait a week. You and me are going to sit on this porch until my hands work again.
They are the best hands in Beckley, as far as I am concerned. They walked my grandfathers old mistake out of my house without a scratch on any of us.