Coal Creek
messenger bag more comfortably onto my hip and followed suit, skipping over the ditch and into the grassy
area where Tony and Sara stood waiting. She was already trying to corral him into a shot with the trees at
his back, camera at the ready. Tony seemed reluctant,
but he agreed to be photographed, even if he didn’t take
off his John Deere hat.
She nodded at the camera’s display. “Looks good.” She
spun it around to show Tony the shot of himself, but
he grunted something and shooed the camera away. He
didn’t seem like the kind who was photographed often,
and, judging by his John Deere hat, wifebeater, and coveralls, he didn’t wake up this morning with any plans
of being photographed. He was an older guy, probably
as old as Sara and I put together, but he carried himself
with a way that showed he knew how to work.
“One sec, Tony,” I said. I pulled the recorder out of a
small pocket on the messenger bag, checked to make
sure I had an SD card in it, and flicked it on. A red light
came on, and I spoke a few words into the microphone
before replaying it to make sure it was recording properly. It was, so I pressed on with the short interview.
“October 18,” I began. “Afternoon, in Cedar Ridge, on
the side of a dirt road with Sara and our new friend
Tony. What can you tell us about what we’re going to
see today, Tony?”
Sara turned to me with a raised eyebrow. I shrugged,
but let Tony keep his momentum.
“The mine rs?” I asked.
He nodded. “S’what they say. Few of them boys I know
from school went missin’ after that. The boys of the
miners, that is. Oldest one mighta been ten. Maybe
eleven.”
“Were they ever found?”
Tony turned back to me. Something sparked in his eyes,
and he shook his head. “Nope,” he said, looking back to
the trees. “Never found ‘em. They searched everywhere
but the old mine, but the sheriff didn’t want anybody
else goin’ in there, didn’t want to risk losin’ his men
or anyone else down there. Said if them boys went in
there, they was as good as dead anyway.”
“Can you show us where the mine is?”
Tony took a few steps toward the trees and stopped
short. “I’ll point you in the right direction, but I ain’t
goin over there.” Then he did point. “You just walk
right through these trees here, and you’ll see a field on
the other side. I’ll be honest: sometimes there’s things
in that field, sometimes they ain’t. Whether there is or
ain’t, I don’t mean to find out. You just walk across that
field and you’ll see some old buildins. They should be
I held the recorder out to him mic-first, and he shied
away from it like it was a rattlesnake. He coughed and
glanced about, but he finally began. “There’s an old
coal mine across a field over yonder,” he said, turning to point through the trees. “They say it opened up
back in the 1800s, but there was a cave-in about fifty
years ago, and they never used it again.” He paused for
a moment, spat into the trees, and continued. “Handful
of miners died in the cave in. Some of them was the
daddies of some older kids at school. Made for a huge
scene at the time, but I doubt anybody outside Chattooga County ever heard of it. Didn’t have worldwide
news like we did when them Mexican fellas got stuck
a few years back.”
With the mic back at my mouth, I said, “You said back
at the diner there were ghosts out here?”
He never looked away from those trees. “Yup,” he said.
“You can see ‘em out there some nights, walkin’ around
glowin’ like it’s some kind of Civil War park.”
56
October 2013
INSIGHT