Last Words
But the story must start earlier before radiation burned through his stomach or three years before that when he, at forty-eight, returned from hunting on a bright fall afternoon to slide, wordless, to the floor from a kitchen chair.
Or perhaps back to when he was twelve and already fatherless and his mother died. His world fell like stars and he followed the glittering remnants even underground where he blew rock with dynamite, dug with pick and shovel and piled years and gleaming coal on rows of cars. Then he was twenty-five, thirty, forty, with two, four, seven children. In a blur of beer joints, coal dust, and willing women, he raised his voice, his fists.
And always the blow-up in the kitchen, curses, black-encircled eyes, the next shift coming, wild sidelong glances.
But, ahh! Rare moods of quiet, moments of grace, when bucket in hand at the kitchen door, he’d turn his head to look at us and with a half-smile say, Toodle-oo, kids. Toodle-oo. [End Page 49]
Sandra Fabert Vrana grew up in a Western Pennsylvania coal camp the daughter of a coal miner. She is now a Professor of English at Alderson-Broaddus College in Phillipi, West Virginia.
