I could still see the boy of thirteen on that morning of the first day of the year 1929, and I could tell them, if they wanted me to, what his life was like growing up in the mining patch outside of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, with his mother in the small house they rented from the company, how he missed the father he barely knew, how he worked because he believed he had to, and how he, the boy, went down into that mine and never emerged, the boy, whom I can still see, even today, but I knew it was the others they wanted me to tell them about, the others I had to carry with me, the husbands and fathers and grandfathers, had to carry with me and think of and have sometimes spoken of in what I have done and in what I have failed to do for those who knew them, who loved them, who missed them too for their entire lives and wondered what they said in their last moments that stretched to minutes and hours and days after we stood by the headframe and the January skies lightened and the dawn dispersed and the miners John Chibala and Štefan Bozak and their butties Matty and Emil heard the sound of the buzzer startling and loud in the cold and low-cloud air, and I slowed my steps as I reached the line and the miner John Chibala turned and greeted me by my first name and told me the inside boss said I would be going down with them in the cage that day as mule boy, and I shouldn’t worry because he knew I already knew the mines from my work as a nipper and a spragger, and leading a mule was a big step up, but if Mr. Bartle-Jones said I was ready, then I was ready
And if you need anything, Ondro, anything at all, just ask, because today Štefan and I are going down to rob them pillars on breast number seven and it won’t take the whole day, if it does we’re too slow or too scared and we’re neither, so we’ll eat lunch in the mine but we’ll be up top before the shift buzzer, ňestaraj śe, he said and he spoke like that in his Šariš Slovak, the words rushed and fluid like water from a tap, his confidence and smile as infectious as the grippe, and he put his hand on my shoulder when he told me not to worry, and I said I had heard that Wicked was a piece of work, but I had seen and been around a lot of mules and I knew Wicked could do what was needed to get done for the cars and the coal he and Štefan Bozak would need to get up top, and my mother had given me a carrot to coax the beast, and John Chibala nodded and touched the peak of his cap
You sound pretty sure of yourself, he said and I put my head down and he took his hand from my shoulder and gave me a sock in the arm and laughed, and even there in the gray dawn his teeth shone like white marble
Your mother’s a good woman, he said and we all stood in line and waited for the cage in silence, the mines no mystery to me before that day because, although she had kept me from the ranks of the breaker boys when my father died in ’24, my mother could only make so much money sewing the clothes miners and their butties wore and wore, and I remember when one of the foremen came to her in the kitchen of our house in the patch and told her I’d be going down to work as a nipper, a boy who opened and closed the shaft doors when the coal cars and their spraggers jockeyed through like one-eyed engines in the dark, just like she asked, and her face showed neither relief nor surprise
Until he gets used to it, the dark, and then maybe I can see my way to finding him a job as a spragger, the man said and I didn’t like the way he said maybe, and I looked at my mother as he spoke to her and she moved slowly at the stove, and when I looked back he had a smile on his face I also didn’t like, and he saw me watching him
What d’ya think about that, son, he said
All right, sir, if you believe I can, I said and he told me it had nothing to do with belief but with how a kid worked and I said all right again, but I didn’t feel all right standing there in the kitchen of our house in the patch, my mother quiet and staring at the stove, and the next day I went down in a cage full of men and boys in the shift and tried to pretend I wasn’t scared, but two boys I knew who were spraggers, tough boys who would bully anyone who wasn’t a miner or a butty, nudged each other and one of them made his way next to me in the cage
Don’t piss yourself down there, he said and he laughed and his breath smelled of old onions and his body of stale sweat and when he smiled his teeth were pitted with black, and a fear I had never felt before began to rise in me, but it wasn’t hard, the work of a nipper, listening for the rumble of a car and watching for the carbide light of the mule boy at its head and the spragger running alongside, that’s when I had to push open the door and let the car through and pull it shut again and wait in the dark for the next one, the wind around the edges and at the top and bottom of the door the only thing different or even distinctive from the absence of light every nipper sat in all day, and I sat there all day minding the door that I had to open when the cars came and keep shut for ventilation when they did not, it was the dark that was hard, dark that in the complete absence of light was like a presence itself, dark you could feel because you had to feel where you were, because even if you put your hand right next to your face you couldn’t see it, you could only feel it when you pressed your fingers against your eyes and cheeks so that you knew at least you had a hand that could touch your face, that kind of dark, and I sat there in it while I waited for the coal cars, and I sat there in it when there were no cars, and I sat there in it by myself and cried and cried because I couldn’t move without wondering what was around me except the door, where I felt the wind at the top and bottom swirling like they told kids ghosts swirled, and I thought of the priest talking about the Holy Ghost as a wind and the wisdom that came on that wind, and I wondered how many people I knew who had died were ghosts, though I never wondered if my father was a ghost, he was full of muscle and strong, so strong he used to carry me off to bed by holding his arm out straight and saying, Pome het, in the Šariš every Slovak in the mines spoke, and I’d grab on and hold tight and he’d carry me dangling like that into my small bedroom in our small house in the patch, his arm one long rope of muscle, so I knew he wasn’t a ghost, but the dark and the wind made me wonder and brought me close to fear, and I sat there for a long time in the wind, sat there even after I heard the shift buzzer sound and no more cars came down the track and I couldn’t move to make my way through the dark and the wind, and I wondered if I could sit there until the next day, sleep when I wanted to sleep, wake when I had to wake, what did it matter whether it was day or night without any light, I told myself, until I saw the flicker of a carbide coming down the tracks and I could tell by its height it was Mr. Bartle-Jones, the inside boss, and the light got brighter and I could see where I was, see the light reflected in the black anthracite of the ceiling and the water along the floor of those tracks, and he hollered for me by name and told me it was time, I should get home and cleaned up and ready for tomorrow, and I wiped my eyes as I swung my arm around to pick up my growler bucket so that he wouldn’t see that I’d been crying, and I followed him down the tracks to the cage, and I did that for a year, until that same foreman, the one who had given me the job before, came by again when my mother and I were sitting down to dinner one night, and he joined us and told my mother mid-meal that one of his spraggers had lost an arm horsing around, the same boy, I realized as the foreman spoke, who told me not to piss myself, and he said if her son wanted the job I could have it, and she knew a spragger made considerably more than a nipper because spraggers got tipped by the miners whose cars they followed and braked and made sure none of the coal fell out or was stolen before it went up top and was weighed and emptied fairly, and I looked over at my mother but she never looked up from her plate, and I looked back at the foreman, who turned to me with that same smile on his face as he chewed our food and belched from the beer he had been drinking before he came into our house
Well, what d’ya think of that, son, you wanna be a spragger and make a little extra money in them there mines, he said and he sounded as though my mother wasn’t listening or hadn’t heard
Thank you, yes, sir, I’ll take the job, I said
You’re damn right you will, he said
and he finished eating and put his fork down and picked up his glass and gulped the water, then stood and threw his napkin on the table and walked out of the house, and my mother never looked up or away from her plate, and I went into the mine the next day with a sprag stick as a spragger, and I did the job the way I’d always seen it done, it wasn’t hard, and after I had gotten accustomed to the dark I grew to love the mines, and even though I believed it was the kind of work my mother wanted for me, the better pay, the relief that we would not be beholden to the company, though everyone was beholden to the company in some way, I would have done it regardless, because a spragger was given a carbide lamp and I went from stationary and watchful in the dark at the doors to something resembling a cross between a trapeze artist and quarterback for the Pottsville Maroons with my sprag, a kind of club that was a little over a foot long and weighed about three pounds, and I used it to slow or stop the coal car by jamming it into the wheels of the load as it coursed along the gangways in the dark through doors where nippers sat and to the bottom of the slopes that took each load to the surface, where it was weighed and emptied, and if a spragger went too slow he slowed up the other cars, too fast and the cars collided with doors, or the spragger lost an arm when he tried too late to make that sprag do what he brought it down into the mine to do, or he killed the mule and the mule boy out ahead of the car, and no one wanted to kill a mule, they were more valuable than the boy, and I had a few close calls, broke a collarbone, broke a finger, and lost more than one toenail, but I did my job well and at the age of twelve I was at home in the mines, took home my pay and gave it to my mother and she got what food we needed at the store and never had to pay on credit, and she stopped sewing, at least the clothes of other miners and butties, and I believed it was all because I had become a man who knew the work of the mines, and yet I was still too young to understand why four months after I became a spragger my mother’s belly had grown round and in another month she told me she was going to have a child, still too young to understand how so many years after my father had died this could be so, but her silence kept me and everyone else in the patch silent, even the priest, until weeks later, how many I don’t know, I came home from the mine on a day sometime around when I turned thirteen and my mother was in bed and a doctor was there and an old widow we called Babča was cleaning blood from the floor, and the doctor told me my mother needed rest and walked out the door, and when I asked Babča what had happened to the baby, she shook her head
There isn’t a baby anymore, take your mother some tea and sit with her, she said
Excerpt from Mule Boy. Copyright © 2026 by Andrew Krivak. Published by Bellevue Literary Press: www.blpress.org. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
