“Never wear black, wear blue.”
She said, “John, don’t never look back,
For, honey, I’ve been good to you, Lord, Lord,
For, honey, I’ve been good to you.”
John Henry was a steeldriving man,
He drove in many a crew;
He has now gone back to the head of the line
To drive the heading on through, Lord, Lord,
To drive the heading on through.
He stops falling. His body bursts and he is jerked up out of his seat. Involuntary Physical Response: the signs people keep on their lawns to repel burglars? He jumps out of his seat. My eyes must be popping out my head like some coon cartoon. His hands point to his throat. Can’t these people see what’s going on? The boy keeps singing. The pain is in his throat, around his throat and he would like them to make it stop. All these crackers looking up at me, looking up at the tree. Nobody doing nothing, just staring. They know how to watch a nigger die.
The first blow shattered half the bones in the boy’s hand and the second shattered the other half. There was no way he could stop his hammer from coming down the second time. He was swinging his next blow before his first struck the bit. That night in the grading camp someone said that they could hear the boy’s scream all the way on top of the mountain and down in the shafts, louder than the sound of blasting. The boy’s hand was all chewed up. The doctor would have to cut it off. The shale dust settled into the blood and melted into it like too-early snow. The other driver dropped his sledge and his shaker told one of the water carriers to run for help. They had stopped singing. This was time out of the Captain’s timetable.
John Henry looked down at the boy. He had the build, but anyone could see he wasn’t a shaker. Too much of the rabbit in him. The boss had told him the boy was a shaker on the west end and had been reassigned to fill in for L’il Bob. L’il Bob had been coughing fiercely the last few days and needed a day of fresh air to clear out his chest. He kept a bucket by his cot for what he spat up. No one mentioned miner’s consumption, the black rot of the lungs caused by the foul air. Between the smoke from the lard and blackstrap candles, the rock dust and the blasting fumes it was a miracle they all weren’t sick after a year in a tunnel. There was still time. L’il Bob didn’t want to get caught coughing and lose his grip on the drill bit. It turned out the boy hadn’t been a shaker on the west end; he’d carried water, and only for a week. What you needed were steady hands and speed, but what you needed most of all was faith. The sledge came down and drove the drill bit into the rock and the shaker had to twist the bit between blows to loosen the dust in the hole and keep the bit level for the next blow. Two quick shakes and a twist made the rock dust fly out of the hole. You had to have steady hands and speed, but you had to have faith. You had to know that the driver wasn’t going to miss and smash your hands and ruin them. You had to hold it straight. John Henry and L’il Bob understood each other, which is why John Henry didn’t like breaking in a new shaker. You had to hold it straight or you’d never hold anything in that hand again. The boy did fine for half the day, but then John Henry could see him get lazy or lose attention or maybe he just realized how crazy the job was. The candlelight was dim and useless. The candles in their hats sometimes snuffed out suddenly, the Lord blew them out, and the hammer fell mightily in darkness. The shaker’s hands better be where they had to be when that happened. If the bit got dull, or the hole got too deep for a six-foot bit and they needed an eight-foot bit, the shaker had to replace it without letting the steeldriver miss a blow. The rhythm was all. L’il Bob did his work well. The boy did fine for a long time. But then he was slow, that one time, and the bit was not level. No question he would lose that hand.
He looked down at the boy. The boy sat on the ground, leaning against a powder can, looking at his hand and screaming to split his head open. The other driver, George, tended to him. He wrapped the rope around the boy’s wrist to stop the blood. John Henry looked down at them. They were blackened by dust and oily with sweat, yellow and brown in the candlelight. This was time out of Captain Johnson’s schedule. Every night Captain Johnson came with his tape to measure the day’s heading. He started at the west end of the tunnel, took a measurement, and came around the mountain to the eastern cut and took a measurement. He could have sent one of the bosses but he did it personally. Captain Johnson had a schedule of convergence, of a moment when the final blast would break the mountain in two. Each morning the bosses changed the wooden shingles on the sign outside the cut. It was how far they had come. John Henry told the boy to quiet his screaming. He was not the first he had maimed.
He looked at his hands, the big dumb mules at the end of his arms. They did what they wanted. Palms like territories. It was stupid. Time it took the runner to get outside the tunnel, the time it took for help to arrive was lost time. John Henry bent over and lifted the boy from the ground and threw him over his shoulder, made a sack of him. He walked east, faster than going west ever was. They made ten feet a day with twelve-hour shifts. It was always faster getting out of the mountain than going in. He walked on the planks. The planks heaved up dust from beneath them with each step. He kicked a blasting cap out of his way and it skittered into a pile of dull bits the runners had left to the side. The hole they drilled that day was eight feet deep; probably the next morning the blasting crew would nestle the nitroglycerine inside it and blow it open to a few feet of heading. He told the boy to be still or else he’d drop him right there and the boy whimpered and was still. He asked the boy where he was from. The boy mentioned a town in Virginia, not far from the Reynolds plantation where John Henry had been born. Then the boy started screaming and John Henry let him. They were a quarter of a mile inside the mountain and John Henry could feel the mountain heave over him, breathing. He looked up and saw the one ugly crag that always taunted him from the ceiling of the tunnel whenever he passed. He remembered the day the blasting exposed the crag of rock and John Henry saw it for the first time, sneering at him, a spiteful beak of shale laughing at their little work, laughing at him. He worked under the crag for four days and each minute it cursed him. He was glad when they finally drove the heading past it and hoped that a charge would obliterate it. But when they reentered the tunnel after the smoke slowed and all the weakened stone from the roof of the tunnel had ceased falling, the crag was still there, angry and unforgiving, and John Henry damned it each time he walked by. The crag knew him.
The mouth of the tunnel was like an eye opening as they got closer to it. He tasted the change in the air. The ground shifted under his feet and all around him. Blasting in the west end. Some small pieces of shale tumbled from the roof of the tunnel but nothing big. Not this time. John Henry felt the back of his shirt wetting with the boy’s blood. Yesterday a blast in the western cut shook out a large section of the arching in the east heading, and a stone from the cave-in crushed the skull of one of the drill runners, Paul. He’d never talked to Paul but John Henry knew he was from further south, Georgia. They buried him with the rest down the hill. No one knew if he had any family. He saw the light swimming in the gloom and as he stepped out of the tunnel he felt like Jonah stepping from Leviathan’s belly. He knew the mountain was going to get him but the Lord had decided it would not be this day.
The blacksmiths at the mouth put down the bits they were sharpening to look at John Henry and the boy. They stood with some pick-and-shovel men and skinners and they all gawked at them. He saw the water carrier who had gone to get help standing with the boss. The carrier was out of breath and pointed at them. The boss frowned and told John Henry to put the boy in one of the mule carts. John Henry laid him down in the cart next to an empty crate of nitroglycerine and saw the boy’s eyes. He had stopped screaming and yelping and he shivered all up and down his body, his eyes open to the sky. The boss said the doctor was in town and one of the men was going to have to take the boy there. John Henry walked away from the cart to a cistern. He dipped in a cup, two cups, and gulped the water down. He closed one nostril with a finger and blew forcefully, ejecting dust and snot, and repeated the process with the other nostril. The