Click the play button below to listen to Nancy Holochwost, associate editor, read “Lumps of Coal” by Robert P. Cooke.
Remembering my grandfather He was ten and drove a team of mules through the shadows in mine shafts, pulling a wagonload of coal that glinted in the carbide light anchored to his cotton cap. He tells me how the animals were raised in the dark and he had to punch their sides to keep them moving and how they would stop and blink, shuddering, at the shaft opening, where the brilliant sun streamed in too suddenly. Years later, when the local politician came to the door asking for his vote, he said slowly, almost inaudibly, through lungs of coal dust, that the world was too unjust, and he could bray like a mule, if asked.
