14

The Little White Chapel

Living in the East, you get used to a consuming green—one that reminds you of what it must have been like for the first colonists who beat cities out of the tangled woods. I get the feeling when I drive around the D.C. beltway, where vines climb over the retaining walls, if we were to let the overgrowth go for just a few years, that nature would take back the roads. Roots would crack through the pavement, and it would seem as if there were never such a thing as a highway.

Seven months after the Sago mining accident, I drove through mountain roads in West Virginia, and this sense of green magnified. West Virginia is hill country. It is not the austere and jagged landscape of Utah, but untamed on the other side of excess: bursting, pollinating, chlorophyllholic. The Appalachians are lower than the Rockies but are smothered in trees, and the ranges off in the distance fade into grades of atmospheric green and blue. West Virginia is what Wales must have been like prior to sheep grazing and mining in the days when the Druids built small shrines in the thick woods to the gods of nature.

Out West, a telephone pole just adds loneliness to a desert road. But here trees have been chopped lengthwise and widthwise to accommodate power lines that carve a path through the dense forest. The branches that remain remind me of the oddly sheared sheep in Merthyr. It is a hack job, a breach, and an interruption.

I followed US Route 220, a mountain road that wound between hills by the side of the Coal River, a tributary of the Kanawha River, along which John Peter Salley found coal in 1742. In West Virginia, settlers disregarded coal for many years due to the plentiful supply of wood. As in South Wales, the coal industry began small scale, gradually replacing charcoal in private homes. Around 1840, West Virginia received national attention, and the era of coal began.

The success of West Virginia’s coalfields, like those of Wales and central Utah, went hand in hand with the reach of the railroad, and as rail lines extended, new fields opened. Slaves and local farmers mined it first, digging coal from the surface with picks and shovels. In the 1800s, following the Civil War, coal companies moved in from the surrounding states, built villages remote from town centers, and imported workers from the British Isles.

Although coal mining provides only 5 percent of the state’s total employment, West Virginia currently produces 15 percent of all US coal—the largest amount next to Wyoming—with 277 working mines throughout the Appalachian Range. In Wyoming, mining involves the removal of only twenty to thirty feet of earth to access coal beds one hundred feet thick. West Virginian coal lies deeper and requires moving hundreds of feet of earth to get at veins only two or three feet thick. In order to stay viable in the market, West Virginia has cut its workforce and increased production. Despite federal regulations, economic pressure has caused unsafe practices to continue. West Virginia leads the nation in coal mining deaths, with 199 fatalities out of 617, or 33 percent, from 1993 to 2010.

A friend who offered me board at her parents’ house for the weekend coached me on how to present myself in West Virginia. “Wear jeans and a T-shirt,” she advised. “Otherwise they won’t trust you.” Weeks before my trip, I had arranged with Reverend Wease Day to visit Sago Baptist Church, located less than a quarter mile from the mine. At this little white church in the woods, journalists had captured the images of mining families waiting for news of their loved ones that had drawn my compassion at O’Hare Airport and propelled my investigation into coal.

Ten hours after I first saw reports of the midnight accident in West Virginia, a woman at Sago Baptist had received a call on her cell phone and yelled to the crowd, “They’re alive!” According to Helen Winans, mother of trapped miner Marshall Winans: “Some damn person, I don’t know whether they done it out of smartness or they didn’t know what they was talking about came through the church a hollerin’.” Family and friends immediately broke out into whoops and praised Jesus.

Down the road at Sago Mine, rescuers had penetrated the debris and were making their way through the tunnels. The fireboss, Richard Helms, had been found dead, killed from the blast. At nearly the same moment as the report of the rescue circulated among friends and family, rescuers reached the entrance where the crew of twelve had barricaded themselves against the carbon monoxide gas. Stripping away the plastic barrier nailed to the rock walls, the rescue team heard Randall McCloy’s uneasy breathing and saw his chest move only slightly where he lay on the floor of the mine. One rescuer began immediate first aid care. The others gazed at where eleven miners leaned against the walls, much as if they were eating lunch, but did not move.

Among the twelve trapped miners, the crew had had only eight working self-rescuers (a small breathing apparatus containing one hour of oxygen) to share among them. Hopeful of being rescued, members of the crew had taken turns banging on pipes and roof bolts with a sledgehammer to signal their location. Some asphyxiated after eight hours of waiting, and some after ten. In their hands were notes they had written to their families as they felt themselves slipping. George Hamner Jr. addressed his daughter and wife: “We don’t hear any attempts at drilling or rescue. This section is full of smoke and fumes, so we can’t escape. Be strong, and I hope no one else has to show you this note. I’m in no pain, but don’t know how long the air will last.” The team carried out the lone survivor; an ambulance surrounded by state troopers drove him through the crowded streets of Sago and the nearby town of Buckhannon to the intensive care unit in Morgantown. The diagnosis was dehydration and a collapsed lung.

Meanwhile, the bells of the small white church rang into damp winter woods and people embraced. They had been keeping a vigil, praying two days for a miracle, and sang “Amazing Grace” to acknowledge God’s mercy. Children danced in the aisles of the chapel. More false reports had circulated, and some were expecting the rest of the men to walk from the mine to the church, just ten minutes on foot, to see their families before they were taken to the hospital for examination. The crowd gathered inside started making room for the recovered miners in the pews. Around three in the morning, state troopers entered Sago Baptist Church and lined up along the walls. Mining chief executive officers (CEOs) and Governor Joe Manchin approached the rostrum. Friends and family members held their breath, expecting good news. Instead, mining representative Ken Hatfield announced that only the youngest of the miners, Randall McCloy, had been saved alive. Jubilation immediately exploded into rage; a fight broke out between the families, mining officials, and policemen. Ann Casto, whose cousin died in the explosion, expressed some of the feelings of the community: “[There are] some who don’t even know if there is a Lord anymore. We had a miracle, and it was taken away from us.” Nick Helms, the son of Terry Helms, who perished in the mine, expressed a different sentiment: “In reality they just lied. I immediately took my girlfriend, my sister, and the rest of my family out because honestly if they coulda got them, there wouldn’t be anything of those guys left alive.”

On the day I arrived in Sago, it was Reverend Wease Day’s Sunday to preach in church. In our last phone call, he had indicated that his parishioners had recently received an upsetting report on the mining accident and wouldn’t be disposed to interviews, but I wanted to see Sago for myself. Places like Merthyr Tydfil, Wales; Castle Gate, Utah; and Sago, West Virginia, draw little interest, outside of local historians until there is a landslide or an explosion. If it weren’t for the Sago mining accident, I would have lived my life unaware of this small West Virginian town and the people in it. It was more than a coal-mining story that I was after, however. I wanted to extend and perhaps find compassion in a town that was experiencing events similar to those in my family’s history. Mining explosions had shaped the character of the Thomas side of my family and may have contributed in a small way to who I was.

Reasons for the explosion in the Sago Mine are still being disputed. Just four days before my trip, West Virginia’s government had released the initial reports. Lightning struck the ground at approximately the same moment that the methane in Sago Mine ignited during the early morning of January 2, 2006. The government inspector appointed by Governor Joe Manchin, J. David McAteer, designated this as the cause of the explosion. However, even he had his doubts—lightning struck more than two miles away from the mine, requiring it, according McAteer, to cross “the river, to the site of the mine … [and] go underground 250–300 feet.”

Some of the locals saw the report as a “convenient” explanation, one that allowed the International Coal Group (ICG), owned by New Jersey investor Wilbur Ross, to dodge any responsibility for the accident. Sago Mine has had a history of safety violations: in 2005 alone it was cited 208 times for contravening the regulations of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and some of the infractions could have contributed to the explosion. The report grated on an already sore nerve, as the locals had not forgotten the three hours in which ICG failed to report the news of the twelve miners’ deaths.

Sago is nearest to the town of Buckhannon, where Reverend Day serves his other congregation. Though Buckhannon is the seat of Upshur County, it is a small community with only one main drag downtown, and on weekend nights only Maggie’s, a sit-down restaurant, stays open past ten o’clock. I followed Day’s directions carefully, driving on a road along the outskirts of town, passing a chapel, a John Deere machinery store, the local high school, and the junior high, until buildings thinned and I was heading back into the woods.

Off on the left, I spotted a narrow street called Sago Road. I took a quick turn, my tires screeching on the gravel. I followed the road built in the gully between two tree-covered hills next to a river and railroad tracks. Houses perched on both sides, reflecting different economies and time periods: some were of brick, others of grayed wood, some of aluminum siding. A large, tattered blue house with a long front porch reflected an old southern style—the whole wooden frame sagged and a “No Trespassing” sign was tacked on the front. The trees cleared suddenly; set back from the road at the end of a grassy lot was a beautiful white church, Sago Baptist.

Erin Thomas, 2006

Sago Baptist church

Established in 1856, this church has had an influence on the community since its inception, serving the settlers that began to clear land and farm in the area in 1801. Reverend Day remembered the revivals he attended as a child—the flashlights that would burn from the woods as people would walk down from their homes to hear preaching about hellfire and redemption. “Hell,” according to Day, “had me so scared, I was afraid the Lord would get me before I got home.” The gristmills were built around the same time as the chapel, followed by the sawmills. Farmers initially cut coal out of the hills to use in their stoves. Mining didn’t begin in earnest until during the First World War.

The smallness shocked me. There couldn’t have been more than twenty houses in the surrounding area. On the days Sago was in the national news, the hill on which the church perched had swarmed with reporters, microphones, and heavy camera equipment. On the morning I first visited Sago, a few cars parked in the gravel lot were the only sign of human presence. Dew lent a stickiness and sparkle to the quiet of insects, birds, and woods. The sun was just over the tops of the trees. Its rays refracted through the leaves, warming the top of my head. Gazing at the tree canopy piling up to a blue sky, I couldn’t believe that anything bad had ever happened here. But it was July, and Sago Mine had blown in January. The sky must have been dark then, with the leftover broodings of a thunderstorm, the trees bare, and the air cool and hazy—weather for ghosts and tears.

Worship service hadn’t started yet, so I walked up the hillside next to the church and read names on the old graves. Later, stepping into the lobby, I noticed, hung just above the chapel, an oil painting of a coal miner bending over a Bible, reading with the light of his headlamp.

A note scrawled on a scrap of paper was pinned to the bulletin board: “To the Sago Baptist Church and Pastor Wease Day. I was so touched by the generosity your church showed during this tragedy with the mine. Please accept this statue from a fellow Christian and a miner’s daughter.” It was signed by a woman from Clarksburg. Her gift was placed on the oak table below: a statue of Jesus laying his hand on a miner carved out of anthracite, the densest grade of coal—hard to ignite, slow to burn. The Romans were the first to carve it, digging it out of Wales and carrying it back to Rome, where they polished it into jewelry. They called it jet, missing entirely the full potential of coal and what it would mean to empire. While in Wales, I purchased a small statue of young mining boy in anthracite for my Grandma Thomas. It reminded me of my grandpa’s stories of the mines in his youth, but especially of six-year-old Evan.

There was something intriguing about the image of a miner being carved from coal, and a Savior being cut from the same material to redeem him. This black rock has had so much influence in shaping our modern world, but also in shaping mining communities and the people in them. Coal is much more than a job; it defines an entire culture.

Next to the note on the board were plans printed from an email for a monument to be built to honor the fallen miners: Tom Paul Anderson, thirty-nine; Alva “Marty” Bennett, fifty-one; Jim Arden Bennett, sixty-one; Jerry Lee Groves, fifty-six; George “Junior” Hamner, fifty-four; Terry Michael Helms, fifty; Jesse Logan Jones, forty-four; David William Lewis, twenty-eight; Martin Toler Jr., fifty-one; Fred “Bear” Ware Jr., fifty-eight; Jackie Lynn Weaver, fifty-one; Marshall Cade Winans, fifty. Each of the miner’s faces smiled, rendered in line drawings probably adapted from photographs. Some were wearing hardhats; others ball caps. The portraits were arranged in an oval to be etched by an artist into a stone slab and erected on the church grounds near the road.

A lean, medium-sized man with slouching shoulders and a gray mustache spotted me through the doors of the chapel as I browsed through the lobby. I looked away, suddenly self-conscious for snooping. He walked to the doors and opened one side to invite me in.

I thanked him and sat in the back pew. In the rows ahead, men sat in checked wool and flannel; their rolled-up sleeves rested on the bulge of their biceps. Their wives wore jumpers. Some had hair that was curled and permed, fluffed out in the style of the 1980s. Several I guessed were near my age, but they looked older, motherly. I hadn’t followed my friend’s advice about jeans. I was wearing a brown corduroy skirt and a T-shirt, an outfit I thought would be appropriately casual, but it was totally wrong for the congregation. My black, SoHo-style glasses immediately marked me as an East Coaster.

A flower wreath near the podium in the front honored one of the killed miners, sent to this small community by another concerned individual. Dick, the man who invited me in, started the service. The former lead elder, Martin Toler Jr., had been among the twelve killed in the mine. Dick first solicited the congregation for names to be included in the prayers. Members spoke out. Mumbles of assent and nods followed each request for remembrance:

“For Gus with kidney stones.”

“Praise the Lord for our son with hepatitis, his enzymes come down.”

“The Buhr family, their grandfather passed away.”

“My neighbor’s got cancer.”

“And we need to remember our pastor, we should always remember him.”

The Sago mining disaster hadn’t been this town’s first tragedy, and as I listened to each plea for help, I knew it wouldn’t be their last.

Scraps of news reports and obituaries written by the bereaved came to mind: Peggy Cohen reported that her father, Fred Ware Jr., “was totally committed to the mines, has been since he was eighteen years old,” and although he believed he would die in a mine, it never worried him. He prayed every morning that his coworkers would be safe. He left behind kids and grandkids, and his sweetheart, Loretta Ables, whom he planned to marry on Valentine’s Day. Samantha Lewis remembered the way her departed husband, David Lewis, used to lace his boots at six o’clock in the morning, preparing to descend into the mine. He was only twenty-eight and planned to work in the mines as a roof bolter just until his wife finished her master’s degree in health care administration. Jack Weaver’s note to his wife told her: “I’ll see you in heaven that’s for sure. And Justin you’ll always be my best buddy.” His son Justin, when he heard the news of the accident, had grabbed his father’s favorite cookie, clutching it in his fist as he and his mom drove down to Sago Baptist. Marty Bennett and George “Junior” Hamner came from families who had lived in Sago for generations.

Members of the congregation rose and knelt on the stoop before the podium, praying out loud as music played. The words “blessed” and “Oh Lord” rose and slipped back into the hum of voices.

Sunday school preceded worship service and focused on “the gifts of the spirit,” a series of passages found in 1 Corinthians 12 in the Bible. Dick led the discussion. Members spoke out when they had something to add. “It’s because of my faith that I am here,” a man declared from the middle.

From the pews across came a reply, “But the Phillipses ain’t here.”

“They had a barbecue this weekend,” one woman piped up.

“Yeah, they’re probably really tired,” another person mentioned.

“The beef was really good!” a man exclaimed, and several in the congregation chuckled.

Dick smiled and reeled the discussion back into Corinthians.

Occasionally, one of the older men from the back broke out into irrelevant pearls of wisdom: “God can do it, and if He does do it, it is to His glory. Godly people die every day, and somehow their dying is to His glory.”

Toward the end of Sunday school, Reverend Day walked in, a large man with extremely white hair, and began to shake hands down the aisles. He had the look of a preacher: a broad smile; a large, sharply cut, triangular nose; and a potbelly that pressed out against his ironed white shirt where it was tucked into his trousers.

He shook my hand, asking, “This your first time?”

Children trailed in. There was only one young woman in the entire congregation, and she held the hand of the only young man. There were around seventy members in attendance, and I was struck by what an absence twelve men would create in a town like Sago. We sang an opening hymn. Ann Casto led—the cousin of Marty Bennett, who was killed in the mine. I had been singing every week in LDS congregations since I was a small child, but even this experience set me apart. I sang it straight; the congregation added twang. My music came out clean, and theirs feelingly.

Reverend Day took the stand. He announced that my grandfather was a coal miner and I was here to visit. Several people turned, and the men with rolled-up sleeves nodded their heads at me. Reverend Day led into his sermon in true revival style: “If I shut up, I’m gonna blow up.” “First and most of all is love. It all boils down to love.” Reverend Day worked in circles of reasoning; the logic wound and looped back in spurts. But as he talked, I felt the spirit—the warmness and pure light that accompanies sincere talk of deity.

Behind the reverend hung a tapestry of the Last Supper, and he picked up where Sunday school left off: “In 1 Corinthians 12 it talks about the body of Christ. Now the spirit is strong, but the body is weak. There is times when this ol’ flesh is wore out. But when one member suffers, we all suffer with it. If there were fifty piano players and nobody knowed how to sing, what would you do? Plumbers, miners, all as good as the preacher. If you plugged your ears, you can’t hear. You’re all part of the family of Christ.”

He stopped now and then to offer spontaneous prayer to “anyone who hasn’t accepted Christ.” I knew he meant me, the only stranger in the congregation. I had told him my Grandpa Thomas mined in Utah, and it was possible he’d concluded I was Mormon, or he might have just considered me a college-educated woman from the East, a relatively godless region. Either way, Reverend Day believed I wasn’t Christian. He built up the emotion, prepping the congregation for a miracle. “I just preach as it comes to me,” he admitted, and continued with stories of sick widows and funerals, careening back to the conclusion of love and being a witness of Christ.

Reverend Day grew up in Sago and moved back ten years ago when he was “called by the Lord to be a preacher.” He drives a bus to supplement his income. He looks seventy, only twenty years younger than my grandfather would be. His salary was small—the church budget was read over the pulpit earlier in the service. As Reverend Day talked about his interactions with his parishioners, and the little white chapel he had helped raise money for and build, I understood why he had returned.

At the end of the sermon we sang “Amazing Grace,” a song the reverend claimed to sing while he did his physical therapy. I noticed with some self-consciousness that the whole congregation could probably hear my voice, so different a melody it produced than their own. But this song was special to me, too. My family sang it the day we learned my older brother had terminal brain cancer, and although I sang it with my church voice, I sang it feelingly.

The reverend prayed again for the anonymous Jesus-less among them. Everyone knew he meant me. He asked the congregation to close their eyes. “Anybody who is ready to accept Christ, raise your hand,” he commanded. I kept my hands folded loosely in my lap. He made one last attempt, “Erin, do you have anything to say?” Maybe these people needed some dramatic conversion: some good to come out of their loss, the reclamation of a stranger to the bosom of Christ. I wanted them to have their miracle, but I couldn’t give him that.

“No, I don’t.” I answered.

A man with a handlebar mustache laughed out loud.

“Well, thanks for coming,” Reverend Day conceded.

“Thanks for having me.” I smiled back.

The service had reminded me of my own experience of loss—not in the sense of the sudden, but long, agonizing loss as my older brother died slowly from brain cancer. It had been over ten years since then, but I thought of him every time I set the table at my parents’ home. We were no longer an even number, and leaving off the eighth plate always seemed wrong. When I visited Sago Baptist church, it had been a mere seven months since the accident, and for all twelve of the bereaved families, this missing plate was at the head.

As the congregation filed out of the chapel, I asked Dick where the mine was.

“Across the road, over the bridge, and just up a ways,” he replied. “It isn’t far.”

I shook Reverend Day’s hand as I left. As I climbed into my car, a man hollered after me, “Come again! We’re just a bunch of hillbillies.”

I drove down the road, over the railroad tracks and the bridge, and around a clump of trees; the mine was not even a quarter of a mile from the church. I could imagine how maddening it was on that day and night in January, the families waiting for news of their men who were so close, but unreachable.

The mine was merely a small bit of property surrounded by an electric fence. Heavy machinery lay at rest, although the mine had been under operation again for two months. There was a pile of coal at the end of a conveyor belt that descended down into a cavern in the side of the mountain. Although it was an eyesore in the middle of such lush greenery, it had little other perceptible effect on the surrounding area. Ironically, it is perhaps the history of deep mining that has much to do with the woodedness of West Virginia. Otherwise the trees would have been cleared long ago for timber or farmland.

I drove back down to the church and stopped next to an outline of stones that marked the foundation of an old house. I walked over to smell the pink blossoms of a single flowering bush. I was told an old woman used to live here; the house had burned down and nobody ever bothered to clear it. All that remained, aside from the foundation, was a tall, slightly tilting stone chimney. Nearby, a cement slab rested on the grass, waiting to receive the monument dedicated to the twelve Sago miners.