“What of it?” the script clerk replied. “You’d be running quick enough for the doctor if one of your kids or your old woman got sick or met with an accident, wouldn’t you? The doctor’s got to live same as the rest of us.”
So the miner stumbled out with no more to say. Sometimes he’d vent his spleen upon his wife. “You wuz the one that wanted to come here! Wisht I’d never married. A man can’t get nowheres with a wife and young ones on his hands.” And the wife, remembering the way of mountain women, offered no word of argument.
When the owners of the coal operation came from the East to check up output and earnings they didn’t take time to make a tour of inspection of the shacks. Certainly they had no time to listen to complaints of miners.
Lured by the promise of big money Clate Wellford, like many other mountain men, forsook the familiar life of his own creek for the strange work-a-day of the mining camp.
Back on Shoal’s Fork of Greasy Creek there was always milk a-plenty to drink. Bless you, Clate knew the time when he’d carried buckets full of half-sour milk to the hogs. How they guzzled it! Here there was never a drop of cow’s milk to drink. You got it in cans—thick, condensed, sickeningly sweet. Couldn’t fool the children, not even when you thinned it with water. “It don’t taste like Bossy’s milk,” the youngsters shoved it away.
What was more, back on Shoal’s Fork there was always fried chicken in the spring. All you could eat. Turkey and goose and duck, if you chose, through the winter and plenty of ham meat. There was never a day date’s folks couldn’t go out into the garden and bring in beans, beets, corn, and cabbage. He’d never known a time when there were not potatoes and turnips the year round. The Wellfords had come to take such things for granted. But here in the coal camp you could walk the full length of the place from the last ramshackle house on down to the commissary and never see a bed of onions and lettuce. The shacks were so close together there was no room for a garden, even if the company had permitted it.
“That’s company-owned!” the boss growled at Clate that time he was trying to break up the hard crusty earth with a hoe.
“I’ve got my own onion sets,” Clate tried to explain. “My folks fetched ’em down.”
“Who cares?” the company boss snarled. “What you reckon the company’s running a commissary for? The store manager can sell you onions—ready to eat.”
So the miner didn’t set out an onion bed.