Free Mother Lode by Carol Anita Sheldon

tightened. The sight caused
her to gasp. The coal, usually piled high to the window, and
restrained at the bottom by a low wooden corral, had overflowed its
banks and spilled out on the dirt floor.
    “Jorie!” she called. “Walter!”
    Still no reply. Her toe caught against a
jagged piece of rock in the uneven floor, and sent her sprawling
forward on her face. When she was back on her feet, she ran up the
steps and toward the well.
    “Thomas! They’ve been in the cellar playing
in the coal,” she spat out between gulps for breath. “But they’re
not there now.”
    Her eyes widened in fear as a sudden thought
crossed her mind. Thomas caught it, and they were off running back
to the cellar. They fell on their knees and began raking the coal
with their hands, throwing chunks to one side and the other.
    A patch of pale blue caught Catherine’s eye,
and digging more furiously than ever, she uncovered Jorie. He was
as black as the substance that covered him.
    Lifted from the rubble, he seemed not to be
breathing. Catherine held him, pounding him on the back. His head
rolled back and he lay still in her arms. At last, as she ran to
the house with him, he gasped for air.
    Thomas called out for Walter. Had an
avalanche of coal buried them both? He fell to his knees again,
pushing the coal aside as more cascaded from above. Finally
satisfied that Walter was not under the coal, but wanting to make
sure he wasn’t hiding, Thomas poked his way around other parts of
the cellar. In the late afternoon, the light was so scant it was
hard to make out shapes. He dare not light a candle amidst the
highly inflammable coal dust in the air. The sudden splintering of
glass startled him. Groping in the dark he’d knocked over a bottle
of his home-made wine. He stood still and waited in the silence,
hearing only the chirp of a lone cricket somewhere in the dark
recess.
    He was about to leave when a chunk of coal
slipping down the pile caused him to look up. Near the top and to
the side of the fading shaft of light two eyes gleamed in the
darkness. He went closer and held the candle high. There,
camouflaged by the coal dust that covered him, crouching like a
feral cat, was the form of Walter.
    By the time Catherine got him to the house
Jorie was crying hysterically, taking in great gulps of air, while
his whole body shook. As she held him, he first coughed up black
phlegm, followed by his lunch.
    Blackened as he was, she couldn’t tell what
injuries he had, beyond almost suffocating. She could see a trickle
of blood drying on a gash on his forehead, and a huge goose egg.
She put water on the stove to boil and dragged out the washtub.
While she waited for it to warm, Catherine rocked him in her
arms.
    Thomas came in as she was bathing Jorie.
“How is he?”
    “It’s the jerky way he’s breathing that
bothers me most.”
    “Any broken bones?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Suddenly she looked up. “Where’s Walter?” It
was the first she’d thought of him.
    “On the veranda. He needs a bath too.”
    “Well, you do it, when I’ve finished here.
Where did you find him?”
    “On top of the coal pile.”
    “He needs to be punished for taking Jorie
down there. They both could have been killed in that avalanche of
coal.”
    Finally she took Jorie out of the bath. He
wasn’t very clean, but the rest would have to wait. She wrapped him
in a blanket, put iodine on his cuts, and carried him upstairs to
bed.
    “Don’t go, Mummy.”
    “I won’t leave you, Precious.”
    “It hurts.”
    “Where?”
    “All over.” He put his hands on his ribs.
“It hurts to breathe.”
    She tried to rearrange him on a pillow, but
it made him cry.
    “I’m sorry, Jorie. Whatever made you boys go
in the cellar?”
    “Walter wanted to play miners.”
    “You shouldn’t have been down there, and you
certainly shouldn’t have been climbing the coal pile.”
    “We weren’t climbing on it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Walter dumped it on