Later they walked along the creek, so close that sometimes their hands brushed as they walked. Joseph spoke of his involvement in the war. He’d volunteered to join the Czech Legion, to fight on the side of the Allies with the hope of garnering support for Czechoslovakia’s independence. He’d been exposed to mustard gas on the northern plains of France, but hadn’t succumbed to it like so many of the other men, though his lungs seemed to whistle a little as he breathed. Breathing in the dust of the mines didn’t help either, but he was happy to secure the necessary papers after the war that allowed him to come to America. He wouldn’t work in the mines forever; he assured Helen of this fact. He had plans beyond the mines; this was just temporary. He just needed to save enough, and he would.
Helen liked the way he spoke, the way his words were infused with confidence, the way his sad eyes would brighten when he imagined the future.
After that afternoon, Joseph began to accompany Helen to church each Sunday, walking her to and from the Martinek house. He started to call her his sweetheart.
***
Behind the house, Helen was hanging a dress on the clothesline when she heard a siren blaring from the colliery. She froze, letting the half-pinned dress swing from her grasp like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Please, not Joseph, she prayed. The rest of the dresses and other garments, still damp from their washboard massage, waited in the basket to be hung.
But Helen was unable to continue.
She rushed towards the colliery, thinking only of Joseph underground.
Breathless, she reached the lamp house, joining the commotion of women and children who had all gathered outside of the mines. Together they waited, exchanging anxious gazes.
Some of the women cried, sobbing into a handkerchief. Their oldest child tried to offer comfort.
It was not yet clear how many men had been killed by the explosion. The coal operators were counting the copper identification tags of miners as they returned them to their hooks, waiting to discover who was missing.
Helen was almost ready to enter the mines in search of Joseph herself when finally a man with his gait, caked in black dust, emerged from the entrance of the shaft.
Helen ran towards him, smothering her face in his filthy coveralls and letting herself sob, not trying to be brave any longer. A lamp was still affixed to Joseph’s cap. He gently kissed the top of her head, rubbing her dress that was now covered in black soot.
“Helen, sweetheart. I was lucky.”
Helen wiggled out of his arms, pushing him away. She knew that he would not always be so lucky. She turned and began to run back to the Martinek house, as fast as she’d come to the mines. Joseph shouted after her, coughing from the exertion, but she kept running.
Helen knew that she was falling in love with Joseph, but the idea of growing closer to someone who she could lose to the mines any day was too much for her. She had tolerated enough loss for one lifetime. She did not stop by the musician stoop the next Friday on her way back from the company store. Then Sunday came and she feigned being ill, sending Joseph away when she saw him push open the front gate of the Martinek’s home to escort her to church. After church let out, Sophia stopped by. Sophia had a letter that Joseph had begged her to deliver.
Helen waited until after Sophia left to unfold and read the soot-smudged letter.
My Dearest Helen,
I will save enough money for us to move to Florida, a sunny place south of here where they have a community of our people. There you will never be cold again, and there I will be able to breathe better. There’s a good life for us there, a better life for us. I know things have not been easy for either of us here, but it has been easier to endure since I met you. When I go into the mines each day and I’m surrounded by such seemingly endless darkness, I think of you and I’m reminded that you are the light in my darkness.
Love,
Joseph
Helen read it twice. She knew the damage was done. She had already fallen in love with Joseph. The pain of saying goodbye to him now, in a year, in ten years, or in fifty years would be equally great, and so they were married a few months later in the same church that they had attended together each Sunday. Joseph was able to pay Mr. Martinek the remaining debt for
Helen’s voyage to America, using the earnings he had been setting aside to purchase a plot of land in Florida. The man who owned Joseph’s rooming house sold the newlyweds the small cabin behind his home. It was a humble construction, but it had a coal stove, and it would be theirs alone.
It was not long before Helen's belly swelled with their growing baby. The baby kicked when Joseph played the accordion in the evenings.
"He likes how his papa plays," Helen smiled, patting her belly.
"He?" Joseph questioned.
Most fathers would welcome a son, an extra working hand, but Joseph prayed for a daughter who would be safe at home, away from the mines. A boy would be expected like his peers to inevitably enter the breaker room, condemned to a childhood of running his vulnerable hands through coal chutes, picking out sharp slate. Would this supposed son of theirs then dare to enter the mines as soon as he was old enough, before Joseph had a chance to save enough for Florida to give them a better life?
He kept this fear to himself, simply shrugging off Helen's insistence that she was carrying a son. He would casually suggest: "Unless it is a girl with her mother's beauty."
And so on that spring day when Sophia called him in from the porch, saying "come in and meet your daughter", his eyes swelled with tears of relief.
“A girl," he boasted, following Sophia inside, over to the bed that he and Helen shared. Approaching Helen, her hair unpinned and sprawled across the top of her nightgown, he gazed at the tiny blue-eyed face visible from the bundle in her arms. He leaned down to kiss his wife's forehead and then his daughter's.
"A girl," he repeated over and over. "She'll be safe from the mines."
He doubled over in one of his coughing fits that always made Helen wince.
Between coughs and happy sobs, he repeated: "She'll be safe.”
Jennifer Bolognese, a medical writer, has Master of Science degrees in biomedical writing and pharmacology. She is currently a candidate for a Master of Arts degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. Jennifer lives in North Bethesda with her fiancé. Consistent with her nostalgia for card catalogs and vintage typewriters, she is planning a literary-themed wedding.
