A short story by Geraldine Glodek

Geraldine Glodek grew up in Pennsylvania, where her father, uncles, and grandfathers were anthracite miners. Her historical novel, Nine Bells at the Breaker, is set there. Her short works have appeared in The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Hoi Polloi, Passager, and Witcraft  (Australia).

Adobe Stock photo

 Hisser Doyle

By Geraldine Glodek

Ronan Doyle, born in 1919, was a curious five-year-old packed into a coal-company home with his immigrant Irish family in Rubytown, a tiny Pennsylvania coal patch of 15 houses. His “front yard” was a railroad yard. Iron ore unearthed at Minnesota’s Great Mesabi Range was shipped by barge across the Great Lakes and picked up by the Pennsylvania Railroad. Partly unloaded at Pittsburgh area steel mills, it was hauled hours east to Ronan’s front door. He loved the racket of the transfer to the Lehigh Valley Railroad — Bethlehem Steel the final destination. Ronan loved the huffing of the locomotives, front and back, straining to lug the recoupled cars over the mountain. 

He was just as interested in freight cars that sat idle for days. One Sunday afternoon, Ronan discovered a handle near a wheel. It was just about even with his eyeballs. He braced his boot against the wheel and managed to nudge the handle a fraction of an inch. It made the most fascinating hiss. He went down the line, thrilling to the pffffffff, pffffffff, pffffffff until he was nabbed by two Coal and Iron Police. Pinching one of his loving-cup ears apiece, they marched him over to the cinder sidewalk. “Where do you live, kiddo?” 

Ronan folded his arms and shook his head. Tears stung his eyes as he tried to squirm free. 

“Where?!?” 

“Don’t tell Mom! My dad will kill me when he gets home!” 

“We’ll kill you if you don’t tell. Tell us!” They gave his ears a twist. 

“No.” Ronan held his breath, trying not to cry out with the pain. 

“Okay, we’ll ask those kids.” The officers tugged Ronan over to where children were playing kick-the-can.  

“Yo!” shouted Patrick Doyle, a boy of 13, his chest heaving from a fast skirmish with other kids competing for the can. “Let go of my brother’s ears!” 

“Show us your house,” one policeman said. 

Patrick kicked the can at them. “Get lost.” 

“Okay, then. Straight to jail this kid goes.” They turned Ronan around. 

“Over here,” Patrick called. The throng of children followed him to his house, a half-double with scratchy green shingles and a red-shingled roof like all the other houses owned by anthracite coal companies in the area. 

Ronan’s mother, Kathleen Doyle, a toddler clinging to her skirt, an infant in her arms, answered the door. “What in the name of—” 

“This your boy?” 

Ronan clenched his jaw as one officer twisted his right ear. 

“Yes, it’s my boy. And I’ll thank you to let go of his ears.” 

They held on. “Your boy, we’ll have you know, was releasing the air brakes on the rail cars.” 

“No, Ronan. Tell me you done no such thing.” 

“I was just makin’ hissers,” he whined. 

“Makin’ hissers,” a girl mocked, flinging her arms out in laughter. 

The taller cop, shoving Ronan toward his mother, said, “He comes within 10 yards of these tracks again, he’s off to reform school.” 

“But we live within 10 yards from the tracks,” she protested. 

“Nine yards, then. You hear that, boy?” 

The other policeman smacked Ronan’s left ear. “Ha! With these funnels, he’d hear the Pennsy pulling out from Lake Erie.” 

Mrs. Doyle yanked Ronan inside and slammed the door. 

Called Hisser after that, Ronan went to school long enough to learn to sound out words and print. At the age of 7, he got hired as a breaker boy. The coal breaker was a tall wooden building to where mine cars, making their way along narrow-gauge tracks, climbed to the top and spilled their loads into the tipple. The great bull shaker sent everything tumbling through a series of sizing screens down long chutes with troughs protruding from the sides. Along those troughs, on backless benches, sat little boys like Hisser. All day long they picked out slag — rocks, petrified wood, anything that wasn’t coal — and tossed it down slag chutes into wooden rail cars outside. The mine-yard lokie, huffing labored clouds of black smoke, hauled away load after load, heaping them up on the black slag piles. After 10 hours of toil in coal dust, the breaker boys came out looking like characters in some morbid fairytale where lumps of coal got poofed to life in the shape of little boys. 

Eventually, Hisser went into the mine. For years he drilled holes for blasting charges, lit the charges, ran for cover, then shoveled the scattered chunks into rail cars destined for the breaker. Agile and slim, he got the worst jobs, crawling into areas with low roofs of rock, stooping and twisting, seldom getting to stand to his full six feet. He got taunted about the day he might worm his way into a narrow chamber where blackdamp, powerful and odorless, lurked, waiting to take his last breath away. Even if he sensed the weakness coming on, he’d be “dunfer,” they said, unable to back out of the same opening because of his loving-cup ears. 

Because of his ears, Hisser shied away from women, other than to lend a hand to miners’ widows with children too small to haul the ashes out or do other hard chores. One such widow was Dolores Von Blase, whose husband Frederick was killed in an underground blast, leaving her with a 5-year-old girl and a boy of 2. Hisser stopped by every few days. He taught Jenny card tricks and shell games. He was steeped in the joy of her lilting giggle as she pulled a sleight of hand. He’d fly little Emil through the rooms like an airplane. After months of visits, Hisser had them dancing a jig across the kitchen to the tune of “The Irish Washerwoman,” while he hummed and their mother clapped the rhythm. She smiled more and more now. 

On one visit, Hisser found Dolores just finishing up a sketch of Jenny on a strip of butcher paper given to the children by the grocer. Emil’s portrait was already clipped to a string along the wall. The likenesses amazed Hisser, especially the life, the exact personalities captured in the children’s eyes. 

“You’re next,” Jenny said. 

Panic swept over Hisser. He couldn’t bear the prospect of being looked at so closely, and for so long. “Naw, not me,” he said. “I’m so fidgety, I could never sit that long. But your mother there, she’s some good artist, I’ll say.” The next evening, he came by with a sketch pad and pencil set from the stationery store. Soon Dolores was sketching coal-patch kids who posed on the cinder sidewalk as she sat on the porch steps with the pad on her lap. Hisser would sit behind her on the wooden swing, content to see Dolores at peace with her art. 

She would invite Hisser to supper, but he always said no until he finally caught on that she wanted to offer something of her own, not just be helped with chores or given things. He had supper there every Saturday night. On a warm, autumn evening, after the children were asleep and Hisser was relaxing on the porch swing, he heard the wooden screen door squeak open behind him. Dolores came out. She sidled up to the swing and took hold of the front chain. Hanging from her other hand was the oil lamp. When Hisser turned and looked up at her face, her eyes were closed. Her hand tightened around the chain as though she were trying to gather the courage to say something. When that moment came, she stood squarely in front of him and set the lamp down at her feet. The flame inside the glass chimney shot up a glow that danced in her dark eyes. With a shy smile, she lifted both of his hands and said, “Ronan, will you marry me? I love you.” She pressed his hands to her lips. 

Hisser, pulling his hands away, lurched back on the swing, his fingers gripping the slats on the bench, his heels stopping the swing dead in its backward rise. The links of excess chain hanging loose from the hooks above rattled softly in the heavy silence. Of course, he loved her! Of course, he wanted to marry her! But could she really — this woman, this kind and talented woman with her cloud of blond hair, her glowing face — could she really be content, year after year, to sit across the supper table from those big ears, that long, thin face with its wide, snub nose, that dull brown hair deserting the forehead? He just couldn’t imagine it. He imagined making her the laughingstock of the silk factory. 

Dolores withered with embarrassment. 

As horrible as he felt, Hisser didn’t dare say yes just to spare her from shame on this one night. What was one night compared to the rest of her life? He wrestled with ways to say no without piling on more humiliation. Finally, he said, “Sorry, Dolores, it isn’t you. I’m just not the marrying kind.” 

Dolores, bowing down, took hold of the handle of the lamp. She lifted it from the floor and twisted the tiny brass wheel at the bottom of the glass chimney, lowering the wick to reduce the flame. Cupping her hand around the top of the glass, she drew a deep breath. She stood tall and looked directly into Hisser’s eyes. Then she blew out the flame and went inside. 

The swing remained tipped at a sharp angle, leaving Hisser half standing, as if dumped off. 

The next day after work, he walked out of his way to avoid Dolores’s house. He didn’t know if he would ever go back. He knew he would not change his mind, wasn’t sure she’d even give him a chance to, but he ached for some way to make her feel better. Before the week was out, he got the nerve to walk down her street. The curtains were gone. A FOR-RENT sign stared back at him, leaving no doubt that all was hopeless. But it left plenty of doubts about God. Would a loving God make a man too ugly to marry? 

Nearly two decades later, Hisser, like a man who had somehow arrived at the middle of the century through a thick fog, was almost mystified to find himself pushing 40, still mining, still helping widows, but never accepting a meal. He nursed his father through black lung disease until his death and tended to his mother till hers. He saw to it that no niece or nephew ever went without a Christmas or birthday gift, but he saw to it with far less joy than he had felt when providing for Dolores’s kids. He was ashamed of his own dulled heart that gave and gave — and gave and gave — like an old mine-yard lokie lugging one more load to the slagpiles. 

Hisser Doyle is a flashback excerpt from Geraldine Glodek’s unpublished novel, How Frugal Is the Chariot, which takes place from the 1940s to 1999, primarily in Pennsylvania. A different excerpt, On to the Great River Road, has been published in the Arkansas Review. In the novel, Hisser Doyle is one of several old men, mostly retired coal miners, who “shoot the bull” every morning in two rows of facing chairs at the town library. Their routine gab sessions get boosted to a mission when someone anonymously gives them a mystery to solve.