Christmas in Culm: Three Stories

By Vincent C. Martinez

In Northeastern Pennsylvania, the scars of coal mining lie in black fields and mounds of waste coal called culm. And the people who carry the scars of heartbreak and desperation during one Christmas season find hope in the strange and the supernatural:

A young girl and her mother attempting to flee an abusive father find help in the form a mysterious abandoned semi-trailer.

A lonely young mailman who delivers mail to a strange, isolated cottage and who feels his life has been a complete failure receives a letter from his long-dead parents.

And a retired woman contemplating life after losing her husband and living alone awakens one morning to find a black train sitting on abandoned railroad tracks behind her house, waiting for her to take the next step.

Three tales bound by the black fields of Pennsylvania coal and the light of life that exists even in the darkest of shadows. Three tales of a Christmas in Culm.

Downloaded thousands of times and recipient of five- and four-star reviews on multiple online bookstores, Christmas in Culm has been fully reviewed and revised to provide a chilly Christmas experience that you'll never forget.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vincent C. Martinez
• Release date: Dec 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311381873

Vincent C. Martinez

Influenced by writers like Ray Bradbury, Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce, and Sherwood Anderson, Vincent C. Martinez composes stories about the sad, spooky, and supernatural. He is currently working on his next collection of stories as well as on a novel.

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CHRISTMAS IN CULM: Three Stories

by Vincent C. Martinez

Copyright ©2014 Vincent C. Martinez. All Rights Reserved.

This short story collection was corrected and revised July, 2015.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This ebook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the reader. It is the copyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase a copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Discover other titles by Vincent C. Martinez at his official author webpage.

CONTENTS

THE TRAILER

I. The Fields

II. The Darkest Night

III. Fred

IV. The Night of Snow and Stones

V. The Whitest Day

VI. The Forever Island

LEMONTREE LANE

I. The Routine

II. The Cottage, the Coin, the Pen, and the Shapes

III. Ms. Simmons

IV. The Messengers

V. The Coldest Christmas

VI. The Endless Journey

DEAR VIVIAN . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE TRAILER

I. The Fields

The black field looked like a tear in space stretching for almost two miles—though sometimes a toothpick tree would break its surface—and trees clustered round its perimeter, hiding abandoned mining equipment or unsealed holes into which people would sometimes fall and disappear. Farther away from the field, clumps of homes called patches dotted the hillsides. When the mines were still open, miners walked to work, but when the mines had been exhausted of all coal, the patches remained, and the miners had nowhere to go.

We called the black fields culm dumps, waste coal that didn’t burn well for steel mills or power plants, coal cheaper to dump than to use. It was piled high, filling forests and fields until they left behind black scars.

We were told to avoid the fields, told that sinkholes could swallow us whole, or that old blasting caps littered the landscape.

There was a culm pile that towered so high it looked like a mountain to my ten-year-old eyes. Kids called it Sky Hill, and during summer days some of us would climb the pile, reach the summit, and survey the black fields below us, the green hills of the Northeastern Pennsylvania valley, the towns of Duryea and Avoca, the brown Susquehanna River snaking through Pittston. Up there, everything seemed so far away and untouchable, everything except the clouds.

We’d grab pieces of thick cardboard, sit on them, pull ourselves to the edge of the summit, and slide down, coating our skin and clothes in dark dust. I tumbled down the hill more than once, and my skirts offered no protection against the sharp coal edges. I’d wander home in the late afternoon, legs burning from sweat and scrapes, happy that for a few seconds I felt I was close to being airborne.

But by the time I’d arrive home, I’d stare at the white front door, the two darkened windows on either side like dead eyes. I’d walk up the cracked concrete pathway, my ears listening for his voice, listening if he was wandering room to room, inspecting corners for stray dust or dropped socks, listening if something he was eating was too cold or too hot or too salty or too . . . anything. Extra beats would thump in my heart, and a panic would settle in my chest. Sometimes I’d stand outside and stare at the house as the sun dipped below the horizon, and the sky turned purple, and the front porch light turned on.

I’d just stare, thinking of places to hide.

***

When hiding, I noticed how certain colors blended well with certain shadows, how twilight made it difficult to see someone walking over fields or through forests, how sometimes you can hide just by sitting still, remaining silent, and not making any quick moves.

My first hiding places were basic: blankets slipped over my head. I knew anyone looking could still see my thin frame, but it shrouded me in darkness, and if I closed my eyes hard enough, I could pretend I was elsewhere, and if I closed my ears tightly enough, I could pretend not to hear Mom crying in her bedroom and the slams of Dad's hands against the walls. I discovered how I could fit the space under my bed and that I could enclose myself in walls of pillows and folded clothes. I discovered the door to the old coal room at the front of the basement and figured out how to lock it from the inside. One March I swept it out when he wasn’t home and wiped clean the narrow window that was once the coal chute. It was still cold, damp, and sooty, but the room was quiet, and the space was mine.

When Mom found me sitting in the coal room one day she asked, Jane? What’re you doing down here, Honey?

I looked at her pale face in the gray light, the long bruises on her neck and said only, I’m hiding.

From what, Honey?

I said nothing, looking out the narrow window again at the pine tree in the front yard, knowing he’d be home soon.

Mom never mentioned the coal room to him, even when he pushed her against the wall and screamed at her about the dark smudges on my dresses, even when he walked the room wanting to know where I was, his deliberate pace creaking through the floorboards above my head.

I found hiding spaces in the forests around the culm dump: from the circular clearing surrounded by tall birches, to the thickets of high blackberry bushes behind the house where I sat and escaped in books by Bradbury, L’Engle, and LeGuin. If I looked hard enough, there’d be a space into which I could fit, a shadow into which I could slide, a wall behind which I could duck.

Then there was the rusting red semi-trailer at the far edge of the culm field.

Lots of the kids knew it was there, its decaying hulk surrounded by knotty trees and tall weeds, but most steered clear of it after one boy had wandered into that section of the field and blown off his right hand with a blasting cap and another who’d fallen into a small sinkhole. It rested on eight wheels, the old Firestone tires frayed and deflated or deflating from years of exposure to the seasons. Someone had placed wooden chocks behind and in front of each set of wheels, which had become overgrown with ivy and thistle. The paint had no markings save for a blocky white number 13 on its side. The rear doors were sealed by two large, rust-encrusted locks that had frozen in place. Around the locks, gouges like claw marks were cut into the trailer’s red skin, failed attempts at entry.

Some thought it contained old mining equipment or television sets. Some thought it contained stolen decorations from the nearby Party Time factory in Duryea. Kids had their ideas about its contents, each idea more exotic than the next.

But aside from the dormant weed-covered railroad tracks a few yards away, the semi-trailer sat alone, marking the years with new layers of rust and new tangles of weeds.

Beneath the trailer, I could cool myself in its shade, keep myself dry from rains, and could sit against its softening tires and read until the afternoon sunlight died. One day, I decided to name it Fred. Because it seemed like a Fred. I’d not known any Fred’s, but if I had I’m sure they would have been like the trailer: simple, solid, dependable.

I’d pull the weeds and the ivy from Fred’s wheels and clear away the trash from the clearing surrounding it. I’d bring an old towel from home and sit against its wheels and read whatever I’d brought with me, or I’d draw pictures of islands in my school tablets, islands with pine trees, islands with lighthouses, islands with just two houses: one for me, and one for Mom.

Or sometimes I’d talk to Fred. I’d ask it how lonely it was out there, or where it came from. I’d tell it where I was from, tell it about my small house in the patch just outside Duryea, about my hiding places, about the nights of screams and the days of tears. I’d tell it how Mom would spend her days keeping the house clean and keeping the refrigerator filled with cooked food, or about how she spent hours looking in the bathroom mirror trying to match makeup colors to her skin color so she could cover the marks that appeared almost every week, or about how she sat alone and waited for Dad every night, her head in her hands, her green eyes staring at the front door.

I’d tell Fred everything.

And it would listen, whistling, rattling, and squeaking in the breeze, but saying nothing.

***

One mid-December I walked to Fred, my worn jeans making loud thwick sounds over the quiet culm field. In my gloved right hand, I carried a library copy of Dune, in my left was a dried pussy willow branch with which I cut the