The following is the final entry from Ash Stirling’s journal, the last of his family line, and leader of a crew of thirty that died in a mine collapse resulting in the permanent closing of the mine. Recorded by his maid, who believed him insane.
In the first week of eighth grade, my teacher asked my class to research our nationalities. Reinaldo, a seat to my left, said he could track his lineage a hundred years back to his ancestors sailing across Atlantic from Spain. John to my right was half German, and being barely twenty years after the end of world war II, his lineage stopped suspiciously short on his father’s side. Tim was English. Mary, French. Chang, Chinese.
Then, after calling upon the rest of the class, Ms. Francisco peered above the lip of her clipboard at me with a frown, “Bring your project forward. It’s time for you to present.”
Even after one week of school, Ms. Francisco and I had already found several differences between us. Undoubtedly she had heard of me from my teachers reaching back until kindergarten.
I knew she had waited to call upon me last after seeing my project, a poster board blank save for four black and white photographs super glued on to a bed of dirt.
“This is my father,” I said, pointing at the bottom most picture, which was in color, “Aiden, from the mine.
“And this is his father,” I pointed at a black and white photograph of a man with a scraggling beard reaching down to his waist, “Vulcan, from the mine.
“And this is his father, Fino, from the mine,” I gestured at a still photo, slightly out of focus, of my great grandfather leaning on his pickaxe.
“And his father, Saraph, from the mine,” I finished, pointing to a hand drawn portrait of the earliest ancestor I could find. Despite the years, the age gap, and the errors of the artist’s hand, visitors at my house often remarked on the likeness between myself and him. Perhaps it was the angle of the nose, the set jaw, or his narrow face. But I thought it was his eyes- searching, always searching from it’s place above the mantelpiece, though his body was long buried in our back yard.
“And I am Ash Sterling, a from the mine.”
“No, Ash.” Said Ms. Francisco, her voice taking the tone of a lecturing to one who was slower than the rest of the group, “What nationality are you? What country is your family from?”
Ms. Francisco had moved here the year prior, and she was unfamiliar with the culture of our town. My family was known as one of the mud-walkers, with a line that stretched back to the opening of the mine. Some people even joked behind our backs, saying that us mud-walkers were so dirty that we crawled out of the mine itself. But we were proud of our heritage.
“Here,” I replied, “We’ve been here since the mine began, and no one can remember further.”
“Well it’s not like you just popped out here,” Said John, the German, giggling from the front row, “everyone comes from somewhere.”
“We’ve been here since the beginning of this town. And everyone does come from somewhere, don’t they, John? Even the Nazis.”
My foot was in the principal's office before his giggles subsided, and I took the chair I had claimed as my own by the door. I had been there so often that the cushion had begun to conform to the contour of my ass, and my father no longer put up a show to the principal that he cared when he picked me up.
“You done did right, Ash,” My father said, a cigarette smouldering out the left side of his mouth, “The mine gave us everything we got, and will continue giving. Like father done said, you just got to dig deeper. We done been here longer than anyone. This is our town. It doesn’t belong to these outsiders.” He flicked the cigarette, and an ember fell on his exposed arm, but his face remained still.
A little ember never made us Sterling's flinch.
That was twenty five years ago, and today my father coughed the last of the dirt from his lungs before I immersed him six feet under in it. And on his deathbed, he asked me to look behind the portrait of Saraph on the mantel, where I found a small leather bound notebook. Like all things in our house, dirt fell from the pages as I brought it to his bed.
“Ash, don’t never forget who you are. The mine, the mine is our birthright. This is the journal of the grandfather of my father, Saraph. Many said he went insane in his age, but I think he saw some truth. Keep it, it belongs to you now.”
I took the journal from my father, and he fell away from this world, a cigarette burning to a stub still in his lips. When tried to lift him from the bed, I knocked over an ashtray on his dresser, and it scattered over his sheets and lifeless form. Despite hours of scrubbing, I never could remove the stains that outlined where his body had rested upon the sheets, and the holes remained where the live embers had burned into the cloth. Sometimes, when I walk past his room deep in the night, I can just smell a whiff of smoke from inside.
I had worked in the mine since I was seventeen, and by twenty I was known as one of the best men who had ever set foot in the tunnels. And when my father passed, I took his position as head of our forty member team, known for exploring deeper than the others in search of fresh silver veins.
Each night I built a fire in my fireplace, stared at Saraph’s picture with the same searching eyes that would stare back, and read his notebook. Saraph’s words often wound in circles that could well have contributed to why he was deemed mad. But I was determined, and picked out the passages that seemed to bear the most importance.