The Lunenburg Werewolf by Steve Vernon Page A

daddy replied.
    â€œWhat’s a fact?” Randy asked.
    â€œThirty-three cents a ton, for one thing,” Randy’s daddy said. “A coal miner deals in facts. He has to. Because most coal miners have got themselves a family to hold onto. Why else would a man go mucking in the dirt, breathing a sniff of death with every snort he took?”
    Randy shrugged an I-dunno-why kind of shrug. “Pride?” he guessed.
    â€œPride?” Randy’s daddy laughed with a snort. “Pride only goes so far when it comes to filling an empty belly.”
    Which is why it probably shouldn’t have surprised Randy when his daddy first told him how he had gone and sold his soul to the Devil himself.

    Randy’s Daddy’s Deal
    â€œYour granddad died a year before I was old enough to work the mine,” Randy’s daddy told him. “The tunnel he was working in heaved up and lay down on top of him, burying him beneath a ton or two of Cape Breton coal—which was all the grave he ever got. We buried an empty coffin in the dirt outside the churchyard. Your grandma sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and then she dried her eyes and just walked on.”
    And then Randy’s daddy spat. Not being rude, you understand. The fact was, Randy’s daddy had spent so many years sucking on coal dust and poverty that spitting had become just as natural as breathing. He spat black, and at forty-three, his back and shoulders had already curled over into that perpetual stoop of a question mark that passed for a spine in those parts.
    â€œEvery year we lean a little closer to the dirt,” Randy’s daddy told him. “Every year we dig a little deeper, looking for sunshine in the shadow of the mine. Coal is nothing more than long-dead greenings pushed down and squeezed hard; nothing but leaves and ferns that once waved beneath the sunlight glinting off of a Tyrannosaurus’s backbone—fossilized sunshine and dinosaur poop. Coal is time, coal is patience, and coal is nothing more than a handful of hardened history just waiting to be dug up and burned in the belly of a woodstove.”
    And then he spat again.
    How sweet the sound.
    Randy’s daddy was a deep one. It was like he spent his entire life working on a single gigantic ponder—always submerged in a sombre solitary state of reckon ing— occasionally surfacing to allow his thoughts and pronouncements to drop upon Randy like slow, heavy raindrops plummeting down upon a rusted tin roof. They echoed and they splashed away, and that’s all Randy really remembered about the man in later years.
    The splash and the echo, fading away.
    It all started on the night that Randy’s daddy came home reeking of whiskey and grinning like a kid who had just discovered candy—and on a work night, to boot.
    â€œI done it,” Randy’s daddy said. “I done it tonight.”
    â€œWhat did you do, Daddy?” Randy asked.
    â€œI done it,” Randy’s daddy repeated. “I sold my soul to the Devil.”
    Randy stood there on the family front porch, waiting for his daddy to wink at him so that he would know that what his father was saying was nothing more than a coal-mining joke.
    Only Randy’s daddy didn’t wink. He just stood there in the candle-lit darkness of the family front stoop.
    â€œI met him tonight on the Hawkins Crossroad,” Randy’s daddy said. “He was standing there tall enough that I thought he was sitting on a ladder. A long man in a long black coat with a set of eyes that burned like a pair of lantern flies. He had the stink of brimstone about him and a fiddle cocked on his elbow and two or three imps playing at his coattails like a pack of frisky cats.”
    â€œYou met your own reflection,” Randy told his daddy. “You were seeing rum in your eye and nothing more.” This sounded good coming out of Randy’s mouth, only the more that Randy’s daddy talked,