Sherry Fairchok
Near Rats and the Devil
The women of Taylor, Pennsylvania watched from windows
while their men ran to the last blast of the company’s whistle
and wouldn’t step out until the great gates latched shut:
Bad luck for a man on his way to the mines to meet a woman.
In the dark, near rats and the devil, was the men’s place.
No women went below.
They worked under the sun’s supervision,
flinging corn to geese, pinning up Monday laundry, burying bulbs
at the feet of plaster Virgins. No woman of Taylor ventured
any deeper than her cellar with its shelved jars shining in rows,
its slumbering crocks of pickles and sauerkraut, though their men
lugged down pails packed by women’s hands with whatever simmered
on coal stoves the night before. That noon-hour whiff of kitchens tasted
of the brightness overhead, like the scent of wet lilacs trickling
down an air shaft in May.
Rats ran to it, too, and ringed
each chewing man, their eye-glints red as lit cigarettes.
Stoned from alleys, poisoned in kitchens, chased by terriers
through back yards, rats were friends in the labyrinth
under the town. When the Susquehanna flooded tunnels,
men followed fleeing rats to dry ground and, ever after, sprang
with their picks all company-laid traps. When rats lingered
to gnaw at what was dropped, reared to beg crusts, miners knew
timbers propped overhead would hold. When rats ran,
you’d better run yourself home.
Women were a different matter:
their bedrooms a tunnel a man entered in fear and wonder,
beneath a plastic crucifix but closer to the devil,
a dark space he worked at night, and crawled from
proud to have done his job, relieved to be out intact,
weak, trembling and homeless as an unearthed rat.
from The Palace of Ashes, CavanKerry Press, 2002.