The Secret Zadie Carried Past the Gate

For three years I pedaled a rusted bicycle past the same gate guard at the Novinger coal camp with a sack of sand riding in my basket, and it was never the sand he should have been watching.

I was thirty-one years old the first morning I did it, and I want to tell this the way it actually happened, not the way the camp gossips eventually shaped it into a legend, because by the time I was an old woman half of Novinger had a different version of the story and hardly any of it was true.

My husband Bexley Mercer kept the machines running at the Excelsior mine for eleven years. He wasn’t a coal man himself, not underground, his lungs wouldn’t have stood it and his mother had made him swear off it before she died. Bexley fixed things. Pumps, cart axles, the tipple’s chains, and for a long stretch in the middle of his time there, the bicycles.

Not many people remember now that the company ran its messenger routes on bicycles before the trucks came. A dozen or so heavy iron bikes, painted the same dull green as everything else that belonged to Excelsior, ridden by boys not much older than fourteen carrying tally sheets and pay envelopes and word from the super’s office down to the tipple and back. Bexley kept every one of those bicycles running. He knew each of their rattles the way a mother knows which of her children is coughing in the next room.

When I met him he was twenty-six and already missing the tip of one finger from a chain that had bitten him wrong, and he used to tell me, only half joking, that he loved those old green bicycles better than he loved most people in camp, because a bicycle never once lied to him about what was wrong with it.