Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

Working for a mining company suited him better, was far safer, more lucrative, more satisfying: in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, he commanded all manner of men and machines.

He had a fondness for big dogs, small women, meat of any kind, and country music. Each Christmas he traveled home to see his senile mother, his sister and her brood, old high school friends. Some had once wrestled with him, and he was pleased to see them approaching their middle years flabby and slow, while he was still as muscled and fit as a young dog.

When he was thirty-five, Mendelson was called back to a site he had once worked for a short while before its closure. A fire had taken hold in the Belle Haven mines, and Mendelson had been nominated to contain it.

Mendelson had never fought a mine fire before. He’d observed a few, monitored the long, tedious struggle to extinguish them, and therefore welcomed the explicit instructions he was given by the committee of his colleagues, local officials, and fire specialists too busy with other mine fires to take on this one. “Dig a trench,” they told him, and told him how. And so he did.

Things might have gone well for Mendelson, had he not still thought of himself as the Centurian. The aging miners who lived in Belle Haven knew its mines better than their own backyards, and they were waiting for him when he arrived. “Here’s where you want to dig,” they told him, uninvited. “Go deeper than that,” they said, catching wind of his instructions. “Farther south,” they said. “Dig fast, or it’ll run right away from you.”

To which he replied, lighting a cigar, squinting at the lot of them, very aware of his youth in the face of their decline, “I know my business. Get on with yours.”

Although they had thought themselves more concerned with their town than their reputations, the miners were silenced by their pride, by their desire to see what this young stranger was made of. Each morning they would arrive to watch the digging of the trench. They would sit in their old trucks and drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, condemn. When the work crew broke for lunch each day, the miners found their fingers itching for picks and shovels. To a man, they longed to leap from their trucks and raise a ruckus, demand a greater effort from the uninspired crew. They were afraid of this fire and what it might someday do. But their pride was formidable. And so they sat quietly in their trucks and watched the goings-on like predators picking out the weakest, best candidate for a chase. But Mendelson would not run.

Day after day, their eyes upon him, Mendelson came to realize that he felt younger and stronger than he had since his wrestling days. Each morning he checked in with his advisors in Harrisburg, gave them a progress report, sought their allegiance, which they pledged. “You’re doing fine,” they said. “Right on schedule.” It was easy for him to ignore his doubtful audience. Even easier to feel inspired by their lack of faith. He often paused in his work to picture their retreat, the fire cut off, the trench more daunting than a wall.

On the day that the trench was due for completion, Mendelson woke earlier than usual. He shaved carefully, dressed silently, walked to the diner next to the Randall Inn, where he was staying, and had eggs, sausage, home fries, toast, three cups of coffee, and, on his way out the door, a banana. Driving over from Randall, he sang his favorite songs and smiled a lot. He was happy. Everything had gone well. He’d done a good job. Soon he’d be headed somewhere else.

Old memories came up out of their black space as Mendelson crossed the boundary onto Belle Haven land. He had worked hard, as a boy, to earn his own pocket money, enough to pay for a yearly baseball, perhaps a comic book now and then, more likely food, which was sometimes scarce at home. He charged a dollar to tend a grave, turn the topsoil each spring, dress it with forest mulch, plant new grass and flowers as ordered. For another dollar, he would keep it tidy all season. For a buck and a half he would shovel a load of coal down a chute and into a coal cellar. He walked dogs when no one was home to tend them, split firewood, painted fences, ran errands. Sometimes he took home a licorice whip for his little sister, but mostly he spent the money on himself. He had, after all, done the work.

Even then, work had felt good, but not like the big work he did now. The way the earth trembled when his machines smacked it, the way he could point and the men would simply go, do what he told them to do: these things made him feel so strong that his work was his pleasure. He was good at what he did.

It was only seven o’clock when Mendelson arrived at the trench, but everything was white and hazy with August sun. The dew on the field grass looked like flint sparks. Sometimes, when Mendelson was the first to arrive, deer stood grazing at the edge of the far woods. But he had lingered over his substantial breakfast and was not so early this morning. Instead of deer he found his crew waiting for him in their trucks, which was odd. The old Belle Haven miners were all standing at the edge of the trench, looking in. This, too, was unusual.

Like a moose facing an onslaught of wolves, Mendelson was suddenly sorry that he had loaded his gut.

“What’s wrong?” he said as his men joined him.

One man crooked a finger and, turning, led Mendelson toward the trench. The others stayed where they were.

It was not such a big trench. By all estimates, the fire should have been confined to one main tunnel at the extreme northern end